Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

selfy-stuff

All In the Family.

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Just to show that nothing is safe from competition in Elise’s family, her sister Jenny left an encouraging comment about how she respects my bloggingness – leaving unspoken the inference that the respect is intact despite my hopeless fat, lazy, dumb, ugliness – and parenthetically mentioned that she is on a Dragon Boat team (huh and the what now?), so I should not count her out of the fitness competition just yet.

And, by the by, she is also a blogger, only her blog is broadcast from Taiwan and features regular lessons in Mandarin.

And, oh, in case I forgot, she used to be a competitive ballroom dancer, and she’s choreographing our first dance when she gets back from Taiwan, so I better watch my mouth or I’m going to have to learn to do walkovers and cartwheels.

Do you see what I’m up against here? Elise already volunteered herself to do upper body workouts with me when I move up to a higher set of weights. Next thing you know I’ll have have their brother emailing me songs he’s written and telling me he’s starting his own music festival.

Although, there’s something to be said for marrying a hyper-intelligent, pro-active bombshell with two similarly equipped siblings, in so much as any time I choose to slack off in some aspect of my life I just picture the appropriate one of them sitting on my shoulder, doing that same thing about five times better than I do it.

Whenever it doesn’t send me into wracking sobs or a panic attack it’s very effective. Like, just a few minutes ago I didn’t do enough bicep curls and the trio of them mocked me in imaginary three-part harmony to the point that now I can’t even lift up a glass of orange juice.

Ahh, family.

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.

No, Not I

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On the list of Arcati Crisis’s mutually favorite artists I don’t know that there’s a musician that debuted within our lifetimes ranked higher than Tracy Bonham.

Tracy’s was the second concert Gina and I saw together; the first was Presidents of the United States of America. Gina and I were possibly the first people into the TLA that night, because I remember standing almost directly in front of Tracy, pressed up against the barricade, Gina intently watching her fingers on every song.

At the end of that school year, Gina decided to audition for the school talent show, and the song she decided to play and sing was “Sharks Can’t Sleep.”

I had just starred in my first play, but at the time I didn’t play guitar. Or sing, for that matter. Yet, when Gina told me about the talent show, I had an unexpected reaction – I asked if I could sing with her.

Our friends were immediately skeptical about this – not only did I not sing, but I was at some point banned from singing entirely in the basement hallway where we all ate our lunch. Suffice to say, I was not experiencing widespread support for my sudden impetus to vocalize.

However, I did have one supporter: Gina. Gina brought in her guitar so I could practice, and gave me my own verse to sing.

As murky as some of the details of this story are, my memory of auditioning for the talent show committee is crystalline. We were seated in the corner of the band room, Gina and I and our friends Lucy and Joanna, who were singing harmony. When we got to my verse I shook like a leaf, but ever-so-carefully sang “Met a star today…”

Afterwards someone on the committee said, “I didn’t know he could sing.”

I don’t have any memory at all of being on stage at the talent show, although there are photos to prove that it occurred. What I do remember, and will always know, is that afterwards I – completely out of the blue – demanded that my mother buy my a guitar.

I’m sure I demanded a lot of things at the time, being a stubborn only-child teenager, but for some reason this particular demand was taken seriously. Within a week I had my clunky old Ashland guitar in my hands, and a guitar lesson once a week. I kept taking them until I learned the F sharp i needed for “Sharks Can’t Sleep” and never looked back.

Over ten years later it is both completely apropos and batshit crazy that I am playing guitar in a band with Gina, since I wouldn’t be playing or singing at all without that first nod of support.

This fall Tracy blogged about “Sharks Can’t Sleep.” (She also spent some time co-writing with Garrison Starr, which blows my mind, as Garrison is my #2 longest supported indie song-writer right after Tracy. Whatever song they wrote, it is surely the best song in the known universe.)

Last year Tracy stealthily released an acoustic disc, In The City + In The Woods. She also peppers her homepage with downloads of new demos, so I suggest you keep an eye out.

Happy birthday, Gina.

The Sixty One

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Editorial Note: Since I first penned this essay The Sixty One has added some terrific features, but has also experienced disappointing community turbulence, which can largely be attributed to repeatedly poor public relations response from the administrators of the site..

The Sixty One is a unique social network that allows artists and musicians to interact, and the lack of a community relations plan – or, worse, imposing a pre-defined view of community onto the site – is not the prescription for continued success.

While I still think T61 offers a unique and enjoyable user experience, I do not recommend becoming a user of the site at this time. Clearly the administrative team needs to further develop their approach to community relations policies and infrastructure and their overarching plan for the site before any further expansion can be both feasible and positive.

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Lately the focus on my crushing internet attention has been brought to bear on The Sixty One, and compelling and altogether addictive new take on music meeting social networking.

At its base, 61 is a place to discover and stream (largely free) new music. Never a bad thing. However, it’s a little more complex than that.

When you sign up as a Listener on 61, you receive a small allocation of points. You’re free to listen to your heart’s content, but if you hear something you enjoy you can use your points to promote – or “bump” – the song.

It takes the most points to bump a new song, and increasingly less points to bump songs that are already popular. Eventually a song reaches the tipping point and launches onto the main page, where it racks up dozens of bumps by the hour from even the most casual of listeners.

When the songs you promote are further promoted by others you experience a return on your investment in the form of more points, scaled based on how early you bumped a song. This makes the act of bumping (and deciding when to bump) an exercise in risk/reward strategy if you want to maximize your ability to spread your influence (points) even further.

The competitive aspect of 61 – who has the most points – isn’t difficult to game. It doesn’t take much smarts to figure out what the community likes to hear, and to bump those sorts of songs as early and as often as possible. In that position you are effectually an A&R Rep – playing the numbers game in the hopes that a fraction of your investments will reap benefits large enough to cover your losses.

If you were playing to win, you’d get pretty far pretty fast with this strategy. Of course, some A&R Reps suck at picking the big hits, either due to a tin ear or a fickle public, and if you’re indiscriminate with your points you might wind up sharing the same fate.

However, there isn’t much joy to the 61 with that approach – you quickly lose sight of discovering amazing new music … listening to it and loving it, feeling that you have to proselytize to all your friends about it, and then realizing that 61 is built explicitly to allow you to do just that.

In this role you are more of a critic – except, there is no pejorative, judgmental facet to the site – it’s all bumps. So, really you’re more like a DJ, spinning the records that deserve the most ears. As you accumulate more points you become more influential – not only due to your riches, but because you’ll gain special abilities, like multi-bumping and reviving past hits. And, your picks don’t have to shoot to success overnight – just like artists receive residuals, you’ll continue to receive points as users discover (and re-discover) the songs you’ve endorsed.

The higher your rank, and the more consistently you bump tasty tunes, the more chance other Listeners will start to take note by subscribing to you – a built in audience to cascade additional bumps down your list of favorite tunes that benefits you and the artists.

If it sounds as though Listeners have all the fun… well, they do. The Artist side of the site is much more passive – you post songs, and sit around praying and fervently spreading good will via comments on other users and songs. When your songs are bumped you win points, which eventually allows you to post more songs, thus winning you more points… et cetera.

Artists are too playing a game – a subtle contest of scarcity and demand. Listeners love discovering new songs and swarm to songs with the most activity (think: feeding frenzy). On a slow day a mediocre new song will seem like blood in open water to bored listeners, but on a busy evening your big hit could get lost in the shuffle – hopelessly marooned with a low point total until a benevolent Listener/DJ gives it a fresh spin.

If you don’t make enough points before hitting your upload limit you’re stuck schlepping your tunes around the community, fishing for an endorsement to open up a new upload spot. (And, as I discovered last night, deleting a song subtracts its points from your total – an unfortunate war of attrition.)

To take advantage of this situation, as an Artist it’s in your favor to dole out catchy tunes slowly rather than dump your catalog all at once. This will entice listeners to bump each of your songs in succession, rather than having to choose between multiple tunes.

Also, Listeners can’t vote until a song has played for at least a minute, so your first few tunes should be chosen with this in mind. The one-minute-delay also promotes research – Listeners need something to do with their 60 seconds, and if they don’t see a catalog of past successes on your page they might be looking for another reason to bump you, so make sure to have a profile image, write a bio, and leave a comment on your song.

All in all, The Sixty One it makes enjoying (and creating) music a game, a game that lacks the pejorative “bad” vote of other discovery systems, like my old favorite somesongs. If it sounds interesting to you I hope you’ll sign up (and maybe even throw some points towards Arcati Crisis)! And, if you list me (krisis) as your referrer, I’ll even make points off of your making points!

So far my favorite tunes have been:

  • Anj Granieri — Former Stranger – On this tune the S. Jersey native sounds like an improbably cheery mashup of Dresden Dolls, Rasputina, and Des’Ree. She makes her Tin Angel debut on April 3rd – I may stop by.
  • The Box Social — Hot Damn! – Fuzzy hot rock in the Jet mold, but they’ll raise you great vocals and much more cowbell.
  • STEFY — Chelsea – Awesomely trashy electro-pop built on a rip-off of the riff from “Sweet Dreams.”
  • Wonkavision — Double-Dealing – Boy/Girl indie pop duet sounds suspiciously like New Pornographers, but jangly and loose in all the best ways.
  • grinConvention — Your Name – The Shirley Manson of T61: sultry female singer fronting an act across international boundaries.
  • Shearwater — Rooks – Snow Patrol with heart and reverb.

    • 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.