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35-for-35: 1996 – “On The Way Up” by Peter Mulvey

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This post is part of my month-long "Blog of Tomorrow" celebration of the launch of Crushing Krisis's Patreon. Learn more or become a Patron today!



How do you remember the moments that changed the course of your life? Can you replay them perfectly over and over in digital crispness? Did time stand still? Do you feel like you were standing outside of yourself, watching, so you can rotate the entire scene around you like a panorama?

I didn’t realize it at the time, but the first time I saw Peter Mulvey play it altered the course of my life. There’s some other timeline where young Peter stayed at dinner at Serrano’s a little bit longer and skipped seeing the unknown opening act for Susan Werner and missed him entirely.

peter-mulvey-rapture

If you have Amazon Prime you can stream this AMAZING record for free! Just click!

Would I have still heard his music down the line? Maybe, but it would not have had the megaton impact on me as seeing Peter Mulvey at the height of his youthful powers from less than ten feet away.

At the time, male singers comprised approximately 1% of my CD collection, so seeing his name on the bill had no special meaning for me. My friend Rachel and I took our reserved seats at a table in the front of the house and waited for the opening act to take the stage.

He was everything I loved on guitar and something more – all of the DiFranco tunings, all of the percussive, staccato strumming, plus other things – partial capos and half barres over open strings. My songs like “Icy Cold,” “Lost,” and “Relief” could never exist without him.

One of the less show-y songs in his set was “On The Way Up,” a song from his seminal album Rapture. It didn’t have the pyrotechnics of his half-capo, mega-detuned “Love Is Not Enough” but it still left its mark. It’s a simple tune in three, a song about constantly rising but never feeling like you’re enough – not for yourself or for the partner you love.

I think it was the song that won my mother over to Peter later, listening in our tiny red kitchen, so that she became my companion for future shows. And, later, it became one amongst E’s many favorites. We used to refer to it as “our hypothetical, eventual first dance,” for an equally hypothetical, eventual wedding we weren’t discussing seriously.

Which brings me back to Serrano’s and The Tin Angel, 11 years later. Peter Mulvey was playing there on a Friday night, and E and I were attending with both of our mothers for their birthdays, which were 11 years apart. I had reached out to Peter earlier in the week to see if I could stop by during his soundcheck and have him finally teach me the proper way to play his song “The Wings of the Ragman,” which I had approximated here on CK in Trio but never quite could get the hang of.

E did not want to join me, but I insisted. “He’s my guitar idol,” I pleaded with her. “This would be like if you got to sing with…” I sputtered, “I don’t know. Pat Benatar. What if you were going to sing with Pat Benatar? I would come and witness that moment, and maybe snap a photo for you.”

E finally acquiesced, and so we found ourselves upstairs in the Tin Angel just after 6pm on a Friday, the room empty save for the two of us, Peter, and the sound man. Peter came back and said hi, shook our hands, and asked me if I wanted to get out my guitar and run through “Ragman.” I complied, just barely, my hands shaking so much I could barely get into the right tuning. He started walking me through the song, explaining in his easy way why certain voicings were different and why he was using the dominant and so forth before eventually realizing I was ready to faint and saying, “You know what, maybe I should write this down for you.”

And that is how I sat and watched while Peter Mulvey tabbed out his own song for me.

That is not the end of the story.

After we were through with my lesson, he said, “You know, you ought to stick around while I sound check. I might play a few things I won’t be doing during the show.” E and I found ourself seated in the first row of chairs behind the door of the Tin while Peter walked up on stage and began working with the sound guy to get his guitar EQ just right. After playing the portions of a few songs, he began to play “On The Way Up.”

I leaned over to E.

“We should dance,” I said, in a husky whisper.

“Dance?” she replied, incredulously. “You want to dance?”

It took some coaxing, but I convinced her to get up out of her seat and waltz subtly with me at the back of the club.

“You know, while we’re here and he’s playing this song, maybe we should ask him to play our hypothetical, eventual wedding.”

“Peter,” she hissed into my ear while we waltzed, “that is crazy.”

“You’re right,” I said, slipping my hand into my pocket to draw out a tiny black box, “that why I asked him to play our engagement instead.”

And that is how E and I became engaged. You see, I had been trading emails all week, first with Peter’s management, and then with Peter himself, to arrange this setup, having already obtained a ring which was proverbially burning a hole in my pocket. To his eternal credit, Peter tried mightily to talk me out of my plan to make sure I wasn’t doing something silly or fannish, but I eventually prevailed upon him how much the Tin Angel and his song meant to me and to us, and so he agreed to play along.

Also to his eternal credit, when Peter saw that the deed was done, he effortlessly segued into “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”

Here is Peter Mulvey playing “On The Way Up” during his set that evening: [Read more…] about 35-for-35: 1996 – “On The Way Up” by Peter Mulvey

a few small repairs

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"Broken Toilet" by Siobhan McKeown. Some rights reserved.

“Broken Toilet” by Siobhan McKeown. Some rights reserved.

Last week was the six year anniversary of our buying this house and I still don’t know how to do anything.

Seriously. I still haven’t replaced a single fixture in six years. I’m great at fixing electronics (ask me about that one time I baked our television) and cleaning, but my list of house projects goes something like, “get poster framed and then beg E to hang it for me.”

Meanwhile, E has hung many pictures, replaced fixtures, painted whole rooms, installed complex wall-hanging laundry systems, supervised the replacement of no less than four doors and fourteen windows, and personally sourced and laid a set of slate steps.

Yes, she is a badass.

As for me, I refer to my combination of reticence and inability as “renter’s mentality.” This is the first home I’ve ever owned. My mother and I lived in three different rented homes, including one house for almost fifteen years. The only thing we ever altered – and I mean the only thing – was paying someone to paint-and-popcorn-ceiling a back room for me in a vomitous seafoam green when I became a teenager so I didn’t have to have a tiny shoebox of a bedroom with a connecting door to her room.

The wallpaper was uniquely hideous in every room, as if there was some sort of game of ugly oneupmanship going on when the house was initially decorated. The sole light source in the living room was a dilapidated chandelier missing several of its dangling crystals and bearing the tattered streamer of a long ago party. It had a certain Miss Havisham quality to it. The kitchen … it was the worst kitchen you can possibly imagine. I still have nightmares about it. It was carpeted, and that was the least-bad thing about it. We didn’t have much money, but I’m sure we could have done something about some of it.

Yet, we were paralyzed in the middle of the renter mentality triangle – decision-paralysis about changing something we didn’t own, lack of budget and hesitance to sink money into something we didn’t own, and lack of knowledge of how to do anything because we weren’t the owners who had to deal with it.

Even though E and I owning our house removes all of the “didn’t own” aspects of that vicious triangle, I’m still stuck inside its three walls, held hostage by the tiniest of options. We want a new faucet for our kitchen and the idea that I have to choose a semi-permanent fixture for our home and then see through its installation was paralyzing.

I kind of sort of committed to a style and then stalled. What if the finish didn’t exactly match the rest of the kitchen? How could I pick a new handle I’d be interacting with dozens of times a day without an intense, hands-on study of UI, UX, and ergonomics?

(Are you beginning to understand how hard it is to be married to me?)

This past Sunday, E looked me in the eye and spoke in the kind of calm, measured voice you use when you’re trying to approach a wild animal without spooking it.

“Peter,” she crooned, “we really need to replace the toilet in the master bathroom.” She saw the fear in my eyes. The toilet. That’s permanent porcelain piece of furniture!

“The tank does not fit into space between the bowl and the wall,” she continued, soothingly, “and so it has a bad seal to the floor. The plumber said he couldn’t fix it again with caulk. It’s time.”

I gulped and nodded imperceptibly. It was a perfectly good toilet! How could we throw it away? It would probably cost untold thousands of dollars to replace and could result in the demolition of the entire bathroom – we might have to knock down a wall in the back of the house and get a crane into the back yard to winch it out.

“You just have to talk to the plumber.” This is the part where you have locked eyes with the animal and are slowly backing it towards the cage in which you are trying to capture it, for its own safety and yours. “Just find out what we need to do.”

Today is Friday. I managed to be busy enough with car repairs and writing and hanging out with our little scamp that I avoided the call all week, but this morning I knew I had to bite the bullet and talk to our plumber – not the hardest call, since he is the most patient human being in the universe who once had to respond to my emergency call after I crashed our car into our house.

I made the call. I described the problem and braced for impact. Would we need to move out of the house for a week while he did the repairs?

“Oh, I could stop by with the toilet on Monday if you want,” he responded.

Did he mean, stop by with his team of burly men, fleet of construction equipment, and double-wide trailer for porcelain throne hauling?

“No, just me.”

I was in awe. How much would such a feat cost? Could we afford it and continue to feed EV her diet of copious fresh fruits and vegetables, or would she spend her fourth year of life eating ramen, exclusively.

Let’s just say, replacing a toilet costs less than my typical monthly order of new comic books.

I was so relieved, I followed up with, “Hey, do you replace faucets?”

Definitely Probably Pregnant

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As I fall asleep, I think about cells rapidly dividing.

Nothing is ever a sure thing, but I am pretty sure we are pregnant.

ZygoteWe have been trying for a few months now, where “trying” means (close your eyes, future offspring) having sex with a little more consternation and chart-making than usual. I mean, depending on your usual sex, I guess.

This time around I don’t think it would be projection to say we both felt a little different as the week wore on. When we woke up yesterday, after much devil’s advocacy from both sides we wanted to take the test. I inquired if I needed to hold any sort of papers while E peed on them and was rapidly dismissed.

“Wait,” I said. “What should I do?”

“Not follow me into the bathroom?”

“No, I mean, what should I be doing in case you come downstairs and tell me we’re pregnant? I don’t want to be surfing the internet. This is a big moment.”

“It is,” she acceded, maybe fidgeting impatiently.

“How long does it take?”

“Five minutes.”

“I’m going to play a song. Something I wrote. A song about you.”

“Okay,” she said. And, maybe, “Can I go take the test now?”

“Yes. Okay.”

I played a song called “What Do You Want From Me?” which in retrospect was a peculiar choice. It’s a song about being an imperfect partner and lover, and being afraid you aren’t enough how you are. I don’t think I chose it with any intent, but it was a decent enough selection for five minutes of being Schrodinger’s Expectant Father.

She returned during the last verse and proffered me a tiny strip of paper full of arcane writing and a series of red lines.

“I think it’s positive.”

“What am I reading here?” I said, squinting down at the paper.

“Two red lines.”

two-red-lines“I see them. The one’s a little faint.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she replied. “I’m pregnant.”

Of course, this is me we’re talking about. E is growing a baby while I harbor an OCD Godzilla. She would need to test again. I would watch. Luckily, this was not the pee right on it sort of test. There was a sort of shot glass full of urine for testing purposes. Is that too much information? I’m just trying to be transparent about the utter ridiculousness of the situation. This is how new life is discovered.

We tested and I watched. Like a hawk. From two or three inches away from our second little urine-soaked paper strip while E kept time on a digital watch.

“I definitely see a second line.”

We were pregnant. Definitely. Probably.

“Can we just dip a fistful of the strips into the pee to be sure?”

She sighed, exasperated, maybe realizing she was in for nine months of me being the crazy one … and, that even if her hormones allowed her to briefly surpass my crazy, Godzilla and I would spring back into the lead and maintain it for the majority of our offspring’s 18 years of childhood.

“Imagine,” I encouraged E later in the day, “if we had a way to make just one or two of those cells the best possible cell right now. We’d wind up with a 12.5% better baby!”

That was most of the baby chat for the day. We’re not too precious. But, as I turned over in bed to face E all that was on my mind was cells that were once one and are now many, more even since we discovered them in the morning.

That was our baby.

Note: This post was embargoed until we reached 20 weeks; it was made public on 3/20/2013.

#MusicMonday: “Shores of California” – Dresden Dolls

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Three years ago, Amanda Palmer was one of the first people to engage with me on Twitter – and, I’m not just talking famous people. People in general.

I don’t always love Amanda’s solo ukele-based efforts as much as the songs from her revelatory punk-cabaret two-piece Dresden Dolls, but I continue to follow her becasue she is one of the most honest and open full-time rock stars on the internet. She contends 24/7 with the trials and concerns I encounter only in rehearsal (four days of our seven, last week).

On Friday, Amanda was tweeting about recording a new record with a new band, and in the stream of messages this one stuck out…

… and not just because it involved one of my top five tunes by Amanda…

It stuck out because, as with many things Amanda shares, it expressed something I have felt about music but haven’t ever really articulated.

Historically, Arcati Crisis learns songs at a rate of about four a year. Since Gina and I each write on our own, that means we’re learning just two of my tunes – yet, I write anywhere from six to twenty songs in a year.

As a result, my perspective on song-picking for AC is that every one of my choices must be lead-single quality. I don’t like subtle picks. Every new song of mine that we choose has to be awesome enough to obliterate the memory of all prior songs.

A few years ago, Gina picked “Unengaged” from my available songs. It’s a song I love. It’s complex, but catchy. It’s challenging to play and sing, but not impossible. It seemed like a good pick.

It lasted about two rehearsals. The problem wasn’t the complexity … it was the emotion. “Unengaged” is about the period where I had decided I was going to propose to E but hadn’t yet gone through with it. It’s a hard type of energy to connect with – happy, but uncertain if that’s the right thing to be – and because of the delicacy of the vocal, I need to nail the emotion behind it to get it right.

I realized quickly that it was destined to be a “live unfavorite.” I already loved what Gina was doing with it, but I knew it would fall to the bottom of my list as we chose setlists because I wouldn’t always want to summon the emotions to sing it. And, with only two songs to choose each year, what would be the point of picking something if I didn’t want to play it?

(I did the same thing a year later with “Tattooed,” at which point Gina and I agreed that songs specifically about E are generally not the best choice as Arcati Crisis songs, exactly for the reason that they can become live unfavorites for me as some new emotion between E and I supersedes the older one in the song.)

That’s not to say that I don’t sometimes select emotionally hard-to-deliver songs for AC. “Love Me Not,” “Dumbest Thing I Could Do,” and “End With Me” can all be hard to get emotionally right and incredibly draining when I do. I was ready to fall on the ground after delivering a searing “End With Me” at our holiday revue, and had to spend the next thirty minutes avoiding conversation with other guest. Yet, those songs simply aren’t personal the way songs about E are. I get to play a character.

When they were together, the Dresden Dolls learned songs at a much faster rate than 4 per year, so Amanda could afford to bring a song to the band that might not become a live staple. It was still worth hearing the band version, and worth recording. Fans still love it. It spawned a hilarious music video. It’s just hard for her to play.

This week Gina and I are picking our next pair of songs to learn, having already learned a pair in January. That means we’ll have hit our 4-song quota by April. Will this be the year we learn an entire album’s worth of new music in twelve months? If it is, I wonder if I will eventually tap a live unfavorite as one of my choices.

Defending Our Ride on CBSLocal Philly!

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E and I are sharing a slice of Internet Fame today courtesy of CBSLocal Philly via their auto correspondent @MikeyIl (who you may recall from my epic interview with him last summer).

Shot by MikeyIl for CBS Local.

My only prior auto-related run-in with Mikey was when he drove me to a concert in a pimped out ride he had on loan for a week to write up for a blog. Many months ago, Mikey put out the call for Philly residents with cars they really loved that were less than five years old. Feeling pretty strongly about the utility of our Toyota Matrix, E and I volunteer and wound up with an interview and photo shoot with our car! It’s our first shared press!

You can read the entire interview and see Mikey’s photos at CBSLocal Philly. As a bonus, here are a few exchanges from our interview that got wound up on the cutting room floor:

DYR: Does your car have an nickname?

E: I’m leaning towards Molly, though after Molly Weasley or Molly Bloom, I’m not sure.

 

DYR: Where did you get your car from? What/where was the dealer?

P: I didn’t even have my license when we bought the car, so a big test for us was if the dealer would actually talk to Elise about car stuff. I didn’t even know which side the gas pedal was on – I was there solely to haggle. I actually staged a walk-out mid-conversation at one dealer who didn’t seem as though he was actually listening to what Elise was saying.

Locally we work with Ardmore Toyota. Except, if you’re me, you sometimes call Toyota of Ardmore OKLAHOMA … which would explain why everyone answered with southern accents for a whole week that one time.

 

DYR: What’s your favorite or worst part of your commute?

E: I’ve driven it to work a few times. My favorite part is when I can first see the skyscrapers, and my least favorite part is when the radio cuts out in the parking garage. :)

P: I commuted to work once all summer. It was about five minutes shorter than my SEPTA commute but, unlike the El, I was not afraid of catching syphilis during the ride.

 
Oh, and this non-sequitur:

P: Elise is the best car-packing Tetris player I’ve ever known. She can make anything fit into anything.

Lies Adults Tell Because They’re True (or: I’ll sleep on the floor and like it)

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As I grow older I am starting to realize that all of the annoying things that adults told me when I was younger were not the baldfaced lies and emotional blackmail that I assumed them to be at the time, but simply the rules of the world viewed through the lens of someone whose body incrementally decays with every passing moment, drawing them nearer and nearer to death.

My answer will NEVER be "no." Never.

While my recent birthday might put me firmly on the side of the slowly dying, I’m hoping using my blog as a reference point can keep my attitude eternally young so I don’t turn into a curmudgeonly old person. For example, now eating too much ice cream or candy makes my stomach upset, but that was never true for the first 27 or 28 years of my life. It was a lie old people told me. I know not to try to impress this fact of my old-person life onto a ten year old enjoying the chocolate carnage of Halloween or the unbidden joy of an all-you-can-eat sundae bar.

I bring this up not because of the impending holiday of chocolate sacrifice, but because of sleep. I never used to need very much of it. Three hours served me just as well as twelve. Presently, I require seven hours and fifteen minutes a night or I will be the grumpmaster the next day. Note that this excludes eight hours, or even nine hours. We’re talking about an exact science. Oversleeping is just as bad as a restless night.

In an attempt to abet my adult habit of fruitful sleep, I have recently campaigned for us to buy a new mattress. The one we’ve been sleeping on just passed its ninth birthday, and over the course of our five homes in those nine years its coils have given up the will the live. When I sit on it, the area around me dips to half its height. Sleeping on it – or, rather, in it – requires several pillows inserted around my body as wedges and cantilevers, and is generally a miserable experience.

Ikea Futon, side view

Thus, times when I absolutely require quality sleep, I wil abscond from the bedroom to our trusty Ikea futon, which has all the give of a cinderblock and imbues me with the energy of my much younger self when I arise the next morning.

This is what lead us to the Great Mattress Shopping Adventure Slash Possibly Catastrophic Money-Pit of 2011 two weekends ago.

I was convinced I wanted a firm mattress, but refused to simply buy an Ikea futon pad as our permanent mattress. That would be declassé. I am through with Ikea. I want expensive, non-modular, fugly, adult furniture that is three times as much money and comes blessedly pre-assembled.

Deep in the bowels of a King of Prussia department store (which, FYI, in my life is utterly synonymous as a scene setting to “fourth or fifth circle of hell”) we discovered their mattress area.

This was mistake number one – why were we in a department store instead of… gee, I don’t know… A MATTRESS STORE?

Then, I committed a second error, uttering the following sentence: “I’d love the firmest possible mattress. Given the choice, I sleep on the floor.”

I quickly discovered that, as with any boutique industry, the more specialized your kink, the more it costs to get you off. I wanted floor, and he would give me glorious floor – glorious, expensive, mattress-shaped floor that had all the features and benefits of sleeping on the floor except for the possibility of getting your clothes snagged on a stray carpet staple.

I stole this from a travel blog. I have to admit, it looks sort of awesome - but that's not the kind of thing you should ever admit to a mattress salesmen, or they will get you on a "ditch filled with sharp pebbles" model.

Why mattress companies are making high end beds that emulate the floor I could never tell you. Anyone who can afford these mattresses can afford and probably possesses a mattress-shaped area of floor that they could sleep on, unless they are so fancy that their mattress is suspended in mid-air, possibly by some sort of anti-gravity ray.

That would be a very valid reason to buy a floor-like mattress. Sometimes you yearn for simpler things.

E and I do not have that problem. We have lots of gravity, and lots of floors that our gravity makes it very easy to appreciate. Yet, we bought the second very firm bed we sat on. To my credit, after we selected it I insisted that we walk around the mall (or, “fiery inferno”) and sit and/or lay on several other surfaces before coming back to the department store to initiate a transaction. I did not want to be the one to later complain about our major purchase which MAJOR PERSONAL DISCLOSURE I always am, unless I had the chance to research it for several months on the internet and it has never received a seemingly valid 1-star review on Amazon.

Nay, not this time.

Said mattress arrived at our house on Saturday, ahead of schedule. When first I sat on it and its firmness bruised my supple cheeks, I proclaimed it good.

Then I tried to sleep on it that night.

You know the downsides of sleeping on the floor? Like, if you turn on your side your hip grinds to dust against the ground as an entire half of your body falls asleep? This mattress has all of those features, too. Like I said, everything but the carpet staples.

An example of E enjoying a firm sleeping surface. I can neither confirm or deny if she is passed out drunk.

Basically, the mattress is for two kinds people at opposite ends of the sleep spectrum: those who fall asleep intent and motionless, flat on their backs, and those who collapse limp and facedown, like a drunk college student. I’ve never been a back sleeper, yet while I may no longer be in college or especially drunk at any given time, I still sleep the sleep of the dead drunk at least half of the time. In that half of the time our new floor-board style of mattress is highly satisfactory.

The rest of the time, not so much. Also, it never occurred to me that the department store version of the mattress had been prodded by people and jumped on by children for months. It did not represent a Day 0 version of the mattress. I would have to work it like a mound of clay or a block of unyielding marble in order to get it to the state of older, carpeted floor boards that have a little give and some weak spots. Fresh out of the plastic bag its consistency was more like “kitchen tile,” or perhaps “cement floor of a prison cell.”

If this was disconcerting to me at least half of the time, E’s percentage was much higher. She’s not of the collapsing drunkenly to sleep persuasion unless she is, you know, actually collapsing drunkenly to sleep. Otherwise, she has a very specific evening ritual to wind her body down towards the gentle embrace of slumber.

Our new mattress, front view

Nowhere in the product catalog for this mattress do the words “gentle embrace” appear.

Two nights later, let’s say I am not married to the happiest woman on Earth.

Yet, I remain dedicated. I am certain I can wear the mattress down to an acceptably firm sleeping surface. We have sixty days to break it in before the manufacturer will accept that we don’t like it and take it back, but I refuse to admit defeat.

Why not? Because I am stubborn? Sure. Because I do yearn for a floor-like sleeping surface? That too.

Yet, one of those reasons is surely that when I was a kid I loved falling asleep on the floor, and adults would needle me: “Don’t you want to go to bed? It’s much more comfortable.” And, even if my slowly dying body now needs much more sleep every night, I refuse to admit that I am so old and decrepit that I require a pillow-top mattress for quality rest. My bones are not yet quite so brittle.

I will take a pass on that Halloween candy, though.