Archives for January 2012

breaking the painful cycle

January 4, 2012 by krisis

I have mentioned my dermatological struggles in the past on the blog. While the potential disintegration of my epidermis seems to have been staved off at the moment, my skin-care needs are (ridiculously) one of the major worrying factors about my health care and costs.

Yesterday, one of my favorite Twitter friend, @JerseyShoreJen, mentioned she had booked another media appearance from her recent EdOp on Eczema. Being a fellow lifelong battler of it and its fiendish cohorts, I congratulated her and asked her to share her article from the NYT Health Section – “The Painful Cycle of Eczema.”

In the bathroom, I try not to dwell too long at the sight of myself in the mirror before patting my skin dry and slathering it with lotion. I wrap bandages over the raw and weeping patches in the crooks of my elbows — a stopgap, really, since the bandages will soak through in several hours. I take Benadryl to calm the itching, and ibuprofen to temper the swelling and pain, before heading to meetings in an antihistamine haze. I hope no one stares, but they do.

…

I wore long sleeves and pants to school, even on the hottest, most humid days. … When I passed through puberty and still had outbreaks, I viewed my eczema as a character flaw, something I brought on myself for not being perfect.

After I read her story, Jen and I got into rapid-fire exchange on Twitter, gushing over our challenges and successes with our conditions. Though my collection of problems do not manifest as violently as Jen’s, I see so much of myself in her story. I never once wore pants to gym. I’ve ruined pillowcases and sheets when my medications have bleached out their color. When I have an outbreak I worry that people will stare and judge in meetings.

There’s not an immediate happy ending here – Jen and I are both continuing our respective struggles and our treatments. However, the silver lining is the connection that Jen created, and the relief I felt in talking to someone who relates to what I’m going through.

Jen writes at Down The Shore With Jen.

From the Beginning: Bruce Springsteen – Greetings From Asbury Park

January 4, 2012 by krisis

I never owned a Bruce Springsteen album as a kid. All I know about him are his cartoonishly overblown 70s and 80s hit singles. I thought it would be fun to experience his records in the original order to try to understand why so many people in my life love his music.

Bruce Springsteen – Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.
released January 3, 1973

Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. is Bruce Springsteen marking his journey from teen punk to struggling adult. It captures that very moment where a young man looks past the haze of his dreams to realize he may never escape the gravity of his small town. Even in that instant he knows that soon his recognition will fade as he, too, becomes a part of the unchanging scenery that surrounds him.

It is a bleak place to live. Welcome to Asbury Park.

There is desperation here as Springsteen tries to record the true faces of the icons of his youth – a series of greasy burn-outs and painted ladies – before he joins their sad chorus. “Blinded by the Light” is both the beginning and the end of the story. It functions as a Rosetta Stone for the record. A hopscotching bass line leaps between crazed blasts of saxophone and Bruce’s non-stop artillery of lyrics as he wonders if it’s worth it to be hobbled by the simple pleasures that surround him.

If the album was merely a time capsule of a long-since extinct mainstreet USA it would be a pleasant artifact. It is more than that thanks to the musical savvy of this nascent version of Springsteen. He fuses the sounds of his contemporaries into something kinetic and occasionally terrifying. He rambles and yowls squeakily like Dylan, treads Van Morrison’s more soulful take on folk (especially on “Spirit In the Night”), and matches Don McLean’s obsessive need to paint every corner of a story with words.

Oh, the words. Springsteen has so much to say that he rarely pauses to repeat a refrain. Songs like “Blinded by the Light” and “For You” threaten to smother your ears in sheer alliteration, growing increasingly absurd under their own lyrical weight. As it turns out, young Springsteen had yet to master the efficacy of a few cutting phrases, which means this LP yields no anthemic choruses in the mold of “Born to Run.”

You have to start here to get there. Springsteen had to empty his mind of an indelible image of his home town and the distractions of youth, as on “Growin’ Up.” That broader, metaphorical version of him is teased here, as on the elegiac “Mary Queen of Arkansas.” It is a ballad for a figure not entirely of the world he inhabited by day, but borne of dreams of a wider America, unseen.

I’ll confess, I don’t like the album very much, yet I can’t deny that it transports me to Asbury Park, circa 1973. I see a town shattered in the shadow of the Vietnam War, full of losers and junkies trying to achieve orbit on a fistful of dope and broken dreams. “Everyone’s drunk on main street, drunk on holy blood,” Springsteen intones on the cutting “Lost in the Flood.” He wonders about the anesthetized figures that surround him, “Did you lose your senses in the war, did you lose them in the flood?”

Asbury Park is not a terribly cohesive album, but it paints a specific time and place. As his contemporaries transformed themselves with each record, Springsteen honed his rangy, biographical songwriting from cascades of words into a tool that could be held by anyone. He redefined the concept of folk troubadour, at points seeming to sing with the voice of America itself like Pete Seeger before him.

Is that so different than singing in the voice of his town? Could those later songs have emerged from the lips of a man who did not come of age afraid he would never escape? That tension between stay and go, settle down or explode has been with Bruce Springsteen for his entire career. It is as much as a part of him as the alleys and main drags of Asbury Park.

we’ll see how brave you are

January 3, 2012 by krisis

Over the past few months I have been trading a volley of emails with the unrequited crush of my high school life.

(Alright, settle down. This is not an intellectual affair of any sort. E is totally in-the-know about this entire saga. But, as you’ll see, there is still some resonance there.)

Seriously, how cute was I back then? So cute.

Being the unrequited crush of my high school life, she was effectively and simply one of my best friends. In fact, I’d say she was the person I spent the most time with in high school after Gina. Since high school was also ground zero for establishing my taste in music, the entire half of my sonic vocabulary that I don’t share with Gina – Elliott Smith, Rufus Wainwright, Tori Amos – I do share with her.

(This pronoun business is getting tired already. In the proud and rarely-invoked CK tradition of assigning cursory pseudonyms to former obsessions to pseudo-protect their anonymity and separate them from posts made while I was actually in some form of crush with them, we shall refer to her as “Scarlett.”)

As with all of the few people who have fallen out with me (rather than the other way around), Scarlett’s story became a little too intertwined with mine. I found myself telling everyone I knew about parts of her life that were maybe not mine to tell, either intentionally or through my songs. Except, Philly is a small place, and she eventually told me it wasn’t the kindest thing to do to a girl.

We didn’t have a fight, necessarily, but we left it there, and eventually became Facebook friends, as one does in these situations.

I am not one to harbor regrets, but I regret that. How could she have known what she was getting into by being my friend? Fifteen songs which are now sitting in mothballs in some attic crawlspace of my brain.

(Yes, I do appreciate the irony inherent in now writing about her on my blog. I suppose this is one of my fatal personality flaws.)

Our renewed contact began because, oddly enough, Scarlett has out-of-the blue discovered a love of singing. And, let me tell you, this was a girl that had no interest in singing. You know me and my constant need to turn everyone into an all-singing, all-dancing cabaret version of themselves. I tried that on her in high school, and maybe had something to do with getting her to act in a play with me, but the singing part never came.

Suddenly, in 2011 she was interested in singing and playing, so she emailed me. I suppose I am the stock person that comes to mind when anything of the sort crosses the mind of anyone who has ever met me. Which is good – +1 to personal branding!

Anyhow, we talked, and then she sent me a recording of her singing. Though untrained, she has this wildly cool voice – as well as the instincts and DNA that come from all that music we shared in high school. A few days later I sent the song back with an instrumental arrangement and a choir of ahh-ing auto-tuned Peter’s.

Things have continued like this for a while now, her sending me new songs, us talking about the mechanics of singing, me musing random musings back at her.

Last week I finished a new song I have been chipping away at for – no lie – two years. I had played it for E a few times while working on it, but when I was finally done it was past midnight and I needed to play it for real for someone so I would remember it in the morning.

I recorded a video and sent it to Scarlett. It’s the first song I can remember sending to her or playing for her for over 12 years, even though back when I first learned to play guitar it was the sort of thing I did whenever I finished anything. “Sweet Nothing,” “Other Plans,” “Touch” – all those old ones, she was one of the first people to hear them as a file shared over instant messenger.

And now, in a way, we have transported ourselves back to our instant messages of 1998, firing our volleys of thoughts and songs across the city at each other.

I want her to be the biggest indie star in Philly, because even if I stop having a crush on someone I am still in love with all of their potential.

Top 12 X-Men Collections of 2011 – Reprinted Material

January 3, 2012 by krisis

Welcome to 2012 – I am still a comic book geek.

Specifically, the X-Men.

Yep. That’s a lot of comic books.

Specifically, I own something like 95% of every X-Men comic book ever reprinted.

On New Years’ Eve I said to myself, “You dashingly handsome scoundrel, how can you use your obsession to aid people who like the X-Men a normal, healthy amount – unlike you?”

The answer? I will count down for you the top twelve collected editions reprinting X-Men comics originally released before 2010. There’s a vast world of thousands of X-Men comics that have been released since 1963, and not all of them are readily available to buy in book format. These reprints mean that hard-to-get, or never-before-reprinted issues can be bought in handy collections with better reproduction of the line art than original issues.

(As for new X-Men material from 2011, that will require a whole new post to cover!) [Read more…] about Top 12 X-Men Collections of 2011 – Reprinted Material

How to turn off post revisions in WordPress 3.3

January 2, 2012 by krisis

Did you just update to WordPress 3.3 only to find that post revisions have returned even though you previously engineered some way to turn them off?

Don’t worry, I can help – but, first, some background and chatter.

Way back in 2008 WordPress added Revisions to its core features, and the feature persists today in the newly released version 3.3.

This is the amount of WP revisions I can create in a single week of editing if left unawares.

Revisions captures every published iteration of a post you are working on, so that if you republish with some minor changes you still have the prior version available to roll back to, if necessary.

This feature can be helpful if you make a lot of major changes to your work, or if you are on a multi-author blog and need to occasionally reverse someone’s edits.

It can also be detrimental, or plain old annoying.

The revisions feature nearly destroyed Crushing Krisis. Because, you see, my managing editor is an OCD Godzilla that lives inside my abdomen and due to his influence I have been known to spend my spare time making literally hundreds of tiny edits to spelling and spacing across the million-plus words of this site. Each edit I published spawned a new post number in a new post ID. My database ballooned by thousands of lines, I was using more RAM on my server, and legacy posts and pages linked by their post IDs were suddenly appearing at new permalinks!

There have been plugins to turn Revisions off, but when a new version of WP debuts sometimes those plugins don’t work right away. That’s why I am sharing the manual way to turn off Revisions.

This involves editing core WP files. You do so at your own risk. I am not a WP developer, and I cannot provide support to you if you hobble or destroy your blog. Unlike a plugin, this will not still work after a reinstall or upgrade of WP, so when you move to WP 3.3.1 you need to do it again.

Ready?

In your root directory you have a file called “wp-config.php.” Save a copy of it elsewhere in case you mess things up terribly.

Open wp-config.php and scroll down. At some point you should see a comment that reads “/* Stop editing */” – we will insert our new code just above that.

Insert this code:
/* Disable Revisions Feature */ define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false );If you would rather just limit the revisions that get saved, change as follows:
/* Limit Revisions Feature (by number of revisions) */ define('WP_POST_REVISIONS',6);

While you are here, you could also choose to add a line to define how frequently you would like WP to make single autosaves of your posts, which frequently saves my ass in the case of a browser crash. That code is:
/* Set Auto-Save Timing (in seconds) */ define( 'AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 300 );

Voila! Though WP will still inform you of your revision number in your posts table, it is no longer saving revisions.

Keep in mind, you do still have a number of revisions in your MySQL database, sitting around doing nothing like some vestigial appendix-like organ in your body that may or may not cause a later explosion.

(If you are me, that number of revisions is 250 in the one hour since you installed WP3.3. Yes, I literally make that many edits to CK in an hour. OCD Godzilla is a terrifying beast.)

To do away with them you simply need to delete all of the rows in your post table identified as revisions. Any time you directly edit your MySQL is potentially bad mojo, so I am not going to specifically advocate doing that. However, if you have backed up your DB and know what you are doing, visit WP Recipes for the simple one-line SQL query that will wipe out your revisions.

I hope this helped you! Personally, I get completely frantic when WP updates and one of my old plugins stops working to provide (or, in this case, block) a feature I rely on.