Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Gina’s Bachelorette Adventure, Pt. 4

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The fourth post in this series finds your author all of three days before Gina’s Bachelorette Party AKA All-Day Adventure and I am, let’s say, FREAKING OUT.

Gina modeling a vast collection of our stenciled icons in action on Gina's back late in the day in her bachelorette adventure (while Mikki and I spray more stencils int he background). As you can imagine, we had to spray these quickly and in highly public spaces.

Allow me to set the scene for you. It is eight or nine at night. I am on my side patio, which I like to pretend is private but really is quite in full view of anyone passing directly in front of our house.

I am wearing only my underwear. My blindingly white naked torso vibrates against the dusk like a bike reflector. I am dual-wielding two cans of spray paint against a defenseless bag of planting soil, which is wearing a plain white t-shirt. The shirt bears several iterations of the Starfleet symbol, some in black spray paint, others apparently colored in with a marker.

I swear, if photographs of this scene existed, I would totally share one.

Why this utter madness? Let’s travel back in time two days. As the guy on the ground in Philly, I was on the receiving end of the various bachelorette party supplies selected by Kelly (in Belgium) and Mikki (in Seattle). Both women are so ridiculously kitschy and crafty that it defies explanation. I received many things. A box of 30 pink t-shirts. A set of Erlenmeyer flasks and graduated cylinders. A package of vaguely phallic sidewalk chalk.

What I did not receive was spray paint for branding our t-shirts.

The t-shirt iconography had become central to our gamification concept for the party, with Gina choosing a team for every challenge. If the team defeated the challenge, they would be branded with a special stenciled badge. Think of it as “Foursquare: LIVE!”

Despite working all day in the midst of a team full of craft maniacs, I am not in the least bit crafty. I’m not even good at speculating about methods of craft. I am good at desktop publishing and subsequently printing things on high end paper. That’s about the extent of my crafting abilities. I am not great at creating things with my hands. I still have problems changing guitar strings.

Thus, the spray paint issue was very … concerning. Three days to the party seemed like the time we should be testing the spray paint, to make sure it would work. Kelly and Mikki had mentioned a few potential brands in their emails, but I couldn’t find any online that I could get shipped in three days, because spray paint can only be shipped via ground.  I started researching other spray paint, discovering that most of it needed to be sealed with heat before it set. Every time I found something that sounded like it might work (including, hilariously, “Hunters [sic] Specialties Permanent Camo”) I ordered it for the fastest shipping possible, all the while getting increasingly frustrated that I was researching spray paint at all instead of writing Gina’s instruction book.

The very highly recommended spray paint choice of Kelly and Mikki was "Montana Gold Acrylic Spray Paint," which comes in every possible color, including metallics.

Remember how I recently shared a leadership assessment that said that I have a strong future vision while focusing on data and clearing obstacles? Well, it also told me that under stress I become myopic and focus only on information overload and slaying things.

It’s not a big leap to the scene that opened this post. I had five cans of assorted spray paint and two markers lined up and had dressed a 40lb sack of dirt in one of my old t-shirts. At a loss for an icon I could quickly stencil out of a sheet of cardboard, I went back to basics: the starfleet insignia. Not wanting to get spray paint on my clothes (even clothes I’ve set aside specifically in a bin entitled, “for painting”), I elected to strip down to a pair of blue bikini briefs to conduct this exercise.

Welcome to my brain. It is a scary place.

The next morning Kelly and Mikki talked me down from my panic after I sent them not the sanest or nicest email I have ever written. They helped me figure out which local stores carried the paint they both recommended, and Kelly assured me we could visit one together when she arrived stateside. Mel coaxed me away from my desk at lunch and convinced me I would not have a panic attack from entering a craft store. I bought the recommended spray paint.

Problem: solved!

Now we had all of the necessary elements for Gina’s party, save for three: Kelly, Mikki, and the instruction book that would lay out the rules of the game and all of the various challenges.

Oh. Just that.

Tune in next time for Kelly and my madcap adventures the day before the party, how an off-hand mention of a “side-quest” turned into the most hilarious part of the event, and samples from the now legendary instruction book.

sounding off

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This is the first time all month I truly don’t feel like blogging. Between the acts of god and the blogiversary I am tapped out, dudes.

Chez Krisis escaped Irene with only the aforementioned broken screen door as evidence of the storm. Goes to show that all that wackiness E put us through with the several tons of dirt and subsequent weeks of hard physical labor paid off, as there was hardly even a trickle in our previously-damp basement.

I cannot believe that there are people whinging about Irene over-hype in the media. I hate local news just as much (okay: five times more) as the next person, but this was warranted. Overhyping a snow storm is one thing – it’s snow. We’re all gonna live through it and probably have a lot of fun getting bombed and using trash can lids as sleds.

Hurricanes are something else entirely. There is no fun aspect, and as a city used to “fun” apocalyptic weather patterns we needed a bracing dose of reality to make sure we’d be prepared for any eventuality. I know I personally ignore all local weather news, but at the point that the National Weather Service thinks it might be dire I pay attention and prepare.

(Did you know they are the ones largely credited for spurring passive communities into action during Katrina prep? Did you know you can input your zip code into NWS’s site Weather.gov at any time to see all the weather warnings for your area? If you hear any politician say something negative about this service, it is a sign they are a total moron.)

Did it hurt to get extra groceries and gas, clean up the stray stuff around our house, and check various batteries. Totally not, so no complaints here. Well, maybe I could have done without eating an entire loaf of Parmesan Pesto bread in the last 24-hours, but as my friend Sarah pointed out, I was simply carb-loading in preparation for feats of athletic exertion during the storm.

And, well, now I’m ready to hibernate and live off my own body fat, which I guess could have come in handy, too.

Crushing On: Twitter in a Crisis

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I know, “duh,” right?

Let me explain.

With the vast majority of everyone I know battening down their hatches in preparation for Irene to blow through their area, I felt as though I had to choose a hurricane-related thing to crush upon.

Could it be the local farmer’s market, still appearing on schedule this morning so we could stock up on healthy food to carry us through the potential apocalyptic conditions? Perhaps it should be my handy pair of camping lanterns, holdovers from my 2006 trip to Bonnaroo? Or, Roman & Sons, who replaced all of the rickety 90-year-old windows on the first floor of our house earlier this year?

I’m crushing on all of the above, but the thing I’m really in love with at the moment is Twitter.

Something I excised from yesterday’s mammoth anniversary post was a paragraph about 9/11. Were you online that morning? All of the news sites went down. For a brief period there was no information, anywhere. Then, an amazing thing happened – blogs(including CK) started acting as a distributed network of information, reporting details more accurately and succinctly than the television coverage. People on the ground in NYC posted photos and eye-witness accounts, while everyone else helped to connect and cultivate that information.

In the intervening ten years, the world has realized that centralized news in a crisis is only effective when the crisis is affecting only a very small group of people. A hostage situation, a plane crash – traditional news excels in communicating information about this kind of news.

When it comes to revolutions and acts of nature, centralized news becomes less effective. Everyone is experiencing the same earthquake, hurricane, or plague of locusts. We are all nodes of information, we all want to know what’s happening as close to us as possible, and we all want to know what’s happening to our friends.

Twitter does all three. Tonight I’ve been broadcasting our status (so far the only casualty is a screen door), searching for mentions of our area and the local roads (the main road north of us is flooded), and keeping up-to-date with our friends (all safe!). I know Nan is fine in NC, where to find our nearest emergency shelter, and that I might need to drive our Shop Vac down the block to help with the baling at Cecily’s house.

Oh, and then there is the intermittent tornado warning/watch. I’m debating if I should remove some of my guitars from the attic.

I might be on pins and needles at the moment, but so is everyone else. We’re on pins and needs together, sharing stories and anxieties and laughter, and knowing that makes it less frightening and confusing.

Plus, no Fail Whales in sight!

Stay safe and dry, friends.

Happy Birthday To This

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Playing Eric Smith’s book release party in November. One of my favorite non-blog images of the year, as captured by the keen eye of Daily News cover boy @MikeIl

An anniversary in three movements: Context, Accomplishment, & Gratitude.

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1st – Context

Philadelphia seems to be heading towards the apocalypse full speed ahead, much to the consternation of the general public (and the delight of my end-times obsessed best friend Gina).

First it was violent flash mobs. A few weeks ago it was a terrifying stories-high fire we could see from our office, followed by a week and half deluge of rain. Then, we had an unlikely earthquake. Now we’re worried about a hurricane.

It’s either a modern twist on a series of biblical plagues, or we are playing some sort of sick game of disaster Bingo with all of the squares filled with lyrics from “The End of the World as We Know It.”

I am waiting for the universe to call “bird and snakes,” or perhaps “Leonard Bernstein.”

AC in Collingswood last September, shot by Jay Donahue.

I witnessed the fire, rain, and earthquake firsthand, but not the mobs or the impending hurricane. I don’t know about them through traditional media. I have no idea when I last watched a weather report. I haven’t watched television news since 2004, and I generally don’t read the newspaper unless it’s running one of my ad campaigns.

I don’t need to. My social networks break news when it is relevant to me, regardless of if it’s the evening news.

That is life (and news) at the speed of Twitter. By comparison, blogs are the slow, galumphing cousin of social media, where we tweet at the speed of thought and voluntarily track our movements from bar to bar and report on whatever we’re watching or hearing.

And traditional media? CNN dot com didn’t have a headline banner up about the earthquake five minutes after it happened. Meanwhile, Twitter already had pinpointed the epicenter and estimated the magnitude.

Blogs can be galumphing, but at least they’re galumphing by choice. I tweeted about the earthquake, then I checked into it on FourSquare, before finally writing a blog post the next day on the train, when I felt like I had something to say.

Backstage at the Tin in September, shot by Gina.

I don’t own a blog to be fast. I’ve been there and done that, babe. I used to post 140-character bulletins four times an hour long before Twitter was a glimmer in Ev’s eye.

In fact, I started doing it eleven years ago today.

Where?

Here, on Crushing Krisis – Philadelphia’s longest running blog.

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2nd – Accomplishment

This is the first blog year where I have felt entirely like an adult for the duration.

It didn’t really have much to do with my impending 30th birthday, or even with E and I owning a house. It was more that many years of work and planning and practicing and acquiring are finally paying dividends in the present.

Dressed as Empire Records for Halloween, shot by our friend Tina.

A year ago today the biggest news was that we lived in a house, but it was eclipsed by the even bigger OMFG fact that I had been blogging for a whole decade.

This year the biggest news is smaller, subtler, yet it was the news that eclipsed CK, rather than the other way around.

I was published by our local CBS affiliate, and the bands I covered saw trickle-down articles as a result. Arcati Crisis added a drummer, and later a bassist, while I became the full-time bassist for Filmstar. I wrote songs for the soundtrack of a novel, and later played the book release party. I wrote an entire novel of my own in one month.

I listened to 200+ LPs released in 2010 so I could finally pen a fully-informed Best Albums of the Year list. I played a sold-out show supporting a musician who I adore. I swore on this very blog that I would earn my learner’s permit and then learned to drive. I got really serious about fitness and going to the gym(!), especially when it involved yoga, and am presently in the best shape of my life. I gigged in all but one month of the year, and had fewer and fewer complaints about my performances.

I was in two wedding parties, but the stupidest thing I wound up doing didn’t even involve me being drunk or at a bachelor party (or both). I finally, belatedly got my license. My blog quite unintentionally turned a profit on a feature I was writing for my own OCD entertainment. I finally implemented the EdCal I’ve been drafting for two years. I engineered a day of drum recording to break ground on my first ever multi-track full-band project.

Me looking snazzy and E in her wedding dress at Dorian’s Parlor, as shot by Gina Martino.

The beauty of those accomplishments is that their entire lineage is contained within this blog. We can trace my 2011 accomplishments back to their 2001 roots – writing CD reviews for our school paper, sleeping through production class, playing open mics while staring down my ex-girlfriend, making and keeping friends (that were later in our wedding), and flexing my OCD muscle on special projects.

The story of a year isn’t told only through its accomplishments. I did things for fun, too. I confessed my obsession with mopping. I summed up my life as a video game and then, ironically, turned Gina’s life into one. I made E tie me to a chair so I could work out plot points for my book. I fell in love with a weird-ass David Bowie vampire flick. I professed my love for unadulterated pop again and again and again. I taught Gina a guitar solo by singing like a Skeksi. I had a near-death experience involving lime popcorn.

I went to a nearly-nude live dancing girls club for the first time. I compared driving to a superhero learning to fly. I undertook a DIY landscaping project with E, against my better judgement. I started incorporating my comic fandom into the blog. I became a full-time older brother for two whole months, and loved it. I opined on the pitfalls of rock band sweat. I explained how I stay organized as a musician.

All that in a year in which I was pretty certain that I didn’t blog enough.

Being suave at Ross & Laura’s wedding in April, shot by Melon.

Whether I was a good blogger or not, I didn’t mention everything significant that happened to me. Not my hours of constant bass playing to get up to snuff for Filmstar, and subsequently buying not one but two more basses. Not finishing Version 1.0 of my song database, including programming a word cloud from scratch. Not my hard-won camaraderie with local musicians I adore. Not our first true Arcati Crisis rock show. Not finally feeling comfortable hanging out with our friends that have babies. Not our epic drive back from Jake’s wedding in Gettysburg and how I love having him as a weekly presence in my life. Not my first producer-for-hire session in my home studio.

Except, really those things live here too, because I tweet my thoughts all the time, and I archive my tweets at CK. Call it a concession to that omnipresent internal OCD Godzilla.

I simply cannot write words down without knowing they are going to be archived somewhere for posterity.

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Perpetrating utter madness at Gina’s bachelorette party in July, shot by Gudrun.

3rd – Gratitude

Eleven years ago today if I had told you – or, anyone, really – that I authored a blog, the reaction would likely be “a what?”

Last Friday I sat in the audience of an awards show thrown by a blog that gave awards to blogs, and whose audience was largely bloggers – or, at least, blog readers who also tweet.

On Tuesday we had an earthquake. In Philadelphia. Or, at least, I thought we did. A minute later I knew it wasn’t my imagination. Two minutes later I also knew they felt the quake in Arlington, Syracuse, and Toronto.

We are past the point of debating the purpose of a blog, or of Twitter. They’ve become so ubiquitous that their presence is assumed as a matter of course. Whether you’re working on a new corporate sitemap or a band page, you’ll hear the same pair of questions: Where’s the blog? Where’s the “Follow Us” link?

Last Friday @ The Geek Awards, shot by E.

No matter how much work I do to answer those questions in professional and personal settings all week long, when it comes to asking myself there’s never any doubt. Social networking has become more than a passtime or habit for me – it’s ritual, almost unconscious. Even when it’s hard work it’s as easy to do as breathing.

Thank you for making a conscious decision to be a part of my ritual, today and any other day you have read CK. Maybe you visit the site, or have me in an RSS feed, or clicked through from Twitter, or read via Facebook note.

I don’t really care how you got here. I care that somehow, against every possible odd and all of my procrastinating tendencies, Crushing Krisis sits in the first page of search rankings for “Longest Running Blog” … even if that’s only true in my fine disaster-plagued city of brotherly love.

Thank you for being a part of this marvelous thing that has tracked my progress to living the exact fantasy I pictured back in 2000, only as a way better singer and with a way hotter wife.

Thank you as a member of two actively gigging rock bands and as a solo artist.

Thank you as the holder of a brand new PA Driver’s License.

Thank you from a body that I feel comfortable inside of for the first time in thirty years of life.

Thank you times eleven years, or 4017 days, or exactly 1.182 million words, or to whatever numerical value you would personally ascribe to being happy and fulfilled 24 hours a day, seven days a week – and merrily blogging and tweeting all the while.

Thank you, and happy birthday to this.