My tweets of the last week:
Archives for June 2012
always crashing in the same car
I don’t know how else to start this story, so I’ll just say it.
I crashed our car.
Into our house.
Yes, you read that correctly. Don’t worry – there were no casualties. I’m here. The house is no worse for the wear. And the car… well, the car lived to tell the tale.
Before you start to make a number of assumption about me and my driving, allow me to point out that I have not so much as nudged another vehicle in my first year behind the wheel. On the road I am a cautious, defensive driver.
It’s off the road where I’m a danger. Particularly, in my driveway. I just don’t have the spacial relations skills to navigate the tiny space. Our car earned its first, tiny, quarter-sized ding in a tango with our garage doorframe last year. It’s just scant inches wider than our car.
This time I made it past the garage, but realized far too late I was still angled towards our house. In my defense, the house actually starts being houselike within the bounds of the frame of the garage door. You have to cut hard right to avoid backing straight into the house.
(If getting out of our driveway is starting to sound like a difficult geometry problem or a question on a Mensa test, you are starting to catch on.)
Angled towards the house does not equal crashing into the house. You see, I actually had not yet crashed. I stopped the car and got our to investigate my predicament. I had barely kissed the side of the house with the back fender of the car. I could reverse course and drive back into the garage and pull out again.
I returned to the car. I put it in drive and gingerly nudged it forward only to hear a terrifying metallic shrieking noise. Creeeeawwww-oy-eeeeeeeeee. I threw the car into park and leapt out to discover that the tiny, tangential kiss I had delivered to the house resulted in our stucco gripping the edge of my fender, and now it refused to let go – to the tune of pulling half of the fender off the car!
I’ll admit it: I panicked. How the hell was I going to get out of this? My crisis logic said, back up a little bit so there is less tension on the fender, and then pry it loose from the wall. And, well, since that was the smartest message running through my brain, I did it.
The problem was that I did it with a little too much verve. I put the car in reverse and tapped the gas slightly too hard, resulting in me colliding with the house at full ramming speed. In addition to my crumpled fender, I now had a shattered taillight, and had bent the spigot on the side of our house in half.
I meekly pulled the car forward a hair and got out to investigate the damage. The spigot was twisted back on itself like a pretzel. I applied slight pressure to try to return it to its former shape and it snapped off in my hands, spraying me with a blast of water.
Suffice to say, this was not one of the finer days in my personal history. To my credit, I had the spigot replaced and a taillight ordered by the time E returned home, which left only the bruises to the rear of the car and my pride as evidence of the mishap.
I don’t understand why the beginning of summer has officially became car calamity season, but I’m happy that last year’s exploits taught me to budget for the worst possible levy of my own personal stupidity tax against my bank account.
What I Tweeted, 2012-06-17 Edition
My tweets of the last week:
Photo Shoot with Filmstar
Editor’s Note: This post was drafted on this date but not finished or published. I believe that at the time I was waiting for one of the photos from the shoot to add to it. I’ve retroactively published it as one of my last written accounts of Filmstar prior to the band dissolving in September of the same year.
Being in a band involves a lot of activities other than playing music – organizing cables, sending emails, promoting shows, and posing for photos, among many other administrative and hard labor tasks.
You might assume photo shoots are the most fun of all the non-music-playing options. I mean, who can argue with being glamorous and having a photographer follow you around for a day?
I’ll admit, that part is pretty fun. But as someone who occasionally manages photo shoots for a living, I know it’s not all lipgloss and striking a pose. There is a lot of organization that goes into a good photo shoot, and when it is lacking it the quality of your photos can become a matter of chance.
That whole diatribe is for another time.
On Saturday all of Filmstar convened at new drummer Brad’s house in Northern Liberties, along with longtime fan Jake (not Arcati Crisis Jake), who was our photographer for the day. I’ve resisted in appearing in band photos since I joined, as I’m still technically a contracted player and not a band member, but with half of the band from the prior photos gone I had to submit to finally stepping in front of the camera.
We started out in an underpass. I know – bands and their brick walls, fences, and urban decay. So tiresome. Except, this particular underpass was rife with colorful, artful graffiti – some of which was dedicated to the recently deceased artist Moebius. So, not your typical graffiti. We also lugged a massive old monitor cabinet with us from Brad’s house to sit on and pose around. A great shot can be just a single prop away.
After the underpass we were intent on finding some other picturesque NoLibs locations to shoot. We had a few favorite bars in mind, but hadn’t had a chance to call ahead and ask for permission.
We walked towards Girard Avenue, debating the best approaches to springing a photo shoot on an unexpecting bartender, when we passed a fantastical wonderland of vintage lighting. It was a lighting fixture warehouse, whose massive load-in ramp was marked with a felled art deco lighting fixture that was flanked with high-backed chairs bearing decommissioned chandeliers.
Glam Decay. The perfect playground for Filmstar.
It turned out that the shop’s owner was a former owner of JC Dobbs from its 80s heyday. You find these sorts of connections all around Philly. He regaled us with stories of a young Kurt Cobain and renting light fixtures to Angelina Jolie movies while we scouted his shop for interesting photos. Well, I mean, the whole place was interesting photos, but we were trying to find one that we would look good standing in.
Feeling quite ingenious and victorious after our impromptu location, we headed into the bars and did what any intrepid band of beer-appreciators would do in that situation – we turned our photo shoot into a bar crawl. In an effort to not have to ask awkward questions about photography, we simply ordered a round of beers at each one.
This had the added bonus of loosening us up a bit. Not that we weren’t loose and gorgeous in our pictures already.
What I Tweeted, 2012-06-10 Edition
My tweets of the last week: