Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

krisis

Krisis has been creating Crushing Krisis since 2000, writing songs since 1996, and reading comics since 1991. He is a Customer Success and Digital Brand Strategy executive, serial organizer, parent, and feminist, among other things. Based in Philly through 2017, he now resides in Wellington, NZ.

What are brands to you?

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Let’s conduct an experiment. There are no right or wrong answers.

Below are five consumer brand logos, and I want you to just shout out the first word that comes to mind other than the name of the brand.

(Don’t worry if other people are around, they certainly won’t think you are weird.)

(Well, I guess that depends on what you shout.)

Ready?

Got your words? Don’t forget them.

This is a common exercise to run with focus groups, or in training around brand identities.

The last few times I’ve done it, the majority of people have responded to each consumer logo with a noun. It might be the brand’s most prominent product, sphere of influence, or figurehead. McDonald’s gets “fries, burgers, fast food, toys, grease.” Apple gets “iPhone” but also “music” and “Steve Jobs”.

Still remember your words? Say them again. How many are nouns?

Not all brands get nouns every time. Brands spend significant time aligning itself with a particular adjective or phrase. In my session this week, the word cloud for Mercedes was almost entirely “luxury” or synonyms. No one has said “cars.”

(Also, brands in a crisis will get the word associated with their crisis, even if it’s not brand relevant. Right now Johnson and Johnson’s logo might elicit “cancer;” banks logos might get “occupy” or “1%.”)

Say your words again. How many of your words weren’t nouns?

I have discovered that I never, ever respond with nouns. It’s not like I’m trying to be contrary. Nouns never pop into my head. My words for the logos above were: healthy, unavoidable, wasteful, killer, and cohesive. In effect, my associations with brands are about perception, not products or people.

I suspect some crowds are more predisposed to give perception answers over the product answers. I’m sure there are studies to explain it.

For the moment, I’m only interested in you. What were your words?

Before you leave a comment, I have one final brand for you to shout out a word for:

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Monsters In Plain Sight

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I seem to have a magnetic, animal attraction to strangers with monstrous personalities.

Not in a sexual way. No, this is a totally platonic urge to toss myself into the maw of a crazy person to be shredded by the sharp teeth of their personality.

I will always choose the most terrifying, egomaniacal person to pair with given any group of relative strangers that needs to break into smaller groups. It doesn’t matter whether it’s for conversation or to board an amusement park ride – I will select the monster.

I apparently have a deep-seated urge to spend time in the company of sociopaths. I want to impale myself on the pointy bits of their psyche.

I’m trying to figure out why I keep doing this to myself. Is it a masochistic tendency? Do I get off on defending myself against these beasts?

Am I a Monster Hag? Like, is my inner OCD Godzilla looking for long term companionship with someone else’s terrifying personality traits? Do I feel like I am a monster who needs to wrangle with my own kind, like grown men on a movie set dressed in massive rubber suits.

Worse: Am I that monster?

I don’t think so. I certainly hope not. I might like to talk about myself, but I also have the journalistic urge to know more about other people, which hopefully tones down my horror as a chat partner.

I think it’s more likely that I see the potential for me to be a loudmouth in a pairing with someone slightly retiring, so I try to pick the one person in a crowd of strangers who seems more gregarious than me. Why have us both dominate conversation with someone else when we can banter loudly with each other? It’s just like dinner with my Italian family!

Except, I’m gregarious on limited topics. I don’t, to draw from a recent actual example, open conversation with a stranger with, “I think I know how we can fix all of your problems.”

What I forget is that my friends who can maintain conversational gambits with me, interrupting back and forth, are all (mostly) sane, (mostly) rational actors in life.

They are not monsters. Even my loudest, craziest friends did not start out as these disaster-movie drop-outs. No good can come of connecting with them.

The next time I get to pick my own social poison I am going with the opposite of my gut. If there is a loudmouth hand-raiser with crazy eyes, I am making a bee-line for the shy one with the nice smile.

It’s for their own safety, as much as it is for mine.

What about you? Do you find yourself facing off against conversation monsters? What is your exit strategy?

(PS: This post was drafted as “that girl is a monster,” but I didn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. However, feel free to listen to Lady Gaga singing “Monster” now that you’ve read it.)

A Moment of Krisis

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Watch as I answer today’s NaBloPoMo writing prompt: “If you knew that whatever you ate next would be your last meal, what would you want it to be?”

Clearly I have an affinity for fish. What would you want your last meal to be? Is it a specific dish like mine, or a entire genre of cuisine?

five years, what a surprise

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I would just like to take a moment to compare my current life to my life during the first year of NaBloPoMo, 2006.

I know I do my big “look at how grown up I am” retrospective every year for CK’s anniversary, but 2006 vs. 2011 makes for an especially interesting comparison. Not only because it’s a shorter amount of time, but because I took the opportunity of the 2006 event to come out as a “secret rock star” who was beginning to take music more seriously (as if I ever took it less seriously).

Let’s compare and contrast.

November 2006

Me in November 2006. I will never get tired of how I look both cute and totally ridiculous in this photo.

In November 2006 I had just started a new job, and I was the junior-most person in the department. I didn’t have to stay late too much and took lunch breaks. My round-trip commute was 72 minutes by SEPTA or on foot.

I went to one open mic a month.  I was not in band, and I had just quit my acappella group.  I did not have rehearsals. I had a repertoire of 10 or 20 solid originals out of the 200 songs I had written, and was working on a slew of good songs that year. I was starting to write songs in a upbeat style I described as a “Justin Timberlake meets Fallout Boy.”

My home office and recording studio were crammed together into my teeny 2nd bedroom (also my dressing room), which was barely big enough for a twin-sized bed. I mainly played two guitars – a brand-new Breedlove acoustic and my red Epiphone electric.

I had been dating E for four-and-a-half years. I was an incorrigible night owl. There was no Twitter. I hadn’t written anything longer than a blog post for fun since high school.

I didn’t spend money on anything in specific, though I had just gone to Bonnaroo and went out drinking a lot. I was just starting to save for an engagement ring.

November 2011

My now-traditional backstage pic in the Tin Angel bathroom, from just before Arcati Crisis's full-band debut gig this September.

In November 2011 I work in the same area, now as one of the more senior members of my department. Sometimes I have to stay late just to get some quiet time, and I hardly ever take lunch breaks. My round-trip commute is anywhere from 80 to 100 minutes.

I rehearse about six hours a week with my pair of rock bands. I have played at least one show each month of this year, but not a single time as a solo artist. I had to give up open mics because they aren’t very rewarding. I have a repertoire of close to 40 songs with Arcati Crisis, and another 20+ with Filmstar, and another 20-30 solo. I’ve been too busy working through a backlog of my own new songs from last year to do much writing, but generally am working on a mix of acoustic dance songs and ballads.

My home office twice the size of the old multi-purposes room, and is dedicated just to writing and reference. My separate home studio is about as big as an entire floor of our old house. I mainly play the same two guitars plus a baritone, but I’ve also added a trio of basses and a pedal board full of effects.

E and I have been married almost three years. I hate staying up past midnight. I’ve been copy-editing the first 200 pages of my novel for the past eleven months, and I’m presently writing the second half.

I have developed a serious collected comic book addiction in addition to keeping up our band equipment. I haven’t been on a vacation since our honeymoon.  I have mostly given up drinking in bars. I’m just getting back to some semblance of savings after buying a house and all of my bass gear.

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I guess my point is not only, “whoa, dude, you really did some growing up,” but to put the idea of blogging daily and recording songs into perspective.

In 2006, what the hell else did I have to do with my life but blog every damn day? Seriously, I had exactly nothing going on. I got home every day by 6pm and went to sleep at 2am. That’s eight hours to dream up a meagre 500 words and record a three minute song.

In 2011 there are weeks where my life is scheduled down to the minute, and blogging is only on the schedule every second Sunday. It happens in found moments, largely on the El (ugh).  I spend so much time rehearsing music and writing communications plans at work that the idea of vomiting up another 500 words for a blog post can seem like it might be physically painful – let alone the requisite 1666 daily words for my novel.

I needed 2006 to get to 2011. I couldn’t have jumped right into the present day me. It took blogging daily and recording 30 songs in a single month to remind me of what I was living for. Things only got more interesting from there.

What about you? What was your life like five years ago today? What’s the biggest difference? Would you-of-2006 be happy to see what you’re up to in 2011?