Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

rufus

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.

Mmm, Zeitgeist

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As someone who has been doing this for more than half a decade, the only thing that amazes me more than the utter ubiquity of blogging is the utter proliferation of blogging trends and tools.

A newer trend in blogging (at least to me, anyhow) is the use of a blog to assemble a well researched academic text. There are two excellent examples i’ve been keeping up with daily. The first, The Long Tail, is (in short) about the 80/20 rule, based on a Wired Article i very much enjoyed. On the second, The Music of Rufus Wainwright, composer and professor Roger Bourland invites discussion of topics ranging from form and phrase structure to the challenges of accurate transcription – all from his forthcoming book examining Rufus’s music in a classical light.

In the tools category, Blogger now fluently accepts phone-posts directly from your cell with no setup required. You simply email a text message or picture mail from your phone to [email protected] – blogger sets up a randomly named blogspot page to receive your messages (identified via your phone # and/or phone email) until you claim it and (potentially) assign further messages to another blog. As you’ve seen from my recent posts, it can even upload your pictures via FTP. Read more at Go Blogger. Currently supports posts from Verizon, AT&T, Cingular, Sprint, or T-Mobile.

In a blogging world of academic tomes and phone posts and the dreaded LJ-meets-Facebook bohemeth that is Myspace it boggles my mind to think that five years ago i was the only boy on the internet singing songs specifically to be published on my blog.

Attack of the Well-Mannered Ex part deux (cont’d): All These Poses

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Okay. I have now given him the tour of our house, eaten dinner, and had three more drinks.

I think i have identified the perfect drink-to-Elise’s-ex ratio, because we’re having a more charming conversation between the two of us than Elise is having with either of us.

Well, not right now, but a minute ago, when i was in the kitchen.

We shared a moment. Actually, several consecutive moments. Like, a naughty daisy chain of moments. See, first he was talking about Golden Girls, which is one of my favorite television shows ever. So, we’re in the kitchen enthusing about our favorite GG moment’s and he says “Bea Arthur” and I off-handedly remark to Elise “of course, now i’m singing that song in my head,” meaning Rufus Wainwright’s “California” where he belts out “and my new grandma Bea ArTHUR!” And, he was like, “oh, yeah, i know that song. I love that album.” And, THEN, we simultaneously launch into Rufus Wainwright concert stories in which we cry for the majority of his set.

I mean, what are the chances of two guys who like Rufus independent of a girlfriend’s influence and who are straight (mostly) (i think).

So, yeah, i think as long as i keep drinking and he keeps liking Rufus Wainwright i won’t even be freaked out by the fact that he’s sleeping in my house.

Please Look Away (Don’t Look Away)

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It’s strange to have taken my birthday back from Hallmark and my family and friends and the rest of the world. No calls, no cards – honestly, just the way i like it. Even without receiving a single gift I got a lot of things that i wanted for my birthday, and some things that i didn’t but got anyway.

In New York i rubbed shoulders with Ani Difranco, almost knocked into Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney, made eye contact with Rufus Wainwright, and split a drink list with Rabi, among other wonderful things. For me the day started at five-fifteen waiting for a late taxi that almost made me late for my train, which was moot anyhow, as my connecting train (and all of NJ transit) was down for the morning. I had to score an unlikely Greyhound ticket to make it into the city in time (just barely) for my first event. As a result, I missed ten or fifteen minutes of Malcolm Gladwell’s wonderful speech, partially about the difference between talented mimicry and dilligent practice, and for the rest of the day i quite punctually absorbed lots of information from people whose diligent practice has resulted in moments of cinematic and musical perfecion. It might not have been on my birthday, but i can’t think of a much better birthday to have.

Yesterday i drank way too many little solo cups of beer, wine, beer again, and some more wine with better than 50% of my friends at Sippin’ By The River. It was fun at points, but ended with six hazy, tortuous hours i only recollect in the vaguest sense of the word. The last thing i remember very clearly is talking about Garbage with Erika’s sister, but afterwards i have had confirmed involved me making out with someone who i really never intended to make out with and almost drowning in my shower because i couldn’t figure out how to turn off the water. Elise further confirmed that i did invite about a dozen people to our house for martini’s and The Simpsons, even though we neither have ingredients for martinis or reception for the Simpsons. It was a wonderful example of excess which, having lived through it, will probably make for an interesting story to tell in years to come.

The merry part of making your birthday a nearly week-long event is that there is no pressure to make a single 24-hours perfect. A day of low-key shopping is finely balanced against a madcap NYC adventure, and a lazy afternoon with your girlfriend is almost a contradiction in comparison to a wild day of alchoholic sampling, but they were all my birthday, a birthday that was finally mine and no one else’s, and quite possibly my favorite one yet.

Vivrant

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Yes, yes, I thought I was going to get things done last night, cleaning and working on the webpage and whatnot, but Rufus had something to say about it. Rufus and his Want, half pop masterpiece half operetta, seducing me to sleep and then haunting my dreams so that I was singing along to songs i had never heard before when I awoke.

I usually think sex is in the rhythm of a song – I am incredulous as the “best to make love to” lists that are troughs of mid-tempo R&B. If I was making a soundtrack for sex it would be all about rhythm – Death Cab “Company Calls Epilogue,” Q-Tip “Vivrant Thing,” Pavement “Stereo” – songs that just have that something that seems to connect to your hips.

My point being (in that obtuse point-being way where I know exactly what I mean and you probably still haven’t the slightest idea) that Rufus’s entire aesthetic connects with my hips, and every other part of my body. His songs are sexy from the beat to the vocal to the scraping of the bow across the strings on “Angus Dei.” Even songs that I don’t like, songs that aren’t catchy in the least, songs I don’t think are entirely clever, appeal to me down to the root.

Gah, why do I even try to speak before nine?