Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

elise

Stalling, Stalling…

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It seems impossible that there are only four days remaining in NaBloPoMo. I have about nineteen post topics left. Sure, some of them will translate to an idyllic and oh-so-close post-NaBloPoMo world, but a few of them really belong with this month – in this special through-line we’ve all built for ourselves. So I’m going to make every effort to get them out this week.

Of course, when I made my list of topics there were only about 900 blogs for me to review, so that might have had something to do with my backlog of topics. Although, I had been planning on 30 songs all along, so i can hardly blame it on that.

My drunken Saturday Night notwithstanding, life is fairly dull without Elise around. I think I have determined that 72 hours is the ideal amount of time to spend without her – less than that and I don’t get enough things done, more and I start to drift aimlessness in my artificial bachelorhood.

Okay, posts and Trios hurtling your way any second now.

Taking Back Giving Thanks

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I don’t enjoy celebrating most holidays. They aren’t really holidays anymore – just treacly Hallmark imitations of the celebrations they once were.

Part of my resistance is societal – a rebellion against Hallmark and Christmas radio stations – but part of it is familial. As children we are subjected to the whims of our family’s traditions with little room for our own opinions. When i hit college i decided i’d start having things my way – i rebuilt my holiday schedule from scratch.

I usually deign to observe a standard July 4th, since it holds historical significance, and Cinco de Mayo, since it kicks off my Corona-drinking season, but everything else is fair game; one particularly defiant year I celebrated Passover instead of Easter.

However, I haven’t fucked with any holiday as much as today’s – Thanksgiving – because i didn’t really feel as though i had been giving very much thanks. It had turned into Turkeyhaving and Footballwatching or, worse, LaststopbeforeChristmasing.

Rather than touch any of that, i co-opted it for my own, never doing the same thing twice. Once i carried a balloon in the parade. Another year i dined with Gina and her family and friends. Two years ago i spent Thanksgiving alone, drinking martinis and watching old movies. Each iteration was superior to the alternative of a dead bird and getting stuffed just to get stuffed.

Over the last nearly-five years i have been gradually assimilated into Elise’s family, which dichotomizes every holiday between a split set of parents (a phenomenon with which i am all-too familiar). I am now an expected guest at their holiday celebrations and, as a result, here i am in NJ celebrating a second Thanksgiving in a row for the first time since the nineties.

At first i was reticent – this was exactly what i had been trying to escape! Yet, the view, the culture, the traditions, the food, and the thanks are all different here than what i gew up with. Admittedly, I don’t like them all – i was especially upset to realize that not every family in America accompanies every holiday turkey or ham with lasagna or baked ziti – but in total they have definitely refreshed my thanks… thanks for who i am, and where i am, and that i am free to choose both and everything in between.

I think holidays should be what you need them to be, especially a holiday about thanks. And sometimes the best way to realize why (if at all) you are thankful is change your perspective.

Found a Catfish Haven

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As much as I can be a dedicated home body, so can Elise, and after almost five years of trying to align the moons and stars of our social inclinations we’ve finally realized that sometimes it’s okay to go out alone.

My recently social outings have been split evenly between the aforementioned best friend Gina (w/boyfriend Wes), and Elise’s best friend Amanda, because it stands to reason that anyone who could tolerate hanging out with Elise 40hrs a week of work plus however many hours of rehearsal will probably be able to tolerate me for the length of a concert or two.

Last night Amanda and I were at the XPN World Café Live venue to check out a free Heartless Bastards show, but the Bastards’ limelight was completely stolen by the fantastic opener Catfish Haven.

I was a little startled when Catfish began to play, because I thought they were just roadies – three unassuming men with long hair and t-shirts who had just been tuning up their instruments. A few bars into their first song my interest was piqued. By song three I was utterly hooked.

I was drawn in by a sound I can only attempt to describe as such: Joe Cocker fronting My Morning Jacket, cranking out occassional raunchy acoustic Franz Ferdinand covers, except Catfish is tuneful and poppy, wearing a badge of Motown soul influence where the aforementioned bands can be too obscure or trite. Not to mention the absolute perfection of Van Morrison pop on “Tell Me” and “”Crazy For Leaving.”

Yeah, they’re eclectic.

Solid drumming from Ryan Farnham was focused by pogoing (sometimes punkish) bass from Miguel Castillo, both underscoring big, crunchy rock chords from singer/guitarist George Hunter.

George wielded a thinline Ibanez the entire time, yet the band’s sound was mostly massive and electric, jangly and propulsive. Animated throughout, the band exchanged self-effacing quips with the audience, making note of songs that were particular good to dance or neck to, as the case might be.

The Chicago-based trio have been fast friends since youth, and were touring behind a self-published EP in 2001 when they sent a demo to Secretly Canadian Records. A week later the label caught a show and the band was signed.

After the set, the super-cool Miguel divulged that they tried a few shows with George on electric guitar, but it never worked. When I quizzed George on how he got such a thick sound from a thinline acoustic he shrugged, “I just use heavy strings, and run it through the twin.” (either meaning this or this)

More to the point, he just plays *hard*, going for every power chord, hard bend, and tremelo with the gusto of a rock god strapped with a Les Paul.

Catfish Haven put out a new full-length – Tell Me – this September. It’s not flashy, and a little rough around the edges, but in all it’s just about as satisfying as their concert – trading in on the manic volume of their loud act for some nuanced backing vocals and horns.

They’re on a three-date run with Heartless Bastards before heading out on a brief tour with the Hold Steady. You can be their MySpace friend, see the video for “Tell Me”, or check them out on Daytrotter, a cool online music mag which featured a great writeup and a quartet of Catfish tunes earlier this year. Of the four, aim for Down By You Fire for Joe Cockerness and Medelin for danciness.

Success to the Successful Thistle Sifter!

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In the theatre program at Drexel we had one particularly favorite vocal warmup, which we did before every show i ever acted or teched. It went like this:

Theophilus thistle, the successful thistle sifter,
While sifting a sieve full of unsifted thistles,
Thrust three thousand thistles through the thick of his thumb.

Now, if Theophilus thistle, the successful thistle sifter,
While sifting a sieve full of unsifted thistles,
Thrust three thousand thistles through the thick of his thumb,
See that thou, while sifting a sieve full of unsifted thistles
Thrust not three thousand thistles through the thick of thy thumb.

Success to the successful thistle sifter!

Much like Homer Simpson’s classic “I am so smart! S-M-R-T” (which i hear least once a week in my corporate office), the Theophilus jingle has stuck with many of us theatre kids, none more so than Elise and i. Whenever we overcome a major household obstacle we are known to proclaim loudly, “SUCCESS! To the successful thistle sifter.”

The charm of the phrase comes, i think, from the fact that sifting thistles by hand is a sortof thankless excercise to take joy in.

Well, as of this post WordPress is (somewhat) unbugged and live on ck.com. And that was not a thankless endeavor. I’m going to write a whole Blogger-to-WordPress walkthrough soon (yeah, and that Bonarroo walkthrough, too), but the thing that really sticks out is that there was an actual, tangible, workable answer to every single question i had through the installation process – right down to the last issue that was keeping me from going live. Most of those answers came directly from the WordPress Support wiki.

Thank you for your patience with me as I spent a few days to complete the changeover. I’m like a kid-on-Christmas with all of these new features to play with – especially categories. Please continue to comment whenever you find something broken, especially if it’s broken in a well-rendered browser like Firefox.