Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Personal

There’s a Stage on My Lawn!

by

This is perennially either the longest or the hardest couple of week of my year. Sometimes both.

Intense rehearsals, losing my voice, drums and drawing blood, chairing my own mixing committee, penning artist interviews while working to re-debut Arcati Crisis…

Sound familiar?

It should, because the third weekend of May is traditionally our Lyndzapalooza (LP) annual spring festival, and 2008 is no exception – LP presents There’s a Stage on My Lawn! this Saturday in Yardley, PA.

I’ve been chewing on a lot of LP-related thoughts for the past year, so my next few posts will be about some of the behind-the-scenes of planning the festival. In the meantime, I’m also posting artist interviews on our MySpace blog with Geoff Ednie, Dante Bucci, Brian Flannagan, Jesse Schurr, Just Like Me, Arcati Crisis, and Lindsay Wilhelmi.

Visit our website and click on the tickets link for discounted presale tickets, details on food and drink, camping reservations, and how you can make your own gear!

in which I am a smoke-filled room

by

At the moment I am beat.

Yesterday I proceeded straight out of that last post into my daily exercise block, which is already starting to feel like a tough-but-feasible challenge instead of a life-or-death struggle.

With barely time for a shower and a bite to eat I public transited to a lengthy Arcati Crisis rehearsal, where we banged on Gina’s “Brother John” and my “Love Me Love Me Not” from every possible angle.

The former is now a staggering seven minutes long (twice the length of the majority of our tunes), and features me playing riffs and singing harmony that are both far outside of my normal comfort zone.

The latter is a weird amalgam of Animals-style sixties riffing and chugging Fall Out Boy alterna-rock, and is so much easier to sing with someone else doing some of the heavier lifting on guitar (even if my lifting really hasn’t changed at all). My previously hard-to-sing single bar of “detox tea” has now extended into a five measure wail during which my diaphragm is all like, “see, I told you I had a purpose other than wobbling around under your fake vibrato.”

Afterwards I ran for my life to catch two trains, the second of which I nearly boarded in-motion, to make it to Buckets for Lindsay guest-hosting the open mic. I met lots of cool new performers, and spent much of the night promoting my ass off on the behalf of our upcoming music festival, and drinking cocktails with Bill McConney, who comes off as a modern update on Nick Drake (aka, pretty great).

Over the course of the evening I played two sets, rocking my now-standard opening duo of “Icy Cold” and “Like a Virgin,” and debuting my new tentatively-titled “Not David Bowie” as well as a cover of “High and Dry.” My latter set was around 1:30 a.m. and featured me wailing “With or Without You,” which was wise to save until after the falsetto-palooza of H&D, but not wise to sing directly before “Love Me Not,” because the five-measure wail was nowhere in evidence.

Afterwards we walked back up the hill to Lindsay’s house and, for reasons unknown to me, I smoked a clove cigarette. Actually, they’re not unknown – an occasional clove when out with friends was one of my only vices in high school, and after a day of physically and vocally pushing myself it seemed like a decent way to relax.

Except, my pack-a-year clove habit is almost a decade old, and dovetailed with the height of my slothful anorexia and complete lack of vocal talents, so I really didn’t have a frame of reference about how it would feel to the new-and-improved version of physically- and vocally-active me. I woke up with my lungs feeling weird and slept-in, exactly like the unmade bed I was rising from.

The feeling didn’t do me any favors physically or vocally, as I discovered on the train and walk home. I wasn’t exactly wheezing, but I couldn’t find a good walking rhythm, and my vocals are unexpectedly squeaky in places, like a guitar string that’s not quite settled into it’s notch on the saddle (I’m sure the Bono-vocals have some bearing as that as well).

After an unexpected and delightful nap my lungs feel back to normal, and now we are about to depart to see the Curtis Symphony Orchestra at the Kimmel Center.

How To Edit Your MySpace Music Profile

by

Editor’s Note: This brief article has helped thousands of musicians begin to gain control over their MySpace pages. If it also helps you please consider friending me on MySpace! In your “ADD ME” note make sure to mention that you found me through my blog. Or, comment below, including your url, to share further tips or tricks you may have uncovered.



I just spent a boggling amount of time (inclusive of intensive brain-process time while asleep) trying to learn how to update the layout of my MySpace music profile.

I won’t bore you with all the gory details. The upshot is, MySpace operates on its own peculiar set of rules, and 99% of websites proffering updated MySpace layouts (AKA “MySpace Codes”) do not care one iota if you understand them. They just want you to pick your layout and be happy.

(Even if you’re a savvy web-user it might not be immediately obvious where you paste the layout, as there is no obvious “backstage” area of MySpace. Improbably, any code alterations get pasted into your About Me box – or, if you’re a Band, your Bio box.)

My problems were twofold:
(a) We all know I can’t be happy until I understand how something works.
(b) Normal profile codes and editors don’t necessarily work they way you want them to on a Band profile.

Now, allow me to provide other musicians with the benefit of my 16 hours of experience in this field. It’s not a tutorial, so much as a guidebook. For this to be of any use you should have a basic understanding of HTML and CSS, and a high capacity for trial and error testing.



First: Understand what you’re getting into. Read an awesome article by Mike Davidson that gives a detailed overview of how MySpace layouts work, and what you have to do to alter them. They’re effectively a series of nested tables altered by simplistic CSS code – not so bad, right?

Next: See Mike’s explanation at play. Visit Views Under Construction and then visit their sample profile and band profile. Now you understand the degree of manipulation you can put your profile through!

Then: Look before you leap. Dip your toe in the alteration waters by checking out some isolated edits you can make at Pimp Web Page, pasting them into your profile to see their effects. Note that you can do more than just change colors – you can resize, move, and hide most elements of a profile.

Finally: Head to the best editor I found, Real Editor. It’s meant for normal profiles, but you can still load up your band file. Here you can tweak just about any element of your page!

My suggestion? After you’re through playing around copy out the complete code for reference. If there’s any of it that doesn’t make sense, go back and work out one element at a time. Each time you finish an element, get the HTML. It will have some other junk in it, but it should be easy to pull out the one element of the code you actually altered. After a few iterations you’ll begin to understand what’s what. Try starting with your Contact Table, which is called contactTable in CSS.

When In Doubt: It’s not always obvious what certain page elements are named, or how they’re manipulated. If you’re stumped on how to get your intended result, trying viewing the source code of your profile, or another profile that you like. Zero in on the thing you’re trying to change.

If it’s an element like your top friends, search for text inside that table – you’ll discover the table class is friendSpace. If you’re viewing a cool profile that has altered that particular element, search again – this time for the name of that class. Now you should see the CSS that’s driving their manipulation.

If what you like is a minor element, like a certain border or text treatment, try searching for that color’s hex value (grab it beforehand by taking a screenshot and using an eyedropper tool in Photoshop, or similar).

And: Every time you arrive at a non-objectionable result copy out your code into a text file and save it before you keep working. If you’re having trouble with one tricky element, just work on that element in an otherwise blank About Me box, and add it to the rest of your saved code once you get it right.

Hope this helps!



Revising your auto_increment in MYSQL

by

This is a post about manually altering your auto_increment value in a MYSQL table. The solution was just obscure enough drive me crazy for a few minutes, so I figured it’s worth blogging for other DIY MYSQL intermediates (including myself) to stumble onto in the future.

The MYSQL query is:
ALTER TABLE Name of Table AUTO_INCREMENT = Next Value

If you don’t understand the query, or why you might use it, keep reading.

[Read more…] about Revising your auto_increment in MYSQL

Week-Weary

by

I’m absolutely beat after this week of working hard, hard workouts, and bloggerific whinging, so I turn you over to two of my Philly compatriots for your nightly content.

First, via my absolute #1 favorite client in the world, Music Snobbery, a local blogger who gets featured in places like NYT and VF, and who threw himself a third blog birthday bash that – upon the breakup of and corresponding cancellation from The Teeth – lured Moby to fill in. Yes, that Moby.

Gee, I wonder who I can get for my blog’s upcoming eighth birthday? Hmm…

Second, Jen @ 1000 Times No is a particular favorite of mine, but last year whenever I’d stop by she seemed to be on a hiatus. Right now she’s active and I’m active, and it’s a beautiful thing – her random assortment goes well with my own.

And, with that, I will now return to the land of recline, wherein the heavy thing I have to lift is the remote control.