Crushing Krisis

The Newest Oldest Blog In New Zealand

Archives for June 2009

Broadcasting live for 12for12k!

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The internet had the chance to see and hear the first ever live web concert of my original songs and familiar covers, plus help to raise donations for Unicef’s Believe in Zero campaign for 12for12k

My 12for12k Setlist with demo downloads (if available)…

Like a Virgin – Madonna
Small & Lonely
Icy Cold
Saving Grace (w/Paris monologue)
Shake It Off (w/ “Shake Your Body” outro)
Since U Been Gone – Kelly Clarkson
Something Real
High & Dry – Radiohead (per Danny Brown’s request of Fake Plastic Trees)
Bucket Seat (an Arcati Crisis song)
Real You
Man In the Mirror – Michael Jackson (cried on every chorus – WTG, rock star)
Granted
Love Me Love Me Not (an Arcati Crisis song)
Space Oddity – David Bowie

Also, a few I planned to play but cut (or just forgot)…
What It Is
Unengaged
Gone Baby Gone

For people who watched and said they’d be interested in buying a CD (a) you are wonderful, and (b) download what you will and make a donation to this month’s charity, Unicef’s Believe in Zero. As a bonus, you can also grab my duo’s most recent Live @ Rehearsal album.

Also, we had a high of 40 unique users in the room at one time, so that’s what I donated ;)

Watch and chat live now with 12for12k

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If you aren’t the sort of person who masochistically books their Mondays right down to the last minute you might want to drop in on some 12for12k video events prior to my big video streaming debut tonight at midnight EST.

Just visit tinychat.com/12for12k to catch the following:

7.00pm est – Charity Panel with John Haydon, Joe Waters, Nicole D’Alonzo, Stacey Monk, Gabe O’Neill, and Danny Brown.

8.00pm est – Live music from special guest (TBA).

9.00pm est – Special section with the Looking Glass Lane girls.

10.00pm est – Comedy hour with Amanda Beals and New York comedy troupe, with an appearance from Wendy Liebman!

11.00pm est – Special adult hour with Avatar Koo reading short stories of erotic fiction.

Midnight est – Live music from me!

Midnight to 4.00am est – Special hosting from Iggy Pintado, author of Connection Generation.

TinyChat is a simple, old-school style web chatroom with the added bonus of audio/video chat from those who have it enabled. You can still watch and chat even if you don’t have a cam.

12for12k is effectively a charity of the month club – they seek out worthy organization with low administrative costs every month, and then spend the entire month spreading the word to raise donations.

Social networking makes this not only possible, but plausible. Instead of evangelizing to the web at least every month, 12for12k can aspire to having 12,000 (or more!) subscribers who chip in a $1 via paypal every month. It’s small change for one person, but $12,000 makes a big difference for the charity of the month.

I hope you’ll support 12for12k’s virgin videothon by dropping in for a few minutes, and follow them on Twitter to keep up with the charities they select for the rest of the year.

Streaming live at 12 midnight for 12for12k

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If you’re awake at midnight EST on the Monday-to-Tuesday divide you can catch the first ever live, streaming concert of my music – in support of an awesome, international charity drive called 12 for 12k.

I think I’ll call it at12for12for12k. Cool?

Founded by social media marketer Danny Brown, 12 for 12k throws down a bold challenge to social media users – can you use your social networks for good in concert with people all around the world to raise $12k for a new charity every month for a year?

This month’s charity is Unicef’s “Believe in Zero” – the belief that we can stop children from dying from preventable causes. And so far there is less than $1,200 pledged for the month.

It shouldn’t be that daunting. 1,200 people could do it for a reasonable $10 a month – three less trips to Starbucks. 12,000 people can do it with no issue – $1 a month, each! Easy pickings. If more than 10,000 Twitter users turned their icons green for Iran, surely just as many can muster $1 a month in donations to a good cause?

If you know me you know that projects like this are very close to my heart. I used Blogathon as a platform for my music to raise money and awareness for my favorite charities. I have cancelled Christmas in favor of giving charitable gifts. I volunteer with Lyndzapalooza – a musical non-profit dedicated to giving a voice to more of Philly’s independent artists. And starting tomorrow I am helping to plan a major non-profit project for this September.

12 for 12k is at once easier and harder than those projects. Easy, because it’s simple to support with a small donation. Hard, because it’s about making your giving a year-round trend – not just a once a year event.

I’ll be playing at midnight, and at the very least I will donate $1 for every song I play … and my songs are short, so that could get pretty expensive! In fact, I think I could play 12 songs in an hour… 12at12for12for12k!

If you’re awake at midnight – or even if you aren’t – will you do the same? Just ten of us donating $12 each is 1% of this month’s goal. We might not make it to $12k this month, but we can make giving a regular part of our lives, and save lives while doing it.

The power of social media compels you!

(PS: I promise at least Madonna & David Bowie covers, and almost can promise MJ as well. Dunno if the Lady Gaga is ready yet… you’d all have to donate a lot of money to hear that.)

Neil & Sir Paul

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If Gina and I saw this live and in person I think our heads would explode right off our necks.


(Neil Young doing an awesome cover of “Day In Life,” joined by Paul for his portion of the song)

Good blogs and the opinions I spouted at them.

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This post could easily be about how I spent the last two weekends sweating my physical and intellectual butt off to completely reorganize my home office and upgrade CK to WordPress 2.8, but you would be like, “Whatever, it looks the same to me,” or “Um, I’m reading you on my RSS feed, so I don’t really care,” or possibly, “Dude, I haven’t read blogs for two years. Send me a tweet about it.”

Which is fine. I mean, should I also tell you about how I swept the floor? Backstage is backstage for a reason. Props people work hard to keep actors focused on their performance, not for the applause.

(Plus, at CK I’m the prop person and the actor. And the box office manager, the technical director, and the old lady ushering you to your seat. You get the idea. Excelsior…)

In my increasingly uncluttered life I’ve been trying to make some more time not only to read other blogs I admire, but to interact with them. That means reading carefully and responding, which sometimes yields thoughtful comments.

I’m sometimes hesitant to leave my thoughts lying around in other people’s homes when they could possibly lead to interesting content back here at my own homestead, but I’ve arrived at a happy medium – I’ll link to all of said intriguing posts as well as giving you a snippet of my reasoned replies.

Here’s a glimpse at some of the discussions I’ve weighed in on in this past week.

(If you find yourself wanting to do the same, try subscribing to Backtype, a simple monitoring service which will doing all of the the keeping-track for you.) [Read more…] about Good blogs and the opinions I spouted at them.

Have an Infinite Summer

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Once I was in a very bad place, and also in the hospital, and I asked my mom to walk to B&N to buy me David Foster Wallace’s massive masterpiece Infinite Jest.

It kept me sane through three days in the hospital, and kept me awake at night for another month – which, at my faster-than-light speed of reading, is quite the feat. Try as I might, I could not devour it in a few sittings like I can with any other book. It was a novel that required digestion.

This summer has been declared Infinite Summer, which gives you an entire solstice-to-equinox season to read the book at a snailish increment of 75-pages a week.

As I understand it, your reading will be accompanied by encouraging blog pep-talks like this one from Kottke:

So sure, it’s a lengthy book that’s heavy to carry and impossible to read in bed, but Christ, how many hours of American Idol have you sat through on your uncomfortable POS couch? The entire run of The West Wing was 111 hours and 56 minutes; ER was twice as long, and in the later seasons, twice as painful. I guarantee you that getting through Infinite Jest with a good understanding of what happened will take you a lot less time and energy than you expended getting your Mage to level 60 in World of Warcraft.

Is that more or less haranguing than my Beatles screamo diatribe from last week? I think the Big K was meaner than me.

In any event, it’s a wonderful, maddening read, there are nifty bookmarks bearing the schedule, it makes a wonderful pillow and/or doorstop, and I might re-read it too if I can find a spare moment or two to read the second half of Outliers.