Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Personal

Polyhacking since a few days ago

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My esteemed friend Matt Lydon has left the confines of LJ for his own WordPress blog.

This is worthy of announcement because – not entirely to my surprise – Matt is a very compelling blogger. He swings from classic literature to pop culture to personal reflection with the ease of a natural writer with a limber pen. His blog is just that – the journal of a natural writer, who happens to post online.

It was my strong opinion that his talents and efforts were being wasted in the vacuum of LJ. Please pay him a visit and see if you agree.

“I’m not old,” and other stories from my actual life.

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Before we head into a week of Kelly Clarkson coverage (just kidding!) (but not really!), here’s a brief interlude from real life.

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(1) Today at work we had a meeting about social networking.

I make it a point not to talk about work so much, but this seems like a big milestone. After all of my years of harping about dragging ourselves into a new digital era I was in a meeting about figuring out how to drag ourselves into a new digital era. My work life has officially merged with my home life.

In said meeting was a hyper-intelligent new employee from elsewhere in the company who joined to chip in her expertise. I expect to be her employee by 2013.

At one point I was trying to articulate how some social networks make a certain amount of sense to me, while others do not. My overly long introduction to that thought was, “It’s not that I think I’m so old (maybe I am), but… [insert communications nonsense here].”

Meeting newbie came back with, “Oh, I don’t think you’re old.”

I should mention that I shaved prodigiously this morning and look about 12.

Somewhere in NJ Kate is still laughing at me.

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(2a) Is it just a given at this point that we’re all having nightmares about an imminent, complete, worldwide, economic collapse?

I mean, I am certainly not denying the existence of a recession, as the evidence is all around me in my group of close friends. Those nightmares were already existent, thank you very much.

No, this is more global, and more systemic. Like, I just had a dream that I was camping in a derelict, foreclosed row home (possibly just down the street from here), and that the banks were going house to house to take the squatters prisoner to work in their slave camps. They were executing the infirm and the socialists on sight.

Something like that, anyhow. Are you having those nightmares too?

(2b) I generally hate when people blog about dreams. Isn’t real life wonderful and terrifying enough? Dream posts are really the only things I ever redact – I write them all out and then think, Who in god’s name is going to stick around after hitting this tripe off of a Google search?

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(3) As to my sudden subconscious fixation with us going the way of Mad Max (before subsequently going the way of Waterworld), maybe it’s just because I was reading about motel homeless earlier.

Okay, honestly? It’s more because of my trip to F.Y.E. to buy the Kelly Clarkson album, which is the only reason I would ever set foot into that abomination of a retail establishment.

I detest F.Y.E. on principal – that a chain with so little relevance or personality could supplant Tower Records as the sole national record-seller is inherently offensive to me. Seriously, they could be a chain specializing in argyle socks and turn-of-the-century coffee pots and I feel like the retail experience would be exactly the same.

Anyway.

This afternoon the sales floor was barren. A group of teenagers were lazily playing Rock Band off in one corner. There was a single cash register open, doing no business whatsoever.

I was accosted by five employees in quick succession within 90 seconds of entering the store. Each of them asked if they could help me find anything, with a certain lingering desperation in their eyes. Like, “for the love of god let me help you find something; if I don’t sell at least two CDs every hour they’ll fire me.”

I started assigning them trivial tasks, just to clear the cannon fodder. One lad I engaged with couldn’t find an explicit version of a Pink album and mumbled some mea culpa like, “You know I could just burn that for you or something did you want maybe a Pink Floyd album instead you know I went to college to get this job please just kill me.”

I did a lot of nodding and backing away, and found myself cornered by another sales associate in the classical section.

It took a while to escape with my Kelly, who always leaves me feeling obligated to stimulate the economy by purchasing music at irrelevant brick and mortar retailers.

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(4a) The house at the end of our block burnt down last week. The debris is still on the sidewalk, giving off a certain hickory flavor.

Last week I wouldn’t leave the house for work until the firemen stopped looking concerned. In row homes that’s only eight doors from here.

(4b) I spend all this time (and money) acquiring Kelly Clarkson albums and guitars and French graphic novels, and all of that could burn away in a matter of minutes. Or the renegade banking enforcement brigade could kick down my door and take everything in the financial holocaust.

It makes me think about the intangible things in my life that have value. I guess in that way social networking is a beautiful matrix, containing all of the memories you might have lost in the flames.

My songs can never burn down. My blog can never burn down.

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(fin) I’m just going to keep living my life, going to meetings, and creating things.

And listening to Kelly Clarkson albums.

pipes and glass

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A long time ago I had a neighbor, freebasing cocaine at his kitchen table.

That came later, though.

Curled around my first guitar on the front step, maybe? Must’ve been. I don’t remember how else he knew I could play. I remember our porch, and his hammers on Ziggy. That’s exactly what I wanted.

We became a pair in his basement from time to time, him showing me barre chords, my explaining why you might retune.

I didn’t have that in my life at the time. I had Gina, still several months of skepticism about my guitar playing before she’d be of much help. No one else to take an interest. Certainly not an adult example.

(My mother’s boyfriend had played guitar, maybe, in the 70s? Some distantly removed time. He had sliced the tendon on his pointer, and could no longer play barres. Useless to me. He had a clumsy way of making a C chord, remembering it a half-fret at a time.

Inwardly I swore: no forgetting.)

So there I was, in the neighbor’s basement. We had known him forever, anyway. He was fifteen years older? Feels like he was much older than I am now. At least seventeen, if he remembered Bowie like that.

I noodled on his ancient synthesizer and he restrung his Yamaha 12-string. “Like Bowie’s.” And he told his story.

He was heavy into music, writing his own all of the time. He went on a cruise ship or some other inane vacation, to play. And someone said, one night, to him – very serious about his music. They said to him he sounded like something or some other thing. It was probably the 80s, so probably some other awful thing. Richard Marx, let’s say.

And he said, “Peter.” He said my name in this very convivial way, like, we’re just two Italian guys shooting the shit. It was not a way men usually said my name. Still not.

“Peter, I didn’t know if it was a compliment. I hadn’t heard anything new in a year. All I would listen to was myself.”

I was incredulous, still a fan more than a musician. How could he turn off everything else? It seemed likely a lie.

I got too familiar, I guess. The whole family lived there, and I got used to poking my head in if I got home late from rehearsal and the light was on.

I put my head in, and there they were, him and his best friend. Hardware on the table, but not the tool box like usual. Pipes and glass?

Pipes and glass, and he said, “do you want any” or maybe “you don’t want any,” and I, numb, just walked back across the porches to my door.

Figures, the one guy who could say my name like that and mean it and play those little hammers. But I knew what my goal was – I would have to learn my barre chords before there’d be any excess.

I forget him for a year or so, here and there. There are other stories – driving to the music store in South Philly, the time I almost cut my finger off and he came over because my mom was at work. That bass in pieces in my closet.

I’ve still never been that freebaser at the kitchen table. I must not be good enough at barres. But, now I know what it’s like to only listen to myself, to not want or need anything else.

I understand him that much.

thoughts right now / subway ride

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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.

Classic Modern Classics

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There is a wonderful meme sweeping the illustrators of blogland wherein they render an antiqued paperback cover for a modern classic.

I first caught this meme earlier in the month from the blog of author Martha Wells, who pointed to these clever Harry Potter covers, in the style of classic Penguin books. The same artist – M. S. Corley – also took a shot at Lemony Snicket and Spiderwick. I recommend spending a few minutes with Corley’s blog during which you scroll down to some of his prior work, much of which is fascinating.

However, that one blog didn’t push my to my posting tipping point – I needed a reminder. Earlier today I caught a link from Neil Gaiman for illustrator Mike Baker‘s entry for a classic Coraline.

Apparently Baker caught the bug from Spacesick, who rendered covers for cult cinema classics like Back to the Future and Highlander. Some of them are particularly excellent – I might print a set and wallpaper my cube.

Finally, Storyteller’s Workshop offers a primer on how to achieve the effect on your own.

If you have seen this meme elsewhere on the web please point me towards the art so I can update this post or pen a sequel.