Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

erika

35-for-35: 1999 – “Center of Attention” by Guster

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[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]lost-and-gone-forever-gusterLindsay, Erika, and I formed an only-child club together in 2001, but its origins were in 1999 and 2000.

That’s when five of the more senior members of The Drexel Players – Erika, Kate, Laurel, Megan, and Anthony – all shared the top two floors of an old row home at 3418 Race Street. For all of us Freshman, it’s where we decamped after every informational meeting, audition, and rehearsal. It’s where I met so many of the friends I still hold dear today, and where I met my entire wedding party (aside from Gina, who still factors into this tale).

There were certain records that never left the CD spinner in that house, such that their songs have become synonymous with one or more of those people for me. (Yes, CD spinner, though we were into into the heyday of Napster at this point.). Some of the records were the stereotypical white college kid things you’d expect – Dave Matthews was a frequent play, especially his Live at Luther College with Tim Reynolds.

Perhaps influenced by that choice, there was also Guster’s Lost and Gone Forever, produced by longtime DMB collaborator Steve Lillywhite.

Sometimes when I hear an album for the first time it seems so melodically obvious that I cannot believe I haven’t heard it before. Other times an album is so perfect that I consider every song a slice of 5-star perfection and can listen to it endlessly.

Lost and Gone Forever is both.

There aren’t a lot of catchy, pop-oriented bands that break through mostly on the power of acoustic guitars and harmony, which is the trick Guster somehow pulls on songs like “Center of Attention.” The amount and intricacy of Ryan Miller and Adam Gardner’s harmony is really quite incredible. It hardly ever sticks to the straight thirds most bands plaster their songs with. At points they’re what I’d call the nearest male analog to The Indigo Girls.

“Center of Attention” doesn’t really use any chords. Listen carefully in the first verse as it reaches the “walls inside my head” prechorus. It’s just a pair of riffs churning against each other to imply tonality. It’s also a perfect example of how Guster eschews the typical rhythm section of drums and bass, with most songs rooted by a baritone-range guitar figure and drummer Brian Rosenworcel pounding on all manner of congos, bongos, and even typewriters.

Guster promo flat

That doesn’t sound like it should make for great, catchy pop music and honestly it didn’t on Guster’s first two records. However, the combination of Steve Lillywhite as a producer and this remarkable set of songs created a whole that you could have never predicted by looking at the parts.

Lost and Gone Forever is an amazing record about the changing nature of friendship and platonic love, about selfishness and getting over yourself, and you can sing along to every song on it.

One of us won’t last the night
Between you and me it’s no surprise
There’s two of us, both can’t be right
Neither will move till it’s over

I’m the center of attention
and the wall’s inside my head
And no one will ever know it
if I keep my mouth shut tight

The that motley crew of Drexel Players I met Freshman year shifted in 2000-2001 as I started this blog. Three members of the house moved away, which is how at one point Lindsay came to be renting Laurel’s back bedroom, and I came to be sitting around in the middle of the day with her and Erika watching game shows.

Just as there aren’t many memorable acoustic pop bands like Guster, there aren’t a lot of great, catchy songs about the mental defenses you construct as a clever only-child. “Center of Attention” is, without a doubt, the only-child’s anthem in that regard. I’d say, “maybe that’s just me,” but Lindsay and Erika have proven that it’s not. You’re not only your own protagonist, as every child is, but all of your adventures are entirely contained in the gossamer bubble of your brain.

Somehow (and I honestly still can’t quite explain it, even with copious posts from the time to aid my memory), the three of us wound up renting a house together in the fall of 2001. Three only children, each as selfish and stubborn as the other, all holed up in the top two floors of our own apartment on 44th street (where we’d later be joined by a fourth only-child (sort of), Gina)).

My own little world is what I deserve
Cause I am the only child there is
I’m king of it all, the belle of the ball
I promise I’ve always been like this
Forever the first, my bubble can’t burst
It’s almost like only I exist
Where everything’s fine
If I can keep my mouth shut tight, tight, tight

I think the reason we found each other and became (and remained) so close is because we’d each tried to outlast each other through the night and failed. Once that defense is finally knocked down, you’ve found someone with whom who you don’t always have to keep your mouth shut so tight.

persistence

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lindsay, erika, and peter 2015 crop)“It’s Miss Lindsay!”

EV yells this at me almost every time she catches me browsing Facebook, and it always surprises me. No, it’s not because Lindsay is omnipresent in my feed – she’s too busy parenting and adventuring for that! It’s because of my profile photo. Not the postage-stamp sized square on my profile page, mind you, but the teeny 20ish pixel persistant image in the header to reminder you that you are surfing as you.

Mine is a photo of Lindsay, Erika, and I (with EV just off-camera, dangling from my arm) standing in a lake in New Jersey during a rare roommate reunion day over a month ago on a very sunny Friday – one of the rare days in over two years where I have done zero start-up-ing for an entire waking period.

(Alright, that’s a wee lie, I did check my email for 15 minutes in a parked care while EV dozed in the back seat, but that’s practically nothing.)

It’s not surprising that EV could recognize the picture in its minuscule size. That’s just recognizing a pattern of an image – even easier than recognizing the actual faces. She is good at playing the game Memory even though she doesn’t know what all the cards are.

The thing that’s surprising is that EV recognizes it and instead of just saying it’s a picture of me (which she does with frequency) she remembers Miss Lindsay, who she has met just three times in her life. She remembers lots of things about Lindsay. Her daughter’s name, her doggie, and how we picked blueberries and then went swimming.

Our outing with Lindsay and Erika was the first time I witnessed EV have a specific, persistent sense of time and recall. As we approached the date she understood we would see Lindsay and Erika tomorrow, and then she remembered we saw Lindsay and Erika yesterday. But then she kept remembering it, mentioning it, telling stories about it, and asking about when we’ll do it again.

Today on a walk with a co-worker I was relating this story and I realized that Lindsay sticks out so specifically to EV not because she’s so awesome (EV will learn that in due time), but because our day together was memorable. In fact, I’m now sure it is among her first persistent memories. Yes, she recalls trips to the market, times down the slide, lyrics to songs, and hugging her aunt Jenny, but none of those refer to a specific incident that she recalls with detail.

That’s amazing.

The other night she turned to me solemnly after dinner and said, “Take a picture, send it to Miss Lindsay.” We had an impromptu photo shoot and sent Lindsay the results, to which she texted back, “I love her!” I feel like every parent talks about creating memories for their children – heck, Disney’s entire marketing machine relies on it – but here I did it unintentionally just by spending the day with my daughter and two of the people I love the most in the world.

Happy Birthday To This

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I. The 27-Club.

Last September I turned 27.

It made me nervous.

Being a major music fan and devout lifetime subscriber to Rolling Stone, I am all too aware of the so-called “27 Club” – a musical super-group headlined by Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, Jimi, Janis, Jim, and Kurt, all of whom met their untimely ends at age 27.

My nervousness wasn’t an actual, rational fear. Just a fringe anxiety, like my utter terror at putting my hand anywhere near the blade of a food processor, even if it’s disconnected from its power source. A mere superstition. Anyway, my musical acumen certainly isn’t at risk of rivaling any of theirs, nor is my level of excess. –> Still, it hung there. The 27 hurdle. A year it would be a challenge to survive.

In the months after my birthday the challenge of surviving gave way to the challenge of getting from one day to the next. Planning a wedding and a honeymoon. Making music solo and with Arcati Crisis. Organizing benefit concerts for four separate charities, all while holding a senior position at work.–> Honestly, I was so preoccupied with life that the whole 27 Club concept didn’t reoccur to me until I was getting ready to jump out of an airplane last month. And, since that failed to kill me, I assumed I was in the clear with regard to the whole untimely end angle.

I continued thinking that until the past few days, when I began re-reading my entries from the past year in anticipation of the ninth anniversary of Crushing Krisis.

It was then I realized that it happened. I died.

If that sounds like hyperbole, it’s meant to be, but only a little bit. Truly, the past year of my life was so vastly different than any that came before that it was hardly lived by the same person.

If that sounds like hyperbole, it’s not. One of the benefits of your blog celebrating it’s ninth birthday is having the ability to make frequent, sweeping, and entirely-accurate generalizations about the state of your life.

In fact, that’s my favorite thing to do on August 26, the birthday of Crushing Krisis.

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II. Running Long.

I first floated the assumption that I was the longest running blog in Philadelphia six years ago today, and I verified it last November (with a footnote).

Having finally taken the time to vet my claim to blog-fame, I began to talk about it. At first it was clumsy to get it off my tongue, but slowly I improved from, “Oh, um, I have a blog that’s been around. For a while. Really long, actually,” to “I write the longest-running blog in Philadelphia.”

Even though I now say it with ease, it still has not stopped sounding strange. As I discovered this year, Philly is a pretty plugged-in town. Bloggers, podcasters, twitterers – the city is swimming with them. To be all three, and to be the one collectively doing it all the longest, stopped seeming like a passive achievement (like, “I lost my last baby tooth!”) and more like an active one (more like, “I pulled out my last baby tooth with my bare hands, because that little fucker was annoying me!”)

–>In truth, it took a lot of effort to get through nine seasons of Crushing Krisis. I had to learn stuff that normal people apparently don’t know how to do based on their day-to-day lives, like being able to offer pros and cons for all of the major blog CMS platforms from present back to 1999, or revising PHP arguments on the fly to get the results I want. Similarly, I know all sorts of silly details about audio production that make even my eyes cross.

I didn’t mean to get this way. Honest. It just happens when you write the longest-running blog in Philadelphia, which is also the longest-running platform for a singer-songwriter to podcast and embed his or her work.

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III. Greatest Hits, The Expanded Edition

A year ago today I wrote that I felt “as though the vast majority of my personal greatest hits record is contained in the last year of my life.”

I’m happy to report that the hits have continued – in both life and song. Significantly, I crossed off two of my biggest goals in life – seeing the Nike of Samothrace in person at the Louvre in Paris, and jumping out of a plane.

The greatest hits of my year weren’t limited to those two events. Hardly.

I planned a wedding and a honeymoon, an all-encompassing circus that stayed relatively fun right through the end, just as I predicted and insisted it would. I recapped dress shopping with my groom’s party in two parts, the first of which hilariously features my near-ejection from David’s Bridal. I recorded a song that would become so synonymous with our wedding that its lyrics wound up in the fortune cookies at my bachelor party

Then there was the actually bit where I got married. Subsequently, I reported our honeymoon adventures in words and photos.

The novelty has not worn off.

I made music both solo and as Arcati Crisis. As AC, Gina and I headlined a show and then co-hosted an open mic for over half a year, in the midst of which we recorded a Live @ Rehearsal record so definitive that it approaches being a studio album (download it free!). But, some of the most fun we had was while driving and breaking traffic laws.

Meanwhile, I realized I had an entire album of new solo repertoire waiting to be played, and I began to get out to perform it more than ever before – particularly Small & Lonely, Saving Grace, Tattooed, and sometimes Gone Baby Gone. Confidently. I even captured me on video, for once.

(Also of note, Elise now fronts her own band, putting me in the position of band-aid that she has occupied faithfully for so many years.)

I planned four benefit concerts for four separate charities – Lyndzapalooza’s Back Yard Music Fest, my own first ever live web broadcast as part of my support for Danny Brown‘s #12for12k, and a pair of impending shows for #blamedrewscancer and at work for the United Way.

Speaking of, work bled into my digital life more this year than ever before. I had the good fortune to join a project with one Ms. Britt Miller, who cajoled me into joining twitter, which in turn lead me to meet like-minded folks at Social Media Club and Tweetup events.

In turn, that resulted in my winding up a part #blamedrewscancer, for which my personal and collaborative efforts have contributed to almost $10k raised in less than 100 days!

Oh, and I jumped out of a plane. Did I mention the jumping out of a plane?

And, as usual, I did a lot more that was hard to categorize. I realized that I’ve been planning events for about two years straight. I shared personal reflections, from the election of a new president to watching my neighbor freebase cocaine at his kitchen table. I visited Erika and her fiance in Boston for a madcap adventure that wound up with us giving each other drunken facials during the Emmys. I tossed off a cover of “Dress You Up” in a single take. I wrote a social media essay on “Network Agnosticism.” I discovered that I’m living in my own teenage superhero novel. Someone even told me I’m not mean enough, which isn’t something I hear too often.

If it seems like an impossible amount of things to do in just one year, well, it is. At points it turned my life into a sort of a joke, whether that be slapstick or black comedy, as I juggled all of those responsibilities. And, amazingly, they lead me to be genuinely happy more times than not.

I flashed back on a younger me, and how I can relive his depressions through my blog (https://www.crushingkrisis.com/?p=3411 ) just like Sebastian gets sucked into the world of the Never Ending Story https://www.crushingkrisis.com/?p=3412) I began to think of my family as Asian, even before the wedding ( https://www.crushingkrisis.com/?p=3364 ).

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IV. The Year of the Phoenix.

I have a different opinion on the 27 Club now than I did on my birthday.

Twenty-seven isn’t a litmus test. It’s a proof of concept. It’s a year that that the self-realization bell curve reaches its pinnacle, where the majority of people begin to realize that the path they’ve taken can lead into a tangible future.

I can understand how that could lead you to your end, intentional or not. It leads to excess and over-extension, and to fear and doubt. You can wind up as a phoenix just as easily as you can wind up ground down to ash.

For all the successes of the past year, it contained many challenges for me too. I died a lot of deaths. In the case of my wedding, it was a rebirth as something greater. In other instances, it was just the end.

It was also the year I started shaving with an electric razor. If that’s not a major beginning I don’t know what else could qualify.

For the first time in years I am writing my anniversary post less enamored with the year that passed, and more enamored with the year to come. I seem to have finally escaped the fear that my best work is behind me instead of beyond me, farther down the vector of my life.

That is a death – finally ending my obsession with re-assessing my past in favor of a future view.

Thank you for helping that come to fruition.

Thank you Elise, for transforming my life into something real. Thank you Gina, for following this line with me, a vector connected to our destination.

Thank you Lyndzapalooza, for forcing me to innovate excel as a communicator and as a musician. Thank you Britt, Drew, and everyone else at #blamedrewscancer, for not only testing my limits, but forcing me to reconsider them altogether.

Thank you, on the other side of this screen, for reading my adventures, and for caring if and when the next installment might turn up. Thank you for watching me die 3,528 tiny deaths – once for every click of the “POST” button, and thank you for waiting for me to come back to life with every subsequent visit to this little white box.

Thank you for having the patience to watch and wait for me to finally take myself as seriously as you’ve always taken me, as a professional, a songwriter, and a blogger.

Thank you. And, happy birthday to this.

here goes…

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Okay, here’s my last post as a bachelor.

Bride aside, I am surrounded by the five most awesome people in my life, and they are in rare, rare form. Ross bottled my special wedding lambic in blue bottles labeled with me! I’m on my bottles.

I don’t think life could be any better than it is at the moment.

See you on the other side.

Hitching: Groom Team Style, pt. 2

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When we last left our intrepid nuptial heroes we were all slinking out of David’s Bridal hoping that they wouldn’t call the cops on me.

Okay, not really. But, if we had stayed much longer I’m sure my photo would have wound up behind the register along with the people who write bad checks.

Lindsay, Matador from rear Though our negative experience soured me on the idea of big box bridal stores, Lindsay and I did come away with an idea of what my groom’s-ladies would wear. We decided on a combination of platinum and black, which meant we’d most likely need separates – lest we be left to the haphazard whim of multi-color one-pieces.

We also needed the ladies on Team Groom to look more groomy than maidsy, so we decided to add a matador jacket to make them more tux-like.

Thus began The Great Matador-Hunt of 2008. Because, you see, outside of the fairy-tale world of David’s Bridal matador jackets for women are apparently a fictional concept. We searched and searched, and turned up a scant one or two, neither appropriate for our purposes.

Jenny?In the midst of our jacket-search we settled (ironically) on something we tried at David’s: a strapless, lightly paneled princess top paired with a simple trumpet skirt. After some deliberation we decided that the skirt would be black to better mirror the gentlemen in their tuxes, while the top would be platinum.

At this point Lindsay, Gina, and Erika commandeered the good ship Groom from my control. They found a collection that carried what we were seeking in multiple styles, and each of them tagged their favorites. We discussed them at length for a week, engaged in several virtual straw polls to determine our favorites, and then Lindsay and Erika did a preliminary shopping trip in Boston.

Suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, Gina was picking me up early on a Saturday morning in August to bring me to a tiny bridal boutique in Havertown called Lizelle’s.

IMG_4035(It should be pointed out here that Gina has graciously served as the official Team Groom chauffeur for each outing, which has lead to extra hilarity in each instance, even though she has yet to wear a cap and a mustache as my godmother did for my mother’s wedding this past June.)

My boutique experience could not have been more different than our previous nightmare.

First, the entire shop was about as big as David’s reception area, but it contained approximately ten times the attractive dresses – no 90s promwear in sight. Second, Bruna – a pretty, diminutive woman with a European accent – had opened early just for us, and pulled out every iteration of the styles we were interested in. Third, I was allowed close to and, in one instance, inside of the dressing rooms.

Last, and most important to me, Bruna crossed out “Bride” on her info sheet and wrote in “Groom.” She didn’t even write down Elise’s name.

By that point a second customer had arrived, alone. I sat down across from her while Bruna fussed over Lindsay with a tailor’s measure.

Cheery Customer: You’re the groom?

Me: Yes.

Cheery: And you came with them to shop?

Me: Well, we did most of it together online. We just came here for the grand finale.

Cheery: (Clearly a little awed). That’s awesome. I had to drive by myself all the way from New York to get here!

A mere twenty minutes after our arrival I was pacing back and forth in the alley next to the store, calling Elise on her cell and at home on multiple cell phones, juggling them to try to find one with reception. Eventually we connected and I had her take one last look at our favorite style on the web.

Elise’s approval confirmed, I headed back into the store waving my platinum card. “We’re a go! I repeat, we’re a go on dresses!”

Bruna, not understanding the international signal for “charge me!” asked Lindsay and Gina to present their credit cards.

Me: No, Bruna, I’m paying.

Bruna: For vat?

Me: The dresses.

Bruna: All of them?

Me: Of course.

(As an aside, I find it fascinating that bridesmaids and groomsmen are typically expected to pick up the majority of their expenses. I know not everyone is in the financial situation to pay for their party’s clothing, but at the point that you have a group of people doing so much research, legwork, and chauffeuring for you it seems only fair to comp their costs as much as possible rather than rewarding them with some inane gift like a monogrammed hip flask.

And, seriously, I have the best, smartest, most-resourceful Groom Team of all time. If wasn’t so busy planning a wedding I’d have them whip up a World Tour or a grassroots political movement for me. I’m lucky they don’t charge an hourly fee. Buying them clothing and accessories is the least I can do.)

Bruna waved me away as she got started on the transaction, and I sat down again across from the cheery customer, who was paging through a sample book.

Cheery: Are you really buying their dresses?

Me: Of course. They’ve done so much for me! It shouldn’t cost them money to be in my wedding.

Cheery: Wow. You are really unique.

Greek Chorus, AKA Gina & Lindsay: You have no idea.

Me: I figure they’ll have to buy their own shoes, and who knows what we’ll do for jewelry…

Cheery: Oh! I can help you with that. I have my own jewelry business. You should call me; I’d even give you a discount since you’re paying for their dresses!

Beautiful dresses and good karma, all in one morning.