Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Tattooed Mom’s Bumper Cars and Textual Healing

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Rocking my song from the Textual Healing soundtrack, "End With Me," upstairs at Tattoo Moms in a vintage bumper car. Photo courtesy of the incredible @MikeyIl

A long time ago – like, about half a life – I attended a birthday party upstairs at Tattooed Mom on South Street.

That is the sense-memory that struck me in the face Friday night when I trundled my two amps up the stairs to the Textual Healing book release party and took in the room with its two pool tables. I’ve been to Tattoo Moms several times since then, but that was the only occasion I had ever been upstairs.

Now I have a second indelible memory of Tattoo Moms – me, standing inside one of the vintage bumper cars in the upstairs back room, singing and playing squelchingly distorted acoustic guitar licks from my place in the back seat.

The whole story of Eric Smith and his book is a sort of hazy dream to me. I can’t believe I wrote a song to the first chapter, or sent it to him a minute later, or wrote another one, or then wrote AN ENTIRE BOOK inspired by his manic and infectious “GO ARTS” energy.

That’s why I was so thankful to be playing for him, for his book, and for a room of people I’ve come to really love and cherish – literally too many Twitter folks for me to try to remember and collect their handles into this single post post.

What I do remember is finishing “Curves Sketched In Letters” and starting up my super-secret cover of “Fuck You” and watching the entirety of the room on my right – including Nan, Schmidt, Linzy and Jess, and a slew of other people – sing all of the callbacks every time I stopped for a breath.

The entirely too beautiful Allie with a copy of Textual Healing and author Eric Smith, courtesy of @MikeyIl.

(Also, intriguingly, the couch in front of me bore a girl I’m quite certain I went on a pseudo-date with in high school. I couldn’t tell if she was enjoying me or not, or if she even recognized me. Would someone from that birthday party recognize me now, playing guitar, if they hadn’t seen me in all of those intervening years? I was sorry she left early, as I sorely wanted to see if it was really her (and, if it was, have her experience how hot my wife looked).)

After my brief set half of Venice Sunlight took the stage bumper car to play a few songs acoustic. I had a grand time chatting VS’s Jay and Dave up well into the night about their band and brand new CD, released on Saturday and just-about-free to download.

Otherwise, the weekend was uneventful. I was couch-bound on Saturday with a howling backache (thanks to all the amp-trundling), and Sunday was spent cleaning and rehearsing solo music.

Now for a new week! Rehearsal, Freelance Whales show, Black Swan (!!), rehearsal, night off, and my tenth appearance at the Shubin Theatre Holiday revue – serving as the house-band with Gina. We’ll debut a cover of Counting Crows’ “Long December” in the long, proud tradition of sad Christmas songs as helmed by Judy Garland’s original “(Have Yourself) A Merry Little Christmas.”

National something something Month

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This is the fifth year I’ve claimed to participate in National Blog Posting Month AKA NaBloPoMo, and the third time I’ve failed at it.

In 2007 when I failed I got engaged. In 2009 I failed less spectacularly, but wrote an EP of new songs I’ve been playing ever since.

This year I wrote another EP of songs!

Oh, and as of 3:30 a.m. this morning, AN ENTIRE FRIGGING BOOK.

Behold this dancing monkey as he informs you that I wrote a frigging novel.

Yes, if you’ve been keeping up with the tiny graphic on the sidebar or my endless authorial ramblings on the Twitters, you would know that I’ve been hard at daily work on a novel for National Novel Writing Month AKA NaNoWriMo, which charges you with penning 50,000 words of fictional first draft in 30 days – 1,667 a day.

I found myself 10k words in the hole a day after Thanksgiving, but I was less worried about making up the missed words than I was that my natural stopping point in the story wouldn’t carry me past the 50k mark. However, last night the final chapter of my plot just kept going and going across 8+ hours of writing until I finally finished it at 4,500 words (9% of the entire book, at this first draft stage), sobbing on my couch at 2:30am with 50,227 words.

Then I plugged the whole thing into NaNoWriMo’s word counter, which counted me about 1k short. I expected that, since my counts have always been about 2% short when I use the website, but I was secretly hoping that it would resolve itself magically when I submitted my final text.

Nope.

Winner. Yep, that's my name.

Luckily, I’ve had a clear-as-a-bell vision of an epilogue for a week now, and I spent the hour deliberately dashing it off in one solid peal of writing to qualify for the official 50k mark on the site without having to make any serious expansions to the rest of the text, aside from a quick reread of the final chapter to catch obvious errors (come on, this is me, there’s no such thing as ‘no editing’).

There’s been a fair amount of polemic against NaNoWriMo, claiming it generates wasted time, false hope, and bad manuscripts. Well, sure. But, dudes, I wrote a book – actually, just a third of the entire story I want to tell, but still weighing in at roughly 243 paperback pages even in first draft.

I’ve always had the ability to write, and the intent to write, but this is still my single longest piece of actual, non-hypothetical, well-past the outline stages fictional writing by a factor of at least three (even as CK has swelled to over a million words – 20 NaNoWriMos worth of text).

So, was it a waste of time? Maybe. Isn’t everything? Why do I blog or play music? Why do people who I look down my nose at for watching television watch television every night? We all have our reasons.

What matters this weary morning is that last night I finally finished the first draft of book I’ve been conceiving and reconcieving since I was riding the 2 bus in 7th grade. Not only did I finish a first draft, I finished one of my current five big goals in life (having already taken a pass on having abs in 2010), and NaNoWriMo helped to inspire that.

So, my thoughts on National Novel Writing Month? In a word?

AWESOME.

PS: Many of you have kindly and without any regard for your own time or sanity asked to read some form of this novel. I absolutely will be posting an excerpt sometime soon, but not the entire thing as, theoretically, it is just a third of said entire thing, which means I have as many as 100k words left to write, as this was never really plotted as a standalone piece.

Of course, neither was A New Hope, so there is some precedent for this sort of thing. (Not that I’m comparing it to Star Wars.)

Fear not. The end goal is definitely to serialize the entire thing in some form here on CK, possibly as a podcast or graphic novel. (Do you like to draw, animate, and/or photograph such things? Because I don’t. So leave me a comment.)

In short, ask me again after I get more than three consecutive hours of sleep.

Now I’m a bassist

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We just loaded out from my first Philly show as a member of Filmstar.

Bass was played. I did not magically forget how to do it when we got on stage, which was a great relief. I had worries that I was going to look down and suddenly discover the bass was totally alien to me, like I was holding an accordion, or something else arcane that I don’t know how to play.

Bagpipes, possibly.

It’s weird to be sitting on the bottom of the mix. With Gina everything has equal weight – guitar against guitar, vocal against vocal. Either of us can dip out for a second and things stay in motion.

With Filmstar if I stop playing there’s no bottom! The bottom falls out.

Well, after one experience with that early in the set, I learned my lesson pretty quickly.

The other strange thing was being so LOUD. I am not a loudness junky when it comes to music, so I’m not used to the way instruments and amps resonate differently at higher volumes. It kept taking my by surprise.

It was a good set. Fast, a few bumps, but nothing I’m going to hold against myself forever.

So, yeah, now I’m a bassist. Seriously, me as the rhythm section? Where do I come up with these ideas.

Video Demo: “End With Me”

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Last night Gina and I held an epic Arcati Crisis rehearsal with our drummer Zina. We’ve worked our way up to eight drummed up tunes, and now we’re adding other special features like electric guitars and effects pedals.

We’re going to figure out this band thing, one way or another.

Meanwhile, I spent seemingly every free moment of yesterday singing the arpeggio D-F#-A-D-F#-A-D, which spans all the good bits of my singing range. However, on a weird set of vowels the top D can be a bit of a beast to get on top of, and of course I wrote myself just such a troublesome set of sounds when I penned “End With Me” shortly after posting about Eric Smith on Sunday night.

Can bad vowels stop me? Hell no. I mean, have you heard some of the audio on here from ten years ago? Not even bad singing can stop me.

Anyhow, here is a late-night first take on “End With Me,” another song from my soundtrack to Eric’s novel, Textual Healing. This tune has a slew of references to the book, including some specific lines. The recording has plenty of rough edges, but it sounds right, and I’ll take rough and right over mannered and plasticine any day of the week.

(Okay, not really, but let’s just think that for the purposes of this post.)


(Watch the video on Facebook, where I occasionally demo brand new tunes for my likers. Also, you can read the lyrics there.)

How Eric Smith rocked my world.

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Story time.

A few weeks ago Britt Miller, my partner in all things FAME, posted a link to the first segment of Eric Smith‘s “podiobook” – a podcasted audiobook version of his forthcoming novel Textual Healing with Britt contributing a special voice-acting appearance.

Eric Smith was one of those people that everyone I know knew, but I did not. Still, I occasionally followed his adventures on Twitter, which is what one does these days when you don’t know someone everyone else knows and you want to know why they all knew him already.

It turns out they mostly know him from running Geekadelphia, editing uwishunu, and working for Quirk Books (of Pride and Predjudice and Zombies fame). Eric’s also a professor and a music photographer who spent time touring with a number of bands.

I knew about a lot of those things separately, but didn’t know Eric connected them. I was intrigued – by Eric, by the idea of the advance podiobook, by Britt’s appearance in it, and by hearing Eric’s voice read his work – so I listened. And in the span of about an hour of my on-and-off listening to the podcast, a song popped out…


(watch the video on Facebook, where I sometimes demo sneak peeks of new tunes before releasing them anywhere else)

…so, doing what any DIY songwriter would do after midnight having just moments ago written a new song for a book by someone he knew only through his extended circle of friends, I recorded my first run-through, posted it to my Facebook page at two in the morning, and tagged Eric in it – off-handedly suggesting it was the first of a number of songs I’d write for his novel.

That resulted in Eric commenting “♥!” about eight hours later, which in turn lead to an email exchanges with the extremely genial Mr. Smith, who now I suppose I finally know directly instead of just knowing of via the knowledge of other people I know. Eric sent me an advance copy of Textual Healing and I am now committed (personally, not by contract or gentleman’s agreement or anything) to write at least four songs for the soundtrack of his book.

I just finished my second tune a few minutes ago, but this time there’ll be no insta-video. The phrases are so darn long that I’ll need to do voice exercise for a few days before I can get from breath mark to breath mark on the verses.

I’m happy to finally know who Eric is, and to have his passion project inspire some passion mirrored in me. Head to his blog, Eric Smith Rocks, to catch up on the first few episodes of the podiobook, and keep your eyes and ears open here for more tunes.

PS: About ten minutes after I posted this I wrote another song. Three down! One to go!