Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

self-aware

Choosing Your Family, and Cheers

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(This is the toast I gave yesterday at my mother’s wedding, prefaced by my extemporaneous introduction of “I’m Peter, and I’ll be your toaster.”)

Every family begins as a unit. The family you find yourself born into; the family you are given.

From there, how you define your family is up to life, to circumstance, to chance, and to you.

Whoever else we may have begun with, there was no questions that E—– and I were a unit – a matched pair, mother and son, adventurer and sidekick, driver and navigator, friend and peer.

We existed as that unit for years, occasionally inviting others (who are here today) into our fold. L—, the first person to ever lay eyes on my face. A—–, hers the first babies I ever held. M— and me, holed up in a blizzard, lip-synching to MTV.

Through all of that E—– raised me to be an overachiever, and in my immediate family there were precious few. So, it was at first with trepidation and then with increasingly welcome relief that I re-met J— in our merry carpool to community college, me getting a jumpstart on the next step in my education and J— rekindling a seemingly insatiable desire for knowledge.

Nothing against E—–, who to this day has committed to memory the names of all of my favorite Thundercats, G. I. Joes, and rock bands, but that summer J— was something almost entirely new in my life: an adult peer who would follow my wandering conversations on any topic and through any debate, and who – if I may be disarmingly frank for just a moment – did not (and does not) hesitate to call me on my teenaged bullshit.

As I broke away from our unit to go to Drexel I began to find my own family, and I wondered what E—–would do with herself in my absence. But, I had no need to worry: she took a class in world religions, became a fitness instructor and a realtor, and finally purchased her own home.

I know many of these actions were inspired, supported, and appreciated by J—, because how can you help but be inspired by him? He has one of the most inquisitive minds I know, and he was one of the few people I knew with a GPA higher than my own.

L— said a very true thing to us on the way to us on the way to the ceremony this afternoon, only slightly undercut by the fact that she was wearing a glue-on-moustache at the time in her capacity as our chauffeur.

She said: She and E—– and A—- were sisters who found each other. Sisters by choice.

That concept is meaningful to me – family by choice – especially now, as Elise and I are creating a family unit of our own. Because, aside from common eyes and noses, what reason do we have to be connected to the family we are given? We have to find them, to choose each other, because the true members of your family are your sisters and brothers… your friends and lovers… by choice.

So, here’s to E—– and J—, B— and E—, M—-, D—-, L— and J–, Elise and I, and all of the other families we have chosen to be a part of, today celebrating with one voice the creation of a beautiful new unit: J— and E—–.

Cheers.

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in.

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When I am out and about as much as I have been lately – happy hours and concerts and open mics and all that – I become fussily self-involved and introverted in all of my off-hours.

I’ve never had to sustain my “on” state four or five nights a week before, and it’s definitely taking it’s toll on my personality, subsequently turning down my volume and contrast until I can adequately recharge.

This always catches people who don’t know me that well off guard – namely, my co-workers. In my corporate life there is a lazy susan of personality quizzes that spins back around every year or so, and each new set of peers are like, “really? introvert? are you sure?”

You can’t really afford to be an introvert while being an account manager, so I can understand their confusion. But, everyone else knows this about me: I need to balance personal and public, output and input. And, sometimes even when I’m the communications guru the off state can make an appearance. Word spreads pretty quickly that I am having an in-service day.

On the homefront my darling Elise is, curiously, trapped inside of the introversion – the girl in the bubble – forced to act as the shoulder-angel to complement the devil in me. To her credit, she knows the call and response pretty well now – communicate, commiserate, and castigate.

(i.e., first find out why I am fussily inwards facing, then agree whole-heartedly with why the rest of the world sucks, and then finally tell me to shut the hell up about it and lighten the fuck up.)

So, yes, we all know this about me by now, having read and re-read endless iterations of the cycle here over the years. Sometimes the ebb is measured in weeks; lately it’s more minute to minute. Round up friends to go on a bar crawl, turn off my phone the next day. Buy twenty new CDs, eschew them to write songs all weekend. Et cetera.

What we maybe didn’t know was that I have a similar web ebb (webbeb?), insomuch as when I’m all over MySpace promoting the band and Facebook keeping in touch with people and Gmail haggling with various wedding musicians, and The 61 hearing awesome new music and, oh, my job that involves keeping tabs on people in email all day … when I’m doing all of that I’m in my on state, and then I get home with the intent to blog and I am off and I’d rather just write eighteen emails to myself and work on my 20k word critical essay on Hedwig then chronicle what is what for the internet at large.

Which is, as per my wont, my excuse to say here comes a backlogged tonne of thoughts and links and mental flotsam that I need to flush out of my system so I can talk about actual timely topics like politics, and my wedding, and how my band fucking rocks.

(Which, by the by, it does, and did, just three hours ago. But, before we get to that, first the further digression…)

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.

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.

all the world’s a stage

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Tonight we took in a bit of high school theatre, watching Elise’s (and, hey, soon my!) younger brother in his first ever play.

I’m self-aware enough of a blogger not to regale you with a blow by blow of his performance, but it did recall a certain memory of the last time I witnessed any pre-collegiate theatre.

It was in the same auditorium, seen with the same company, possible seated in the same row as tonight, again watching another of my soon-to-be-siblings on stage – this time Elise’s sister.

The main difference was that we were on the other end of our relationship; we had been dating three weeks at the time, and the show was a prelude to my first time meeting Elise’s family.

After the show I milled to and fro, self-conscious and worried about first impressions, while Elise ducked backstage to say hello to former costars. She was still connected to her school – certainly more than she was connected to me.

Tonight she picked those old cast members’ younger sibling out of the playbill, more mine than anyone else’s.

I like this life.

(Also, let it be said that Elise’s brother rocks incredibly; he’s like a better, more talented version of teenaged me. He’s made me – who from an early age had vowed to strangle any potential siblings in the cradle – really re-think my position this whole only-child thing.)