Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Personal

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lazy summer heat is slowly seeping into my pores because it always distributes evenly to where things are cool because that’s how science works. i am listless with heat, waking up abruptly from crucial points in my technicolor-bright dreams to glittering sun bathing my entire bed in gilded rays. last night there were three story double homes with bay windows in the third floor bedroom and i remember hugging someone very tightly to me and something strange lurking in the basement that i knew all about as a narrator but nothing about as a character. and then i was flying, weaving inbetween buildings and up and over and out into sky and that’s about as much as i recall about that.

today i really do have work to do, but the page was looking sort of lonely. read that last post, if you haven’t already. but, anyway i just realized today that i haven’t played “under my skin” since i played it for rabi or at the bar and i think i somehow got past it or something and that scares me, because that song was all about everything. have you been paying much attention to the new songs? they’re conspiring against me and my album and i think they might have kidnapped “relief” because i haven’t heard anything from it for a while. i think “splinter” is in charge of the whole conspiracy even though it doesn’t show up too much, because it’s very jealous about not getting on the album and it knows that gina really likes it and oh god now i’m talking about my songs like they’re people just like tori amos does but i always just explain that away with the fact that she did too many low-quality l.a. drugs in the 80’s but i’ve never even been to nebraska so i’m obviously just crazy to begin with.

the songs are sortof like people though. after you play something enough you begin to develop a relationship with it; some days you dress it up special and some days it barely rolls out of bed and some days it just doesn’t want to have it’s picture taken and it’s holding its hands up in front of its face and complaining. the scary thing is that the new songs are doing this now, as they’re written. that last one flaunted its independence right at me saying “you can’t end me unless i want to be ended, so keep on writing” and i did and it takes up way more pages in my little grey book than any of the other songs do but now that it made me write it all down it doesn’t really seem to want to be played, which confuses me to no end. i don’t think i really realized that all of my songs are relationship songs until gina pointed it, and now i seem to be able to write everything else but it’s like hitting a new note for the first time because i can’t tell if they’re strong or if they just seem very nice because i’ve never heard them before.

if you were wondering, this is just how my head is working lately. i wrote a 2300 word email last night without even really intending to. it’s like when i open up my head things just come pouring out until it’s empty again. but, anyway, this post is just a post for the sake of being here in this little box, so i again defer to the intelligence of the last post and wish you all have a nice day.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/06/3950354/

3920759

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Since i’ve been crushing heavily on Erin McKeown’s music lately, i just thought i’d log a little link to a prominent website about her at Imperfectly (which, incidentally, used to host the best Ani DiFranco web site on the internet). Erin fascinates me, because listening to her albums i can hardly imagine that these songs just come to her … it’s seems much more than she deliberately chooses a way for a song to sound and them molds it into the exact shape that she wants. However, no matter how she does it the results are completely arresting on record, even more so live.

Erin just graduated from Brown University last week with a degree in EthnoMusicology (she had to fly in from a UK tour with Peter Mulvey for the ceremonies), and she is touring the American folk-festival circuit this summer. I consider this success… whether or not she ever meant to be a rock star or a folk hero doesn’t really matter; what matters is that she has adoring audiences in each city she heads into, and that she heads out of every one with new fans (myself included).

Her long journey to this point started (apparently) with being named a semi-finalist by the songwriters’ association of washington dc before ever getting to Brown, and with gigging and selling tapes around Brown’s campus. At some point those tapes found their way onto a cd called Monday Morning Cold, and from the attention she garnered from that she moved forward to create last year’s Distillation. Five years. The difference between being a high school senior and a college graduate, and Erin McKeown is living the life that i would choose for myself above all other lives. She went to the school i wanted to attend, she writes songs i envy and adore, and she tours with Peter Mulvey (he was her opening act here in Philly!), and she’s not even 25. And i’m left, as i always am, wondering how she got there.


Of course, we all know how she got there. She had a relentless vision and an amazing talent, and she didn’t keep it a secret. However, it’s hard being relentless or anything else about music while i’m working every day and trying to line up an internship for next year and fretting about classes and paying my bills. Of course, musicians come from much worse all the time, but in the void of major label interest (that is, i wouldn’t be vaguely interested) i am in awe of the Ani DiFrancos, the Peter Mulveys, and the Erin McKeowns because at some point they decided that music was what was for them and that they needed to devote all of their attention to it. I think i need to make that decision or let the matter drop; if only i spent as much time on my music as i do writing for this website.

And therein lies the conflict: as much as i need to better myself musically, the time i spend writing for and administering this site feels like a definite way to prepare my voice and my patience for the world of journalism. I feel like having a successful blog (still an aspiration of mine rather than a reality) is the equivalent of Erin McKeown’s summer folk festival tour. Even if i got to write cd reviews for a local paper with a circulation of 100,000 – how many people read past the cover story? How many people read past the albums they want to buy to the reviews they aren’t really interested in, just to hear new & different opinions? Having your own successful website means you are in touch with an audience much more focused than any group your circulated publication could ever reach. So… to give this up would be to emphasize music over my course of study, when really in my mind they are equals now.

Somewhere in there i think i came to a conclusion that i’ve been working on for the last four years; I can tell because my stomach just dropped out of the center of my body as if i’m being spun on a tilt-a-whirl. Or, perhaps it is just time for lunch. I suspect that i’ll get back to you on this one…

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Have i beat this horse to death yet? Oh no! I think it moved! Beat it more!

#1 is true. I have had exactly one serious scrape or cut, ever, and it wasn’t even that serious. This wasn’t a trick, folks, because a broken collarbone is neither a scrape nor a cut. Once i cut open my finger on a catfood lid and it bled for about an hour, but i didn’t even need a stitch. I must’ve been fifteen or sixteen and i remember being amused when my neighbor put on latex gloves to help me bandage up my finger because it meant he assumed i actually had the chance to catch any bloodborne diseases, which was a little flattering. Later that summer he gave offered me a bass guitar and some cocaine, of which i took one.

#2 is true. I used to have a foot fetish before i understood what was supposed to be attractive about people. Um, yeah. It’s hard for something about girls to be hot when you’re five, so i think i just arbitrarily picked feet. It was actually pretty funny, because if i was hanging out with a girl with her shoes off it was entirely equal to me walking down the street now and seeing someone i know who’s totally topless and trying to have a conversation with her without making her aware of looking directly at or directly away from her chest. I think the reason everyone thought i was a bit gay when i was little is because sometimes i’d get distracted by boys with nice feet. Yeah… the weirdness knows no bounds.

#4 is true. I still fit into my first pair of jeans. My first pair of jeans were purchased in eighth grade, and i’m wearing them right now as cutoffs. There wasn’t a reason to have jeans when i wore a uniform to school every day, and seventh grade was the year of the sweatsuit. And, since i barely nudge having over a 30inch waist now, 30×30’s were massive on me six years ago. Love that trim girlish figure.

#5 is false! Before this year i had cried exactly twice since i left grade school? What utter tripe; i’m such a fucking wuss. I’ve cried on the phone to Gina, cried when we had to put my cat Keeko to sleep, and once i mustered up some rockin’ alligator-tears for a substitute we had in English class who wouldn’t let me go to the bathroom. Suckers.

#9 is true. I have never been outside of this time zone. Okay, this one is a little fudgey, but only because of my mother. As far as i ever knew, i had never been out of this time zone, having only been up to Boston and down to Florida. However, my mother informs me that Jamaica is indeed in the next time zone over from this one, and i have visited there twice, albeit very briefly. However, i’m still counting this question as true because i didn’t have a watch with me in Jamaica on either trip and my mother never saw it fit to tell me that we had lost an hour on the way down or gained one on the way up. Way to go mom. So, from now on this is false, but up until today i had no idea.

#11 is true. Until next year i will have spent a third of my life on welfare, a fifth of my life in braces, and nearly half my life without ever having a friend enter my bedroom. After my parents got separated my mother and i were on government assistance for quite some time while she bartended at night and went to nursing school during the day. I will never oppose welfare because i am a result of the welfare system gone right, and if you’d like to tell me that the goverment shouldn’t provide for people in a tough position then you’re telling me that my mother should have never gone to college and that i’m not supposed to be here either, among other things. So, there’s a real life story for you, chew on that. I had braces for four and a quarter years, and it was not fun, but my teeth are absolutely perfect now. I had exactly two friends ever enter my bedroom in the house where i lived for nearly a decade and a half, because i had no friends and even the ones i had hardly ever came to my house, let alone my bedroom. After we moved i had a ton of people who came into my bedroom, and since most of my friends were girls i think it made my mom a little nervous, but nothing steamy ever happened. I mean, why would anything steamy happen? I am the opposite of steam, yet i am not ice because then i would be cool. Contemplate that one.

#12 is true. I learned to subtract from playing Monopoly. A lot of my friends somehow contrived to learn how to read at age three or four, and i can’t imagine that, but i knew math very early. I was a kid who was into doing things, so my mom eventually resorted to Risk and Monopoly hoping to bore me to death, but it didn’t work. At all. However, being a resourceful mother, she just made it a point to teach me how to make change through playing Monopoly (and how to achieve socio-economic domination through the both combined) so that in first grade math was barely as hard as raiding the $1’s drawer. In fact, when i got tested for MG at the end of first grade they gave me this really complicated problem about babysitting and i blithely used multiplication to answer it while the tester let her mouth hang open and my mom smirked to herself. Don’t ever ask her about it, though, or she’ll brag about showing me mentally engaging flashcards rather than talk about board games.

#16 is true. is true. I was the worst reader in my first grade class. Even though i was a tremendously good student, and could spell well, and had very high listening comprehension, i couldn’t ever put it all together and read. There’s one infamous story i have about those giant reading charts with the pictures next to the vocabulary words. One day i got this word that made absolutely no sense to me and the picture seems to look a lot like Toucan Sam with a drippy nose and i just stared and stared at it until finally one of my classmates shouted out “it’s ‘water’!” Coulda fooled me. That summer i read my first book (a children’s version of Dracula … can you see how i got so fucked up? This is like the “how did Peter get so fucked up” game) Somehow by the end of second grade i was in the top reading group in the class, and in third grade i was reading books for eighth graders. And everyone lived happily ever after. The end.

#21 is true. I refused to wear anything coloured navy to the point of a temper tantrum until it became one of my school colors last year. It looked much too much like black and it always was trying to trick me into buying it, and if my mom handed me that even looked a little like navy i would go into full-out only-child tantrum mode until the piece of clothing was back on the rack. If you were ever wondering, that’s why “touch” has the following line: “there’s no place to touch you, skin sweet with navy blue, but it’s so close to black though.” Damn those hot indy-rock girls and their navy tee-shirts. Actually, it turns out i look really good in navy; who knew?

#22 is true. is true. Both girls i’ve ever asked out on a date wound up kissing my best friends. Another fudged one; it’s actually all three girls i’ve ever asked out on a date. Juliana was the first, and she wound up dating Justin. (Evil) Kate (daughter of a local news anchor) was second (see “Falling Down“), and she wound up being slutty with the now-disavowed Lucas. Jesse with blue hair was the last one (see “Afterglow“), and she had her first hook-up with Andrea. Anastasia never hooked up with any of my best friends; she just neglected to acknowledge my romantic existance so i never asked her out. Lots of songs about that…

And that, my friends, is more than you should ever have to hear about my life in a single week. Goodnight.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/06/3916597/

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I just recorded the worst trio ever. Ever. It started with me trying to cover Weezer, and then i sing a punk song, and then i try to be a credible folk singer for a song or two, and then i make “Lost” sound like it’s a bunch of cats fighting each other out in an alley. Yum. But, even better, i’m taking another stab at it in five minutes.


Speaking of stabbings, i managed to stab myself three separate times with that shiny new knife of mine. Three. So, yeah, it didn’t just look sharp because it was the only big knife in the aisle. Also, i made dinner for a whole room full of people and mine was the only dish that was completed gone at the end of the night. Mad props.

Wow, actually, inbetween all of the cats fighting i do some pretty neat stuff on “Lost.” Okay… try #2, here we come.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/06/3915058/

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Off to cook italian food and feel like a real person! Cooking is a vivid life experience if you do it with passion. And, definitely a turn-on. Okay, that’s enough sharing for now, i’ll have nine truths and a lie for you later in the evening. Are you scared yet?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/06/3909402/