thoughts

Cover songs or originals – which are easier to play?

July 17, 2016 by krisis

We held an unusual rehearsal in our dining room today – three hours of running through the Smash Fantastic cover song repertoire, but as fronted by my Arcati Crisis co-writer and BFF Gina.

An incredibly rare, one-of-a-kind shot of the first time Gina and I performed music together on stage (also the first time I sang solo in public!) This was in 1997 at Masterman, peforming “Sharks Can’t Sleep” by Tracy Bonham. From left to right: me, Joanna, Lucy, and Gina.

The strange arrangement is the result of being asked to play a big benefit show during a week where Ashley will be on vacation. It’s a fun show and we love donating our time to it, so Ashley gave her blessing for us to play it with a fill-in vocalist.

Despite you all knowing Gina primarily for her amazing songwriting and intuitive harmony vocals, she is an awesome interpreter and karaoke veteran. It helps that the rest of the band – Jake, Zina, and I – is the same for both Smash Fantastic and Arcati Crisis.

It was a rollicking rehearsal full of surprises – for example, after over 20 years of friendship I found out that Gina loves “Because The Night” as much as I do, but she does not quite know how to sing Queen’s “Somebody To Love.” We also played a rare pair of our own “Holy Grail” and “Better” with Gina on vocals but not on guitars!

The most interesting part for me was the conversation while we packed up. As we were coiling wires, Gina mentioned off-handedly that she found getting the cover songs right to be much more challenging than playing in an original band.

That took me by surprise! Gina is a confident, experienced singer – I would never expect she would be stressed by cover songs. In fact, I invited her to fill in because I thought she’d find singing two hours of covers a relief in comparison to the stress of shredding through our own songs. However, her reasoning resonated: when you’re covering a song, there’s an existing standard to be held to. As great an interpreter as you may be, you’ve got to get the lyrics right and hit the expected high notes before people will even begin to consider if your performance is any good.

I know that’s the reality, but I’ve never considered it that way. For me, cover songs are a fun vacation from the intense challenge of playing original music.

With cover songs, you simply have to capture the spirit of a song people know well. While Jake tends to hew closely to the real basslines of songs, Zina and I approximate their drum fills and guitar riffs. It’s about verisimilitude. If you give a crowd a hint of the real thing, they don’t notice all the elements you leave out.

That works in our favor on songs for which we can’t quite assemble all the elements of a recording, but it also works in our favor – our covers of “Bang Bang” and “Uptown Funk” dress up the more bare originals considerably with additional passing chords, while even on a classic like “The Way You Make Me Feel” Jake has installed a more propulsive bassline that is only implied in the original.

The first time Gina and I played guitar together in front of people! This was in 1998 at Masterman, playing U2’s “With Or Without You” for the departing senior class. Psychedelic water damage courtesy of my Sophomore year apartment.

By contrast, playing originals is terrifying! The only context the audience has are the notes coming from the stage. There is no earned good will or existing song that will put a smile on their face. And, even when you’re in top shape with a set of good songs, it’s impossible to know when they’re good enough.

It’s like doing yoga – you can always challenge yourself to sink deeper into a pose. I have songs that are nearly 20 years old that I still haven’t mastered playing; I found extra harmony on one just a few weeks ago that makes it sound more like itself than it ever has before.

Gina doesn’t have that anxiety. To her, an original song is something entirely under her control not only to interpret, but to shape and transform. The entire point of the thing is that it belongs to you and it might continue to evolve. That’s nothing to be afraid of – it’s a joy.

I was so intrigued that as best-friends and co-writers Gina and I could differ on this point, but it explains a lot about our relative comfort over the years as performers. There’s no disputing that I’m more vivid and energetically myself on stage in Smash Fantastic, just as Gina is obviously transfixing in Arcati Crisis when she settles into playing an original like “Song for Mrs. Schroeder.”

It will be an interesting eight weeks of getting 30 songs ready for this cover gig, but I think I’m even more intrigued by what Gina and I will know about ourselves afterward when we turn our attention back to originals for the first time in three years.

our supersized supermarkets

July 16, 2016 by krisis

I’ve been thinking about groceries, scale, and the American way.

Last night, while our daughters napped under J’s watch, Lindsay and I absconded to Wegmans for a quick shopping trip slash Pokémon catching session. Yes, you read that right – we had an hour to ourselves and we went grocery shopping for amusement. To be fair, Wegmans is definitely like an amusement park for hungry adults recovering from five hours swimming in a lake with two boisterous young ladies.

Photo by Flickr User Seuss. Some rights reserved.

You could fit an entire French supermarket into this Wegman’s photo. Photo by Flickr User Seuss. 2008, some rights reserved.

I know I’m a little late to coming around to Wegmans – heck, Lindsay grew up shopping at one! Even as I marveled at how Wegmans has every possibly thing (Six different kinds of raw shrimp to choose from! Three different kinds of Tahini! Every single organic vegetable! Liquor and Beer!), I also reflected on the very middle/upper-class American condition of being excited to visit a grocery store that’s as much about leisure as it is about subsistence.

My grocery situation as a small child was all about subsistence. For deli and packs of cigarettes, we had a tiny Vietnamese bodega on our corner, and for other groceries a smallish Stop and Save and Shop or Something on the next block that accepted our food stamps. I remember being mystified by the cheap brands of frozen foods like waffles or steaks that I had never heard of before – because they didn’t advertise on TV.

When an Acme was installed on 80th street it was big news, and the long aisles full of expanded cereal choices and real meat counter seemed like luxuries – likely combined with the fact that we had graduated from welfare with my mom getting her degree and could more readily afford such things.

In college we alternated between a newly-opened Fresh Grocer, which was like a slightly watered-down Whole Foods, and a local Thriftway that Lindsay, Erika and I re-christened “Theftway” for its sometimes-shady customers and peculiar aisle arrangement. Theftway was great for getting cheap name brands, but for anything special, fresh, or healthy we’d take the four block walk to Fresh Grocer.

On our honeymoon the tiny Paris apartment E and I were renting had an impossibly small miniature refrigerator, which meant we needed to restock our food options every other day. That wasn’t so unusual, and the local grocery store reinforced that – it was no bigger than a suburban Wawa and didn’t contain a single super-sized portion of anything. Juices topped out in half gallons, and paper towels came in a max three-rolls-per-pack. When it came to wide varieties, the selection focused on fresh things like cheeses, breads, and juices rather than 100 different kinds of cereal.

We loved it. Bigger doesn’t always have to be better.

Now my local haunt is an impossibly large Giant, which has nearly put our local Acme out of business – it looks dismal by comparison. Not coincidentally, it’s now completely devoid of the upper-middle-class suburban shoppers that used to clog its aisles. After all, Giant has not one but two aisles of healthy and gluten-free foods!

That’s not meant as a knock on GF stuff, since it’s a requirement in our household – more an acknowledgement of the kind of choices that become important to you when you’re not looking for the foods that your WIC check will cover. Recently EV and I had a long wait behind a couple who were trying to figure out what they could cover with WIC checks and what they needed to pay in cash.

After they were finished, the cashier fixed me with a grimace and apologized for the wait. I responded, “No worries, I remember what that was like.”

She gave me a puzzled look in return and started ringing my groceries.

These were my thoughts as Lindsay and I wandered through the stadium-sized Wegman’s. Do we need all of this super-sized choice to be satisfied as consumers? How lucky are we that buying our meals is an act of amusement and convenience? How lucky are we that we can buy them at all?

I (Kirsten Dunst movie) do not care about (Katy Perry song title)

July 5, 2016 by krisis

Like a David Foster Wallace novel, this is only going to make sense if you read the footnotes.

There are some things in the world that I deeply, deeply¹,do not give any shits about but I am begrudgingly willing to experience through the eyes of a toddler. Holiday fireworks are one of those things, which makes it cosmically Alanis Ironic that I watched them without EV.

Fireworks sparkle, which is plus, but they are loud and incredibly pointless, which is a minus. I’m all about enjoying excerpts of them from a vantage point that is far away from where they are exploding (but not from the comfort of my own home, because that means that they are too close to home). Like, maybe I would enjoy them from a roof deck party with some delicious catering. In the fall. Wearing a jacket.

I do not want to see them up close. I do not want to hear the blaring low-fi music. I do not want to feel sticky with perspiration while watching them.² I especially do not want to interact with any of the people also watch them.

Yet, there we were, past EV’s bedtime in a crowd of people who were waiting to watch fireworks. Well, really, there were E and EV. I was still parking the car, largely because we were told to do so by two bored-looking police officers.

“But, there’s no signs saying we can’t park here,” E retorted, when they told us we weren’t allowed to park on the side of the street we just parked on, alongside several other cars and absolutely zero signage about not parking there.

“Yeah,” one of them replied, “there ought to be some signs. Last year we didn’t have signs, and it was just a mess out here with all the fire trucks and ambulances on the street. There really ought to be signs.”

As a result of that total non-answer, I was parking the car in part of downtown Landsdowne I had never before seen while E and EV walked to the local high school’s field to watch the fireworks show for a suggested donation, which is another aspect of fireworks you do not have to deal with when watching them from afar.⁴

I parked my car Bowie-knows-where at the asterisk intersection of three different streets. Luckily, I could still see the top of the high school and so, after reciting a mnemonic for the cross streets to myself⁵, I began to thread my way through a series of one-way side streets toward the school, following the ever-growing trickle of people funneling in from other adjacent streets.

As I turned a final corner to reach the side of the field, I noticed that a section of fence was broken open. It curled back on itself. No one was anywhere nearby. I could just duck under the fence with my water bottle and my laptop and avoid paying to watch the fireworks I planned to studiously ignore while writing a blog post on said laptop and stealing sideways glances at EV.

I considered it for only a moment, because I generally do not break any laws or ordinances regardless of if there will be consequences (thus the re-parking of car despite lack of enforceable signs). Anyway, the field wasn’t especially full, so it felt wrong to avoid the cover charge. The crowd was sparse enough that some kids were turning long peals of cartwheels down the middle of it. I texted E with one thumb: Where AR U?

She texted back: Middle bleachers.

Funny that; there were no bleachers on the field.

I paced back and forth down its length, trying to imagine if she would refer to a small copse of folding chairs as “bleachers” and also wondering where you paid to enter before it occurred to me that the high school must have two fields⁶. This field, I realized as the fireworks began exploding overhead, constituted the cheap seats – you didn’t have to pay to sit here.

I half-jogged off the field, adjusted my speed based on the amount of perspiring I was already doing, and ambled around the school as the glittering opening salvo exploded over my head to the strains of a John Williams march. As I turned the northeast corner of the building I discovered the throngs of people that the parking situation clearly indicated were in attendance. I picked through the crowd until I reached a thick knot of folks standing between me and the the gate to the second field. They could all see and hear the fireworks perfectly well; some of them were sitting on blankets in the middle of the street. Beyond them, there was a sole man in a “STAFF” shirt, ostensibly acting as a ticket-seller, ticket-taker, and bouncer all rolled up into one. Past him was a field of even more people, with a marginally better view of the fireworks than the knot I was tied up in.

I was reaching for my wallet to pay just as another salvo launched. The fireworks were so loud. My head was already thrumming from the repeated booms. I think they were nearly as loud as my drummer Zina, and I won’t go anywhere near her without ear plugs or in-ear monitors. I took another look past the seller/taker/bouncer at the field. It was teeming with people and it was closer to where the fireworks were exploding. I don’t like either of those things. Yet, somewhere in the teeming mass was my wife and child, the latter of whom was either gaping in wonder at the man-made marvel of fireworks or sobbing inconsolably about how loud they were⁷.

I did some mental calculations. We were at least two Williams movements into the show. It would take me at least another three minutes to pick my way across the field in the darkness to the middle bleachers. How long could a fireworks show be? 10 minutes? 12? I wanted to experience EV experiencing the fireworks, but it seemed like I’d only make it in for a minute of them, tops. I texted E: Staying outside fence at this point.

There was a terrifically gnarled old tree across from the entrance to the field. I sat on its grasping roots at the fireworks continued overhead, now to the strains of “The Raiders March” from Indiana Jones. The march came and went. Fireworks were still exploding. I pressed a pinky into my ear and texted E: Kind of long, no? How is she holding up.

No answer. We were onto some other Williams now, but not Star Wars, although I cannot imagine why not. Certainly it’s not any more of a fireworks choreography cliche than Indiana Jones?

Long story moderately long, the fireworks went on for 30 minutes all throughout which I kept thinking, “surely that must be the finale, it cannot possibly get louder than that,” and then for another rogue minute after the music stopped that was either a dangerous misfire or an encore. Despite all the throngs of people, it wasn’t hard to spot E and EV afterwards to lead them back through the series of sides streets back to the car.

“Did you like the fireworks?” I asked EV, who looked blessedly un-tear-stained.

“THERE WERE EXTRA!” she answered. “EXTRA FIREWORKS!”

“At the end?” I said.

“YES, EXTRA FIREWORKS AT THE END AND I ATE A LOT OF SNACKS AND THERE WAS A MAN HE MADE A ‘V’ WITH THE LIGHT UP SWORDS LIKE THE ‘V’ IN MY NAME, ‘EV’!”

“Do you think she’s yelling because she was deafened?” I asked E.

“No, I think she’s just excited.”

I smiled. I might have missed the fireworks, but I definitely did not miss her reaction.⁸

Endnotes:

1. One time E and I bought the Kirsten Dunst movie Deeply for $5 at a grocery store and it was every bit as bad as that suggests and every time we refer to it (which is with surprising frequency) we say it in this lusty, throaty voice, like “deeeEEEEEEply,” and that is the voice with which you should read the italicized word above.

2. I’m sorry, I tried to make this into a green eggs and ham³ joke, but the meter never gelled.

3. I have yet to read Green Eggs and Ham to EV because all of the eggs we eat are green (either with spinach or pesto) and I do not want to put her off of them.

4. E has informed me that it is common to charge for premium seating for fireworks displays in the suburbs and I was like “For real for real?” Philly is so flat and the buildings are so low south of Chestnut that you can more or less see waterfront or sports complex fireworks from any rooftop and most back windows. Come to think of it, one of the big differences between city life and suburb life is that I no longer have a back window to climb out of onto a roof BUT ALSO that suspected burglars cannot flee across my roof either.

5. “Favorite pizza in college, a small and typically shortrun paperback booklet yet not a booklet but a man, marriage of those two concepts.” Or, Powelton, Chapman, and Union avenues.

6. Consider that I attended a city high school where the only two outdoor spaces were a caged-in roof and a tiny parking lot that you had to circle nine times to run a mile, vaulting trash bags along the way.

7. She is not much of a cryer and she totally hangs at rehearsal with Zina (while wearing ear protection, of course), but she is terrified of loud noises she can’t really get away from, like hand dryers in small public restrooms. A few weeks ago we were in a stall toilet in a tiny bathroom at the zoo when a gaggle of kids decided to play with the hand dryer, and that was maybe my second worst five minutes of parenting so far since I’ve been parenting full time (and the first worst was on that day, too).

8. Just a reminder that you don’t have to read every italicized work on my blog like”deeeEEEEEEply.” It was just that one time. I don’t want to leave you with the wrong idea. That’s not what I mean every time I use italics.

your princess is in another castle

July 2, 2016 by krisis

Without realizing it, each Wednesday for our weekly adventure I have gotten in the habit of dressing EV in her “This is what a programmer looks like” t-shirt from Django Girls, a non-profit that helps women learn to code. I hadn’t even realized the pattern until I scanned through our recent photos and saw the shirt again and again in the shots from Wednesdays.

I really love when EV wears that shirt. It’s awesome seeing examples of diversity of gender and race in the tech community, and there’s something even more powerful for me to see children implicated in that. That programmer woman you so desperately wish you could add to your team isn’t a magical unicorn who you could easily identify out of a lineup of women. She’s a person. She started out as a little girl. That is what a programmer looks like.

EV a few seconds after this week’s “princess” incident.

However, this week I discovered an extra layer to adventuring in our “programmer” shirt when someone repeatedly referred to EV as “princess.”

We do not use the word “princess” in this household.

It was one of my early edicts of parenting even before a little girl emerged in the delivery room. I don’t like princess culture. Yes, they’re lovely and the stories are classic. It’s wonderful that princesses are increasingly portrayed as active, adventurous, and empowered.

However, even the most well-intended princess is still a princess. They’ve either won their status via a birth lottery that blessed them with royalty even as it cursed them with the prick of a spinning wheel or they romanced a prince who won a birth lottery and have now gained elevated status all thanks to love.

Neither is a message I feel needs encoding on a toddler whose brain is a sponge. Do we insist that every hero a little boy idolizes be a prince? No – more often the heroes presented to boys have earned their status through their actions, even if they are frequently working from the same book of “chosen one” tropes.

I see how EV absorbs every little input. She will reference minuscule details of events from weeks or months ago out of the blue with perfect recollection. It’s not special – it’s what toddlers do. What happens when you feed that spongey brain the message about birth lottery and marrying into status over and over and over again as the underpinnings of an otherwise innocuous and delightful story before they even understand how to consume stories?

Maybe nothing. Maybe just the pathological need to dress up in fancy dresses. That’s fine. It’s the other implications I dislike. Glam knows that plenty of today’s most successful women consumed these stories as kids, but why sandbag a little brain with confusing messages? I don’t think it’s ever too early to teach a doctrine of free will, nondeterminism, and consent, and princess culture can undermine all three.

I try not to get the claws out over a stray “princess” from someone speaking to EV the way I did at first (especially when it’s from a woman, because it lacks a leering aspect of condescension isn’t as present when it’s from someone of the same gender). This week I let the first mention from a man slide by. Then there was a second, and I bit my tongue. The third, delivered with him crouched down at eye level with EV, set me off.

“I think you meant ‘programmer’,” I said.

“Hmm? What?”

“You keep calling her ‘princess.’ She’s not a princess. Stop saying that.”

What I should have added was, “She’s not a princess now and she’s not aspiring to be one, either. So, you might as well call her ‘programmer.’ Or ‘doctor’ or ‘director’ or ‘engineer’ or ‘professor’ or anything, really, but certainly not the one thing she will almost certainly never be, because Kate Middleton is an extreme outlier. At the very least, can we settle on, ‘big girl’?”

“Or ‘president’.”

like a carnival ride, I kept swinging from side the side

June 30, 2016 by krisis

Last night, Mother of Krisis and I brought EV to the Wildwood Boardwalk for her first encounter with funnel cake, seagulls, and carnival rides.

(I think EV has already encountered white trash within the actual boundaries of Philadelphia. HEY-OH.)

(I kid, I kid. I actually have a deep, abiding love of the Wildwood Boardwalk as the sole interesting thing about being dragged to the beach multiple times each summer. It offers many bounties, like Curly’s Fries, Salt Water Taffy, and Lime Rickey, and it’s where I first encountered the six-player X-Men arcade game which birthed my obsession with Dazzler.)

2016-06-29 19.11.35 Our first excursion was a set of Jeep-like buggies which rode up and down over invisible hills, encountering some bumps along the way. Since it was EV’s first ride and because I did not want to be the parent yelling soothing words at a crying child trapped on a ride for two more minutes, I opted to ride along with her in the comedically small car. EV sat in the driver’s seat, with me crouched awkwardly behind her.

(Mother refers to rides vaguely as “the attractions” in the manner of a jaded carny.)

I was immediately happy with my choice to accompany EV, because before the ride even began we were attacked by half a dozen seagulls. We hadn’t even had the funnel cake yet, but maybe she had one little crumb in her hair from lunch or something. Those fuckers are ruthless. My Tiger Father instincts kicked in and I formed a fleshy suit of gull armor around EV’s body, slapping birds away with the flats of my palms.

Actually, the seagull attack was a good introduction to the boardwalk. Not only did EV totally understand our need to eat funnel cake covertly later in the evening, but I think the gulls were scarier than any of the rides. After that, the the buggy bumps were only mildly alarming – possibly just because they were invisible.

The first time around, EV looked back at me, wincing. Not a good sign. “That’s the bumps!” I exclaimed, joyfully. “You have to get ready to steer over them.” The second time there was no wincing, but still an expression of great concern.

The third time there was maniacal laughter and an expression of pure joy. She would ride the buggies several more times – without me along in the backseat.

This morning we cast about for something to do that was not the beach, because my anxiety builds exponentially with each grain of sand stuck to my person. We settled on a tandem surrey ride on the boardwalk.

I enjoy the boardwalk by day – when I was trapped at the shore against my will as a kid I would walk its full, mostly-empty length and back while early risers hit the beach (a preview of my adult jogging on the Vegas strip while the prior night’s revelers were still passed out on benches).

The problem with this plan was the bit about working in tandem. Though Mother of Krisis is still convalescing from surgery, she thought she’d be able to occasionally contribute to the pedaling of said surrey. Perhaps she could have. The issue we encountered was that her feet could not even reach the pedals.

That meant I would be the sole pedaler for our 90-minute journey.

Let’s do some back of napkin math, shall we? A bit of web sleuthing reveals the surrey is 265 pounds, shipped. I’ll be generous and assume 10% of that weight is packaging. Mother of Krisis, EV, and I combined weigh 356 pounds. I carry a backpack that is another 15 pounds, at least, owing in part to the 100oz Camelbak full of water inside (for which I was very thankful).

That meant I spent 90 minutes locomoting over 600 pounds of Krisis Family Vacation up and down the boardwalk with only the power of my thick Italian thighs, all while small children on bikes and surreys powered by more than one person bobbed and weaved around us.

I wish I could say that writing this blog constituted the sum total of my subsequent physical activity for the day, but afterwards I swam laps while EV splashed around with her grandpop.

See: I really don’t vacation well. The only way to push through my mounting anxiety is to treat each day like I am on some sort of reality TV fitness challenge.