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Crushing On: Chronicle

September 1, 2012 by krisis

I love this minimalist poster. Beware – a more spoiler-filled version is displayed below.

This week I watched an amazing movie – and I almost turned it off after five minutes.

The movie was Chronicle, a $12 million small-scale superhero flick that just hit DVD after running in theatres earlier this year.

Why did I nearly turn it off? Two words: found footage.

On the list of cinematic tropes I categorically dislike, found footage movies rank consistently high. You know what I’m talking about. Cloverfield. Paranormal Activity. Ever since Gina and I saw the disjointed Blair Witch Project in the theatre I’ve held a special contempt for the contrivances of these flicks. You have to suspend your disbelief like whoa to trust that various characters would keep wielding a camera and talking to it through the challenges of the plot. As a result, a good story is frequently sacrificed to the lame cinematic device.

Also, there’s the shaky camera making you want to barf.

Lower on my list of trope no-nos – but still ranked – are superhero origin stories. Few superheros have origins so epic they should take an entire movie to tell. Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, The Fantastic Four – these are heroes whose origins have been shown in a few frames of cartoon theme songs. Do they really merit entire movies to explain? Rather than reimagine an origin for the umpteenth iteration across all media, why not show us a unique portrayal of heroism that only your movie can achieve?

Chronicle is a found footage superhero origin story, and I loved it despite myself and my list of loathed tropes. Like, raving on Twitter about it before it was even over loved it. E loved it, too. It hit a random rental grand slam in our house.

Let’s just say that the movie does not waste Dane DeHaan’s resemblance to Mark Hamill. Honestly, it gives the movie a bit of extra resonance.

Now, how to explain the joy of this flick without giving away all of its prickly twists?

Chronicle‘s excuse for being found footage starts out having nothing to do with its overarching plot. Andrew is a peculiar loner (and dead ringer for Luke Skywalker) with few interests, a dying mother, and an abusive father. He picks up a camera one morning and begins documenting his life – ostensibly to catch his dad’s abuse on camera, but secretly to analyze his day to find some meaning in life.

He doesn’t manage to do either. What he does is capture an inexplicable event and its aftermath on camera. Suddenly, he is recording a historic breakthrough in human potential – partly just to document it, but still to find some meaning in life.

The breakthrough provides meaning, but only to a point. Like a shiny new toy that eventually becomes a part of your daily routine, having a special power changes your entire world except for things like friendships, financial and physical well-being, and the general circumstance of your life … which is to say, it doesn’t really change your life at all until you start wielding it as a tool.

This realization is crucial to any good origin story – yes, you have great power, but what sort of responsibility will you take on along with it? The kids in this movie are no Clark Kent, Peter Parker or Bruce Wayne – they are typical, modern, bored suburbanites. Their first instinct is not to make the world a better place. Or, more accurately, it is only to make their own worlds a better place, and only in the most superficial and temporary ways.

This is a bit spoilerific, but they made it a poster, so here it is

A chain of dumb teenage decisions leads to ever increasing conflicts until the movie reaches straight up Matrix-level heights of insane Superman-inspired tussles, except it wields them more smartly than either franchise ever has. A protracted fight scene at the end is effectively the best superhero blowout I’ve ever seen short of The Avengers. Low budget effects work lends the film a visceral, tangible heft.

So, Chronicle sticks the landing on the origin story. What about the found footage?

First, it’s not all that shaky. Second, there comes a point in the story where the main characters stop being interested or capable of shooting video of themselves, but by that point the filmmakers have built up several devices to allow us to believably track their story. The transition from intentional to unintentional recording barely registers. The way they record a particularly tense mid-air confrontation is ingenious both in concept and execution.

In the end, Chronicle is a solid indie super flick that explores what it would mean to have powers in the real world, where not every superhero is infallibly noble.

Would Clark Kent really decide to be a clumsy, mild-mannered reporter by day? Would Peter Parker so quickly shrug off the death of his uncle and be a superhero every night, even while trying to pass his classes and keep Aunt May’s house out of foreclosure?

Chronicle says: maybe. You’ll have to watch to understand why

(Thanks to Alex for recommending this one!)

Happy Birthday To This

August 26, 2012 by krisis

Day before 30th Birthday

There are few things in our lives that are truly finite.

Of course, that’s patently untrue. For example, there are a specific, quantifiable number of people on Earth.

Go ahead, count them.

Arcati Crisis at the Tin Angel, September 2011

Full band debut at the Tin Angel

If that’s too tall a task, we can limit the scope. What about the number of cars in America? Still too large? Let’s think local – how many stores and carts in Philadelphia sell soft pretzels?

From the perspective of a single person’s experience, those finite numbers are unknowable. We can rely on estimations, aggregate data, and computer projections, but in our lives we’ll likely never know the answers. We’ll never know all of the facts or have all of the money.

The finite will remain infinite.

E and I at Chris’s birthday

II.

Two important things happened yesterday.

Around noon, E and I collected her two siblings and one nearly sibling-in-law into our car and drove to New Jersey to attend her step-sister’s wedding. There we met up with my extended clan of in-laws, which includes a pair each of step-aunts and -uncles, all beaming at a storybook beautiful bride.

On stage with Filmstar

(We also tailgated with them in the parking lot of a church, but that’s another story entirely.)

About halfway through the reception I was idly texting best-and-worst wedding stories of all time with Nan between speeches when a peek at Twitter revealed that Neil Armstrong had passed away.

I didn’t mention it to our table – I didn’t want to be that guy, reading the news off his phone at the wedding (even if I already was) (sorry, Tal). Later, outside in the parking lot in the fading daylight, I glanced upward to see a slivered moon hanging low across the sky, ready for the sun to cede its place in their nightly ritual.

I wish I could make the moment seem more poetic by saying I thought of Neil, but I didn’t. I was mostly thinking about how days pass so quickly while you’re living them, just like months and years. You live your life and then suddenly the moon is glowing above you and you are almost done being thirty, and you aren’t sure how you got there.

Okay, not you. Me. How I got there. Here.

Sometimes I’m not so certain, but that’s what Crushing Krisis is all about – all twelve years of it, as of today.

My retro-punk haircut

III.

Year twelve of CK has been a huge year of my life.

Ridiculous at the Shubin Theatre Holiday Revue

I turned 30. I was featured in Jump Philly magazine. I fronted a full, four-piece rock band for the first time. I was promoted to being the most senior individual contributor in my department. E and I were interviewed for CBS Philly. I visited Las Vegas. I began editing my first novel as a member of an Author’s Club. I became a regular contributor to another blog.

I went on my first road trip to celebrate Gina’s birthday. I managed the communications for one of the biggest events in Philly for its biggest year of all time. I found myself the leader of a wedding band. I completed my collection of every X-Men comic, ever.

I crashed our car into the house. I ran my first 5k. We recorded the rhythm tracks for our first Arcati Crisis studio album. I was named Geekadelphia’s Geek of the Week.

E in Las Vegas

Not every notable moment was a big one. We survived Hurricane Irene, mostly unscratched. I interviewed Philly art star Britt Miller. I delivered a dramatic reading about the morning after.

I reviewed a slew of DC’s New 52 debut comics, part of a rare “post every day” month at CK. I recorded songs from the first third of my lifetime, including a cover of Vogue with an emotional essay attached. E and I took home a band for the night. I attended a funeraland then visited bro in his first apartment.

I explained how bigots should not be allowed to like X-Men. We bought a firm new bed. I wrestled with the monsters in my life. I recorded a video confession about my obsession with coasters. E got drunk at The Muppets and could not help me identify a lost song. I shared my OCD issues with dirty feet. I mused on how Taylor Swift is like (and unlike) The Beatles. I reviewed the best of X-Men from 2011.

Yoga at work (long story)

E dreamt about zombies. I speculated about dead aliens being removed from our plane from Vegas to Philly. I re-watched the X-Files. I reviewed Madonna’s new LP, track-by-track. Gina taught me an Iron Maiden song. I broke the first comprehensive news about Marvel’s non-reboot. We spent time with our new old friends Chris and Courtney. I saw Fiona Apple, as I have once after each of her albums. I was on vocal rest for two weeks.

Lounging with my fellow Authors

IV.

There are well over a million words on CK. To you they might seem infinite – more than you’ll ever read. They’re infinite to me too, but in a different way – I’m never certain how many more of them I have in me.

As always, I struggled with wanting to post more – constrained both by privacy and time. Week after week I planned seven days of posts, but I rarely wrote past a Wednesday.

Before Filmstar at Dobbs

As a result, I missed recording many details of my life. I did not write about every Arcati Crisis rehearsal and show. I did not share every new thing I am crushing on. I did not describe the excitement of talking to E about her new career as a Software Engineer at a local start-up. I never finished a post about my first photo shoot as a member of Filmstar.

I never made the post about how I wore a hood for weeks after Trayvon Martin’s murder. I did not blog about a brief depression this spring. I forgot to detail E’s riotous birthday party, and the amazing new friends we have in our lives. I didn’t discuss joining the board of Social Media Club Philly.

I have yet to write the first post of my epic re-read of every X-Men comic in the order they were written. I didn’t talk about the zeal of seeing my favorite band, Garbage, back on stage. I totally skipped out on recording my exploits with Nan at the 140 Conference in New York.

Hooded for Trayvon Martin

Why didn’t I record all of those moments and feelings? Because, if there is one thing in our lives that is finite, it’s time. We might waste it – pass it with idle distractions – but it’s the one thing that lies plainly charted and steadily consumed. There is no more of it to discover, and none of it truly lost. There are only moments forgotten, unrecorded and unremembered.

Refereeing FourSquare Day

Back to the wedding, and the moon.

The distance from where you sit reading this right now to the surface of the moon is finite – and not finite like the people in the world or the soft pretzels in Philadelphia. It’s knowable. Measurable down to the very centimeter.

April show at Tin Angel

Except, it seems pretty infinite to you, doesn’t it? I know it does to me. It’s not a distance I can use anything in my life to define or describe. It’s not a place I’ll likely ever go. Yet, some people on this planet understand the distance perfectly, because they have not only measured it, but traversed it to stand on the surface of that sphere that looms above our heads every night.

One less person now.

Then there is the wedding. Not exactly a harbinger of the infinite. I’ve been to a lot of weddings – I had even at the point I started writing this blog twelve years ago.

As a wedding band

What I didn’t have back then was siblings. I was still a year away from from moving in with Erika and Lindsay, and further from meeting E’s sister and brother. I had Gina, but we had yet to truly explore the depth of our connection to each other through life and music.

I was alone, and that solitude seemed infinite. The idea of marriage, and later of knowing a fraternal and sororal love so deep that I would beam back at them on their wedding day, was a concept so remote at to seem infinitesimal – just like the surface of the moon seems to me today.

Nan at #140Conf

VI.

There is so much in life we’ll never never know or do that it’s easy to define ourselves with that negative space. I will never know everything. I will never have all of the money. I will never play my songs for every person living in Philadelphia

Stained at the Color Run

That list of nevers stretched even further twelve years ago, and if I didn’t have a blog it would not be so easy to understand how I have expanded to know and do so much more than I ever thought possible.

No one should aspire to simply be an outline of the space that contains them. Better to wish to expand your life in every direction to find new knowledge, experiences, and family. New objects in space. Because the one thing we know we will run out of – the only thing that truly contains us – is time.

At the Geek Awards

Thank you for being a part of my journey through time and space, and for reading about it again and again. You are part of the infinity I once thought untouchable that is now tangible. Every word that you read expands the boundaries of my life a little further.

Thank you, and happy birthday to this.

Trust

August 1, 2012 by krisis

I am sitting alone on the step in the small front hallway of my house, playing guitar.

A cage of microphones, stands, and cables surround my body in such a way that I can’t turn or stretch. If I drop a pick it’s lost to me. I just grab another from the tin sitting beside me and keep playing.

Gina, Zina, and Jake are less than 25 feet away – I know, because that is how long the 1/4” cable plugged into my guitar stretches. I can’t see them. We have erected a wall of cardboard boxes in the door frame that leads from our hall into the living room. Gina and I puzzled it together on Saturday while she hummed the theme to Tetris.

I can hear them. Only faintly through the boxes, but loud and clear over my massive, ear-cupping headphones. Gina chirps in a variety of accents through her control room mic, keeping me informed of the action in the other room and singing my songs on my behalf. Jake and Zina communicate via their instruments.

Every track I have ever released has been engineered, mixed, and produced by me. That means any time you have listened to me as a performer I was also busy thinking about a lot of other things, like if the mics are placed correctly or if the bridge is going to clip.

I can’t do that from this side of my wall of boxes. The control room is 25 feet away. Gina and Jake are the ones engineering my songs, and Zina is driving them. My only job is to sit on this step and play guitar the best I know how.

It was hard during my first song. I was still barking commands and telling Gina just how to cue each track. That did not last for long. It didn’t need to. If I can put my musical life in Gina’s hands, then who else can I trust?

That’s the word I keep coming back to in my tiny guitar room, stare fixed on the sideways logos on cardboard boxes as Gina cues up another track. Trust. I don’t know if I ever understood rock bands before now. I liked them and obsessed over every detail of their album credits, but I don’t know if I understood them.

Now, in my little box, I understand.

Rock bands are about trust. Every note, every rhythm and chord, is another blind fall. If you cannot trust the rest of the band to catch you it will never ring true.

I am ready to plummet through another take.

#MusicMonday: “The Wicker Man” – Iron Maiden

July 2, 2012 by krisis

Yesterday I learned to play an Iron Maiden song.

Certain artists and bands are proceeded by so much accumulated conversation and so many cultural references that I assume I’ve heard their music at some prior point without actually knowing anything about what they sound like.

That’s always been the case for me with bands that are generationally a little before my time. I’m sure the same holds true for you with a certain handful of artists. If you’re my age, you might not be able to hum a Rush song, but you certainly know them by reputation. Same for Kate Bush. If you’re older or younger the list will be different, but the sensation will be the same. Niche artists with one or two major hits, there’s no convenient way into their catalogs on the radio, so you hear the version you’ve assumed in your head, maybe reinforced by that one greatest hit.

This covers a lot of early metal for me. Like, I know my requisite share of Black Sabbath and AC/DC songs, but that’s about it. They’re all a long parade of fantastical album covers and t-shirts worn by Wayne and Garth or Beavis and Butthead,

Yesterday, at our first duo rehearsal in over a year, Gina casually announced, “There’s this great Iron Maiden song we should cover.”

I grinned and nodded. If you know Gina or have ever listened to Arcati Crisis, you’d understand that sort of thing is a little out of our wheelhouse. Yet, I bring as many crazy ideas to the band as Gina, and the few of them that work turn into us covering “Love Game” or other similarly entertaining insanity.

Still, my interest was piqued, and I rarely turn down a musical challene, so we marched over to my mixing computer and loaded up “The Wicker Man” by Iron Maiden.

That’s not metal. At least, not the obnoxiously loud, Metallica-adjacent metal I was expecting from Iron Maiden (and, Metallic is a band I actually know). Despite being from 2000 – a time when there are a hundred different genres of metal ranging from Cookie Monster growling to soaring counter-tenors – the song was more like punk in its supreme simplicity, aside from the solo. The guitars weren’t even that loud. And the singing was incredible – ringing and dressed in multiple layers of harmony.

More or less a perfect Arcati Crisis cover tune. I played it again.

“It’s just that riff,” Gina said, indicating my reference monitors as the yoyoing chorus riff began.

“That’s not so hard,” I vowed. I picked up my twelve-string and began to work it out as Gina sang the melody above me. The song transitioned into the second verse, and I kept playing along. “It mostly sits on the root.”

I played the rhythmic Em, sliding down to pick up the C underneath it. Gina nodded and mirrored my changes on her guitar. “Right, but it doesn’t really resolve D, it has a G in bass.”

I tried it, and she was right. “Makes sense, there’s a D at the top of the next progression anyway. Hey, I think this is low enough for me to sing.” I sang through it tentatively and Gina jumped up to harmony, our voices ringing out through the room until we arrived at another chorus. “Okay, well, I can’t sing that.”

“No, wait, there’s an underneath part, give me a second.” These things really do take just a second with Gina, who is a living harmony jukebox. “Here it is, YOUR TIME WILL COME! YOUR TIME WILL COME!” I sang it back. “No, sit on the low note the first time, it only goes up on the second lines.”

The second chorus ended and we were into the extended intstrumental, with its epic guitar solo. I looked up at Gina standing over my desk. “You’re going to play the solo.”

She smirked back at me.

And that is how I got to know Iron Maiden, and how Arcati Crisis learns a cover song.

The Busy Trap

July 1, 2012 by krisis

Yesterday the New York Times featured an OpEd titled “The Busy Trap,” about how Americans seemed to delight in the sound and fury of unproductive busyness. Here is an excerpt:

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

That first sentence describes me perfectly. I am too busy to think about anything off-mission, or to catch up with friends, or write this blog.

The OpEd made me think of my life from 2006, before Arcati Crisis, before I was playing open mics, before was in an acappella group. I remember trying to make plans with a pair of my friends and finding it impossible to find a free day. They were interminably booked for weeks into the future. Not a spot of daylight on the schedule for me to hang out and listen to music with them unless I could plan months ahead.

I remember thinking, “What is it you have to show for being a packrat of appointments? What have you accomplished? You just waste your money and get fatter. It’s miserable.” I had my songs to comfort me, and my ridiculous spreadsheets and fastidious budget. I loved my time to myself.

Lately I have been trying to schedule coffee dates with social media friends who I’ve never had a chance to get to know better offline. These arrangements have yet to be consummated, due to my impenetrable schedule. The first one will finally happen tomorrow, because I am free Mondays. I hate to make plans on Mondays, so they are paradoxically the best night to make plans.

Am I that person that I secretly hated, all those years prior?

I choose not to think so. I have less time for my songs, but so many more of them are being played. My spreadsheets aren’t as plentiful, but they’re more meaningful and permanent. My budget is still on-pace down to the cent, but I don’t ogle it every day. And the things I fit into my free time – my bands and my book and my comic collection – they are the things I always wanted. Coveted for myself but thought would stay relegated to some impossible adolescent dream, never to be fulfilled.

This weekend I had a free day, so I relearned the fundamentals of javascript. Now I can follow some of E’s work discussions, and I built myself a new web feature that previously defied any solution.

I don’t think busyness has to be a trap, unless you can be trapped into being happy and fulfilled. Oh no! I wish we could stretch each day a little further so I had more free time to sit and speculate, or just drape myself over furniture and listen to music, but if that’s all I ever did I wouldn’t even have a blog in the first place.

I wish my busyness on you, so long as it does not become a cage. It should be a gossamer bubble, shimmering and iridescent in the air around you, making the untouchable world beyond shimmer in delightful color as you float by.