Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

in my tribe

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Because you are savvier than I am I’m sure you’ve all seen this by now, but the BBC had pictures from Brazil of a tribe that has never had any contact with modern society.

The concept fascinates me. Here we are on the internet, sending each other mp3s and photos and links to porn while we burn through our fossil fuels keeping us alternatingly warm and cold, and somewhere out there people are still living the lives they’ve lead for centuries.

Unsurprisingly, they all seem to be staring at the airplane taking their photos. Way to obey the prime directive, photographers.

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in.

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When I am out and about as much as I have been lately – happy hours and concerts and open mics and all that – I become fussily self-involved and introverted in all of my off-hours.

I’ve never had to sustain my “on” state four or five nights a week before, and it’s definitely taking it’s toll on my personality, subsequently turning down my volume and contrast until I can adequately recharge.

This always catches people who don’t know me that well off guard – namely, my co-workers. In my corporate life there is a lazy susan of personality quizzes that spins back around every year or so, and each new set of peers are like, “really? introvert? are you sure?”

You can’t really afford to be an introvert while being an account manager, so I can understand their confusion. But, everyone else knows this about me: I need to balance personal and public, output and input. And, sometimes even when I’m the communications guru the off state can make an appearance. Word spreads pretty quickly that I am having an in-service day.

On the homefront my darling Elise is, curiously, trapped inside of the introversion – the girl in the bubble – forced to act as the shoulder-angel to complement the devil in me. To her credit, she knows the call and response pretty well now – communicate, commiserate, and castigate.

(i.e., first find out why I am fussily inwards facing, then agree whole-heartedly with why the rest of the world sucks, and then finally tell me to shut the hell up about it and lighten the fuck up.)

So, yes, we all know this about me by now, having read and re-read endless iterations of the cycle here over the years. Sometimes the ebb is measured in weeks; lately it’s more minute to minute. Round up friends to go on a bar crawl, turn off my phone the next day. Buy twenty new CDs, eschew them to write songs all weekend. Et cetera.

What we maybe didn’t know was that I have a similar web ebb (webbeb?), insomuch as when I’m all over MySpace promoting the band and Facebook keeping in touch with people and Gmail haggling with various wedding musicians, and The 61 hearing awesome new music and, oh, my job that involves keeping tabs on people in email all day … when I’m doing all of that I’m in my on state, and then I get home with the intent to blog and I am off and I’d rather just write eighteen emails to myself and work on my 20k word critical essay on Hedwig then chronicle what is what for the internet at large.

Which is, as per my wont, my excuse to say here comes a backlogged tonne of thoughts and links and mental flotsam that I need to flush out of my system so I can talk about actual timely topics like politics, and my wedding, and how my band fucking rocks.

(Which, by the by, it does, and did, just three hours ago. But, before we get to that, first the further digression…)

in which I am a smoke-filled room

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At the moment I am beat.

Yesterday I proceeded straight out of that last post into my daily exercise block, which is already starting to feel like a tough-but-feasible challenge instead of a life-or-death struggle.

With barely time for a shower and a bite to eat I public transited to a lengthy Arcati Crisis rehearsal, where we banged on Gina’s “Brother John” and my “Love Me Love Me Not” from every possible angle.

The former is now a staggering seven minutes long (twice the length of the majority of our tunes), and features me playing riffs and singing harmony that are both far outside of my normal comfort zone.

The latter is a weird amalgam of Animals-style sixties riffing and chugging Fall Out Boy alterna-rock, and is so much easier to sing with someone else doing some of the heavier lifting on guitar (even if my lifting really hasn’t changed at all). My previously hard-to-sing single bar of “detox tea” has now extended into a five measure wail during which my diaphragm is all like, “see, I told you I had a purpose other than wobbling around under your fake vibrato.”

Afterwards I ran for my life to catch two trains, the second of which I nearly boarded in-motion, to make it to Buckets for Lindsay guest-hosting the open mic. I met lots of cool new performers, and spent much of the night promoting my ass off on the behalf of our upcoming music festival, and drinking cocktails with Bill McConney, who comes off as a modern update on Nick Drake (aka, pretty great).

Over the course of the evening I played two sets, rocking my now-standard opening duo of “Icy Cold” and “Like a Virgin,” and debuting my new tentatively-titled “Not David Bowie” as well as a cover of “High and Dry.” My latter set was around 1:30 a.m. and featured me wailing “With or Without You,” which was wise to save until after the falsetto-palooza of H&D, but not wise to sing directly before “Love Me Not,” because the five-measure wail was nowhere in evidence.

Afterwards we walked back up the hill to Lindsay’s house and, for reasons unknown to me, I smoked a clove cigarette. Actually, they’re not unknown – an occasional clove when out with friends was one of my only vices in high school, and after a day of physically and vocally pushing myself it seemed like a decent way to relax.

Except, my pack-a-year clove habit is almost a decade old, and dovetailed with the height of my slothful anorexia and complete lack of vocal talents, so I really didn’t have a frame of reference about how it would feel to the new-and-improved version of physically- and vocally-active me. I woke up with my lungs feeling weird and slept-in, exactly like the unmade bed I was rising from.

The feeling didn’t do me any favors physically or vocally, as I discovered on the train and walk home. I wasn’t exactly wheezing, but I couldn’t find a good walking rhythm, and my vocals are unexpectedly squeaky in places, like a guitar string that’s not quite settled into it’s notch on the saddle (I’m sure the Bono-vocals have some bearing as that as well).

After an unexpected and delightful nap my lungs feel back to normal, and now we are about to depart to see the Curtis Symphony Orchestra at the Kimmel Center.

Sound and Vision

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On Friday night I attended the New Artists opening at Muse Gallery, a third of which was the art of one my increasingly close friends, Jennifer Vessels.

I was one of the first guests to arrive, and I got to experience the art of all three of the new members in a nearly empty room to the hypnotic sound of Dante on his hang drum. I had seen some of Jennifer’s work before, but smaller, and as prints – never up close, original, and with all of the beautiful texture that each of her collagraphs contain.

Each piece was labeled with title and price, and though I understand that the intent of the show is not necessarily to sell the pieces, the concept of selling a piece of physical artwork is so strange to me. I could sell one of my songs, but I would always be able to play it. Elise could sell a photograph, but it would just be a print – a single version of an original negative.

I marveled at that, lost in the detail of her lines and colors on a second walk through the gallery. How to be Jennifer, so entangled in music and light that she can contain them both on a canvas, yet able to part with a piece, never to see its texture again.