Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Streaming live at 12 midnight for 12for12k

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If you’re awake at midnight EST on the Monday-to-Tuesday divide you can catch the first ever live, streaming concert of my music – in support of an awesome, international charity drive called 12 for 12k.

I think I’ll call it at12for12for12k. Cool?

Founded by social media marketer Danny Brown, 12 for 12k throws down a bold challenge to social media users – can you use your social networks for good in concert with people all around the world to raise $12k for a new charity every month for a year?

This month’s charity is Unicef’s “Believe in Zero” – the belief that we can stop children from dying from preventable causes. And so far there is less than $1,200 pledged for the month.

It shouldn’t be that daunting. 1,200 people could do it for a reasonable $10 a month – three less trips to Starbucks. 12,000 people can do it with no issue – $1 a month, each! Easy pickings. If more than 10,000 Twitter users turned their icons green for Iran, surely just as many can muster $1 a month in donations to a good cause?

If you know me you know that projects like this are very close to my heart. I used Blogathon as a platform for my music to raise money and awareness for my favorite charities. I have cancelled Christmas in favor of giving charitable gifts. I volunteer with Lyndzapalooza – a musical non-profit dedicated to giving a voice to more of Philly’s independent artists. And starting tomorrow I am helping to plan a major non-profit project for this September.

12 for 12k is at once easier and harder than those projects. Easy, because it’s simple to support with a small donation. Hard, because it’s about making your giving a year-round trend – not just a once a year event.

I’ll be playing at midnight, and at the very least I will donate $1 for every song I play … and my songs are short, so that could get pretty expensive! In fact, I think I could play 12 songs in an hour… 12at12for12for12k!

If you’re awake at midnight – or even if you aren’t – will you do the same? Just ten of us donating $12 each is 1% of this month’s goal. We might not make it to $12k this month, but we can make giving a regular part of our lives, and save lives while doing it.

The power of social media compels you!

(PS: I promise at least Madonna & David Bowie covers, and almost can promise MJ as well. Dunno if the Lady Gaga is ready yet… you’d all have to donate a lot of money to hear that.)

Good blogs and the opinions I spouted at them.

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This post could easily be about how I spent the last two weekends sweating my physical and intellectual butt off to completely reorganize my home office and upgrade CK to WordPress 2.8, but you would be like, “Whatever, it looks the same to me,” or “Um, I’m reading you on my RSS feed, so I don’t really care,” or possibly, “Dude, I haven’t read blogs for two years. Send me a tweet about it.”

Which is fine. I mean, should I also tell you about how I swept the floor? Backstage is backstage for a reason. Props people work hard to keep actors focused on their performance, not for the applause.

(Plus, at CK I’m the prop person and the actor. And the box office manager, the technical director, and the old lady ushering you to your seat. You get the idea. Excelsior…)

In my increasingly uncluttered life I’ve been trying to make some more time not only to read other blogs I admire, but to interact with them. That means reading carefully and responding, which sometimes yields thoughtful comments.

I’m sometimes hesitant to leave my thoughts lying around in other people’s homes when they could possibly lead to interesting content back here at my own homestead, but I’ve arrived at a happy medium – I’ll link to all of said intriguing posts as well as giving you a snippet of my reasoned replies.

Here’s a glimpse at some of the discussions I’ve weighed in on in this past week.

(If you find yourself wanting to do the same, try subscribing to Backtype, a simple monitoring service which will doing all of the the keeping-track for you.) [Read more…] about Good blogs and the opinions I spouted at them.

Have an Infinite Summer

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Once I was in a very bad place, and also in the hospital, and I asked my mom to walk to B&N to buy me David Foster Wallace’s massive masterpiece Infinite Jest.

It kept me sane through three days in the hospital, and kept me awake at night for another month – which, at my faster-than-light speed of reading, is quite the feat. Try as I might, I could not devour it in a few sittings like I can with any other book. It was a novel that required digestion.

This summer has been declared Infinite Summer, which gives you an entire solstice-to-equinox season to read the book at a snailish increment of 75-pages a week.

As I understand it, your reading will be accompanied by encouraging blog pep-talks like this one from Kottke:

So sure, it’s a lengthy book that’s heavy to carry and impossible to read in bed, but Christ, how many hours of American Idol have you sat through on your uncomfortable POS couch? The entire run of The West Wing was 111 hours and 56 minutes; ER was twice as long, and in the later seasons, twice as painful. I guarantee you that getting through Infinite Jest with a good understanding of what happened will take you a lot less time and energy than you expended getting your Mage to level 60 in World of Warcraft.

Is that more or less haranguing than my Beatles screamo diatribe from last week? I think the Big K was meaner than me.

In any event, it’s a wonderful, maddening read, there are nifty bookmarks bearing the schedule, it makes a wonderful pillow and/or doorstop, and I might re-read it too if I can find a spare moment or two to read the second half of Outliers.

run ragged and happy

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This is a meandering post about life and stuff. Content that’s all focused like a laser mounted on a deadly shark may or may not resume tomorrow.

This weekend E headed up the NNJ/NYC to play a show and help with some solstice cleaning along with the sibs at her mother’s house. I wanted to tag along to see her concert and reap the sib-time, but my life was in need of some cleaning up as well.

When I woke up on Saturday I felt like my to-do list was a litany of random drudgery. Organize this, scrub that, upload stuff to here. Even as I was crossing things off it didn’t feel very big picture. Typical: artist-, writer-, marketer-me trapped under a Sisyphisian list of uncreative to-dos. The only thing keeping me sane was my Twitter pipeline to the outside world.

As the day wore on I kept feeling like I was behind the boulder until I caught a social network update from my dear musical friend Vicky Spaeth, which read:

Simplify, simplify, simplify! I think we over-complicate our lives way too much.

I read that, then took another look at my list, and realized there was a big picture. It was all “simplify.” Organizing shelves and wires so my creative space is less cluttered, so I can create. Clean out the house so I don’t have a worry of other things to do nagging me when I want to create. Upload what I’ve created to as many places as will have it, so people can actually hear it.

I finally have the simplicity that provides one big picture. I have focus. Finally everything I’m doing points in the same direction.

I look back at the 2000 me. Within a two month span I started a blog, shot digital video of myself, and was the only songwriter on the whole internet uploading a concert every week. And it all came easy. But it was over-complicated. The technology was a tangle. The life was a tangle – pulling As and paying for my first apartment and squeezing in music beside theatre.

Maybe I was on the verge of conquering the world, but it wasn’t simple. There was no picture to focus on. Which was fine – I was in college! But that’s why we grow up. And hopefully get less complicated, instead of more.

It took the weekend and the twenty-seven years before it, but I am really almost there. Almost to the point that I can just flip a switch and empty my thoughts and songs directly onto the internet without a fussy mess of wires and files and wasted time.

And be worth watching.

It feels cool and satisfying, and I’m happy – happy sweating my ass off and mopping the floor, or putting away the umpteenth load of laundry, passing out on the couch while I wait for my wife to get home. Happy without any descriptors or mitigators, because there’s a point to it.

Just happy.

Play at playing with The Beatles. Or, just play with The Beatles.

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The pair of surviving Beatles recently appeared at E3 to hype the impending The Beatles: Rock Band, out on September 9. It represents a remarkable milestone – mass licensing of Beatles songs to a third party, cooperation of all four Beatles estates on new intellectual property, release of new studio chatter from the band, and creating multi-tracked masters of songs originally recorded live in mono or stereo. (see the full fact sheet)

In the game, you and your friends can take the Beatles from the Cavern Club days all the way to the rooftop in your own living room, not mention traipsing through their imagined acid trips. You’ll start out with 45 Beatles songs in-game, but many more will available as downloadable content – starting with the complete Abbey Road.

Assuming you already have a plethora of plastic video game instruments lying around the house, the a la carte game will cost you $100. If you need all of the plastic instruments to go with it, you’ll be dropping $250 for the full kit.

Seems like a bargain to play along with 45 of your favorite Beatles tunes, right?

Not really. Because, if you have an actual instrument lying around the house, you can buy The Beatles: Complete Scores hardcover tome for half the price of the a la carte game and learn how to play the actual music to every single Beatles song.

If you need an actual instrument to go with it, you can pick up a starter guitar or bass package plus the book for about $250 – yes, even including a replica Hoffner bass! (The scores plus drums will run you a bit more – $300-$500).

Herein lies your dilemma. Do you want to have a primary experience with the music you love, or a secondary experience?

If you’re a non-musician, you might argue, “I don’t really have a choice,” but I think you do.

You might argue, “I don’t read music,” yet you’re willing to learn an arcane method of notation in Rock Band that’s not too different from reading guitar tab, which is included in the score book.

You might argue, “I don’t have nimble fingers, a sense of pitch or rhythm, or a decent voice,” yet if you expect to surpass even easy mode on Rock Band you’ll need to hone some or all of those skills just as you would playing actual music. In fact, Rock Band is much less forgiving of mistakes with drumming and vocals than a jam with friends would be.

You might argue, “I don’t have time to practice music enough for it to be worthwhile,” yet you have time to play Rock Band two or three hours a week. That same time would serve you equally well training on an actual instrument. You could probably learn how to play “I Want To Hold You Hand” on guitar in the same time it takes you to reach your first save point.

Convinced yet?

Other Rock Band titles offer the allure of collecting disparate, virtuosically-difficult music into a video game – much of which is impossible to track down as printed music. None of that is true this time around – the music comes from a single source, the virtuouosity is in the ease of playing, and it’s all collected in a single, relatively cheap book. It’s a completely level playing field for anyone – novice to expert.

You can’t say that about any other Rock Band game or for any other artist in the history of music.

Essentially, you have no argument to buy The Beatles: Rock Band other than perhaps, “I already know how to play all 213 originally released Beatles songs, and now I’m bored.”

The game does have some redeeming features in the areas of drumming and singing – the two bits of Beatles that are the hardest to master on your own. Designers worked closely with Ringo to make the game a tutorial for his unique drumming style. Also, the game features a harmony training mode, which will allow you to voice any part in the band’s remarkable multi-part harmonies.

Based on that, if you’re a Beatles-loving singer or drummer starting from scratch I can appreciate wanting to purchase the game for some guidance. If only the game also allowed you to plug in an actual midi-guitar in to test your chops against the recordings … then I’d buy it in an insant!

Otherwise, if you’re a Beatles-lover who wants to experience playing their music yourself, my advice would be to actually play it yourself.