Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Endlessly Avoiding Perfection

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Heading East recently shared a theory that each artist has only a single great “story” inside of them waiting to be released. A particular quote really resonated:

Some artists escape by fashioning alternate versions of their story, never actually telling it perfectly, always leaving a bit of mystery in the center, always working their way around and around the one truth they know, but maybe these artists are doomed too as they will always fall short…

Though I don’t agree completely with the one-story-only theory, I do believe that each artist has a limited amount of ways to portray any single given archetype within their sphere of art, with each attempt a facet of a perfected portrayal. As alluded to in the quote, the artist has a choice (though not always a conscious one) of spending a lifetime drafting an incomplete version of their truth, or of crafting one version that is crystalline in its perfection.

I certainly feel that way about songwriting. I used to specialize in a particularly jilted sort of breakup song that I spent most of my time writing and re-writing. Suddenly, early in 2005 i wrote “Regrets,” and I was suddenly no longer bound to tap and retap that archetype for my material. Since then my songs have expressed a much wider array of emotions – I freed myself by closing a door on a particular story.

Penning that perfect story is a frightening concept; what if you finish it too soon? What if you don’t have any other important stories to tell? Yet, as daunting as those questions are, if you let them handicap your creativity you’ll never attain that perfect story. And that means you’ll never get to try your hand at its sequel.

A more rabid month looms on the horizon. Oh, and vegetable percussion.

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In four weeks the second annual National Blog Posting Month will begin, wherein you pledge to post at least once a day for all of November for no reason at all.

This year participation is being managed through social network Ning, where I am curating a music bloggers group.

I also plan to offer some manner of prize since I won one last year, but I have not yet decided on anything suitably awesome.

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Ethicurean posted the truly brilliant Vegetable Orchestra, who perform music solely on instruments made of vegetables. Words escape me; please refer to moving pictures, below:

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When I saw Bettye Lavette @ Bonnaroo in 2006 I described her as a bloodthirsty Motown praying mantis whose goal it was to devour the entire audience before the end of her set. Yeah, Bonnaroo was weird, but it’s an apt description considering how long she was in industry exile; she came back hungry.

Read a great Stylus Magazine interview with Bettye about her new covers disc, wherein she is backed by Drive-By Truckers. Link via Largehearted Boy, who also offers a legal listen to some of the tracks from Scene of the Crime

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The Strand offers books by the foot, a service providing decorative book collections in any style and subject. Prices range from $10- to $400- per foot. A cool gift for your bibliophile friends, and a fantastic resource for set dressing; at $300/ft the Victorian era books are rather stunning. Via Kottke.

K-link part deux: Do you need 8 oz. of dehydrated strawberry powder? You can buy it, and other molecular gastronomy fixins, at L’Epicerie. After you’re done salivating, hit up this exhaustive blog post for info and resources.

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Then there were quick hits.

46 tax deductions for bloggers. Um, hells yeah. Via Akkams.

One time in college Elise did a whole photo project where she painted me with light. If she was here I could tell you the whole story about how her professor was friends with the originator of the technique. In any event, if you have a camera with long exposure time and a tripod you can do it yourself.

More photography: All panoramic pictures, all the time. Want to shoot your own? Read up on Gigapan, an automated robotic tripod. Latter two links from Contentious, former via Mashable; a great feed (if you can keep up with 20+ posts a day).

If your phone and internet errands are swallowing up your free time you should look into outsourcing to an offshore personal assistant; sounds like they’re worth the money if you have the right sort of tasks on your to-do list.

I don’t know that I realized New York City was quite so tall over a century ago.

Free iTunes Songs is a handy RSS feed that links you to all of iTunes free content, including the weekly free song downloads.

Second Rotation is an online pawn shop that pays you for your used consumer electronics up front, saving you the hassle of dealing with an actual buyer. As to where all the items go, the site is a bit cagey. I have one word for you: gnomes. Via recent daily fixation Unclutterer.

Finally, Torrez was very nearly my first favorite blogger (and, not only because he ran Power Bloggers). He’s back, and recently posted some simple advice on increasing blog traffic. After a month of following his own advice his Alexa rank is up ~200k. Probably advice worth taking.

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.

A Wired Universe

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I habitually read Rolling Stone cover to cover the very day it slips through my mail slot, but when it comes to essential reading my lifetime subscription is being slowly but surely supplanted by Wired.

As of 2003 I had never read Wired – assuming, perhaps, it was a magazine for electricians – when my then boss bought me a subscription to commemorate the end of my tenure as a co-op. “This magazine,” she said,” is full of people like you.”

When I first started reading it I didn’t exactly catch her meaning – at a surface level I felt much more akin to the musicians in RS than the various inventors and whatnot that graced the pages of Wired.

Four years later as I read their Geekipedia and realized I already knew about roughly 90% of the 149 entries I finally caught her drift: I’m not like these people, I just think along the same lines.

Anyway, all that was to say that I was amused but also depressed by their smarmy Geekipedia illustration of the blogosphere, because it didn’t contain very many actual blogs, by which I mean blogs that are not just corporate or political fabrications of internet reality. And then I noticed a tiny satellite around the death star that is Boing Boing – Kottke.org. And, though I don’t actually know the man, and doubt he’s ever read CK, it was a comforting thing to see a name of an actual person who’s been around as long as me in the face of link aggregators and new media.

Blogosphere (small)
(click the above for a huge version)

This issue of Wired also featured my lead-off link topic, an interview with Ridley Scott, who 25-years after the fact has completed a final cut of Blade Runner. I adore that he was so committed to the narrative of his film that he refused to rest until it was perfected. If only we could all be so dedicated to our arts.

Oh, I can finally deploy this link: Ethicurean recently featured an essay on Wired’s catering.

Have you ever encountered a benign link that you know inexplicably-yet-instinctively you must click? that’s the feeling I had when Katharine Evan‘s name popped up in some random comment chain I was reading this weekend; I didn’t know why, but I had to know who she was. Imagine my delight to find the website of a talented illustrator who has worked on major films like Transformers and a household favorite Constantine.

A very wired person, I’d say. I never expect to encounter these sort of people in actual internet life, which is ridiculous in light of the fact that I used to live with a girl who majored in exactly this sort of thing. Katharine lamentably doesn’t have much work online, but she does have an extensive list of links to industry colleagues and students.

Well met, Ms. Evans. And, while we’re on the topic, check out the charming animated short Clik Clak online for free.

Oh, and watch two robots play Gnarles Barkley’s Crazy. Real robots, mind you, not computer animated ones. Via Telescreen.

(And, while you’re on YouTube, watching the Sesame Street Pinball short, aka 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12. Take that, Feist.)

Wow, way to connect all those links to each other in a way that seemed intentional. And now, the hits that are quick:

23 album covers that changed everything. Via LHB.

Ta Da Lists is an online to-do list-making tool. Via No One’s Watching.

Comm geeks unite: a periodic table of branding elements. I might seriously send this to my Vice President. Thanks Debbie Millman.

Unclutterer reminds us that a bigger HDTV means increasing viewing distance – not always a living room friendly combination.

Mighty Goods could alter the orbit of Elise’s entire home existence with everlasting LED tealights and handy wine wedges.

Smogr posted a great Flickr set of retro arcade photos.

Creepy-ass photo of the day from Pruned. Their past few posts have featured intruiging architectural elements from the fascinating Désert de Retz, a “romantic French folly garden.” If your high school French has a half-life similar to mine you can also learn a bit on French Wikipedia. All super-interesting; I’m pretty darn close to buying the coffee table book.

Finally, since everyone I know seems to be reading this lately, does anyone want to see Amadeus at the Wilma? I really like the movie, and would love to see it on stage.

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How Radiohead is trying to rehab a rapidly melting industry (but they won’t go, go, go).

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(1) One of the major benefits of Radiohead’s release strategy for the forthcoming In Rainbows hit me squarely on my walk to the subway this morning: no leaks.

The release of each of Radiohead’s last three albums has been an event. Not just a manufactured Kanye v. 50 affair, but an honest-to-goodness critical and popular bomb dropped on the record buying public. And, no thanks to their savvy fans, each record tends to leak ahead of the disc release.

I never had the impression that Radiohead minded leakage, per se, with Johnny Greenwood saying the following about a two-month early leak of Hail to the Thief

Shame it’s not a package with the artwork and all, but there you go. I feel bemused, though, not annoyed. I’m glad people like it, most of all. It’s a little earlier than we’d expected, but there it is. (WP)

You can read between the lines there to understand a few things about Radiohead. They value albums as an experience. They enjoy designing the collateral that accompanies them. And, as illustrated by their never-ending iTunes holdout, they aren’t crazy about badly encoded versions of their work.

All three factors lead to a band that’s “bemused” by leaks rather than “annoyed” – they think it’s quaint that anyone is making an effort to obtain an early version of an incomplete product.

By offering a pay-what-you-will download of In Rainbows two months ahead of the physical release the band gets to leak on their own terms. They can independently master their disc and shuttle it straight to their service provider for upload, with no studio interns to smuggle a pre-master or label reps to swipe a final copy.

Furthermore, fans get the music on Radiohead’s terms – not some nth generation digital-to-analog-to-digital transfer encoded to an MP3, but a direct-from-source version engineered to the band’s specifications.

It is, in a sense, the best possible leak.

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(2a) The Radiohead situation got my awesome co-worker Chris and I talking about the current rapidly-failing state of the music industry.

Record companies sit on what for decades seemed to be an inexhaustible resource – audience-facing intellectual property in the form of sound recordings and publishing rights, and artist-facing deep pockets that control access to big producers and hype machines. However, those resources were inexhaustible only because the means of distribution and production were highly controlled.

As a nominal example, take Fleetwood Mac. Much to my teenaged consternation, for over a decade there was no single greatest hits CD on which you could purchase a particular trio of their biggest classic rock hits, namely “Landslide,” “Rhiannon,” and “Go Your Own Way.” Yes, their single disc hits package leaves off “Landslide.”

Why? Who knows, but it’s as good of an illustration as any of the record companies and their inexhaustible resource of intellectual property, which remained valuable due to scarcity. Scarcity driven by selectively signing bands and selectively releasing their work, by holding on to publishing and sound recording rights, and through cross-promotions and radio payola, to name just a few of the channels metered with a heavy hand by labels.

At the crux of the matter is a business paradigm that’s all sewn up in old media. Record companies still want to act as a broker of music between and artist and their fans, and their preferred method of business is still retail transactions – physical or virtual.

For all the talk of the threat of file-sharing and the relative oligopoly of the digital music market, it’s the business model that’s sucking the life out of the music business. Unless you’re Radiohead (or Ani DiFranco) putting together a gestalt album package, what does album intrinsically mean? Why sell albums? Why sell? Why not let listeners subscribe to an artist like a magazine that doles out singles instead of issues?

Because that system doesn’t really require middleman, does it?

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(2b) Recently the tables have turned on the record industry and its previously inexaustible seat of power.

iTunes is returning the business to it’s single-oriented 45 days, killing per-track margins. Its a la carte nature combined with p2p makes it harder than ever for companies to reap extra album sales by repackaging the same release or through judicious exclusion of key tracks.

Meanwhile, songwriting artists are wising up and shopping to smaller labels and imprints to get more out of their publishing rights or make deals to own their own masters, and label power over FM radio is being eroded by satellite, internet streams, and the almighty iPod.

Suddenly that seemingly never-ending glacier of resources is melting at the labels’ feet while marquee names like Madonna take their business elsewhere because their major moneymaker is no longer their records but their overall brand. Artists major and minor are increasingly make their living from merchandise, publishing, and live shows, painting labels quite plainly as outmoded loan sharks hoping to advance money and support in exchange for the brand and intellectual property. And, the artists are finally – rightfully – balking at the concept.

They no longer need labels – labels need them.

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(3) Of course, record labels know they are about to be sitting in a lukewarm puddle resources, and they’re taking every action to prevent their leverage from melting.

Amy Winehouse was withheld from the American market for years after her strong debut with Frank, including several months after her blockbuster sophomore effort Back to Black dropped in the UK to massive acclaim.

Why wait? Universal Island wanted to drum up a perfect storm of stateside media coverage for their critical darling, and they wanted to ride a huge post-Grammies wave of attention on other UK imports who recently followed the same strategy: Gnarls Barkley, KT Tunstall, and Corinne Bailey Rae.

Amy shipped a big hit – score for Universal. However, it was just a single disc, and Amy hasn’t been anywhere near a studio for follow-up due to her whirlwind US promotional efforts. Six months later she’s canceled her first major headline tour for a stint in rehab, and is being haunted by bad press wherein her family is urging listeners not to buy her record until she cleans up her act. Universal Island is now pushing out Frank to American soils, but there’s no telling if she’ll be good for a follow-up hit.

None of that is the label’s fault, per se. What is their fault is letting the business artificially lead the music – trying to manufacture a hit with art that was already in the world by keeping Winehouse bottled up in the UK when she was fierce and ready to tour behind a fresh disc.

America got her second-hand, and it shows.

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(Epilogue) Radiohead is engaging in the antithesis of the Winehouse strategy – they’re letting the music drive the business, and it makes an astounding amount of sense. Release digital the second the disc gets out of mastering to hit rabid fans and major tastemakers. Then drop a special package for the die-hards and collectors. Finally, after drumming up a holistic, naturally occurring storm of interest, release a more traditional version of the disc for retailers to shill to the masses.

Not only does it make sense, in that order no one feels slighted by buying all three releases – no one is getting teased out by eighteen extra-special limited edition versions of the disc, it just runs a natural course: leak, premium, normal.

Kudos to Radiohead for breaking free not only of their label, but of the industry paradigm. I hope everyone votes early and often with their wallets handy.