Crushing Krisis

35-for-35: 1984 – “When Doves Cry” by Prince

November 4, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]1984 was a year that included a Madonna record – one of my favorite records of all time, actually – Like a Virgin. I could go on and on about that album. Yet, as with yesterday, I have to pluck out a different song to highlight. Unlike yesterday, this song as quite a pedigree.

Why do we scream at each other
This is what it sounds like
When doves cry

“When Doves Cry” may have been the first time I noticed that songs imitated life. I was on the verge of my Madonna obsession that came the following year with endless spins of “Dress You Up” b/w “Shoo-BeeDoo” but it was also the period where my parents were moving towards their separation.

I don’t have a lot of memories from when they were together and together in the same place. There are only two that I can recall clearly, and one was standing on the landing of our staircase listening to them scream at each other.

I always wonder, is that memory so singular because it was the only time they fought in front of me, or because it was frequent?

(Please, mom and dad, don’t comment and ruin the mystery.)

(Due to Prince’s curious vendetta against any of his music appearing online, there are no embeds of the video of “When Doves Cry” to share! Instead, have this early rehearsal footage of him learning the song with his band.)

Despite the dirty electric guitar riffing in the intro and the jaunty piano chords of the refrain, “When Doves Cry” is a sparse song. Prince is singing to an unnamed partner, but to me the song plays out in a locked white room (“a world that’s so cold”) with several Princes, drums, a piano, and some phase effects. There is no bass. Nothing else will enter or depart.

Maybe it is the inside of Prince’s mind, him arguing maybes back and forth, the drum an echo of his heart beating from just below.

How can you just leave me standing?
Alone in a world that’s so cold? (So cold)
Maybe I’m just too demanding
Maybe I’m just like my father too bold
Maybe you’re just like my mother
She’s never satisfied (She’s never satisfied)

I think it says something about me that for over 30 years “When Doves Cry” has always been a song about parents when that amounts to only four lines alone in the context of the bottled lust of the rest of the song.

I have to consciously check in to hear anything else in the song as words other than noises. Like “animals strike curious poses” – I could recite the phrase to you phonetically, but every time I remind myself of the lyrics I quickly forget.

E said a thing to me last night to the effect of, “we’re all just machines executing code we wrote when we were eight years old.” We weren’t talking about “When Doves Cry,” but that’s absolutely what the song is about. At a point, all of the lust and heat in world can’t change your programming. You either add new functions to help correct the old code at the core, or you just keep executing the same mistakes again and again – either the mistakes of your parents or the mistakes you make in reaction to their actions.

All of that meaning is packaged in this hermetically sealed white room of a song with its sparse arrangement, three stanzas, and a chorus. Prince was a genius of both music and the human condition, and also of efficiency. Lines of musical code.

If he could have said it in any fewer words or notes he would have.

Live @ Rehearsal Video Concert – November 1st, 2016

November 3, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]After a month of piloting Facebook Live lunch rehearsal concerts to my network of friends, this week I unveiled them on my Facebook page!

Setlist: Shake It Of w/Shake Your Body Down (to the ground), A Few Bars of Goodbye, Saving Grace, a totally off-the-cuff and unrehearsed cover of Lady Gaga’s Million Reasons, Bucket Seat, Saving Grace, and a special encore duet with EV on We Are The Crystal Gems (the theme from Steven Universe)

Performance Notes:

With my first solo performance in a LONG time under my belt two weekends ago, I’m starting to get a feel for my solo repertoire again.

For me the standout here is “Status Quo.” I invoked it in this year’s anniversary post, and this is one of the strongest versions of it I’ve performed. It has all sorts of extra ornamentation I’ve never done before. Definitely wish I had that one in studio quality!

“Shake It Off” was a decent rendition, and I’m starting to get the muscle back to pull off three whole minutes of those hammers (seriously, it’s a workout).

I was really focused on keeping “A Few Bars of Goodbye” on the slower side since I tend to gain speed on songs in 3, but the tempo focus distracted me from some of the lyrics. That said, it’s great to hear it at the right speed (and I got the final chord right)!

“Million Reasons” was a bit of a train-wreck, but that’s the fun of doing this live and not as some big studio project where such things would never sneak through. Early Trios featured plenty of beautiful wrecks. I need to take the key slightly up from there to get to a better place in my range for sustained notes – you can hear how much trouble I’m having with breath management. It’s a statement to how damn good the song is that the quality still shows through my shaky performance.

As for the pair of Arcati Crisis songs, “Saving Grace” and “Bucket Seat,” I’ll simply say the transition to doing that material sans the incomparable Zina on drums hasn’t been the easiest.

FB Live presented an interesting technical challenge, because FB offers nary a means of broadcasting video from a desktop device. I tried for a few weeks by using my phone, but discovered that the cap on its WiFi upstreaming capabilities meant that live music just didn’t sound great.

After a bit of research, I found a magnificent walkthrough on JoelComm.com that explained desktop-based streaming and even included an applet to generate your streaming key! Once I installed the excellent open-source software OBS I was ready to stream (the next best solution is hundreds of dollars).

The next hurdle is achieving studio-quality sound. The sheer volume of me clips any standard cellphone or laptop mic, plus those mics aren’t great with dealing with reflections and echo and can make even the most pitch-conscious singer (which I am not) seem out of tune. Unfortunately, OBS doesn’t play very nicely with my studio setup, or else this would already be a solved problem. It’s a work in progress.

From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Deathblow #0-4

November 3, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]Deathblow was the third book in Jim Lee’s trio of WildStorm launch titles, introducing his own analog to The Punisher – one of his famous runs as a penciller at Marvel in the late 80s.

(The character was first introduced in a brief tale in the anthology Darker Image, although that story doesn’t track directly to the beginning of the series and would be completed in a #0 issue.)

Deathblow would later coalesce into a remarkably gripping story, but at its introduction the book was a mere footnote to WildStorm’s pair of flagship teams. That’s due to a staggered publishing schedule and four short, disconnected issues that don’t feel like they had Lee and scripter Brandon Choi’s full focus.

That’s puzzling, as Deathblow begins with the most traditional opening arc of all three of the initial WildStorm titles. We get time to linger on our anti-hero and his relationships before being plunged into action. Why isn’t it satisfying?

At this early stage of their independence, Lee and Choi didn’t know how to deliver information while keeping a story in motion. As a result, the first three chapters of the story feel like prologue, while the brief action sequence and bizarre twist in the fourth hardly pays off all the set-up.

While the story was a muddle, Deathblow remains notable as a rare example of Jim Lee inking himself. The style is striking. It retains all of the dynamics of Lee’s typical work, but drapes them in shadows and negative space. It’s a much more dark, rough-hewn look than his typically sharp pencils. It almost suggests Frank Miller or Jae Lee’s inky style. Jim Lee also plays with silhouettes and reversing out foreground details in a single color from the backdrop.

The unusual style is emphasized by a desaturated color palette of grays and greens. Most characters are colored as pale white ghosts or sickly yellow specters. Any hints of red are reserved for the lines under Deathblow’s eyes, religious imagery, and bursts of occasional violence. It’s a bold, memorable choice, but the early days of digital color don’t do it full justice. The high contrast looks smudged where colors meet, and inexact gradients swallow up Lee’s penwork.

Tim Sale takes over finishes duty over Lee’s layouts in the third issue. Sale isn’t as detail-obsessed as Lee, and as he settles into his simpler style the art begins to gel more with the early digital colors. This would coalesce into a beautiful, minimalist look that would last through issue #12, though Lee would continue providing misleading hyper-detailed covers

There’s little to recommend this early run, which reads like the worst of everything Image was accused of in its early days. Even if the between-issue delays are invisible to us now, the stories are short, incoherent, and try to push as many “cool” and” x-treme!” buttons as they can in their brief page count.

Want the play-by-play? I’ll get into the nitty-gritty of Dark Image, Deathblow #1-4, and #0 below. Here’s the schedule for the rest of this month’s WildStorm re-read – tomorrow I tackle WildC.A.T.s Special #1 and WildC.A.T.s Trilogy #1-3.

Need the issues? Deathblow #1-4 (and on through #12) was collected in a 1999 TPB titled “Sinners and Saints.” DC issued a revised, expanded, and re-ordered HC and TPB of #0-12 that are still readily available. For single issues try eBay (Darker Image & #0-4) or Amazon (Darker Image, #0, 1, 2, 3, 4)
[Read more…] about From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Deathblow #0-4

35-for-35: 1983 – “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya” by Culture Club

November 3, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug] culture-club-kissing-to-be-clever 1983 was an obscenely good year of the music I love. Seriously, check out this list of releases at the top of my personal iTunes charts:

David Bowie – Let’s Dance, Billy Joel – An Innocent Man, Cyndi Lauper – She’s So Unusual, Madonna s/t, The Police – Synchronicity, U2 – War, plus singles like “1999,” “Sweet Dreams,” and “Flashdance What A Feeling” – plus, the music video of “Thriller”!

(Sadly, they were all shut out at the Grammys by Thriller, which arrived on November 30, 1982, after the end of the 1982 Grammys eligibility period.)

How to choose? As much as my heart lies with Madonna when it comes to 1983, I’ve already done a lot of writing about her best songs. Cyndi Lauper’s album is an all-time classic, but I didn’t have ears for it until after I met Lindsay. I love the singles from An Innocent Man, but in 1983 we were still spinning Glass Houses.

After agonizing over the decision, I realize I was making the mistake of looking for songs that I love now, when really I should be searching my earliest memories for songs I loved then. And, after “Thriller,” the great love of my three-year-old life was “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya.”

Yes, by Culture Club. I was so addicted to that song as a kid. It was the earliest example of my childhood choreography, as I’d launch into a series of somersaults during the chorus.

But, what is this monstrosity? It begins with mariachi horns and castanets, it briefly turns into a sort of lounge song, before turning into queer calypso elevator music on the chorus. And, check out the lyrics to the verse:

Downtown we’ll drown
We’re in our never splendour
Flowers, showers
Who’s got the new boy gender?
I’ll be your baby, I’ll be your score
I’ll run the gun for you and so much more

Holy crap, tiny Peter, was your first favorite song really an ode to blurred gender roles and sexual innuendo? And, also, how was Culture Club so deeply weird yet also so incredibly successful?

I cannot answer any of those questions, so I turned to the next closest source of information: my mother. Yes, my beloved readers, you about to witness a Crushing Krisis first: A BLOG POST FROM MOTHER OF KRISIS.

Take it away, Mom:

I first heard and saw Culture Club on MTV, which was new at the time. We didn’t have a big income, but we did have cable TV. There was something about their sound that grabbed me.

You were a music lover from a very early age. You definitely had your favorites and I can safely say “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya” was one of them. You would become a little animated dancer when it came on. You were a little young for a full fledged somersault, but you gave it your best try.

We lived in South Philly, and I used to take you to the playground off of 13th & Oregon and push you on the swings while I sang you my newest favorite song, like “Electric Avenue” and “I Can’t Go For That.” Through the process of elimination, perhaps I bought Kissing To Be Clever at a record store on East Passyunk Ave? Sometimes, when the weather was nice I would take you for a walk there. [Ed Note: See, my mom was a hipster before all of y’all were hipsters, okay?]

As far as the club music I was exposed to, the most important aspects of a song were:

Does it have a good beat? and
Can you dance to it?

Calypso, Caribbean, reggae, soul, funk, etc … they generally have a beat and you can dance to them. “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya” fit those parameters.

I suppose I noticed Boy George’s way of being different, but I didn’t care one way or another. I just liked the music. I guess different was ok with me. Bear in mind, I had spent a considerable part of my young life being a huge Bowie fan, so I wasn’t phased much by Boy George’s gender-bending feminine look (though, in no way did Boy George remind me of Bowie).

Not to blow my own horn, but I don’t think I was ever judgmental about how people looked or acted. Perhaps I developed a tolerant attitude as it relates to gender and sexual orientation. I mean, I was about 10 years old when my parents took me to visit my cousin D and her partner [a woman]. This was 1965. Also my cousin W was gay. The family just accepted it. Even my parents.

(I am the same person who bought you no less than two baby dolls, Care Bears, Jem, and both He-Man and She-Ra.)

That was… actually pretty awesome. Thanks, mom! Perhaps we can tempt her into another guest appearance as the month presses on. I love that last little aside, in case any of you ever doubt me saying I was all about inclusivity right down to the toys I played with as a toddler.

From The Beginning: Dr. Seuss – And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (Book 01)

November 2, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]Welcome to my “From The Beginning” read of Dr. Seuss’s entire bibliography!

And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street was the second book released by the pseudonymous Dr. Seuss, and his first written explicitly for children.

(His first publication being his not-at-all sexual The Pocket Book of Boners, which was more of a joke book.)

And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937) – Dr. Seuss

CK Says: – Borrow It

Gender Diversity: None – every single character depicted is male; one woman is mentioned

Ethnic Diversity: “Rajah” riding an elephant, a Chinese man eating with chopsticks

Challenging Language: keen, outlandish, minnows, charioteer, Rajah, fleet (adj), Alderman, confetti

Themes to Discuss: Truth vs Exaggeration, racial stereotypes

Reading Time: 5-10 minutes

Young Marco has a problem. Every day he walks to and from school, and every day his father asks him to tell him what he’s seen, but after he relates his tale his father always replies, “Your eyesight’s much too keen.”

This is a theme I can sympathize with, as EV has a keen memory of fine details. She will sometimes comment weeks after an event on a particular phrase or the color of the buttons on a shirt.

Marco’s problem is a bit different. You see, if he only notices his own feet and a horse-drawn wagon, it doesn’t seem like enough to report on to his father. Thus, the wagon is now pulled by a yellow racing zebra whipped into a frenzy by a charioteer.

I was cautious of this book on my first read. We’ve now reached the age where EV is beginning to exaggerate intentionally and we’re teaching her what it means for something to be true. I want to encourage her imagination while emphasizing the value of truth. And To Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street does exactly that – it suggests that you ought to engage every aspect of your imagination to create a fanciful tale, but that in the telling its best to relate on the truth of the matter.

The illustrations are quite tame as Dr. Seuss goes. They mostly depict only the action of one animal and its cart down the street from a fixed perspective, even if the processing behind the animal grows to be quite elaborate.

and-to-think-that-i-saw-it-on-mulberry-street-interior Also, there aren’t many fantastical things – the people are quite people-like and the animals are all real. It took me a moment to realize a pair of giraffes were just giraffes because I was so intent on figuring out how they connected to some future fanciful beast.

As with many early Seuss books, there is a casual racism employed in casting different racist tropes into obvious roles. Here were have a Rajah riding an elephant and “a Chinese man who eats with sticks.” Neither of these are caricatures or especially mean-spirited, so with some guidance on the trope I’d say they are still appropriate for modern readers.

While this book wouldn’t top my list of Dr. Seuss acquisitions, I think it has a worthy message and not too much confusing language, plus a pleasing rhyming scheme. Any kid who has spent time watching passing cars or telling you about their day will be able to relate.

I’ll be back next Wednesday with the second Dr. Seuss book, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins!