Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

Filmstar’s Sugartown Dance Party

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On Saturday night Filmstar (the band fronted by E, with me on bass) played the Sugartown concert series at Tritone, and had a lot of sweaty fun doing it.

Elise rocking the mic at Sugartown (in one of her fav concert action shots) on June 25, 2011. Photo courtesy of Tritone.

I’ve now played a handful of festivals and sold-out shows, but I don’t have a lot of experience with converting a crowd – that moment where an unknown band turns the tide of chatter to become the focus of the room.

On Saturday I watched from my vantage point on the stage – and felt in my gut – as Filmstar did just that. We had the help of a handful of boosters in the crowd, but for a moment during our second song I could feel the attention of the room focus on us. Suddenly we weren’t playing to the sides and backs of heads – we were playing to ears and eyes.

Part of what’s awesome about Sugartown is how common that conversion can be. Sugartown is a monthly show featuring (really good) all female-fronted or majority-female bands.

If you know me well, you know I’m not usually into reverse discrimination programming, but Sugartown isn’t about excluding boys. It’s about creating a haven for fans of female rockers to find four new bands to love every month.

And, as we know, I’m a fan of female rockers. As are all of the other Sugartown attendees. Thus the frequent conversion, and typical friendly vibe.

E and I quickly made friends with the first band, Yumi Sekai. Lead singer Salena Kress said she had tried to start up a failed math rock act before settling on the Yumi Sekai sound, but I felt like I could still feel the lineage. YS was like mathless math rock – all the crazy instrumental breakdowns and killer riffs with none of the “we’re counting really hard now” compound changes and screwed-up faces.

Dance party in-progress at Sugartown on June 25, 2011. Photo courtesy of Tritone.

Salena and Jackie Wechsler trade lead guitar duties while Salena delivers intensely pretty vocals. Even when she rises up to her topmost rock belt she sounds less like a screaming rock banshee and more like a Disney princess out for revenge.

I mentioned that to her after the set, and she totally got it. “I like melodic music,” Salena told me, “it can rock, but the singing has to be good.”

If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s my policy too. Needless to say, Salena and I hit it off. We did some booty-shaking together during the closing set from Girls Dresses as Girls.

It’s so different for me being a bassist instead of a band-leader. My job of holding down the low end and supporting the rhythm leaves me more open to experience what’s happening in the room. When a dance party sprung up during our set, I did what came naturally – I danced, kicked, smiled, and laughed.

We converted the room, and the room converted me.

It was a good night.

I know I look like the band nerd here, but in my defense, based on Glenn's capo position I think this might have been the exact moment the dance party began to break out. So I was probably using my measure of an open E-string as an opportunity to execute a killer dance move, which is hard to depict accurately in a photograph. Or, I am the band nerd. Photo courtesy of Tritone.

azaleas are a lie

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If I’ve learned anything from my first year of home ownership, it’s that I have forgotten everything any of my Biology teachers every taught me about the kingdom Plantae.

The human body, environmental science, chemistry – they all make sense to me. Home repair? Electricity? I can handle it.

Flowers? A complete lie. Total bullshit.

Azaleas bloom in spring, their flowers often lasting several weeks. Shade tolerant, they prefer living near or under trees.

A few weeks ago our neighbor’s massive block of azalea bushes were in full, hot-pink bloom – the exact color of my Gem and the Holograms bicycle, circa age six.

“They must be new,” I exclaimed to E as we toiled in our front lawn, “because I don’t remember anything pink from last year.”

E fixed me with a look – the look she gives me when she can’t tell if my naivete is a conversational ploy or if I could really be that ignorant about something

“You realize,” she said evenly and carefully, “that those are the same bushes that have always been there. Right now they are flowering. So, you see, they are pink.”

“You mean to tell me that we’ve lived here an entire year and I’ve never noticed that her bushes are actually covered in hot pink flowers?That seems hard to miss.”

E examined my face for a tell – some indication I was putting her on. There was none; I am awesome at bluffing when I don’t even realize I am bluffing AKA I have no idea what we’re talking about.

“Peter, not all plants flower for all of spring. Azaleas only flower for a few weeks. Last year they probably flowered before we saw the house, or even between when we saw it and when we moved in. You know, like our pink tree.”

I considered our pink tree. Really it was a tree-colored tree, but per its pink tree-print on the Google Maps overview of our house, it had produced delicate pink blossoms for a week, which then fluttered away to cover the neighborhood. But that was a tree! Bushes, I reasoned were something different.

I thought back to all of my grandmothers’ flowers from childhood, and I didn’t remember any of them coming and going as they pleased. They were flowers, and that’s what they did – flower.

I rendered my reply.

“That’s bullshit. Flowers don’t come and go week to week. Except for, like, tulips or other special stuff. Maybe they’ve just,” I stammered, flummoxed for an explanation, “matured this year. Maybe they are in hedge puberty this year.”

E shook her head in submission. “Okay. Let’s talk about this again in two weeks.”

It’s been two weeks.

Yeah, the bushes are now green, again.

Ride or Be Thrown

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Life keeps happening, even after I dig in my heels and insist it is not going to happen anymore, and won’t it just hold still for a second while I catch up on sleep or even take a minute to fix that weird thing my hair keeps doing.

It’s a stubborn beast, life. Like some sort of angry bull you can try all you want to wrangle and ride, but will ultimately head in the direction it was planning to head before you ever climbed aboard.

Yep, that about sums it up.

Which begs the question – couldn’t you just ride a cow instead?

(I actually asked someone that this weekend. Are there riding cows? Or, if someone sits on their backs do their udders drag on the ground getting snagged on rocks and stuff? This is how little I know about the natural world.)

(In the same conversation we decided my autobiography would be entitled, Flowers are Bullshit, which I think is an accurate depiction of both my general ignorance of the natural world as well as my aforementioned naïve and/or stubborn attempts to wrangle the non-cow of life in any direction that suits me.)

This past month the raging bull of life has been on a rampage. Actually, it’s been a sort of a bull fight as we’ve intersected with other lives along the way. We reconnected with forgotten friends, gained an unexpected roommate, and admitted that both our house and band situations are permanent fixtures in our lives so it was time to start treating them that way.

We can get so ensconced in our own wrangling that it becomes easy to forget that people we casually summarize or dismiss have their own rodeo of life to wrangle outside of our peripheral vision.

I feel like E and I have largely been in our own rodeo for this first year of the house. Sure, we worked, rehearsed, and showed up for a requisite amount of dinners and shows with our friends. Yet all of that was a part of our own narrative, our own bull ride. We never got in too deep with anyone else. We were busy wrangling and trying not to get thrown.

At point in the last two weeks my stomach has actually felt like this - meaning either that I felt like I was going through it at the time, or it was happening INSIDE OF my stomach.

Well, these past few weeks we got deep. Bulls have locked horns.

Last Wednesday we went to dinner with a friend we’ve literally never hung out with one on one. I’ve known him for twelve years! Yet, this was the first time we sat together at a table together and traded stories over dinner. Did we know he remodeled his kitchen from the floor to the rafters at the same time he built the new South Street Bridge? Um, that seems like something we couldn’t help but know, yet we didn’t.

Different bulls.

Two Wednesdays ago we got a call from E’s brother, four days out of his Freshman year of college. Could he stay with us? Like, for the weekend, right? No, actually, he had to move back to Philly because he landed a job counseling a theatre camp for the summer. Oh, and an understudy role at the oldest theatre in the country.

Arguably the one person E and I make the most effort to keep up with, and we had no idea he had a job, an audition, and a need to camp on the futon in Arcati Crisis studios.

That is bullshit.

So here I am, fresh from setting up our new PA system, rehearsing, dining out in Manayunk, playing a show in Manayunk, replotting the wiring of Arcati Crisis studios, rehearsing more, attending (and playing) a wedding, driving 150 miles in a single day, reorganizing Arcati Crisis studios slash our brother’s bedroom, and conducting nightly three-hour Rock Band 3 harmony singing sessions – and heading into another dinner in Manayunk, more rehearsals, recording my first new solo tracks in a year-and-a-half, and more (likely including more nightly Rock Band 3 in harmony mode, because I don’t have a harmony-singing little brother living in our recording studio all the time – just for the summer).

The bull keeps raging. Life keeps happening.

Try not to get thrown.

Hot Yoga, Good Omens, & Happy Endings

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A year ago if you told me I would willingly lock myself in a room heated to 105 degrees with 40% humidity to do 90 minutes of extreme stretches with a gaggle of nearly nude hipsters, dancers, and absurdly ripped gay men, all dripping with sweat…

Actually, I have no idea what I would have done if you told me that a year ago. There’s really no way to predict past me’s response. Maybe I would have asked you to mix me a stronger drink.

I have surprisingly awful balance, but I actually managed to strike this pose twice last night. The first time I promptly fell on my ass due to my complete and utter shock at getting into it. Oh, and the sweat.

Yet, there I was last night at my first Bikram Yoga class, dripping with sweat (a rarity!) and also nearly nude. Nearly nude in public! I like to wear t-shirts to the beach, people. The only time I get naked in front of other people is under carefully controlled conditions on the internet.

That was a joke; I haven’t been naked on the internet for, like, a decade.

After a few months of yoga classes at work I pestered my two fittest co-workers to tag along to a class in the outside world. Possibly as part of some form of ongoing hazing, they suggested I come with them to Bikram yoga.

There I was, half naked and sweating, at one point dropping out of a triangle pose because I was about to faint. I think at some point I also prayed to an undetermined god of yoga to strike me down where I stood. But I stuck with it the full 90 minutes.

(Don’t worry, I’m going somewhere with this. This might become a blog about homeownership or television shows from time to time, and it’s always a blog about OCD and slight social awkardness, but I swear it’s not going to turn into a blog about yoga. None of us wants to read that.)

(Unless it has to do with slight social awkwardness, in which case it is fair game.)

Nearly ten years ago I was in my first student run theatre production (and my last piece of theatre at Drexel). Being student-run means we had to do everything ourselves – sets, promotion, makeup – everything. And at the time the idea of choosing what to wear onstage seemed a bit beyond me. It had to be what my character would wear, but also say something about him.

Luckily, we had a fantastic advisor, Michelle, a Drexel administrator working on her Fashion degree. I talked out my character ideas with her, and we settled on what I ought to wear.

It turned out fine. The first time E ever saw me was onstage in that show, wearing those clothes.

Later, I had graduated and was living with E, and I decided it was time to get better at singing. I found a voice instructor I wanted to try, and headed to his house on the train. Who was sitting next to me? Michelle, who I hadn’t seen for years, and her daughter.

It turned out fine. That voice instructor didn’t work out (he was creepy), but I came away knowing what I wanted. I eventually found the ideal coach for me. My voice blossomed. My singing became healthier. Now I can rehearse two nights a week with rock bands and not get the slightest bit hoarse.

Last night. I was lying next to the window of the Bikram studio in my dri-fit shirt, already desperately sweating. I’m the kind of sweater that has to bring a second shirt to a wedding, because I will be dripping with sweat on the dancefloor … a dancefloor that’s not heated to 105 degrees or approaching some form of medieval torture.

A man laid his mat next to mine, and I was relieved to see he was not a dancer or absurdly ripped, but a normal dude in a dri-fit shirt like me. He smiled hello and set out a second mat. “For my wife,” he said, so he wasn’t gay either.

Michelle does not typically have wings or appear in a Tony Kushner play, but she still may be my guardian angel.

That put me at ease, even as I mopped the sweat from my brow for the first time and laid back into Savasana (AKA corpse pose, and even that was hard to do in the heat). When I finally emerged from it to start the class, a women’s voice called from off to the right.

“Peter?”

Yes, Michelle was in my yoga class, sitting next to her husband, the normal dude in the shirt.

Despite at points thinking I really was going to pass from this life onto the next, Bikram yoga turned out fine. I stuck it out in the room the entire time, emerging with a new appreciation of 80-degree weather, drenched in sweat on a crazy endorphin high.

Though I hugged Michelle goodbye, I’m starting to think she isn’t real. I mean, I definitely touched her (I wasn’t that high on yoga), but what other explanation is there for her appearing at important junctures in my life to signal that a major decision lies ahead, and it will turn out fine.

Even if she isn’t a Roma Downey-style angel, she’s definitely a good omen.

Where Dirt Means Dirt

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I don’t know if this is a universal experience in Philadelphia, but I spent my whole life up to this point living no more than two doors down from a drug dealer.

Visit Philly! Score some drugs!

No, seriously.

I don’t know if it was something about my choice in row homes or just something about Philadelphia, but there has been evidence of illegal narcotics distribution within a few hundred feet of my door in every place I’ve lived. Southwest, University City, West, South.

Mind you, if you are a drug dealer, or a drug addict – or, hey, even a drug mule! – I am not passing judgment on you. I can’t afford to alienate that (potentially wide) swath of blog readers. But, more to the point, what you do inside your house is totally cool. Me, I have my wife tie me to a chair in a room covered in plastic sheets, so you guys can just keep on keeping on. I’m just saying, it’s not like I’ve always lived within two doors of a police officer, or a gymnast. There’s simply something special about drug dealers.

This is maybe why I maintain a blanket approach of wary kindness to neighbors. I want to know their name in case I have to borrow a cup of sugar or talk to the cops about them, but I typically don’t want to go over for dinner or anything. I mean, you heard about the neighbor who offered teenaged me some crack to smoke, right?

When a neighbor stopped by our house to offer to cart away some of our dirt, perhaps you can understand why I immediately assumed it was code. I mean, the dirt is just dirt, but the offer must have something to do with drugs. He said he needed to fill in his yard before he put in an above ground pool, but “fill in the yard” probably meant “bury the evidence” and “above ground pool” was probably code for “massive bong.”

Right?

In this case, said neighbor showed up with an actual wheelbarrow to transport the literal dirt. I wanted to ask, “are you a drug farmer?,” because who else just shows up at your house with a wheelbarrow? Who even owns a wheelbarrow? Farmers, that’s who.

My neighbor was not a drug dealer, a drug farmer, or a non-drug farmer. He was a friendly guy who wants to put an above-ground pool in for his hilarious five-year-old daughter, who helped us shovel and then volunteered to plant flowers for E.

I realize I’ve now unwittingly befriended everyone within a two-house radius of our new house, and so far none of them have tried to sell us drugs. Which makes me wonder: is this real life?

(Although, to be fair, said neighbor did tell us about a grisly triple-murder that happened just down the block … but I have to think that’s way more common in Philly than even friendly neighborhood drug dealers.)

Next the world is going to try to convince me that if I leave our car unlocked no one is going to come by to pee in it.

It’s not going to work! I know that unlocked cars are the world’s urinal.