Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

over-achievement

independence doesn’t mean you can’t ask for help

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On a top-secret mission to Sine Studios at 127 S. 22nd Street in Philadelphia, just above Walnut.

Happy Independence Day!

Last night Jake and I conducted a special, top secret Arcati Crisis mission at Sine Studios, my favorite studio in Philly.

I can’t get into the details of our journey just yet, but given the context of today it made me think about what independence and DIY really means to me – and to you.

For a long time I was DIY because I had to be – because no one else wanted to help me make music or publish my writing or code my website. I didn’t have the money or the clout to attract anyone to my projects, so I did them all myself.

I’m sure you’ve found yourself in the same place. Nobody would do it for you, so you did it for yourself!

That do-it-yourself know-how is a wonderful thing to have. I love that I’ve never been to a recording studio and that I’ve coded all my own websites from scratch or with open source. I love being capable and autonomous.

But being independent doesn’t mean you can’t ask for help.

This weekend in my JavaScript coding I got super-stuck more than once. Luckily, I am married to a self-taught JavaScript expert. I was happy to have her help. Last summer E laid down a set of beautiful new slate steps in our back yard, but mixing a new cement panel for our front walk was beyond her. We hired a local contractor, and they took care if it in a matter of hours a few weeks ago.

E and I never stopped being independent and capable. We still did our research and learned new things from the process. We just called in the experts when the time was right.

I have been working on recording projects for both Arcati Crisis and Filmstar over the past year. Recording a full rock band is a tall task. It’s not just about putting up a ton of microphones and rolling tape. You have to deal with noise, separation, splitting signals, phase issues, and tons of other aspects.

I can handle that myself as a recording engineer, but that takes a lot out of me as a performer. Add to that a fiercely played full drum set, and the hamster in my brain will run itself right off of his wheel.

That’s what lead to our top secret trip to Sine. I was asking for help from experts that I trust.

It doesn’t mean we’re not independent. It doesn’t mean I couldn’t do it myself if I wanted to. It just means that now I know when it’s time to reach out to someone I trust instead of suffering through difficulties on my own.

That’s what independence means to me today.

What does independence mean to you?

The 30 for 30 Project

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When I hatched one of my typically insane musical project ideas – to record 30 songs from the 30 years of my life for my 30th birthday (maybe in the 30 days of September?) – I was working from the assumption it would stay an idea due to my perfectionism. The concept would be safely tucked away as an iTunes playlist with all of the other covers projects that I’d never started.

"Endless Love" by Diana Ross & Lionel Richie was the number one record in America the day I was born. While I won't say that I'll NEVER cover it, you definitely won't be hearing it later today as my pick from 1981.

Then, August happened. I kept posting every day, and really enjoying it. I finally found a blogging rhythm, eleven years into my experiment. I thought, maybe the idea isn’t so crazy after all. Maybe I should do it.

The issue is that I haven’t recorded any new solo music since we moved into the house last June. I have hatched half a dozen cool projects in my head, but I haven’t launched a single one.

This seems paradoxical. I have a studio now. Space to set up and stay set up without having to drape suit jackets over my microphone poles and check email from within a lattice of quarter-inch cables.

I mean that literally. At the old house my studio was my office was my dressing room. It was common to find a discarded microphone atop a pile of wireframe sketches and freshly laundered underwear. Gear shared a walk-in closet with board games and old copies of Rolling Stone. Switching to a different guitar meant risking sending up a tinker-tape parade of brightly colored Monopoly money in my hallway if I moved a box the wrong way.

And you know what? It didn’t stop me. I recorded two seasons of Trio, four Arcati Crisis Live @ Rehearsals, and over a dozen solo demos that became my Brown Bag Demos, Vol. 1. Now I have an entire attic committed solely to recording, and the well has suddenly run dry.

Actually, the well is quite wet. I have the best intentions. The new wrinkle is that with space to set up a perfect signal chain the issue is no longer my willingness, but my perfection. Everything has to be perfect. Perfectly planned, perfectly rehearsed, perfectly executed.

The Rolling Stones' 18th American LP, Tattoo You, held the top album spot when I was born. I won't be playing "Start Me Up" at any point in this project.

Perfect makes things hard. Bobbling that one chord change? Delay it. Tickle in my throat? Cancel it.

30 for 30 is different. I am not promising perfection. I am not promising that I’m going to get it done in 30 days. I am not promising you will know all the songs. I am not promising polished studio cuts. I am not promising all of the covers will be perfectly played.

And, I am certainly not representing it as a collection of my favorite, most-cherished songs.

No. All of that leads to perfectionism paralysis.

What I am promising is a single take video play-through of a song from every year from 1981 to 2010, with some commentary along the way. No cherished favorites. No multi-track demos. No perfection.

Just me and the music.

30 for 30 starts later today, in 1981.

Gina’s Bachelorette Adventure, Pt. 3

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When I left off last week we had a video game theme, an instruction booklet introduction, and a visual concept of 8-bit goodness – all for my best friend and bandmate Gina’s highly unusual bachelorette party.

Here I am shown negotiating something – possibly our surrender – with two park rangers while our live action video game was in progress. No, I am not threatening them with a baton, that’s just a trick of perspective. Still, they seemed to find me rather intimidating. Notice how the one on the left has his hand near his utility belt, while the one on the right is making an exceedingly obvious attempt to reach for his radio receiver.

As for what we’d be actually be doing during our human video game, that was another story entirely. A story with no plot or structure. Or mini-bosses.

We had to start somewhere. Since Gina is a chemist by day, we decided she should be challenged to put her chemistry knowledge to the test. I originally wanted to her to conduct a chemistry demonstration in the middle of the street with everyday groceries, but we eventually decided that might look a bit too much like an act of terrorism during 4th of July weekend within a few blocks of The Liberty Bell.

(At the time there were legitimate questions being asked, like “Do we need a permit to do that?” and “Can you even legally buy that in Pennsylvania?” We fully anticipated losing one or more attendees to some mix of boredom, drunkenness, heatstroke, or tasing by park rangers.)

With a mind to not being detained under the Patriot Act, Kelly devised an insane chemistry challenge to fulfill our needs that we could all understand as laypeople… and, possibly as drunks, depending on how the day was going at that point. [Read more…] about Gina’s Bachelorette Adventure, Pt. 3

Gina’s Bachelorette Adventure, Pt. 1

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This weekend was Gina’s (she of Arcati Crisis, high school, and many madcap adventures in between) bachelorette party.

In 2008, my bachelor party (planned by Gina and four of my other closest friends) was an 80s Prom entitled “Like a Virgin.” It came complete with DJ, decorations, catering, and friends dressed in period fashions – with hair to match. Plus, the DJ was actually a karaoke emcee, and all of the 80s tunes were sung by my friends and I.

Now, I am more than a little competitive. Not in the playing sports, head-to-head, high score kinda of way. I could care less, but not by much.

No, my style of competitive is “anything you can do I can do better.” Like, my blog is the longest running in Philadelphia, or I have the most expansive guide to collecting X-Men on the internet, or when Bruno Mars tracks came out for Rock Band 3 I wouldn’t let bro go to bed until we had 100% and were ranked in the top 30 internationally of all harmony vocalists.

Thus, when I was charged with planning Gina’s bachelorette party along with her best friends Kelly (a chemist in Belgium) and Mikki (an architecht & non-profit organizer in Seattle), I had something to prove. I had to conceive of the most memorable, most epic, and most fitting Bachelorette Adventure possible without actually having Gina go on tour with Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young.

My first impulse was to plan something with music and the 80s, but… surprise! Gina had already won the “Best Party Ever” designation in that category.

As Kelly, Mikki, and I talked about it over the course of several months, we kept coming back to a “this is your life” tour through Philadelphia landmarks. It was a cool idea, but didn’t sound fun. There’s your house! There’s your high school! Isn’t this awesome!?

No.

We kept talking. What if it was a City Chase version, with special clues and teams racing the city? Cooler, but not the best format for celebrating around a single person. But, what if each location held a special challenge for the team – half Amazing Race, half Double Dare?

Now we were getting somewhere. We picked some locations and made up a few challenges. It was sounding somewhat entertaining, but not EPIC. It was lacking a grand scale and a clear theme, other than walking around Philly for eight hours.

Then, I had a not-rare-but-not-nearly-common-enough stroke of mad genius while idly humming one of Gina’s Arcati Crisis songs, “Fisher Price,” which goes a bit like this…

There comes a time when you realize
That you don’t get anymore chances
There’s no extra lives
You don’t get big from a magic mushroom
And you don’t find coins in an underground room.

My epiphany? Gina’s Bachelorette Adventure would be a video game. A real life video game that was part Super Mario Brothers, part Grand Theft Auto, and part live-action role playing game – all with Gina’s favorite parts of Philadelphia as its world map.

It sounded suitably epic, but would it make any sense to Kelly and Mikki… or to Gina and the 20 friends she asked us to invite?

Tune in for the next installment to hear how our motley trio planned to turn Philadelphia into a massive game board, and how having crafty and artist co-conspirators elevated my insanity to a whole new level.

http://arcaticrisis.bandcamp.com/track/fisher-price

it’s a glam rock life

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At about midnight on Saturday Gina and I were having some issues.

At that time we were on the third song of our full-length, fully-electric Arcati Crisis set at Fergie’s pub.

Actually, we were about four minutes into trying to start our third song, my one-minute and six-second tune, “Glam.”

In case you are bad at rock math, 4:1 is not a very good prep-time to play-time ratio.

On the left side of the stage, one of Gina’s two lowest strings was a hair out of tune. On the right side of the stage, I was playing the opening riff to my own song in the wrong key (which sorta made Gina’s ever-so-minor tuning issue a moot point).

Even in the moment I was struck by the Alanis-Irony that after six months of preparing for our big electric debut we were having the kind of rock-stoppage that regularly felled us a decade ago when we were acoustic teenagers, all while our brand new drummer looked on, bemused.

That’s rock for you. You can practice all your high flying solos and set up an awesome effects chain, but rock has some basic requirements to fulfill and one of them is playing in the same key as each other (unless you want to play more experimentally and/or with a lot more distortion than we do).

You don’t think about this stuff when you watch a pop band play their new single on Saturday Night Live. They have guitar techs. The drummer has a click track in ear so they can cue samples. One of the guitarists is actually playing into a midi sequencer so it doesn’t matter too much if he’s a hair out of tune. And on every chorus the singer is doubled by a ten-track, four-part harmony pulled right off of her record.

That shit is way above our heads.

Of course, if one of them forgets what key the song is in they’re still in trouble, so I suppose what I’m saying is Gina would do fine on Saturday Night Live, but I would be immortalized in my own Ashlee Simpson moment.

But not really. Because I am a freakish perfectionist, and we had played all of these songs hundreds of times already, and we already played an awesome sneak preview date and teaser set and two awesome songs, and I was not about to let me forgetting for three measures the song was not actually in F ruin my night.

The upshot of this story is that the gig was awesome. The whole “Glam” snafu was barely a blip. On our third try we just started the damn thing, and after the eight seconds of dischordant intro all of our issues were over. We proceeded directly from that into a raucous debut of our cover of “Moonage Daydream.” Then we played Gina’s brand-new “Song for Mrs. Schroeder” for the first time, and turned in pitch-perfect versions of “Apocalyptic Love Song” and “Love Me Love Me Not” to end our first set.

I even hit the little hammer in the last verse of “Love Me Not” I had missed in our last few rehearsals.

Over an hour later we closed the night by launching into one of the most awesome, hard-rocking versions of Gina’s seven-minute epic “Brother John” that we’ve ever unleashed.

When it was over we said thank you, doled out sweaty hugs to our friends that had hung around until last call to catch every song, and got paid.

And then I drove a car inside of the Philadelphia city limits for the first time ever – at 2:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning – and I didn’t even kill any drunk douche bags on Walnut.

In sum, the “Glam” incident barely even ranks. I’m only devoting precious digital column-inches to it as a reminder that the stupid crap that happens to me in the middle of a show only has to matter if I let it.

Otherwise, it’s eight painfully out-of-tune seconds out of a three-and-a-half hour gig, and that is a really effing good out-of-tune to awesome ratio.