Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

my music

Weary, but without wedding woes.

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I am profoundly tired.

The day that preceded that condition included some crazy legwork at the office, as well as three hours of hosting LP’s new Wednesday night open mic @ Intermezzo at 31st and Walnut.

However, the root cause of the weariness extends back several days, during which I have been trying to squeeze in more content than a day can hold. Much of that content has been wedding-related.

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A year ago I said,

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.

Well, I’m back a week shy of one year later to report that I still agree with that sentiment. Maybe you should ask me again in two more months.

In the past year I’ve discovered that weddings don’t have to be difficult projects filled with temper tantrums. We’ve certainly had some stressful moments, and we’ve argued and disagreed over a few things. I’m sure that’s true for every couple, no matter how in-sync they are. Yet, on the whole the entire planning process has been … well, mostly just fun.

It helps that we’re both OCD project managers with experience in communications and event planning. Elise methodically steers the critical path of our overall project plan, and I own a subset of tasks – one of which recently resulted in booking the fantastic Alexandra Day to play our cocktail reception. Anything that deviates from the plan is addressed or eliminated. Several cagey or uncooperative vendors have been jettisoned prior to signing a contract. All four sets of parents have been supportive and barely meddlesome. Whenever we get stuck we ask our parties for advice; they have solved every problem we’ve come up with so far.

The past week has been especially active because we mailed our invites on Monday. They are definitely amongst the top five most awesome wedding invites I have ever laid hands or eyes on. Not coincidentally, all five invites on my most-awesome list were at least partially self-designed and hand-made, with every aspect of their formats customized to the personality of the couple.

Elise and I started discussing our ideas for invites as early as January. At the time our wedding was still fresh news, rendering it the lead-in topic of every conversation. Since invites were one of the few things already underway I was eager to talk about our ideas to everyone. Surprisingly, I heard a handful of puzzlingly dismissive comments, usually along the lines of the following:

Me: “… and, we’re designing and producing our invites by ourselves!”

Them: “Oh, I guess you’re trying to cut costs, huh?”

Me: “Not really. We both do similar projects all day at work; we thought it would be fun to do one together.”

Them: “Yeah, sure, it’s neat when people find a way save money on their wedding.”

Me: “Actually, it’s more about designing exactly what we want.”

Them: “Yeah, sure, and you can do it really cheaply that way.”

Me: “I don’t think we’ll save very much. It’s just that we’ll have control over the quality.”

Them: “Yeah, sure, but they won’t be as nice as invites you buy out of a book.”

Me: “Um… [bangs head against the counter]”

Ultimately we did save some money on materials compared to “customized” wedding invites available from a book or online. But, that wasn’t the point, and it isn’t even a fair comparison. The definition of “custom” in commercially produced invitations is vastly different from our own, which features unique text and layout, high-end specialty paper, a bevy of custom shapes and die-cuts, and hand-embossing.

To get a better sense of how “cheap” our invites really were, I sought out a more realistic comparison. I showed a final invite to one of the senior designers at work and asked her to quote what she would charge to produce them as a freelance project.

Once she was done calling in other members of her team to marvel at our amazing paper, she conservatively estimated that she would have charged at least $700 for the design (not including costs for comps), $500 or more for the time Elise spent on hand-assembly (some of which she would have sent to a vendor for digital die-cut), and a 10-15% markup on our material costs. And, that doesn’t account for our hours of debate over colors, paper weights, fonts, and content, or our extensive usability testing with a series of prototypes,

Essentially, Elise put in the commercial equivalent of more than $1200 worth of woman-power into our invites. If you also factor in her material costs, we just sent out a fleet of invites valued at over $21 a piece, not including postage. And that’s the conservative estimate.

I haven’t done too much market research, but I don’t think that’s very “cheap” in comparison with the industry average, no matter what your definition of “custom.”

I think that even the cost-cutting crowd from above would appreciate all of the effort … if they received an invite. Which they didn’t. Why? Because I cut their rude asses from the guest list months ago … even before we paid for venues, meals, and dresses they were more interested in how much our wedding cost than in how much it was about us.

(Aside from that alteration, our final guest list was nearly identical to the list we originally drafted a year ago this week. Again, why does this cause people stress? It’s pretty simple. First, when you get engaged write out a list of all of the people who you might like to see when you get married, as well as those who want to see you when you get married – not because they expect to be invited or because they are calculating the tab in their heads, but because they care about you. (If you are me you will supply a draft of this list along with the engagement ring.) Then, check with your parents and close friends to see if you forgot anyone important (and by important I mean important to you). Next, stratify your full list in some way – like, small-wedding vs. large-wedding, must-invite vs. should-invite, A-B-C-D lists, 80/20 rule, or whatever. Once you have established a budget and looked at some venues it will be clear which version of that stratified list you can afford to invite. Finally, send invites to those people. The end. If that means you wound up cutting a cousin in favor of a co-worker, so be it. Life goes on.)

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As part of the invite process Elise built a staggeringly detailed web site that matches the overall look of our wedding “campaign,” and on it she placed the first three entries in my series of ten engagement posts.

Seeing as the wedding quickly approaches, I’m thinking I should write the other seven in pretty short order.

And rent a tuxedo. And buy my wedding band.

And go to sleep.

Arcati Crisis Upstairs@Zot

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Last night Arcati Crisis played our first true headlining set inside of the Philadelphia city limits, in a fantastic space upstairs from Zot Restaurant, sharing the bill with our good friends Lindsay Wilhelmi, Andra Taylor, and Nate Dodge.

In my increasingly frequent travels in the Philly music scene I often feel like an amateur, and in open-miking I still am. There are Philly artists who have honed the art of open mike to a fine, fine point, and are able to score kudos from a crowd of strangers on every outing.

I’m not that. But, I am a communications professional, a project manager, a Lyndzapalooza organizer, and a reformed amateur theatre junkie, and I brought all of those experiences to bear on what turned out to be an amazing show. I designed the flyers, I worked with all of the performers come to a consensus on our schedule, I provided a sound system in a pinch, and I refocused lights and worked the crowd throughout the night.

I don’t mean that to sound like I take credit for our night, because if I had done all of that of that for a four-hour solo Peter show I wouldn’t have garnered nearly the same amount of support or success. Just as there’s something magical about the harmony of Arcati Crisis, there was something special about sharing a real bill with Lindsay after how hard we’ve worked on our music together over the years, and about sharing a stage with our new friends Andra and Nate, who energize and inspire us with every performance.

Would the flyers have been as cool if I hadn’t been designing on their behalf? Would the schedule have been so intuitive without their brains? Would the PA have been worth carrying up the stairs without Lindsay to strike a balance on the initial mix? Would the lights be worth refocusing without a bill of compelling performers to watch?

I can’t take credit for combining the four of us – to that we owe our thanks to David Simons of Five Year Plan Entertainment, who gave us all the chance to be heard, and to be heard together. It was a rare bill where I could cross-promote every artist with the confidence that our audiences would seamlessly overlap.

My dad arrived to the show early and held court at the bar for the duration, and every time I stopped by he was ready with a polite litany of ways we could improve for our next show. We need a bigger board with an off-board equalizer, and maybe a compressor. Sandbags for the bottom of mic stands. Better eye-lines. Performers closer to the audience. Stop by ahead of time to check out the lighting situation.

If you’ve followed my history with my father at all, you know that it’s rare for us to find an intersection of interests, and it was fascinating to hear him so effortlessly detail all of the credible, tangible ways we could improve for our next show.

At one point in the conversation I interjected.

“Dad, we will do everything you just said. But, realize that it used to be that we had no mic stands to even sing into, so I bought those. And then we didn’t have mics that were good for Gina and I, so I bought those. Then Lyndzapalooza needed a PA system, so I bought that. And, Gina and I couldn’t get anyone to pay attention to us without quality recordings, so I bought a digital recording interface and spent the last year mixing and burning demos.”

My point was well-taken, just as his was by me: success requires steady progress; milestones require constant motion.

It was a year ago today that Arcati Crisis made our Philadelphia debut at the Tin Angel, playing three newly learned songs in a brief set during a lineup of almost a dozen other performers – mostly strangers. As great as that felt, and as inspiring as the support from friends and family was, I don’t think we could have imagined that a single year later we would be playing for five times that long to twice as many of our dearest supporters on a bill of talented friends.

I am truly blessed to be a part of a community that continues to support the evolution of our music. I will continue to do everything within my power to make sure it gets heard.

Arcati Crisis invades Saxbys Abington

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We just returned and unloaded from an Arcati Crisis show at Saxbys Abington, and my head is a jumble of thoughts.

I originally attributed the the jumble to the caffeine. We’ve discovered through reckless experimentation that every drink they make at Saxbys is at least twice as caffeinated as what you’d find at any other coffee shop.

That said, I’ve also been beset by fall allergies, and earlier took an allergy medication with pseudoephedrine for the first time in years. I had forgotten until just now that for the first few days it makes me feel hollow, anorexic, and on speed. (Indeed, it is a precursor in the illicit synthesis of methamphetamine.)

So, yes, clearly a jumble.

Foremost in the jumble is that we had the privilege to share a bill with Becca Marlee, a hyper-talented 13-year-old who writes amazing pop hooks and dishes them out effortlessly on her gorgeous Larrivee guitar. Even though we played the longer sets Becca was really headlining – she absolutely packed the shop with her friends and kept everyone (including us and our guests) riveted. We told her we’d be happy to open for her any time, and we really meant it!

Second is that, despite some fumbles on my part due to my jumble of speediness, we felt really good about our performance. It used to be that we’d leave a show armed with a withering critique of every song, but tonight we were confident and in fine voice. We only repeated three originals across 100+ minutes of playing, and debuted three songs – our totally new covers of “Video Killed the Radio Star” (awesome) and “Hunger Strike” (needs some fine-tuning), as well as the first-ever Arcati Crisis performance of my “Love Me Love Me Not.”

The latter was the best feeling in the world. Gina is not only my best friend and best lady, but the person who taught me to love playing guitar. Whenever I write a song that I’m really obsessed with my number one ambition is to hear what Gina would bring to it, and now that Arcati Crisis is a real band I’ve experienced that four times over. Even after hearing a single rough-around-the-edges version of “Love Me Not” I’d say it’s the best result yet, especially since the song is so meaningful to me personally. I’m trembling with excitement to play it again.

Or, actually, that’s probably the speed talking. Still, a feeling I’ll never forget.

In addition to Becca’s attentive crowd we brought a trio of ever-dedicated local fans and two friends from high school we’ve recently reconnected with. Plus our core Saxbys crowd of three young girls who keep coming back, mostly because at our first outing we promised to learn a Jonas Brothers song for them and delivered mightily upon our return.

I had since forgotten the song – “Australia” – which they were upset about. One of them asked me point-blank – “do you like the Jonas Brothers?,” and I responded with a lengthy monologue about the subtle subversiveness of repackaging the Beatles and Elvis Costello as a teen pop phenomenon. To which she replied, “but, you like them, right?”

Later I managed to medley “Australia” into “Under My Skin,” which Gina and I thought was hilarious. The girls were not as impressed, and were generally displeased that I hadn’t brought fiancee with me (they adore her).

“Where is she?”

“At work, I think.”

“This late? What does she do?”

“Build websites”

Collectively: “Oooooo. Cool.”

(Apparently I made a misstep by telling one of them that she looks like Lindsay Lohan. “Eww. She’s weird,” was the response. Apparently I am so three years ago, and should have said Hanna Montana instead? I think she’s weird.)

There was also table of older teenagers who had solid taste in music. As the night progressed they shouted over a dozen great requests, including classic folk from Joni Mitchell to Bob Dylan to Donovan, the latter of which Gina merrily provided. They also danced around to “Galileo,” let me play an Ani song, and totally dug our verbatim cover of “Space Oddity,” which too often goes unappreciated.

We were so impressed with them that we took down their emails so we could quiz them at length for new covers.

That’s about all I have to say about the show at the moment. As I’ve been unjumbling I opened our MySpace to find an intriguing invite to play a show later this month that I need to follow up on ASAP.

More news as it breaks…

Taking The Dive

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Last night Gina and I were completely out-of-sorts, which lead to not one of our more productive rehearsals ever, except for it seems like whenever we have one of those “Real End” is impossibly great. Probably because it’s our oldest tune.

(Actually, en route an LP meeting last week I discovered that Gina has a Blogathon 2001 best-of disc in her car, which is the only existing high fidelity copy of all of those songs, including the first ever demo of Real End. Which is kinda awesome. Like, it doesn’t sound like us – it’s got a borderline indie-rock awfulness to it but it still totally holds together. I think if we still sounded like that people would like us better.)

In any event, the point of this post is that after our incredibly unfocused rehearsal we walked a few blocks over to The Dive to open for our new band-friend Kursten Bouton.

It was an interesting excursion. The Dive is, in fact, a dive. It’s essentially a South Philly row home that happens to be a bar.

We were in the upstairs, a tiny triangle of a room fronted with an abbreviated bar and terminating in a stack of huge speakers and a strange, little, wooden sidecar of a room containing an awesome, old, 16-channel board with wooden trim that I had way too much fun with. The mics and stands were a little suspect, though, and if we ever head back there I’ll probably bring my own.

Despite a relative lack of audience we had a good time hanging out with Kursten again and hearing even more of her repertoire (though my favorite pair is still “Don’t Surrender” and “Polaroid Migration”). After a few songs of intro I talked Kursten into doing an Ani song with me, and in a pinch we belted out “Gravel.” Afterwards AC played a solid 45 minute set, ending with a comfortably loungy rendition of “Noncommittal.”

Pretty fun, but mostly because of Kursten. The Dive is a cool bar to have in the neighborhood, but I’m not sure if I’d head out there just for the open mic when I could hit South Street instead.