Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Illuminated Pickups, et cetera

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(1) Elise bought me a gift certificate for a pickup replacement on my primary electric guitar as a birthday gift, which is perfect timing, as Gina and I were already plotting on evolving Arcati Crisis into the electric realm over the course of the next few months.

My guitar is an Epiphone copy of a Gibson 335, and after several years of playing it and digesting online reviews it would seem that the only non-esoteric detail separating my guitar from the equivalent Gibson is the style/tone of the pickups (and also the nut).

My original birthday gift plan was to outfit my guitar exactly like a brand-new 335 – with two Gibson 57 Classic humbuckers. However, at Arcati Crisis’s Tin Angel gig I got into a conversation with our friend Chris about the possibility of buying two different types of pickups so my neck tone is differentiated from bridge.

And, um, I am not quite rock enough to know anything else about this life-altering decision.

I spent a few days researching my various indie-rock heroes, but none of them has a distinct enough setup for me to emulate. Also, I can’t turn up anything on the guitar rig of Garbage ax-slinger Duke Erickson (he being ostensibly the reason I bought this particular guitar in the first place). However, I did locate the eminently informative Guitar Player Gear Guide blog.

Do any of you wonderful people know anything about this? I have to drop my guitar off at the store on Saturday if I have any hope of getting it back before the next Arcati Crisis gig.

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(2) I want a WordPress plugin that will insert illustrated initial letters into my posts, both automatically and on-demand. Bonus points if they are illuminated.

I know enough PHP to be a minor threat when it comes to WordPress, but this particular concept is out of my realm because it involves live rejiggering of text as its being called out of the ether of my database.

Anyone?

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(3a) After an inexplicable one week delay the new PJ Harvey disc, White Chalk, came out yesterday. It’s been billed as PJ’s piano album, but that only tells a fraction of the story. It’s really more like her indie, piano-based, acoustic, English-Appalachian folk record. Sort of. Full review forthcoming.

(3b) Also inexplicable: Bruce Springsteen‘s lead single (“Radio Nowhere“) is one of the catchiest songs I’ve heard in months, and the production is all tight and sparkly and curiously “Since U Been Gone” sounding.

A quick sample spin through the rest of his newly released Magic yields similar results on at least three others songs, leading me to (for the first time ever) want to buy a Bruce Springsteen CD in a bad way. But, then I’m like, dude, you so do not like Bruce in any way, shape, or form. In my youth he was relegated to my mother’s forbidden trinity of vocal idiosyncrasies – Bruce, Bob, and Neil.

Even having disposed of a few of those systematically programmed prejudices (e.g., I do not ridiculously eschew middle Beatles) I can’t seem to succumb to the Magic of Asbury Park’s favorite son. I even tried paying for a copy with Elise’s credit card to try to alleviate some of the hard-coded guilt, but I couldn’t bring myself to go through with it.

Maybe if i just buy it track by track from iTunes I can avoid any imperative towards self-immolation my mother may have embedded in my unconscious psyche in my infancy through a series of flash cards.

(3c) OMG, I forgot to mention the best part of last week’s happy (six) hour(s): Melon is going to go to the Kelly Clarkson concert with me. Oh yessss.

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(End Note) Not only does me + Gina = awesome rock stars, but as of a few minutes ago I completed the first draft of a standard notation transcription of one of our songs, complete with guitar tabs and harmony.

I cannot express to you the undue amount of excitement this is causing me, a major sheet music fetishist.

Sheet music! Of our song! Necessary because we forgot how to play it!

(Or, more accurately, because we recorded it in one night for SongFight, so it never really existed as a song that we could play together in a physical space (though I believe we once attempted it at a Lyndzapalooza).)

Alright, enough chatter.

Will I?

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I’ve been remastering seven-year-old audio and chipping away at installing WordPress 2.3 for twenty of the last twenty-four hours, and at this point I’ve lost track of which thing I’m doing for fun and which is the chore.

Oh, I’m sorry, they’re both supposed to be fun? I must have missed the memo, because at the moment I can’t wait to get to work in the morning to do some project management and be free of this insanity for eight or nine hours.

I’ve been in overdrive every since I spent all of a gorgeous yesterday sitting naked on the couch, eating an entire box of veggie chicken patties, watching inane commentary tracks on fucking Heroes just because that’s what I would watch if Elise was here, followed by wandering off to the bedroom for a three-hour nap while my audio project takes ten minutes to process.

Clearly some atonement had to occur for that seven-hour period of my life, which is what lead to the weeks-early install of WordPress 2.3, which at the moment fails to impress me in any way, shape, or form. So far it’s fucked up everything I liked about WordPress, resisted the installation of every theme that serves my esoteric organizational needs, and provided me with a useless little box to manually write tags in. They call that a feature? It helpfully suggests “cats, pet food, dogs.”

Don’t be surprised if you start seeing posts tagged as “you can shove those cats up your ass,” or similar.

On the plus side, now through almost three hours of archived audio I am getting uncannily good at making seven-year-old Real Audio sound reasonably listenable with 12-band parametric EQ and other assorted magic of GoldWave, which I’ve now been using for almost a decade and which is still hands-down the best audio editing tool you can purchase for under $100. If only it had a project history a la Photoshop it would be perfect…

(If I was really serious (re: masochistic) I would actually bring multiple tracks of each guitar vocal into my mixing software and tease out each one for a specific purpose, like guitar, vocals, room sound, et cetera, thus creating an artificial four- or eight-track version of something I’ve got on a dismally compressed single take. I’m pretty sure that’s what they do when they remaster old-school wall-of-sound stuff.)

I seem to have defeated the mid-mastering naps by heading into the hallway to sort laundry, and now that I’ve run out of laundry I just go do sit ups until I start to wheeze, which is usually a sign that my audio is done processing.

It’s a glamorous life, this pseudo-bachelorhood.

Uncluttering

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A week ago a blog I’ve become quite fond of – MLarson – quoted my statement from “Why A Link Is Not Enough“:

Links aren’t life.

His reflexive link might have been a thank you for all of the links to him I’ve featured in the past few weeks, or maybe it was an ironic commentary on the fact that I followed up a post stating “Links aren’t life” with a post with several dozen links in it. Or, maybe it was both.

I don’t dispute that links are a big part of blogging. I love posting links. I just like to pair my links with some personal commentary and context so that I at once show you interesting things you may not have read or seen and remind myself about that said things exist when I am old and senile. In, like, a month.

Anyhow, per positive feedback on recent link posts, for the moment they’re going to be a semi-weekly feature.

Unclutterer is to blogs what Real Simple is to magazines. I love it.

Gimme Sanity is back has been back, but I was too dim to look for it at its domain name. Duh.

Axis All Areas is a Garbage fan site with a very comprehensive breakdown of the gear the band has used on every tour. Also, the author has a signed Guild guitar identical to mine! Cool.

Mighty Goods is a shopping blog written by the author of the seminal Mighty Girl. Despite my unequivocal love for her taste in stuff I’ve never bought any of her selected items. The most recent contenders for first purchase are fork easels, and a pattern book that presents patterns in EPS and high res JPG so you can use them for various web and print projects.

Philly Blog The BM Rant tells the tale of the original (ghost)writer of The Hardy Boys. Also from my town, Vintage captures a scene from my daily life. And, XPNer Some Velvet Blog introduces me to Trolleyvox, an awesome local band.

Visual Search Lab is like a user-powered Google Image search, aiming to “find visually similar images.” via Photojunkie.

Brandon Fuller, creator of the technology behind my Now Playing sidebar, laments missing the boat with other big ideas. I feel his pain, having missed out on cashing in on a number of great ideas and web trends due to lack of time or lack of savvy. But, I say, never give up: Friendster seemed to have the annoying lock on social networking before the even more annoying MySpace cropped up, and now they’ve both been eclipsed by the classier Facebook.

10 Future Web Trends is an apt examination of up and coming web technology, via Akkam’s Razor. Also at Akkam’s: the math of making money on your blog.

CNN shares five simple keys to nutrition. Unlike their organization article, I have yet to master any of these habits. Also handy: how to clean your home in 19 minutes. I really enjoy when CNN subcontracts their open article slots to magazines rather than shoddily written AP stories.

Awe-inspiring communications blogger Debbie Millman contributed to A Brief Message – which combines a 200-or-less word essay on design with an accompanying illustration. I love their current one, Arrogance and Humility.

Links from usual suspects: this week TDavid and I chatted about link rot and social networking. Kottke posted a highly addictive web-game, Bloxorz. I grew bored in 15 minutes; Elise beat it within an hour. Also from K, light pollution, and the absence thereof is one of the many reasons I’m jealous of E’s impending trip to Australia.

Largehearted Boy posted a great interview w/Rufus Wainwright; oh, Rufus, if only your album didn’t suck quite so much. Also from LHB, a 69 Love Songs wiki. And, finally, the aforementioned MLarson found an illustrated guide on how to be creative.

Fin.

Why A Link Is Not Enough

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I know some of you are more interested in my recent Trio highlights than others, and that those others have been counting down the days until I do a proper blog post where I amusingly contemplate my navel and/or contemplate the amusing navels of other blogs through extensive linking.

The latter post topic has always seemed to me to be an interesting conundrum, which was highlighted succinctly by Ernie several weeks ago.

Ernie, AKA LittleYellowDifferent, was (is?) a major-league A-list blogger who celebrated his seventh-year anniversary of blogging a scant month before my own. As a birthday gift to his readers, he reinstated hundreds of old posts that had been long-since gone from his page.

Commenting on his great post reinstatement, he made the following observation:

…although a couple hundred of those posts are left unpublished since they’re links to dead websites. … Like all bloggers that started in the early 2000’s, content centered around link commentary, rather than having your blog be a personal soapbox.

I never really fit in with the bloggers Ernie mentions because I’ve always been more parts soapbox and/or megaphone than links, and his post crystallizes the reason why.

Links aren’t life. When you spend all your time blogging about the hottest video or the latest tech news your blog stops being about your life and starts being about everyone else’s. Seven years down the line those links are dead, and you’re left skimming off a seventh of your posts that are now meaningless.

That’s why you’ve spent three days listening to the ancient best of Trio. Trust me, I have plenty of interesting links – enough links in the past five days that I could dole them out one per day and almost make it to Thanksgiving. But, looking back there wouldn’t be any blog there – no life or music – just other peoples songs, lives, and blogs.

And, if you aren’t interested in my songs, life, and music, I’ll still share some of the links with you every week or so.

(Now if only Ernie would reinstate the archives from SurvivorBlog and PuppetMaster. a-hem)

My Favorite Trio Tracks:
#15 – Crashing (from Trio Season 1, #2)

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I recorded and uploaded my first Trio seven years ago tonight.

After a week of blogging at all hours of the day I realized that I had something more to offer to the internet than just words – I had songs. Just over a hundred, at the time. And, it was time for them to be heard as a regular part of Crushing Krisis:

As of this instant i have added a new weekly feature affectionately dubbed trio. … i will sit down in front of my computer and play a continuous live take of three songs … i’ll always play a trio of songs – no more and no less.

In the seven intervening years I’ve violated each of those introductory terms. Trio certainly didn’t stay weekly … at one point it went on a two-year hiatus! On the other hand, last November I posted nine Trios in a single month – some on consecutive days.

Furthermore, starting with the latter half of Season 3 I stopped recording all three songs in a continuous live take, instead working on them one by one. The first trio of Season 4 Trios were dubbed and mixed just like album tracks, though I have since abandoned the process (it was too time-consuming).

Finally, a handful of Trios have featured more than four songs – quite intentionally in the first season, but since then just as spontaneous extra tracks.

I’m due to start the sixth season of Trio in a few weeks, now armed with twice as many songs as I had when Trio first began.

While I am rehearsing behind the scenes for the new season I’ll also be counting down my fifteen favorite live Trio recordings from seasons one through four (since nearly all of five was a favorite), offering a la cart versions of each song as excerpted from a newly remastered mp3 version of the original Trio.

My first selection, “Crashing,” is from my second-ever Trio, recorded on September 10, 2000.

At the time “Crashing” was hardly a year old, and still a regular staple of my live sets. Since then it has sped up, slowed down, included piano, and quoted Destiny’s Child. However, through all of those recordings, its Trio debut has remained one of the most definitive, and one of my favorites.