Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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A Big Enough Heart Can Hold Onto Anything

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Alison seems like someone cool enough that i should trust her taste in music, so i was very interested to read Largehearted Boy after her link to him stated “He has the same taste in music that i do, which equals great!”

I consider myself to be a fairly open-minded music fan, but the Boy’s taste definitely veers lo-fi and out of tune. I can manage to forgive both of these traits individually, but in tandem i can’t stomach them at all. Speaking of which, witness two posts about my arch-nemesis Bright Eyes over the course of a single month. Someone really needs to teach that boy how to sing.

Bright Eyes aside, Largehearted Boy has a Top 11 of 2003 list up, and what could be a better gauge of his (and, thus, Alison’s) taste in music? I didn’t buy a whole ton of new music last year, and The Boy’s tastes run much more indy-male-rock than my own so, not shockingly, i’m only familiar with three discs on his list.

Lowest ranked is the Yeah Yeah Yeahs disc Fever To Tell, which was subtly disappointing … everything i had heard about them made them out to be “The Next Big Thing, but it’s mostly just girl-lead punk with fairly uncatchy screaming (i prefer The Distillers). Still, i can at least comprehend making this pick.

More objectionable is The Shins disc, which Aim was kind enough to gift me with, at number three. Chutes Too Narrow is a listless sounding attempt at something, though i don’t know what. I keep seeing the words “Pop Masterpiece” thrown around in regards to this band, which confuses me. Does underwhelming, out-of-tune singing combined with deft acoustic strumming suddenly equal MASTERPIECE? If so, please send me the masterpiece application next year.

(Pls. see R. Wainwright for the album i would nominate as the “pop masterpiece” released in 2003)

Finally, at number one, is The Postal Service. Give Up is an album i wanted to like in a big way. It features vocals by Ben Gibbard (lead singer of my co-favorite indy band Death Cab for Cutie) and Jenny Lewis (co-lead singer of my co-favorite indy band Rilo Kiley). Also, it was personally recommended to me by Erin McKeown, who i hold in a very high regard. But, the album fails to claim the title of Best Indy Disc Ever that i was so ready to ascribe to it, which is perhaps attributable to its third collaborator, Jimmy Tamborello.

Jimmy lends beats to the disc in the form of stuttering drum machine clicks and claps, which sound so tiny and far away. I don’t object to drum machines on principal, but they are supported mostly by equally far away guitars and humming synthetic organs, none of which grounds Gibbbard’s shiny half-falsetto in enough reality for me to love it the way i do in DCFC. Give Up has made for some excellent background noise, but to me it is too insubstantial sounding to qualify for a “Best Of” list in any category other than background, which made it all the more disappointing to me.

Now that’s i’ve complained sufficiently about two albums that have been collectively bugging me for months and months, effectively lynching the poor largehearted man’s taste (though, only 3/11 of it, which isn’t all that much), i will now, as a conclusion to this rambly weblog post, admit that i am madly in love with his blog.

Why, you ask? Because his absolute adoration of music seeps through every seam and pore and past every comma and period, and that makes his taste completely irrelevant. I wish i could convey to you my love for music, and how i allow it to surround me, and how excited it makes me, but that has never been and won’t ever become the primary focus of this page. However, i can safely say that Largehearted Boy is the nearest facsimile you will ever find, and i plan to read him constantly if only to remind myself how much joy being a fan can really bring you.

And, well, maybe i didn’t find out too much about Alison’s taste in music, but if she even halfway empathizes with the vibe over at The Boy then i think it tastes just fine.

Coolness

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File under “Coolness” – A daily reading of the superb semi-fictional (i hope) Acerbia lead me to the witty Stiletto Philosphy, whose top link is none other than The Go Fish, who i suspect could be the most read Philly blogger (she was mentioned in the Inquirer article i kvetched about on CK’s birthday). It makes me happy that TGF’s blogger has become known enough that i find my way back to her from blogs in completely other circles, which i suppose isn’t surprising given her mammoth reading list.

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My wants have always exceeded my needs, just as much as my reach has always exceeded my grasp. That’s the kind of person i am; always looking to the next step rather than delighting in the one i’m on.

I used to boast that i wrote so well because i wrote so much … 3000-5000 words a day. At the time it was entirely true; between blogging, record reviews, academic work, and personal projects i really was generating that much wordage daily, even if a lot of it was getting scrapped. It occasionally lead to a glut on this page, but i always had an easy time saying what i meant in a very assured voice.

Recently i’ve moved so far away from my three-thousand-word habit that when i sit down to write too much comes tumbling out. Each thing i want to say branches into five other things, and suddenly i’m creating more strands that i can plausibly weave together. I feel like the result is unfocused no matter how much i revise it because the intent is corrupt — i wasn’t sure what i wanted to say in the first place, so i never said it the right way in the end.

In a way this speechlessness posing as verbal diarrhea has expanded into my conversational life: i’m majoring in journalism, yet when people ask me what i want to do i hem and haw, eventually saying that i want to be in corporate communications. Do i? Well, maybe. But that’s not what i really want.

What’s completely shocking to me is that i’ve always known what i really want. What’s completely shocking is that it never occurred to me until about an hour ago. Elise went to bed but i wasn’t tired, and i eventually became engrossed in a very comprehensive X-Men FAQ. All throughout the FAQs explanation of dangling plot threads and character origins, i kept thinking Well, that was dumb; they could have accomplished it much easier this way. And, suddenly, there was a click.

Narrating. It’s as dumb and simple as that, and i have too many examples to even invoke here, including my seven-year-old propensity for authoring short stories on a manual typewriter, my oft-revised but never finished teenaged superhero novel, my late-blooming song-writing bent, and my college devotion of blogging. Narrating is what i’ve always wanted to do, but been too afraid to say. From an age as early as eight i secretly wanted to be a novelist, but knew i would be shot down if i ever mentioned such an artistic endeavor in the presence of my family. Ever since i started writing my own songs i’ve wanted to make my habit a professional one, but have lacked the time and the talent to do so.

I don’t have the plots to be a novelist, or the guts to be a singer-songwriter, but i still have my words. I’ve always said i want to appear in Rolling Stone once before i die, and not having accomplished it by the age of twenty-two doesn’t mean i have to submit to a lifetime of trolling my way into the letters column. For each of the endless times that i’m going to be asked what i want to do between now and June, i want to have the nerve to say “write,” and the backup of those three-thousand-words a day. I suppose we’ll just have to see where that takes me.

Shit, was that a resolution?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2004/01/107303685544558759/

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Does anyone remember the days when Beautiful Freak was a mainstay of my sidebar? In the infancy of CK I’d trade sarcastic entries with its blogger Re every few evenings; she was mentioned about as much as i now name-drop Rabi in a typical month of writing.

I already talk about 2000 like it was ancient history, and that sensation was made all the more real by Re saying “Peter seems to be the only person that I read that has not gone to livejournal with their site on hiatus.” And, well, no i haven’t gone to LiveJournal, or went on hiatus, because no matter what happens to me, no matter how much of a battle it is to write, i never really manage to quit this.

Re, the entire year 2000, is such a long time ago to me. I still had both grandmothers. I still hadn’t had a girlfriend. I was living in my own apartment, taking music classes for the first time. I had never even heard of a girl called Rabi. I had never worked a full time job. So much life got set into motion after that New Year that looking back it seems like it occured in just two or three major symphonic movements, with the individual stories playing out like repeated themes from different instruments … the Queen of Darkness suite, the Loneliness Fugue, and the Girlfriend canon.

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about that ancient history, and Re’s invocation of it just served to jog my memory a little more. People change, and cells regenerate, but i wonder if y2k me would even know what to say the nearly graduated boy sitting in my place today. Could he have ever suspected it? Would even believe it?

How much have you changed so far this millenium? What happened to you that you never thought would happen? What ambition have you lost that you never thought you would lose?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/12/107268084996775085/

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When was it that i learned how to tuck the corners in so deftly? This is the first year that i’ve been good enough to warrant the question; the first time that i haven’t hollered frantically for Erika to hold down the folds for me while i taped them. I remember how i used to do it not so long ago, wrapping paper around and around a box and then practically fashioning a bow out of scotch tape to hold it all down. I hated wrapping, and i hated wrapped presented. I told my mother not to bother; “Why use all that time and paper,” i said, “just so i can rip it open?”

When did i start to thrill in surprise? High school’s last Christmas Anastasia and i sat on her floor with empty shoe-boxes and packages of tissue paper trying to decide how to best obscure our killer compact discs. I taped mine down in a goloshes box and covered it with layers of tissue while she created a protective exoskelton to protect the tell-tale shape of her jewel case. Still that mass of paper, still that scotch tape bow, but i understood something about the thrill of surprise; it wasn’t enough just to buy, but to keep guessing until the last possible second.

When did i make it my own? Last Christmas i got a few excellent gifts, but i was more intent on giving. Elise helped me hunt down a wonderful list of bottle stops, DVD players, chess sets, Dr. Seuss Books, and Guiness playing cards in a whirlwind weekend while i slowly amassed her own pile of presents solo. I shopped fearlessly into late December not because i was fearless, but because i was no longer celebrating the same holiday as the people in the line in front of me. When all was said and done i had re-charged half of my credit card, but i was too happy doing it to stop. Christmas had finally stopped being a season, or an obligation — it was an excuse to give something to some of the people that i loved the most.

I almost forgot that this year, creating invisible, impractical, self-imposed timelines and deadlines for myself. Yet, as i lined up the pattern on the wrapping paper so perfectly a few minutes ago, as i cut out my own inventive little gift tags and wrote in the cards, i realized that i have come all the way around: from understanding the joy of surprise, to understanding the joy of the season, to understanding the joy of creating the surprise.

I will never submit myself to the Christmas celebrated by the people i stand in line with at the cash register. It isn’t about their idea, or my idea, or the cash register. It’s about liking the giving so much that you hardly care about what you get in return. It’s about liking it so much that you let it creep into March and September, buying things just because, so that when you look down your list sometimes you can say “i already gave them the perfect gift.”

But, it isn’t about my idea, and you’re giving me an excellent gift right now. Here’s to hoping your ideas are working out just as perfectly.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/12/107216091026681200/