Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

the corners of my mind

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I have a habit of dozing off on the 57 bus in the afternoon on the way home from work. I don’t think it’s because I am so tired. There’s just something about the rhythm of motion and the droning of the motor humming through my body while I listen to my headphones.

The nap is only ever about ten minutes long. It’s not even a nap, really. I’ve never slept through my stop. It’s just an extended hang right on the line between awake and asleep.

I love that line, especially when traveling in that direction rather than the opposite – being tortured by an alarm clock. Heading in to sleep is different. Your brain will rationalize outside stimuli however it sees fit. The world outside of your body takes on an arbitrary – almost hallucinatory – quality.

On the bus my favorite thing to do is turn on my own music – new demos or an Arcati Crisis rehearsal – and then drift off. My brain finds things in the songs I’ve never heard before. Sometimes I have a momentary synesthesia and my own words are painted in color. Others I am enraptured by Gina narrating an epic story, only to realize I’m not listening to her towering “Brother John” but just twenty seconds of refrain of “What’ll I Say.”

Last night when my body was finally ready to settle down my brain refused to go gently into that good night. It was raining hard, a symphony of individual droplets pattering against the roof above my head, and my mind wanted to examine every one.

I hate those nights. I’ve hated them since high school, when every night brought the possibility of seeing the subsequent dawn from the wrong side.

Last night I slipped in my earbuds and suddenly “Small & Lonely and “Gone Baby Gone” were rendered in plastic yellow totems, a wry stop-motion tribute to Yellow Submarine, awash in the white noise of the storm.

It took all of four minutes to fall asleep.

…and there was life

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My body is convinced that there are 27 hours in the day.

It will gladly absorb a requisite eight of sleep, but then it wants to stay up and about for a too-long 18 hours, plus a bonus hour to wind down to sleep.

I’ve long since been used to tricking myself into being tired, but I cannot always trick my brain into making a to-do list that can be completed before midnight.

Tonight was an epic amount of exercise, mixing for a top-secret freelance project, uploading brand new Arcati Crisis videos, chipping away at some freelance writing, and beginning the massive late-spring cleaning required to accommodate the hulking new digital audio workstation Gina and I lugged from her car on Saturday before a completely exhausting/exhaustive drumming rehearsal with Chas.

BTW, Arcati Crisis with drums is awesome. Just you wait.

If you have been wondering where the spiffy PM demos have gone, they are far from over. It’s just that I realized somewhere around 9:30 p.m. on June 7th that I haven’t had to contain many more than a dozen well-rehearsed, original, solo songs in my body all at once for several years – let alone contain them on top of my AC repertoire – and so it would be a stretch to assume there were another 46 good ones ready to tumble out daily for the rest of the month.

Also, there was the little matter of having completely worn through my dozen-years-in-the-making guitar calluses, a feat I’ve only accomplished a handful of times previously. Merrily, my vocals stayed strong throughout – more points towards the value of good voice instruction. Old-school me would have been croaking like a frog by day four.

(Also also, I was primed to miss out on some actual life in order to keep recording – including seeing good friends (and clients) play big shows, supporting local open mics, and communicating with my wife, amongst other things. Oh, and maybe a Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon.)

(Don’t judge.)

Point being, I’ll be back with another run of of demos as soon as I have the time to rehearse them a bit, because scrabbling through a daily duo of tunes so barely-rehearsed that they hardly hang together sortof defeats the entire point of the project (i.e., to rehearse for my impending studio album and definitively/digitally put to rest some older tunes).

In the meantime, I am insanely happy with the results of the first seven days, particularly Saving Grace and Colorblind, both of which are intricate and in alternate tunings. Not ones I thought you’d hear in the first week.

Knowing my body and its various to-dos, I’m thinking sleepiness will arrive circa 1:50 a.m.

whiling away the hours

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(1) A few years ago I saw Malcolm Gladwell deliver a speech at the New Yorker Festival that is largely recapitulated in the second chapter of Outliers, called “The 10,000 Hour Rule.”

In it, Gladwell draws our attention to a data point converged upon by countless studies of experts in a variety of fields. He says, “In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.” He goes on to quote neurologist Daniel Levitin:

In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. … It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.

Gladwell supports the rule using Mozart, Bill Gates, Bill Joy, and the Beatles as his examples. Not to say that their genius and success is purely a result of 10,000 hours of practice – the book as a whole explains other facets – just that it was an essential component of their expertise.

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(2a) 10,000 hours is a long time.

If as a child starting at age five you had piano lessons two times a week (an hour each) and also practiced an hour a day, you would clock nine hours a week. 468 hours a year. 4,680 hours a decade.

If you kept that up until age 26 you’d finally have served your time.

(2b) 10,000 hours can go by before you know it.

Maybe you got into video games at age 11. You played them every night after homework and dinner, let’s say from 7:30 to 11:00 p.m. on most nights, plus extra on the weekend. That’s more than 25 hours a week. 1,300 plus a year.

You’d be a master by the time you started college. Most kids are.

(2c) Time is relative.

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(3) In the car today Gina and I were singing in harmony to the amazing Hezekiah Jones album Hezekiah Says You’re A-OK, on the way to see his band split a bill with the equally fantastic Up the Chain.

“You know, Gina,” I said, breaking from my lead vocal, “I’ve been thinking about this 10,000 hour thing. Not everyone’s an expert at something. I mean, what do most people spend 10,000 hours doing by the time they’re 25? Watching teevee, I suppose.”

“More than likely,” she replied.

“But, think about me. I watched a lot of television, sure. Mostly, though, I read until I was old enough to write, and then I wrote and read. That’s what I spent my 10k on.”

(Perhaps she interjected, “Oh, I remember.”)

“And, you know, is it any surprise that I’m good at communications? I’m not an expert, but no wonder it’s my calling. I spent my whole life practicing for it.”

We sat and sang for a moment, contemplating that.

“What about you?”

Gina paused in her harmony. “Hmm, me?”

“Yeah. What did you spend 10,000 hours doing?”

“This. Listening to music. Singing harmony.”

“Really your whole life, right? Your mother singing, your father playing guitar…”

“Yeah, since I can remember.”

“Right. So, no matter how much I rehearse, you’ll always have the edge. It’ll always come easier to you, until I reach that threshold.”

“I suppose.”

We paused as the song wound down.

“What do you think Hezekiah spent 10,000 hours doing?”

We thought on that for a few moments, and then sang together to “Albert Hash.”

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(4) We’re not all Mozart. I might not ever be Hezekiah Jones. But, we’ve all spent 10,000 hours doing something other than sleeping, and hopefully other than watching television. Maybe something incidental that we do out of necessity or habit. Driving? Social-networking? Cleaning? Taking care of children?

I’ve put in more than my share on communications – reading cereal boxes and trashy fantasy novels, writing stories at eight on my manual typewriter and almost nine years of blogs.

I got an early start on 10,000 hours of being Gina’s best friend, which I keep padding. I’m really good at that. More recently I’ve attained well-in-excess of 10,000 hours of being in love with Elise.

I hope eventually I’ll reach my 10,000th hour of serious focus on music. It’s a large piggy-bank of time to fill.

What about you? What have you spent your life mastering, intentionally or unintentionally?

don’t fail me now

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The last forty-eight hours of my life.

At six o’clock on Monday I am playing guitar. I have been playing for hours, drilling songs against a metronome. The bridge of “Unengaged” for twenty minutes straight. I’ve worn through a callous for the first time in ages.

Later I rehearse piano and vocals equally as hard. I fall asleep reading Outliers in bed, which just two chapters in already has caused one blowup with E because I said if I had me as a child I’d call me a failure.

I don’t want to be a failure.

Tuesday I have a fun, frantic day at work – the kind where you realize at the end of the day that you never stopped to hang your coat. I start writing the second my ass is on the bus, and emerge almost three hours later with that last post.

I rehearse. Hard. Again. Trying not to fail. Despite my voice sounding brittle and inflexible due to the lack of a warm-up, I venture out to an open mic while E stays at home and works on freelance.

At the restaurant my first song is awesome; the room is quietly transfixed. (I’m not a failure?) Afterward I promptly break a string and become shy and faltering when I’m handed another guitar. I fuck up “Like a Virgin,” of all things, and promptly lose everyone’s attention.

Today I feel slightly beaten up (thank god I don’t drink at those things), on top of beating myself up. Still manage another frantic work day that barely includes a coat-hanging. On the way home I listen to my own voice on my iPod, which a lot of days is the only thing I can manage to do.

I’m listening to “Like a Virgin” from 2006 and thinking, This is awful. Why am i singing like that? (Of course, I wouldn’t make it ten seconds into “Like a Virgin” from 2001.)

Then I listen to a Trio from 2008 and realize, God, I really did get better.

I am not a failure.

I get home and am kissed goodbye as E heads out to front her band at the Khyber. Another hour of writing.

Grudge Match

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My friend Rob Baniewicz (of killer improv comedy duo Meg & Rob) shared an article from the Onion A/V Club Q&A titled “Lifetime Grudges.”

The article caught my interest because it’s about lifelong, subjective, sometimes irrational grudges that people develop against artists. Many of the Onion’s regular contributors shared their personal grudge matches, from Sofia Coppola to U2.

Surely you’ve done it. A movie star whose weird mouth-shape you just can’t get past? A musician whose utterly terrible new album forces you to lose faith? The reason doesn’t matter so much. just that they’ve jumped your personal shark permanently, never to return to your good graces.

A few spring to my mind immediately. Alanis Morissette – by her fourth US record she had entirely quit writing catchy, interesting music, so I gave up. Chuck Palahniuk – wrote too many overly-convenient, repetitive books for me to care that he might eventually get better. Jason Mraz – I found his songwriting schtick underhwhelming from the first second I heard him.

The grudge article is an interesting counterpoint to something else that has been on my mind lately: permanent “must-buy” policies. Lifetime subscriptions, let’s call them.

Surely you have these too – an unflinching desire to consume everything by a specific artist. I’ll buy any song by Garbage, watch any movie by David Fincher, and love any print by Mucha, no questions asked. It’s a form of brand-loyalty – these artists appeal to some aspect of your personal aesthetic, and you’ll support them forever for it.

Who is your #1 Grudge, and why? What about your most major undying, devoted subscription? Could the grudge ever (re)earn your trust? Could the subscription ever fall from the pedestal?