Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Tangible

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Over at SongFight they have two particular side skirmishes that have been piquing my interest.

One is the Album a Day movement, where you do your best to write and record a 20-Minute EP in a single 24 hour period. Lots of SongFighters have joined the fray; the results i’ve heard have been mixed, with a lot of silly songs, but a a few keepers. I am sorely tempted to try it.

The second, starting on Friday, is Marathon Songs – where all the participants will write one song per day for sixteen days. The thought of recording and posting a song for sixteen straight days makes my head quiver and long to explode – this is, afterall, my year off from Blogathon. Still, i am intriqued by the thought of forcing out a product consistently for two weeks, especially as lately i am alternately convinced my songwriter gland has atrophied and afraid that i will never be able to record all of the dozen dozen songs i’ve got floating around.

That’s the crux of it, really. I have so many songs floating, and i am torn between forging onward into the unknown and holding back to work what i have into perfection. Hopefully the decision will be made easier by the shiny new guitar winging its way to me from Kansas City as we speak, but in the meantime i am warming up for either or both of the SF challenges, with my final decision on whether i participate or not coming on Friday.

So, yeah, basically what i’m trying to say is: here’s some shitty poetry.

I am thinking where am i
Georgia O'Keefe flowers keeping watch
Over my drip drop on the museum floor

I am soaking wet in Washington
Sixth and Pennsylvania
With four dollars in my pocket

     Lost here in the city
     I recognize each building
     That i have seen on teevee
     Could i be as real as these streets?

I was walking in New York City
Skirting the hole
Where buildings used to be

I was circling Central Park
Where teevee stars walk
But i don't know where i am really

     And lost then in the city
     Rabi seated across from me
     Could i be as real as those streets?
     As real as the buildings i once looked down from upon
     Now gone?

I am wondering who am i
Walking to your house
Wondering if i know where i begin
So many ends i've got figured out, but
The means to acheive is what i'm always missing

Dry now in Washington i know i'm as real as the streets
And that white house where all the dignitaries meet
As real as Georgia O'Keefe's
Lewdest flowers, hung for all the world to see

There’s Something About Zeitgeist

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Zeitgeist. In one of those late nineties years it got to be a popular term to bandy about in conversation, though not one that could be easily defined. Paradigm? Sure, you can pick that up from context. Modernity? Its word root tells you the whole story. But Zeitgeist? It was always used in association with (pop)cultural trends, but in my anorexic teenaged mind all it did was draw up a picture of Linda Blair reading a little bit of Vogue every time her head spun around to the front.

You can look at the dictionary definition, but i think to really understand this work you need to understand another accompanying term: Jumping The Shark. It originated on Happy Days. The internet pretty much specializes in defining Shark Jumping, so i won’t bore you with an extended explanation. The short of it is that when something very popular becomes uncool or passé, it has jumped the shark. It has reached the end of the cool spectrum. People at the water-cooler are now openly mocking it, when at one point they were climbing over each other just to talk about it.

At the other end of the spectrum, there is zeitgeist. Z is the way you can measure of whether or not something even ranks on the sliding scale of coolness to begin with. It’s like a Technorati or a Blogdex of culture at large; a cultural trend-line. Z is the difference between invisible and up-and-coming, between Visqueen and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, between Line of Fire and CSI: My Ass.

Z can be a undertow you are swept into and a crest that you ride upon. To further beleaguer my metaphor, depending on how far upstream in cool river you are, you will get early indications of new phenomenon. I tend to have good advanced warning of new music, decent knowledge of upcoming movies, and relatively no knowledge of hip technology stuff.

I have prepared three examples to make light of this, but you’ll have to come back after i get out of class to see what they are (see, isn’t that responsible of me?).

Red v Blue

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God, i should really know better than to open up Metafilter just before i’m ready to put a post to bed. As if there’s not gonna be any interesting links at MeFi. Nope, never happens.

We’ll start with the easy stuff. This map scares the shit out of me. Red areas are concentrations of Democrats, blue of Republicans. It scares me ’cause:

A) Aside from that one odd spot in South Dakota i don’t even see any heavy red marks

B) Good grief, looking at it this way i can see the logic behind thinking that liberals are really a tiny, mostly coastal and urban voice that’s screwing things up for everyone else. Ahhh, bask in the self-loathing.

C) Electoral College results seem almost inevitable if you assume most Americans are partisan voters.

D) It says a lot about self-segregation. That’s what The MeFi Post is about, though i think the more informative read would be this Atlantic article’s remarks on Thomas C. Schelling.

Schelling’s research with artificially constructed societies informs us that like prefers like. Seems elementary, you might think. Yes, it’s elementary if every citizen wants to live somewhere where 80% of their neighbors are similar to themselves — so long as they don’t specify what demographic the other 20% should be made up of, they’re most likely just going to wind up in a big 100% block of homogeneity.

The revelation (for me, at least), is that even if you say “i’ll be happy if just half of my neighbors are similar to me” you will eventually become a part of a stratified neighborhood that looks a lot like the scary map (see figure 2 in the article, via another MeFi thread). Of course, most people think of halfway immersing themselves with a different race, culture, or political viewpoint makes them incredibly open minded. And, furthermore, who doesn’t want to find at least one out of two faces to be sympathetic? Still, it says very significant things about human psychology, the basic nature of discrimination, and maybe even why Democrats can only win certain southern states.

Good lord, that took forever. Maybe we’ll let that be a post all by itself. Yes. The other dozen links soon to follow.

From Pop Culture to Quick Pictures back to Pop Culture (with stopovers in Snapshots, KevRock, & Ill-Fitting Clothing)

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So much to link to, so little time to spend not worrying about school. Yesterday got burnt desperately trying to catch up on academic reading while getting my panties into a knot over who would get kicked off American Idol. Good thing i have this misshapen b’twixt class break in which i can finish my daily blogging so i have time for both homework and a drunken karaoke celebration of my roommate’s birthday.

The Minor Fall, the Major Life is a pop-culture tracking log from someone who’s sardonic wit does a fairly good impression of my interior monologue. Which is to say, the writing ranges from laugh out loud funny to nonsensically cryptic, all while serving up the latest entertainment-related linkage. Perhaps worth keep an eye on? (Cribbed from Strident Harpy, who dishes a good bit of political news herself).

Perennial favorite blogger KevRock launches yet another one of his dazzling side-projects, Random Pixel. In this bit of mischief, Kevin hands off a disposable camera to some good ol’ regular folk who proceed to document a bit of their life.
When i asked Kevin why he didn’t aim for a more bombastically cool “one pic per person” cross-country trip for his darling cameras, he replied with math proving that he was more likely to get the cameras sent back to him with his current method.

Anyone who can use math to explain the methodology of a blog side project is already A-O-K in my book, but Kevin proceeded to tempt me with an invitation to get a g-mail account. If you haven’t heard about Google’s entry into the world of email, you should read up; watchdogs call it creepy, i call it fucking sexy. One gig of storage, people. One Gig. Of course, KevRock was playing the part of a cock-tease in a whore-house, getting me all worked up for something i was going to get anyhow, as hours later g-mail opened its pearly gates to a number of “very active” Blogger users (thanks to hao2lian for pointing this out, and for the gracious link the other day). Moral – Kevin is a god amongst bloggers. I wonder if the Big G is hiring in their communications department anytime soon…

Next, from the ever-informative Ask Metafilter: Why your shirts don’t fit. No, really … a cool little discussion on why size, width, length, and cut varies from brand to brand and store to store. File under “Things i always subconsciously suspected but never outright knew.”

Hopping back over to the media: Sellout Central is brand new music news site that does not suck. Witness as they transition from a discussion on copyright and digital promotion to news on the highly underrated Anastacia to discussing a neat hack on the iTunes store that allows you to search via HTTP. Oh, and the co-writer of the site is the ever-popular Brad, of BradSucks (whose music you can sample at my daily-favorite, SomeSongs).

That makes a lovely segueway to talking about Anastacia for just a second. I remember her coming in second on MTV’s proto-American-Idol hip-hop show, partially dreamed up by David Foster. And then she dropped off the face of the earth, as did the Lauryn Hill imitator who won. Except, she really only dropped off the face of the ignorant, flat, American-music-scene Earth, because it turns out she’s one of the biggest selling artists in all of the rest of the world. This despite only shipping in the hundreds of thousands in the US. Do we just have bad taste? Is the market so undersaturated over there that viral marketing is more successful? The communications geek in me would love to do a paper titled “From Robbie Williams to Kylie Minogue – Why Doesn’t America Get Them?” that examines the differences in communications and marketing strategies here and abroad to try to understand why so many pop acts never make the trip across the pond.

Yeah. Look for me to write that paper as soon as i finish the paralyzingly huge pile of work i have due next week. And graduate. And start a real job.

Webbing the Log

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Good lord i accumulated a lot of links while i was doing homework last night. Old-me would hoard them like the squirrel that fell through Lindsay’s bedroom ceiling, but new-me just wants to get them out there so that i can find more! Cause i am a WEB LOGGER. I LOG the WEB.

(Sorry, i had to explain that to a stupified class of Communications majors yesterday. At least my professor actively mocked them.)

You can watch Walmart from almost any angle these days, but this economist article is great sum-up if you’re doing an academic project. Link from daily favorite Largehearted Boy.

How real is American Idol? An excellent report on The Motown Episode remarks on the (sometimes huge) difference in sound between seeing a live taping and watching the show on television. I wish there was a reliable source that provided this kind of analysis every week.

Hockey player takes out a hit on his [male] lover? Or, a study in failed anger management combined with mediafucker agent? Or, trying to kill mediafucker agent? You be the judge.

Why am i not still reading more miserable crap every day? Oh, wait, i am. Lisa, oh Lisa, when will our weekly lunches resume? Probably in July. By-the-by, When i add you to the sidebar again, you will be listed as Libertine Seahag.

I generally don’t know what the fuck is going on on my Primary Ballot after i get past the bit about Senators, which is why The Committee of Seventy is a good thing — a century-old Philadelphia political watchdog group that tracks and explains the ballot. This came to light as i found out that, apparently, a fellow high school thespian of mine is running to be the Representative for Center City, abetted by fellow fellow thespian Ariel. The man is Andrew Hohns, and i’m linking him because i think it’s sad that an article about how his opponent has the gayborhood locked up currently tops his domain in google rank.

Also in the political arena: Shocking no one thought of this before. God knows my blood boils…