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.

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Okay, so, you can call it the after-effects of the spectacular Buffy Musical from this weekend which swept Garbage, Erin McKeown, DeathCab for Cutie, Rufus Wainwright, and Leona Naess right out of my musical rotation as soon as i finished downloading it … but i want to write a musical.

Hey, stop laughing. Just stick with me for a minute.

For my Creative Writing class i wrote this awfully belabored story, and i could have passed it off as excellent work to any other teacher, but my instructor leveled her gaze right at me and said “you didn’t like that assignment too much, huh?” So, after much negotiation we decided that i would write another short story and hand in a cd of a few songs to make up for some of my least favourite poetry assignments, and that my grade would somehow be triangulated from the both of them. Mind you, i’m getting an A in the class either way, but both of us agreed i should at least try to get some criticism out of the class for my effort, and i can’t really do that with a story i’m not feeling at all. So, once more with feeling…


Meanwhile, we have the new songs. Some of them are quite nice and i like them, but this year i’ve found a lot of them work just as much as stories as they do pop songs. For example, there’s the inverted pair of “Over You” and “Excuse,” the latter of which details a sexual escapade that might not have been the best idea in the world and the former pretty much saying that the narrator can’t get said escapade out of his head. While working out the puzzle of what songs are heading for my next demo earlier i found myself with a heap of these narrative songs, with an entire handful of them that are as good as those two but that i wouldn’t leave standing alone in the middle of an album.

And that’s when it hit me… i should turn in a one act musical to my Creative Writing class… or, at the very least, a story with narration via song. Yes, it sounds insane, especially since i typically hate musicals and writing drama, but it makes some sort of crazy sense in this post-Buffy world. So… we’ll see. (Nevermind that i just wrote the synopsis and the main character’s theme, we’ll see. Honestly. I’m not going to spend all night doing this instead of studying to retain my perfect score in communications).

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7070555/

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Of course, on most of her tours Tori Amos manages to play well over two thirds of her entire catalogue, mostly just excluding the last album she had released. So, hope isn’t lost, i suppose. … i just have to grow up to be Tori. Right.

Where’d i put that baby grand piano…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7053740/

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So, we’ve established how pretty much everyone i know has heard “Under My Skin,” right? And, why not? It’s cute, it bops, it’s got some background vocals, and i’m singing it like i mean it (because i do). Tonight as i took a quick scroll through my lyrics folder i had to remind myself that there was life before “Under My Skin,” and that life included writing and singing and playing guitar just as much as this one does. There is one song more representative of that than any other, and that is “Touch.”


Life was on a smaller scale when it came to my guitar Senior Year… writing a good song sometimes meant that three or four people might hear it ringing out against the tile of the basement hallway, and “Touch” was my relative success. With it’s nonexistent nonsense lyrics that were practically ad-libbed every time and it’s chiming verses that spun out to the simplest of choruses, “Touch” was just about the utmost of what i could offer, and hardly anyone knew about it. Three years ago this week a mere handful of people had heard it, and two years ago the number had only improved by another couple handfuls. And, now, this once-stalwart of my collection is buried under dozens of songs that i like more with little hope of anyone ever really getting to appreciate it. My life is weird that way… hits rise and fall in my own mind. The chances of “Under My Skin” making a repeat appearance on my next demo recording are slim to none, which means a year or two from now even it’s listening public of over a hundred people will (hopefully) pale in comparison to what songs like “Excuse” or “Tangling” will know.

Radiohead mostly stopped playing “Creep” after everyone screamed for it at every show, and at last month’s Ani DiFranco concert the oldest song she played was from her fifth album. Point being, not even fame necessarily cures the case of lost songs because they are either “Under My Skin” or “Touch” — you’re sick of them, or have too many other songs crowding them out.

And, so, i am almost afraid to write down what i feel, because it will have a life so much shorter than mine despite my attempts to immortalize it. I sang “Touch” tonight because it had somehow slipped through the cracks of Trio for over a year despite its only being two years old last fall. I wonder if it’ll ever appear again…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7053722/

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Today was a cranky day, and yes, that is the sound of me spending an entire 48 hours only departing the apartment once, to take out the trash. We are all a bit cranky tonight, and i decided after intermittently coloring in a coloring book and blankly staring at the teevee for a fourth hour to say “goodnight” and get the hell out of the living room. The thing about living in a threesome of people is that it’s always two on one, and yesterday it was me and Lindsay versus Erika so today was them versus me. Erika and i hardly ever team up against Lindsay so much as we just hang out by ourselves. It actually doesn’t bother me in the least, but the intelligent thing to do was to extract myself before it did bother me. So, i came up here and recorded a suck-ass Trio.


Meanwhile, my cold has kept me substance free all weekend, and don’t think that has anything to do with being in the house, either. The ladies put a sizeable dent into a few bottles in the wet-bar, and i consumed three cartons of orange juice and one of ice cream. Such is a sleepy weekend, solely composed of naps, guitars, musical Buffy episodes that left me gasping and in shock, and blowout Eagles games. Makes me feel real, at least…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7050450/