Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

artistic explorers

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In the rush of rehearsals and shows this fall, I flagged this quote in the hope I would later have the time to give it some deeper thought:

Every artist has an obligation to be a kind of researcher, whether its within the technical/formal aspects of their medium, the boundaries they push, or for the cultural knowledge they are producing.

Artwork by Kelsey Halliday Johnson.

The quote comes from an interview with visual artist Kelsey Halliday Johnson (via Maria’s tumblr), and it identifies why I am so obsessed not only with consuming art, but also by the process of creating art.

One of my major fascinations with comic books is the ridiculous range of people and objects that the artists must render – some of which are not even remotely based in reality. Ever since I started reading comics I have wanted to be able to draw, but even if I could draw figures or houses or cars how would I know how to draw dinosaurs or doomsday devices or dimensional gates?

Of course, that challenge faces a whole range of designers and artists – it’s not limited to drawing fantastical fights between superheroes. Does an architect know their history enough to design an addition to a Tudor Revival home?

Similarly, when I write songs I am drawing on the sonic vocabulary of every song I have ever heard before. That’s not to say I am plagiarizing. It’s more like a game of memory. That’s how Aural Training works – you learn to remember intervals, rhythms, and notes by memorizing other works that include them.

When I hear a song for the first time, whether it’s mine or someone else’s, I think, “that little melodic leap is from Juliana Hatfield; the quick chord change is David Bowie.”  My ability to hear those snippets evaporates over time as the song becomes its own gestalt; I’ve taken to jotting down the little earwigs when I first write something new so I can fondly recall them years down the line.

Can I write a song with parts I’ve never heard before? Yes. Would it come to me as easily without thousands of other songs on my brain – a lifetime of sonic research. Probably not.

Halliday Johnson’s entire interview is fascinating, I suggest you give it a read.

anything but a.m.

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This is an actual thing. Or at least, an actual thing in development. I would consider buying it, but I think there would be a lot of commensurate psychological trauma involved with waking up every morning. Of course, that is a good motivator.

I remember clearly the abject horror that child Peter had at waking up early in the morning.

I would do anything to delay the inevitable. Play dead. Let my body go limp so that it could not be dragged out of bed. Agree to relocate to a chair or couch and then promptly go back to sleep.

When all else failed, I would plead. Ten more minutes. Five, even. Any stay of execution to stand between me and a fully waking state.

I'll admit a certain affection for waking up every morning to the banshee screams of Ms. Love before dawn. Given the choice, I think that's what I'd still be doing.

I look back and wonder how I ever got myself to high school on time, let alone every day. It’s the same way I look back at sophomore year of college and wonder how I stayed alive when all I remember consuming was vodka and chicken cheesesteaks.

My attitude towards waking up has improved as an adult. Slightly. I don’t like sleeping late, per se. I can even be up ultra-early to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for a special event.

Still, my preference is for my alarm to begin ringing in the form of some terrifying, unignorable noise an hour or two before I have to set foot on the ground. That gives me some time to come to terms with the psychological ramifications of waking up.

E is not so much a fan of this arrangement. We’ve negotiated it down to a normal alarm ring within 45 minutes of actual waking.

I don’t know that I will ever be able to delight in dawn. I hear there are some people who are in the gym by the time the sun comes up.

Still, there is some satisfaction to starting a day early – if only in that I’ll manage to squeeze in so much more of my life than if I had woken up an hour or two later.

breaking the painful cycle

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I have mentioned my dermatological struggles in the past on the blog. While the potential disintegration of my epidermis seems to have been staved off at the moment, my skin-care needs are (ridiculously) one of the major worrying factors about my health care and costs.

Yesterday, one of my favorite Twitter friend, @JerseyShoreJen, mentioned she had booked another media appearance from her recent EdOp on Eczema. Being a fellow lifelong battler of it and its fiendish cohorts, I congratulated her and asked her to share her article from the NYT Health Section – “The Painful Cycle of Eczema.”

In the bathroom, I try not to dwell too long at the sight of myself in the mirror before patting my skin dry and slathering it with lotion. I wrap bandages over the raw and weeping patches in the crooks of my elbows — a stopgap, really, since the bandages will soak through in several hours. I take Benadryl to calm the itching, and ibuprofen to temper the swelling and pain, before heading to meetings in an antihistamine haze. I hope no one stares, but they do.

…

I wore long sleeves and pants to school, even on the hottest, most humid days. … When I passed through puberty and still had outbreaks, I viewed my eczema as a character flaw, something I brought on myself for not being perfect.

After I read her story, Jen and I got into rapid-fire exchange on Twitter, gushing over our challenges and successes with our conditions. Though my collection of problems do not manifest as violently as Jen’s, I see so much of myself in her story. I never once wore pants to gym. I’ve ruined pillowcases and sheets when my medications have bleached out their color. When I have an outbreak I worry that people will stare and judge in meetings.

There’s not an immediate happy ending here – Jen and I are both continuing our respective struggles and our treatments. However, the silver lining is the connection that Jen created, and the relief I felt in talking to someone who relates to what I’m going through.

Jen writes at Down The Shore With Jen.

From the Beginning: Bruce Springsteen – Greetings From Asbury Park

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I never owned a Bruce Springsteen album as a kid. All I know about him are his cartoonishly overblown 70s and 80s hit singles. I thought it would be fun to experience his records in the original order to try to understand why so many people in my life love his music.

Bruce Springsteen – Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.
released January 3, 1973

Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. is Bruce Springsteen marking his journey from teen punk to struggling adult. It captures that very moment where a young man looks past the haze of his dreams to realize he may never escape the gravity of his small town. Even in that instant he knows that soon his recognition will fade as he, too, becomes a part of the unchanging scenery that surrounds him.

It is a bleak place to live. Welcome to Asbury Park.

There is desperation here as Springsteen tries to record the true faces of the icons of his youth – a series of greasy burn-outs and painted ladies – before he joins their sad chorus. “Blinded by the Light” is both the beginning and the end of the story. It functions as a Rosetta Stone for the record. A hopscotching bass line leaps between crazed blasts of saxophone and Bruce’s non-stop artillery of lyrics as he wonders if it’s worth it to be hobbled by the simple pleasures that surround him.

If the album was merely a time capsule of a long-since extinct mainstreet USA it would be a pleasant artifact. It is more than that thanks to the musical savvy of this nascent version of  Springsteen. He fuses the sounds of his contemporaries into something kinetic and occasionally terrifying. He rambles and yowls squeakily like Dylan, treads Van Morrison’s more soulful take on folk (especially on “Spirit In the Night”), and matches Don McLean’s obsessive need to paint every corner of a story with words.

Oh, the words. Springsteen has so much to say that he rarely pauses to repeat a refrain. Songs like “Blinded by the Light” and “For You” threaten to smother your ears in sheer alliteration, growing increasingly absurd under their own lyrical weight. As it turns out, young Springsteen had yet to master the efficacy of a few cutting phrases, which means this LP yields no anthemic choruses in the mold of “Born to Run.”

You have to start here to get there. Springsteen had to empty his mind of an indelible image of his home town and the distractions of youth, as on “Growin’ Up.” That broader, metaphorical version of him is teased here, as on the elegiac “Mary Queen of Arkansas.” It is a ballad for a figure not entirely of the world he inhabited by day, but borne of dreams of a wider America, unseen.

I’ll confess, I don’t like the album very much, yet I can’t deny that it transports me to Asbury Park, circa 1973. I see a town shattered in the shadow of the Vietnam War, full of losers and junkies trying to achieve orbit on a fistful of dope and broken dreams. “Everyone’s drunk on main street, drunk on holy blood,” Springsteen intones on the cutting “Lost in the Flood.” He wonders about the anesthetized figures that surround him, “Did you lose your senses in the war, did you lose them in the flood?”

Asbury Park is not a terribly cohesive album, but it paints a specific time and place. As his contemporaries transformed themselves with each record, Springsteen honed his rangy, biographical songwriting from cascades of words into a tool that could be held by anyone. He redefined the concept of folk troubadour, at points seeming to sing with the voice of America itself like Pete Seeger before him.

Is that so different than singing in the voice of his town? Could those later songs have emerged from the lips of a man who did not come of age afraid he would never escape? That tension between stay and go, settle down or explode has been with Bruce Springsteen for his entire career. It is as much as a part of him as the alleys and main drags of Asbury Park.

we’ll see how brave you are

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Over the past few months I have been trading a volley of emails with the unrequited crush of my high school life.

(Alright, settle down. This is not an intellectual affair of any sort. E is totally in-the-know about this entire saga. But, as you’ll see, there is still some resonance there.)

Seriously, how cute was I back then? So cute.

Being the unrequited crush of my high school life, she was effectively and simply one of my best friends. In fact, I’d say she was the person I spent the most time with in high school after Gina. Since high school was also ground zero for establishing my taste in music, the entire half of my sonic vocabulary that I don’t share with Gina – Elliott Smith, Rufus Wainwright, Tori Amos –  I do share with her.

(This pronoun business is getting tired already. In the proud and rarely-invoked CK tradition of assigning cursory pseudonyms to former obsessions to pseudo-protect their anonymity and separate them from posts made while I was actually in some form of crush with them, we shall refer to her as “Scarlett.”)

As with all of the few people who have fallen out with me (rather than the other way around), Scarlett’s story became a little too intertwined with mine. I found myself telling everyone I knew about parts of her life that were maybe not mine to tell, either intentionally or through my songs. Except, Philly is a small place, and she eventually told me it wasn’t the kindest thing to do to a girl.

We didn’t have a fight, necessarily, but we left it there, and eventually became Facebook friends, as one does in these situations.

I am not one to harbor regrets, but I regret that. How could she have known what she was getting into by being my friend? Fifteen songs which are now sitting in mothballs in some attic crawlspace of my brain.

(Yes, I do appreciate the irony inherent in now writing about her on my blog. I suppose this is one of my fatal personality flaws.)

Our renewed contact began because, oddly enough, Scarlett has out-of-the blue discovered a love of singing. And, let me tell you, this was a girl that had no interest in singing. You know me and my constant need to turn everyone into an all-singing, all-dancing cabaret version of themselves. I tried that on her in high school, and maybe had something to do with getting her to act in a play with me, but the singing part never came.

Suddenly, in 2011 she was interested in singing and playing, so she emailed me. I suppose I am the stock person that comes to mind when anything of the sort crosses the mind of anyone who has ever met me. Which is good – +1 to personal branding!

Anyhow, we talked, and then she sent me a recording of her singing. Though untrained, she has this wildly cool voice – as well as the instincts and DNA that come from all that music we shared in high school. A few days later I sent the song back with an instrumental arrangement and a choir of ahh-ing auto-tuned Peter’s.

Things have continued like this for a while now, her sending me new songs, us talking about the mechanics of singing, me musing random musings back at her.

Last week I finished a new song I have been chipping away at for – no lie – two years. I had played it for E a few times while working on it, but when I was finally done it was past midnight and I needed to play it for real for someone so I would remember it in the morning.

I recorded a video and sent it to Scarlett. It’s the first song I can remember sending to her or playing for her for over 12 years, even though back when I first learned to play guitar it was the sort of thing I did whenever I finished anything. “Sweet Nothing,” “Other Plans,” “Touch” – all those old ones, she was one of the first people to hear them as a file shared over instant messenger.

And now, in a way, we have transported ourselves back to our instant messages of 1998, firing our volleys of thoughts and songs across the city at each other.

I want her to be the biggest indie star in Philly, because even if I stop having a crush on someone I am still in love with all of their potential.