Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Oldies Aren’t So Old Anymore

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I have been a huge Madonna fan for essentially my entire life – I have distinct memories of spinning the 45 of “Dress You Up” and its b-side “Shoo Be Do,” which came out when I was three-and-a-half.

My father is a different story – and not just on Madonna. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him actively listen to a single song released after I was born (except, occasionally, Billy Joel). His taste in music is firmly rooted in the 50s and 60s – doo-wop, Motown, and early rock – and the radio in his car was permanently and without question tuned to Oldies 98.1, WOGL.

No exceptions, no Madonna tapes. Oldies 98.1 or else. And we spent a lot of time in that car.

When I first was old enough to care about radio stations I thought it was an annoying and restrictive rule. Seriously, no new music? How uncool was that?

Then I got to know the songs. At age five I would perform flawless choreography to “Stop! In the Name of Love” and sing along in parking lots to girl-group classics like “I Will Follow Him” and “Leader of the Pack.”

Those were the obvious oldies – Supremes and Stones, Beatles and Temptations. I’ve owned them for years. But WOGL was more than that – a never-ending stream of doo-wop, 60s pop, deeper cuts, and one-hit wonders. After years of riding around Philly with my dad, to this day I have instant and total recall whenever I hear a classic like “Lightnin’ Strikes.”

Relatively early in my life I remember asking him, “Dad, how old will I be when they play Madonna on WOGL?”

We did some math. Despite playing a lot of Doo-Wop, at the time the majority of WOGL’s songs were grouped around the late 60s and early 70s (disco was relegated to its own hour at night), so my father took The 5th Dimension’s “Age of Aquarius / Let the Sunshine” in as an average example.

“Well, ‘Aquarius’ went to number one in 1969, and now it’s a song we hear a lot on WOGL, in the 1980’s. So, it took it almost twenty years to become an ‘oldie’.”

“So, I’ll hear ‘Holiday’ on WOGL in… um… 2004?”

He laughed. “When you’re 23? Maybe. I don’t know if they’ll ever play Madonna.”

I giggled my agreement – how could Madonna ever be an “oldie”?

Now a full five years past his predicted 23, I’ve heard Madonna on WOGL. It makes a certain amount of sense – she’s an oldie to someone!

What my dad and I didn’t anticipate on our idyllic long rides was that when the oldies’ qualifying line reached forward into the 80s that the oldest tunes would reach their expiry. First it was the more obscure, one-hit doo-wop that went extinct – yes to “The Still of the Night,” but no more spins for The Del Viking’s “Come Go With Me” (very nearly my favorite song all time).

Then it was Doo-Wop entirely. Then the line crept into the sixties pop, slicing through all but the most enduring Motown and Brit Rock – stuff you can still hear on television commercials. Smaller pop singles like Lou Christie’s “Lightnin’ Strikes” went MIA. Now the midday playlist is mostly 70s classic rock and disco in the day time – where it should never show its spangled face.

Songs I once assumed would be forever woven into the fabric of my life have all but disappeared. Now I rely on random trips to the supermarket to jog my memory – that’s what it took to unearth Friend & Lover’s “Reach Out Of the Darkness” – and it’s from as late as 1968!

The same me that grew up with Madonna grew up with those songs, and this morning when Philebrity‘s Joey Sweeney posted his unfinished thoughts on WOGL 98.1 FM’s recent inclusion of hits from the 1980s into the canon of “Oldies” – complete with name-checking “Come Go With Me” – it resonated with me (and, from the looks of the comments, it resonated with a lot of other 20- and 30-somethings as well).

Yes, “Borderline” is an oldie now. But it’s on other formats, and on Greatest Hits CDs still moving thousands of units a year.

What about “Come Go With Me”? Will any eight year old Gaga-loving kid ever have the chance for that to be his favorite song? Has doo-wop seriously gone the way of ragtime and big band – a dusty antique with no relevance to today.

Probably. I guess that means when I have kids I have to alternate between Madonna and doo-wop on every car ride to make sure they know all of their musical fundamentals.

next, on a very special CK…

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I don’t know how this suddenly turned into Peter’s Precious Story Time at Crushing Krisis.

Seriously, aside from my re-launch during NaBloPoMo I can’t tell you the last time I posted three heavy-duty stories with dialog and stuff within a single week, let alone the last time that from a word-count angle I had this high of a words:posts:week ratio (1013:1).

I guess part of that is being a little more diligent about blogging lately. That partially comes from reading the blog archive more, and realizing how many gaps it leaves in my life and the things I have opinions about. As a result, I blog more. And while I’m blogging more and thinking about blogging more then there isn’t the need to so carefully prune by topic or length.

Essentially, reading more means writing more means writing more.

Also, life is actually pretty exciting lately. Like, not as obscenely over-stimulating as it was last summer with all the #blamedrewscancer stuff. Really just stimulating enough that I have some time left over to write some of it down.

As for this week, basically I have spent the five days since skydiving trying to completely unpop my right ear.

See, not all of the stories are interesting.

paint chips, forks, and vomitoriums

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The non-extreme portion of Memorial Day weekend found E and I in Home Depot, contemplating paint chips for a redress of our new dining room. Or, rather, E was contemplating paint chips while I idly examined the paper quality and die cuts of the paint brochures.

“What colors do you think the dining room should be?” E queried, fist full of colored slips of high-end paper.

“You know me – everything spartan.”

(I pronounced “spartan” as “spahttan,” a Buffy in-joke about Faith and her seedy apartment.)

While reductive (and an in-joke), as a statement it’s essentially true – the colors I like in a home are white, hardwood, and bricks. That’s it. When pressed for a choice I will always pick the bluest option, unless it’s navy. Oh, and I enjoy stainless steel, where applicable. That’s about the extent of my home decor color preferences.

(Not coincidentally, our wedding colors were sapphire and platinum.)

I continued my careful examination of the paper samples for a moment, at which point E perhaps shot me a look, so I reluctantly joined the color browsing and continued the conversation.

“Well, the wood in that room is pretty blond, so there’s that to keep in mind. Not everything goes with that. You don’t want to pick something that would turn it into a vomitorium.”

Pointedly ignoring my last statement, E produced a deep purple chip. “What about this?”

“No, that would make me vomit.” Here the older couple standing next to us at the paint display began to eye me with caution.

“Can you possibly describe the qualities a color could have that would make you vomit?”

“Well, really there’s two different facets of vomitous colors.”

Having long since grown familiar with my peculiar brand of insanity, E braced for impact.

“First, there’s context. Like, when I was a teenager my mom had our back bedroom refinished for me, and I picked this seafoam-ish green for the walls. It had context – it was part of a palette with the ceiling, the hardwoods, and my area rug. But when you live in a room you’re not always seeing the entire palette, or looking at the walls in the context of the rug. Sometimes you are just staring at the wall and you realize it’s not ‘seafoam’ so much as ‘mint,’ like mint chocolate chip ice cream and, while it made for a beautiful palette, it’s not necessarily the most pleasant-to-look-at color all on its own, but now you’re surrounded by mint chocolate chip ice cream for the next three years.

“Suddenly my room had become a vomitorium.”

At this point the older couple, who had skirted me widely to continue to browse the paint colors, put down their samples and moved to a different display.

I continued. “Then, there are colors that are pretty in the short term but will be vomitous over a longer period of time. Like, see this ‘eggplant’ chip? I love this color. But I can tell it’s like ‘fork.'”

E perhaps thought she had reached an absolute apex of exasperation during my first monologue. However, here she seemed to discover a heretofore unknown height.

“Like a fork?” She said this with a slight steeliness to her voice, like she might abandon me here in Home Depot if I wasn’t the one with the GPS phone. However, I was wound up and could not be stopped.

“No, like ‘fork.’ Like, ‘fork’ makes sense. It’s a tidy little word – four prongs, four letters. But ‘fork’ is one of those words that can get weird. Like, if you say it too many times? Fork. Fork. Fork. Fork. Fork. After a while it begins to sound made up. Fork. Fork. Fork. Fork. It doesn’t seem like it could possibly have any meaning. Fork. Fork. Fork. Eventually it starts getting uncomfortable in your mouth. Fork. Fork. Why does it have to sound so quacky? Fork. That ‘k,’ it’s so unwieldy, it kind of unsettles your stomach. It kind of (fork) makes you (fork) nauseous (fork) to even say (fork) the (fork) word (fork).

“After a while,” I intoned, gravely, “you feel like you will vomit if you even see one, let alone say the word.”

“The word for…”

“No,” I interrupted, “please, don’t say it. I’ve already said it too much.”

We stood in silence at the paint display, E staring at me in glassy disbelief.

“You see, ‘eggplant’ as a color is just like f… just like that word. As a paint chip it’s lovely. In a web palette I adore it. On a wall … every day? Eventually it’s just going to wear me down. It will turn that room into a vomitorium.”

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

“I know exactly what it means, honey. It means a room that would make me vomit whenever I walked into it.”

That was pretty much the end of our browsing for paint chips.

.

(PS: This post is dedicated to my dear friend, SLska. Or, I should say, Master SLska.)

Seeing Both Sides of Salt

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This weekend the New York Times ran a fascinating, lengthy article, “The Hard Sell On Salt.”

The upshot of the article was that New York City and the Institute of Medicine have come out to urge food manufacturers to tone down salt content in their foods, and that this is a battle that has already been lost repeatedly in the past thirty years thanks to deft lobbying efforts from the food industry.

I’ve seen a lot of social media commentary on the article that pulls this quote:

“If all of a sudden people would demand lower salt because low salt makes them look younger, this problem would be solved overnight,” [Dr. Howard Moskowitz] said.

It’s a great soundbite, comparing the lack of enthusiasm for salt-slashing to the embraced push for lower sugar and fat.

However, the salient point that’s unspoken by the soundbit is that companies embraced the idea of lowering sugar and fat because they had a niche demand as well as alternatives that could maintain the taste and texture of their products.

Not only does low-salt lack demand, and not only does salt drive taste – it turns out salt is more than just taste. It’s texture. Witness the consistency changes when some of Kellogg’s key brands are prepared sans salt:

As a demonstration, Kellogg prepared some of its biggest sellers with most of the salt removed. The Cheez-It fell apart in surprising ways. The golden yellow hue faded. The crackers became sticky when chewed, and the mash packed onto the teeth. The taste was not merely bland but medicinal.

“I really get the bitter on that,” the company’s spokeswoman, J. Adaire Putnam, said with a wince as she watched Mr. Kepplinger struggle to swallow.

They moved on to Corn Flakes. Without salt the cereal tasted metallic. The Eggo waffles evoked stale straw. The butter flavor in the Keebler Light Buttery Crackers, which have no actual butter, simply disappeared.

Was this an elaborate smoke & mirrors demonstration for the benefit of the journalist? Partially. It’s also an example of how our nation’s bad nutrition habits are completely entrenched in our favorite brands.

Will anyone eat no-sugar, no-fat, no-salt Cheez-Its? Maybe the former two, but the Cheez-It is all about salt, and we love it that way.

The undeniable truth is that the majority of America’s culturally-reinforced consumer diet for everything – soups, crackers, cookies, and lunch meats – is built on a giant pile of salt.

Extreme Best Memorial Day Weekend Ever Extreme Recap

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As it turns out, jumping out of a plane seems a lot more insane the second time.

That was the thought going through my head on Sunday morning around 9:30 a.m. as our tiny, 12-person plane ascended into a cloudless blue sky, prepared to dump Arcati Crisis and some of our core of friends out of its side.

The first time skydiving was a purely a concept – mysterious in its execution. This time the open door of the plane winked at me conspiratorially as I sat two inches from its maw. I was going to exit that door into nothing.

Why was I doing this again?

In fact, skydiving was not the most insane aspect of our extreme band weekend. That title is easily awarded to our tubing experience.

Or, really, the experience of trying to depart our tubing experience without being murdered, dragged to death behind a car, dying of exposure, or starting a forest fire.

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