Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

selfy-stuff

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I’m having trouble deciding what i feel about anything except for sitting holed up in my room protected by womb of thick walls and loud music. Yesterday on my way home from class i walked a block out my way – out of boredom, i guess. I had never been on it on foot before, just in a car passing by. The feeling was indescribable, as if i had stepped off of my front porch and onto the set of a television show (because i had never seen that block before except for through the glass of a window/screen).

I think that sometimes Elise feels bad that i don’t write so many songs anymore, as if it’s her fault. It guess it is a little bit, because i am happy and not creating stupid scenarios in my head to connect me to every person that i pass by on the street out of utter desperation to be a part of someone else’s day. It’s confusing to look at the entries in my little grey book from a year ago, while Elise was still new and confusing enough to evoke my typical lyrical ramblings. At a point not too far after that there is a disconnect, and suddenly i am not writing out of my gut anymore, from where my songs used to spring covered in bile and blood. Every time Elise gets used to me not having anything new to sing at all i surprise her, the other night with four new songs that she had never even heard a hint of before. They make me uneasy — i have trouble feeling them and so they are hard to sing.

I have thirty four weeks of college left after i complete my last co-operative learning experience this summer. I said a funny thing last night to Erika about that. I said that i wasn’t returning my mother’s phone calls because she would have to get used to not hearing from me and being worried once i left Philadelphia. I talk a lot about what i may or may not do after i graduate, everything from going abroad to going to grad school, and usually it has an air of fantasy and speculation about it. Last night, though, i said it without thinking. It felt like singing one of my old songs, half diaphragmatic support and half a punch in the gut. I don’t know where i’m going to go, or what i’m going to do, but apparently it’s not going to be here.


Or so i say. But, for as many streets there are in this city that can make me feel alien there are other cities on this planet that i’ll never see. I really ought to start working on that.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/03/90595788/

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Fuck editing.

Drexel University has disappointed me more than a couple of times during my three and a half years here. Bad scheduling, botched financial aid, boring classes. But, for once, just once, they have come through for me. In this round of co-op interviews i was offered not one, but two jobs. Two. Both of them at major companies around the country and specifically in Philadelphia, both in Communications, and both very well paid. For once i am faced with the opposite of my typical Drexel decision; instead of trying to make the best of something i don’t like, i am faced with trying to discern what the best is between two excellent choices.


I haven’t got a clue, and i need to find one by Tuesday morning.

And, meanwhile, i’m sure you’re thinking “Yo, Peter, what happened to all that ‘i’ll be less busy next term’ crap? Where the hell have you been?’ Well, it’s a damned good question. I’ve been stage managing The Vagina Monologues. But, no, not just stage managing. Scheduling. Promoting. Publishing. Just about everything i could possibly do up through this point short of acting or directing. And, it doesn’t go up for another three weeks.

Anyhow, i’ll have more to say about that soon. There is something to this Winter, the verging on adulthood that is almost tangible. I’m not alone in this feeling, but i still feel alone in the sheer lust i have. I want everything. I want rock star, and i want business man… i want travel, i want home, i want love, i want happiness, i want maturity. I need more of everything; i need more time. The one thing i can say for Drexel is that it’s five-year program creates an illusion at once grand and awful… allowing you to put off the real world for that much longer but just making you want it that. much. more. badly.


I want all that and i’m sitting at my computer in my fucking jeans and a tee-shirt, listening to myself play guitar. I want it all and, as i’ve just found out, if i were to get it all i wouldn’t know what to do with it at all.

I think this calls for a drink.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/01/90206744/

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If you were to ask me to talk about my biggest hobby, i would simply say, “Music.”

If you were to ask me to elaborate on my favorite elements of music, i would reply, “Hearing it. Making it.” Or, more explicitly, i enjoy being a fan of music and being a writer of music. One can involve being very critical of other people’s work, while the other requires an unending faith in my own.

Sometimes i have trouble reconciling the two. For example, in a book of my agonizingly chosen flying-to-Florida collection of music, the new Bright Eyes disc faces a burned cd of my recent trios. I have no qualms in admitting that i am skeptical about Conor Oberst’s new effort as Bright Eyes; i was skeptical before ever hearing a song by Conor and continue to feel that way now that i have bought a third album of his. He’s not so different from a previous version of me; a recent Rolling Stone article featured a picture of his slight vegan frame with a guitar almost dwarfing it, singing about heartbreak in a style whose lineage includes Brian Wilson and Bob Dylan.

I happen to really enjoy my new Trios;though the imperfections of my performances are more noticeable when crisply preserved in digital format, i delight in hearing the sound of my own voice captured in such a faithful fashion. I have worked hard for that voice… failing auditions, slaving at voice lessons, struggling through choir. Singing and singing until the sound of my own voice became transparent to me; hearing myself on a recording of “Tangling” or “Excuse” feels the same as performing the songs live. I cannot distinguish anything about my vocal performance other than whether i am hitting the notes i intended to. I cannot be critical of it

Conor is just about a year older than me, and i don’t think he is much of a singer. His bio calls his vocal stylings “quak[ing] with the tumultuous energy that only youth can produce.” Tumultuous energy sounds very much to me like unsteady notes and failing vibrato. There are parts of his album Fevers and Mirrors that i physically cannot consume — he screams, yowls, stretches his voice past the breaking point. I do it too, of course, all rock singers do at some point. But, to me it never sounds as rough… as pained. And, i am doing it for my website… him, for an international audience of consumers..

I ostensibly bought his new disc Lifted to review it, but i know that i am really casing up the competition. In the past i have wondered at the success of others who are only slightly older than me, and whose work i adore. Now, i am wondering about the success of someone who i could very plausibly be; who shares the exact years of pop culture inundation with me, if not some of the same influences. I happen to think that i sing better than him; i also think i write more accessible songs. But, i am in college, and he is on the road. I am on the dean’s list, and he is in Rolling Stone.

My two favorite hobbies will be staring each other in the face deep inside my bookbag as i walk through the metal detector this morning, bound for Fort Lauderdale. They will both air themselves, probably more than any other music i will have with me. And, when my family asks me what i did this year, all i will say is “i am on the dean’s list.”


Merry Christmas.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/12/90080825/

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I have been transformed, though not completely.

The assignments in my songwriting class have so-far been very involving, especially to me — a non-music major. For example: write a melody for a completely instrumental piece and turn in an accompanying paper discussing your use melodic contours and devices. Less perplexing (though still very involving): write three different titles for each of three different subjects, then expand each title into a brief synopsis of plot, and finally re-write each original title using idiom/axiom or assonance based on what you outlined in your synopsis.


I thought i would be alone in my venture into this musical territory, and went to the length of getting the program head and my own dean (a music major himself) to sign off on adding me to the class. Much to my surprise, there were a few non-music major in my section of the class by the end of the first week. However, their introductions went something like “Hi, i’m Bob, i’m in this band…”


They all dropped the class after the melodic contour project.

To the best of my knowledge i am the only student in my section who turned the assignment in complete and on time, despite harrowing and somewhat vague instructions including having to notate the entire melody and perform it in class.


This week we had a myriad of assignments due, capped by one particular task: write a song. By no means did it have to be a good song, or a very well-written song, but it was meant to make use of all the exercises in title devices and word-painting that we had been employing earlier in the assorted assignments. As directed, I wrote a song, but i was less than pleased with what i came out with. Having already made a somewhat big point out of all the writing i’ve already done, i was definitely hesitant to turn something so equivocal and boring in masquerading as a masterpiece. So i wrote another… not my best song ever, but something i really enjoy playing. Because of my extra work i wound up scrambling before class to photocopy the scribbled lyrics out of my poetry book and to pencil in the chords, but i still had it turned in on time..


To the best of my knowledge i am the only student in my section who turned the assignment in complete and on time.


Complete and on time… there’s something about that. In the past i’ve been one of those students who turns things in incomplete and begs for extensions to wind up with their A. So far this year i haven’t done that — not once, even when i had the opportunity to do it to save myself from a logistical mistake.

I don’t know what’s come over me… could it be that i was destined to suddenly become responsible at the age of 21? I’m still trying to figure it out, but in the meantime all that i can be sure of is that i’ve entered every day of class so far with the intent to prove that i am a capable student, if not the most capable student, when it comes to completing the work in an acceptable fashion. Not only that, but when people show up with excuses like “i was sick” or “i didn’t quite understand the assignment” or “i missed the roll sheet last week” i just roll my eyes and go back to taking notes. I’ve done all three, and i’ve still made it out with an A in each situation, but being smarter than everyone else is so much more satisfying when i am really being more intelligent.

I really am.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/10/85568735/

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I thought that maybe she had gotten thinner since the last time i saw her, but as i stared at her from across the room the lines on the side of her face slowly began to resolve in my vision. Clever, i suppose, even artful. Not any thinner, though. Still, i would have never thought to so carefully sketch in a smooth jawline with concealer, gracefully feline, to separate my face from my neck. Really they’re still the same, one right after another, but the girl gets points for trying.

I was made to truly shudder by someone talking about how his friends should all switch to a BA program from a BS. Sure, i’ve conducted similar conversations in my day, but his line of reasoning was so incomplete that i think he may have entirely broken his point. Still, it wasn’t my place to interrupt him so that his friends could hear what a BA of Journalism really consists of, no matter how much i might want to.

Days are very systematic, consisting of: waking up, checking rank, working, learning, and walking. There are more repetitions of each depending on the day, and the only way i’ve been able to keep track of where i am or where i’m going are the people that i encounter in between. Last night on the train two girls were talking in Creole, and one of them noticed how my eyes kept peering over my copy of Suicide whenever i could make out a few words of French. They were from Immaculata, and we spoke briefly about Classical Sociological Theory and the continuous length of Lancaster Avenue before i got off … only to find that i had de-trained a stop early. At first i was a little nervous, but i eventually found my way back to Lancaster Avenue and began my walk to the concert.

While life is slowly becoming routine again, dreams are getting more and more disparate with each passing night. At the end of last week i fell asleep with a playlist of music on, and my dream seemed to take place entirely within a single play of “Seams“, though it seemed much longer than four or five minutes. The setting was plain, just walking around in my old house talking to my mother and to Elise. However, at the onset of each chorus in the song i slowly began to unravel — literally to come apart at the seams. At first i hardly noticed, as the first chorus is quite short; the sensation was not dissimilar to stripping off wet bathing trunks. It was during the second chorus that i began to become really alarmed, as with each line some small part of me would loosen and fall to the ground. Skin came unclung from my legs, it unwound from around my midsection, it came off like fallen leaves from my chest and back. My mother and Elise did not notice, though, still blithely talking to me as we walked around inside my house. Each line now was an eternity … long enough for me to lose another part of myself to the inexorable process of coming apart at the seams, and to watch that part turn into so much dust as it hit the ground.


As the final chorus began i was so weak that i could barely support my own weight for the walk into the bathroom to check the scale, and even as i read it the pointer was get lower and lower. Suddenly i was singing too, “i wonder if anyone will notice,” and as i began to move towards the next line i found myself sprawled on out on my back, watching in horror as the last of me fell away to reveal my ribs and the beating red heart within. In just whispers now i was keeping up with the lyrics, endlessly repeating “at the seams” until i saw movement in my peripheral vision. Elise was suddenly there, crouching beside me and reaching out as if to lay a hand against my exposed ribcage.


Instead she extended a single slim finger, which slipped between two bones and allowed her to brush her fingertip gently against my heart. My insides collapsed upon themselves at her touch, unable to properly communicate the feeling i was enduring. At that moment the song resolved, and my eyes opened.

The first thing Elise asked when i told her about it was if the effects were realistic or like stop-motion animation. My eyes must have widened a little — because they were the latter, and it had been the first thing i thought when i woke up.


I do not think we will be making videos for my Songwriting class, but i can ask tomorrow afternoon. Anyhow, that concept would be entirely out of my budget… and, for that matter, so would “Under My Skin.”


Why am i awake, again?

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/10/85510501/