Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
You know how i’m always talking about how totally pornographic i’d be with a webcam? Or, alternately, are you a SurvivorCam fan? Well… a small brown box just arrived in admissions, and all it contains is packing material and your gateway to my luscious naked ass. Be very, very afraid.
So, after months upon months of bitching and whining, i’m actually internet window-shopping for a webcam as we speak with my credit card in hand.
I’m having a hard time deciding ultimate whether or not i want a cam. Firstly, i’m sure to shell out $50 to $100 for it, which i could be putting towards a decent digital camera or new musical gear. But, more importantly, i don’t really want to take the mystique out of my bitching and whining. You can hear my songs; they are real. I can talk and talk and talk about how wonderful my songs are, but ultimately you can sit down and listen and decide for yourself because i make them available to you.
I am painted differently on here than i am in real life, which is why my friends occasionally have trouble when experiencing both narratives simultaneously. It’s really not intentional on my part; it’s just like how the sound of your own voice is wholly different when you just hear it vibrating through your own cheekbones compared to listening to yourself on an answering machine. Part of what allows me to illustrate myself in such a fashion is that you’re blind to me; when i talk about fabulous hair cuts or early morning beauty, you have to just take my word for it. Aside from the scattered and few pictures of me i occasionally let slip through the great majority of readers don’t know what i look like. And, maybe i enjoy that. Maybe having my image streamed onto the site at regular intervals will make it all too literal and boring. Maybe you’ll get bored with me once you see me for how i am.
So, if you were me with $100 burning a hole in your pocket, what would you do?
Since i’ve been crushing heavily on Erin McKeown’s music lately, i just thought i’d log a little link to a prominent website about her at Imperfectly (which, incidentally, used to host the best Ani DiFranco web site on the internet). Erin fascinates me, because listening to her albums i can hardly imagine that these songs just come to her … it’s seems much more than she deliberately chooses a way for a song to sound and them molds it into the exact shape that she wants. However, no matter how she does it the results are completely arresting on record, even more so live.
Erin just graduated from Brown University last week with a degree in EthnoMusicology (she had to fly in from a UK tour with Peter Mulvey for the ceremonies), and she is touring the American folk-festival circuit this summer. I consider this success… whether or not she ever meant to be a rock star or a folk hero doesn’t really matter; what matters is that she has adoring audiences in each city she heads into, and that she heads out of every one with new fans (myself included).
Her long journey to this point started (apparently) with being named a semi-finalist by the songwriters’ association of washington dc before ever getting to Brown, and with gigging and selling tapes around Brown’s campus. At some point those tapes found their way onto a cd called Monday Morning Cold, and from the attention she garnered from that she moved forward to create last year’s Distillation. Five years. The difference between being a high school senior and a college graduate, and Erin McKeown is living the life that i would choose for myself above all other lives. She went to the school i wanted to attend, she writes songs i envy and adore, and she tours with Peter Mulvey (he was her opening act here in Philly!), and she’s not even 25. And i’m left, as i always am, wondering how she got there.
Of course, we all know how she got there. She had a relentless vision and an amazing talent, and she didn’t keep it a secret. However, it’s hard being relentless or anything else about music while i’m working every day and trying to line up an internship for next year and fretting about classes and paying my bills. Of course, musicians come from much worse all the time, but in the void of major label interest (that is, i wouldn’t be vaguely interested) i am in awe of the Ani DiFrancos, the Peter Mulveys, and the Erin McKeowns because at some point they decided that music was what was for them and that they needed to devote all of their attention to it. I think i need to make that decision or let the matter drop; if only i spent as much time on my music as i do writing for this website.
And therein lies the conflict: as much as i need to better myself musically, the time i spend writing for and administering this site feels like a definite way to prepare my voice and my patience for the world of journalism. I feel like having a successful blog (still an aspiration of mine rather than a reality) is the equivalent of Erin McKeown’s summer folk festival tour. Even if i got to write cd reviews for a local paper with a circulation of 100,000 – how many people read past the cover story? How many people read past the albums they want to buy to the reviews they aren’t really interested in, just to hear new & different opinions? Having your own successful website means you are in touch with an audience much more focused than any group your circulated publication could ever reach. So… to give this up would be to emphasize music over my course of study, when really in my mind they are equals now.
Somewhere in there i think i came to a conclusion that i’ve been working on for the last four years; I can tell because my stomach just dropped out of the center of my body as if i’m being spun on a tilt-a-whirl. Or, perhaps it is just time for lunch. I suspect that i’ll get back to you on this one…
I just recorded the worst trio ever. Ever. It started with me trying to cover Weezer, and then i sing a punk song, and then i try to be a credible folk singer for a song or two, and then i make “Lost” sound like it’s a bunch of cats fighting each other out in an alley. Yum. But, even better, i’m taking another stab at it in five minutes.
Speaking of stabbings, i managed to stab myself three separate times with that shiny new knife of mine. Three. So, yeah, it didn’t just look sharp because it was the only big knife in the aisle. Also, i made dinner for a whole room full of people and mine was the only dish that was completed gone at the end of the night. Mad props.
Wow, actually, inbetween all of the cats fighting i do some pretty neat stuff on “Lost.” Okay… try #2, here we come.
