Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

under my skin

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As for resolution… in seventh grade i resolved to be attractive. I was going to pay more attention to what i was wearing and how i brushed my hair, and i was going to make an effort to talk to the girls i liked. I could make it happen. I resolved to make it happen.

Six years later i had my first kiss.

You can’t really resolve to do anything except for those things so explicitly under your own power that you could and should be doing them anyway. I would resolve to see my friends more, or to cook more, or to be more organized … except all three of those things got under way well before the drop of the ball because i realized how easy it would be for me to do them. Other resolutions are less finite… losing weight, seeking out a meaningful relationship, or getting straight A’s. I’d love to do any or all of those things, but they’re circumstantial — i can try my darndest to accomplish them with nary a result if the fates don’t intend it to happen.

So, what am i resolving to do, you might wonder? The only thing i can responsibly resolve to: resolving. I can’t promise myself to make anything happen that isn’t directly within my own power, and i’ve already began to work on things about myself that i’d like to change, so all that is left is to make an attempt to be at peace with all of those nasty circumstances i brought up in my last post so that i can face the new year fresh and ready for anything.

I’ll be sure to let you know how it turns out…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/01/8337271/

Trio: Season 2, #6

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Season 2’s Trio #6 came from an unexpected place; i meant to do some sort of fun event with my newly reclaimed 1960 electric hollow-bodied guitar this weekend but had the bad fortune of losing a solid half of my upper vocal register to the various parties i attended. Tonight i sat down to Trio a new trio of songs and found myself utterly disconnected from all three of them… they were in the wrong range, not the right sort of aggression, and not really what i was feeling. And, so, 4 days of careful planning got the flush as i dropped a D and raised a C, and suddenly i found myself smack in the middle of an unusual fifteen minutes.

I had a similar experience with Trio #5 last fall, where i was too stuck to do anything but meander my way through a familiar group of songs. The difference was that here i was actually reinventing with force rather than meandering aimlessly, and having fun in the process. “Lost” was awarded an extra refrain so it could mold itself to the year and a half since i wrote it, and ends in a mock thrash; “Crashing” akin to its beginnings on my bedroom floor, emerging with the most spectacular ad-lib section i’ve ever mustered (short of when it unexpectedly broke into “Say My Name” last summer); “Under My Skin” was classically playful and free — i even venture into a superbly flat falsetto at the close of the song. Electricity and fun are somewhat unusual feelings for me, but tonight they clicked.

Very unusual. Especially the electricity. Give this a listen… what sounds different to you?

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So, we’ve established how pretty much everyone i know has heard “Under My Skin,” right? And, why not? It’s cute, it bops, it’s got some background vocals, and i’m singing it like i mean it (because i do). Tonight as i took a quick scroll through my lyrics folder i had to remind myself that there was life before “Under My Skin,” and that life included writing and singing and playing guitar just as much as this one does. There is one song more representative of that than any other, and that is “Touch.”


Life was on a smaller scale when it came to my guitar Senior Year… writing a good song sometimes meant that three or four people might hear it ringing out against the tile of the basement hallway, and “Touch” was my relative success. With it’s nonexistent nonsense lyrics that were practically ad-libbed every time and it’s chiming verses that spun out to the simplest of choruses, “Touch” was just about the utmost of what i could offer, and hardly anyone knew about it. Three years ago this week a mere handful of people had heard it, and two years ago the number had only improved by another couple handfuls. And, now, this once-stalwart of my collection is buried under dozens of songs that i like more with little hope of anyone ever really getting to appreciate it. My life is weird that way… hits rise and fall in my own mind. The chances of “Under My Skin” making a repeat appearance on my next demo recording are slim to none, which means a year or two from now even it’s listening public of over a hundred people will (hopefully) pale in comparison to what songs like “Excuse” or “Tangling” will know.

Radiohead mostly stopped playing “Creep” after everyone screamed for it at every show, and at last month’s Ani DiFranco concert the oldest song she played was from her fifth album. Point being, not even fame necessarily cures the case of lost songs because they are either “Under My Skin” or “Touch” — you’re sick of them, or have too many other songs crowding them out.

And, so, i am almost afraid to write down what i feel, because it will have a life so much shorter than mine despite my attempts to immortalize it. I sang “Touch” tonight because it had somehow slipped through the cracks of Trio for over a year despite its only being two years old last fall. I wonder if it’ll ever appear again…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7053722/

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Somewhere in my Communications Theory book it says something to the effect of art introduces a new or original way of looking at life. Right.


I have been having some fussy bitchy unjustified issues with Laurel lately. Don’t ask me why, because there is no why; any issue i ever have with Laurel exists entirely inside of my own head. But, anyway, the first day she got back i just got this vibe from her that Laurel Had Returned and that i had gotten shuffled way down to the bottom of the deck from where i had been before she left. And, why not? Laurel is the pretty one, the talented one, the intelligent one, the castable one. Of course, i never saw it that way at first; all i knew was that i had a dream where we kissed and that it didn’t seem like such an awful idea.

Two years later, the situation is more tangled in my head, and who knows what the situation is like in hers. Tonight when we started talking in our production class all the petty resentment i was starting to build quickly faded out because face to face there was nothing… only things i had created and surmised.

Before tonight’s round of auditions Laurel gave me a ride to my house, and while we were there i played her some songs … two she already knew and three i wrote while she was away. Sometimes i question whether or not anything i do is vaguely artistic by anyone’s definition let alone by the one i mentioned at the top of the post, and today while i was playing songs for Laurel i was playing all my usual games … glancing up and away, shutting my eyes, carefully watching my picking even though i surely know the patterns tried and true. When i inevitably got to “Under My Skin,” Laurel sang along just like she did on the demo recording, and looking at her she was really meaning something when she was singing the words… not just intonations and syllables, but something beyond. I’m not sure if she’s even applying the lyrics to the same time and place that i wrote them about, but suddenly they have life and meaning for her, and according to my communications book that’s one tangible step closer to art.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/10/6070887/

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