Crushing Krisis

The Newest Oldest Blog In New Zealand

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Your guitar plays great songs!

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There’s a meme I keep seeing on Twitter to the effect of, “Telling a photographer their camera ‘takes good pictures’ is like telling a cook their oven bakes good cake.”

I will tell you, I got my back up a little about this. Sometimes your ability to do good work is truly limited by the quality of the tool of production.

I don’t know if a good cook could produce great work in my Sophomore year oven. Honestly, to this day I’m not conclusively sure the thing heated up past 200 degrees.

In my contrary angst I clicked through the meme to a delightful blog post from photographer Erin Farrell, who maybe was the patient zero of this wave of strident photogs? Erin put “takes good pictures” to the test – handing her pro camera to her amateur brother to shoot a friend’s daughter, and then shooting that same girl in the same location herself.

The results? You have to read her post to see, but the essence is that even her brother’s best shot with a heavy-hand of pro touch-up doesn’t compete with her middling shots directly out of camera.

Touché, Erin.

Then I thought about guitars. What if someone stopped me after a show and said, “your guitar plays great songs!”

I think that phrase is more illustrative of the photographer’s dilemma than the camera example, because the divisions are clearer. A guitar isn’t as smart as a camera – it has no automatic mode; it can’t focus on faces. As the songwriter, I’m the one who dreamed up the melody, wrote down the words, and decided on the arrangement and dynamics.

The guitar can’t do any of that for me. Like the photographer, it results from my skill and years of experience.

What the guitar did was give it tone. Depth. Credibility. If your favorite guitar player played your favorite song on a crappy guitar it would still be your favorite song, but it wouldn’t ring as true as their original. I am not a huge guitar snob, nor am I the best guitar player, but I categorically won’t play on other people’s guitars – my guitar is as much a part of my sound as my voice.

If an aspiring songwriter told me “your guitar plays great songs” (and they have, more or less, because I love to let other people play my guitar), I would thank them and tell them about Breedloves and why I like playing them. Because, even if my songs might be better than their song at the moment, the better tool is going to help level the playing field – and help them improve.

In short, the nicer guitar will play great songs.

That, in turn, made me think about cameras again. E is a degreed photographer, and I love her prosumer Pentax digital camera. In Paris she frequently let me shoot with it even though I also had a low-end “point and click” camera to shoot with.

Below are two photos of one of my favorite works of art, Cupid and Psyche, which lives in the Louvre. Both were taken by me with no coaching from E, though with different cameras on different days and with different light. Both are the best shot I took out of many with each of their respective camera, based on the limits thereof.

Which camera took the “great” picture? Click through for full size.


Bottom line? Some cameras take great pictures, and some guitars play great songs – but they need a certain alchemy from the taker and the player to do their magic.

not-so-prompt prompts

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In my Google Reader I have a tag called “PROMPT” that I affix to posts that made me think or feel something that I might like to share on CK.

I’ve discovered that prompts are best served fresh – ideally I should be writing a post about that intangible thought or feeling within a day or two of having it.

There are presently prompts on my list from as long ago as September. That is scary. It is sitting in the way of me being prompted to tell you about new thoughts or feelings. I need to flush out all my prior prompts so I can post about prompts promptly when they prompt me.

Let me see if I can string some together in a way that makes sense to us both.

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Spezify is a visual search engine, but that doesn’t mean what you probably think it means. Spezify searches the web for text, photos, and social media mentions of your search term, and arrays the results in a collage on your screen. It’s a great way to catch a quick snapshot of a person, place, musical artist, or brand. See what it has to say show and tell about crushing krisis or Philadelphia. Link via Fresh Arrival.

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The imitable Maggie of Mighty Girl posted about her husband’s project, Typekit. Typekit seems to still be in a closed alpha, but the gist of it is that it allows you to dynamically embed text in any font onto any webpage, regardless of if you (or the end user) has that font. You can follow the development on the Typekit blog.

In my humble opinion, Mighty Girl continues to be one of the definitive personal blogs on the internet.

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Geekadelphia (an excellent blog) recently posted a mammoth interview with J. C. Hutchins. Hutchins parlayed the net-success of his podcasted 7th Son trilogy into a publishing deal and subsequent tangible book. Said book – Personal Effects: Dark Art – comes complete with an intricately crafted alternate-reality game component that expands the narrative far past the boundaries of the book. Probably the next piece of fiction I will read, and setting the bar high for the next evolution of the novel.

(PS: M. Hutchins dropped by to comment less than twenty minutes after this was posted. Nice to see his publishing deal hasn’t changed his net savvy :)

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Matthew Sheret (who I found via Warren Ellis) is a writer and photographer with an intriguing list of projects. I am fascinated by his recent post This is a Souvenir, in which he details writing songs for an imaginary band, and how he’d like to take it a step further and have an imaginary record label.

I love that sort of thing – a simulacrum of the footprint left by actual media, but in the absence of said media.

(Speaking of Ellis, I enjoyed his dissection of what it means to be a “digital magazine,” and how that ought to be different from a bells and whistles flash interface with whosits and whatsists. His point (and mine)? You can change the method of delivery, but “magazine” should still mean “magazine.” But, can “newspaper” still mean “newspaper”? Compare to a recent Conversation Agent post about what happens when your local paper goes entirely online.)

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Lane is a remarkable photographer I have been a fan of for a long time. Today she posted an unreal photo of a rainbow seen over the New Mexico desert. Recently she volunteered with Review Sante Fe, a local photography exhibition. She posted a sampling of RSF photographers, and their work was uniformly amazing.

Now that Lane is back in the US I need to buy a print from her.

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I saw what was perhaps my first double rainbow ever a few Saturdays ago on the way to E’s show at The Saint in Asbury Park. It was so close it seemed like we could drive right to the end of it.

A more rabid month looms on the horizon. Oh, and vegetable percussion.

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In four weeks the second annual National Blog Posting Month will begin, wherein you pledge to post at least once a day for all of November for no reason at all.

This year participation is being managed through social network Ning, where I am curating a music bloggers group.

I also plan to offer some manner of prize since I won one last year, but I have not yet decided on anything suitably awesome.

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Ethicurean posted the truly brilliant Vegetable Orchestra, who perform music solely on instruments made of vegetables. Words escape me; please refer to moving pictures, below:

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When I saw Bettye Lavette @ Bonnaroo in 2006 I described her as a bloodthirsty Motown praying mantis whose goal it was to devour the entire audience before the end of her set. Yeah, Bonnaroo was weird, but it’s an apt description considering how long she was in industry exile; she came back hungry.

Read a great Stylus Magazine interview with Bettye about her new covers disc, wherein she is backed by Drive-By Truckers. Link via Largehearted Boy, who also offers a legal listen to some of the tracks from Scene of the Crime

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The Strand offers books by the foot, a service providing decorative book collections in any style and subject. Prices range from $10- to $400- per foot. A cool gift for your bibliophile friends, and a fantastic resource for set dressing; at $300/ft the Victorian era books are rather stunning. Via Kottke.

K-link part deux: Do you need 8 oz. of dehydrated strawberry powder? You can buy it, and other molecular gastronomy fixins, at L’Epicerie. After you’re done salivating, hit up this exhaustive blog post for info and resources.

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Then there were quick hits.

46 tax deductions for bloggers. Um, hells yeah. Via Akkams.

One time in college Elise did a whole photo project where she painted me with light. If she was here I could tell you the whole story about how her professor was friends with the originator of the technique. In any event, if you have a camera with long exposure time and a tripod you can do it yourself.

More photography: All panoramic pictures, all the time. Want to shoot your own? Read up on Gigapan, an automated robotic tripod. Latter two links from Contentious, former via Mashable; a great feed (if you can keep up with 20+ posts a day).

If your phone and internet errands are swallowing up your free time you should look into outsourcing to an offshore personal assistant; sounds like they’re worth the money if you have the right sort of tasks on your to-do list.

I don’t know that I realized New York City was quite so tall over a century ago.

Free iTunes Songs is a handy RSS feed that links you to all of iTunes free content, including the weekly free song downloads.

Second Rotation is an online pawn shop that pays you for your used consumer electronics up front, saving you the hassle of dealing with an actual buyer. As to where all the items go, the site is a bit cagey. I have one word for you: gnomes. Via recent daily fixation Unclutterer.

Finally, Torrez was very nearly my first favorite blogger (and, not only because he ran Power Bloggers). He’s back, and recently posted some simple advice on increasing blog traffic. After a month of following his own advice his Alexa rank is up ~200k. Probably advice worth taking.

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“Photo is a major with personality,” i opined to her as we sat in the plastic institutional chairs and eyed the machine that was whirring and drying her prints. “Smells like a beach in here,” i told her, not meaning to go on to make fun of New Jersey, but doing so anyway. Minutes beforehand there had been four of them along the wall-length sink, all with their odd developing cylinders and odd-smelling chemicals. A major with personality, expressed in the cuts of their jeans and the way they agitated the shiny containers with their spools of film safely ensconced from any possible outside influence.

I followed her into the darkroom without really thinking about it; after all, i was along to watch her develop film. I should’ve noticed the quizzical look on her face before she shut the door, as afterwards i couldn’t make out anything at all in the broom-closet sized room that she had just plunged into pitch darkness. She had to brush past my entire body to turn the bolt on the door, and i interiourly chuckled at the thought that the entire scene might have a more seductive tone if she wasn’t intent on her film. “I suppose it’s just like flirting with me while i play guitar,” i thought to myself as i carefully slid down the wall to sit on the ground in front of the door, “i hardly even notice.” I was told not to move, and i was unable to see, and all there was for a few minutes were the odd metallic clicks of the reel and my eyes desperately trying to make out any vestige of the dull red light of the main room through the door. My fingers looked slightly less black than the rest of the blackness, but the wall kept coming as a surprise.

The girl at the end of the sink had on jeans that fit her hips awkwardly, riding too high up off of her thighs and low from her waist to show off the bottom of a swirling tattoo on the small of her back. For a second it reminded me of how Anastasia’s jeans used to fit her, unselfconsciously dorky and sexy at the same time, and for that second i imagined that it was her tapping her shiny container against the sink. Just my imagination, i chastised myself. Instead, the dull metal thuds that rang in the air were the product of a taller, darker girl who somehow managed to seem entirely plain despite her angular features. I suppose it was that… the ability to exude careful plainnness and inattention… that reminded me of the parts of my Senior Year spent idly hanging out on Anastasia’s bedroom floor. I had just been mentioning it to Elise the other night, and i had found myself immediately self-conscious of my mentioning another girl who i had written a song for.

“A major with personality,” i said, and as i surveyed the room for a second i found myself thinking of Anastasia, who maybe was the first quirky girl with a camera i really got to know. There’s something about the clicks of a camera, the sureness of the fingers, the rotating it ninety degrees around the careful eye. Something about plastic binders full of black and white photos and sheets of negatives makes me think of her, although now she doesn’t even seem to talk to me in the odd moments i run into her on instant messager. I don’t think Elise was too jealous; after all, it’s not much use being envious of someone who never really cared for the songs i wrote about her over three years ago. And who never took my picture.

It must be something like watching me tune my guitar — that’s what i had thought when i watched Elise carefully advance a fresh roll of film earlier. An unrelenting attention to the instrument that acts as an extension of her eye, and my ever increasing ease with the shiny silver tuning instruments of my guitar and the chiming harmony the strings should wind up in when i’m done.

Her pictures versus my songs; a fair trade, i suppose. Except, now i owe her several thousand words more of them.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/04/75051512/