Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
by krisis
The only good bit i can locate in all of that is that it looks as though my co-assistant-stage-manager is none other than…
Yes, that’s right, the girl from the date. Could life get any more like a WB drama?
By the way, if you want the previous four posts to make the proper amount of sense (or, at least the amount of sense i intended them to make, which may or may not add up to a proper amount of sense), read them bottom to top.
by krisis
Blogging is not a daily column. I don’t even have to post everyday, as one of my readers just reminded me as i lamented my headache-induced writer’s block. I don’t have to post every day because i’m only posting for me… i’m putting up the effort, and the editing, and the $30 a month that keeps my website functional as my bank account gets inexorably smaller and smaller.
Are you starting to see where those other posts were headed? I am tired… tired of having to learn all of the foundations that lay beneath the successful artifice of art, and having to be responsible for them all on my own. I am tired of spending endless hours programming my site and weeks in the studio just for a paltry 100 copies of my demo and a thousand readers a week. I am tired just at the thought of having to create a new layout or having to mix down another demo. I don’t want to do it. I just want to play, and to write, and to have an amount of attention paid to me that has some relation to the effort that i put into my work and the quality that emerges. Even double the readers, or five times the listeners, probably wouldn’t be enough for me … because even after my in front of the scenes work is paid adequate attention i’m still stuck behind the scenes like the Wizard behind the damned curtain, sweating away as he produces such a spectacular show.
I don’t think this means anything… i’m obviously not quitting or going away. I’m just so tired… tired of having to spend a year on music courses so i could have a key to the studio that i hate, and tired of earning A’s in programming just so i can properly sort out the PHP i program the site with. Tired of having to beg to be a mere assistant stage manager when we all know i’d rather be in front of any curtain, anywhere. I just… i don’t know how i’m supposed to be heard at all, otherwise. Maybe you could call it paying my dues, or maybe it’s just my own particular burden (and not such a bad one, at that), but the charm is wearing off … what was once exciting is now my dread of quarter inch to eighth inch cable adapters, and my absolute dread of photoshop, and my remorse over spending half of my education learning how to make what i want to do work, instead of doing what i want to do.
Conclusion? Who knows… either one step closer to sending out demos, or one closer to subway busking. Two steps forward, two steps back, same old me.
by krisis
I can’t seem to focus on anything — my eyes were aching long enough that i actually took a minute to wipe off my low-prescription reading glasses and put them on. They don’t seem to be doing anything to relieve the pressure, though… a low dull pressure pushing obliquely down from just about my range of vision as though it’s trying to pop my eyeballs out of my mouth Beetlejuice style. I find it to be a rather contentious stance for my body to be taking… here i am, well rested, listening to Bob Dylan, ready to do some serious blogging, and looking at the screen makes me nauseous. And, not for any of my normal reasons, either!
Ugh.
by krisis
My second class today was “Finding Your Voice in Journalism.” I hardly knew what to expect. In fact, i didn’t even really know where the class was; when i arrived at its original location down on 32nd and Market i saw that it had been reassigned to a classroom over half a mile away! The remarkable part wasn’t getting to the class, though, but my instructor Clark DeLeon. Clark used to write for both Philly daily papers, and for the past five years he wrote a regular column for America Online where he had his own keyword. What impressed me more than his digital cred was that while he wrote for the Philly Inquirer he wrote a daily column, once a day, every day. Writing a daily column is so much more intimidating than doing daily reporting… there are no facts and stories to hunt down so much as there are facets of yourself that you can put on display through the subjects you select.
I always say that i want to write a column in a weekly magazine or newspaper like the one that Liz Spikol writes for the Weekly, and even that is intimidating. She at least has an entire week, during which should could conceivably write and erase her column multiple times before settling down on a final version. Clark had no such luxury — he had to come out of a weekend with five fresh ideas and get them all written before the deadline. That takes some balls.
I haven’t got the slightest idea about what he’s going to teach me about my voice, other than he told us to write a short piece about something that makes us really angry. I think i have found a bit of a voice through this, but blogging isn’t quite the same thing as doing daily writing for the major newspaper in one of the big five metro markets in America, is it?
by krisis