Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Uncluttering

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A week ago a blog I’ve become quite fond of – MLarson – quoted my statement from “Why A Link Is Not Enough“:

Links aren’t life.

His reflexive link might have been a thank you for all of the links to him I’ve featured in the past few weeks, or maybe it was an ironic commentary on the fact that I followed up a post stating “Links aren’t life” with a post with several dozen links in it. Or, maybe it was both.

I don’t dispute that links are a big part of blogging. I love posting links. I just like to pair my links with some personal commentary and context so that I at once show you interesting things you may not have read or seen and remind myself about that said things exist when I am old and senile. In, like, a month.

Anyhow, per positive feedback on recent link posts, for the moment they’re going to be a semi-weekly feature.

Unclutterer is to blogs what Real Simple is to magazines. I love it.

Gimme Sanity is back has been back, but I was too dim to look for it at its domain name. Duh.

Axis All Areas is a Garbage fan site with a very comprehensive breakdown of the gear the band has used on every tour. Also, the author has a signed Guild guitar identical to mine! Cool.

Mighty Goods is a shopping blog written by the author of the seminal Mighty Girl. Despite my unequivocal love for her taste in stuff I’ve never bought any of her selected items. The most recent contenders for first purchase are fork easels, and a pattern book that presents patterns in EPS and high res JPG so you can use them for various web and print projects.

Philly Blog The BM Rant tells the tale of the original (ghost)writer of The Hardy Boys. Also from my town, Vintage captures a scene from my daily life. And, XPNer Some Velvet Blog introduces me to Trolleyvox, an awesome local band.

Visual Search Lab is like a user-powered Google Image search, aiming to “find visually similar images.” via Photojunkie.

Brandon Fuller, creator of the technology behind my Now Playing sidebar, laments missing the boat with other big ideas. I feel his pain, having missed out on cashing in on a number of great ideas and web trends due to lack of time or lack of savvy. But, I say, never give up: Friendster seemed to have the annoying lock on social networking before the even more annoying MySpace cropped up, and now they’ve both been eclipsed by the classier Facebook.

10 Future Web Trends is an apt examination of up and coming web technology, via Akkam’s Razor. Also at Akkam’s: the math of making money on your blog.

CNN shares five simple keys to nutrition. Unlike their organization article, I have yet to master any of these habits. Also handy: how to clean your home in 19 minutes. I really enjoy when CNN subcontracts their open article slots to magazines rather than shoddily written AP stories.

Awe-inspiring communications blogger Debbie Millman contributed to A Brief Message – which combines a 200-or-less word essay on design with an accompanying illustration. I love their current one, Arrogance and Humility.

Links from usual suspects: this week TDavid and I chatted about link rot and social networking. Kottke posted a highly addictive web-game, Bloxorz. I grew bored in 15 minutes; Elise beat it within an hour. Also from K, light pollution, and the absence thereof is one of the many reasons I’m jealous of E’s impending trip to Australia.

Largehearted Boy posted a great interview w/Rufus Wainwright; oh, Rufus, if only your album didn’t suck quite so much. Also from LHB, a 69 Love Songs wiki. And, finally, the aforementioned MLarson found an illustrated guide on how to be creative.

Fin.

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.

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.

Gilt & Hail

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While out in the world I am constantly seeking out details to ferry back to this little white box.

Some days are just as plain as the box itself, monochromatic and empty, and so the smallest sensation of actual life sticks out. Last Friday, a fever, riding home in a cab from work. He had attached a small plastic hose to the passenger a/c vent, and it pumped air under the divider, directly onto my naked ankle. In my hyper-sensitive state the sustained blast of air was alternatingly soothing and intensely painful.

I sank into a kind of paralyzed trance, in rhythm with the throbbing veins beneath my skin.

Other days the world is so vibrant with narrative color that I can hardly take it all in. Not if I had a tape recorder for my thoughts, or a camera for the view. And so I marvel at the human mind, and how in a life full of gadgets it is still the best recording device I’ve got so long as I make sure each aspect of the world is remarkable in its own way.

I prise away at every little detail.

A beautiful voice is emerging from the post office boxes. At first I think it might be the radio, but it slips remarkably from disco to R&B to lullaby without changing key. I don’t think digital satellite can do that.

I peer through the keyholes and tiny windows in the doors of each box to try to catch a glimpse of her. Gilt, but fading, each door is set with a key hole surrounded by a multi-pointed star, each of ten successive letters marking its points.

I don’t understand why. I still can’t see her.

A pleasant-looking woman in a Ft. Lauderdale shirt strolls in with her toddling son, adorable with untied shoes. In line behind me he too is drawn to the singing, or maybe just the gilt, and strays beneath the nylon divider to investigate.

“Get yourself back in here,” she croaks. She speaks like a bull frog, lower and more destroyed than a woman who had smoked for twice her age. She yanks him under the rope and lays a firm smack across his midsection. It reverberates across the tiled floor as he looks up at her. No tears, still quizzical.

She catches me staring, and I hold her gaze for long seconds.

The posters, I notice, are coded. A star means to leave them up indefinitely. A plus means they will expire; their shelf-life is printed below, white on black. And it isn’t just the posters – laminated mats and signs as well.

The tiny woman in front of me is trying to pick up mail in her maiden name; she drops pennies into her purse and they make a peculiar clinking sound, like the inside is made of tin. At the next window the clerk informs a man that he was lucky to receive his package, as it had no address on it.

I can’t figure it out, either.

I am at my bullet-proofed window. I think I could slip a pvc tube around the edge and spray aerosol poison into the face of my clerk. But that wouldn’t be an effective way to pick up my package. She is fussing with her watch, which is clearly two or three links too small for her wrist. Had it swollen suddenly?

There are scratches everyone on the inside of the bullet-proofed window; who is trying to escape?

The woman behind me bobs, up and down, back and forth. The stamp machine does not take dollars. There is a mural on the wall of some Midwestern settlement, and I can’t understand what it has to do with post offices or Philadelphia.

I fiddle with each tiny ball bearing that chains the pen to the bullet proof window as if they are rosary beads.

I pray: remember each detail.