Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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My Favorite Trio Tracks: #1 – Up & Down / So Hard (from Trio Season 3, #5)

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My favorite Trio tracks have documented many memorable musical moments from 2000 to 2004. Songs made their debut, found their fans, and were gradually refined or radically transformed.

However, sometimes the best part of Trio is playing a song – old or new, well known or obscure – and playing it very, very well. This became my mission throughout all of Season 5, with outstanding results, but up until then a specific pair of Season 3 tunes were the best example.

I remember very specifically burning them to CD and listening to them on the train ride to Elise’s house, and as soon as I arrived pushing the disc into her stereo, ignoring that one of the tunes was a touch explicit and Elise’s 10 year old brother was sitting on the floor playing video games. Not to mention that the cover in the middle of the two songs was “Untouchable Face.”

(Little did I suspect that years later I’d take him to a Dresden Dolls concert where backup dancers would pantomime giving each other back alley abortions, alternating the Charleston with pulling doll parts out from under their dresses. That made me feel so much better about blasting “Untouchable Face” in his living room.)

Check out “Up & Down” and the debut of “So Hard” from Trio Season 3, #5. And, tune in next week for the first Trio of Season 6.

Will I?

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I’ve been remastering seven-year-old audio and chipping away at installing WordPress 2.3 for twenty of the last twenty-four hours, and at this point I’ve lost track of which thing I’m doing for fun and which is the chore.

Oh, I’m sorry, they’re both supposed to be fun? I must have missed the memo, because at the moment I can’t wait to get to work in the morning to do some project management and be free of this insanity for eight or nine hours.

I’ve been in overdrive every since I spent all of a gorgeous yesterday sitting naked on the couch, eating an entire box of veggie chicken patties, watching inane commentary tracks on fucking Heroes just because that’s what I would watch if Elise was here, followed by wandering off to the bedroom for a three-hour nap while my audio project takes ten minutes to process.

Clearly some atonement had to occur for that seven-hour period of my life, which is what lead to the weeks-early install of WordPress 2.3, which at the moment fails to impress me in any way, shape, or form. So far it’s fucked up everything I liked about WordPress, resisted the installation of every theme that serves my esoteric organizational needs, and provided me with a useless little box to manually write tags in. They call that a feature? It helpfully suggests “cats, pet food, dogs.”

Don’t be surprised if you start seeing posts tagged as “you can shove those cats up your ass,” or similar.

On the plus side, now through almost three hours of archived audio I am getting uncannily good at making seven-year-old Real Audio sound reasonably listenable with 12-band parametric EQ and other assorted magic of GoldWave, which I’ve now been using for almost a decade and which is still hands-down the best audio editing tool you can purchase for under $100. If only it had a project history a la Photoshop it would be perfect…

(If I was really serious (re: masochistic) I would actually bring multiple tracks of each guitar vocal into my mixing software and tease out each one for a specific purpose, like guitar, vocals, room sound, et cetera, thus creating an artificial four- or eight-track version of something I’ve got on a dismally compressed single take. I’m pretty sure that’s what they do when they remaster old-school wall-of-sound stuff.)

I seem to have defeated the mid-mastering naps by heading into the hallway to sort laundry, and now that I’ve run out of laundry I just go do sit ups until I start to wheeze, which is usually a sign that my audio is done processing.

It’s a glamorous life, this pseudo-bachelorhood.

Crawling Through Bars to Drown My Mopes

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As soon as I knew Elise was in the air for the first leg of her 24 hours of travel I was caught off guard by a rapid onset of moping.

I don’t usually mope when Elise is on vacation. Not right away, at least. Typically I spend a day or two delighting in my pseudo-bachelorhood, and by the end of day three I get bored and start to tidy things in anticipation of Elise’s eventual return. So, I was entirely surprised yesterday when the delight never began.

Maybe it’s because she’s nearly half the world away rather than in a known location like New Jersey or California. Or, maybe bachelorhood just isn’t as delightful as it used to be. In any event, as of three o’clock yesterday afternoon I was officially moping, which made it a perfect time for our friend Melon to send me an email to ask if I wanted to go to happy hour.

Between my need to drown my mopes in cocktails and the general never-ending stream of conversation that Melon and I effortlessly sustain, happy hour turned into a six-hour upscale bar crawl, which I periodically documented on film.

Mantra @ 122 S 18th St was dead when we arrived at 5:15 p.m. The bar looked cool, but their vodka selection was seriously lacking and they charged too much for basic drinks. Thumbs down.

It was at this point that we established our one-drink-per-bar rule, and crossed the street to Tria @ 123 S 18th St. Tria had a great wine list with very aptly categorized and described selections. I had a pinot noir with hints of strawberry and rhubarb. Now ever-so-slightly tipsy, we decided to initiate all subsequent center city bar crawls at Tria.

I don’t know how any Center City bar crawl could be complete without a visit to the Midtown Continental @ 1801 Chestnut St. We sat on the peculiarly stubby stools at the bar and nursed our martinis through a long and increasingly deep conversation.

At this point pleasantly inebriated, we headed to Alfa at 1709 Walnut St. Alfa had my favorite decor of the night, as well as our favorite waitress, but my rose martini smelled like dish detergent and their hummus and baba ganoush were bland. However, Our spirit were up, which leads me to believe we’ll give Alfa a second chance some other time.

Next we hit Monk’s Cafe @ 264 S 16th St. Per usual, Monk’s was crowded and armed with rude-to-the-max wait staff, both tolerable because they have the best selection of beers in the city. We split a bottle of one of my top drinks, Lindeman’s Framboise Lambic.

We ended up circling the same block a few times before settling on Tequila’s @ 1602 Locust St. Neither Melon or I thought very highly of Tequila’s when we ate there last November – it features plenty of over-expensive and under-impressive mexican food – but it had a fantastic drink menu.

Imagine our chagrin when after they sat us outside under giant metal air warmers we were informed that said list no longer exists. Strike one. Next, I was harassed by a waiter because I wanted a rum in my mojito rather than tequila, after which said waiter spilled Melon’s sangria over our entire table (and my camera) while trying to show off. Strike two. My mojito wound up great, but sangria-conneuseur Melon rebuffed her drink after one sip, which was a final strike for Tequila’s.

We were a little bummed to be ending with a poor showing, and almost headed to McGillin’s for some soul-soothing karoake, but decided to save that for our next crawl.

Speaking of our next crawl, we need five more bars to visit after our kickoff at Tria! Suggestions welcomed.

Intervening Warbly Quick Hits

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I skipped making a second link post this past week. I had every intent of compiling one, but then my birthday got in the way.

Looking back at the intervening week I give the impression that I’m a major rock impresario spending my idle time on my blog. In fact, despite appearances to the contrary it’s been just about the opposite – I’m more involved in the behind-the-scenes of blogging ever – reading more blogs, fixing more issues with my archives, and prepping more content, and it’s meant less work on my solo music as I spend my non-blog time focused on Arcati Crisis.

Really, it’s just that I default to talking about my music when my brain is too busy to talk about anything else.

On that note, let’s start with music links, for a change of pace.

XPN programmer at Some Velvet Blog highlights the best in Philly Indie Rock. No Polymer there, though they’re surely one of the area’s best (and, I say that having once written a really nasty song about their lead singer that I (coincidentally) featured yesterday).

Arcati Crisis is still several months off of the list. As opposed to a band cemented on the list – the A-Sides – who are now a national. I gave their album a cursory listen, and it’s more of the usual for recent trends in indie pop – ornate arrangements, middling tempos, incessantly warbling vocals.

Seriously: I know I’m a snob and not the most terrific singer, but why don’t we ever expect indie rock men to sing well? Of the however many new tracks I’ve heard this month – let’s arbitrarily call it 50, although I’m sure it’s more – I’ve only purchased one by a male singer. ONE. It’s embarrassing. At least when people refer to me as folk music I don’t hear an implicit knock at my vocals in the categorization.

(Ben of Polymer sings way better than any of the fifty, and is one of major reasons why I am always obsessed with improving my singing, which is why you should go listen to them.)

(On a similar note, Gina could sing a fucking circle around the whiny vocalist behind the otherwise catchy Limes.

Indie rockers, PLEASE LEARN HOW TO SING. kthnxbye.)

Wired‘s Listening Post blog highlights the fantastic (and friendly) Daytrotter, a Rock Island, Illinois studio podcasting all manner of free music from major indie artists. (Previously blogged here.)

To close out the music topic: Largehearted Boy has so many special journalistic features with artists and authors that I really could spend the entirety of my music topic covering them. This week his brand new Soundtracked feature has the director of the otherwise excruciable Good Luck Chuck discussing the music from the film’s soundtrack.

Here’s the most amazing, fantastic, scary-useful link of the week, from telescreen.org: Jott. What is it? A toll-free number you can call up and dictate to, which subsequently transcribes your ramble into text – punctuation and all.

Urban(e) blogger Smogr posts about a real life Atlantis – called Seuthopolis in Bulgaria. Seriously. For real. More detail at archi-blog Pruned, or, if you still think this is a hoax, at WikiPedia. The entire project will cost an estimated €50mill, which seems like a bargain to unwet a freaking underwater city.

(ps: I keep reading that as Seussopolis. Like, OMG, an underwater city filled with one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.)

MN blogger Stefani claims that absinthe has found renewed legality in the USA. This is actually a lie. one brand of absinthe has a low enough Thujone content to be legal.

Bonus points: this is my favorite classic advertising print.

Pennsylvania’s CHIP is one of my major clients, so I found Akkams Razor’s illustration of CHIP funding v. Iraq funding to be morbidly fascinating. Because a day of ambiguous freedom-promoting military services is totally the equivalent of keeping a quarter of a million kids healthy. Totally.

Via 18,000 different blogs, 20×200 peddles high quality, limited edition artist photos and prints at acquirable prices, as curated by blogger Jen Bekman.

Also, via approximately a third of the blogging community: Rotten Neighbor, a site that helps you avoid the neighbors that other internet denizens have found distasteful. You know the type: well-adjusted people without blogs.

Okay, my stamina is declining. Here’s my quick hits:

Hexiom is like reverse Minesweeper, via Fresh Arrival. And: they have a sister photo site that recently featured panoramic UK photographer Will Pearson.

Mighty Girl is interviewed by 9-yr-old blogger @ In the Air. Matt’s a great journalist for being a third of my age!

(And, I know this is not really something you can appreciate the enormity of via the internet, but M.G. blogged about a production of Sweeny Todd where the chorus doubled as the orchestra. Can you wrap your mind around that shit? Crazy.)

Highways of the Nation are changing their fonts. Via Kottke. Also via K: I love tennis, but I’ve never really understood the difference between clay, hard, and grass courts. NYT to the rescue! Check out their high informative animatics. Also, strangers cross the Brooklyn bridge.

Unclutterer tells you what to do with your old cell phone(s).

Iggy Pop’s hilarious tour rider.

20 ways to make great icons.

Chirky posts an amazing cake.

Learn the basics of foreign languages online with Mango. Via Make You Go Hmm.

Adventures in San Francisco land (fill) Albany Bulb.

Philly blogger Ninth Street Records posts a nascent blog, Laceo Art, which features submissions from imprisoned juvenile offenders.

Also from Philly, we finally have public access television, via PhillyFuture.

Animated GIF map of the NYC subway. Via Harvard Avenue.

Freakonomics NYT blog takes on the future of the music industry. Certainly not warbly indie bands, that’s for sure.

Rilo Kiley has some pretty great videos, including the new ones for “Moneymaker” (with real live porn stars!) & “Silver Lining,” and last disc’s great “Portions for Foxes.” I think I just like watching Jenny Lewis sing.

For reference, she is of the same approximate talent level as Gina ;)

Do you see what happens when I don’t blog links for an entire week? Pandemonium! Smogr has my photo of the week.

/fin