Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

blogathon

Taking The Dive

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Last night Gina and I were completely out-of-sorts, which lead to not one of our more productive rehearsals ever, except for it seems like whenever we have one of those “Real End” is impossibly great. Probably because it’s our oldest tune.

(Actually, en route an LP meeting last week I discovered that Gina has a Blogathon 2001 best-of disc in her car, which is the only existing high fidelity copy of all of those songs, including the first ever demo of Real End. Which is kinda awesome. Like, it doesn’t sound like us – it’s got a borderline indie-rock awfulness to it but it still totally holds together. I think if we still sounded like that people would like us better.)

In any event, the point of this post is that after our incredibly unfocused rehearsal we walked a few blocks over to The Dive to open for our new band-friend Kursten Bouton.

It was an interesting excursion. The Dive is, in fact, a dive. It’s essentially a South Philly row home that happens to be a bar.

We were in the upstairs, a tiny triangle of a room fronted with an abbreviated bar and terminating in a stack of huge speakers and a strange, little, wooden sidecar of a room containing an awesome, old, 16-channel board with wooden trim that I had way too much fun with. The mics and stands were a little suspect, though, and if we ever head back there I’ll probably bring my own.

Despite a relative lack of audience we had a good time hanging out with Kursten again and hearing even more of her repertoire (though my favorite pair is still “Don’t Surrender” and “Polaroid Migration”). After a few songs of intro I talked Kursten into doing an Ani song with me, and in a pinch we belted out “Gravel.” Afterwards AC played a solid 45 minute set, ending with a comfortably loungy rendition of “Noncommittal.”

Pretty fun, but mostly because of Kursten. The Dive is a cool bar to have in the neighborhood, but I’m not sure if I’d head out there just for the open mic when I could hit South Street instead.

Trio: Season Five, Suite #8!

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Trio: Season Five, Suite #8:
Songs on the Topic of Friendship
Standing, Martyr, Until You Awake



Trio – the original singer-songwriter web session – returns for its fifth season featuring my own DIY music. This season each trio of songs will have a loose topic to connect them, which I will discuss between songs.

A sample of what I had to say in this Trio…

Standing
It’s about both a negative and a positive aspect of friendship … leaning. This mutual leaning society that you have with your friends. Which is a good thing – that’s what friends are for. But it’s about the event where one person stands more freely than the other. You have one leaner – one Tower of Pisa in the relationship, and one Eiffel Tower – and the back and forth that creates.

Martyr
Sometimes when you are a third party really looking at a problem that your friend is having and you’re not involved in that problem it’s hard to gauge how much of a problem it really is. You have no way of knowing. They’re your filter. You don’t have any other reality other than their reality. … We all climb on a cross every so often, and this song is about telling one of your friends to get the fuck down. … It’s not that I don’t like you, it’s that I don’t believe in your problems.

Until You Awake
I had become friends with somebody through Rabi, and that person had an unfortunate incident with her health, and they actually were into a coma. … Things were not looking good for her. … I have really been blessed in my life by not only my own good health, but the good health of everyone around me, and I didn’t know how to react to this young, vibrant person who maybe would never get to hear one of my songs. So I sat down one night and wrote “Until You Awake”

I remember that I sent it to her boyfriend and he played it for her in the hospital and shortly thereafter she woke up. … I still play it because it represents the power that ever-tenuous-connection across the internet can have over you, and over your songs.

You can download this Trio, or listen to a previous Trio:

Candy Says

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Cool moment of personal achievement:

Listening to random underplayed songs at work I thought I was listening to a heretofore unheard live track of one of my favorite songs, but it was actually me singing it! I didn’t even realize until I picked up my iPod and saw my face on the album cover.

Alright, alright, if you insist: It was Candy Says, from Blogathon 2003. A little buzzy at full volume, but played quietly on work speakers it’s perfect.

Sunday Morning

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The party was a huge success, and I probably have enough leftovers to last me all week (which is good, because I’m going to need to skip lunch for a month to repay my party debt to my budget). Also, Elise is now graduated, or commenced, or whatever, and along the way her arrangement of the Star Spangled Banner sounded fantastic, took everyone by surprise, and garnered lots of random congratulations out on the lawn after the ceremony was over.

Lots of post-party mopping awaits me downstairs, but i thought i’d unload some scant links on you all first.

A Bookslut interview with the founder of Guys Read, a non-profit organization that encourages boys and men to find literature that’s right for them. I’ve been a reader almost my entire life, but that’s probably because my mother always bought me the right things to read, so i am pleased and fascinated by this cause (found via Neil Gaiman).

Word has it that Blogathon is a go, and will be held on August 6th. I’ve never liked the last-minuteness of the planning of the ‘Thon, because it sells short the opportunity to support it and it disqualifies possible participants who have a life and like to plan ahead for it. I myself already have plans for August 6th (i’ll be on stage!), so it looks as though my participation with the ‘Thon has ended. I might still be doing some promotional writing for the event, and otherwise wish them the best.

MusicLab is a study on how you like music. I haven’t done it yet, but in exchange for being a test-subject you get to download all sorts of free indy tunes. Link probably from Coolfer.

Also from Coolfer, a cool girl band Jessie Diamond and the Thousand There was another band i wanted to link to, but i lost their link. Instead, read the best guitar-oriented interview with Ani DiFranco ever.

Okay, off to mop.

Look, my snake is eating its own tail!

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I am still working towards my weekend 10,000-coherent-word goal, but i have made some progress into my Senior Year death march of assignments. Again, if you live in China or have friends from Brazil, allowing me to interview you could save my ass in a dramatic fashion.

The current snag that i am working through is that, because my narrative voice and style tends to be consistently distinctive, i find that i am unwittingly quoting content that i wrote for the Blogathon site last year in pieces of my Senior Project. If you unintentionally quote your own uncredited writing, do you have to make a citation to avoid accusations of plagiarism? Or, alternately, to prove that you aren’t surreptitiously mining your own previous work in order to avoid writing new content? Furthermore, do i have to cite the sources of statistics that i compiled myself last summer for the Blogathon? What if the sources don’t exist anymore? Do i just get to say “cause i said so?” If were to wrap myself in a white sheet as if i were preparing to be mummified and then subsequently roll off my back roof, would i be distinguishable from the creepy thing that looks like a dead body in my neighbor’s yard that Lindsay and i were always too afraid to investigate from a distance closer than her back window?

So many questions, such a small attention span.