Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

elise

I am Peter’s beleaguered abdomen.

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I have a whole litany of things to say about Lyndzapalooza, Arcati Crisis, and Amy’s new section of the newspaper, but today I’d like to keep the attention on my abdominal section.

Separate from my (now infamous) teenage anorexia, I was also a sit-up addict. I don’t know why – I wasn’t especially interested in any other sort of fitness. In fact, I wasn’t even seeking a six-, four-, or two-pack. I just wanted tone.

I think part of the reasoning was, “food goes to the stomach, so abuse the stomach.” Also, I think one time I saw an anorexic girl on Oprah talk about doing 300 sit-ups a day and thought, Hey, that sounds way better than bulimia as a convenient companion to my anorexia.

Seriously. Fun times.

In any event, I left both the anorexia and the sit-ups by the wayside in college when I discovered things like all-you-can-eat cafeteria mac’n’cheese.

Fast forward a decade past my multi-hundred sit-up prime and my entire abdomen is a joke. And, not a laughing-with-it joke, either.

No, they are definitely to be laughed at.

When fiancee introduced a simple, nightly crunch regimen to get into absolutely drool-worthy shape for her trip to Australia I simply watched – sometimes while eating ice cream – because my abs, they are no longer. Even a standard set of crunches gets me huffing and puffing, and that doesn’t even get into the pure horror of any sort of side crunch that attacks the love-handle area.

A bit insulting, perhaps, that my future wife is in tip-topper shape than me with barely any effort, but it’s not really injuring my pride. After all, it’s not as though I’m spilling out of my clothes here – I’m just weak in the mid-section. I still eat better than ninety percent of the population of America. I still walk three miles or more a day from spring to fall. I just don’t cause her whiplash when I walk by with my shirt off.

However, what did add insult to injury was Elise’s younger brother.

He’s already a better singer and actor than I was at his age, which I can at least rationalize as due to his vastly superior genetics (I mean, we are talking about Elise’s brother, here). Yet, on top of that last year he out-of-the-blue started working out daily.

I was skeptical. I made all sorts of resolutions in high school, but the only two I actually stuck with were playing guitar and try to subsist solely on water and Altoids.

For a while all he had to show for it was endurance for the boredom of jogging and an altogether terrifying skill at Dance Dance Revolution. Now he has actual muscles! Abs, pecs – you name it. And, not just while impressively flexing – he has muscles even while at rest!

When I played DDR in front of him over Christmas I felt like a cow skipping rope. Oh, and did I mention that their father runs marathons, and that when he deigned to run my company’s ten mile race last year he posted the best time of everyone I know? And her sister, the non-fitness-nut, is currently serving out the remainder of her Fulbright Scholarship teaching English. In Taiwan.

I’ll be a legally bound part of this family in a scant nine months, and the peer pressure is starting to mount. To date I’ve skated by on the account of being an academic-wunderkind and a singer-songwriter. Then I had a few months of grace on the “wow, that’s a nice hunk of diamonds you bought for my sister/daughter.”

I’m going to have to step up my over-achievement, lest I become permanently tagged as the fat, lazy, dumb member of their family. (And, theirs is a beauty contest that I am never destined to win (unless I plan several thousands of dollars of plastic surgery (and this is not a post about my need to compete with my own mother))).

My grad school indecision is about to continue into it’s fourth year, so I don’t see a Fullbright in my immediate future, and – let’s face it – I’m not planning on running anywhere anytime soon. (Being the longest-running blog in Philadelphia has so far won me no respect.)

My most realistic aim in this impending crash-course in sibling (and parental) rivalry is somewhere between the fitness levels of my fiancee and her brother – more than a nightly crunch routine, but less than a military-like regimen that causes high school girls to forget how to breathe.

Really, I’d be happy with enough to get Elise to gawk at me when I walk around the house naked, which rises in frequency as the weather improves.

Sound and Vision

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On Friday night I attended the New Artists opening at Muse Gallery, a third of which was the art of one my increasingly close friends, Jennifer Vessels.

I was one of the first guests to arrive, and I got to experience the art of all three of the new members in a nearly empty room to the hypnotic sound of Dante on his hang drum. I had seen some of Jennifer’s work before, but smaller, and as prints – never up close, original, and with all of the beautiful texture that each of her collagraphs contain.

Each piece was labeled with title and price, and though I understand that the intent of the show is not necessarily to sell the pieces, the concept of selling a piece of physical artwork is so strange to me. I could sell one of my songs, but I would always be able to play it. Elise could sell a photograph, but it would just be a print – a single version of an original negative.

I marveled at that, lost in the detail of her lines and colors on a second walk through the gallery. How to be Jennifer, so entangled in music and light that she can contain them both on a canvas, yet able to part with a piece, never to see its texture again.

Trio Season 6 – Suite #3: A Confidence Game

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Trio: Season Six, Suite #3: A Confidence Game
Unengaged, Tangling, Wonder

A sample of what I had to say in this Trio…

Unengaged
It wasn’t the lack of confidence in doing that thing, but the lack of confidence that came in the wake of that – like, “Oh god, what have I gotten myself into?” … It’s also about [lack of] confidence in performing it: I wrote that melody almost just as an exercise in getting it up into falsetto over and over again. I didn’t ever think I was going to perform it that way. … If it’s your song, and you wrote it that way, then there must be a reason it’s in falsetto.

Tangling
It was the anchor of this set … Somebody moves out of your life for some period … and you think, “wow, we’re so connected.” And then they get back and you don’t feel that connection immediately. And you wonder – was that connection so tenuous that it dissipated with the distance? … People change over a period of time, and you have to take some time to retune that connection.

Wonder
I think anyone can identify with that walking down the street – or, in the case of this song, in a train station – and you see somebody, and in your mind you have a whole fantasy about them in a split second … and then they get on the train. Or, maybe that’s just me?


Trio – the original singer-songwriter web session – returns for its sixth season featuring my original music, recorded live and DIY in my bedroom. You can download this Trio, or listen to a previous Trio:

Not Dead, Just Floating

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February tends to be a pretty sparse month on CK, aside from the first two, whose blogging were fueled by infatuation with the Queen of Darkness and Elise, respectively.

Actually, February tends to be an infatuated month – a 28-day Fat Tuesday of topical gluttony – which is maybe why the blogging tends to drop off. In 2004 it was SongFight; last year, consuming media. 2006 was… being scruffy? I honestly couldn’t tell you.

I bring those three years up specifically, as they’ve dictated much of my month so far. The scruffiness aspect finally ended this morning, when I shaved off what I think (if we’re being fair) I can say was my first ever mustache. It was charming at first, and looked dashing in photos, but the prickliness of it finally got to me (just as Elise was claiming I had progressed past Brillo-pad stage, too; oh well).

The mustache was, in turn, indicative of my preoccupation with things other than self – as typically I am much too busy examining myself in the mirror to allow any such deviation from core residual self image – and those two things correspond to the other two years I mentioned above.

Like a square to a rectangle but not visa versa, SongFight is to Arcati Crisis. SongFight was perhaps the first time Gina and I masqueraded under our proper name, though we had certainly recorded together before as an entity. And, from our fours-years-ago SongFighting emerged “Moscow, Idaho,” which we played an utterly stunning version of on Saturday ever-so-shortly before my voice-losing escapade.

(“Moscow” is a curious story unto itself, but I’m saving a recap of that for when we have a better demo of the song.)

Like 2004’s before it, this February so far has been a very Arcati Crisis month. We performed three separate times, and this last one marked a major milestone that we just realized this morning: we’ve now played every one of our current songs in front of an audience. That’s sixteen tunes, which represents a nearly indescribable leap from last February when we knew just three or four.

In fact, with the exception of “Fisher Price” the songs which we now consider to be the most “solid” and “reliable” didn’t even exist as duo tunes this time last year – they were still relegated to the various demo discs and Blogathons from which they originated. Suddenly we find ourselves with thumb-twiddling time at rehearsals where we once were dreaming up new riffs to catalog tunes, and so far this month we’ve filled it with new songs and rehearsals with cello (!). Tomorrow we’ll be recording the few stragglers who haven’t yet made it onto one of our Live @ Rehearsal discs, and then I’ll be spending the rest of the month mixing.

I know that other bands have come farther in a shorter amount of time – after all, of those sixteen songs all had been written prior to 2007 – but I still can’t help but be infatuated with our progress.

Not just our progress, though – that’s an old-Peter model of infatuation, that restless addiction to revisiting a process and its product, rather than living in the present. This time I am actually infatuated with the present tense of us, and all that we are capable of. Could we have imagined in 1994 that one night we’d wind up on stage at Doc Watson’s a hair shy of last call with our friends bouncing and singing along to every word of our songs?

Well, maybe we could have, but in that mental image I probably still had my Spock haircut, which is not nearly as ravishing as the current one, AKA “Dean Winchester.”

Which, in retrospect, probably prompted the stubble.

Meanwhile, there is the aspect of 2007 that I am repeating – I’ve been very much absorbed in media consumption. It’s partially because I have been following the primary elections on various news sites, but really it’s just an input/output thing. I’m outputting riffs, harmonies, new songs, project plans, site maps, engagement party thank you notes – all manner of creativity. And if I don’t ingest and digest input from some other sources I’ll be left with nothing to output.

(Or, worse, I will return to my past-process addiction and just output recursive, painful feedback. Sort of like this post, but more shrill.)

(Okay, while we’re parenthetical already I just need to point out that I started talking about that whole input/output deal almost seven years ago, and at work we’re reading this horrific business book that I won’t even do the justice of name-checking, and it has a whole fucking chapter about how you need input in order to maintain output. Like, with a chart of a Pac-Man-esque circle eating and shitting information. I kid you not. So, yes, 20-year-old-me could teach this business guru a thing or two about a thing or two.)

(Any, mucho digression; do you see what February causes?)

My increased intake of media – particularly election coverage, which has been nigh-unavoidable the past few weeks – has re-awakened my love of media critique. Especially after nearly four years of freedom from the bonds of television I feel like I’m seeing messages for what they really are for the first time – often just inelegant, thinly-veiled agendas meant to obscure the actual meaning behind the message:

Disney loves to sell its girl-empowerment, but don’t look for it to offer a fair payout to the author behind one of its hugest properties, The Cheetah Girls.

Similarly, CNN trumpets its bottomless cadre of cell-phone equipped i-Reporters, but when one of their segment producers runs a hip, snarky blog that gets too opinionated he is promptly fired.

And, in perhaps my favorite example, our favorite brand names and supermarkets re-purposed plain old oats in increasingly portable and nutrionless forms until we are paying dozens of dollars on the pound for curiously un-oat-ish cereal bars, with MILK INCLUDED (TM).

I’m not sure if the sudden transparency is coming from me, or coming from the internet, or coming from the world at large having finally gone in for a look at its cataracts, but I’m loving it.

And, with ten days left to go, that is my February, so-far.

Guitarness

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I’m often at a loss for what to do with myself when we visit Elise’s families in New Jersey. At home, or at any friend’s house, my default position is guitar playing – it gives me something to do with my hands in idle moments so that I don’t feel like I have to carry on a non-stop conversation at all times.

I don’t usually bring my guitar with me to NJ, which means the families haven’t witnessed this particular phenomenon too often, but Elise was planning to leave me marooned while she went on a wedding dress tour, and I needed a way to pass the time. I added a wonderful new “print-version” feature to my lyrics database, so for the trip I printed out sheaf of my fifty most incomplete songs to workshop while Elise was out on her wedding whirlwind.

Isn’t that a little crazy – fifty songs that are unfinished and still relatively new?

I really vacillate about this sort of thing. At this point Gina and I have a solid sixteen song set, and I have ten or twenty of my strongest songs that go in and out of solo rotation. It’s a comfortable point to be at, but then I look at my freaking database and I see all of these unfinished songs – some of which I really adore and like to play, such as they are in their unfinished state. And, since my current setlist is heavily influenced by my 2003-04 stuff, there are incomplete songs hanging around that are about to be four years old.

Four years old! Which is a problem when I have a whole new fleet of unfinished songs to be working through – I only have so much headspace to to to push these things forward. So, I sat down with my sheaf today and had a touch of a workshop. I re-notated a few things in a more complete fashion, and I think finished one from 2001 – “4th of July” – once and for all.

All that rehearsal meant I was plenty limber for my post-dinner conversational gambit. Except, these are people who aren’t used to my schtick – that I like sit and underscore a conversation without needing anyone to pay attention to me, and that if there’s a lull I might sing for a bit before tucking my voice back under the din.

It made for a few awkward moments … I don’t know that Elise’s father has ever heard me play my own songs before? Certainly not songs about his daughter, anyhow. But, they won’t be getting rid of me anytime soon so they might as well get used to the incessant underscoring of my life. Along the way I turned in possibly my best vocal of all time on the bridge of “Love Me Not,” and also a very respectable version of the recently on-hiatus “Little Love.”

All of which is why I need to go home tomorrow and record a Trio. And then I need to record another another one. And then another. And so on.

Right. But, first I need to drink this glass of wine. And maybe another one.

G’nite.