Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

my music

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Yesterday was impossibly full… two or three different days all slipped deceptively into the packaging of one. Shopping turned into lunch, which turned into a deep conversation about what made me who i am, which turned into a concert for my mom that ended with a concert that pulled out notes and chords from places i’ve never been before. That was one day… happy deep family day. Then there was my day to myself, with guitar and internet and music and napping and food. And, then, came my day with friends, which typically started out happy and fun and quickly descended into misery. I’m usually introverted enough towards the middle and end of big parties, but this time i had headphones with me so i just turned on the good bits and let everyone at the party do their miserable little social dance to the sounds between my ears. Eventually i got tired of waiting for the people i wanted to be with (the story of my life) and i went out on the front step and turned it up all the way until finally i set off for the apartment.

So many blogging things happened in there… things i’ll have to say eventually for me to make more sense. Somehow i explained to my mother exactly why i like to be thin and why i like the girls who i like and why i have to be successful at something and she understood it all with this wane little smile and tears welling in her eyes. I can’t imagine what it must have been like seeing me from the outside… i wanted to thank her for everything and so when she asked me to play “under my skin” i shut my eyes and opened up and poured things into it that she had never even heard before, and afterwards she sortof just stared at me and i was just sweating and breathing and smiling because somehow i opened the song up again just when i thought i had used it all up.


It’s hard to quantify 20 years in any kind of way, but somewhere in between my nearly mathematical proof that i’ve never had a male role model before Peter Mulvey and my gut-wrenching concert i think i was having a happy birthday. The only happy one out of the three.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5862553/

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I haven’t been saying much about my songwriting lately other than my notoriously weepy comments of last week, and i’m not sure if it’s because i haven’t had anything to say or if it’s because i have too many things. While i am still in an intake phase, it is slowly giving way to some tiny forms of output … guitar riffs and quickly scribbled verses that are slowly coming together as my new songs. One thing that is entirely clear is that i am once again lacking in an emotional center to orbit around in my writing (which is almost amusing, since between that post and now i had a long period of only having a center and not too much else). I think the new songs are frightening me a little bit because they are actually doing things i’ve been wanting songs to do for a while… using different types of chords and strumming, narrating differently, being about the same feelings but from different angles.


The reason i mention this at all is because i was bored on Saturday and decided to make a list of songs that either just missed being on Relief or were written since then. The list quickly grew to over 30 songs, and as of this morning the current final tally seems to be 44. I’d point out (as always) that easily half of those songs are only half-decent and that i might never take the time to make them decent (or better). But, anyway, click if you’re interested in titles:
[Album Songs][All Songs]

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5742112/

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This morning i was walking down Walnut street listening to The Green Album and “Hash Pipe” came on and i swear i just started crying right in the middle of the intersection of 39th and Walnut.

For those of you not familiar with Weezer’s vast musical catalogue, “Hash Pipe” isn’t a very sad song. In fact, it’s a song that for all intents and purposes is an emotional flatline; it hardly makes narrative sense to begin with, let alone exuding any sort of sentiment. Yet, there i was in the middle of the street at eight thirty five in my Drexel polo shirt shedding tears (and probably being the laughing stock of every Penn student that passed me on their way to class).

Although i’ve always liked Weezer i was never really a “fan” due to that fact that the band is all boys, and i was only into girls. However, last year Gina and I inexplicably were able to obtain tickets to their sold out warmup show in Philly, and to honor the occasion i bought their eponymous album so i could refresh my memory of their most famous songs. For the vast majority of the intervening year i was happy to sit and listen to the familiar blue album, and to sing it at parties and appreciate it as classic modern alternative rock, if there is such a thing.

I bought Pinkerton for Gina years ago when it had just come out, but i had never really listened to the album all the way through. As a result the only songs i really knew “El Scorcho,” “Good Life,” and “Pink Triangle.” With the impending release of Weezer’s 2001 disc i began searching for Pink only to discover that it was nearly impossible to find… chain stores were out of stock and Weezer is virtually nonexistent in Philly used cd stores. Finally i broke down and ordered from Cheap-Cds. It came in on a quiet day in admissions; i put it on and it sounded nice.

At some point the album came home with me and was left indefinitely in my stereo and the songs started seeping into the nooks and crannies of my brain as the disc spun and spun again on repeat. By the beginning of June i had decided that Pinkerton was the answer to Ani DiFranco’s Dilate: wronged, raw, desperate, sexual, and loud (not to mention self-produced). Suddenly i found myself with a relationship album that i could actually identify with – frustration and breaking it off from the boys’ point of view.

Back to this morning. There i was crying in the middle of the street trying to sniffle away my tears or pass them off as an allergy attack. And i found myself wondering: “Why didn’t i cry yesterday when i was listening to Pinkerton?”

The answer is not an easy thing to nail down. At some point during my identification with Weezer’s second album i decided that it was something that i should be able to do… it was something that i should be able to sonically and emotionally recreate in my own fashion. In the virtually listenerless vacuum that my music exists in i should be able to have those songs and to create that sort of sonic equivalent to an open wound.

Some people just identify with an album because they can chill to it, or because some of the lyrics seem to apply to their life. When i identify with music it suddenly becomes a part of my own catalogue, with each song potentially mated with one of my own as a fluid a-side and b-side or as the ebb and flow of a live performance. There are plenty of albums that i like and love, but if i don’t picture myself onstage singing the songs they are not works that i have a large personal overlap with; i just dig the music. Whereas i typically make mismatched or gender-bending pairings between myself and other artists, with Weezer there are songs that are truly twins of my own progeny, separated only by the physical age and emotional distance between Rivers Cuomo and I.

My bitter pairing of “Splinter” & “Hold On Me” is just a weary attempt to escape from someone else’s bed, while “Tired of Sex” laments that being stuck there doesn’t do one much good in the end. “Unstrung” shares its broken heart and strings with “Falling For You.” “Over You” plays with the pushing/pulling gravity of an imploding relationship, but it cannot admit to enjoying the pull the way “Getchoo” does. “Up & Down” is the culmination of the emotions… the breaking point that nothing on Weezer’s album ever gets to but everything seems to inexorably lean towards. My songs aren’t as mature as Rivers’, and it shows in that i am so focused on the breaking while he is focused on the emotions on either side of it. “No Second Chance” laments a relationship that fell apart without ever directly identifying the person its addressing; its mirror is the tangled web between “Across the Sea,” “El Scorcho,” and the mournful “Butterfly” – songs that are more concerned with lusting, liking, and losing rather than just with the snap of a heart torn in two. Each song in that trio is tied into someone and their life more than i’ve allowed any of my songs to be with the possible exception of “Up & Down.”

Or, maybe i’m full of it and i get off on comparing my meager songwriter existence to today’s darlings of rock. I am by no means a great fan of Weezer’s new disc, but today on the street the oohs and claps of “Photograph” were sucked backwards into feedback and out came “Hash Pipe” and i unexpectedly felt that sudden tug of identification. It felt as though i was watching a video of myself after i write my Pinkerton (or my Dilate) as a cohesive album and then casually discard it to move onto crunchier guitars and more fun. “Hash Pipe” is Weezer taking itself less seriously as a band but more seriously as a production. I have yet to let go of the emotions of “Under My Skin,” and i am still writing from the trailing emotions of this year’s wounds… when will i ever be able to tie them up neatly, package them, and then move on to write something that will in its own way supersede them all?

Heaven only knows. Until then i suppose we can just blame my allergies…

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5604037/

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With me there are intake phases, and output phases. They connect to everything. With writing music i will have a strong output stage where i’m not listening or learning anything unless i’m using it to directly focus back into my output of new songs and covers and things. The same goes for writing on the internet, or working on my webpage, or anything that could be construed as creative work. However, usually they don’t all line up. When i was busy writing new songs i wasn’t really in webdesign output-mode because i wouldn’t have the time to do both. But, somehow last month it all lined up over the course of the two or three days around the BlogAThon, which means now i’m all switched over to input and can hardly create anything. No designs, no new music, and it’s like pulling teeth to get me to blog something.


The more interesting switch that had been flicked somewhere along the way is the one where i used to be able to blog about anything, or nothing… especially nothing, but now i need some sort of inspiration or subject or hard kick in the pants to get me into this tiny white box. That switch was a gradual thing, and you can watch it happen if you read any length of the archives. The only thing is… it wasn’t really intentional, and i don’t think this spareness really represents what i meant to be doing, but neither did the constant rush of new post after new post with no respect for the ones that were scrolling off of the bottom of the page. Of course, my spareness obviously connects a little bit to my lack of output, but it makes me wonder where in the middle of my fifty three archived weeks i reached equilibrium, and how far back i have to track to get back to it.

Yeah, fifty three, i just counted. Because of weird archive-week math that doesn’t mean that i’ve really been here for an entire year, but we are six days away. Wow.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5174847/

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Of course, becoming someone is a two way street. When someone gets famous and says “some school rejected me and it changed my life” to some random interviewer, ten different thoughts shoot out in ten different directions depending on who the reader is. The most basic reaction is probably something akin to “wow, they got rejected by school. I’m shocked!”

What follows is the part that matters… is it more important that the school is that much more prestigious for turning down your favourite actor or singer, or is the school pathetic and shallow for not seeing their potential when it had been so obvious?

The thing with me was that nothing was obvious. I somehow had the idea that i could trump everyone else’s comparable scores with a slew of activities like acting and writing and volunteering, and while schools do claim to care a lot about all of that but they honestly don’t really seem to mind either way. Unless you’re submitting a portfolio, they like to hear about competing, and winning – not showcasing and performing … unless you were winning while doing that.

I was a special challenge because i was undecided about my academic major when i was applying to colleges, which was surely one of the biggest strikes against me. At Drexel, we invite undecided students to apply. We encourage it. We can help them work it out. But, some schools have no use for the indecisive, and would only take them if they’ve proved themself to be a potential nobel prize winner no matter what they major in. So, honestly, i would have had a shot at splitting my rejections in half if i had just arbitrarily picked English or Literature as my major. But, i didn’t. Oops.

The thing with me is, i’m inconsistent. I mean, i have 10 simultaneous projects up in the air at any given time, none of which are ever really getting finished or resolved. In high school, this translated into a hodge-podge of activities and B+’s instead of A’s. In retrospect, i don’t think i did anything before the age of 13 or 14 that had any definitive effect on my academic future. What it comes down to is that i need something to light a fire under me before i can be excited about anything, and back then the only things i had really were comic books and video games and reading books and nothing serious and enjoyable. As it is now I need PuppetMaster or 25/24 or taking the minutes at a big admissions meeting to light a fire under me. to keep me motivated.

However, now i have the weak excuse of passing these fires off as my continuing exploits in DIY journalism. If i didn’t have this to refer to as my way of honing my writing skills and narrative voice, what the hell would i be doing with my free time? I’m very jealous of you science types that can quantify what they’re learning and their goals so clearly. I just need to have an enthusiasm for something, and at the beginning of this Summer i said i’d ditch my guitar if i didn’t start playing this summer – for people in places other than my apartment – and i played a few times. But, it took up no effort on my part, so the guitar is getting tossed in the backseat. I have songs and voice and image but i have no drive or fire, and i don’t have anyone else to light one for me because hardly anyone else has heard these songs because i never play them because i obviously don’t have enough attention to pay to it unless i combine it with things on the internet. 25/24 was a rousing success for me even if i find the singing hideous and unlistenable; even if i somehow still haven’t finished the Best-Of CD because i keep pulling “bad” songs off of it and putting “good” songs on. But, i have failed my guitar and i feel like suddenly our little interlude has ended, and so now it is just another tool … a weapon if i hold it right.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5119833/