Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

stories

No, Not I

by

On the list of Arcati Crisis’s mutually favorite artists I don’t know that there’s a musician that debuted within our lifetimes ranked higher than Tracy Bonham.

Tracy’s was the second concert Gina and I saw together; the first was Presidents of the United States of America. Gina and I were possibly the first people into the TLA that night, because I remember standing almost directly in front of Tracy, pressed up against the barricade, Gina intently watching her fingers on every song.

At the end of that school year, Gina decided to audition for the school talent show, and the song she decided to play and sing was “Sharks Can’t Sleep.”

I had just starred in my first play, but at the time I didn’t play guitar. Or sing, for that matter. Yet, when Gina told me about the talent show, I had an unexpected reaction – I asked if I could sing with her.

Our friends were immediately skeptical about this – not only did I not sing, but I was at some point banned from singing entirely in the basement hallway where we all ate our lunch. Suffice to say, I was not experiencing widespread support for my sudden impetus to vocalize.

However, I did have one supporter: Gina. Gina brought in her guitar so I could practice, and gave me my own verse to sing.

As murky as some of the details of this story are, my memory of auditioning for the talent show committee is crystalline. We were seated in the corner of the band room, Gina and I and our friends Lucy and Joanna, who were singing harmony. When we got to my verse I shook like a leaf, but ever-so-carefully sang “Met a star today…”

Afterwards someone on the committee said, “I didn’t know he could sing.”

I don’t have any memory at all of being on stage at the talent show, although there are photos to prove that it occurred. What I do remember, and will always know, is that afterwards I – completely out of the blue – demanded that my mother buy my a guitar.

I’m sure I demanded a lot of things at the time, being a stubborn only-child teenager, but for some reason this particular demand was taken seriously. Within a week I had my clunky old Ashland guitar in my hands, and a guitar lesson once a week. I kept taking them until I learned the F sharp i needed for “Sharks Can’t Sleep” and never looked back.

Over ten years later it is both completely apropos and batshit crazy that I am playing guitar in a band with Gina, since I wouldn’t be playing or singing at all without that first nod of support.

This fall Tracy blogged about “Sharks Can’t Sleep.” (She also spent some time co-writing with Garrison Starr, which blows my mind, as Garrison is my #2 longest supported indie song-writer right after Tracy. Whatever song they wrote, it is surely the best song in the known universe.)

Last year Tracy stealthily released an acoustic disc, In The City + In The Woods. She also peppers her homepage with downloads of new demos, so I suggest you keep an eye out.

Happy birthday, Gina.

Imagine There’s No Heaven

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When I was in grade school a frequent topic of conversation and consternation was heaven.

As the Born Agains would have us believe, every thought we had or action we performed – from doing math to running on the playground to watching television at night – had a direct relationship to our eventual destination. Heaven. So, we ought to pay good attention to every decision we made, lest we get diverted from said destination, thus sharing the fate of the gays, Jews, catholics, &c.

It mostly seemed like bunk to me from the start – did god really care which version of the Our Father I recited, so long as I was still name-checking him? Or, to put a finer point on it, did he mind if I listened to a tape of the B-52’s Cosmic Thing on the bus to our field trip?

I didn’t think so, but my principal did. He, and the entire staff of the school, shared that same opinion about all popular music, which increasingly lead me to rebel in tiny ways, like asking if we could pray for Gloria Estefan when she had her big accident (“we don’t pray for those people”) and writing The Immaculate Collection as my favorite album in a survey for class (“it’s Conception, and it’s not an album, Peter” … “No, not this one”).

If you think you understand where they were coming from – that the B-52’s and Gloria Estefan and Madonna were actively sexual and inappropriate for grade school – then you’re only seeing a symptom of their insanity, rather than the depths to which it ran.

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I was a precocious reader, and by fourth grade I had exhausted the Nancy Drews and every other Young Adult novel in the school library. My mom, who was in danger of being run out of house and home by fueling my voracious reading habit with monthly trips to the book store and weekly trips to the library, decided I could start reading her books as long as she read them first to screen for anything truly inappropriate.

At the time my mother (and most of America, I suppose) was on a heavy Stephen King kick. All the classics – Pet Cemetery, It, The Stand, and every other one that wound up as a movie. Some of them she rightfully screened from me for a year or two, but others she passed along.

One was The Eyes of the Dragon, which was not horror so much as a dark fantasy. Or, at least that’s what I remember from the first 20-or-so pages, because after that it was snatched away from me (on yet another field trip) by a teacher.

“Where did you get this?”

“From my mother?”

“You shouldn’t steal books from your mother.”

“I didn’t steal it, she gave it to me to read on the bus.”

The teacher clearly did not believe me, but my mother – as always – came to my defense. “He’s a smart kid,” I imagine she argued, “and he needs stimulation.”

Of course, they couldn’t be trusted to trust my mother, and so I received long, personalized sermons from everyone from my teacher to the janitor about why reading Stephen King books was a bad idea. Why would I want to jeopardize my spot in heaven for some gory horror novel? It just didn’t make sense.

Well, they were at least right about that. Every time I thought I had them figured out they’d find a new way to paint me into a decidedly unheavenly corner. Reading fantasy books was frowned upon if the fantasy wasn’t directly derived from god. GI Joes were not an appropriate toy, because they had guns (nevermind that they all supported Iraq #1, and I’m sure Iraq #2 as well). And, AIDs was a plague the gays deserved, and anyone else who caught it was just collateral damage.

It was around the time of that last one that I decided I was definitely not going to be a Born Again Christian.

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So, yes, they talked a lot about heaven. Or, at least, a lot about getting into heaven. Not so much about heaven itself.

It seemed strange to me, that they were so focused on getting to a place they didn’t know much about. It seemed analogous to begging your mother to go to an amusement park without knowing how many loops the roller coasters had.

(Clearly my Stephen King reading had left me a little remedial in studying up on the concept of Faith.)

(Or, maybe I’m just not wired that way.)

Gradually, I started to make my own concept of heaven that would match all of the tedious effort they put into getting there.

The whole point of heaven, it seemed, was to be awesome. Clearly it was always blue-skied. All of the food would taste great. You would never have to sleep, and you could re-watch television shows you missed by mistake.

(Yes, heaven imported TiVo from the future. Heaven is that awesome.)

God, I decided, was sortof a hard-ass – what, with all the smiting and sending Jesus to pal around on Earth for three decades just to get himself killed. I mean, the “only begotten son” bit just didn’t ring true to me – god was definitely the same Old Testament hard-ass he always was, he just looked softer because he had a kid. I had seen the same thing on television.

God was effectively Gargamel – old, batty, mean, and chasing around little people who barely came up to his shin with a big club. But, in a wacky, non-threatening, recurringly eposodic way.

By contrast, Jesus was definitely John Lennon, walking around singing “Imagine” – or, if you asked very nicely, “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” It definitely put his “bigger than Jesus” comment into a particularly ironic light, I thought.

However, I determined that the greatest feature of heaven was that you would know everything anyone ever thought about you. Not in an intrusive way … just a tally. Like, Leah, the girl I had a crush on for four years, would be able to see every distinct time I thought about her. Or Victor, the bully, would be able to discern the times I feared him versus the times I just felt sorry for him.

It made a certain amount of sense to me; if you were going to spend the rest of your life mingling through the clouds, you ought to be on equal footing with each other.

(Slightly later I amended the list to include people being able to get a tally of how many times people thought of them while having an orgasm, with a second tally indicating how many times that was during an orgasm had with someone other than you.)

(In retrospect, that might not be the kind of thing you find out in heaven.)

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I still remember our last exchange with anyone on the staff in the sharpest possible focus. It was after our sixth grade end of year assembly, and we were all running around behind the stage drinking carbonated punch, which I claimed made me feel a little tipsy since I had never drank anything carbonated before in my life.

My mother was talking to the wife of the school’s principal, and as I ran past her I overhead this snippet of conversation…

Mom: “It would be nice if you held some events where they could just socialize together.”

Wife: “Oh, yes, that’s always nice.”

Mom: “Maybe even something like a dance.”

Wife: “A dance?”

Mom: “You know, with music? Around this age the kids in public schools and Catholic schools start to have dances.”

Wife: “Oh no. No. No no. We could never…”

I don’t remember anything else. Maybe I zoomed out of earshot, inebriated on bubbles. Or maybe my mother excused herself and ushered me out to the car. Either way, it was the last time I ever set foot in the building, or spoke to any of them other than my best friend Monica.

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I still dream about them sometimes, about the teachers and janitors and principal’s sons. Sometimes I dream that I am 10-years-old but still myself, desperately trying to escape their serpentine corridors without notice. Sometimes I dream that they invite me to a twentieth reunion and I try in vain to explain to them how they made me so hateful and distrustful of religion.

Sometimes I dream that they all wound up being gay, and that they each confessed to me in turn that they were afraid they would never get to heaven.

I really hope they all get to heaven, since their whole lives have been dedicated to the practice – to the exclusion of school dances, Stephen King novels, and Madonna albums.

I wonder if when they get there they’ll see how much time I’ve spent worrying about them.

I wonder if they’ll care.

all the world’s a stage

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Tonight we took in a bit of high school theatre, watching Elise’s (and, hey, soon my!) younger brother in his first ever play.

I’m self-aware enough of a blogger not to regale you with a blow by blow of his performance, but it did recall a certain memory of the last time I witnessed any pre-collegiate theatre.

It was in the same auditorium, seen with the same company, possible seated in the same row as tonight, again watching another of my soon-to-be-siblings on stage – this time Elise’s sister.

The main difference was that we were on the other end of our relationship; we had been dating three weeks at the time, and the show was a prelude to my first time meeting Elise’s family.

After the show I milled to and fro, self-conscious and worried about first impressions, while Elise ducked backstage to say hello to former costars. She was still connected to her school – certainly more than she was connected to me.

Tonight she picked those old cast members’ younger sibling out of the playbill, more mine than anyone else’s.

I like this life.

(Also, let it be said that Elise’s brother rocks incredibly; he’s like a better, more talented version of teenaged me. He’s made me – who from an early age had vowed to strangle any potential siblings in the cradle – really re-think my position this whole only-child thing.)

The Arrival of Arcati Crisis

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My birthday celebration began officially on Thursday night when I stepped on stage beside Gina as Arcati Crisis, before several dozen of my friends, and in front of a three-piece backing band, and commenced the first moment in my life where I truly felt like a rock star.

Flash back to a year ago – the beginning of my quarter-life danger/opportunity.

I knew – had known for months – that I wanted to get out to play more often. It was one of the reasons I had quit my promising run with our semi-pro acappella group after six months of arduous rehearsals. Yet, after two months of constantly playing around the house and a tepid run at World Cafe Live’s Monday open mic, I was stuck playing a single bar once a month.

I needed something a little more artist-oriented – where I wouldn’t be fiercely battling for attention over and over again with the same damn Madonna cover.

Out of the blue, I recalled Penni Gould – a woman I knew in passing from years of playing the Shubin Theatre holiday revue. At the 2004 show she mentioned that she was starting up a monthly performance salon for local theatre artists? Was it still around?

Not only was it still around, but after a brief email exchange I found myself invited to their next soundcheck for an audition. I played one rocker and one ballad, and just like that I was booked for a debut in December.

Meanwhile, Gina and I just had commenced rehearsing for our annual appearance at the Holiday Revue. This year we were effectively co-headlining with a three-song set, for which we were hardly prepared.

As a result, we resolved to do something highly unusual for us: rehearse. More than a week before our performance. And, more than once.

For the first couple of meetings we just played around, trying to figure out what we sounded like after a year-and-a-half apart. By our third rehearsal we realized that two of our biggest past challenges had transformed into major opportunities.

First, Gina was more consistent and aggressive than ever on her guitar parts, making it easy to scale up to more complex arrangements.

Even more significant, my acappella experience had taught me how to hold my own against other vocals, and as a result I no longer had to struggle to sing harmony with Gina. Not only could Gina sing more harmony with me, but for the first time I could sing harmony on her songs as well!

We wound up with more than a trio of songs – we discovered a formula, both for our sound and for motivating ourselves to rehearse. After a nearly flawless performance at the revue I floated my typical annual question to Gina – any chance you want to keep rehearsing in the new year?

Shockingly – though somehow not surprisingly – she said yes.

Now travel forward to May. Gina and I had just made our official redebut as Arcati Crisis at the 5th Annual Lyndzapalooza, and a few weeks later I found myself scheduled for another Melange performance.

Amusingly, over the past six months my tables had been turned: coming off of rehearsing with Gina as Arcati Crisis my own material was flabby and out of shape, especially in light of what looked to be a strong lineup at Melange.

Past that self-consciousness, Lindsay emailed me about a curious new development – Melange listed a future date at the Tin Angel, one of my favorite venues. Would I be playing there?

My only answer was a sinking feeling in my stomach that I wasn’t prepared to make a strong showing that night at Melange … certainly not strong enough to merit a coveted spot at the Tin.

A bit worried (okay: panicked), I sent Gina a pleading email: was there any chance she’d come up to sing harmony with me on one song, so I didn’t feel so nude?

As the day progressed we continued to exchange emails and the plans became more elaborate, until finally we agreed to just appear as Arcati Crisis. And we did, rocking an unusual combination of her bouncy “Fisher Price” and my elaborately maudlin “Counts the Most.”

Afterwards, Penni told us she would see if she could squeeze us in to the yet-to-be-announced second Tin Angel gig.

Now just a month ago, Gina and I are in a third floor apartment across from the Kimmel Center playing with a drummer and a bassist for the first time. Beforehand we absconded into the stairwell, working hushedly on our harmonies and debating on what we should tell the drummer to do.

The point wound up being moot. Tom, our drummer, was fantastic – picking up on exactly what we wanted without us even having to say so. All of our songs transformed into the better selves we had imagined all along, none more than Gina’s “What’ll I Say” – now less languid folk and more acoustic jam.

Suddenly our little duo had been expanded to an honest rock band that would be making its debut on September 20th.

Now we just needed an audience.

Thursday night, and Gina and I are backstage in one of two dressing rooms at the Tin Angel, having spent the past hour hand-labeling the Live @ Rehearsal, Vol. 1 discs I took the day off from work to mix and produce.

The walls of our room are covered with sharpie marker signatures from the many bands that had appeared there. Chris Smither loomed just above my head, and Erin McKeown high behind my chair. After much searching I failed to spot Peter Mulvey, but we discovered our acquaintance Mutlu near the ceiling and upside down.

Enough people had been seated that there was a bit of a hum drifting back to the room, and I delighted that this wasn’t theatre and that it was okay for me to sneek out for a peek.

The peek snuck the breath right out of me; the vast majority of the audience were our family and friends. Both of our parents, and our partners. Former roommates and theatre compatriots. Co-workers and random friends.

Most performances are a blur, but I can still hear this one in super slow motion. It makes the mistakes all the more painful than usual, but it also magnifies the successes.

A flipped pronoun on “Standing” pales against the best bridge vocal I’ve ever done. Skipping a progression on “What’ll I Say” to untangle my quarter inch tiny in the face of belting out my harmony at the close. And, starting “Wait” with a too hard pick hardly mattering when compared to our hilarious ad-libbed inflections and gestures on the final verse, tossing our lines back and forth to each other while the rhythm section carried the song.

Afterwards Elise and I went out for drinks, and more drinks, and karaoke, all of which I experienced through a film of joy. It might have taken ten years of preparation and a year of work, but I’ve finally transformed from wayward solo songwriter with no confidence to part of an assured and rehearsed duo that’s had a taste of a backing band and is hungry for more.

An errant Banker’s Club cosmo aside, Thursday night was the best birthday gift ever.

Pre-Autumnal Misery, or Histaminic Kryptonite

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As if trying to balance out some great karmic equation, for the duration of what has – despite containing my birthday – grown to be my favorite month of the year I am cursed with severe seasonal allergies that no medication can quite quiet.

How severe? It took not one, but two separate 24-hour prescription decongestants to open up my nasal passages for an 8-hour day of work, during which I was a dessicated zombie-husk of my normal chipper self.

I quickly discovered that if you’re a designer you do not want someone delirious and half-blind from dehydration to be your proofreader.


My allergies initially emerged one day when I was eleven. We were on a boat, near the banks of some brackish body of water in the Philadelphia area, and we passed by a bevy of reeds.

“Achoo. Ahhhh-choo. Atchu. Atshooooo.”

My convulsive sneezing was unstoppable, even after I had been brought below deck and told to breath through a damp washcloth. One of those river reeds was my histaminic kryptonite, and it had doomed me to a life full of seasonal suffering.


When I was in highschool my mother met another nurse who worked in an allergy clinic. Clearly, I was an early topic of conversation, and one night my mother arrived home to inform me that I could make hundreds of dollars if I participated in an allergy study. I would go off my normal medication for a few weeks, taking the study meds instead.

To a teenager it seemed like the easiest money possible; I begged her to sign me up.

It was then that the agony began. For a week before being screened for the study I had to forgo all allergy medications, prescription or otherwise, so that the study could get a baseline – to prove I was allergic enough to join.

I showed up at the end of the week, splotchy, stuffy, grumpy, and unable to complete a sentence without adding several sneezed punctuation marks.

I qualified with flying colors as a perfectly allergic specimen, and gladly received my study medication.

I knew that some people would receive placebos, but I assumed that – given my hyper-allergic state, I would clearly qualify to be the lab rat for the medication actually being studied.

Oh, but, through the cruel irony of pharmaceutical science and my mother’s error of omission, I hadn’t fully grasped the concept of a “double-blind study.”

I returned to the office several weeks later, splotchier, stuffier, and grumpier than I had been on my previous visit.

The nurse received me with a grin, which I returned with a doleful stare. She drew some blood, despite my convulsive sneezing, and then sat me down to survey me.

“I see here that in our last interview you said on a scale of 1 to 10 – 1 being worst and 10 being best – that your quality of life was a 3 when not taking your allergy medication. What would you say your quality of life is now, after several weeks taking our study drug?”

I glared back at her, probably sniffling.

“I’d say 2. Definitely a quality of 2.”

“Well that’s… unusual. For quality to go down. Why would you say that is?”

“Because I’m taking the placebo.”

She smiled bashfully. “Now, now, I can’t reveal what you were taking because I don’t know.”

She pronounced the last three words in an intensely cute, almost sing-songy way.

I willed myself to sneeze on her, but I chanced upon a rare sneezeless moment in my life. I settled for glaring at her in stoney silence.

“I’m going to go down a list of symptoms, and you tell me how bad they’ve been this past week – 1 being worst, and 5 being not bad at all.

“Ready? Sneezing.”

“One.”

“Congestion.”

“One.”

“Itchy eyes.”

“One.”

The survey continued, interminably, each successive question more and more antogonizing, and my answers steadily monosyllabic.”

“Okay, finally, I have an open-ended question for you. What’s an everyday activity you perform while on your normal allergy medication, and how has that activity been impacted by taking our study drug?”

“Crossing streets.”

“Hmm?”

“Crossing streets.”

“I, ahh… I see.”

We stared each other down for several long seconds.

“That’s an… an unusual activity to name. I was looking for something more like playing sports, or shopping.”

“Well,” I sniffed, “you see, I would have to cross a street to do either of those things. But I haven’t been able to cross streets unassisted for the duration of the study. Because, my average sneezing fit (currently averaging upwards of seven and half sneezes) lasts longer than the duration of a yellow light in Philadelphia, so unless I start crossing at the very beginning of a green I’ll wind up stuck in the middle of the street when the light turns red, sneezing and half-blind, until some inattentive motorist just mows me down And, don’t even get me started on South Philly stop signs.”

“I’ll just put down ‘going for walks.’ Would that be okay?”


If you’ll excuse me, I think that’s as much blog as I’m good for in my current state. I’m off to a land of cold compresses and 75mg of Benadryl washed down with some high-end vodka.