Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

my music

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From Copy Protection to Copy Protection, via AAA and a lot of chemistry that i very vaguely understand.

I’ve been alone in the house all day working on a paper on copy protection for my New Technologies in Communication class, and when Gina stopped by to say hello just after the second one a.m. she was only the third human i had spoken with all day . I was on a break from my paper at the time, sitting amidst a tangle of wires on the floor attempting to write a song in AAA form for my songwriting class. Gina inquired into this endeavor, and in my explanation of it i overstepped the bounds of simple differentiation between verse-chorus-verse, ABA, and AABACA to speculate on how song form effects the commercial prospects of an artists — perhaps dwelling on a day spent largely listening to Tori Amos.

I followed this idle chatter across our common area and into her room, by which point the conversation had switched over to inhabit a subject philisophically adjacent to the difference between Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Gina put on her new Donovan hits CD as i tooled around on my guitar in DADGCE, but the conversation eventually turned back to pop construction. After my obligatory monologue about the interrelation of image, genre, and songwriting Gina mentioned how pop music at least kept her awake and functioning during her grueling Saturday 7-hour laboratory class today. This particular exercise in weekly chemical punishment has become a favorite topic of ours, as Gina basically has eleven weeks to play a rousing game of “guess that organic compound” with the five seemingly random samples chosen for her by her instructor. I not only delight in the inherently game-show nature of this particular exercise, but also in the fun things Gina must do in her quest for knowlege.

One less than delightful thing Gina has to do in this quest for knowledge is use an array of photoscopic machinery to determine the nature of her compounds, rather than more traditional means like boiling things and making their colors change. However, Gina did all manner of machine-assisted processes at her co-op job, where she basically spent all day in a lab running reactions on organic polymers. After talking about several aspects of her employment, such as how she spent weeks getting a particular product to the ideal shade of “water white,” we finally came to rest on the benefits and similarities of ultraviolet and electron beam curing of… um… this thing that i’m going to ask Gina to name for me again when i wake up tomorrow morning. Basically, she was testing one element in the process that makes the wierd peely adhesive labels you find on plastic soda bottles, or the gloss and ink sealents on magazines.

This particular thread of conversation went on for a good long time, with several stop-overs for debates of when in their employment life-cycle a worker stops actively attaining/retaining knowledge of applicable technology and begins to merely sustain it. Coming back out of that, i attempted to make my understanding of electron beam curing more complete by asking what it would be more and less efficient to cure. Adhesive labels – good. Magazines – probably. Vinyl flooring – maybe not.


Consequently, Gina brought up that the sealants in questions were similar to those used on fiber-optic wire, which in turn sent me into a five minute discussion of fiber optics based on a presentation i saw in my New Technologies class this week. At the tail end of that it suddenly occured to me that the polycarbonate layer in the middle of a compact disc and the acrylic layer on the outside probably both made use of the chemical technology that Gina had been describing to me for the better part of two hours, and my mention of it lead into a brief overview of how a cd is put together. That in turn lead to an equally brief description of the differences between a CD and a CD-R, which in turn lead to a discussion of how CD-Rs are sometimes hard to read for older units but a cinch for CD-ROM drives. From there naturally headed into error correction and how CD-ROM technology error corrects more than a typical cd drive. And, before i knew what was happening, i was back at copy protection … explaining how sinister it was to corrupt the error correction of a disc to protect it from copying because it would degrade the overall lifespan of a disc.


I knew that extra hour would wind up being useful for something other than sleep.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/10/85607009/

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I have been transformed, though not completely.

The assignments in my songwriting class have so-far been very involving, especially to me — a non-music major. For example: write a melody for a completely instrumental piece and turn in an accompanying paper discussing your use melodic contours and devices. Less perplexing (though still very involving): write three different titles for each of three different subjects, then expand each title into a brief synopsis of plot, and finally re-write each original title using idiom/axiom or assonance based on what you outlined in your synopsis.


I thought i would be alone in my venture into this musical territory, and went to the length of getting the program head and my own dean (a music major himself) to sign off on adding me to the class. Much to my surprise, there were a few non-music major in my section of the class by the end of the first week. However, their introductions went something like “Hi, i’m Bob, i’m in this band…”


They all dropped the class after the melodic contour project.

To the best of my knowledge i am the only student in my section who turned the assignment in complete and on time, despite harrowing and somewhat vague instructions including having to notate the entire melody and perform it in class.


This week we had a myriad of assignments due, capped by one particular task: write a song. By no means did it have to be a good song, or a very well-written song, but it was meant to make use of all the exercises in title devices and word-painting that we had been employing earlier in the assorted assignments. As directed, I wrote a song, but i was less than pleased with what i came out with. Having already made a somewhat big point out of all the writing i’ve already done, i was definitely hesitant to turn something so equivocal and boring in masquerading as a masterpiece. So i wrote another… not my best song ever, but something i really enjoy playing. Because of my extra work i wound up scrambling before class to photocopy the scribbled lyrics out of my poetry book and to pencil in the chords, but i still had it turned in on time..


To the best of my knowledge i am the only student in my section who turned the assignment in complete and on time.


Complete and on time… there’s something about that. In the past i’ve been one of those students who turns things in incomplete and begs for extensions to wind up with their A. So far this year i haven’t done that — not once, even when i had the opportunity to do it to save myself from a logistical mistake.

I don’t know what’s come over me… could it be that i was destined to suddenly become responsible at the age of 21? I’m still trying to figure it out, but in the meantime all that i can be sure of is that i’ve entered every day of class so far with the intent to prove that i am a capable student, if not the most capable student, when it comes to completing the work in an acceptable fashion. Not only that, but when people show up with excuses like “i was sick” or “i didn’t quite understand the assignment” or “i missed the roll sheet last week” i just roll my eyes and go back to taking notes. I’ve done all three, and i’ve still made it out with an A in each situation, but being smarter than everyone else is so much more satisfying when i am really being more intelligent.

I really am.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/10/85568735/

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I thought that maybe she had gotten thinner since the last time i saw her, but as i stared at her from across the room the lines on the side of her face slowly began to resolve in my vision. Clever, i suppose, even artful. Not any thinner, though. Still, i would have never thought to so carefully sketch in a smooth jawline with concealer, gracefully feline, to separate my face from my neck. Really they’re still the same, one right after another, but the girl gets points for trying.

I was made to truly shudder by someone talking about how his friends should all switch to a BA program from a BS. Sure, i’ve conducted similar conversations in my day, but his line of reasoning was so incomplete that i think he may have entirely broken his point. Still, it wasn’t my place to interrupt him so that his friends could hear what a BA of Journalism really consists of, no matter how much i might want to.

Days are very systematic, consisting of: waking up, checking rank, working, learning, and walking. There are more repetitions of each depending on the day, and the only way i’ve been able to keep track of where i am or where i’m going are the people that i encounter in between. Last night on the train two girls were talking in Creole, and one of them noticed how my eyes kept peering over my copy of Suicide whenever i could make out a few words of French. They were from Immaculata, and we spoke briefly about Classical Sociological Theory and the continuous length of Lancaster Avenue before i got off … only to find that i had de-trained a stop early. At first i was a little nervous, but i eventually found my way back to Lancaster Avenue and began my walk to the concert.

While life is slowly becoming routine again, dreams are getting more and more disparate with each passing night. At the end of last week i fell asleep with a playlist of music on, and my dream seemed to take place entirely within a single play of “Seams“, though it seemed much longer than four or five minutes. The setting was plain, just walking around in my old house talking to my mother and to Elise. However, at the onset of each chorus in the song i slowly began to unravel — literally to come apart at the seams. At first i hardly noticed, as the first chorus is quite short; the sensation was not dissimilar to stripping off wet bathing trunks. It was during the second chorus that i began to become really alarmed, as with each line some small part of me would loosen and fall to the ground. Skin came unclung from my legs, it unwound from around my midsection, it came off like fallen leaves from my chest and back. My mother and Elise did not notice, though, still blithely talking to me as we walked around inside my house. Each line now was an eternity … long enough for me to lose another part of myself to the inexorable process of coming apart at the seams, and to watch that part turn into so much dust as it hit the ground.


As the final chorus began i was so weak that i could barely support my own weight for the walk into the bathroom to check the scale, and even as i read it the pointer was get lower and lower. Suddenly i was singing too, “i wonder if anyone will notice,” and as i began to move towards the next line i found myself sprawled on out on my back, watching in horror as the last of me fell away to reveal my ribs and the beating red heart within. In just whispers now i was keeping up with the lyrics, endlessly repeating “at the seams” until i saw movement in my peripheral vision. Elise was suddenly there, crouching beside me and reaching out as if to lay a hand against my exposed ribcage.


Instead she extended a single slim finger, which slipped between two bones and allowed her to brush her fingertip gently against my heart. My insides collapsed upon themselves at her touch, unable to properly communicate the feeling i was enduring. At that moment the song resolved, and my eyes opened.

The first thing Elise asked when i told her about it was if the effects were realistic or like stop-motion animation. My eyes must have widened a little — because they were the latter, and it had been the first thing i thought when i woke up.


I do not think we will be making videos for my Songwriting class, but i can ask tomorrow afternoon. Anyhow, that concept would be entirely out of my budget… and, for that matter, so would “Under My Skin.”


Why am i awake, again?

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/10/85510501/

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Well, whether you’d believe it or not from that rather hurried first Trio of the season, i am now officially a part of the Drexel University Chorus. As in, i auditioned — in a room with just Dr. Powell — and was accepted… albeit, not in the voice part i expected. So, there’s another hurdle in my life’s list of accomplishments down (and, my first “successful” audition for Dr. Powell ever). Yay.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/09/385499762/