Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Archives for January 2012

#MusicMonday: “Safe & Sound” – Taylor Swift and The Civil Wars

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This weekend I was up late writing, and turned on the film of A Hard Day’s Night in the background to keep me awake and alert.

It kept me more than that. It’s a funny movie that unleashes a stone cold classic Beatles song every six or seven minutes.

Beatles or Bieber?

As my gaze drifted up to the screen again and again I noticed the fans. The film is full of them. While everyone from businessmen to make-up artists treat the fab four as a commodity, the fans who are screaming their heads off are invariably teens of both ages, and slightly older young women.

I think about today, and who that same demographic of fans is screaming for. I’m sure a few artists come to mind, yes? I’ve sampled them all, but I wondered – would I be willing or able to recognize if they were producing music even a fraction as beautiful and groundbreaking as The Beatles’?

I think so.

Case and point, I typically assume Taylor Swift songs are going to be fizzy pop affairs with obscenely catchy chorus hooks. Not that there is anything wrong with that – hell, I aspire to it. I listened to “Safe & Sound” from The Hunger Games soundtrack expecting more of the same. I got something other than I was expecting. I’m certainly not comparing it to The Beatles, but “Safe & Sound” is an amazing song. Fitting, that it comes from the movie of a book I nearly wrote off as Popular YA Fluff and wound up devouring.

The song is so beautifully organic, with production that makes it sound as though Taylor and The Civil Wars are sitting right beside you as it plays. Notice the imperfect guitar plucking, sometimes evoking buzz from the edge of a fret.

There are a couple of bits of pure magic here. The endlessly-repeated, never-resolved simple melody hook, that turns into a canon in the middle of the song. The eerie, almost spooky underneath harmony from The Civil Wars. How the song hints heavily at an impending major crescendo with an increasing artillery of percussion and then never actually arrives there. As Jacob pointed out to me, how the menace of the arrangement belies the title. And, finally, how it absolutely sounds as though it could come from within the world of The Hunger Games.

It’s a great song, and I hope you still gave it a chance after you saw it was by Taylor Swift.

(Thanks to Jacob, my personal hero of snark, for turning me on to this song!)

Who will I be in 2012?

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Eight years ago (!) I made three blanket resolutions that I have hung on to nearly every week of my life since them.

Clearly, they work well for me and do not need any changing.

Hell, they could work for anyone – watch what you spend, watch what you eat, and spend your time wisely.

Doing all three of them doesn’t yield any specific sort of result, but you wind up with plenty of extra money, energy, and time – the three things we’re always wishing for.

It’s deciding what to do with all that extra capacity in your life that is the tricky part.

It’s easy to see the benefit of hindsight. 2009 was a year of saving up my life. 2010 was a year of spending it. 2011 was a year of enjoying it. I saved for the house, rehearsed the hell out of the bands, and worked my butt off for a promotion, spent my cache of effort, and then reaped the rewards.

As 2012 stretches out empty in front of us, I find myself wondering – what else do I want? You can’t live your whole life off of the royalty check of one cool thing you did, once upon a time. That’s how reality TV stars are born. It’s a land of diminishing returns.

If you didn’t get everything you wanted in 2011, I hope you know what it is and how you’re going to get it in 2012.

If you’re happy with who and where you are right now, I hope you find yourself ready and willing to want something new.

As for me, at the beginning of a new year I am always looking forward to becoming a better version of myself.

I will let you know as soon as I figure out who he is.

 

Crushing On: Okabashi Shoes

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When I joined a gym early in 2011 I had one major concern.

Okay, two, but everyone looks silly at points while doing yoga, so I got over that one pretty fast.

No, my major worry was the showers. Really it was an array of several related worries. A bouquet, if you will.

Meet my new gym enablers. I love them.

After a year of gym-going I was able to sublimate OCD Godzilla for long enough to be seen mostly nude by other human beings not on the internet, use gym-supplied towels without breaking into hives, and bypass my typically lengthy shampoo regimen while still feeling clean. Yet, nothing can disengage my genetic heritage of being skeeved out by stuff, and there is nothing more skeevy than the floor of a four-by-four square stall that has sweaty naked men coming and going from it all day.

For some people, a turn-on. For me, skeevy.

It came down to my feet. I am notoriously sensitive about the idea that feet are meant to touch the ground, which other stuff has touched, and thus might be dirty. I was the child that needed to be carried directly from the ocean to the beach towel, so no offensive sand could stick to my tiny toes. Wearing flip flops anywhere but the poolside was (confession: still is) absolutely verboten, less the edge of my heel slip from their rubberized surface to touch the ground in a parking lot or grocery store freezer aisle or any other location where I might catch a deadly foot plague.

Wow, who knew it would feel so good to type that all out?

Back to the gym. Even after I got over all of my other shower hangups, I could not let any part of my feel touch the shower stall. “Of course,” you say, “I wouldn’t either.” Yet, my autopodomysophobia extended to the flip flops. Would they not also become riddled with disease over time due to their contact with the shower stall floor, spreading to infect not only my feet, but my entire gym bag?

For most people this image conveys the idea of a relaxing vacation. For me, it conveys the idea of OCD heart attack. This may explain why I have not been on a beach for over 10 years.

This spawned lengthy, philosophical conversations with my co-workers about what they did with their shower shoes. No explanation was enough for me. I slowly tapered down my gym-going, as on every freshly-showered return to my desk I could do nothing but worry about my feet, which surely had contracted a fungus from my flip flops.

And chlamydia.

And the plague.

I decided I needed a pair of flip flops that could be put in the washer, or dishwasher, or microwave, or some other disinfecting appliance short of the furnace.

Enter my good (also OCD) friend Mary and her suggestion of Okabashi shoes.

These Okabashi people know all about the concept of shower OCD. Their flip flips are molded from just one or two pieces of injected molded microplast, which means there are few nooks and crannies for dirt and chlamydia to infest. They are treated with an anti-microbial agent, which means less fear today and more super-germs in our apocalyptic future. Plus, Made in the USA!

Most importantly: they are completely waterproof and dishwasher safe!

Three days and $20 later, I had a pair of Okabashi shower shoes that are completely impervious to all possibly gym shower floor related phobias and concerns. And, if I get concerned I can just spray them down or put them in the dishwasher.

Problem solved! I have literally been to the gym twice as much since I acquired the new shoes. That’s even better than a New Year’s Resolution!

(PS: The shoes run slightly small, I would consider estimating up one half size.)

artistic explorers

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In the rush of rehearsals and shows this fall, I flagged this quote in the hope I would later have the time to give it some deeper thought:

Every artist has an obligation to be a kind of researcher, whether its within the technical/formal aspects of their medium, the boundaries they push, or for the cultural knowledge they are producing.

Artwork by Kelsey Halliday Johnson.

The quote comes from an interview with visual artist Kelsey Halliday Johnson (via Maria’s tumblr), and it identifies why I am so obsessed not only with consuming art, but also by the process of creating art.

One of my major fascinations with comic books is the ridiculous range of people and objects that the artists must render – some of which are not even remotely based in reality. Ever since I started reading comics I have wanted to be able to draw, but even if I could draw figures or houses or cars how would I know how to draw dinosaurs or doomsday devices or dimensional gates?

Of course, that challenge faces a whole range of designers and artists – it’s not limited to drawing fantastical fights between superheroes. Does an architect know their history enough to design an addition to a Tudor Revival home?

Similarly, when I write songs I am drawing on the sonic vocabulary of every song I have ever heard before. That’s not to say I am plagiarizing. It’s more like a game of memory. That’s how Aural Training works – you learn to remember intervals, rhythms, and notes by memorizing other works that include them.

When I hear a song for the first time, whether it’s mine or someone else’s, I think, “that little melodic leap is from Juliana Hatfield; the quick chord change is David Bowie.”  My ability to hear those snippets evaporates over time as the song becomes its own gestalt; I’ve taken to jotting down the little earwigs when I first write something new so I can fondly recall them years down the line.

Can I write a song with parts I’ve never heard before? Yes. Would it come to me as easily without thousands of other songs on my brain – a lifetime of sonic research. Probably not.

Halliday Johnson’s entire interview is fascinating, I suggest you give it a read.

anything but a.m.

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This is an actual thing. Or at least, an actual thing in development. I would consider buying it, but I think there would be a lot of commensurate psychological trauma involved with waking up every morning. Of course, that is a good motivator.

I remember clearly the abject horror that child Peter had at waking up early in the morning.

I would do anything to delay the inevitable. Play dead. Let my body go limp so that it could not be dragged out of bed. Agree to relocate to a chair or couch and then promptly go back to sleep.

When all else failed, I would plead. Ten more minutes. Five, even. Any stay of execution to stand between me and a fully waking state.

I'll admit a certain affection for waking up every morning to the banshee screams of Ms. Love before dawn. Given the choice, I think that's what I'd still be doing.

I look back and wonder how I ever got myself to high school on time, let alone every day. It’s the same way I look back at sophomore year of college and wonder how I stayed alive when all I remember consuming was vodka and chicken cheesesteaks.

My attitude towards waking up has improved as an adult. Slightly. I don’t like sleeping late, per se. I can even be up ultra-early to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for a special event.

Still, my preference is for my alarm to begin ringing in the form of some terrifying, unignorable noise an hour or two before I have to set foot on the ground. That gives me some time to come to terms with the psychological ramifications of waking up.

E is not so much a fan of this arrangement. We’ve negotiated it down to a normal alarm ring within 45 minutes of actual waking.

I don’t know that I will ever be able to delight in dawn. I hear there are some people who are in the gym by the time the sun comes up.

Still, there is some satisfaction to starting a day early – if only in that I’ll manage to squeeze in so much more of my life than if I had woken up an hour or two later.