Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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all the blue jeans you ever wanted

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Do you know how many pairs of jeans you own?

About 80% of my total collection of jeans, blue or otherwise.

This is a decidedly first world sort of question to even need to ask. Personally, I would love to have some sort of smart phone app to track and rate my jeans, because I have completely lost the plot when it comes to knowing how many I have or which ones make my ass look just right for bass playing.

I remember my first pair of jeans – in fact, I still have them and wear them as cutoffs. They were UnionBay jeans, and I bought them in eighth grade.

I am not telling you that to make you feel fat, although that is frequently the reason I still wear that pair of jeans.

My point is that nice jeans – attractive, durable jeans – are not cheap. For much of my life, acquiring a new pair was a momentous occasion. In college I owned a finite number of them. Four, typically – two identical newer pairs that were more for dressing up, and two older pairs for bumming around.

Now there is the distinct chance that I may come home with four pairs of jeans from a single, manic shopping excursion.

This morning as I worked to stow an overflowing basket of laundry I tried to explain my jeans-shelving methodology to E, but it is the sort of process that warrants a flow chart for proper understanding and I did not have a PC with PowerPoint or Visio handy. My jeans are no longer a strictly finite affair. I have about as many jeans as a Gap display shelf with a svelte mannequin standing in front of it. I need a set of those clear sticky tags to label one pant leg of each with the relevant size and style information.

I am not telling you this to make you feel inadequate about your own personal jeans collection. No. My seemingly infinite jeans are an allegory for my 2011.

2011 was awesome. I loved it. It featured so much stuff that I barely remember it all. Stuff to do. Stuff to buy. Stuff to remember. Stuff to play music on or through. Lots of stuff.

Honestly, it was a bit overstimulating. Now that I have my own house to house my seemingly-infinite jeans, approaching-infinite music collection, my actually-as-infinite-as-possible X-Men comic books, and many other precious things I love to acquire, the mere act of directing my attention at a single group of them can sideline me not just for hours, but for days – and that doesn’t take into account the possibly-actually-infinite other things I could be doing with my life, like writing songs or spending time with friends I love.

That observation doesn’t equate to a neat resolution for 2012. Do I want less stuff? No. I love my stuff. Do I want to be less stimulated? Good god, who would ever aspire to that? I am incredibly proud of my overstuffed, overstimulated 2011. I played a show every month. I paid off a student loan. I got promoted. It was awesome.

I suppose with a new year stretched out invitingly before me I simply want to offer both myself and you, my dear reader, the simple moral of my 2011 fairytale – that getting everything you ever wanted or needed just means you’ll want something new afterwards.

Don’t make your whole life about wanting.

Do. Create. Give. Love.

Live.

And, if your ass looks great in the pair of jeans you wear while living, more power to you.

she’s gone home

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Tonight we held our second Filmstar rehearsal sans drums, as we are now without Zina aside from a few wrap up recordings and gigs.

It is weird. This is the first time I’ve ever been a party to a change in band members. I keep thinking of all these little things, like friends of ours who never got to see us with Zina, or the fun riff we do together in “Weight of the World.”

Would a new drummer do the riff just like Zina does it? I made sure to do all of the old bass player’s riffs verbatim until I had a chance to ask about changing them, or feel that they could change.

I really like that riff, though.

I joined Filmstar as a unit of Glenn, Elise, and Zina, and I purposefully held myself apart from the unit. It was Filmstar, with Peter on bass. I didn’t want to be billed any higher than that, I tried not to vote on any official band business, and I fought to avoid appearing in photos. It was their band – I was just a hired gun.

I don’t know what I am now. Tonight Glenn and E talked about things that make us worth drumming with, and things we’re looking for in a drummer. At this point “I” am implicit in the “we.” I mean, am I really going to hold myself apart form having a say in my new partner in the rhythm section?

Ultimately it’s Glenn’s band and E’s voice, and whether I get a permanent vote on anything or not I’m there to support that and to try to help them execute their vision. That’s what I would want a supporting member of Arcati Crisis to do for me and Gina.

I don’t know if I would understand how to lead Arcati Crisis as a band without being a follower in Filmstar. I wouldn’t be as good of a contributor to Filmstar if I didn’t have the experience of needing others to contribute to my and Gina’s vision for Arcati Crisis.

I think somewhere in the midst of all that I stopped being able to claim that I don’t have a clue about what it takes to be in a rock band.

Do you know any good drummers?

Work/Life balance is bad for you

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Editor’s Note: For reasons unbeknownst to me, I never hit publish on this post when I first wrote it on 11/30/11. I have a slightly different perspective on this topic now, having worked at a start-up and become a parent, but I still find value in the thoughts of a prior me. That’s the entire point of this blog. I’ve edited about five words, added about 30, and retroactively published it to the blog at the point it was written. – PM, 6/14/2016

If you are striving for work-life balance as if it is some complex and delicate equation where both sides can be equal at all times you are doing it wrong. I don’t think I would be as happy or as successful if I had terrific and constant balance between the two.

Over the summer I went out to lunch with an intern from outside of our department who I only knew from hallways and elevator rides. While we ate she quizzed me on what I do for a living, and what I do at home. Her jaw dropped as I unfurled my litany of activities and relationships – and this was a super-active student at an Ivy League school!

She asked me what I skipped to keep myself going, and I answered truthfully. “Meals, laundry, current events, going out at night.”

And I love it. Not just my life, but my friends who are marathoners and magazine editors, fundraisers and foodies.

Work-Life balance says we should learn how to keep the peanut butter and jelly of our home and work separated. Stop working after work. Stop bringing devices to the table. Build downtime into your schedule. Do some chores every day. The theory is, if we make more time to live as people at home, we’ll have less distractions to work with focus at the office.

On this, I call bullshit. If I strove for that kind of balance I wouldn’t average a promotion every 22 months, or be on an unbroken streak of playing a show every month for over a year. All that would be different is that I’d have perfectly folded laundry and I’d watch a lot of inane television shows.

That said, I don’t think the things work-life balance experts suggest are entirely wrong. Instead, I think we need to focus on a “passion/passive” balance.

What’s the difference? I think of it in two parts.

1. Work and Life should be interchangeably exciting

Why should we treat the work brain and the home brain as two separate entities, like hoopy frood Zaphod Beeblebrox? Our goal in life should be engaging 100% in what we’re doing at all times – even when we’re sleeping!

If what makes me feel engaged is writing a project plan at midnight, so be it. Similarly, if I didn’t have the passion of my blog or my music tugging at my brain, my creative work would have no urgency.

Does that mean I should skip dinner for a project plan, or interrupt a meeting to post a blog? God, no. That would make me a moron. Do I need work-life balance to not be a moron?

If you let your passion drive your life, both work-you and home-you can be engaged and productive. Instead of listless email checks at night just to be the first-responder, you might whip open your laptop late at night when a bolt of inspiration about a big project hits you.

That’s totally healthy, and totally passionate.

2. Idleness is the holiday of fools.

That’s what the Chinese food fortune presiding over my desk reminds me every day. I disagree with the idea of scheduling daily chores and regular downtime. Do you want to remember your year by the amount of daily chores you did or the amount of time you made to sit on your couch?

Instead, recognize that even when you love life you can’t be passionate all the time. When your passion ebbs it’s time for some high quality maintenance and planning.

A few weeks ago I worked five days, took two classes, played two shows, held a rehearsal, and loaded in and out of a conference. It was awesome – one of my best weeks ever – and I would have never accomplished it if I had scheduled in downtime. But at the end of it I had a Saturday of reading in my PJs, which meant I also had the chance to catch up on maintaining my life.

Everyone is a different blend of introvert and extrovert and we all need a different mix of passive downtime relative to our passionate uptime. Prescribing that we need thirty minutes a day of meditative dish washing might not be for everyone. You can’t prescribe idleness the same way you can recommend how many ounces of water to drink each day.

#

In the words of my thought-partner Britt and I, this is “FAME.”

FAME isn’t being famous. FAME is the act and feeling of constantly achieving your wildest dreams (they start small at first, then grow; FAME is never over), and having friends, family, and eventually strangers support you in your endeavors.

hours in between

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Last night we had a “play everything” Filmstar rehearsal for tomorrow’s free show at Fergies with Cris Valkyria and the Opponents.

I joke that I love playing bass because only having to worry about one string at a time gives me plenty of time for choreography. It isn’t entirely a joke. When I am playing lead guitar or singing lead while playing rhythm I have no room for other thought. There’s not much room for mindfulness of how I’m standing or if I need to tighten up a rhythm or a change.

Playing bass leaves room for those thoughts. I can actually improve at every rehearsal, instead of simply maintaining.

It seems as though Glenn brings his new songs in pairs. The last pair, “Weight of the World” and “Silence Kills” were both incredible songs that I was lucky to get in on early. As a result, my bass lines are a big part of the backbone of each song, in some cases intertwining with Glenn’s guitar lines or Zina’s rhythms.

His new pair, “She’s Gone Home” and “The Hours In Between” are just as genius, but different. I don’t know if it’s that Glenn was farther along in his process, or that I hear them as more of a gestalt. Either way, I could tell immediately it wasn’t my job to act melodically or contrapuntally on these two.

Sometimes bass must be the basis.

“She’s Gone Home” clicked for me first. One of the first times he played it for us he remarked that it was slightly patterned after “She’s Leaving Home,” from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Between rehearsals I listened to the album (never a chore), and realized a driving rhythm that matched Glenn wasn’t the right thing for the song. It would make it too heavy.

When we reconvened I had a neck-striding walking bass line. Glenn’s eyes lit – it sounded like it would fit perfectly with a riff he was working on.

“Hours In Between” is something else entirely. Try as I might, I cannot seem to pin down what it wants from me. I have some of the elements in place – a heartbeat pulse of bass on the verse, a quick hammer on the chorus, scales at the close. Yet, there’s something about its personality that I’m having trouble with. It goes from gray regret to wistfully sunny, and I need to be the ground beneath E as she sings us through the journey.

I’ll figure it out eventually. “Millionaires” used to be my least favorite Filmstar song, both to hear and to play, and now it seems like it might become the lead single from our next EP. How long did it take to figure it out? About nine months. We kept playing it during that time, of course, but I knew that it wasn’t right. One day it just clicked. Now I love the whole mess of it, a sweaty disco protest song.

I know the personalities of these songs better than mine or Gina’s.

As it turns out, not all my spare mindfulness is spent on choreography.

#MusicMonday: “Sorry I’m An Asshole” – Sunshine Superman

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In the past year or so the frequency with which I receive pitch emails has risen.

I’m sure that’s not some sign of my rising status as a blogger (as if), but more the general trend of people realizing blogs can help spread the word about the thing they’ve been toiling to produce.

A lot of the music pitches whiz by unnoticed, because they’re asking me to do something I don’t have time for – read up on some obscure artist, or come to a show with just a few days (or hours) notice.

The pitch I got from reader Lewen on behalf of local band Sunshine Superman was different:

I’m a long time reader/supporter of your blog and thought that you might like to check out a band I work with.

Here’s a video of ours that has been well received and gotten tons of views … I’ll keep this brief as I’m sure you get tons of emails.

Pretty simple: a person who claims to be a steady reader wants me to watch a video. I can do that. You can too – here’s their hyper-catchy, DIY-recorded, track, “Sorry I’m An Asshole.”

I am so freaking in love with this song! It appropriates a Ronnettes handclap rhythm, strips it of the wall of sound, and tops it with a slightly icy sing-song vocal that immediately made me think of Sia (aided by the up-close shots in the video, which are similar to her “Buttons”).

It’s not just the song that’s awesome. Let’s talk about all the awesome in this pitch: [Read more…] about #MusicMonday: “Sorry I’m An Asshole” – Sunshine Superman