Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

theatre

Things To Do In Philly, 9/7/11 Edition

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Dante Bucci, as shot by E!

Are there many things to do in Philly this week? Hell yes. Have you seen the Fringe Guide, or perhaps the City Paper’s capsule reviews of shows?

Well, I’m not here to talk about all of that. Unlike my comic book coverage, when it comes to Philly I only mention shows I’d consider attending myself – and, in the case of this lineup, I’m really going to try to attend them all!

Let’s go!

Thursday, 9/8
Who: Filmstar, featuring your author and the lovely E
Details: 8p, $10, North Star Bar, 2639 Poplar St., Philly
Why? We are fresh off of two killer rehearsals, and our set features a brand new song and a slew of fan favorites. Northstar Bar is one of the biggest local venues in the city, and comes equipped with great beer and food. Also, we’re sharing the bill with Mean, Secret Music, and Kyle Andrews – a Chicago-based artist whose music has been featured on Grey’s Anatomy and national commercial campaigns. Expect us to hit the stage 10pm or later.

Friday, 9/9
Who: Dante Bucci, Victoria Spaeth, and Andrea Nardello
Details: 10p, $10, Tin Angel, 20 S. 2nd St., Philly
Why? This is more of a “why not,” as I am madly in love with all three of these artists. Dante is the most notable hang drummer in the country, luring millions of YouTube viewers with his entrancing melodies. Victoria Spaeth is a fiercely independent songwriter who graduated from playing covers to open mics to fronting her own rock band, unspooling her fantastic and increasingly-muscular urban folk. Andrea Nardello straddles rowdy barroom acoustic-rock and twinkling folk in every set, and is on-the-record as liking the way I shake my ass when I play “Hyperbole” ;)

Gina and a monochromatic Wes in The Gray Area. This is a real photo - no digital trickery involved! Photo by Jason Colflesh.

Friday 9/9 through Sunday 9/11
What: The Gray Area, an original Fringe play produced by Gina!
Details: 8pm F/S & 3pm S/S, $15, The Rotunda, 4014 Walnut, Philly
Why? Ocelot on a Leash presents a second run of their original Fringe production Gray Area, featuring short Twilight Zone inspired plays produced completely in monochrome.

Wednesday 9/7 through Sunday 9/11
What: Checkers, an original one-man Fringe show
Details: various times, $15, The Fleisher Art Memorial Sanctuary, 719 Catharine Street, Philly
Why? A peculiar one-man show that liberates a single moony romantic from his original absurdist play to start in his own farce. See my write-up from last week for the fuller details.

Monday 9/12 through Friday 9/16
What: Water Bears in Space
Details: 7pm, $10, Circle of Hope, Broad & Washington, 1125 South Broad Street, Philly
Why? You know how you sometimes miss a show and then hear such ridiculously over-the-top fantastic things about it that you wish you could be Cher and turn back time? For me, that show was Rails, a collaboratively created show from PuppeTyranny featuring half a cast of humans and half of puppets. The company and concept are back for Water Bears in Space, along with outstanding reviews and the absolutely magnetic local starlet Kate Black-Reagan, who I guarantee you will fall in love with immediately. Don’t miss this – I definitely won’t!

Tuesday, 9/13
What: Notorious F.O.L.K.
Details: 8-11p, FREE, Triumph Brewery, 117 Chestnut , Philly
Why? Enjoy the beers at my favorite Philly micro-brewery while an impressive array of Philly acoustic artists cover Notorious B.I.G. songs, folkstyle. Seriously.

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That’s my lineup for the next week, and if I have to miss more than one I will spend all subsequent nights crying myself to sleep. What are your hot picks for things to do in the City of Brotherly love in the next nine days?

Critical or Contrary?

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Critical or contrary – which one are you? More importantly, can anyone else tell the difference?

The topic is on my mind thanks to something Gina said to me a few weeks ago. E and I were chatting with Gina after the last show of her Fringe Fest play. We joked about different narrative structures – ways her play of three connected one-acts could be turned backwards or inside out to get a different reaction.

(I know, nerds, right?)

At some point this phrase emerged from my lips:

That would be very Nolan-esque – like Inception, only without being awful.

Now, I don’t want to get into Inception drama – we’re all entitled to an opinion. I typically love Nolan, but what’s relevant here is people who liked Inception outnumber the dislikers nine to one and I’m in the “dislike” camp.

That’s where Gina’s response comes in. She whipped her head over to me and said,

Oh, Peter, you’re just contrary.

After years of having buck teeth and big ears, very few insults get under my skin, but this one cut deep.

I protested, “I’m not contrary! I’m just critical. I like plenty of things other people like. Twitter! Dark Knight! Lady Gaga!”

Despite my protests, Gina stuck to her label. To her, I’m contrary – I frequently dislike things enjoyed by a majority.

I don’t see that as contrary – just critical. If my reasoned response is to dissent on a musician or a movie while 90% of the world loves it, that’s part of my critical barometer. If you don’t like Inception either, maybe you’ll agree with some of my other opinions. Whole recommendation engines have been built on this idea, like Netflix and Hunch.

Disagreeing just means I’m critical, not contrary. Right? If we all agreed all of the time, what would be the point of art?

Let’s return to my opening query: critical or contrary – which one are you?

The answer is probably both. It depends on the perspective.

Like the proverbial stopped clock, any committed critic is going to come off contrary sometimes, just like a dedicated contrarian can still hit the critical mark on occasion.

Your challenge is that people listen to critics and ignore what’s contrary. When you’re the odd one out as a critic you still have to frame your opinion in a way that can engage and inspire your audience – even if that’s just your best friend.

Which one am I? In my head I’m a critic, and when it comes to music almost everyone  I know trusts me to be one – because I offer reasoned opinions about everything from Gaga to Rodrigo and Gabriella. With movies, if I only take the time to dish on popular films I dislike (which are numerous) clearly I’m coming out all wrong. If I want my disappointment in Inception to be taken seriously maybe I need to dial up my enthusiasm about movies slipping past other people’s radars.

What about you?

rodrigo and gabriella.

Doppelgangers

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Tonight we saw Elise’s brother depict Orsino in his high school’s performance of Twelfth Night.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to recap high school theatre at length for you. At least, not just yet. First, I have to tell you about my doppelganger.

Basically, there is a kid that is friends with E’s brother, and he looks and talks and moves just like me. He’s even inappropriately loud at all the wrong moments, just like I was (but am not as much anymore).

Every possible person has commented about it. E’s mom thinks we look alike. Someone else in the show saw me in the audience and thought he/I had snuck out from backstage.

It’s uncanny. I didn’t have the curly hair back then, he has a better nose, and I don’t think he is under the impression that he is David Bowie, but otherwise he is a relative spitting image of me.

It’s a little unsettling, if only because E’s brother reminds me of me enough to begin with (mostly intellectually, and in wishful thinking, because I wished I was him when I was in high school), but then to have another person remind me of me, and to have the two of them be buds and gallivanting around on-stage, is kind of mind-collapsing.

Also, Twelfth Night itself is a play of doppelgangers and doubles. It’s possibly my favorite Shakespeare comedy because it moves briskly and doesn’t require much suspension of belief. The troupe did it in the style of commedia dell’arte, which meant they all played as archetypal models, and nearly all wore elaborate masks. They also played a collection of found and real instruments, and did some offstage singing to score the scenes.

We did a commedia-style show my freshman year – the brilliant A Company of Wayward Saints – and it was also great. There’s something about the reductiveness of the archetypes that makes it easy to bring amazing scenes to life – like it’s easier to just sink into the character without thinking too much about it.

We also did the found-music thing in Bretch’s Good Woman of Setzuan, a process well-documented in the annals of the blog.

Basically, bro just did my two most technically challenging collegiate shows wrapped up along with Shakespeare AS A HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT, and knocked it out of the park. As did my doppelganger, and all of their castmates.

They’re pretty cool.

Daily Demo: Crashing

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Song #77: Crashing (live demo) [“Save As” to download from that link]
Last recorded for Blogathon 2002.

10 years ago this weekend I went to my first college party, still very much a purposefully-naive, dewy-eyed teen.

I came home having had my first vodka cranberry and my first inklings of adult romance, drifting to sleep wrapped in the blissful denouement of each.

The following Monday morning was a decidedly dreary day, and I found myself locked out my dorm room in my pajamas. Instead of heading to French 103 I sat down in our common room – five stories from the ground with a two-story windowed wall staring out into Center City Philadelphia.

I pulled out a pad and wrote “Crashing.”

Later that day, having been let back into my room, I recorded its first rough demo and transferred the lyrics to the first page of the crisp new book I bought for my collegiate songs. Up until then I wasn’t sure how I would know it was time to start using it, but I suddenly did.

“Crashing” made frequent appearances at parties and late night hangouts throughout my Freshmen year, resulting in the first complements on my voice I had ever heard. They came as a great shock to me, as they still do. Later that autumn I recorded it for my first full length demo, Other Plans – shakily, in the middle of the night, trying not to wake up my mother in the process.

As a dreary fall turned to winter I moved on to add other songs to my slim gray book – many of which I still play to this day. Yet, it was “Crashing” I would play between classes as I sat at the dinged, old upright piano in the theatre green room. I would hypnotize myself with the rolling two chord verse, learning how to play piano in increments (and maybe a little bit about what the song really meant, as well).

It took the entire intervening decade to learn how to play piano well enough to demo it that way, and it seems apropos that it wound up recorded just as shakily and late as its original demos were, respectively.

Good blogs and the opinions I spouted at them.

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This post could easily be about how I spent the last two weekends sweating my physical and intellectual butt off to completely reorganize my home office and upgrade CK to WordPress 2.8, but you would be like, “Whatever, it looks the same to me,” or “Um, I’m reading you on my RSS feed, so I don’t really care,” or possibly, “Dude, I haven’t read blogs for two years. Send me a tweet about it.”

Which is fine. I mean, should I also tell you about how I swept the floor? Backstage is backstage for a reason. Props people work hard to keep actors focused on their performance, not for the applause.

(Plus, at CK I’m the prop person and the actor. And the box office manager, the technical director, and the old lady ushering you to your seat. You get the idea. Excelsior…)

In my increasingly uncluttered life I’ve been trying to make some more time not only to read other blogs I admire, but to interact with them. That means reading carefully and responding, which sometimes yields thoughtful comments.

I’m sometimes hesitant to leave my thoughts lying around in other people’s homes when they could possibly lead to interesting content back here at my own homestead, but I’ve arrived at a happy medium – I’ll link to all of said intriguing posts as well as giving you a snippet of my reasoned replies.

Here’s a glimpse at some of the discussions I’ve weighed in on in this past week.

(If you find yourself wanting to do the same, try subscribing to Backtype, a simple monitoring service which will doing all of the the keeping-track for you.) [Read more…] about Good blogs and the opinions I spouted at them.