Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Elise

My Best Pesto

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I don’t remember the first time I had pesto, but it is one of my favorite things to add to any food.

pesto-in-jar-crushingkrisisPasta. Salmon. Shrimp. Toast. Eggs. Chips dipped directly into it. Pesto makes everything better. It’s also pretty much an entire spinach salad in every few spoons, which is how I help justify how quickly I can consume it compared to the amount of cheese and oil it contains.

I clearly recall having it at the appropriately-named Ristorante Pesto on Broad Street as a teenager, but that seems like such a late point in life to have tasted pesto for the first time.

Thus, while I wish I could say this is an old family recipe, it’s not – it’s just adapted from The Better Homes and Gardens cookbook over the course of dozens of trials over the course of the past decade. It used to be that E made it and then I just greedily consumed it. Finally, I became impatient about waiting for her to decide she felt like making pesto and so I made it myself and realized it is so easy to do (as long as you have a decent food processor).

Now I make double and triple batches every time so I can enjoy as much pesto as I want on my pasta and everything else.

Here is the ingredient list for an 8oz batch of pesto, which is probably enough to toss with for pasta for four. I use the alterations in parenthesis every time, but they make things more complex – you’ll do just fine ignoring them your first time. [Read more…] about My Best Pesto

Song of the Day: “Fresh Eyes” by Andy Grammer

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When I hear a song for the first time my brain does something special.

It’s like the song is made of sand and my mind is a special sort of sifting pan. With each passing second I am sifting through the writing, the performance, and production to find something hidden inside.

The influences.

Sometimes I don’t even realizing it’s happening until my brain starts spitting out information, readouts printed on mental ticker tape. I think this only works the first time I listen to a song because afterwards I’m hearing it more as a single, gestalt creation. I might still be able to identify its influences, but it’s something deliberate I’m doing with my conscious mind.

Listening for the first time is different. I’m trying to make sense of the whole of the song out of its parts, and it’s easier to sift out an obvious pinch of another song. A certain melody. A vocal tone. And, just like the mental sand I sifted them from, if I don’t jot them down right way they’re lost forever. The next time I hear the song, I’ll just hear the song.

Last week I was setting up my weights at the gym before a workout when the little ticker tape printer in my brain started working overtime. My mind buzzed non-stop, spitting out the names of other songs and performers.

Weirdly – because this never, ever happens – one of the names it spit out was mine. And then, just as unconsciously, I started singing along with the song as I was hearing it – first with the melody, and then the high floating harmony on the chorus.

The cause of all that buzzing was Andy Grammer’s late-2016 single, “Fresh Eyes.”

Now, I’m not saying Andy Grammer was influenced by me or nicked one of my songs. I heard so many hints of other artists in this song. [Read more…] about Song of the Day: “Fresh Eyes” by Andy Grammer

run ragged and happy

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This is a meandering post about life and stuff. Content that’s all focused like a laser mounted on a deadly shark may or may not resume tomorrow.

This weekend E headed up the NNJ/NYC to play a show and help with some solstice cleaning along with the sibs at her mother’s house. I wanted to tag along to see her concert and reap the sib-time, but my life was in need of some cleaning up as well.

When I woke up on Saturday I felt like my to-do list was a litany of random drudgery. Organize this, scrub that, upload stuff to here. Even as I was crossing things off it didn’t feel very big picture. Typical: artist-, writer-, marketer-me trapped under a Sisyphisian list of uncreative to-dos. The only thing keeping me sane was my Twitter pipeline to the outside world.

As the day wore on I kept feeling like I was behind the boulder until I caught a social network update from my dear musical friend Vicky Spaeth, which read:

Simplify, simplify, simplify! I think we over-complicate our lives way too much.

I read that, then took another look at my list, and realized there was a big picture. It was all “simplify.” Organizing shelves and wires so my creative space is less cluttered, so I can create. Clean out the house so I don’t have a worry of other things to do nagging me when I want to create. Upload what I’ve created to as many places as will have it, so people can actually hear it.

I finally have the simplicity that provides one big picture. I have focus. Finally everything I’m doing points in the same direction.

I look back at the 2000 me. Within a two month span I started a blog, shot digital video of myself, and was the only songwriter on the whole internet uploading a concert every week. And it all came easy. But it was over-complicated. The technology was a tangle. The life was a tangle – pulling As and paying for my first apartment and squeezing in music beside theatre.

Maybe I was on the verge of conquering the world, but it wasn’t simple. There was no picture to focus on. Which was fine – I was in college! But that’s why we grow up. And hopefully get less complicated, instead of more.

It took the weekend and the twenty-seven years before it, but I am really almost there. Almost to the point that I can just flip a switch and empty my thoughts and songs directly onto the internet without a fussy mess of wires and files and wasted time.

And be worth watching.

It feels cool and satisfying, and I’m happy – happy sweating my ass off and mopping the floor, or putting away the umpteenth load of laundry, passing out on the couch while I wait for my wife to get home. Happy without any descriptors or mitigators, because there’s a point to it.

Just happy.