Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

meta

Broadcasting live for 12for12k!

by

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 ;)

Neil & Sir Paul

by

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.

by

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.

don’t fail me now

by

The last forty-eight hours of my life.

At six o’clock on Monday I am playing guitar. I have been playing for hours, drilling songs against a metronome. The bridge of “Unengaged” for twenty minutes straight. I’ve worn through a callous for the first time in ages.

Later I rehearse piano and vocals equally as hard. I fall asleep reading Outliers in bed, which just two chapters in already has caused one blowup with E because I said if I had me as a child I’d call me a failure.

I don’t want to be a failure.

Tuesday I have a fun, frantic day at work – the kind where you realize at the end of the day that you never stopped to hang your coat. I start writing the second my ass is on the bus, and emerge almost three hours later with that last post.

I rehearse. Hard. Again. Trying not to fail. Despite my voice sounding brittle and inflexible due to the lack of a warm-up, I venture out to an open mic while E stays at home and works on freelance.

At the restaurant my first song is awesome; the room is quietly transfixed. (I’m not a failure?) Afterward I promptly break a string and become shy and faltering when I’m handed another guitar. I fuck up “Like a Virgin,” of all things, and promptly lose everyone’s attention.

Today I feel slightly beaten up (thank god I don’t drink at those things), on top of beating myself up. Still manage another frantic work day that barely includes a coat-hanging. On the way home I listen to my own voice on my iPod, which a lot of days is the only thing I can manage to do.

I’m listening to “Like a Virgin” from 2006 and thinking, This is awful. Why am i singing like that? (Of course, I wouldn’t make it ten seconds into “Like a Virgin” from 2001.)

Then I listen to a Trio from 2008 and realize, God, I really did get better.

I am not a failure.

I get home and am kissed goodbye as E heads out to front her band at the Khyber. Another hour of writing.

thoughts right now / subway ride

by

I ran into one of my favorite professors today on the subway, trundling to work in this non-event of a snowstorm.

We briefly caught up (me, married! him, reconstructing his house! my band, awesome!), and the conversation then turned to my blogging proclivity and how I have yet to abandon it. Which, (a) hilarious that my senior project adviser still asks me about my blog five years after the fact, but (b) way to stick the personal “blogger / songwriter” branding so that it’s the first thing he thinks of, even five years after the fact.

(me, old!)

Anyhow, us being two massive communications nerds having a conversation about communications on the subway, I sketched out the situation. Longest running, blah blah, own a single topic of conversation, blah blah, more magazine style content. Hit tracking, publics, &c, &c. Minus points for not somehow mentioning Cultivation Theory to prove that I am actually as big a nerd as I represent myself to be.

And, you know, as I was being my hip nerdy self for sixty seconds of subway exposition, it occurred to me that I spend more time plotting about blogging than I actually spend blogging.

It’s not such a bad thing, really. Well, it’s a medium bad thing. It’s equally good and bad. I love planning and organizing things so much that sometimes I’d rather not ever do the actual thing.

(This is actually a running theme in my life. See also: song database but no new recordings, exercise plan but no new muscles. The only time it works in my faovir is when having a plan inherently leads to the plan being success, as with a budget.

Anywho…)

There is technically a column I was going to post today. Well, it being 11:35, I think maybe technically has edged into theoretically. But the fact of the matter is, after a non-stop weekend of alternating social engagements and hardcore freelance writing and editing, I am in no mood to write a column.

And that, my friends, is the difference between a blog and a magazine. I can own all the topics I want, but there will still be this inanity sandwiched between.

God bless it.