Crushing Krisis

Monthly Archives: April 2008

Sound and Vision

Monday, April 7, 2008

On Friday night I attended the New Artists opening at Muse Gallery, a third of which was the art of one my increasingly close friends, Jennifer Vessels.

I was one of the first guests to arrive, and I got to experience the art of all three of the new members in a nearly empty room to the hypnotic sound of Dante on his hang drum. I had seen some of Jennifer’s work before, but smaller, and as prints – never up close, original, and with all of the beautiful texture that each of her collagraphs contain.

Each piece was labeled with title and price, and though I understand that the intent of the show is not necessarily to sell the pieces, the concept of selling a piece of physical artwork is so strange to me. I could sell one of my songs, but I would always be able to play it. Elise could sell a photograph, but it would just be a print – a single version of an original negative.

I marveled at that, lost in the detail of her lines and colors on a second walk through the gallery. How to be Jennifer, so entangled in music and light that she can contain them both on a canvas, yet able to part with a piece, never to see its texture again.

Filed in Philly, art, elise, thoughts | | Comments (1)

A Long, Painful Weekend

Sunday, April 13, 2008

I woke up on Friday at 6:30 without my alarm.

On any other weekday I’ll be thrilled for this god-send of an early rise, likely to deliver me into my cube an hour early.

Except, I had off on Friday. And, I had awoken not because I was well-rested. No. No, not because of streaming sunlight interrupting my quiet repose, either.

I awoke because of the pain.

It was an unspecific, fuzzy ache even with the very bottom of my sternum. I generally have a high tolerance for specific pain and a low tolerance for general discomfort, and this split the two uncannily well.

Probably a stomach thing, I thought. I had overeaten to the maximum limit the day before … four donuts, three sections of tuna hoagie, two veggie burger pitas, and one delightfully large dose of peanut butter before bed. Probably all of the eating.

I walked around for a few minutes, checked WebMD but grew frustrated with its persistent braying about the possibility I was in cardiac arrest, and went back to bed.

I got up again at 7:28.

This time the pain was much more insistent, and it had no intentions of letting me sleep in. Or, really, of letting me sleep at all. Or do anything else for that matter, including walking outside or singing or going out to dinner – all things I might like to do on my day off.

Yes, insistent it was, and persistent too. I would up beached on the couch for the majority of the day, sitting alone and miserable while Elise headed out for the night rather than going to dinner at Striped Bass as we had plan. The pain was omni-present but far enough below my threshold that I would feel patently silly going to the ER to do anything about it. How could one day of overeating – three-fourths of which was entirely healthy and non-toxic – cause all this misery?

It wasn’t until the next morning that I finally put two and two together by stepping back further from my donut binge.

You see, prior to the donuts I had my typical fistful (600? 1200? really, who can say?) of ibuprofen on an empty stomach. Well, not entirely empty, because the evening before I had another typical fistful before bed.

That prior fistful wasn’t on an empty stomach, though. It was on a veggie burger and a number of beers.

I had an uncharacteristic mid-week night out to scout out Just Like Me at the Khyber on the behalf of Lyndzapalooza, and afterwards the already uncharacteristic night turned super-unusual when I wound up having a bit of a guys hour with two friends from my former a cappella life. Between the Khyber and our eventual visit to my official designated spring/summer bar, National Mechanics, I had a fair number of beers.

(This doesn’t really figure into the story, but I saw another terrific band – Parker House & Theory – who I have a major crush on at the moment. Their CD release is this Thursday in Boston. I’ll maybe remember to post about them separately, but we all know how those promises go, so best to mention them here.)

Now, mind you, this was still a work night, so I had been cautious – those beers were ingested over the course of several hours, and I did a bit of dancing and walking in that time, so by the time I got home I was only slightly inebriated, and with plenty of time to sleep prior to work. Still – mindful that I am typically a cocktail drinker and hoping to having a productive morning at work – I took that first typical fistful of ibuprofen as a preemptive strike on any possible morning fuzziness. When I awoke said fuzziness was nowhere to be found, but I took another fistful just to be sure (and, as it happens, had quite a upbeat day at the office).

Now, I’m not too much up on my general medical diagnoses – last time I was in the hospital I was convinced my appendix was exploding, but I in fact had an irritated bowel. However, even with my basic knowledge I know that alcohol, NSAIDs on empty stomachs, and sugary sweets can all contribute to an ulcer and, as it happens, I had ingested slightly higher than average quantities of all three in exactly that order .

Yes, it was certainly an ulcer.

With a better-than-dubious home diagnosis in place Saturday and today proved to be much more pleasant than their predecessor. I loaded up on medical and homeopathic remedies, and my stomach has been converted from thunderdome to a plush, well-lined (though sparsely furnished) bachelor pad.

For the record, to achieve that you want to stick exclusively to my personal variation on the Bananas, Rice, Apples, Toast diet (BRAT) – which omits apples and fulfills the rice requirement with a combination of sushi and Rice Dream ice cream – all while ingesting some combination of OTC Prilosec, Evening Primrose Oil, and Deglycyrrhizinated Licorice (DGL), the latter of which has perhaps the highest foul-taste to efficaciousness ratio I’ve ever encountered in my life.

(Seriously, it tastes like black licorice blended with mashed up aspirin and garden soil. Its label cheerfully suggests “it’s chewable, because saliva enhances the effect of DGL’s natural compounds,” which is worth pointing out because chewing it up and swishing it around in your mouth goes strictly against your natural impulse, which is that it is poison and will surely kill you. But, truthfully, it knocks out any flare of symptoms in about ten minutes flat.)

In any event, I feel fine now, except for I feel like I was in a time warp for the last 72 hours, and that rather than heading to work in the morning I should just now be gearing up for my glorious Friday off from work.

On the plus side, I can now add “cultivating an ulcer” to the list of things I am really good at doing without even trying.

Filed in day in the life, health | | Comments (1)

I am Peter’s beleaguered abdomen.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

I have a whole litany of things to say about Lyndzapalooza, Arcati Crisis, and Amy’s new section of the newspaper, but today I’d like to keep the attention on my abdominal section.

Separate from my (now infamous) teenage anorexia, I was also a sit-up addict. I don’t know why – I wasn’t especially interested in any other sort of fitness. In fact, I wasn’t even seeking a six-, four-, or two-pack. I just wanted tone.

I think part of the reasoning was, “food goes to the stomach, so abuse the stomach.” Also, I think one time I saw an anorexic girl on Oprah talk about doing 300 sit-ups a day and thought, Hey, that sounds way better than bulimia as a convenient companion to my anorexia.

Seriously. Fun times.

In any event, I left both the anorexia and the sit-ups by the wayside in college when I discovered things like all-you-can-eat cafeteria mac’n'cheese.

Fast forward a decade past my multi-hundred sit-up prime and my entire abdomen is a joke. And, not a laughing-with-it joke, either.

No, they are definitely to be laughed at.

When fiancee introduced a simple, nightly crunch regimen to get into absolutely drool-worthy shape for her trip to Australia I simply watched – sometimes while eating ice cream – because my abs, they are no longer. Even a standard set of crunches gets me huffing and puffing, and that doesn’t even get into the pure horror of any sort of side crunch that attacks the love-handle area.

A bit insulting, perhaps, that my future wife is in tip-topper shape than me with barely any effort, but it’s not really injuring my pride. After all, it’s not as though I’m spilling out of my clothes here – I’m just weak in the mid-section. I still eat better than ninety percent of the population of America. I still walk three miles or more a day from spring to fall. I just don’t cause her whiplash when I walk by with my shirt off.

However, what did add insult to injury was Elise’s younger brother.

He’s already a better singer and actor than I was at his age, which I can at least rationalize as due to his vastly superior genetics (I mean, we are talking about Elise’s brother, here). Yet, on top of that last year he out-of-the-blue started working out daily.

I was skeptical. I made all sorts of resolutions in high school, but the only two I actually stuck with were playing guitar and try to subsist solely on water and Altoids.

For a while all he had to show for it was endurance for the boredom of jogging and an altogether terrifying skill at Dance Dance Revolution. Now he has actual muscles! Abs, pecs – you name it. And, not just while impressively flexing – he has muscles even while at rest!

When I played DDR in front of him over Christmas I felt like a cow skipping rope. Oh, and did I mention that their father runs marathons, and that when he deigned to run my company’s ten mile race last year he posted the best time of everyone I know? And her sister, the non-fitness-nut, is currently serving out the remainder of her Fulbright Scholarship teaching English. In Taiwan.

I’ll be a legally bound part of this family in a scant nine months, and the peer pressure is starting to mount. To date I’ve skated by on the account of being an academic-wunderkind and a singer-songwriter. Then I had a few months of grace on the “wow, that’s a nice hunk of diamonds you bought for my sister/daughter.”

I’m going to have to step up my over-achievement, lest I become permanently tagged as the fat, lazy, dumb member of their family. (And, theirs is a beauty contest that I am never destined to win (unless I plan several thousands of dollars of plastic surgery (and this is not a post about my need to compete with my own mother))).

My grad school indecision is about to continue into it’s fourth year, so I don’t see a Fullbright in my immediate future, and – let’s face it – I’m not planning on running anywhere anytime soon. (Being the longest-running blog in Philadelphia has so far won me no respect.)

My most realistic aim in this impending crash-course in sibling (and parental) rivalry is somewhere between the fitness levels of my fiancee and her brother – more than a nightly crunch routine, but less than a military-like regimen that causes high school girls to forget how to breathe.

Really, I’d be happy with enough to get Elise to gawk at me when I walk around the house naked, which rises in frequency as the weather improves.

Filed in elise, family, fitness, health, high school, over-achievement | | Comments (2)

This is why I don’t like to stay late at work.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Scene.

Thirty minutes past the proscribed quitting time I – in sharp gray suit, curly hair tucked under my stereo headphones, and bright red sneakers – sigh with resignation, shut down my computer, and walk out to wait for an elevator.

(I am most likely singing along to an Arcati Crisis song at the top of my lungs while walking in a circle, because that is what I do anytime I am alone and waiting for or riding in an elevator.)

The elevator opens.

In it is our CEO and all three of our SVPs. They grin like a school of sharks.

I sheepishly slide my headphones off of my ears, nod hello, and squeeze in next to the highest ranking woman in the company.

The doors close. The air hangs silent for a moment, and then they continue with the conversation they were having when I arrived.

I am sorely tempted to push a button. The floors pass ever so slowly. Any button. Each floor passes, doors shut and unrelenting.

After what seems like an eternity of biting my lip and pretending not to understand the fine details of their conversation, the elevator finally reaches our upper lobby.

The doors open, and we all hang for a second to see if anyone is going to give anyone else the right of way. “Oh, you first.” “Oh, no, I couldn’t.” “Well, you are the CEO.” “Yes, but…”

Nothing. Silence.

The wait continues. We are in danger of the elevator doors closing and sending us back up for another excruciating ride.

I am dead center – a straight shot out the door. And I am the lowest-ranking employee, so it made sense for me to exit first.

Were the doors beginning to inch shut? I would not survive a ride back up.

Flashpoint. I dart out of the elevator … at the exact same moment that the highest ranking woman in the company also makes a break for it.

She was, after all, the only woman in the elevator.

We collide.

In the continuing silence my world slips into impossibly slow motion – I feel my cushy hips rebound sideways off of her slight frame, feel as though I can hear my cellulite churning to reform itself.

It is not just a little bump, either. No. It is a straight on, full-contact body-check straight out of raucous-yet-executive game of deck hockey. I pray futilely that the the men will all pile on (or at least cheer) to make the moment less awkward.

If only.

Finally, my forward motion arrested mostly by utter mortification, I turn back to regard my partner. She is askew, as if I delivered said body check followed by a headlock/noogie combo.

Hers is the laugh of drops of water slicking off of an icicle.

“In a hurry?”

Scene.

(ps: Dear management: I redacted all of the names and sensitive information. And the mean parts. Particularly the word “bony,” which I had mistakenly used twice. So, please do not Dooce me. Thank you.)

Filed in Year 8, corporate, day in the life | | Comments (2)

All In the Family.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Just to show that nothing is safe from competition in Elise’s family, her sister Jenny left an encouraging comment about how she respects my bloggingness – leaving unspoken the inference that the respect is intact despite my hopeless fat, lazy, dumb, ugliness – and parenthetically mentioned that she is on a Dragon Boat team (huh and the what now?), so I should not count her out of the fitness competition just yet.

And, by the by, she is also a blogger, only her blog is broadcast from Taiwan and features regular lessons in Mandarin.

And, oh, in case I forgot, she used to be a competitive ballroom dancer, and she’s choreographing our first dance when she gets back from Taiwan, so I better watch my mouth or I’m going to have to learn to do walkovers and cartwheels.

Do you see what I’m up against here? Elise already volunteered herself to do upper body workouts with me when I move up to a higher set of weights. Next thing you know I’ll have have their brother emailing me songs he’s written and telling me he’s starting his own music festival.

Although, there’s something to be said for marrying a hyper-intelligent, pro-active bombshell with two similarly equipped siblings, in so much as any time I choose to slack off in some aspect of my life I just picture the appropriate one of them sitting on my shoulder, doing that same thing about five times better than I do it.

Whenever it doesn’t send me into wracking sobs or a panic attack it’s very effective. Like, just a few minutes ago I didn’t do enough bicep curls and the trio of them mocked me in imaginary three-part harmony to the point that now I can’t even lift up a glass of orange juice.

Ahh, family.

Filed in Year 8, betterment, elise, family, over-achievement | | Comments (3)

Week-Weary

Friday, April 18, 2008

I’m absolutely beat after this week of working hard, hard workouts, and bloggerific whinging, so I turn you over to two of my Philly compatriots for your nightly content.

First, via my absolute #1 favorite client in the world, Music Snobbery, a local blogger who gets featured in places like NYT and VF, and who threw himself a third blog birthday bash that – upon the breakup of and corresponding cancellation from The Teeth – lured Moby to fill in. Yes, that Moby.

Gee, I wonder who I can get for my blog’s upcoming eighth birthday? Hmm…

Second, Jen @ 1000 Times No is a particular favorite of mine, but last year whenever I’d stop by she seemed to be on a hiatus. Right now she’s active and I’m active, and it’s a beautiful thing – her random assortment goes well with my own.

And, with that, I will now return to the land of recline, wherein the heavy thing I have to lift is the remote control.

Filed in linkylove | | Comments (0)

Revising your auto_increment in MYSQL

Sunday, April 20, 2008

This is a post about manually altering your auto_increment value in a MYSQL table. The solution was just obscure enough drive me crazy for a few minutes, so I figured it’s worth blogging for other DIY MYSQL intermediates (including myself) to stumble onto in the future.

The MYSQL query is:
ALTER TABLE Name of Table AUTO_INCREMENT = Next Value

If you don’t understand the query, or why you might use it, keep reading.

How To Edit Your MySpace Music Profile

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Editor’s Note: This brief article has helped thousands of musicians begin to gain control over their MySpace pages. If it also helps you please consider friending me on MySpace! In your “ADD ME” note make sure to mention that you found me through my blog. Or, comment below, including your url, to share further tips or tricks you may have uncovered.

I just spent a boggling amount of time (inclusive of intensive brain-process time while asleep) trying to learn how to update the layout of my MySpace music profile.

I won’t bore you with all the gory details. The upshot is, MySpace operates on its own peculiar set of rules, and 99% of websites proffering updated MySpace layouts (AKA “MySpace Codes”) do not care one iota if you understand them. They just want you to pick your layout and be happy.

(Even if you’re a savvy web-user it might not be immediately obvious where you paste the layout, as there is no obvious “backstage” area of MySpace. Improbably, any code alterations get pasted into your About Me box – or, if you’re a Band, your Bio box.)

My problems were twofold:
(a) We all know I can’t be happy until I understand how something works.
(b) Normal profile codes and editors don’t necessarily work they way you want them to on a Band profile.

Now, allow me to provide other musicians with the benefit of my 16 hours of experience in this field. It’s not a tutorial, so much as a guidebook. For this to be of any use you should have a basic understanding of HTML and CSS, and a high capacity for trial and error testing.

First: Understand what you’re getting into. Read an awesome article by Mike Davidson that gives a detailed overview of how MySpace layouts work, and what you have to do to alter them. They’re effectively a series of nested tables altered by simplistic CSS code – not so bad, right?

Next: See Mike’s explanation at play. Visit Views Under Construction and then visit their sample profile and band profile. Now you understand the degree of manipulation you can put your profile through!

Then: Look before you leap. Dip your toe in the alteration waters by checking out some isolated edits you can make at Pimp Web Page, pasting them into your profile to see their effects. Note that you can do more than just change colors – you can resize, move, and hide most elements of a profile.

Finally: Head to the best editor I found, Real Editor. It’s meant for normal profiles, but you can still load up your band file. Here you can tweak just about any element of your page!

My suggestion? After you’re through playing around copy out the complete code for reference. If there’s any of it that doesn’t make sense, go back and work out one element at a time. Each time you finish an element, get the HTML. It will have some other junk in it, but it should be easy to pull out the one element of the code you actually altered. After a few iterations you’ll begin to understand what’s what. Try starting with your Contact Table, which is called contactTable in CSS.

When In Doubt: It’s not always obvious what certain page elements are named, or how they’re manipulated. If you’re stumped on how to get your intended result, trying viewing the source code of your profile, or another profile that you like. Zero in on the thing you’re trying to change.

If it’s an element like your top friends, search for text inside that table – you’ll discover the table class is friendSpace. If you’re viewing a cool profile that has altered that particular element, search again – this time for the name of that class. Now you should see the CSS that’s driving their manipulation.

If what you like is a minor element, like a certain border or text treatment, try searching for that color’s hex value (grab it beforehand by taking a screenshot and using an eyedropper tool in Photoshop, or similar).

And: Every time you arrive at a non-objectionable result copy out your code into a text file and save it before you keep working. If you’re having trouble with one tricky element, just work on that element in an otherwise blank About Me box, and add it to the rest of your saved code once you get it right.

Hope this helps!

Saving Grace (live demo): Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Bucket Seat (live @ rehearsal): Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Filed in Making Music Work, webdesign | | Comments (16)

in which I am a smoke-filled room

Sunday, April 27, 2008

At the moment I am beat.

Yesterday I proceeded straight out of that last post into my daily exercise block, which is already starting to feel like a tough-but-feasible challenge instead of a life-or-death struggle.

With barely time for a shower and a bite to eat I public transited to a lengthy Arcati Crisis rehearsal, where we banged on Gina’s “Brother John” and my “Love Me Love Me Not” from every possible angle.

The former is now a staggering seven minutes long (twice the length of the majority of our tunes), and features me playing riffs and singing harmony that are both far outside of my normal comfort zone.

The latter is a weird amalgam of Animals-style sixties riffing and chugging Fall Out Boy alterna-rock, and is so much easier to sing with someone else doing some of the heavier lifting on guitar (even if my lifting really hasn’t changed at all). My previously hard-to-sing single bar of “detox tea” has now extended into a five measure wail during which my diaphragm is all like, “see, I told you I had a purpose other than wobbling around under your fake vibrato.”

Afterwards I ran for my life to catch two trains, the second of which I nearly boarded in-motion, to make it to Buckets for Lindsay guest-hosting the open mic. I met lots of cool new performers, and spent much of the night promoting my ass off on the behalf of our upcoming music festival, and drinking cocktails with Bill McConney, who comes off as a modern update on Nick Drake (aka, pretty great).

Over the course of the evening I played two sets, rocking my now-standard opening duo of “Icy Cold” and “Like a Virgin,” and debuting my new tentatively-titled “Not David Bowie” as well as a cover of “High and Dry.” My latter set was around 1:30 a.m. and featured me wailing “With or Without You,” which was wise to save until after the falsetto-palooza of H&D, but not wise to sing directly before “Love Me Not,” because the five-measure wail was nowhere in evidence.

Afterwards we walked back up the hill to Lindsay’s house and, for reasons unknown to me, I smoked a clove cigarette. Actually, they’re not unknown – an occasional clove when out with friends was one of my only vices in high school, and after a day of physically and vocally pushing myself it seemed like a decent way to relax.

Except, my pack-a-year clove habit is almost a decade old, and dovetailed with the height of my slothful anorexia and complete lack of vocal talents, so I really didn’t have a frame of reference about how it would feel to the new-and-improved version of physically- and vocally-active me. I woke up with my lungs feeling weird and slept-in, exactly like the unmade bed I was rising from.

The feeling didn’t do me any favors physically or vocally, as I discovered on the train and walk home. I wasn’t exactly wheezing, but I couldn’t find a good walking rhythm, and my vocals are unexpectedly squeaky in places, like a guitar string that’s not quite settled into it’s notch on the saddle (I’m sure the Bono-vocals have some bearing as that as well).

After an unexpected and delightful nap my lungs feel back to normal, and now we are about to depart to see the Curtis Symphony Orchestra at the Kimmel Center.

Filed in thoughts | | Comments (1)