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.

Not In Love

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Here’s some news: Fiona Apple shit all over her wonderful unreleased Extraordinary Machine so that she could have something banal and common.

Yes, it’s true. If you don’t believe me, go listen to a clip of the OFFICIAL version of Not In Love here. I can’t hold up a Jon Brion UNRELEASED clip of Not In Love because Sony has sued them all off of the internet so you would have to resort to Torrent if you’d like to hear one, but what you have to understand is that there was this gorgeous little cello riff in the background that sortof spat back at the little piano rumble, and she sounded so playful, and little violins swooped in so that this bed of strings caught her every phrase. And there was NONE of this SISSY cymbal ride crap, no drums were required, and NO GUITARS either, for that matter. Not on this song, and not anywhere on the album, and its lack was a beautiful refreshing thing – like drinking beautiful clean water from a very deep well. But, what has Fiona given us? Nasty, ugly, terrible ELECTRIC guitar spread like a thick coating of shit all over her tremendously large chorus chords, guitar so nasty, ugly and terrible that you CANNOT HEAR how the bottom notes are clanging against themselves slightly out of tune because that’s how pianos get way down there when you play big chords hard.

She erased the charm from the most charming song i’ve heard in months. For reasons i cannot discern Fiona HERSELF, not SONY, not any other evil CONGLOMERATE of people, but FIONA threw out Jon Brion’s gorgeous arrangement in exchange for an exercise in utter banality. I listen to a beautiful song almost every day for four months and she wrecks it.

I’m not in love, because I can’t stop falling out. If this is what the other eleven tracks hold in store, I honestly hope Fiona’s re-recorded Extraordinary Machine tanks like a record has never tanked before. It would be her just reward; she looked the goddamned gift horse in the mouth. NO ONE gets two amazing versions of the same album. Look at Let It Be. Perfection is not meant to be fucked with. I will personally distribute Jon Brion versions to EVERY PERSON I KNOW if that’s what it takes. No one should have to pay money for her silly retool of a so tangible, so personal, so charmingly different original when they could have that instead.

Do you want one?

All We Owe, We Owe Her

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Work was as productive today as work can be with Ace of Base’s hit single “Don’t Turn Around” lodged in your brain for eight hours.

My title changed as of yesterday to better represent the incredibly intangible, incredibly invaluable project management service i continue to provide for our company. What’s funny is that i thought my job change would actually reduce the ridiculously large scope of my projects by honing my attention onto more specific, more completeable projects. In fact, I’ve actually tripled my scope just in the last day, and it looks like tomorrow will add some more scope to the pile.

In the wake of the change, i am left wondering if I love what I do. I loved what i did when I started this job, and i still love what my department does. But, do i really love being a project coordinator?

Regardless of the answer to that question, i definitely stopped loving what i was doing sometime between Autumn and Spring. Everything about my job and the people i did it for became twisted so that it was completely unrecognizable. Suddenly, work became the null-time that it is for too many of my co-workers – nothing remarkable or exciting or energizing. i liked what i was doing, but not the reasons i was being made to do it.

Now that’s all been resolved, and i’m doing project management for good, healthy reasons – and learning more about it every day. And, i do enjoy project management – it’s something i have a natural bent towards, to an extent. Yet, it’s so far removed from what i went to school for, and what i came here intending to do, that i am beginning to wonder if i’ll ever love it the way i want to love a job.

What am I interested in anyway?

I Don’t Know What I Hope

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We’ve experienced a bout of radio-silence here in July because I was preparing for a role in what turned out to be a sold out production of Kurt Vonnegut’s Happy Birthday, Wanda June. It amazed me on many levels. As it turns out, I still can act, and not so terribly, either. Also, who would have thought that the girl I threw peanuts at in the lunchroom nearly a dozen years ago would be producing and directing me in a play where she stars as my mother. Certainly not i. In a cool turn of events, we got advance coverage in City Paper without a sneak preview, even if they plagiarized some web sites for the blurb.

Work continues to be work. I moved to a new position as of today. Work was the same (work), only verifying what I had already guessed: life is not your title, it’s what you make of it.

I have come back around to Gawker, the snide NY Scene slash celeb gossip internet rag. I don’t know why I have come back around to it. I do know why i have come back around to it – they were covered in RS, which I fetishize, and their EIC Jessica Coen is sorta hot (not pictured in the web article) (wow, lends a lot of credibility to my opinion as a Journalism major, eh). Yes, this means I’m only about a year-and-a-half behind the prominent web-trends. I really need to work some good individual weblogs back into that. Time to hook up Thunderbird’s RSS feeds.

Not sure what else to say, really. I have now been doing this for 1822 days, which means in about half a year I’ll have been doing it for 2000. That’s a lot of days to do something. More on that later this week.

Technology Ruins Everything

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(Of course, that entire lost-pop-gem phenomenon has been slaughtered by the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-selling iTunes, which (among other things) sees/knows/sells that it’s called “More Today Than Yesterday,” and is by Spiral Starecase. Cue one less magical radio-only moment; ninety-nice more cents spent.)

Nothing Left to Win; Nothing Else to Lose

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(There is a high probability that you are reading this post because you searched for the lyrics in its title. They slightly misquoted from the song “With or Without You” by U2, released in 1987 on their album The Joshua Tree. (The actual lyric is “nothing left to lose”).

Purchasing that album, which also includes “Where the Streets Have No Name” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” was one of the major reasons i wrote this post.

I’d love it if you would stick around to check out my writing and my original music. I’ve embedded an MP3 of the original “With or Without You” elsewhere on this site – you might bump into it if you do enough browsing. You can read the full lyrics here.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled post.)

There are some songs I’ve only ever heard on the radio. Those magical hits, disembodied from albums, never seemed meant to be played at my command. I might not hear one for years, but one day be bestowed with it in a restaurant, or in someone else’s car. All a matter of chance.

These songs are different for everyone. Certainly some are more universal than others. They are each quicksilver, resolving in your aural canal as quickly as they will trickle away. You may not even remember them from one listen to the next, maybe not even if you see their names.

When people come to my house sometimes the marvel at how many of these songs – otherwise lost to them – exist in my record collection. Can they listen to this one, or borrow that one? It’s a wonderful role of fantasy fulfillment, being able to render the songs more real for my friends by offering them in the context of albums, cases, and liner notes.

I can’t possibly own each possible slippery tune, mine or anyone else’s. Not without buying all of the “Best of DooWop” and “The Big Eighties” collections there are to be had. Yet, sometimes you are in Tower Records, and there is an inexplicable $7.99 sale, and your fingers are dancing across the tops of plastic cases, and suddenly you see it – one song easily worth a penny under eight dollars just so you can capture it, like lightning in a jar.

Will you listen to it once a day? Will it hold up? Or, will you content in knowing that the next time you catch a snippet of it you can return to your home and release those notes into the air to light up the room, if just for three brief minutes?