Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

28 years, 51 weeks: intro

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It is six thirty-five in the morning, and I am on my way to work to begin raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity for two hours before doing my actual job.

I slept about three hours last night. I have eight-hundred more words due on a freelance assignment before midnight tonight and then rehearsal for the next two nights. I’ll have Thursday night to myself, unless I go out to see the show I’d like to see. Somewhere in there I have to fold some laundry and edit and upload a few gigabytes of videos for three different bands.

All that, and turn 29, on Wednesday.

Sometimes I don’t know how I’m supposed to do it – be this thing that I so desperately want to be. Like some Sisyphean Looney Toons sketch, I feel like I’m constantly plugging leaks in a giant dam only to have a new one spring for each I’ve stopped.

Can I be a successful professional in good shape with a happy marriage, an evening music career, a well-kept home, and writing gigs on the side?

Last week I tried to do it all. I was moderately successful, but it meant I was too busy to blog about it at the time. Does it defeat the purpose of being moderately successful if I don’t have time to blog about it?

Well, I’m making the time now. I’ll be moderately successful, damnit.

Critical or Contrary?

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Critical or contrary – which one are you? More importantly, can anyone else tell the difference?

The topic is on my mind thanks to something Gina said to me a few weeks ago. E and I were chatting with Gina after the last show of her Fringe Fest play. We joked about different narrative structures – ways her play of three connected one-acts could be turned backwards or inside out to get a different reaction.

(I know, nerds, right?)

At some point this phrase emerged from my lips:

That would be very Nolan-esque – like Inception, only without being awful.

Now, I don’t want to get into Inception drama – we’re all entitled to an opinion. I typically love Nolan, but what’s relevant here is people who liked Inception outnumber the dislikers nine to one and I’m in the “dislike” camp.

That’s where Gina’s response comes in. She whipped her head over to me and said,

Oh, Peter, you’re just contrary.

After years of having buck teeth and big ears, very few insults get under my skin, but this one cut deep.

I protested, “I’m not contrary! I’m just critical. I like plenty of things other people like. Twitter! Dark Knight! Lady Gaga!”

Despite my protests, Gina stuck to her label. To her, I’m contrary – I frequently dislike things enjoyed by a majority.

I don’t see that as contrary – just critical. If my reasoned response is to dissent on a musician or a movie while 90% of the world loves it, that’s part of my critical barometer. If you don’t like Inception either, maybe you’ll agree with some of my other opinions. Whole recommendation engines have been built on this idea, like Netflix and Hunch.

Disagreeing just means I’m critical, not contrary. Right? If we all agreed all of the time, what would be the point of art?

Let’s return to my opening query: critical or contrary – which one are you?

The answer is probably both. It depends on the perspective.

Like the proverbial stopped clock, any committed critic is going to come off contrary sometimes, just like a dedicated contrarian can still hit the critical mark on occasion.

Your challenge is that people listen to critics and ignore what’s contrary. When you’re the odd one out as a critic you still have to frame your opinion in a way that can engage and inspire your audience – even if that’s just your best friend.

Which one am I? In my head I’m a critic, and when it comes to music almost everyone  I know trusts me to be one – because I offer reasoned opinions about everything from Gaga to Rodrigo and Gabriella. With movies, if I only take the time to dish on popular films I dislike (which are numerous) clearly I’m coming out all wrong. If I want my disappointment in Inception to be taken seriously maybe I need to dial up my enthusiasm about movies slipping past other people’s radars.

What about you?

rodrigo and gabriella.

’cause that’s how I flow

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I’m just going to leave this here…

Tracy Jordan: Lemme just say, I’m excited to be here. It’s an honor for you to meet me. I’ve got a lot of characters I’m ready to bust out. I got a character named “Biscuit”, write that out. I got another character named “Rolando”, who is a two-foot-tall Spanish hustler. [pointing to Frank] Glasses, I want you to write that one. I got another character named “Ching Chong” who loves to play ping pong. I just made that up right now, ’cause that’s how I flow. Now, I’m up for anything.

That little slice of Tracy Jordan insanity from 30 Rock is similar to the mode I get into when I start filling up my editorial calendar during months like this, except I don’t have anyone to command, “write that out.” It’s just a lot of vague ideas I came up with and scheduled with just a title, leaving it to future me to figure out what the hell I meant and how to wrangle an entire post out of it.

10 years, by the numbers

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As of today, the 10th anniversary of Crushing Krisis, I’ve blogged…

3,652 days
3,724 posts and 28 pages
988,154 total words
263 average words per post
271 average words per day

641 posts with the world “guitar”
261 posts with the word “awesome”
181 posts mentioning Madonna
121 posts linking to rabi

3 months with posts every single day

107 unique original songs posted (holy shit, that’s a lot … 10 albums worth!)

And, in those ten years of my life…

262 original songs written
105 of 120 months in relationships
17 states visited or traveled-through
11 guitars owned
11 different job titles

One pair of favorite boots, purchased circa 1997. Resoled twice.

10 non-profit fundraiser concerts
9 roommates
7 primary residences
7 plays produced
4 twenty-four hour fundraisers
4 appearances at the Tin Angel
3 iPods
2 skydives
1 favorite pair of boots

10 days, 3 bands, 1 brain

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It is 10 days until Crushing Krisis’s 10th birthday and I am having an editorial calendar failure. And a brain failure.

Really it’s kind of an overarching not being able to do anything except nap and read comic books failure, which as failures go is not such a bad one. It’s way better than the “so overstressed I can feel the ulcers growing” brand of failure I was experiencing two weeks ago.

Actually, I think the napping and the comic books had a lot to do with escaping that particular pit of despair. Napping, comic books, little purple pills, and not drinking a gallon of lemonade every single day.

Meanwhile, in news related to the brain failure, I have discovered that being in three separate musical acts each with their own set of unique arrangements is the functional limit of my brain capacity. The wherewithal to recall all of those songs seems to have jettisoned my ability to return phone calls or schedule home repairs.

I am now off book on seventeen bass arrangements for Filmstar. As long as someone yells out what key we’re in at the start of the song I am fine, except for the one song that only makes sense if I pretend we are playing a David Bowie song. Like, if we begin and I’m like, “Oh, it’s a Filmstar song,” then I am a hot mess and play about two correct notes. But, if I instead say, “This is the secret, unreleased B-Side to ‘Suffragette City,’” then I’m fine.

Meanwhile, as Arcati Crisis Gina and I are working on two new songs, which – per our modus operandi – are completely different in every possible way from anything we’ve done before. One is an acoustic dance song from me equally influenced by Gaga and Heart, which I just previewed on our Facebook page.

(The other is a Gina tune which could be referred to as “Message In a Bottle from an American Girl in Russia,” but is actually called the much more succinct “American Mikaela.” It’s chorus hook is so destructively catchy that I have successfully lobbied to sing it three times as much as Gina originally planned.)

There’s also the musical artist that is me, who I can sometimes forget about in all of the commotion between the other two and commuting to my actual, fully-paid, highly-beloved full time occupation. He’s rehearsing to support Mieka Pauley this weekend at our house concert shindig, where he is rumored to debut a brand new Madonna cover (and, when you rumor something to yourself, it’s pretty sad if it doesn’t come true, so I need to get on that).

Meanwhile, ten years minus ten days ago I was sitting in a dorm room with a broken collar bone, registered for a year of music courses totally outside of my major and wondering if I would have anywhere to live in a month.

Ten years. Wow. What were you doing ten years ago today?