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.

More Screaming

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What a beautiful day!

Okay, enough positivity, now for more introspection. This weekend reminded me of two things that I know and say all the time, but don’t put into practice nearly enough.

First, not coincidentally, is practice makes perfect – whether it’s practicing your singing or practicing what you preach. After a lengthy runs on some of my lesser played songs this weekend, my voice is warm and limber. The only way to keep it that way is to use it every day.

Second, the only reason to be afraid of an honest critique is if you deny its veracity (on some level, at least). This was evoked by two things specifically – a rather comedic exchange between a book-reviewer and a nasty Christian-publishing-house rep, and a reviews of an Off the Beat CD.

In the case of the former, the publisher just can’t take a negative review, and rather being constructive and trying to build a relationship with the reviewer, the rep lashes out. Repeatedly. In the case of the latter, former OTB music director Ethan Fixell took the lament that Off the Beat’s 2002 CD entailed too much “screaming” as a compliment – he and the group half-jokingly titled the next disc “More Screaming.”

How much truth existed in either review? Was the book truly that terrible? Who knows. I don’t think Off The Beat does all that much screaming – they just like to produce records that sound as authentically rock as the songs they cover. To a trained a cappella reviewer, though, that might come off an awful lot like screaming. I am sure that in each critique there was some element of truth, but for the artist it was how that truth was handled that was most important.

I can’t be afraid to record songs just because my voice is imperfect. It won’t get any better unless I sing, and hear myself singing; it’s unreasonable to expect perfection. Maybe I’m going to be flat, or scoop a lot, or use too many diphthongs – but, maybe I’ll convey exactly what the song means to say. And, once I do that, I have to be willing to hear all about those flat, scooped diphthongs, and to either own up to them or proudly say, “I meant it that way.”

Then, only then, will I get better.

(to find love is to know love)

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My ability to be complimentary has been faltering, fading fast. After it, all that will be left is to analyze, to criticize, but not to enjoy.

Ask me about the last good record i bought. I’m not sure, but i can tell you about the last bad record i bought. The last five bad ones, actually.

This is just a small example. Actually, I am unconvinced that i will be able to like anything anymore in the very near future. As for my example, I’ve all but given up on buying records (one of the few true pleasures of my life; ask anyone) because all i seem to be able to do is dislike them. Going to a cappella concerts has become a sort of critical duty, as i am almost assured to whisper nasty things about them the entire time to whoever deigns to sit next to me. Riding elevators inevitably leads to a lengthy internal monologue about ugly hair styles, lamentable posture, and why some people even bother to get out of bed in the morning

My newfound inability to enjoy much of anything is infecting my free time. Why see a movie? Why eat at a new restaurant? So insidious is it that it has crept into my own art. Why record a song if it won’t be perfect? Why write at all if your words are not fully-realized and crystalline?

From there it is only a few steps to complete self-imposed isolation. Why talk to your friends if you have nothing nice to say? Why care what i’m wearing if i’ll be ugly anyway?

Have i spent all of my compliments already, along with my self-esteem? You’ve met me, so surely you’re familiar with both – at some point i’ve probably told you how wonderful, or fabulous, or beautiful you are, and you’ve surely witness me in some act of supreme confidence and hubris. Have i spent that all before my quarter-life crisis? Splurged, even, so that there is nothing left but scant ‘decents’ and ‘it was okays’?

After last month’s a cappella concert at Drexel i spent an hour or two mercilessly outlining the indelible failures that each group displayed during their performance. In the middle of this assured diatribe Maggie or Ed (i forget which; perhaps both) looked right at me (through the back of the seat or from the corner of his eye on the road, respectively) and said, “I enjoyed it because we saw a bunch of people doing what they love to do. It doesn’t matter how good they were.”

I spent some time thinking about that tonight. We saw a fun, decent mixed acappella group whose guest performer was a local singer-songwriter. Leah Kauffman. In the program she described her influences as “Laura Nyro, Fiona Apple, Joni Mitchell, and Elliott Smith.” I was first excited to hear her, and then almost immediately afterwards hostile and skeptical – how could she do anything but let me down.

She was pretty, shy but not slight, and told us she would start with a cover from Blue. Her “A Case of You” stuttered, as she plucked chords rather than strumming, and faltered slightly on that riff that traverses the length of the guitar neck. She allowed the song to taper off after the last chorus, muttering that she messed it up. After three more songs (two at the piano, and another on guitar) she slipped off stage, and the lights came up for intermission.

I am known for my ferocious reviews of singer-songwriters, but after the performance i could say nothing bad about Leah. She is 19, and she is not perfect, and she meant every word she sang to us.

She made me think of Maggie/Ed’s comment, and how i have lately lost that wonder in my life, and about something i used to say to explain why i liked singer-songwriters rather than big-voiced artists like Whitney or Mariah. “The art is in the imperfection.”

It is strangely-shaped in my mind as i mull it, unfamiliar in my mouth as i tongue its shape. If it wasn’t for Leah, i fear i might have never remembered it at all.

Leah told me that her website was broken, but took my email address she so could send me some songs.

I am glad still have the capacity to like something.

I Can See Clearly Now…

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When I first got braces (an event I bless and rue) my mom’s best girlfriend told me that she had wanted braces as a kid. So bad. But, her teeth were too nice.

She wanted glasses too, but her vision was nearly perfect. She was healthy, and pretty, and she just had this need to have some sort of artifice between her and everyone else. Why wasn’t she allowed a disguise, she reasoned, when so many other people were afforded them?

She never said it in as many words, but that’s obviously what I would have thought if I was nine year old girl in 1964.

Having had my fair share of wearing braces, I didn’t think I wanted glasses; I had pair in high school, just for reading. I thought they looked like John Lennon’s, but in them I looked look a great owl.

It was bright in California when it wasn’t raining, and Justin and Sara shopped for sunglasses with me. I subsequently became so enamored with the tiny square frames of my pair that I didn’t like to take them off. The indoors are brightly lit anyhow. I wore them in Amoeba on my second trip, peering over them at the most used CDs I had seen in my life.

Returned for LA-land to my primarily indoor habitat here at home, I promptly scheduled an optometrist appointment. And, well, when I said I was worried because I use a computer eight-to-sixteen hours a day the doctor was convinced immediately. I needed to protect my assets.

(When was your last checkup?

Um… during the Clinton administration?)

Three days later, I had indoor-appropriate glasses (I could only get away with wearing the square ones on my head at work; even on the way down in the elevator I got looks). I feel as though I have located an entirely new me, a me as sharp as I used to be, as precise and witty. I attend meetings, dinners, and soirées in them exclusively. I wear them to bed to scan through magazines. I look better in them when I sing.

I think I might call my mom’s best girlfriend to let her know that I finally get it.

Thoughts Right Now

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I don’t really like chocolate, but believe in it. I have faith in chocolate. Because, even though I don’t really like it – the dirty smell, the heavy taste it leaves in my mouth – I find that I still love to eat it. I’ve probably eaten more chocolate so far this year than I did in all of 2004. I can appreciate that it does something for the brain. Sometimes I intellectually want chocolate, even when it’s the last possible taste that I’m interested in.

I feel starved. No, wait, not because I’m just eating chocolate. I feel intellectually starved. Usually after six months at a job I’m back to class. We’re going into month eight. My body is primed to learn something new and intense. I am afraid that my brain might atrophy, and try to cram in new facts from magazines and new songs by ear.

A friend of ours is playing at South-by-Southwest this year. He’s a terrific singer and guitar player, but I am not a fan of his songwriting. I’m sad because I’ve always wanted to go to SxSW, and because I’m sure that he will break there, and I haven’t even had a gig in a bar since 2001. I’m sad because no one is singing along to my songs.

This weekend Sara visited from California. I felt like such a nerd, but all I could talk about for a third of the time is how I wanted to go back. I still can’t tell if it was because it was the perfect vacation at the perfect time, or because I really liked what I saw of LA. All I am sure of is that Sara has so fabulously evolved past Philadelphia that talking to her about something that happened in Philadelphia is like someone extolling the virtues of a horse-drawn carriage – its quaint, but outmoded.

We’re moving, Elise and I. A company who we are not fond of took over the management of our building, and if the world operated exclusively on my parameters we would move out NOW, because I don’t like people I don’t trust profiting from me. I am sick of apartments; I have decided that we must rent an entire house. I want to know that everything that happens behind the front door is my responsibility; I am sick of letting people in because other apartments’ bells don’t work.

Elise complained a few days ago that I am always home. It’s winter, I told her, and I don’t drive. And I work all day. And, I don’t have extracurricular activities to attend. And, I never want to go outside or do anything or interact with other people and find out their opinions anyhow. So, really, I have no choice but to stay home.

There is always a choice.

Beekeeping for Dummies

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Do you want to hear a good album? Not a great album, mind you, and certainly the worst one you’ve heard by this particular artist, but one that will stay in your head for a little while and won’t disappoint? It goes a little something like this: Buy Tori Amos’s The Beekeeper. Listen to the following, in roughly this order: 1, 6, 4, 16, 19, 18, 14, 7, 8, 5, 12. Then, a few days later, sample the eight tracks i left off to see if you’d like to trade in anything.

Please, for the love of all that is Tori, just trust me on this one. Don’t do what I did; don’t sit and listen straight through this eighty-minute adventure in mediocrity twice in a row. Because, you will find yourself thinking Tori has lost her edge, or that she put out a terrible, horrid album.

Both of these things might be true, but you don’t need to think them. I thought them for you. I typed 3500 words to illustrate my point. But, much like the disc itself, it was too much of too little. Instead, as i highlighted Tori’s track listing for you, here are some of the hits.

1. Parasol (+)

What is she saying? She is saying “when i come to terms with this.” She is repeating her lines to drive them in. She is sending me a message. Do not rush, she says. Just hang in there.

Maybe it’s a self-preservation instinct. She knows this record will not survive my snap judgement, just like her past records have failed to connect with more mainstream critics. So, now it is my turn, and she is telling me about it in Tori code. She is that painting. Her pleasure is the wall that she hangs on. She has come to terms with it? She is safe in her frame. Will i keep her in her frame?

Come in, Spacedog. I can’t read you.

2. Sweet The Sting (-)

I think this is the song that got all the critics on board. Tori is playing against type; unsuccessfully i say, but perhaps just convincingly enough. The gospel choir here is a nice touch – the opposite of the soothing cushion on “Way Down,” this is the gospel that infused itself into Ray’s sexy strut – the thought that sensuality crosses easily between religious and secular, holy and sex, okay and obscene. Tori has always straddled that line, but here it is so subdued. She’s not challenging us. She is stating. It is a matter of fact.

Frankly, here you can’t see the forest of the possibly sexy composition for the trees, the cracks in Tori’s too-forward voice obscuring what she is even saying. You can’t fault the girl for not knowing how to produce funk, but you can eschew the product.

8. Mother Revolution (+)

This is a good song. I missed it the first time through, maybe because it was a little too slow-moving. I’m sortof a music-critic version of T-Rex from Jurassic Park – you can slip slow ones by me, good or bad, but if you’ve got a song that’s waving a flashlight around like a lunatic and then running into the outhouse i’m going to suddenly become real interested.

Anyhow, this is a good song.

9. Ribbons Undone (-)

Footnote: Tori, you fucking lied in your book when you said you don’t write autobiographically. You can keep telling yourself that, but we’ve all heard Little Earthquakes, and we’ve all heard “Northern Lad,” and now we’ve heard this. There’s nothing wrong with admitting that not every one of your tunes is a fairy creature floating into your head on a filament of light. Sometimes you just feel something and you write a song about your life

Just. Get. Over it.

13. Ireland (–)

In case you were tempted to think that “Cars and Guitars” was the worst Tori song ever, you have to allow me to reset your expectations. This, in fact, is the worst Tori song ever. You can even include the part of Y Kant Tori Read where she raps.

The nearly unbelievable thing is that it’s all a matter of arrangement. Tori is actually playing this wonderful legato organ part that would make the song sound dirge-like if the other instruments would stop freaking harassing it. Maybe i could stomach Tori singing about her Saab if it was in a dirge. But, this is all the kitsch of Ani doing “Wishing and Hoping” with none of the irony.

I just read a review that called this four minutes of perfection. Honestly, i would rather poke myself with something sharp for four minutes than allow this to degrade my opinion of Tori ever again.

14. The Beekeeper (++)

Just terrific – the kind of totally different but totally canonical song i buy Tori albums for. It reminds me of Bjork remixing something from choirgirl. This is the queer epic i wanted from Datura, or Happiness Is A Warm Gun, or I Can’t See New York, but the first time she’s actually delivered the epic goods since maybe as far back as “Yes, Anastasia” or “Little Earthquakes.” And, when Tori says, “I have come for the Beekeeper … can you use me instead” it sends a chill down my spine; “Plugged into a heart machine, as if you ever needed one.”

Where is the album that this was supposed to be the emotional centerpiece of? Three songs this good would be worth the price of admission, so i’d pay about $40 for that hypothetical album.

Hoochie Woman (+)

“Hoochie Woman” is some classic shit. I know it might put you off at first, but hear me out: the thing is, it’s literal and a little bit lame, but it’s so perfectly well done. You might not like it, but like “She’s Your Cocaine” before it, you just shouldn’t bother arguing, because Tori has, finally, strutted all her lounge cred, finishing the kooky lark that began with “Bachelorette,” but in the most spectacularly amusing fashion possible.

The song is written for the Bridget Jones soundtrack. I can see Renee dancing to it in my head. Freaking handclaps and gospel baritones intoning “that hoochie woman” in the background. Yes. Oh, oh, yes.

18. Marys of the Sea(++)

I said i would pay the price of admission for three good songs, and now i can’t ask for my money back. We are adrift into Tori from that first note, and it just feels so right. Maybe i do expect something from Tori … maybe it’s not the piano, or the ballads, or the shock value. Maybe it’s something smaller – the spaces she leaves, or the imaginings she piques. I’m still not even hearing the lyrics on this one. It tricks you into thinking it’s over around a minute in, and then you are meandering in ballad territory for a second. You’re confused, almost lost, Tori’s speaking french. It seems like it’s going to turn into a bad scene. But-then-there-is-a-pound-ing-draw-ing-us-in and we’re roiling again.

Roiling is, in fact, what i love about Tori’s compositions. “Hey!” she says, and it gets my attention entirely, “for now you have hijacked the sun, and last time i checked he came to light the land for everyone.”

Preach it, sister. Buy yourself something nice with that $12. I don’t hold a grudge.