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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Two things were set into motion on Saturday, August 26th, 2000 that would forever alter the life of one jobless young Los Angeles area gaysian twenty-something named Ernie Hsiung.

The first was an ambitious little lark called SurvivorBlog, a somewhat nepotistically cast venture that featured some semi-regular Little Yellow Different linkees such as Kevin from Fury, Asian journalist du jour Min Jung, and hottie among hotties Gerard Reyes.

The second was an aimless little lark called Crushing Krisis – otherwise known as my blog.

I’m not sure what the true aims of either project were at the time, but i could venture a guess. SurvivorBlog was an attempt to pair the red-hot Survivor phenomenon with weblogging for fun and profit. Crushing Krisis was meant as a way to participate in the personal publishing revolution, and for me to have a place to bitch and whine on a regular basis. As luck would have it, both Sblog and CK were added to Blogger‘s directory sometime later that week, and the rest, as they say, is history.

(History being that we were deadlocked as #1 & #2 on PowerBloggers for almost all of our second week of existence, which was totally ridiculous, because i was trying to outblog 10 people all by myself. And, even more ludicrous i mostly won. Ha! Now, back to our story.)

Such was my introduction to Ernie and his addictive string of web reality games, which have brought him hundreds of adoring daily fans even more dedicated than myself. Of course, I despised him and his unholy creation with a passion throughout its entire original run because it represented something that i wasn’t yet a part of – something i never thought i’d lay hands on: relative blog-fame and a semi-attentive semi-regular audience. However, by the end of it I had stopped by so many times to check out the competition that I was thoroughly hooked, and so when SurvivorBlog2 rolled around I sighed a deep sigh and submitted a submission, and so began my entanglement with Ernie.

I don’t think i ever seriously expected to be cast on SurvivorBlog2, but somehow Ernie thought i’d push someone’s buttons, and so into the mix i went. And, out of the mix i came with double my normal visitors, having been cast as that annoying self-righteous boy who did nothing but write moody songs and talk about his girlfriend. After i got the boot life went on, i broke up with the girlfriend, and Ernie was off having fun as a nominee at SxSW along with various other sBlog cast members. I relegated myself to the background, content to post on PSB2 and occasionally commenting on Ernie’s site with the hope that people would recognize me and that Ernie might appreciate my contribution.

That all changed less then a month ago when i casually asked Ernie if he had any commenters lined up for his newest web-venture PuppetMaster. In that month i have seen Ernie procrastinate, speculate, celebrate, and hyperventilate while i’ve had some of the most fun i’ve had in my entire year of blogging. And that brings us up to the present: i would’ve never met Philo had i not hit on him for an entire month of PM and, somehow, when he decided to give Ern a little helping hand, he decided i was someone who should represent the cause.

August 26th is a less than two weeks away, and in the intervening year i went from knowing Ernie only as the creator of my most despised enemyblog to an actual friend who i’m planning to visit sometime in the near future. When he blogged about losing his job i was aghast, hoping that it was some kind of wicked PM crossover stunt, but alas it’s the god’s honest truth. In the wake of this news Philo has created a funddrive called ErnAid. It might seem like a bit of a light-hearted little lark, but know that this little lark really does come from the heart. I consider myself a fan and a friend to Ernie, and as such i didn’t hesitate at all to give a few dollars. If you consider yourself either of those things, think about doing the same.

For more reasons to donate (including exclusive photos and a new song), check out my stint as guest-host of ErnAid tomorrow @ East/West.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5072807/

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Today i was combed down and cleaned up and i looked like the greyscale version of me except for my hands and face which were unusually rosey; from bottom to top i ran black, grey, grey, black, silver, black, face, black. Someone has turned down my contrast, apparently. I might have had something to do with it… staying up until 6am to re-read Hi Fidelity (as if that last monster-post could’ve been inspired by anything other than the first chapter) and folding up clothes so i could stay hidden within my air-conditioned room rather than the threatening humid mess of my living room. But, here i am, back in the humidity and mess and trying to seriously commit to packing something tonight … i’m not sure what or where i’ll put it, but it’ll get packed. But, anyhow, i don’t think i’ll miss this apartment much… it was never comfortable enough to be homey, even if it represented the reality of home. Check back with me on September2nd to see if i have anything to add to that.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5070059/

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I’ve never found very much of my music collection to be too implicitly sexy; sure, certain songs have their own sex appeal and others somehow took on one over the years, but what it comes down to is that i frankly don’t have a lot of albums that i would leave on while making out. Of course, for the longest time my rules of album buying went something like “there has to be a girl or an acoustic guitar, and both if i’m really going to enjoy it.” And, while this still is the most ultimate truth in my hunt for new music, it is no longer my sole critera for purchase, and it’s because of this that i feel like i own some music that’s a wee bit sexy now.

The crux of it is that the female voice doesn’t have a scandalous effect on me. Tori Amos sings some sexy songs, Elastica has one about feeling one’s back on the hood of a car, and Garbage has a web of darkly electric songs that are simply churning with sexual energy. That’s all well and good, but i’m compelled to listen to them rather than have it on the score of my lovelife. These songs are soundtrack music rather than scores… they talk about the movie but they don’t always click with the emotional content of the scenes themselves. However, today i realized that i do have the elements of the score lurking in my music collection (although theoretically half of it would come from hers), and it’s all because of the effects of a single girl.

We never kissed. Not once. Not even goodbye. Such was my relationship with Anastasia. However, what we did do a lot of was going to the movies and lying on her floor on Sunday afternoons arguing about music; she had the same sort of exception to women singers that i did to men, only really harbouring a great love for Tori Amos, Bjork, and Heather Nova. Her soft-spot was for men… and not aggressively loud alternative men, but squeaky or thoughtful or nerdy men: Soul Coughing, Ben Folds Five, Elliott Smith, Evan Dando, Get Up Kids, and a whole raft of even more indy rock guys whose albums i know on sight but not by name. And, so, we’d sit on her floor and we’d argue about why i didn’t like any of those bands and why she should really buy an Ani DiFranco album (which she eventually did, with Dilate).

Anastasia and i had a falling out near the end of Senior Year when the mess of applying to college was over and i felt as though i could actually talk to my old friends again. It was too late for my record collection, though, as a tiny kernel of the future had already taken root; on a total whim i had bought the just-released Keep it Like a Secret by one of her favourite bands, Built to Spill. I knew that i liked them a little, but i saw it and it was $13 and suddenly i needed it. But, when i got home it laid untouched on my desk in it’s perfect cellophane wrapped sitting on top of a brown bag containing its receipt. I wasn’t going to open it … it was simply symbolic of my lost relationship (and lack thereof) with Anastasia and there was no reason for me to open it let alone to buy it to begin with.

And, while i was at school the next day, my mother walked into my room for the first time in weeks, ostensibly to take out the trash, and she threw out the empty brown bag i had sitting on my desk. Afterwards it was inevitable – i could scream at my mother all i wanted to, but that album was a part of my collection as much as it was a part of hers, and i couldn’t not listen to it. So, in into the cd-changer it went.

It seemed so harmless at the time, just one happy springtime record in my collection of disappointed and jilted women, but the damage was done. I listened to it with my windows open, i put it on during showers, and i played it while working on my webgame. Built to Spill was like a pot slowly boiling all through my Freshman year; an album i would return to at the drop of a dime. And, suddenly, with this school year came restlessness and disposable income, and suddenly i was coming home with Ben Folds Five and Elliott Smith and even striking out on my own to find things she would like, like Deathcab for Cutie.

Today i was trolling through the used section at AKA Music and i bought, among other things, the Matador Records 10th Anniversary 3 disc set. The first song on the first record is “Stereo” by Pavement, which is a sort of innocently thumping bass groove with a nearly-spoken almost unattentive vocal that trips its way through the song unselfconsciously as it accents and squeaks and turns. And, somehow, to me the geek sound of an indy rock voice paired with at once carefully crafted and lo-fi instrumentation is a seductive sound to me.


There is a Built to Spill album called “There’s Nothing Wrong With Love,” and the cliche of the title mocks the a-typical and affecting songs therein. I remember that once we were lying on her floor talking and she told me how Ben Folds loves Built to Spill and how they both do “Twin Falls Idaho” and how the song after that on the Spill disc mentions David Bowie and at some point while i was sitting there nodding along and listening attentively my brain decided that the upward curl of an untrained mail falsetto or the persistent movement of a band with just a lead or bass guitar rather than a rhythm guitar was an attractive sound to me. Men have a way of writing about girls and sex that women obviously don’t, and while it’s not always the most artful thing in the world when compared to one of my Tori Amos cds, i understand when Ben Gibbard says things like “i hung my favorite shirt on the floorboard, wrinkled up from pulling pushing and tasting tasting” because even though the lyric is obvious, the effect the girl had on him is inherent to the lyric more than the lyric is demonstrative of it. Or,… i don’t know, maybe my brain is just forever trained to create sexual tension around Anastasia’s sort of music the same way i can get whiplash if someone walks past me smelling of Happy


The funny thing is that she’s in New York or Boston now because she got into college a year early and is this amazing artist and has all sorts of direction and i’m still sitting here in Philly listening to her sort of records as if she’s ever going to make it onto my top-five breakups list just because she’s influenced at least one song on every relationship mix tape i’ll ever make while in college. In a way she transcends my hardly populated list of heart-breaks because we never happened, so that in my memory i can keep us lying on her floor together perfect and separate forever without any tangles to comb out. So, here i am listening to Pavement and wondering if it could really underscore a perfect kiss. I wonder if, hundreds of miles away from here, the thought ever crosses her mind while she’s listening to Dilate.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5056420/

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Last night’s start stop rain versus humidity gave way to gray an drizzle today, much to my delight. So much heat all week was just piling more wear and grief onto me and onto the city with every day, and today wiped everything back down to the simple scent of cement and a breeze. With the city so cool and forgiving Hillary entertained my ambitions to get out and wander. We were on second street looking for a restaurant to preface seeing Ghost World, and somehow we wound up in Pagoda.

Pagoda occupies a place in so many simultaneous sentences in my head that i can hardly discern what order i’m supposed to write them in, so please excuse the tangle.

Pagoda is nestled in a restaurant-and-Ritz-theatre district that is Old City, so there are a lot of cobbly streets and things with “independence” in their name. In front of it there is some kind of tiny square about Ben Franklin (though it is not the Ben Franklin House, which is nearby), and in it is a tiny metal model of a historic house on a tiny podium. I saw the house all of the time, because Pagoda has just recently become Pagoda… it’s claustrophic bamboo-strewn space has experienced several incarnations in my lifetime. The restaurant to occupy the building for the longest time was Waldo’s… the same upstairs balcony with a low-flying view out the two-story front face of the building but with a marbly bar extending the entire length of the restaurant from front to back with the swingy doors to the kitchen at the end and a pinball machine tucked into the back corner.

I would sit tiny in those high chairs at the bar with a can of pineapple juice over ice and a bowl of chunky round bar pretzels watching football, because i was nearly always there on a Sunday. The surroundings and everything have melted away now so much that i believe that i really didn’t know anything about the place other than the doors and the balcony and the chair and the top of the bar and the teevee. And my father behind the bar; but, he’s not something i know all that well.

Any story i could tell you about Waldo’s would just be an iteration of “and then the Eagles scored” or “and then we played pinball,” but looking back i think it was the only place i’ve ever been where i have been unequivocally happy; time has wiped away all of the pouty bored pieces of it so they are just smudged pictures around me at the bar trying to teach my dad how to play football on gameboy (“What do you mean there’s not penalties?”) or making my typical assertions (“If the Eagles lose the the Cowboys on my birthday i’m never watching a game here again, okay dad?”) or something. My last memory was from down at the end of the bar at one of those Superbowls that Denver lost, but by then we were me and my dad and his wife and i only remember it was strange being there at night on a Sunday because visitation always was over by 7pm on a Sunday so my life could get orderly again for school the next day.

Splitting time between parents was a funny thing, because weekends with my father never got very much accomplished except for stealing me away from what i was used to, and we never went anywhere because i always was back at home by sundown on a Sunday with a kiss goodbye from his rough stubble. But, i did it nonetheless, from when he lived in a tiny apartment with fish and one of the other bartenders to the wife’s adorable splitlevel house in Andora to their home in BlueBell that is anything but that to me. And, now i don’t even really call him for father’s day, because i don’t have a strong enough association with the world, but i think of him whenever i hear doo-wop on the radio because of his silly high voice that i cannot really match, or when i am distractedly ignoring the Eagles lose. Or when i see where Waldo’s used to be.

So, Hillary entertained my buried sense-associations and we ate at Pagoda and i choked back some tears. It was raining, anyhow.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5038252/