Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Happy Birthday To This

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I. The 27-Club.

Last September I turned 27.

It made me nervous.

Being a major music fan and devout lifetime subscriber to Rolling Stone, I am all too aware of the so-called “27 Club” – a musical super-group headlined by Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, Jimi, Janis, Jim, and Kurt, all of whom met their untimely ends at age 27.

My nervousness wasn’t an actual, rational fear. Just a fringe anxiety, like my utter terror at putting my hand anywhere near the blade of a food processor, even if it’s disconnected from its power source. A mere superstition. Anyway, my musical acumen certainly isn’t at risk of rivaling any of theirs, nor is my level of excess. –> Still, it hung there. The 27 hurdle. A year it would be a challenge to survive.

In the months after my birthday the challenge of surviving gave way to the challenge of getting from one day to the next. Planning a wedding and a honeymoon. Making music solo and with Arcati Crisis. Organizing benefit concerts for four separate charities, all while holding a senior position at work.–> Honestly, I was so preoccupied with life that the whole 27 Club concept didn’t reoccur to me until I was getting ready to jump out of an airplane last month. And, since that failed to kill me, I assumed I was in the clear with regard to the whole untimely end angle.

I continued thinking that until the past few days, when I began re-reading my entries from the past year in anticipation of the ninth anniversary of Crushing Krisis.

It was then I realized that it happened. I died.

If that sounds like hyperbole, it’s meant to be, but only a little bit. Truly, the past year of my life was so vastly different than any that came before that it was hardly lived by the same person.

If that sounds like hyperbole, it’s not. One of the benefits of your blog celebrating it’s ninth birthday is having the ability to make frequent, sweeping, and entirely-accurate generalizations about the state of your life.

In fact, that’s my favorite thing to do on August 26, the birthday of Crushing Krisis.

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II. Running Long.

I first floated the assumption that I was the longest running blog in Philadelphia six years ago today, and I verified it last November (with a footnote).

Having finally taken the time to vet my claim to blog-fame, I began to talk about it. At first it was clumsy to get it off my tongue, but slowly I improved from, “Oh, um, I have a blog that’s been around. For a while. Really long, actually,” to “I write the longest-running blog in Philadelphia.”

Even though I now say it with ease, it still has not stopped sounding strange. As I discovered this year, Philly is a pretty plugged-in town. Bloggers, podcasters, twitterers – the city is swimming with them. To be all three, and to be the one collectively doing it all the longest, stopped seeming like a passive achievement (like, “I lost my last baby tooth!”) and more like an active one (more like, “I pulled out my last baby tooth with my bare hands, because that little fucker was annoying me!”)

–>In truth, it took a lot of effort to get through nine seasons of Crushing Krisis. I had to learn stuff that normal people apparently don’t know how to do based on their day-to-day lives, like being able to offer pros and cons for all of the major blog CMS platforms from present back to 1999, or revising PHP arguments on the fly to get the results I want. Similarly, I know all sorts of silly details about audio production that make even my eyes cross.

I didn’t mean to get this way. Honest. It just happens when you write the longest-running blog in Philadelphia, which is also the longest-running platform for a singer-songwriter to podcast and embed his or her work.

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III. Greatest Hits, The Expanded Edition

A year ago today I wrote that I felt “as though the vast majority of my personal greatest hits record is contained in the last year of my life.”

I’m happy to report that the hits have continued – in both life and song. Significantly, I crossed off two of my biggest goals in life – seeing the Nike of Samothrace in person at the Louvre in Paris, and jumping out of a plane.

The greatest hits of my year weren’t limited to those two events. Hardly.

I planned a wedding and a honeymoon, an all-encompassing circus that stayed relatively fun right through the end, just as I predicted and insisted it would. I recapped dress shopping with my groom’s party in two parts, the first of which hilariously features my near-ejection from David’s Bridal. I recorded a song that would become so synonymous with our wedding that its lyrics wound up in the fortune cookies at my bachelor party

Then there was the actually bit where I got married. Subsequently, I reported our honeymoon adventures in words and photos.

The novelty has not worn off.

I made music both solo and as Arcati Crisis. As AC, Gina and I headlined a show and then co-hosted an open mic for over half a year, in the midst of which we recorded a Live @ Rehearsal record so definitive that it approaches being a studio album (download it free!). But, some of the most fun we had was while driving and breaking traffic laws.

Meanwhile, I realized I had an entire album of new solo repertoire waiting to be played, and I began to get out to perform it more than ever before – particularly Small & Lonely, Saving Grace, Tattooed, and sometimes Gone Baby Gone. Confidently. I even captured me on video, for once.

(Also of note, Elise now fronts her own band, putting me in the position of band-aid that she has occupied faithfully for so many years.)

I planned four benefit concerts for four separate charities – Lyndzapalooza’s Back Yard Music Fest, my own first ever live web broadcast as part of my support for Danny Brown‘s #12for12k, and a pair of impending shows for #blamedrewscancer and at work for the United Way.

Speaking of, work bled into my digital life more this year than ever before. I had the good fortune to join a project with one Ms. Britt Miller, who cajoled me into joining twitter, which in turn lead me to meet like-minded folks at Social Media Club and Tweetup events.

In turn, that resulted in my winding up a part #blamedrewscancer, for which my personal and collaborative efforts have contributed to almost $10k raised in less than 100 days!

Oh, and I jumped out of a plane. Did I mention the jumping out of a plane?

And, as usual, I did a lot more that was hard to categorize. I realized that I’ve been planning events for about two years straight. I shared personal reflections, from the election of a new president to watching my neighbor freebase cocaine at his kitchen table. I visited Erika and her fiance in Boston for a madcap adventure that wound up with us giving each other drunken facials during the Emmys. I tossed off a cover of “Dress You Up” in a single take. I wrote a social media essay on “Network Agnosticism.” I discovered that I’m living in my own teenage superhero novel. Someone even told me I’m not mean enough, which isn’t something I hear too often.

If it seems like an impossible amount of things to do in just one year, well, it is. At points it turned my life into a sort of a joke, whether that be slapstick or black comedy, as I juggled all of those responsibilities. And, amazingly, they lead me to be genuinely happy more times than not.

I flashed back on a younger me, and how I can relive his depressions through my blog (https://crushingkrisis.com/?p=3411 ) just like Sebastian gets sucked into the world of the Never Ending Story https://crushingkrisis.com/?p=3412) I began to think of my family as Asian, even before the wedding ( https://crushingkrisis.com/?p=3364 ).

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IV. The Year of the Phoenix.

I have a different opinion on the 27 Club now than I did on my birthday.

Twenty-seven isn’t a litmus test. It’s a proof of concept. It’s a year that that the self-realization bell curve reaches its pinnacle, where the majority of people begin to realize that the path they’ve taken can lead into a tangible future.

I can understand how that could lead you to your end, intentional or not. It leads to excess and over-extension, and to fear and doubt. You can wind up as a phoenix just as easily as you can wind up ground down to ash.

For all the successes of the past year, it contained many challenges for me too. I died a lot of deaths. In the case of my wedding, it was a rebirth as something greater. In other instances, it was just the end.

It was also the year I started shaving with an electric razor. If that’s not a major beginning I don’t know what else could qualify.

For the first time in years I am writing my anniversary post less enamored with the year that passed, and more enamored with the year to come. I seem to have finally escaped the fear that my best work is behind me instead of beyond me, farther down the vector of my life.

That is a death – finally ending my obsession with re-assessing my past in favor of a future view.

Thank you for helping that come to fruition.

Thank you Elise, for transforming my life into something real. Thank you Gina, for following this line with me, a vector connected to our destination.

Thank you Lyndzapalooza, for forcing me to innovate excel as a communicator and as a musician. Thank you Britt, Drew, and everyone else at #blamedrewscancer, for not only testing my limits, but forcing me to reconsider them altogether.

Thank you, on the other side of this screen, for reading my adventures, and for caring if and when the next installment might turn up. Thank you for watching me die 3,528 tiny deaths – once for every click of the “POST” button, and thank you for waiting for me to come back to life with every subsequent visit to this little white box.

Thank you for having the patience to watch and wait for me to finally take myself as seriously as you’ve always taken me, as a professional, a songwriter, and a blogger.

Thank you. And, happy birthday to this.

9 Reasons I Didn’t Like District 9

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I disliked District 9 from the start, but it took until about an hour in for me to reach the “I really might leave this theater” stage.

Mild spoilers, but not as many as the Rolling Stone review.

1. It’s a personal take on sci-fi, except we’re made to dislike the extremely unsympathetic protagonist very early on. A mid-flick attempt to humanize him (pun) didn’t work for me, as he only seemed repentant as a result of his torturous conditions and quickly reverted to being an ass whenever possible.

We’re left with only a vaguely personal connection to a shallowly defined alien sidekick and a well-executed CG tiny alien tot. (The best scene in the movie is when we first visit their home, and find the pair of them to be defiantly intelligent. Well-scripted and -played.)

2. The transition from documentary to omniscient perspective was clumsy – only made worse by continuing use of documentary devices, eventually leading to a transition back to documentary.

3. The documentary portion is too caught up in it’s tasteless racist (speciesist?) humor, and not interested in enough in its characters. Yes, we get it, subhuman treatment of non-humans is a lot like subhuman treatment of people that are different than us. Were you that afraid the theme wouldn’t play to the back row?

(That said, I did love the abortion joke. Most big summer flicks would never go there.)

4. The movie is gross just to be gross. Gore and splatter is one thing, but did we really need the constant vomiting, dripping, severing, and devouring of unsightly food? Again, gimmick in lieu of plot.

5. The major plot maguffin is a complete deus ex machina, which would maybe be forgivable if it wasn’t for all of the antogonists being completely fucking obsessed with the effects of said maguffin.

6. There isn’t a single good bit of dialog in the entire movie, which leaves the audience to be dragged along for the (yes, frequently compelling) ride rather than strongly engaged and eager to follow. They say “fucking” more than I say “awesome.”

7. Aliens are shown to be viciously strong, except where it doesn’t suit the continually contrived story.

8. The action set pieces just didn’t sizzle – lots of noise and wonderful effects, but the confrontations themselves were one-dimensional.

9. The exploding people trick was just done by Watchmen, though I think it was executed better here. Still, shock value was lost.

I’m in the minority to the tune of 80/20 per the TomatoMeter; the review I agree with most completely is Vancouver Voice:

It’s a bore. Blomkamp offers up an ugly world, poorly photographed. There is more debris, more smudged faces, more gore effects packed into this film than are conceivable in the worlds of, say, Ulli Lommel and Lloyd Kaufman. Worse, nothing happens in this film that the viewer can’t anticipate after the first 15 minutes. It’s mockumentary style is rendered inconsistently since there are scenes shot in mock style but to which the implied filmmakers couldn’t have had access. And, like most so-called science fiction these days, it is really a war story in scientific drag. … [T]he narrative eventually devolves into one of those long CGI fight scenes that at least a portion of the viewing public is finding repetitious and uncreative. The film is also achingly obvious in its political message.

Biggest plus? Constant subtitling, of both aliens and hard-to-understand humans. I’ve been watching movies with subtitles for over ten years; I’d watch every movie and tv show that way if I could.

Monday Evening Remainders

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My ass was firmly planted on the lazy-train this weekend. I watched a lot of movies and listened to a lot of music in my collection that I’ve been inexplicably neglecting (notably Andrew Bird; how in god’s name did I ignore that one?).

Anywho, all of which is to say that I wasn’t ready with links this morning. Boo-freaking-hoo.

Graphic Design Blog‘s list of 45 Creative Blog Designs will make your head spin (although I note that a lot of those huge headers would push the content below the fold on my laptop). Moradito, Kulturbanause, and Matt Bernstein are favs.

A look at the present realm of reader revenue from the charmingly named “Newspaper Deathwatch.”(via @journalistics)

I wouldn’t have assumed my journalism degree would be obsolete quite so soon. At least I’ll always have my hard-won college lap dancing skills to fall back on.

(Don’t knock them, that’s what convinced E to marry me.)

I really enjoyed this list of web ways to learn through play, via Philly blogger Akkam’s Razor.

Here’s a list of the top 42 “Content Marketing” blogs. It’s not definitive by any means, as exemplified by alternate sources provided in the comments – notably, the Ad Age 150 and AllTop’s Content Marketing Page. (via @ritubpant)

The echo chamber of marketing blogs can make me a little nauseous when they’re all trying to reinvent writing with every post when posts are barely 500 words long. I chatted a little more about what I refer to as the “epiphany epidemic” in a comment on Danny Brown’s post “Why Mediocre Blogging Can Still Be Great.”

For posts that go beyond sound-bite to actually make you think, check out the killer “What Twitter & Facebook Can Learn from Phish at Mashable, a social media workflow at the consistently smart P Morgan Brown, performing a social media audit from regular read Overcommunicated, and the two-part The Future of Influence post at Colorado Business Mag. (PMorgan via @kimwood; CBM via @TobyDiva/@ThomasFrey)

Want to break out of the echo chamber? PodCamp Philly is an unconference on social and emerging media, or, in their words, “for anyone interested in podcasting, blogging, video-casting and social media.” Which, um, hello, that’s me. Everyone I’ve ever spoken to who has attended has amazing things to say about it. It’s on October 3 and 4 for just $20.

I think that’s enough remainding for the time being. I’m off to a #blamedrewscancer meeting in NoLib.

Man In the Mirror

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Now a month after he passed, the MJ hoopla continues.

Rolling Stone finally got around to shipping an issue with him on the cover, with a solid accompanying article tracking his whereabouts over the last two years. Still has its lurid bits – prosthetic nose and Latoya trolling through Neverland looking for bags of cash – but it’s more of a portrait than most of the continuing coverage.

The thing that gets me about all the coverage is that people still don’t seem to know all that much about Michael Jackson as a musician. Like anything else, it’s just an echo chamber of the same small handful of facts on spin cycle.

For example, “Man in the Mirror” – a fantastically constructed song that has leapfrogged all of his freaky-video hits to become his official theme and lament. So very Michael, right? Definitive?

It may have been definitive, but it was one of the few big hits of MJ’s solo career that he didn’t have a songwriting credit on. It was penned by Siedah Garrett – an 80s pop artist, songwriter, and killer backing vocalist (frequently with Madonna), and arranged with Glen Ballard, best know as the co-writer and producer of Jagged Little Pill (as well as the debut of Wilson Phillips).

Rolling Stone‘s fantastic Smoking Section just interviewed Ballard about how “Mirror” got onto Bad at the last second.

Siedah and I wrote it for him directly. It was near the end of the recording for Bad — it was the last weekend before they wrapped up Bad — and think I had written something for the album but it didn’t get accepted. Quincy [Jones, Bad‘s producer] called me and said, “Don’t you have anything else for us?” He thought we were idiots not to try again, and Siedah had an idea, and we got together on a Saturday night, met at my house in Encino, and we just wrote it on the spot. It was really simple, we just wrote it on a Fender Rhodes, and did a quick demo with Siedah singing. It felt really good, but you never know. And we didn’t have time to dress it up, so I didn’t feel like it had a chance.

As for Siedah, at a recent service she briefly eulogized Jackson and then delivered an unbelievable solo turn on the song, backed by the tremendous Agape International Choir.

I started working on my cover of “Man in the Mirror” sometime last fall, and it only started coming together a week or two before Michael died. I love playing it, but I might need to wait a few months before doing it at open mics feels something other than opportunistic.

I’m sorry that Michael Jackson coverage has reached a point of backlash. Honestly, I would listen to him all day and cry two months ago, so I don’t see why I can’t keep doing it now.

Breaking the tyranny of traditional ROI, or “Why I love my throw-pillows”

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Five months after the fact my wedding has taught me a lesson about return on investment – aka ROI – and it has nothing to do with the cost of our appetizers.

I could probably summarize the gist of my epiphany in a bite-sized snippet, but for me the realization was as much about the story as its moral.

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Non-traditional, in every sense of the word
Ever since the wedding, whenever we chat about the big day with our friends they continue to enthuse about the non-traditional elements of the event. I had a pair of co-best-ladies! We didn’t have any flowers!

Invariably, their lists converge on two unique highlights. One is my mother and I having our mother/son dance to Nikka Costa’s funky “Everybody Got Their Something” – not your typical syrupy slow-dance.

The other is Gina’s co-best-lady toast, a bitingly-funny, lovingly-irreverent, truly-unique roast from someone who knows me a little better than I know myself. It started with the story of how we met and wrapped up with how I’ll eventually turn into an old coot rambling around my acreage, laying rat poison and bear traps to decimate any unsuspecting wild-life that dares to interfere with my DIY recording sessions.

However, the part that stuck out to me was about my throw-pillows.

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Are your pillows your most valuable possession?
When E and I moved into our house in 2005 our living room was missing one key feature – pillows. Our couch looked nude without them and we had nothing to rest our heads on.

I spent an entire year looking for the right pillows. I tried every possible physical and online store. Just as I was beginning to despair that my perfect pillows were a figment of my imagination I finally found the right ones – on sale for $15 each.

More than three years later, the amount of time I spend rhapsodizing about the pillows is hard to believe. Any time I lay on them, walk past them, or even think about them I am known to remark, “God, I just love those pillows.” Like, even right now I am appreciating how much I love them.

It would not be a stretch to say that I’ve reflected on my satisfaction more than a thousand times in 36 months. 1000 satisfactions compared to the $30 cost is a whopping 100:3 satisfaction ratio. That means for every $1 spent I’ve been happy with my purchase 33 times over!

That’s a pretty satisfying pillow. It’s a pretty satisfying anything!

Gina told the entire pillow-satisfaction story in her speech. Her point was that since I insist on measuring my pillow-related happiness with such oddball precision it’s no wonder Elise and I are both so unusual and also so absolutely perfect for each other.

Five months later I still think about Gina’s speech almost every day, because she gave a perfect explanation of how I measured the ROI of something that seemed impractical or impossible to measure. And, if I’m valuing ROI by satisfaction, my pillows are worth more than anything else I own – even my entire home recording studio!

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Finding the value of the invaluable
Businesses spend huge swaths of their budget on traditional marketing like newspaper ads, billboards, and television commericals. Why? Not because the ROI is obvious. No, it’s just traditional – tied to familiar, easy-to-capture metrics like brand awareness or sales.

It’s similarly simple to quantify the value of my home recording studio – it has paid for itself many times over when compared to what I would pay to record in a commercial studio. It’s so valuable that I might call it “invaluable,” but its value is actually easy to measure in traditional ways.

My throw-pillows are more like digital or social media marketing – invaluable in that they’re hard to put a value on.

Except, according to Gina, I found a meaningful value – satisfaction. While my pillows aren’t saving me $165 per song, in one year the pillows “pay” for themselves by making my happy 11 times for every $1 spent. No matter if I measure by cost, time spent, or difficulty, it’s hard to find something in my life with a per-unit satisfaction ratio higher than my pillows – except, of course, for my relationship with E.

If I can figure out why my pillows were personally profitable, why is it so hard to convince people that building relationships on Web 2.0 is crucially important to their business – moreso than a $30k billboard or full page ad?

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Prove your profit in an unexpected way
As people and businesses we’re rightly concerned with justifying new expenses, and when pennies are in a pinch that’s often the safest way to make a decision. However, when cost isn’t the biggest factor in our decision that mindset can get in the way. What about when we’re trying to become happier or expand our capabilities?

The answer is that we’re all special experts in deciding how much something is personally worth to us. For Gina, it’s Dunkin Donuts coffee. For my mother it’s a trip to the beach. I just happened to take the time to prove the worth of my pillows in an unexpectedly tangible way.

Gina found a major lesson in my pillow obsession – that it’s important to be the voice that offers to value the invaluable.

When it comes to business, your potential expenditure might not immediately translate to improved brand awareness or increased sales. Just because it doesn’t result in a traditional ROI doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. People’s satisfaction with your existing products might go up. They might view your brand as more savvy, responsive, or trust-worthy. You might reap more feedback – positive or negative – about your products. Customers might become more likely to evangelize on your behalf – non-customers too!

None of those thing are as easy to quantify as my throw-pillows. They might involve competitive analysis, surveys, and focus groups just to establish a baseline. You’ll have to consider how much you would hope to improve, and how much resource time that improvement would be worth.

In proving that unexpected value you might completely redefine what ROI means to you or your company. It’s up to you to find the right measurement to prove your point.