Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Creative

The road flows like a river, and pulls me around every bend.

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I think that was a sufficient amount of time to bask, uninterrupted, in being a fiancé.

Much stuff is afoot in chez krisis, and not just our impending wedding. I have more to say on that topic than you could ever hope to consume in a single sitting, so I’ll be dragging the whole mess of it through National Blog Posting month, and beyond.

Okay, I’ll say one thing now: I love all the dire wedding warnings that come from every quarter when you first get engaged. I suppose it’s a cultural hazing thing? I just don’t get it. Each of our favorite weddings were relatively lacking in insanity and drama according to the various brides. Also, we’re both OCD project managers with the same taste in everything.

Right. Remind me to come back and read this post in about twelve months and see what I have to say about it.

If that was all that was happening it would be, oh, say, the most exciting time of my entire life. However, chattery on the topic of engagedness tends to eclipse the fact that there are also some other life events in motion, such as the massive behemoth of posts that is NaBloPoMo looming a mere two days away.

You should be comforted to know that I’ve drawn up a comprehensive content grid so I’m never lacking for post topic (see, OCD project managers). The challenge will be finding myself awake and at a computer long enough to do any posting.

Part of that challenge is that Gina and I (AKA Arcati Crisis) are playing a second trio of songs with a rhythm section on November 9th at the Rotunda, followed by multiple holiday performances, and moving through a half-hour set at Doc Watson’s in January (and, possibly another appearance at the Tin Angel), all of which results in plenty of rehearsals, both together and separately.

Oh, and the normal busyness, such as having four of my projects reviewed (and approved!) by our CEO over the last month, learning various exercises and arias for my weekly voice lessons, working up a communications plan for our homegrown music festival, and trying to drag my sorry ass out to East Falls every Thursday to play our favorite open mic.

And, last but certainly not least (though, what could really be least in this list?), I suddenly – and completely out of the blue, I assure you – can play piano. I’m still slow to learn actual pop songs, but I seem to have collected a modest enough palette of rhythms and riffs that I can bang through my own stuff with increasing ease and surprising variation, and I actually prefer some of it on keys to guitar strings. Imagine that!

Anyhow, that’s life, at the moment – full of activity, but paradoxically forcing me to take frequent naps in order to keep up with it.

How have you been?

Sorry, no Trio; have some Kelly instead. (SOTD #7)

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I spent the last four hours setting up for and recording a Trio, but the more I listen to it the more it sounds like a full dress rehearsal rather than an actual show.

Positives:
– Good setup; very clean sound
– Great performance of my new song
– Articulate between-song talks
– Bonus: Made it through a really hard cover for the first time, ever

Negatives:
– Brief audio skips from my FirePod (as many as three per song?)
– Blew my voice attempting a different (easier) cover; lead to lack of dynamics on (harder) cover
– Questionable rhythms on my old song; bad final note
– Bonus: Audio sync on my camera didn’t work

I’m trying to get away from being a crazy perfection freak, because that doesn’t lead to a high quantity of Trios. However, given the clarity of the audio the skipping is driving me crazy, and that’s enough of a reason to compound the other negatives into a redo. Freak or not, I want to be able to listen to Trio months from now without wincing (which was generally the bar I set for myself in Season 5, and it worked out nicely).

Also, I really wanted to do a video podcast of some portion of Trio in video, but my camera doesn’t seem to be up to the job. I can use Elise’s video camera, but that means waiting until she returns to the country, plus a few days (at least) to learn what to do.

So, sadly, I bring you no Trio. We’ll see how long it takes me to trouble-shoot the audio skips and work from there.

In the meantime, have a random recording from over the summer – “Chivas” (aka “Shivers”), by Kelly Clarkson, on baritone guitar. At the moment I have no idea what key I’ve transposed it to, but the chords in standard are A, F#m, C#m, E.

Endlessly Avoiding Perfection

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Heading East recently shared a theory that each artist has only a single great “story” inside of them waiting to be released. A particular quote really resonated:

Some artists escape by fashioning alternate versions of their story, never actually telling it perfectly, always leaving a bit of mystery in the center, always working their way around and around the one truth they know, but maybe these artists are doomed too as they will always fall short…

Though I don’t agree completely with the one-story-only theory, I do believe that each artist has a limited amount of ways to portray any single given archetype within their sphere of art, with each attempt a facet of a perfected portrayal. As alluded to in the quote, the artist has a choice (though not always a conscious one) of spending a lifetime drafting an incomplete version of their truth, or of crafting one version that is crystalline in its perfection.

I certainly feel that way about songwriting. I used to specialize in a particularly jilted sort of breakup song that I spent most of my time writing and re-writing. Suddenly, early in 2005 i wrote “Regrets,” and I was suddenly no longer bound to tap and retap that archetype for my material. Since then my songs have expressed a much wider array of emotions – I freed myself by closing a door on a particular story.

Penning that perfect story is a frightening concept; what if you finish it too soon? What if you don’t have any other important stories to tell? Yet, as daunting as those questions are, if you let them handicap your creativity you’ll never attain that perfect story. And that means you’ll never get to try your hand at its sequel.

Illuminated Pickups, et cetera

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(1) Elise bought me a gift certificate for a pickup replacement on my primary electric guitar as a birthday gift, which is perfect timing, as Gina and I were already plotting on evolving Arcati Crisis into the electric realm over the course of the next few months.

My guitar is an Epiphone copy of a Gibson 335, and after several years of playing it and digesting online reviews it would seem that the only non-esoteric detail separating my guitar from the equivalent Gibson is the style/tone of the pickups (and also the nut).

My original birthday gift plan was to outfit my guitar exactly like a brand-new 335 – with two Gibson 57 Classic humbuckers. However, at Arcati Crisis’s Tin Angel gig I got into a conversation with our friend Chris about the possibility of buying two different types of pickups so my neck tone is differentiated from bridge.

And, um, I am not quite rock enough to know anything else about this life-altering decision.

I spent a few days researching my various indie-rock heroes, but none of them has a distinct enough setup for me to emulate. Also, I can’t turn up anything on the guitar rig of Garbage ax-slinger Duke Erickson (he being ostensibly the reason I bought this particular guitar in the first place). However, I did locate the eminently informative Guitar Player Gear Guide blog.

Do any of you wonderful people know anything about this? I have to drop my guitar off at the store on Saturday if I have any hope of getting it back before the next Arcati Crisis gig.

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(2) I want a WordPress plugin that will insert illustrated initial letters into my posts, both automatically and on-demand. Bonus points if they are illuminated.

I know enough PHP to be a minor threat when it comes to WordPress, but this particular concept is out of my realm because it involves live rejiggering of text as its being called out of the ether of my database.

Anyone?

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(3a) After an inexplicable one week delay the new PJ Harvey disc, White Chalk, came out yesterday. It’s been billed as PJ’s piano album, but that only tells a fraction of the story. It’s really more like her indie, piano-based, acoustic, English-Appalachian folk record. Sort of. Full review forthcoming.

(3b) Also inexplicable: Bruce Springsteen‘s lead single (“Radio Nowhere“) is one of the catchiest songs I’ve heard in months, and the production is all tight and sparkly and curiously “Since U Been Gone” sounding.

A quick sample spin through the rest of his newly released Magic yields similar results on at least three others songs, leading me to (for the first time ever) want to buy a Bruce Springsteen CD in a bad way. But, then I’m like, dude, you so do not like Bruce in any way, shape, or form. In my youth he was relegated to my mother’s forbidden trinity of vocal idiosyncrasies – Bruce, Bob, and Neil.

Even having disposed of a few of those systematically programmed prejudices (e.g., I do not ridiculously eschew middle Beatles) I can’t seem to succumb to the Magic of Asbury Park’s favorite son. I even tried paying for a copy with Elise’s credit card to try to alleviate some of the hard-coded guilt, but I couldn’t bring myself to go through with it.

Maybe if i just buy it track by track from iTunes I can avoid any imperative towards self-immolation my mother may have embedded in my unconscious psyche in my infancy through a series of flash cards.

(3c) OMG, I forgot to mention the best part of last week’s happy (six) hour(s): Melon is going to go to the Kelly Clarkson concert with me. Oh yessss.

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(End Note) Not only does me + Gina = awesome rock stars, but as of a few minutes ago I completed the first draft of a standard notation transcription of one of our songs, complete with guitar tabs and harmony.

I cannot express to you the undue amount of excitement this is causing me, a major sheet music fetishist.

Sheet music! Of our song! Necessary because we forgot how to play it!

(Or, more accurately, because we recorded it in one night for SongFight, so it never really existed as a song that we could play together in a physical space (though I believe we once attempted it at a Lyndzapalooza).)

Alright, enough chatter.

My Favorite Trio Tracks: #1 – Up & Down / So Hard (from Trio Season 3, #5)

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My favorite Trio tracks have documented many memorable musical moments from 2000 to 2004. Songs made their debut, found their fans, and were gradually refined or radically transformed.

However, sometimes the best part of Trio is playing a song – old or new, well known or obscure – and playing it very, very well. This became my mission throughout all of Season 5, with outstanding results, but up until then a specific pair of Season 3 tunes were the best example.

I remember very specifically burning them to CD and listening to them on the train ride to Elise’s house, and as soon as I arrived pushing the disc into her stereo, ignoring that one of the tunes was a touch explicit and Elise’s 10 year old brother was sitting on the floor playing video games. Not to mention that the cover in the middle of the two songs was “Untouchable Face.”

(Little did I suspect that years later I’d take him to a Dresden Dolls concert where backup dancers would pantomime giving each other back alley abortions, alternating the Charleston with pulling doll parts out from under their dresses. That made me feel so much better about blasting “Untouchable Face” in his living room.)

Check out “Up & Down” and the debut of “So Hard” from Trio Season 3, #5. And, tune in next week for the first Trio of Season 6.