Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

memories

Why I #blamedrewscancer, pt. 2

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(Read Part 1)

It is Saturday, at 2:30 in the afternoon. After a brief flight, our plane has reached its apex.

Now it is time to dive out of it.

Drew contemplates the open doorThe friendly chatter of the BlameDrewsCancer team falls away as the tiny cabin bustles with activity. Each of our tandem partners checks to make sure we’re completely winched together.

Then, before I realize it is happening, the plexiglass door over the hatch is slid entirely open, and Chris and his partner are duckwalking to the very edge of the floor. They tip out, into the blue, quickly disappearing from sight.

Drew is sitting next to me. I look him in the eyes, but I don’t think it registers. He will be the next to jump.

I find that, unexpectedly, I am completely calm.

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On Monday, June 29, I met Britt outside of our office, and we took off for New Jersey to meet with Drew.

I had read up on the BlameDrewsCancer phenomenon, but I couldn’t say I completely understood the point of it. All I knew was that Britt was in charge of this mysterious Blame-a-Thon event, and that I had volunteered to take notes for her so she could stay focused on her dialog with Drew.

Otherwise, I was in the dark. Blame Drew’s Cancer was just a meme to me. I had never even sent an @-reply to Drew.

We converged on Applebees for our meeting. Me being me, I had never been inside of one before, and wasn’t entirely sure what sort of food they sold. I advertised the fact to Drew, a stocky, tattooed, slightly-imposing man in a baseball jersey.

Great, I thought. Way to endear yourself to the intimidating guy with cancer by advertising your never-ending weirdness.

Thirty minutes later the five of us – Drew, his friends Chris and Mikey, and Britt and I – were seated and eating. The following exchange kicked-off our meeting:

Britt: I brought charts!

Drew: I brought cancer!

This, I learned quickly, was par for the course with Drew – and a running theme of BlameDrewsCancer. Drew was sick of cancer being an unspoken “c-word.” He talked about his cancer loudly and without reservation, and welcomed questions.

Drew was fresh from chemotherapy, and Britt quizzed him on the details over salad. Yes, he had a permanent port in his body for the chemo, so the drugs wouldn’t burn his skin. No, it wasn’t too uncomfortable, but he wasn’t allowed to get any more tattoos while he was in treatment.

As we got into the thick of the meeting I took furious notes on the scope of the event. It would be huge. 24 hours of party, half of it at Philly’s venerable North Star Bar. We would need to coordinate live video streaming of the entire event. The band Stroke 9 was reportedly working on a Blame Drew’s Cancer theme song. Drew was now an official partner of LiveStrong, in a story set to break later that week on outlets like AOL and CNN – until then the news was embargoed.

In Drew’s words, we should “Think big.” When Mikey jokingly fired back, “Big like Tom Hanks,” Drew responded, “Sure, if you think you can get in touch with him.”

It was at that moment that I began to understand what Drew – and, by extension, BlameDrewsCancer – was actually about. It was about a no-holds-barred rebranding of cancer as something you could talk about, get support for, and live through. Really live.

Drew was only intimidating in that he had ideas with no boundaries, and he was looking for people to help realize them. By the time we headed back to our cars, I knew that I wanted to be one of those people; I had to be involved with Blame-a-Thon in a capacity more meaningful than just taking notes.

I did not suspect that “involved” would involve jumping out of a plane.

Filmstar. Rock’n’Roll Star. Wife.

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Elise & Co. (aka Filmstar) rocked an amazing show tonight at the M-Room, followed by the obscenely sexy and awesome Stone Thrown (like Muse, but Philly-local and half-Asian).

Here’s Filmstar’s newest tune, which I am in love with. Note the Bowie / Karen O. dual influences.

(Or, head to YouTube to watch “Rock & Roll Star.”)

There is prelim talk of a worlds-colliding Filmstar v. Arcati Crisis party/show sometime in the fall. If that were to happen, I would play the shit out of a tambourine on that song.

not-so-prompt prompts

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In my Google Reader I have a tag called “PROMPT” that I affix to posts that made me think or feel something that I might like to share on CK.

I’ve discovered that prompts are best served fresh – ideally I should be writing a post about that intangible thought or feeling within a day or two of having it.

There are presently prompts on my list from as long ago as September. That is scary. It is sitting in the way of me being prompted to tell you about new thoughts or feelings. I need to flush out all my prior prompts so I can post about prompts promptly when they prompt me.

Let me see if I can string some together in a way that makes sense to us both.

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Spezify is a visual search engine, but that doesn’t mean what you probably think it means. Spezify searches the web for text, photos, and social media mentions of your search term, and arrays the results in a collage on your screen. It’s a great way to catch a quick snapshot of a person, place, musical artist, or brand. See what it has to say show and tell about crushing krisis or Philadelphia. Link via Fresh Arrival.

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The imitable Maggie of Mighty Girl posted about her husband’s project, Typekit. Typekit seems to still be in a closed alpha, but the gist of it is that it allows you to dynamically embed text in any font onto any webpage, regardless of if you (or the end user) has that font. You can follow the development on the Typekit blog.

In my humble opinion, Mighty Girl continues to be one of the definitive personal blogs on the internet.

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Geekadelphia (an excellent blog) recently posted a mammoth interview with J. C. Hutchins. Hutchins parlayed the net-success of his podcasted 7th Son trilogy into a publishing deal and subsequent tangible book. Said book – Personal Effects: Dark Art – comes complete with an intricately crafted alternate-reality game component that expands the narrative far past the boundaries of the book. Probably the next piece of fiction I will read, and setting the bar high for the next evolution of the novel.

(PS: M. Hutchins dropped by to comment less than twenty minutes after this was posted. Nice to see his publishing deal hasn’t changed his net savvy :)

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Matthew Sheret (who I found via Warren Ellis) is a writer and photographer with an intriguing list of projects. I am fascinated by his recent post This is a Souvenir, in which he details writing songs for an imaginary band, and how he’d like to take it a step further and have an imaginary record label.

I love that sort of thing – a simulacrum of the footprint left by actual media, but in the absence of said media.

(Speaking of Ellis, I enjoyed his dissection of what it means to be a “digital magazine,” and how that ought to be different from a bells and whistles flash interface with whosits and whatsists. His point (and mine)? You can change the method of delivery, but “magazine” should still mean “magazine.” But, can “newspaper” still mean “newspaper”? Compare to a recent Conversation Agent post about what happens when your local paper goes entirely online.)

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Lane is a remarkable photographer I have been a fan of for a long time. Today she posted an unreal photo of a rainbow seen over the New Mexico desert. Recently she volunteered with Review Sante Fe, a local photography exhibition. She posted a sampling of RSF photographers, and their work was uniformly amazing.

Now that Lane is back in the US I need to buy a print from her.

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I saw what was perhaps my first double rainbow ever a few Saturdays ago on the way to E’s show at The Saint in Asbury Park. It was so close it seemed like we could drive right to the end of it.