Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Philly

Monday Morning Remainders

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I performed with Filmstar for the first time on Saturday, but you have to wait a day or two to hear about the results and if I’m still feeling conflicted about playing with the band.

First, here are your Monday Morning Remainders – eight blogs I’ve enjoyed or tweets I’ve flagged.

1. Philly (and the internet at large) got up in arms last week about a so-called “Philly Blogger Tax,” which was really just the city’s business privilege license being applied to Bloggers. My virtual friend JoeBeta sussed out a sensible explanation and critique of the policy, from Technically Philly co-founder Sean Blanda.

It’s certainly a horrible waste of resources to pursue blogs with revenue in the hundreds when some companies and individuals owe the city millions in back taxes, forcing the city to do things like offer a tax amnesty to the dead beats.

2. Rocking local blog Phrequency had a flash concert for TJ Kong on the freaking Broad Street Subway. I love TJ Kong and my old promo shots were from the Walnut Street station, so in my opinion this is approximately the best thing ever.

Do not hold your breath waiting for me to do one on the El, though.

3. A Vancouver realtor’s Facebok page gained over 4,000 fans in 12 days. Crazy pyramid scheme for iPads? Nope – good old fashioned content that people give a shit about. (via @morganb.)

4. I’ll just repeat what Torrez said:

Imagesoak is a fantastic application for finding things to read and look at based on the interesting photos and images that accompany them. Nevermind what I just said, just go there.

5. Matthew Leone, bass player for the Chicago based band Madina Lake, sustained life-threatening injuries while trying to defend a stranger from brutal domestic abuse. Sweet Relief, a fund that supports musicians in times of illness, is raising funds to pay for his treatment and rehabilitation. Matthew’s band member and brother has been blogging through the ordeal.

6. Leslie Hunt was one of my favorite recent American Idol Semi-Finalists – she had a real identity and real taste in music, but was quickly kicked to the curb for her quirk. Mpomy.com blogs a video from her new project, District 97

7. Amanda Palmer’s life is so serendipitous. On break from her hectic schedule, she sees a random trio of teens whose photo she feels compelled to take. Almost after she’s gone, one realizes who she is, and catches her to tell her that he’s a big fan. One thing leads to another, and suddenly he’s playing a concert to thousands of internet viewers from her apartment.

8. Amanda’s fiancé is super-famous comic, fiction, and film writer Neil Gaiman. Neil has been in a legal struggle with Todd McFarlane since 2002 regarding unpayed royalties on creator-owned characters he developed for McFarlane’s Spawn. Neil blogs part of the judge’s new decision, which contains delicious text like:

Much as defendant tries to distinguish the two knight Hellspawn, he never explains why, of all the universe of possible Hellspawn incarnations, he introduced two knights from the same century. Not only does this break the Hellspawn “rule” that Malebolgia never returns a Hellspawns to Earth more than once every 400 years (or possibly every 100 years, as suggested in Spawn, No. 9, exh. #1, at 4)…

I hope your Monday is going well. More news (and video) on my weekend as a Filmstar coming up!

But I Regress, pt. 1

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With the launch of my monster definitive guide to collecting X-Men comic books as graphic novels, I have officially become a fifteen year-old.

Allow me to explain. Or, to begin to, as I’m sure this is a multiple-post-spanning story (just as that website feature was a multiple-month spanning obsession to research).

A few months ago Philly-local social media mover/shaker/sandwich-connoisseur @MikeyIl threw a series of events for the Ford #FiestaMovement. One of them was an all-local art show, featuring work by my partner-in-fame Britt Miller, as well as Eddidit and others.

Being Britt’s unpaid intern / personal assistant / life coach and a faithful supporter of friends and local artists, I got my ass there – even though the event was smack in the middle of negotiating the price of our house with our Realtor over the phone.

(Literally. Drunk friends: “What are you doing?” Me, to phone: “Hold on a second.” Me, to friends: “Oh, I just got another few thousand dollars knocked off the price of our house.” Drunk friends: “Wowwww.”)

Where was that fateful art show held?

Brave New Worlds. A comic book shop.

Here at Crushing Krisis I haven’t ever fully explained my addiction to comic books, c. 11/1991 – 4/1996.

X-Men #24, one of my favorite comic covers.

It was a brief but tumultuous affair. Comic books combine my love of serial narrative with an OCD urge to make meticulous, alphabetical lists. They created a 10-year-old who would do anything to earn $40 a month to pick up every book bearing the image of Wonder Woman or an X-Man.

(Seriously, I’m surprised I wasn’t peddling coke for my neighbor. It’s a good thing my guitar habit didn’t get to drug-running levels of expense until after college, when I was salaried.)

For only collecting for four-and-a-half years, my comic collection is prodigious. Not only did I collect new issues weekly, but in the pre-spreadsheet days the adolescent OCD Godzilla in my soul – a mere tadpole, at the time – compiled lists of back issues by hand… lists twenty and thirty pages long, complete with estimated budgets and timelines for purchase. Every few months my father engaged my whim, and I checked off line after line.

I was hardcore. The guys at the comic store treated me like I was twice my age (now ironic) because I was so on top of my shit with my pull lists and my back issue pricing and my discussions of the Magneto’s morality and if the ends truly justified the means.

Then came the internet. AOL dial-up cost by the hour, and I was hooked on it within minutes of my first sign-in in January of 1996. Four months later my wallet issued an ultimatum: limit my internet usage, or jettison my comic addiction – now complicated by Marvel’s 90s’ decadence of holographic covers and limited series.

The real decider was probably a demo of Warcraft II, a living digital board of Risk I could play over and over again with my friends over my 14.4 baud modem.

I dropped the comics and never looked back.

Until last month.

(To be continued! In the meantime, if you’re a closet x-fan who wouldn’t know a pull list from their elbow, check out definitive guide to collecting X-Men comic books as graphic novels – the easiest (and cheapest) way to be an adult comic book fan.)

Disaster is Natural

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I have this theory about how Philadelphia is immune to disaster.

Stick with me for a minute.

No seismic activity. Relatively far away from potential tidal waves and protected from hurricanes. We’re not known for forest fires or mudslides, and despite our utter flatness occasional floods are minor. It doesn’t get too oppressively hot and the biggest challenge in our snow storms is waiting for the city to send plows. We’re relatively drought- and famine-proof, as modernized cities go, and NYC and DC are preferable targets for terrorists and rogue nuclear missiles.

Really, the closest we come to city-wide disaster is one of our sports teams winning a championship. Otherwise, short of OCD Godzilla bursting free from my chest to tramp around Center City, it’s a pretty safe place to live.

So, of course we move out of the center of the city to the fringes and within the first week there’s a tornado on our block.

Yes, day six as homeowners, tornado.

That is only vaguely an exaggeration. It wasn’t officially a tornado, and it was actually on pretty much every block adjacent to our new one while leaving us untouched.

I witnessed a portion of the storm from my office window, and it looked sufficiently deadly – I saw it blowing things clear off the gated roof of an adjacent building before my view was reduced to a foggy blackout. However, when I left, Center City looked no worse for the wear.

A huge tree on the next block, completely uprooted.

My new neighborhood was a different story. My bus stopped a mile short of our house in traffic snarled by dark traffic lights.

I disembarked and began a muggy hike back to my home. About a mile out from our house I started to see down tree branches. Then it was downed tree limbs, taking some power lines with them.

By the time I was a block away it was entire trees – trunk, roots, and all, upended ass over end to be splayed rudely across well-groomed lawns. Entire blocks of entire trees, the entire landscape denuded by mother nature.

To say I was nervous when I approached our house would be an understatement. I was obsessing over the huge tri-trunked tree that shades our patio, and how any of its trio of arms could go crashing through the roof to destroy my collection of guitars and recording equipment, now located in one conveniently destructible place.

My heart sank when I turned onto my street a block below our house, only to find it completely blocked off by the arboreal carnage.

A barricade of branches and power lines.

Having lived in the absence of disaster for nearly three decades, to me the sight was fantastical – as if my block had experienced some sort of wizarding dual, the debris glinting with hints of magic in the afternoon sun.

I navigated around it with great care, emerging on the other side to regard a pristine, untouched block stretching beyond the mess.

I raced the remaining distance to my house but, like the rest of our block, it was unmolested – no downed trees, no holes in our windows from golf-ball-sized hail. The only evidence of a storm my neighbor described as sounding “like a freight train passing by” was a dusting of shredded leaves on our lawn and our power, out.

We dodged a bullet – a house on the next block had its gutters shredded by downed trees, while a few streets over a massive branch decimated the windows of an SUV. A co-worker lost all of the power lines to his house to trees.

Us, we just lost our innocence – no longer protected from disaster by Philly’s impregnable grid of row homes, and now inclined to worry about the state of our house after every storm.

just a one-hitter / don’t stop believing

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I’m still upset about not blogging on Thursday.

It wasn’t like I forgot about it. I had words in the white box at least three times, but nothing seemed blog-worthy.

With all of this news about perfect games in baseball I was really looking forward to notching a month of blogging every day which – incredibly – I have only done three times in the past 118 months.

It’s the same sort of rarefied event as nine innings of no one on base – a perfect storm of a strong performance by me, plus my team of interesting friends and co-workers supplying me with fodder to write about.

(Also for the record books: that’s only the second time in 118 months this blog has ever discussed baseball (so don’t get your hopes up for another mention (unless you plan to read for another five years)).)

Anyhow.

We went out last night to see two of our favorite local bands in our last “we live ten minutes from South Street” hurrah.

As of noon we are about halfway through our packing process – all of the media, books, decor, and closets have been packed, but the everyday clothes, computers, dishwares have not – which is encouraging, since we have a full 120 hours left before any movers arrive.

In excavating my hall closet I unearthed about 200 issues of Rolling Stone, which I am finally willing to part with, along with my high school year book – now 11 years old, almost to the day.

I took a brief intermission from packing to page through, showing E various pictures of my rail-thin, long-haired self, alternating between my two stock high school poses – one, smiling obviously for the camera, and the other, mouth open and finger pointed in mid-discussion.

It’s amazing how many of the notes – some from people I haven’t spoken to in 11 years! – say something to the effect of, “You believed in me and it made my high school years bearable. You are so talented, and I know you will find success.”

I know I read those messages at the time, but I’m not sure if I really appreciated what they meant. If I could write something in that book today that would appear to the me of 11 years ago, it would be this:

Dear Peter 1999,

One of your greatest talents is your ability to be enthusiastic about everyone you meet, which is why you’re going to school for journalism. I know it feels like while you believe in everyone else no one believes in you. Maybe that’s because people assume (rightly) that the enthusiasm and ambition you have for them is the same as you have for yourself, so you don’t really need their belief.

Don’t be afraid to let people know you believe in yourself, too.

Don’t worry, you’re doing everything right.

Don’t change, ever.

xoxo,
– Peter 2010

Wednesday Morning Remainders

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I could write a post about each of these links, but in ten years would that be interesting to read? Maybe they need the context of each other to create a narrative beyond their end destinations.

Here we go.

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1. Ever fantasized about being a globe-trotting musician headlining your own tour? Amanda Palmer does just that, and her no-holds-barred look at managing the business of her music while on tour via email will either thrill or terrify you.

2. On the way back from our aborted-by-clouds skydiving attempt Wes played a hilarious NPR show/podcast called Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, an hour-long quiz show that’s part Daily Show part Whose Line Is It Anyway. As I’ve recently mentioned, I can be a humorless curmudgeon, but the show’s mix of news, puns, and grammatical humor struck a chord with me. Derek Powazek discusses how the Wait, Wait formula is crowd-sourcing done right.

3. Skydiving was my present to Wes for graduating from Temple Law. HuffPost interviewed Nikki Johnson-Huston, who went from homeless to college-dropout to award-winning graduate of Temple Law. (via JoeBeta)

4. My friend and fellow sky-diving companion Chris is the glassblowing apprentice at Old City’s Hudson Beach Glass, where they are having a design-your-own-pint-glasses special through this Sunday to commemorate Philly Beer Week. I’ve been remiss in not dropping by for one of their open-studio days – an issue to be amended soon. (via UWishUNu)

5. Reminiscent of my blog-buddy Unsolicited Analysis, You Are Not So Smart tackles common misconceptions with detailed take-downs. Their recent “Misinformation Effect” addresses a recurring theme of CK, the persistence and reliability of memory. (via Kottke; on a related note, see his post on “mesofacts”)

6. Also in the UnAnal vein, Flowing Data blogs data visualizations, like heat-mapping tourist routes based on the volume of photographs by location.

7. Are you a worry-wart about things like burglaries, shark attacks, and plane crashes? Meg’s Tumblr provides a handy graphic to divert your fears to identity thefts, dog bites, and automobile accidents. The greater, more probable danger is often in plainer sight than the more fearsome, relatively exotic danger.

8. Do you wield your iPhone or iPad outdoors and while mosquitoes enjoy your pale, savory flesh? Grab an anti-mosquito iApp that broadcasts high frequency noise that’s a total buzz-kill for the pests. (via MightyGirl)

9. Speaking of iPad, imagine if every seat at your longest meeting had one. Seth Godin did just that. Would meetings really become more efficient? Seems like it would apply favorably to political processes as well (and I know some congressional or parliamentary bodies use a similar system).

10. Last month Danny Brown presented a post of his 17 top WordPress plugins, many of which I’ve added to CK in the intervening weeks. Now that I see them in action, it turns out they’re as ubiquitous as they are ingenious, and thanks to them my quality of blogging-life has greatly increased – thanks Danny! I’ll add the suggestion ofAfter the Deadline – a proofreading plugin for both WP and your favorite browser.

11. Design blog NotCot presents a detailed look at the farcical Pre-Handshake Handshake Device from artist Dominc Wilcox. I need Dominic to design a body-suit in a similar style for me to wear on the El…

12. … and/or, when I am all hot post-hypothetical-triathlon, I can buying some Matrix-style gear from Ego-Assassin. (via Warren Ellis; I’ve been reading his Planetary)

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Wow, they really did end up as a narrative … for me, anyway.