Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Arcati Crisis invades Saxbys Abington

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We just returned and unloaded from an Arcati Crisis show at Saxbys Abington, and my head is a jumble of thoughts.

I originally attributed the the jumble to the caffeine. We’ve discovered through reckless experimentation that every drink they make at Saxbys is at least twice as caffeinated as what you’d find at any other coffee shop.

That said, I’ve also been beset by fall allergies, and earlier took an allergy medication with pseudoephedrine for the first time in years. I had forgotten until just now that for the first few days it makes me feel hollow, anorexic, and on speed. (Indeed, it is a precursor in the illicit synthesis of methamphetamine.)

So, yes, clearly a jumble.

Foremost in the jumble is that we had the privilege to share a bill with Becca Marlee, a hyper-talented 13-year-old who writes amazing pop hooks and dishes them out effortlessly on her gorgeous Larrivee guitar. Even though we played the longer sets Becca was really headlining – she absolutely packed the shop with her friends and kept everyone (including us and our guests) riveted. We told her we’d be happy to open for her any time, and we really meant it!

Second is that, despite some fumbles on my part due to my jumble of speediness, we felt really good about our performance. It used to be that we’d leave a show armed with a withering critique of every song, but tonight we were confident and in fine voice. We only repeated three originals across 100+ minutes of playing, and debuted three songs – our totally new covers of “Video Killed the Radio Star” (awesome) and “Hunger Strike” (needs some fine-tuning), as well as the first-ever Arcati Crisis performance of my “Love Me Love Me Not.”

The latter was the best feeling in the world. Gina is not only my best friend and best lady, but the person who taught me to love playing guitar. Whenever I write a song that I’m really obsessed with my number one ambition is to hear what Gina would bring to it, and now that Arcati Crisis is a real band I’ve experienced that four times over. Even after hearing a single rough-around-the-edges version of “Love Me Not” I’d say it’s the best result yet, especially since the song is so meaningful to me personally. I’m trembling with excitement to play it again.

Or, actually, that’s probably the speed talking. Still, a feeling I’ll never forget.

In addition to Becca’s attentive crowd we brought a trio of ever-dedicated local fans and two friends from high school we’ve recently reconnected with. Plus our core Saxbys crowd of three young girls who keep coming back, mostly because at our first outing we promised to learn a Jonas Brothers song for them and delivered mightily upon our return.

I had since forgotten the song – “Australia” – which they were upset about. One of them asked me point-blank – “do you like the Jonas Brothers?,” and I responded with a lengthy monologue about the subtle subversiveness of repackaging the Beatles and Elvis Costello as a teen pop phenomenon. To which she replied, “but, you like them, right?”

Later I managed to medley “Australia” into “Under My Skin,” which Gina and I thought was hilarious. The girls were not as impressed, and were generally displeased that I hadn’t brought fiancee with me (they adore her).

“Where is she?”

“At work, I think.”

“This late? What does she do?”

“Build websites”

Collectively: “Oooooo. Cool.”

(Apparently I made a misstep by telling one of them that she looks like Lindsay Lohan. “Eww. She’s weird,” was the response. Apparently I am so three years ago, and should have said Hanna Montana instead? I think she’s weird.)

There was also table of older teenagers who had solid taste in music. As the night progressed they shouted over a dozen great requests, including classic folk from Joni Mitchell to Bob Dylan to Donovan, the latter of which Gina merrily provided. They also danced around to “Galileo,” let me play an Ani song, and totally dug our verbatim cover of “Space Oddity,” which too often goes unappreciated.

We were so impressed with them that we took down their emails so we could quiz them at length for new covers.

That’s about all I have to say about the show at the moment. As I’ve been unjumbling I opened our MySpace to find an intriguing invite to play a show later this month that I need to follow up on ASAP.

More news as it breaks…

Now with more Asian action?

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A few weeks ago I took an epic phone survey on SEPTA, prompted by a hilarious older gentleman on the other side of the phone.

I know that most people dread these calls, but I delight in them. They are a chance to register my opinion, and to observe a company’s communications in action. This one covered everything – schedules, drivers, cleanliness, safety, advertising – just about every aspect of what SEPTA does as an organization.

My prompter was stunned as I rattled off the litany of routes that I ride in an average month. “Are you a transit inspector,” he asked in awe. “No,” I replied, “just a yuppy musician without a car.”

From there we established strong rapport, and as a result merrily progressed through the dearth of questions with hardly a pause.

After thirty minutes of grueling survey, we got down to the final section – some basic demographic information. Zip code. Household income.

We arrived at ethnicity and I declined to answer, as I have since second grade. Except, my prompter gravely explained, I was not allowed to skip this question – my entire survey would be invalidated. All of our hard work down the drain.

Without thinking, I said, “Fine, then put Asian.”

Elise and her sister were in the next room, and chuckled at my flippancy.

Except, I wasn’t being flippant. Not entirely, anyway. The section was about our household, and as an engaged pair of dependents we’re not just “Caucasian.” Elise and her sister wouldn’t say that. Our eventual, hypothetical children won’t. I’m just the single, white, outlier in an otherwise ethnic household. As a microcosm of the melting pot, Asian is the thing that still sticks out about us.

So, in the context of the survey the “ethnic status that most accurately identifies [me]” was Asian.

That innocuous question made me take note of ways that I’ve become subtly attuned to an Asian perspective in my daily life. I’m noticeably more critical of stereotypical Asian characters in the media. I even reflexively flagged a casting call for Chinese actors, later sending it to Elise and her brother when I realized that I couldn’t attend.

Suddenly “diversity” is a lot more than just a buzz word to me. I respond to diverse advertising more than I used to, and I’m turned off by ad campaigns that make a point of showing diversity just in black and white.

Most interesting was that – though I don’t tolerate any kind of ethnic slur – upon recently hearing a common piece of slang for Chinese I became not only enraged, but viscerally offended.

I usually delight in phone surveys because I feel like I usually learn more about the company than they do about me, but this time I wound up learning about myself.

Living Marginally

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As I’ve alluded to in recent posts, an interesting confluence of events has lead Elise and I to begin searching for our first house a full six months before we intended to undertake such a project.

As we both combed through our finances in anticipation of applying for pre-approval for a mortgage, a certain fact about the two of us became abundantly clear: we are living marginally.

That’s not the same as “living on the margins,” a phrase you might use to describe the forgotten Americans our politicians are currently busy vying over. We are hardly teetering the precipice of hopelessness and debt. Thank goodness.

Instead, what I mean to say is that our lives just don’t cost very much to live, and by extension we have assets but not much equity.

The cost of being us is marginal. We began our adult lives by leaving college with a manageable amount of personal debt. We haven’t owned a car in years, and don’t own our own home. We don’t have any children or pets, or other family members to support. We consume uncomplicated food, and not much of it. We have a finite collection of housewares and consumer electronics that we don’t frequently expand. I quite adamantly dislike vacations, and neither of us participate in a particularly costly hobby or habit aside from music, which is at times a second career.

Essentially, in any given month after rent, food, utilities, and student loans we’re in the clear.

If it sounds like a charmed existence, well, it is. We’re living risk-free. But, that comes with a downside that’s subtly dangerous: we’re naive about how much life costs, and we’re reticent to find out. We have no concept of car insurance or property taxes, or even of paying for parking or needing a lawnmower, and it would be easy to stay this way

Yet, we can’t stay this way if we want to become upwardly mobile adults. No risk, no reward.

Therein lies the thin line between living marginally and living in the margins. You must make the leap into adulthood just right or else you become a forgotten American. You wind up making an effort to make ends meet, and tying up your entire livelihood in the upkeep one major asset – your home – living in fear that its value might drop out from under you. And if the bottom falls out from under your life you don’t just become forgotten – you disappear completely.

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We had to be cajoled into applying for our pre-approval, because we assumed we would be laughed out of the realitor’s office. We read the news – we knew about how bottom fell out of the mortgage industry, taking thousands of forgotten Americans with it. We didn’t think we had a hope.

Well, owing to living marginally, we did; though we don’t have any equity, we don’t have any bad credit either. In the mind of a reeling industry we still represent a good risk – a possible reward.

For a few weeks the potential mortgage check in my pocket made me feel immune to any financial woes. But, now that the euphoria has worn off the sticker shock is settling in.

Can we afford the homeowner’s life? Are we equipped to go from marginal to mobile without falling into the margins?

While I don’t think we will become invisible or disappear completely, both outcomes now loom tangibly, if remotely, over our house hunting. I’ve been invisible before, when I was a child visiting the corner store with a fist full of food stamps. The prospect of returning there – no matter how incredibly remote and unlikely, sets my stomach to roiling.

Life without risk may not be rewarding, but at least it’s comfortable.

Sarah Palin doesn’t care about you or me.

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This post is about three things Crushing Krisis has habitually avoided for a number of years – snap reactions to current events, personal opinions on politics, and sex.

Maybe this September CK will be about getting out of my comfort zone?

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Today’s morning Metro declares “Bloggers face calls for Palin restraint” – which, hilariously, could refer to bloggers backing off of any number of major Palin-related embarrassments that arose over the weekend – have you heard the one about how she fired the local officials that didn’t support her bid for Mayor? – but clearly pertains to the unplanned announcement of the unplanned pregnancy of her seventeen-year-old daughter Bristol.

I do feel a certain amount of restraint is due on this matter. Obama himself yesterday reminded the press that family is off limits. It wouldn’t be fair to make Bristol the focus of partisan crossfire, nor is her pregnancy a reason to assail the personal family values of her mother.

What we should not be restraining ourselves on is how Bristol’s pregnancy pertains to actual campaign issues, and to the poor political judgment of her mother Sarah Palin and her partner John McCain.

Make no mistake – Sarah Palin is a woman, but she does not support women. She does not support their right to choose, and furthermore she is a figurehead in a party that largely supports abstinence-only sexual education – something that Pennsylvania’s typically beloved governor Ed Rendell just accepted funding for on the state level.

Let’s me be very clear: abstinence-only sex ed does not work.

I could state this as a matter of personal opinion. I could even state it based on data that supports the assertion.

However, allow me to state it based on the fact that I was a peer educator for four very defining years of my life – high school.

In those four years I believed, practiced, and taught that abstinence was the best possible decision for a high school student when it came to sex. However, I also believed and taught that abstinence is not the only option, just like pregnancy doesn’t only result from missionary position vaginal intercourse.

Teenagers don’t come pre-equipped with this information. Someone needs to communicate it to them, or else they wind up as misinformed adults who think the withdrawal method is a valid way to protect themselves from pregnancy and disease, or who think they can’t get pregnant if they have sex just before or during or after their period, or who don’t realize that mutual masturbation or trading oral sex can deliver sperm just as effectively as intercourse, or who can’t recite that the four bodily fluids that transmit HIV are blood, semen, vaginal fluid, and breast milk.

That’s why teens need sex education, and why the best sex education is often supported by peer education. Peers are not afraid to talk about condoms, whether it’s how to put them on or how they feel. They are are not afraid to disclose facts that parents don’t know or are afraid to admit: that sex is about a lot more than intercourse, and that teens can abstain from any or all of it while still developing and affirming their sexual identity.

Many teens are put in the position where their abstinence is no longer an option, let alone their best or only option. That situation is different for each teen, and it’s not the place of the mainstream media or political bloggers to contemplate what that situation was for Bristol Palin.

However, if all teens – Bristol included – received education on contraceptives that was supported by their peers and parents, they could be better protected from pregnancy, and from the risk of disease.

And, let me ask you, how would this be playing out differently if the headlines blared, “Bristol Palin: HIV Positive”?

That’s just as likely a result not only of her actions, but of the ignorance of her mother and the Republican party. Birth control is not just about birth. Pharmaceutical birth control is about regulating the body, and physical barrier protection is about just that – protecting yourself.

Sarah Palin does not care about any of that, and by extension, neither does the Republican party.

This dissonance is an example of the ultimate failure of the GOP – how they barely practice what they preach, and even in practice the preaching tends to fail. And it’s a single issue indicative of all the reasons McCain and Palin are the wrong choice to lead our nation.

Forget Bristol. Forget, even, that Palin is pro-life, as that is an issue equal parts personal and political.

Remember that Palin wants to swap out sex-education programs for abstinence-only programs.

Remember that Palin supports creationism being co-taught with evolution.

Remember that Palin believes global warming may not be entirely a man-made phenomenon, and Palin also believes global warming might not even being happening.

Remember that Sarah Palin does not feel that crimes motivated by discrimination against sexual orientation should be classified as hate crimes, because in her opinion “all heinous crime is based on hate.”

Remember that in Sarah Palin’s opinion the message written on my door last month – the cat shit shoved into my home – was motivated by normal hate. And so was the deaths of Matthew Sheppard and Larry King. Not hate based on bias, on fear, on lack of acceptance. Not hate that requires specific regulation and punishment to dissuade others from acting on it. Just regular, run-of-the-mill hate that wasn’t meant to threaten me based upon my identity, real or assumed.

Sarah Palin doesn’t care about women, teenagers, or our planet. And she doesn’t care about me.

A vote for John McCain is a vote that endorses all of those positions – the policies of a party that’s no longer just assaulting logic, but outright denying it.

Bristol Palin is just one small example – teach abstinence, knowing that isn’t effective but claiming that it’s more moral, and when the teaching (and the associated morals) fail convert that failure into success by endorsing the family values that will raise and love that unplanned baby, and support that unwed mother.

Nevermind that not every young mother in the nation has a determined state governor for a mom. Nevermind that for every potential baby there is also potential for another life marked by HIV. Nevermind the implicit failure of abstinence-based education in the very home of the potential Vice President who supports it.

Nevermind?

No.

And that is why we cannot and will not restrain ourselves.

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(A big thank you to Five Thirty Eight for planting this kernel, and for many of the links.)

after a weekend

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I needed this weekend to recharge for September, always an active month in my world. And, that’s without the currently thrumming circuit of band, wedding, car, house that keeps me anxious at all hours of the day.

Aside from much learning of covers, virtual house-hunting, and watching Kristen Bell deliciously chew scenery on Heroes, this weekend also allowed me to decisively finish off the remaining glut of neglected posts in my Google Reader, the best of which I’ll now share with those of you who eschew Labor Day BBQs to get your September off to a properly lazy start.

#1 Link: Mark Larson points out that you can stream the documentary All Hands on the Hard Body via Google video.

The docu, about contest where the way to win a brand new truck is to keep your hand on it for the longest amount of time, has been on my Netflix queue since the day I joined. Totally what I am watching tonight. (originally via and add’l background from Kottke.)

#2 Link: Know Your Stuff is downloadable software that allows you to catalog all of the stuff you own. Great for prepping insurance applications, or if you are an OCD nut like me. Via Unclutterer and Lifehacker.

Similarly, via trusty Kottke, Daytum is a “home for collecting and communicating your daily data.” Personal annual reports? OCD Godzilla approves mightily.

A close runner up in awesomeness, I spent way too much time on Saturday futzing with Election Projection’s Interactive Probability Calculator. Allows you to set the probability for each state and then runs an endless series of matchups based on your probabilities to determine the overall probability of the election result. For someone like me, who believes that most surveys are crap – political surveys doubly so, this is a nice equalizer.

Also:

Philebrity just ran an equally edifying and hilarious Philadelphia Internet History Week, tracking the ignoble fates of a handful of prominent Philly web startups. I should collaborate with Lindsay on a tell-all Record Kingdom post ;)

Drinking Liberally engineers happy hour meetups with other liberals in your community. Seems as though Philly is in need of a new event (hint, hint, anyone?).

Mad science alert: The five experiments most likely to end the world. A link unique in that it combines Gina’s professional interests and prominent musical themes. Also: one step closer to a real invisibility cloak.

Remaindered from many months ago, photos from the perspective of your tongue. Also, I continue to love this photo of WWII women working on a B-17 bomber.

Great visual: Texas house sucked into wormhole, via Electicism.

Worksheets for those both organizational and visual. Via Akkam’s.

A photo-essay slash interview on Japanese bathhouses. Not safe for work, I suppose, but I think the nudes are far from sensational – they actual portray the relaxing atmosphere of the sento. Also: Japanese float parade.

Another oldie that found sudden relevance this week: Become an expert interviewer. I’ve got a bit of natural flair at interviewing (oh, and that journalism degree), but this is a succinct reminder of what to do.

From MLarson: The Superest is an illustrated log of off-beat superpowers, each one meant to best its predecessor.

Last, but not least: longtime fav Gingerbead Latte took a moment to recap her month, including an ingenious game of the top 100 words in the English language. I got only slightly over a third, but all of the top two rows. Similar results on the 50 largest countries, where spelling was a big challenge.

That’s all I’ve got. If you have any thoughts for an overarching September theme for CK, please feel free to share. Last year, as you may recall, I remastered and reposted my favorite trio tracks from the past seven years.