Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

off-topics

rock band sweaters

by

Tonight we had a sweaty Filmstar rehearsal.

Sweat is one of those unglamorous parts of rock star life that I feel is not sufficiently advertised by bands to aspiring musicians and parlor-bound Rock Band addicts, along with writing lead sheets and receiving constant electric shocks to the face from your microphone if your instrument isn’t properly grounded.

(Seriously, do you want full, pouty, Jagger lips? Just play a shoddily grounded bass and sing right up on the mic.)

No matter what sort of sweater you are under typical life conditions, when you are flinging a sixteen pound bass around while also doing some form of the frug and singing backup vocals, you are going to develop more than a healthy sheen.

Add to that the heat generated by your equipment or a low-hanging stage light focused on your neck and rocking out for an hour is roughly equivalent to spending the same amount of time in a sauna. Which makes 2.5hr rehearsals a marathon of perspiration.

I think I was experiencing all four aspects of band sweat at this gig. What you can't see in this photo is the stage light positioned about eight inches from my face.

We’ve all seen bands sweat, right? So what am I bitching about? Here are some aspects of band-sweat you might not have previously considered:

Sweaty vision. Sweat can sting in your eyes to begin with, but if you are a perfectly coifed rocker you are gradually sweating all of your chic hair product into your eyes, causing a stinging temporary blindness.

This usually takes three or four songs to get underway, which means you’ll be struck blind just as your set is heating up, typically during the most intense and difficult-to-play section of a song.

Which leads us to…

Sweaty hands. Either your hands sweat, or you get sweat (and dissolved hair product) on them trying to restore your vision. Shockingly, neither holding on to a plastic pick nor plucking bass strings in a regular rhythm is made easier.

Which means…

Sweat accessories. You need them, and I don’t mean Olivia Newton John style headbands. When planning your killer stage outfit, some part of it has to double as a hand-towel – and, let me tell you, leather pants do not fit the bill. Now I understand why so many singers wrap boas and scarves around their microphone stands.

Of course, then there’s the problem of…

Sweaty clothes. Once your set is over you want to reap the rewards of being a rock star – namely, adoring fans, and possibly a cold beer. Except, you are soaked through to the skin as if you had been standing under a fire hydrant, and with the rush of performance and the baking stage lights behind you your body is suddenly cold and clammy.

(My father has for years pointed this out to me about strippers; I did not realize he was telling me a parable that would assist in my rock star life. Sorry, dad.)

Allow me to enlighten you to the fact that fans are way less interested in fawning over you and hugging you when your entire ensemble is a massive sweat stain. And, despite what your Almost Famous dream fantasy looks like, until you are past local levels of fame most green rooms do not include fully appointed bathrooms with showers so you can make a quick change. I’ve played exactly one gig that has had one.

There you have it: my band sweat exposé. Maybe next I’ll address the practical issues of selecting attractive footwear that does not hinder your pedal-stomping.

For all my rocker friends: what other unexposed pitfalls of band life should the aspiring rocker be aware of before turning up to 11?

sing

by

“Do you want to sing?”

Is my answer ever not “yes”?

I’ve heard people say that your willingness to sing has a reciprocal relationship to how good you are, and that the best singers will be the first to gracefully retire from the room when the topic is broached.

On that I call bullshit, and not just because it implies that I am a crap singer.

If you love to sing, you love to sing. Gina sings her way through life. E is singing beneath her breath at all times. Whether it was yowling teen in my high school hallways or increasingly lithe rocker of today, I sing on any occasion, so why would I decline to open my mouth and emit a joyous noise when someone specifically wants to hear it?

.

“Do you want to sing?”

I fielded that query at two o’clock on Saturday, and my relative skill as a vocalist aside it was a rare moment when I clearly did not want to sing.

I was in weekend bum mode, unshaven and in a t-shirt from my drawer of t-shirts that are explicitly set aside to never be seen outside of the house. The night before Gina and I had one of our longest rehearsals ever in that very living room with our new aider and abettor Jake, and we sang our voices right down to the quick until at the end my harmony on “Real End” was a mere squeak.

No, I did not want to sing.

This askance came from our little brother – not mine, actually, but E’s, except he is for all intents mine, for half his life and a third of mine. He was in our living room, moving out the next day, with his friend in tow, her first time in our grown up kids house, and if I was going to be in unimpressive weekend bum mode for her instead of lounging around the living room in rock star mode wearing nothing but sunglasses and vinyl pants drinking champagne from the bottle at least I could do some singing.

(Please note that the reality is more often than not me lounging around in low-rise jeans and drinking lemonade from a tumbler, but let’s not disabuse anyone of their glamorous illusions of your author.)

Of course I said yes. Is my answer ever not “yes”?

I said yes and hollered out Weezer and Lady Gaga and sang harmony on Maroon 5 until I was singing on fumes, and I know enough about myself to know when graceful retirement is the best option, so I finally excused myself from the room to wallow in the air conditioning upstairs.

.

“Do you want to sing?”

The night before E and I moved in together I wrote a song rather than pack – a song with the line, “I’m a little bit sick and tired of getting put on display,” though afterwards I quickly counter the sentiment by confessing, “I guess I shouldn’t have listed that skill on my resume.”

It’s funny how little that describes my relationship to E – we’re never putting on a show for each other’s benefit. If anything, we are the show. The line was never meant to describe us – it was more about being thrust onto the stage in every social and occupational situation because I’m the only person in a room who’s both a consummate professional and a professional ham (a skillset shared entirely by Gina – but I digress, that’s another post entirely).

Bro and I both have that skill on our resume, and it’s become a big part of our relationship to each other. I brag to people about how he got upgraded from sometimes extra to general ensemble understudy at the oldest theatre in the country. He brags to his friends about living in my recording studio. I show my friends how he can hit Freddy Mercury’s soprano A in “Under Pressure.” He shows his friends how I can sing “Love Game” with no hint of hipster irony.

Is this what siblings do – a constant gladiatorial battle that is half one-upmanship and half hero worship? I have no frame of reference, having promised at an early age to smother any suddenly appearing siblings in the cradle.

(I was an intense child.)

So I sang, because it’s on my resume, because it’s what I do. Bro sang too, and just like with E or Gina we weren’t putting a spectacle on for each other – we were simply being the spectacle that is us.

.

“Do you want to sing?”

Yesterday bro moved out, bound for yet another theatre production and then his first apartment.

We never hug, not out of some unspoken bro code but because neither of us ever seem to have the urge to hug the other one when instead we can whoop and sing in harmony, but he gave me a hug before he got in the car and drove away to be the spectacle in some other show while I go on starring in my own.

I will not deny the presence of a tear in my eye as I returned to our suddenly quiet house and opened my mouth.

In the list of things E, bro, and Gina and I all have in common, at the top of that list is that even on our worst day our answer is secretly: “yes.”

Gina’s Bachelorette Adventure, Pt. 1

by

This weekend was Gina’s (she of Arcati Crisis, high school, and many madcap adventures in between) bachelorette party.

In 2008, my bachelor party (planned by Gina and four of my other closest friends) was an 80s Prom entitled “Like a Virgin.” It came complete with DJ, decorations, catering, and friends dressed in period fashions – with hair to match. Plus, the DJ was actually a karaoke emcee, and all of the 80s tunes were sung by my friends and I.

Now, I am more than a little competitive. Not in the playing sports, head-to-head, high score kinda of way. I could care less, but not by much.

No, my style of competitive is “anything you can do I can do better.” Like, my blog is the longest running in Philadelphia, or I have the most expansive guide to collecting X-Men on the internet, or when Bruno Mars tracks came out for Rock Band 3 I wouldn’t let bro go to bed until we had 100% and were ranked in the top 30 internationally of all harmony vocalists.

Thus, when I was charged with planning Gina’s bachelorette party along with her best friends Kelly (a chemist in Belgium) and Mikki (an architecht & non-profit organizer in Seattle), I had something to prove. I had to conceive of the most memorable, most epic, and most fitting Bachelorette Adventure possible without actually having Gina go on tour with Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young.

My first impulse was to plan something with music and the 80s, but… surprise! Gina had already won the “Best Party Ever” designation in that category.

As Kelly, Mikki, and I talked about it over the course of several months, we kept coming back to a “this is your life” tour through Philadelphia landmarks. It was a cool idea, but didn’t sound fun. There’s your house! There’s your high school! Isn’t this awesome!?

No.

We kept talking. What if it was a City Chase version, with special clues and teams racing the city? Cooler, but not the best format for celebrating around a single person. But, what if each location held a special challenge for the team – half Amazing Race, half Double Dare?

Now we were getting somewhere. We picked some locations and made up a few challenges. It was sounding somewhat entertaining, but not EPIC. It was lacking a grand scale and a clear theme, other than walking around Philly for eight hours.

Then, I had a not-rare-but-not-nearly-common-enough stroke of mad genius while idly humming one of Gina’s Arcati Crisis songs, “Fisher Price,” which goes a bit like this…

There comes a time when you realize
That you don’t get anymore chances
There’s no extra lives
You don’t get big from a magic mushroom
And you don’t find coins in an underground room.

My epiphany? Gina’s Bachelorette Adventure would be a video game. A real life video game that was part Super Mario Brothers, part Grand Theft Auto, and part live-action role playing game – all with Gina’s favorite parts of Philadelphia as its world map.

It sounded suitably epic, but would it make any sense to Kelly and Mikki… or to Gina and the 20 friends she asked us to invite?

Tune in for the next installment to hear how our motley trio planned to turn Philadelphia into a massive game board, and how having crafty and artist co-conspirators elevated my insanity to a whole new level.

http://arcaticrisis.bandcamp.com/track/fisher-price

Filmstar’s Sugartown Dance Party

by

On Saturday night Filmstar (the band fronted by E, with me on bass) played the Sugartown concert series at Tritone, and had a lot of sweaty fun doing it.

Elise rocking the mic at Sugartown (in one of her fav concert action shots) on June 25, 2011. Photo courtesy of Tritone.

I’ve now played a handful of festivals and sold-out shows, but I don’t have a lot of experience with converting a crowd – that moment where an unknown band turns the tide of chatter to become the focus of the room.

On Saturday I watched from my vantage point on the stage – and felt in my gut – as Filmstar did just that. We had the help of a handful of boosters in the crowd, but for a moment during our second song I could feel the attention of the room focus on us. Suddenly we weren’t playing to the sides and backs of heads – we were playing to ears and eyes.

Part of what’s awesome about Sugartown is how common that conversion can be. Sugartown is a monthly show featuring (really good) all female-fronted or majority-female bands.

If you know me well, you know I’m not usually into reverse discrimination programming, but Sugartown isn’t about excluding boys. It’s about creating a haven for fans of female rockers to find four new bands to love every month.

And, as we know, I’m a fan of female rockers. As are all of the other Sugartown attendees. Thus the frequent conversion, and typical friendly vibe.

E and I quickly made friends with the first band, Yumi Sekai. Lead singer Salena Kress said she had tried to start up a failed math rock act before settling on the Yumi Sekai sound, but I felt like I could still feel the lineage. YS was like mathless math rock – all the crazy instrumental breakdowns and killer riffs with none of the “we’re counting really hard now” compound changes and screwed-up faces.

Dance party in-progress at Sugartown on June 25, 2011. Photo courtesy of Tritone.

Salena and Jackie Wechsler trade lead guitar duties while Salena delivers intensely pretty vocals. Even when she rises up to her topmost rock belt she sounds less like a screaming rock banshee and more like a Disney princess out for revenge.

I mentioned that to her after the set, and she totally got it. “I like melodic music,” Salena told me, “it can rock, but the singing has to be good.”

If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s my policy too. Needless to say, Salena and I hit it off. We did some booty-shaking together during the closing set from Girls Dresses as Girls.

It’s so different for me being a bassist instead of a band-leader. My job of holding down the low end and supporting the rhythm leaves me more open to experience what’s happening in the room. When a dance party sprung up during our set, I did what came naturally – I danced, kicked, smiled, and laughed.

We converted the room, and the room converted me.

It was a good night.

I know I look like the band nerd here, but in my defense, based on Glenn's capo position I think this might have been the exact moment the dance party began to break out. So I was probably using my measure of an open E-string as an opportunity to execute a killer dance move, which is hard to depict accurately in a photograph. Or, I am the band nerd. Photo courtesy of Tritone.

How I Got My License AKA parallel parking is the mind-killer

by

I am now a licensed driver.

I couldn't find a picture to appropriately illustrate a "Philly Bump," so for the purposes of this story we'll just have to pretend that this is a traffic cone JUST AFTER being Philly bumped.

I don’t know how to make this post any funnier than that. My wife, Gina, Erika, and all of my co-workers have already received their entire quota of comedy content for a single post.

I suppose I should put in a little more effort for the benefit of everyone who hasn’t spent more than 40 hours a week with me at some point in their lives.

For someone so obsessed with adult things like having a budget and a house and a two-digit amount of two-piece suits, my inability to drive labeled me as an eternal adolescent. I need a chaperone to go anywhere. In every meeting or social event I am someone’s little brother. And not even a useful little brother who is under 21 so can always be the DD.

Thus, time for a license.

The driving test itself was much easier than I had anticipated. I had been studying for it as if it was an GRE-caliber of challenge instead of a drive around the block. E has been grading me on every stop and turn for the past six months. I parked for over six hours in the weeks leading up to the test – just parked and reparked, over and over again in front of our house (which has lead to the neighbors asking E some interesting questions).

While the grading might have been overboard, the over-parking –> was strictly necessary, as my sense of spacial relations is… let’s say, “vestigial.”

More accurately, when the car is backing up I don’t seem to think there is any relation between where the back of the car is pointed and what I do with the wheel. So parallel parking is really exciting, like one of those carnival rides where the teacup can turn in any direction at any second.

You know how in the teacup there's the little center wheel, and everyone in the teacup futilely attempts to steer it against the gravitational forces at play, ultimately spinning directionless for the entire two minute duration of the ride? That's what parking is like for me.

To her eternal credit, E really tried to explain it. She tried to teach me tricks of the trade. She tried to explain the actual geometry of the car.

It was all for naught.

Instead, I taught myself to parallel park the same way I taught myself to play guitar and program in PHP, two other things that I understand logically in hindsight only now that I’ve been doing them both for over a decade.

The method? Mindless repetition until I have made up my own special Peter’s Guide To Parallel Parking that has no bearing whatsoever on the actual parallel parking process. You know how on Friends Phoebe doesn’t know the names of any guitar chords, instead calling them things like “bear claw” and “old lady”?

That’s exactly how I know how to park.

It starts with me repeating, “slow, deliberate, and strategic” over and over, which is like my parallel parking equivalent of reciting “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer,” until the parking has gone and only I remain.

Then there are a series of arcane calculations about wheel turns and the relative size of the curb in my rear view mirror. Then I park again. And again. We’re talking hours of nothing but parking.

Did I mention how incredibly patient my wife is?

I was reciting my parking mantra carefully under my breath on Saturday morning as my tester approached the vehicle, pausing only long enough to learn his name. Burt. Like Burt and Ernie. But probably don’t point that out to him.

Also not my test-taker. Actually, he was a lot more reminscent of the Muppet.

I managed not to break any traffic laws in the actual DMV parking lot (which I had been doing with great aplomb prior to the start of the test) and then we were at THE SPOT.

People had told me really encouraging things about how the parking spot would be big. Quite large. Rotund. They were fucking liars. The spot was tiny. I saw at least two people ahead of us in line fail just on the parallel parking. I was a little concerned it wasn’t even as long as our car.

When we reached the spot I went into my parallel parking Rain Man routine hardcore, hoping that Burt would be more afraid for his life from my behavior than from my actual backwards navigation abilities. He carefully instructed me that I had three “reverses of the vehicle” and then maybe retreated as far to the passenger side window as possible.

I restarted the mantra.

And then I parked perfectly in one move.

Just for fun I asked Burt if I should use a second move to give the orange cones a “Philly bump.”

He declined.