Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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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…although a couple hundred of those posts are left unpublished since they’re links to dead websites.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.

Made Me Forget Myself

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At 7:30 a.m. we were on our way to pick up car share, and it was that zen weather that only comes to Philadelphia in September: air cool on our bare arms, sky a perfect cloudless cerulean blue.

“This is a perfect day,” I said to Elise.

Shoot The Stars

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I am not a habitual taxi-taker. In fact, I’m the opposite – usually walking home with my guitar at 1 a.m. after playing at Lindsay’s bar of choice.

Every so often the need arises. Like a few weeks ago, heading home from work sick.

Months ago I meant to write about one driver in specific. He was the old, whiskey-soaked sort of driver you see in movies and not in actual taxis much anymore.

“I used to drive in Atlantic City,” he confided, “until one night I picked up this fare, and I knew something wasn’t right.

“Sure enough, at the first red light we hit he held a gun to the back of my head and told me to hand back all of my cash.

“I was sure he was going to kill me,” he said, as I stared at the back of his head, riveted. “But, he just waited until I had handed it all back to him, and then he just opened the door and got out.

“So I stopped driving in Atlantic City.”

As the numbers on Washington ave slid every-lower we talked about guns and people, and which is the real killer. We talked about how life is valuable.

When he left me on my step I half imagined that I would turn to find his cab nowhere in sight, as if he was some gossamer coachman emerged from the night just for that conversation.

This Thursday night on the way home from our band rehearsal my driver was Russian, and not sure how to get to my house from the Kimmel Center. Another recent transplant, perhaps?

After I pointed him in the right direction, he began to speak – unselfconsciously, not in a making conversation sort of way.

“My good friend from home played jee-tar,” he told me, turning onto Broad. “His mother, his father, both are deaf, and I think he not hear so well. But, he could play the jee-tar so well. His hands move so quick on… what do you say? The long part. For me it is [?].”

“The neck.”

“Yes, the neck. His hands move so quick on the neck. My friend’s jee-tar, made from before revolution.”

(I inwardly winced, remembering the t-shirt I had almost worn, but didn’t, knowing for certain that Gina would wear it instead (and she did).)

I found myself telling him how I like to play acoustic because I like to feel the music through my body, because you never need an amplifier that way.

“This week, the stars,” he said as we turned onto Washington. “How do you say? You have a saying.”

“Falling stars?”

“Yes, yes, but when they fall…”

“Shower?”

“Yes. A shower of stars this week.”

I told him about the time I laid in the middle of a football field in nowheresville, tucked into my sleeping bag, watching the stars fall. He corrected me, “not stars, Leonids.”

“You have to get out of the city,” I implored him. “They aren’t the same with the lights. You need to find somewhere where it’s really night.”

The ride seemed long for the conversation, but the fare was inexplicably cheap. Maybe he doesn’t know how to work the meter yet, i thought.

“Good luck with your show,” he said after i left him his tip.

“Good luck with your stars,” I told him.

This one I’m sure was real.

Getting Regular: OCD moms, Suck flashback, pop economics, APOD, and other think-provoking links.

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In case you haven’t caught on, I have lit a bit of a fire under myself on the topic of Year 8 of Crushing Krisis, and part of that flame had extended to reading other blogs.

Blogs don’t exist in a vacuum, but if you pretend that yours does then its reality will conform to your whim. That’s been one of my biggest problems – I have plenty of regular reads, but beyond Rabi, Amanda, Jett, and Alison I don’t make much of a point of regularly reading, commenting and – most importantly – linking to my favorite compatriots.

I’m trying to surmount the first two difficulties by using Google Reader to aggregate my favorite RSS feeds. The reader has a handy “starred” feature to let me highlight my favorite posts, which will hopefully lead to many bounties of links such as the one you’re about to experience.

Okay, so I lied a little – I read more than just those four blogs on a regular basis. Like every other blogger on the face of the internet, I regularly read Dooce, ostensibly so I can chat about it with Lindsay over lunch, but more and more often because I love how she weaves in her OCD with her toddler stories.

(ps: Linds, I know you’re reading. Check out this post about photocamp. Spin any gears in your brain?)

On that same topic (the one before the parens), Whoopee is one of my favorite blogs from NaBloPoMo, as is Flotsam, with the terrifically statistically improbable phrase, “our embryos are the most beautiful embryos that ever underwent meiosis.”

I’m also a long time reader of Acerbia, which tricked me into thinking it was telling the truth for the first time in a while. And, I’m a devotee of Things That Make You Go Hmm, though TDavid often blogs faster than I can read, offering an embarrassment of rich links.

My favorite Hmm-link of the week was a brief feature on Whateverlife, a flashy-as-hell free MySpace layout website run by Ashley Qualls, a 17 year old girl living in Detroit. Oh, did I mention it gets roughly 60 million page views a month? For more interesting background, check out “Girl Power,” an article from FastCompany.

Not only is Ashley amazing, she’s saving us all from having to dumb down our web design skills just to satiate the beast that is MySpace.

God bless her.

Mlarson is another terrific blog for useful and/or thought-inducing links … without never ending commentary of TDavid or, say, yours truly. My favorite of his this week was a link to a diagram illustrating the difference between generalist and specialist approaches to problem-solving. That’s via Communication Nation and how could I not like a blog named that?

Speaking of things you can’t help but like, did you ever read Suck? Back in it’s late-90s heyday it was an utter addiction of mine – a daily dose of irreverence from a snarky group of anonymous writers.

Whether you recall it or not eZine Keep Going featured an amazing article about what they rightfully deem the first great website.

(What I love the most about the article is that it’s a whopping 15,000+ words. I love a piece of journalism that you can really sink into.)

That link was gleaned from Karl @ Paradox1x, proprietor of Philly Future, who has been reading CK a long-ass time. We’re talking early Year 2. This week he made an absolutely essential post (partially) about the problem with Facebook which I later commented upon. Also good: the power of tagging is as a byproduct, not a feature.

Jumping back one topic, another weighty article you might enjoy is The New Economics of Pop Music (via Smokler‘s del.icio.us). Oh, also, while you’re enjoying thing please enjoy my two favorite photos of the week, via Ugly Green Chair and Dooce.

Finally, randomly, the top ten most amazing pictures taken by Hubble. Trivial note: every desktop I work on has a background from Nasa’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, which draw endless complements. At home it’s stars, dust, and nebula, at work it’s blue lagoon. So, clearly I am a nebula fan, but, really, there are so many good ones that it’s very hard to choose.

One Astronomy shot i glanced at while compiling that sentence wasan illustration of the relative size of Earth, which is coincidental, as I had pegged this Debbie Millman post on planetary proportions as a must-link because it’s the first time I’ve ever truly been impacted by such a visual representation (probably because it shows depth).

As a rule of thumb, that’s roughly a fifth of the amount of great reading I’ve been missing out on in the past year just because I didn’t have an RSS reader. Scary.