Crushing Krisis

The Newest Oldest Blog In New Zealand

Year 08

After these messages…

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Today I woke up early so I could go to work early so I could get stuff done early so I could go to a press check and, ultimately, leave early.

After said early departure I engaged in a four-mile marathon walk past and through every hip men’s clothing shop in the entirety of center city Philadelphia, in search of my Lyndzapalooza outfit.

This is a time-honored tradition stretching back to 2003, when I wore my brand new orange sneakers to the first event and got them hopelessly dingy climbing up and down from our stage AKA neighbor’s elevated backyard.

Anywho, the trek, it was long. Every store is selling the same ugly men’s clothing right now, except for Diesel, which is selling fucking uglier men’s clothing. What I really wanted was a Flash t-shirt … well, no, what I really wanted was a Cheetara shirt and a Wonder Woman shirt, but in the midst of writing like 20k unique words over the past month I forgot to order them, which initiated this whole sad hunt. Eventually I found what could be my new favorite piece of clothing (only, mine is green).

Late in the game I dragged my ass the length of South Street, now quite sweating underneath my favorite suit, and increasingly parched. I bypassed mucho de Starbucks to hit one of my few favorite indie coffee shops, Java Company, on 4th and South.

As I ordered my iced soy chai latte (one of my few truly yuppie vices) I overhead a conversation:

“Rip Torn?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure he was in Clue

And, now, make sure you are picturing this correctly. I am at my most corporate, in my best suit, and also sweating to death and in running shoes trailing shopping bags, and I whip my head around and say the following:

“Um, are you talking about Clue, the movie? Because Rip Torn is not in Clue. Clue starred Martin Mull as Colonel Mustard, Christopher Lloyd as Professor Plum, Michael McKean as Mr. Green, Leslie Ann Warren as Ms. Scarlet, Madeline Kahn as Mrs. White, Eileen Brennan as Ms. Peacock, Colleen Camp as Yvette, and Lee Ving as Mr. Body.”

(Actually, it took me one or two tries to get it all out in a string, because I was getting the McKean’s name tangled, and also because I kept getting distracted by 20 ounces of iced chai latte sitting in front of me, but that was the gist of it.)

Absolutely dumbfounded at my sudden outburst, one of the men from the original conversation replied.

“And Tim Curry.”

“Yes,” I acknowledged, exasperated that he even felt the need to point this out, “and featuring Tim Curry, also as Mr. Body.”

At this point the entire coffee shop, and some children outside, are all staring at me.

“It’s my favorite movie.”

The men stared back at me, their dumbfounded faces slowly melting into a wash of pity and revulsion in reaction to my savant-like obsession with the film.

“Um, yeah. Funny how it’s a movie, but it’s a board game.”

“Yeah, my brother loved that board game. We watched it, like, a dozen times.”

“I’m going to go in the back and look it up on IMDB. I think Rip Torn was in it.”

“Yeah, I think he was.”

I turned, finally, to retrieve my drink, and received a conspiratorial wink from my barista.

“I love that movie. I thought it was so funny when I was a kid, and now when I see it I catch all these different jokes.”

Sensing she was on my side I chose not to delve into a treatise on the obliquely scatological and intensely political humor of the film.

“Yeah, it’s actually pretty subversive.”

Now completely dehydrated and about to crumble into a dusty mix of my constituent non-H20 molecules, I paid for my drink and left.

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And that is why it is after 1 a.m. and my heart is beating about as fast as a hamster’s.

All In the Family.

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Just to show that nothing is safe from competition in Elise’s family, her sister Jenny left an encouraging comment about how she respects my bloggingness – leaving unspoken the inference that the respect is intact despite my hopeless fat, lazy, dumb, ugliness – and parenthetically mentioned that she is on a Dragon Boat team (huh and the what now?), so I should not count her out of the fitness competition just yet.

And, by the by, she is also a blogger, only her blog is broadcast from Taiwan and features regular lessons in Mandarin.

And, oh, in case I forgot, she used to be a competitive ballroom dancer, and she’s choreographing our first dance when she gets back from Taiwan, so I better watch my mouth or I’m going to have to learn to do walkovers and cartwheels.

Do you see what I’m up against here? Elise already volunteered herself to do upper body workouts with me when I move up to a higher set of weights. Next thing you know I’ll have have their brother emailing me songs he’s written and telling me he’s starting his own music festival.

Although, there’s something to be said for marrying a hyper-intelligent, pro-active bombshell with two similarly equipped siblings, in so much as any time I choose to slack off in some aspect of my life I just picture the appropriate one of them sitting on my shoulder, doing that same thing about five times better than I do it.

Whenever it doesn’t send me into wracking sobs or a panic attack it’s very effective. Like, just a few minutes ago I didn’t do enough bicep curls and the trio of them mocked me in imaginary three-part harmony to the point that now I can’t even lift up a glass of orange juice.

Ahh, family.

This is why I don’t like to stay late at work.

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Scene.

Thirty minutes past the proscribed quitting time I – in sharp gray suit, curly hair tucked under my stereo headphones, and bright red sneakers – sigh with resignation, shut down my computer, and walk out to wait for an elevator.

(I am most likely singing along to an Arcati Crisis song at the top of my lungs while walking in a circle, because that is what I do anytime I am alone and waiting for or riding in an elevator.)

The elevator opens.

In it is our CEO and all three of our SVPs. They grin like a school of sharks.

I sheepishly slide my headphones off of my ears, nod hello, and squeeze in next to the highest ranking woman in the company.

The doors close. The air hangs silent for a moment, and then they continue with the conversation they were having when I arrived.

I am sorely tempted to push a button. The floors pass ever so slowly. Any button. Each floor passes, doors shut and unrelenting.

After what seems like an eternity of biting my lip and pretending not to understand the fine details of their conversation, the elevator finally reaches our upper lobby.

The doors open, and we all hang for a second to see if anyone is going to give anyone else the right of way. “Oh, you first.” “Oh, no, I couldn’t.” “Well, you are the CEO.” “Yes, but…”

Nothing. Silence.

The wait continues. We are in danger of the elevator doors closing and sending us back up for another excruciating ride.

I am dead center – a straight shot out the door. And I am the lowest-ranking employee, so it made sense for me to exit first.

Were the doors beginning to inch shut? I would not survive a ride back up.

Flashpoint. I dart out of the elevator … at the exact same moment that the highest ranking woman in the company also makes a break for it.

She was, after all, the only woman in the elevator.

We collide.

In the continuing silence my world slips into impossibly slow motion – I feel my cushy hips rebound sideways off of her slight frame, feel as though I can hear my cellulite churning to reform itself.

It is not just a little bump, either. No. It is a straight on, full-contact body-check straight out of raucous-yet-executive game of deck hockey. I pray futilely that the the men will all pile on (or at least cheer) to make the moment less awkward.

If only.

Finally, my forward motion arrested mostly by utter mortification, I turn back to regard my partner. She is askew, as if I delivered said body check followed by a headlock/noogie combo.

Hers is the laugh of drops of water slicking off of an icicle.

“In a hurry?”

Scene.

(ps: Dear management: I redacted all of the names and sensitive information. And the mean parts. Particularly the word “bony,” which I had mistakenly used twice. So, please do not Dooce me. Thank you.)

No, Not I

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On the list of Arcati Crisis’s mutually favorite artists I don’t know that there’s a musician that debuted within our lifetimes ranked higher than Tracy Bonham.

Tracy’s was the second concert Gina and I saw together; the first was Presidents of the United States of America. Gina and I were possibly the first people into the TLA that night, because I remember standing almost directly in front of Tracy, pressed up against the barricade, Gina intently watching her fingers on every song.

At the end of that school year, Gina decided to audition for the school talent show, and the song she decided to play and sing was “Sharks Can’t Sleep.”

I had just starred in my first play, but at the time I didn’t play guitar. Or sing, for that matter. Yet, when Gina told me about the talent show, I had an unexpected reaction – I asked if I could sing with her.

Our friends were immediately skeptical about this – not only did I not sing, but I was at some point banned from singing entirely in the basement hallway where we all ate our lunch. Suffice to say, I was not experiencing widespread support for my sudden impetus to vocalize.

However, I did have one supporter: Gina. Gina brought in her guitar so I could practice, and gave me my own verse to sing.

As murky as some of the details of this story are, my memory of auditioning for the talent show committee is crystalline. We were seated in the corner of the band room, Gina and I and our friends Lucy and Joanna, who were singing harmony. When we got to my verse I shook like a leaf, but ever-so-carefully sang “Met a star today…”

Afterwards someone on the committee said, “I didn’t know he could sing.”

I don’t have any memory at all of being on stage at the talent show, although there are photos to prove that it occurred. What I do remember, and will always know, is that afterwards I – completely out of the blue – demanded that my mother buy my a guitar.

I’m sure I demanded a lot of things at the time, being a stubborn only-child teenager, but for some reason this particular demand was taken seriously. Within a week I had my clunky old Ashland guitar in my hands, and a guitar lesson once a week. I kept taking them until I learned the F sharp i needed for “Sharks Can’t Sleep” and never looked back.

Over ten years later it is both completely apropos and batshit crazy that I am playing guitar in a band with Gina, since I wouldn’t be playing or singing at all without that first nod of support.

This fall Tracy blogged about “Sharks Can’t Sleep.” (She also spent some time co-writing with Garrison Starr, which blows my mind, as Garrison is my #2 longest supported indie song-writer right after Tracy. Whatever song they wrote, it is surely the best song in the known universe.)

Last year Tracy stealthily released an acoustic disc, In The City + In The Woods. She also peppers her homepage with downloads of new demos, so I suggest you keep an eye out.

Happy birthday, Gina.

Imagine There’s No Heaven

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When I was in grade school a frequent topic of conversation and consternation was heaven.

As the Born Agains would have us believe, every thought we had or action we performed – from doing math to running on the playground to watching television at night – had a direct relationship to our eventual destination. Heaven. So, we ought to pay good attention to every decision we made, lest we get diverted from said destination, thus sharing the fate of the gays, Jews, catholics, &c.

It mostly seemed like bunk to me from the start – did god really care which version of the Our Father I recited, so long as I was still name-checking him? Or, to put a finer point on it, did he mind if I listened to a tape of the B-52’s Cosmic Thing on the bus to our field trip?

I didn’t think so, but my principal did. He, and the entire staff of the school, shared that same opinion about all popular music, which increasingly lead me to rebel in tiny ways, like asking if we could pray for Gloria Estefan when she had her big accident (“we don’t pray for those people”) and writing The Immaculate Collection as my favorite album in a survey for class (“it’s Conception, and it’s not an album, Peter” … “No, not this one”).

If you think you understand where they were coming from – that the B-52’s and Gloria Estefan and Madonna were actively sexual and inappropriate for grade school – then you’re only seeing a symptom of their insanity, rather than the depths to which it ran.

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I was a precocious reader, and by fourth grade I had exhausted the Nancy Drews and every other Young Adult novel in the school library. My mom, who was in danger of being run out of house and home by fueling my voracious reading habit with monthly trips to the book store and weekly trips to the library, decided I could start reading her books as long as she read them first to screen for anything truly inappropriate.

At the time my mother (and most of America, I suppose) was on a heavy Stephen King kick. All the classics – Pet Cemetery, It, The Stand, and every other one that wound up as a movie. Some of them she rightfully screened from me for a year or two, but others she passed along.

One was The Eyes of the Dragon, which was not horror so much as a dark fantasy. Or, at least that’s what I remember from the first 20-or-so pages, because after that it was snatched away from me (on yet another field trip) by a teacher.

“Where did you get this?”

“From my mother?”

“You shouldn’t steal books from your mother.”

“I didn’t steal it, she gave it to me to read on the bus.”

The teacher clearly did not believe me, but my mother – as always – came to my defense. “He’s a smart kid,” I imagine she argued, “and he needs stimulation.”

Of course, they couldn’t be trusted to trust my mother, and so I received long, personalized sermons from everyone from my teacher to the janitor about why reading Stephen King books was a bad idea. Why would I want to jeopardize my spot in heaven for some gory horror novel? It just didn’t make sense.

Well, they were at least right about that. Every time I thought I had them figured out they’d find a new way to paint me into a decidedly unheavenly corner. Reading fantasy books was frowned upon if the fantasy wasn’t directly derived from god. GI Joes were not an appropriate toy, because they had guns (nevermind that they all supported Iraq #1, and I’m sure Iraq #2 as well). And, AIDs was a plague the gays deserved, and anyone else who caught it was just collateral damage.

It was around the time of that last one that I decided I was definitely not going to be a Born Again Christian.

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So, yes, they talked a lot about heaven. Or, at least, a lot about getting into heaven. Not so much about heaven itself.

It seemed strange to me, that they were so focused on getting to a place they didn’t know much about. It seemed analogous to begging your mother to go to an amusement park without knowing how many loops the roller coasters had.

(Clearly my Stephen King reading had left me a little remedial in studying up on the concept of Faith.)

(Or, maybe I’m just not wired that way.)

Gradually, I started to make my own concept of heaven that would match all of the tedious effort they put into getting there.

The whole point of heaven, it seemed, was to be awesome. Clearly it was always blue-skied. All of the food would taste great. You would never have to sleep, and you could re-watch television shows you missed by mistake.

(Yes, heaven imported TiVo from the future. Heaven is that awesome.)

God, I decided, was sortof a hard-ass – what, with all the smiting and sending Jesus to pal around on Earth for three decades just to get himself killed. I mean, the “only begotten son” bit just didn’t ring true to me – god was definitely the same Old Testament hard-ass he always was, he just looked softer because he had a kid. I had seen the same thing on television.

God was effectively Gargamel – old, batty, mean, and chasing around little people who barely came up to his shin with a big club. But, in a wacky, non-threatening, recurringly eposodic way.

By contrast, Jesus was definitely John Lennon, walking around singing “Imagine” – or, if you asked very nicely, “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” It definitely put his “bigger than Jesus” comment into a particularly ironic light, I thought.

However, I determined that the greatest feature of heaven was that you would know everything anyone ever thought about you. Not in an intrusive way … just a tally. Like, Leah, the girl I had a crush on for four years, would be able to see every distinct time I thought about her. Or Victor, the bully, would be able to discern the times I feared him versus the times I just felt sorry for him.

It made a certain amount of sense to me; if you were going to spend the rest of your life mingling through the clouds, you ought to be on equal footing with each other.

(Slightly later I amended the list to include people being able to get a tally of how many times people thought of them while having an orgasm, with a second tally indicating how many times that was during an orgasm had with someone other than you.)

(In retrospect, that might not be the kind of thing you find out in heaven.)

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I still remember our last exchange with anyone on the staff in the sharpest possible focus. It was after our sixth grade end of year assembly, and we were all running around behind the stage drinking carbonated punch, which I claimed made me feel a little tipsy since I had never drank anything carbonated before in my life.

My mother was talking to the wife of the school’s principal, and as I ran past her I overhead this snippet of conversation…

Mom: “It would be nice if you held some events where they could just socialize together.”

Wife: “Oh, yes, that’s always nice.”

Mom: “Maybe even something like a dance.”

Wife: “A dance?”

Mom: “You know, with music? Around this age the kids in public schools and Catholic schools start to have dances.”

Wife: “Oh no. No. No no. We could never…”

I don’t remember anything else. Maybe I zoomed out of earshot, inebriated on bubbles. Or maybe my mother excused herself and ushered me out to the car. Either way, it was the last time I ever set foot in the building, or spoke to any of them other than my best friend Monica.

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I still dream about them sometimes, about the teachers and janitors and principal’s sons. Sometimes I dream that I am 10-years-old but still myself, desperately trying to escape their serpentine corridors without notice. Sometimes I dream that they invite me to a twentieth reunion and I try in vain to explain to them how they made me so hateful and distrustful of religion.

Sometimes I dream that they all wound up being gay, and that they each confessed to me in turn that they were afraid they would never get to heaven.

I really hope they all get to heaven, since their whole lives have been dedicated to the practice – to the exclusion of school dances, Stephen King novels, and Madonna albums.

I wonder if when they get there they’ll see how much time I’ve spent worrying about them.

I wonder if they’ll care.

How is it that we made it out to be so hard?

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IMG_3071Earlier this evening Gina and I spent some time watching a DVD of a performance of ours from 2004.

The experience was at once reassuring and horrific. Horrific because of the sheer terror of some of the choices we made on dynamics and harmony. Reassuring because the core of what we were doing four years ago – the good part – is identical to what we’ve been doing for the past thirteen months.

Bands, unfortunately, don’t come with an instruction book. Luckily, Gina and I are unshakeable friends with the same ridiculous sense of humor, so the interpersonal part hasn’t been difficult, and any stumbling blocks have been handled with aplomb. But, it’s taken a lot of trying to figure out how to run an effective rehearsal, or how to approach learning a new song, or how to salvage a floundering set, amongst a myriad of other difficulties.

(For the record, the former includes eating dinner first, and the second involves having multiple copies of printed lyrics on which we make constant, extensive notation in pencil. We haven’t completely figured out the third, but so far it would seem to involve playing “Pocahontas,” multiple times if necessary.)

I feel as though now that we’re in our second year of formal existence the training wheels on our band are slowly starting to disengage. Clearly we know how to write lead sheets and arrange harmony, or else we wouldn’t have made it this far with a pretty solid 16-song set. However, 2008 is already bringing more advanced trials – like booking our own gigs, and adding additional members to the ensemble.

We’re two unusual people, and we make an unusual pair of singer-songwriters. We sing an unusual collection of tunes ranging from unrequited longing to ruminations on the apocalypse, from vitriolic blasts to paeans to a semi-fictional communist outpost in Idaho. Neither of us knows a damn thing about what we’re doing, and we’re having a hell of a lot of fun doing it.

If there was an instruction book I’m not sure I’d read any of it.

(if you’re reading this on a feed, visit CK to hear the audio)
(also, be our friend)
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