Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
by krisis
I feel like a total fucking rock star this morning. I’m not sure what it is: the two incredible songs Gina and I recorded last night for the ‘thon, being asked a question about my intended slate of songs by a real-life honest-to-goodness reporter, or my girlfriend’s adorably punk pink hair.
Well, it’s certainly not from sitting in a cubicle from eight thirty, that’s for sure.
by krisis
I usually have an intense fight or flight reaction to opening acts that i have never heard before, which is increased exponentially when i am in a room small enough that any under-breath comments could be overheard between songs. I can rarely find anything to appreciate about these seemingly random (occasionally local) artists as i innerly triangulate between critique, ambition, and jealousy. Too self-absorbed. I could hit that note. Why can’t i be up there?
With James, i definitely did not have my typical urge to change him, ignore him, or to mentally replace him on the stage with myself. His stage presence made me think of a lithe French Stuart covering Dan Bern, which seemed somehow apropos to open a Bitch and Animal concert. During his first song, rather than bitterly wondering who would ever volunteer to listen to him, i was instead speculated on whether he shaved his arms — his perfect and smooth arms with their muscles churning hard as he pounded out major seventh chords on his guitar. Perhaps wax? How else could they get so smooth?
I didn’t love any of James’s songs individually, but on the whole he had an effect on me; not the same effect he had on Gina, Kelly, Kelly, and Kat, all of whom signed up for his mailing list. It only had one empty line on it by the time it made it to me, handily answering my own rhetorical question: That’s who’s would volunteer to listen to him.
Kat knows better than to ask me how i liked an opening act, and Gina knows me well enough to anticipate my response, so i’d like to think i gave them a pleasant surprise when i opened my mouth and said that i loved the way James used his voice. It was my second favorite thing about him after his arms (which i didn’t mention). It was lovely, a convincing baritone with ample vibrato that switched to Dylan-like whine as it got higher until it hit a Dan Bern’s sort of vocal equivalent of a cheese grater, but only for a second until he began to descend again.
The rest of the thought was, of course, which i would use in a much more convincing fashion if it belonged to me. The voice was indisputably his, though, and today’s reading of his site only proved how hard he must have worked to earn it… “James left college in the mid-1990s to write fiction. Somewhere in this murky chronology, the fiction became social, political, personal songcraft. His head full of Shakespeare, Ozu, Coppola and Bukowksi; James open staged his way through his senior year in state college.”
It goes on to detail that he feels there is a sort of innate lack of weight to what i know and occasionally love as contemporary acoustic music. I like to think the people i admire in the field, the Ani’s, Erin’s, Mulvey’s, and Bitch and Animal especially, have their own startling gravity that upsets your entire world. I’m not sure that James has found his own yet, but knowing that it is there to be possessed and manipulated is half of the step to being an arresting performer
I fled, fled so far that i didn’t talk about my own songs until conversation of James had long faded into the intermission. Well played, Mr. O’Brien.
by krisis
I never know what’s going on in my apartment.
There are four of us, spending all of our time alternatingly at work, in class, with our significant others, or on stage. The odds that more than two of us will ever be here at the same time are dwarfed by the odds that the apartment will be empty when one of us arrives.
The way i figure it, you and your college roommates would have to be absolute dweebs for this not to be the case. “Dweebs,” for sure, because the four of us are definitely geeks, so i had to find a word that had more of a “shut-in” connotation.
It’s not hard to spend nearly three quarters of your typical waking hours outside of your collegiate abode; it’s not like we do it intentionally. In fact, occasionally going days at a time without re-entering it really isn’t a challenge — especially when you’re dating someone with their own apartment.
What starts to occur is that, with so many lengthy departures, your home can hold something unusual for you upon your return. Different. It can be full of surprises. And, though these surprises might prove alarming at first, as the length of your residence increases the unusual circumstances that you find yourself entering into become less and less alarming.
Rearranged or missing furniture should not phase you, nor should strangers reclining on said furniture (even if they are the only people presently in your house). The appearance or disappearance of drastically large amounts of any kitchen items, including actual food or liquor, should be duly noted but not unduly fretted over. Finding a sign on your front door that proclaims “Ring hard and often; cover $5” should only bother you if you do not have a doorbell. You should expect to find large new appliances, game / home-theatre systems, or piles of laundry more often than not. You should strive to exhibit no surprise upon the emergence unexpected or unwelcome people from your roommates’ bedrooms. If any of your personal effects seem to be lost or missing, even from your own room or bathroom area, you should allow ample time for them to be returned or replaced before entering a period of mourning.
Then there are the notes. Even in this technologically advanced age, notes are the most effective form of roommate to roommate conversation. Why? You can blow off an email, but there is only so long that you can profess to ignore something that is affixed to your doorknob, disco ball, toilet-lid, television screen, Brita pitcher, or bedroom door. Additionally, you should learn to anticipate what will at first seem like non-sequitir content in said notes, which will eventually bloom to make a terrifying amount of sense once you put the correct context in place, as in the only vaguely exaggerated examples that follow:
and, a personal favorite excerpted from Elise’s house:
College… it’s an adventure.
by krisis
Past three years: spent my fallback time drinking.
This year: spent my fallback nearly doubling my knowledge of organic chemistry.
So, yeah, on some level i’m getting incrementally smarter every day.
by krisis
From Copy Protection to Copy Protection, via AAA and a lot of chemistry that i very vaguely understand.
I’ve been alone in the house all day working on a paper on copy protection for my New Technologies in Communication class, and when Gina stopped by to say hello just after the second one a.m. she was only the third human i had spoken with all day . I was on a break from my paper at the time, sitting amidst a tangle of wires on the floor attempting to write a song in AAA form for my songwriting class. Gina inquired into this endeavor, and in my explanation of it i overstepped the bounds of simple differentiation between verse-chorus-verse, ABA, and AABACA to speculate on how song form effects the commercial prospects of an artists — perhaps dwelling on a day spent largely listening to Tori Amos.
I followed this idle chatter across our common area and into her room, by which point the conversation had switched over to inhabit a subject philisophically adjacent to the difference between Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Gina put on her new Donovan hits CD as i tooled around on my guitar in DADGCE, but the conversation eventually turned back to pop construction. After my obligatory monologue about the interrelation of image, genre, and songwriting Gina mentioned how pop music at least kept her awake and functioning during her grueling Saturday 7-hour laboratory class today. This particular exercise in weekly chemical punishment has become a favorite topic of ours, as Gina basically has eleven weeks to play a rousing game of “guess that organic compound” with the five seemingly random samples chosen for her by her instructor. I not only delight in the inherently game-show nature of this particular exercise, but also in the fun things Gina must do in her quest for knowlege.
One less than delightful thing Gina has to do in this quest for knowledge is use an array of photoscopic machinery to determine the nature of her compounds, rather than more traditional means like boiling things and making their colors change. However, Gina did all manner of machine-assisted processes at her co-op job, where she basically spent all day in a lab running reactions on organic polymers. After talking about several aspects of her employment, such as how she spent weeks getting a particular product to the ideal shade of “water white,” we finally came to rest on the benefits and similarities of ultraviolet and electron beam curing of… um… this thing that i’m going to ask Gina to name for me again when i wake up tomorrow morning. Basically, she was testing one element in the process that makes the wierd peely adhesive labels you find on plastic soda bottles, or the gloss and ink sealents on magazines.
This particular thread of conversation went on for a good long time, with several stop-overs for debates of when in their employment life-cycle a worker stops actively attaining/retaining knowledge of applicable technology and begins to merely sustain it. Coming back out of that, i attempted to make my understanding of electron beam curing more complete by asking what it would be more and less efficient to cure. Adhesive labels – good. Magazines – probably. Vinyl flooring – maybe not.
Consequently, Gina brought up that the sealants in questions were similar to those used on fiber-optic wire, which in turn sent me into a five minute discussion of fiber optics based on a presentation i saw in my New Technologies class this week. At the tail end of that it suddenly occured to me that the polycarbonate layer in the middle of a compact disc and the acrylic layer on the outside probably both made use of the chemical technology that Gina had been describing to me for the better part of two hours, and my mention of it lead into a brief overview of how a cd is put together. That in turn lead to an equally brief description of the differences between a CD and a CD-R, which in turn lead to a discussion of how CD-Rs are sometimes hard to read for older units but a cinch for CD-ROM drives. From there naturally headed into error correction and how CD-ROM technology error corrects more than a typical cd drive. And, before i knew what was happening, i was back at copy protection … explaining how sinister it was to corrupt the error correction of a disc to protect it from copying because it would degrade the overall lifespan of a disc.
I knew that extra hour would wind up being useful for something other than sleep.