Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

gina

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

35-for-35: 2003 – “Locked Box” by Frankie Big Face

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artist_frankie_big_face_image[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]I can almost guarantee you’ve never heard this song before.

In 2003 Gina moved into our 44th street apartment and I was armed with my first set of serious recording gear. We were both writing a lot of new songs, many of which remain in our Arcati Crisis repertoire until this day.

I had stumbled upon a website called SongFight, which called out a random name for a tune into the void each week and then presented all of the songs written for it the next. (This is still happening today, by the way.) A few weeks after Gina came by to sing my first attempt at fighting, “Goodbye Monster,” she walked into my room, sat down, and played me “Moscow, Idaho” for the first time.

We didn’t win that SongFight, but I still think it’s one of the best songs ever written.

But, this isn’t about Gina. You see, through discovering SongFight, I discovered a massive online community of indie songwriters just like me – people who weren’t necessarily gigging out in bars and clubs, but who were holed up in their rooms recording each song they wrote – sometimes entire albums at a time.

I had found my people. And one of them, Frankie Big Face, was one of the best songwriters I’d every heard in my life.

This man could take any inane song title and tell you a story with it, breaking your heart a little along the way. With a voice like a hoarse David Bowie and songs that ranked from plaintive folk to Van Morrison 60s songwriter to synth pop, I was in awe of him. And he was just a regular guy – a high school music teacher and band director who lived within a hundred miles of me!

I loved (and still love) many Frankie Big Face songs, but none so much as “Locked Box,” which is like the secret best song Squeeze ever wrote but never recorded. It’s a song about a girl who is going through the motions while trapped in her own anxieties and it is catchy as hell. You’ve been warned.

The song comes with an awesome story. A handful of the most prominent and prolific SongFighters decided to have an album fight – an entire full length comprised of pre-determined song names, of which “Locked Box” was one. Frankie’s version of Smile If You Absolutely Have To is available to stream on Amazon or directly from his website (where he also provides the lyrics and lead sheets for all of his tunes). In fact, you can download “Locked Box” for free right now. Here’s another of my favorites, “Funny Enough For You.”

There is so much Frankie Big Face music out there for you to hear – he’s been writing at a pace much faster than mine for the dozen years since I discovered him, and recording exponentially more than I do. Honestly, I have about 10 years of his stuff to catch up on and am presently in a downloading frenzy to get it all into my iTunes.

Here’s his website’s discography. You can also check out his SoundCloud for more, including his interpretation of Beck’s Song Reader.

35-for-35: 1995 – “Lump” by Presidents of the United States of America

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[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]Strap in for a story, folks. In fact, both songs today come with lengthy stories, but that makes sense – we’re really into my formative years at this point.

This isn’t necessarily my favorite song from 1995, but sometimes art reflects life, and when it comes to the songs of 1995 this is the one I wound up with all those years ago.

presidents-of-the-united-states-lumpMy burgeoning rock fandom really exploded in my Freshman year of high school as Gina and my loose cadre of middle school nerds coalesced into a group of rocking teenagers. Though I had the claim to fame of having seen Madonna as my first rock concert, I was growing jealous of our peers and their live music escapades.

I remember seeing Gina in her first play at Masterman sitting behind an entire row of kids from our class who had just been to an Offspring concert – the height of cool.

After what I’m sure was some amount of campaigning to my mother, she lamented and for my birthday purchased me a pair of concert tickets (one for me and one for Gina, of course – we weren’t quite inseparable yet, but quite a music-loving pair). Since my prohibitive favorite LP of 1995 was Garbage, my new favorite band, and since Garbage would be in Philly playing one block from Gina’s house, obviously that would be my mother’s selection.

Right?

Well, apparently I sang “Lump” at the top of my lungs out the car window one too many times, because the tickets were to see Presidents of the United States of America one night before Garbage.

I begged. I pleaded. I would find someone to buy the PUSA tickets. I would pay for the Garbage tickets, too! Please, for the love of Bowie, would she relent and let me see Garbage.

The Mother of Krisis was unyielding. She had done me a solid and not only granted me permission to go to a concert but bought the darn tickets and there were no takesies backsies going to happen. I would go and see “Lump” and like it.

(Let it be known that Mother of Krisis has never lived this down and still is reminded at least annually (plus whenever Garbage releases an album or I see them live, again) that it was her biggest parenting mistake of all time.)

(Which, credit where due, if this is your parent’s worst mistake of all time they are probably a slightly better than average parent, at minimum.)

the-presidents-of-the-united-states-of-america-4fd31761f15c2I might have looked that gift horse in the mouth when offered the tickets, but when it came to the show – my first rock show – I was fully committed. We were in line early and in the second row of bodies from the stage. Gina and I still talk about the insane opening act, Supernova, and their gum-chewing, pogoing set that included the ridiculous tune “Chewbacca,” which we can still shout at you on command.

The Presidents were great. Honestly, as first rock shows go, you couldn’t do much better. It was a group of young, energetic dudes who played their instruments well and wrote inane songs about kitties and peaches – yes, another early influence on our totally weirdball songwriting.

As for “Lump” – what is she? A dead body? A stupid girl? A Gen Xer sleeping her way through life in more ways than one unless there’s an awesome band on stage? I tend to subscribe to that last one – Lump as a metaphor for someone stuck in the mud of life, circled by piranhas of bad decisions.

(“Totally emotionless except for her heart,” is the right answer, by the way.)

35-for-35: 1987 – “Where The Streets Have No Name” by U2

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[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]On September 24th. I found myself on stage in front of thousands of people, guitar held aloft beside my head, thrashing The Edge’s signature two-bar riff from the chorus of “Where The Streets Have No Name” while silently screaming with happiness.

As impressive and stadium-filling as many of U2’s epic early anthems are, when you break them down at the musical level you find that there’s very little there. Like, practically nothing. This song is pretty much a eighth-note bassline entirely of roots and a handful of chiming mid-neck electric guitar notes with a delay. Bono and Larry Mullen, Jr. do all the heavy lifting, and it’s not even all that heavy.

That’s fascinating to me, because I think this song sounds nothing less than majestic.

I discovered the simple bones beneath this epic song this summer as we prepared to play the first day finish line of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society’s City to Shore bike ride. My cover band Smash Fantastic had been invited back to play after missing 2015 due to a hurricane that never really came.

where-the-streets-have-no-nameWe had one problem – our lead singer, Ashley, would be at the happiest place on Earth during the show. She had even though about our charity gig while booking her Disney vacation, but was working from the later date of the previous year’s race.

Playing for the MS even is a cause that’s meaningful to me on several levels, so I didn’t want to pass up the chance to play and had Ashley’s blessing to perform without her. Yet, we couldn’t do that without a rocking female lead singer.  Jake and I both sing lead on a significant portion of Smash Fantastic songs, they weren’t enough to fill a two hour gig – and, even if they were, they’d leave out tons of our most-popular tunes.

Enter by BFF and long-time collaborator, Gina. We had done covers on many occasions as Arcati Crisis, including once as a wedding band. Plus, Gina is a karaoke veteran who occasionally fronted a rock band for holiday dinners at her old job. While she wasn’t going to be tackling any Kelly Clarkson, the Smash classic rock rep is right up her alley.

With Gina’s came the assumption that we’d be learning a U2 song. There’s just something about Bono’s overdramatic delivery and not-quite tenor voice that maps perfectly onto Gina’s voice, but we never had the excuse to exploit that as Arcati Crisis. Gina, Jake, Zina, and I kicked around a few choices, and decided that this would be the most-appropriate to celebrate finishing between 25 and 90 miles of bike riding.

I wanna run, I want to hide
I wanna tear down the walls
That hold me inside.
I wanna reach out
And touch the flame
Where the streets have no name.

the-joshua-tree-u2There was much charting and mapping to get the song set for our first go at rehearsal. It was almost too simple for us to make work – so few notes create the overall tonality that one minor misstep sends the song spinning into something unfamiliar. Yet, once we got past counting issues, those simple pieces snapped together perfectly. Suddenly, we were creating that majestic sound.

We rehearsed it only three more times before the show; there was really nothing else to do other than count.

I wanna feel sunlight on my face.
I see the dust-cloud
Disappear without a trace.
I wanna take shelter
From the poison rain
Where the streets have no name

On stage on a gray, windswept September day we rolled out of the second chorus and into the refrain and I had my guitar held up high beside my head as I kept up the machine-gun strum of The Edge’s riff while mouthing the lyrics along with Gina as a way to choke back my tears.

The city’s a flood, and our love turns to rust.
We’re beaten and blown by the wind
Trampled in dust.
I’ll show you a place
High on a desert plain
Where the streets have no name

We’re still building and burning down love
Burning down love.
And when I go there I go there with you
(It’s all I can do)

For five minutes on September 24th, that majesty belonged to us.

Gina’s Bachelorette Adventure, Pt. 5

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Gina models her Level 1 Veil as Bridal Partier Mikki sprays on her first magical rune.

After months of preparation, the day of Gina’s real life video game bachelorette party adventure had finally arrived!

Actually, it wasn’t the day that arrived, but the day before, which brought with it fellow bridal party member Kelly and her partner Gudrun. They pulled up to my house on a beautiful sunny day to put the finishing touches on Gina’s party.

Kelly brought two suitcases into my house – one with her traveling gear, and one packed with supplies for the party. There were her insane 8-bit pins, special puff-painted hats for the chemistry dance, and more. She had even made a lovely fluffy white veil for Gina to wear at the beginning of the day, when we would lure her into a false sense of complacency that her bridal party would be quite normal and not an insane reality show crossed with The Legend of Zelda.

As Kelly finished unpacking, two curious items emerged from her suitcase. One was a headband with a lightning bolt affixed to it. The other was a yet-to-be-assembled hat bearing two feathered wings.

“I know we talked about making Gina wear silly things,” Kelly confessed, “and I started thinking about all the power-ups Mario collects. I thought we could give her these to replace the veil.”

I nodded, gears spinning inside of my brain.

“Kelly…”

I’m not sure that Kelly knows me well enough to see the crazy emerging in my eyes when I come up with a complicated new idea to make something harder, but I think E spotted it from across the room.

“…you know how Gina has to defeat a “boss encounter” at the end of every stage in the city?”

“Yes.”

“Well, what if when she defeats the challenge she wins a new hat… a new piece of armor… a new piece of SPECIAL BRIDAL ARMOR…”

“Yes!” Kelly exclaimed, making clear the special brand of insanity she shares with both Gina and I, “and she’ll get special powers! The hat with wings will give her flight!”

I wield the exceptionally large Game Master version of the instruction book to explain the final encounter of the first stage of Gina’s Adventure.

“Yes! … Except, how exactly do we make Gina fly?”

“I have no idea.”

“Yeah, me neither. Well, do you at least have enough ridiculous pieces of armor for every stage?”

Kelly inventoried her items. The fluffy veil. The winged hat. The lightning bolt headband. A labcoat, to be bedazzled.

“We’re only short one,” Kelly reported, “plus I want to make her a sort of punk rock veil to wear at the end of the day.”

Both of our gears now spinning, we headed out to take Gudrun on a tour of suburban shopping meccas in order to gather the final elements of the adventure: tulle for a punk veil, a massive roll of paper to construct banners, and one more piece of bridal armor. Oh, and beer.

When we found a purple tulle and tiny black flowers for the punk veil plus a fuzzy rainbow boa at Joanne Fabrics it all clicked in my head. When we returned to the house I left Kelly downstairs to craft and ran up to my office to draft the instruction booklet… [Read more…] about Gina’s Bachelorette Adventure, Pt. 5