Crushing Krisis

The Newest Oldest Blog In New Zealand

memories

free license & drunken birds

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New Zealand is so nice that they gave me a driver’s license just because I asked for one.

It’s probably for the best that they don’t know how long I waited to get my license back in Pennsylvania (and that it involved several months of parallel parking practice). With that in mind, just walking into an auto inspection shop to be magically and immediately licensed with just the barest of visual tests seems both ludicrous and like a grave error on the part of my new country.

Let’s be honest: driving is pretty different here. It’s not just the whole left side of the road thing and all the roundabouts. It’s not understanding what the method is behind when there are white lines versus yellow lines versus double lines. It’s not being able to quickly decipher all of the various “watch out for wildlife” semiotic signs. It’s not knowing the procedure of what to do if you are pulled over by the police.

The woman who issued my license was a gem, like a bawdy and hilarious alternate take on Joni Mitchell. I gave my typical cold steel stare to her camera and when she saw the photo she told me, “You already look like you’re angry for being pulled over for whatever you were doing before the officer asked for your license.”

“Oh, I’m not going to get pulled over. I drive like the most cautious grandmother you’ve ever met. The only problem could be that I don’t know what all the road signs mean.”

“Oh really? Should I be worried?”

“Well, I figured out that ‘Give Way’ was about everyone being very polite, which isn’t possible in the States. But I remain very concerned about the ‘Watch for Kereru’ signs. Have you seen those birds? One flew into the side of my house and it was like a bomb went off!”

Let me back up for a moment.

Kereru are like extremely oversized and somewhat adorable wood pigeons. They are the wild turkey of the pigeons family. E spotted one last year when we were looking at houses, and when she pointed it out to me I said, “That whole thing is one bird? Are you sure?”

I am not a doctor of birds like my friend Lori, but my layperson speculation is that the kereru’s brain is maybe not complex enough to account for them being the size that they are and also a bird that is meant to fly through the air.

They carry themselves very proudly in the fashion of a beast that is completely unaware of anything happening in their immediate surroundings. It gives them the distinct look of something that ought to be extinct. You know what I mean – you’ve seen the museum dioramas. If kereru existed anywhere other than an island with virtually no land mammals they would’ve never made it this long. I’ve seen some kereru in action here prior to the one that hit the side of our house, and they have a very dazed and confused quality to them at all times.

Part of that is the public intoxication factor.

You see, kereru get bombed on ripe fruit. I swear, this is a real thing and not some apocryphal Kiwi myth. They gorge themselves on ripe fruit during the summer. Again, they are the size of a roasting bird, so that is a lot of fruit. Then, the kereru doze off in said heat due to said gorging, and the fruit actually ferments in their crop (which is an extra storage compartment in the esophagus, like pockets in a dress). They are living, breathing, self-fermenting bags of wine.

The result: drunken bird bombs who have no idea of their surroundings and do not know which was is up.

It was not especially warm on the day a kereru tried to detonate itself against the side of our house, so I cannot say for sure if it was drunk. I was downstairs in my office doing some sort of comic book thing. Suddenly, I heard what I was sure was some sort of explosive crash. I assumed a delivery truck had come up our drive too quickly and crashed into our house.

I ran upstairs to investigate the damage from above, which is when I noticed a giant, bird-shaped smear on our sliding glass door and an extremely large, extremely confused kereru looked more dazed than usual on the deck below.

From here, allow me to direct you to this primary source account of the drama, as discussed between E and I in our ongoing chat thread: [Read more…] about free license & drunken birds

weak in the knees

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Everyone has their own version of what makes them feel physically fit. For some it’s their weight. For others it’s their abs, or how much they can lift.

For me, it’s always been squatting.

Not “squats,” where I have to crouch down with a fraction of the weight of the world on my shoulders and then power that weight up to the sky as I straight my posture. Those came later.

No. Just good old regular squatting to reach something on the ground.

If I wheeze or grunt while I’m doing it, I am not in shape. That’s my litmus test. That’s what sent me to the gym for the first time back in 2011. I was not quite 30 years old and doing that little old man grunt when I bent over to pick something up.

“Uhnf,” I expel on a little puff of breath as I crouched down, or as I pressed myself back up.

A lot of that “uhnf” came from the knees. I was sure mine had gone bad from years of pounding down Philadelphia’s cracked concrete sidewalks at high speeds in my unforgiving pair of Sketchers boots.

In yoga I could not do “chair pose.” When I ran it felt as though my knees heated up like a paper clip being repeatedly bent. My mother’s knees needed replacement. For me, it was probably just a matter of time.

“Should’ve gone with Doc Martens,” I’d muse. Oh, the folly of youth.

I felt fit at some point in my original gym adventures earlier this decade, which meant my squatting was not bad. No more little puff of complaint at their nadir. My opinion of my knees did not change.

I shared that same opinion with my friend Alison when she coaxed me to start weight training in 2016. Why did I use only half of the weight I needed to use for squats (this time the real sort of squats that required that fraction of the weight of the world)?

The knees, I’d tell her. It’s all in the knees.

It’s now been two years of lifting those weights every week, with a few breaks along the way. I’ve had a lot of little niggling problems in that time – ankles and cramps and my back and a whole litany of other little weaknesses to overcome.

Never the knees.

I realize now that the problem was never my knees. The problem was how I was using them. The only way I used my legs before 2011 were as massive pistons, driving my feet to the ground again and again as I walked four miles at a time. That was the only way they knew how to be strong. Any other kind of leg exercise – from running to yoga to squatting – I’d just rely on my knees to do all the work.

My legs know how to do different things now. I’ve got muscles I never had before, not just those piston pressing thighs. Squatting is fine, with weights or without. When I squat to pick something up I’m using my entire body – my abdominals, my back, my thighs, my calves.

I’ve come a long way from those squats being the delineation of my fitness. They’re not “not bad” now. They feel fine. Good, even. Sometimes I even pretend I am Spider-Man for a moment as I rock back onto my haunches.

How did I get past being weak in the knees? Back in 2016, Alison told me I couldn’t use them as an excuse. “Plenty of people have bad knees and still do modified squats,” she told me. “That’s not a reason to avoid them.”

Yoga teachers had said the same thing to me, but they didn’t know me like Alison did, since sitting on the floor in her dorm room putting together copies of my first demo CD. She met me when I was skin and bones and curly hair, before the singing lessons and the career and my relationship with E.

She knew that I didn’t let minor obstacles stop me from doing what I want, so she made me knees into an obstacle rather than my weakest point. “Just work around them,” she told me, and so I did – and it turned out that working around them was exactly what I needed to do.

I am trying to transport this little lesson about squats and knees into other areas of my life. Sometimes your perceived weakness is about a lack of strength somewhere else. The place where you perceive the symptoms of a problem isn’t always the spot that needs curing. Sometimes your perceived weakness is about a lack of strength somewhere else.

Whether it’s squats or something else, our metrics of success measure more factors than we might realize at first.

Song of the Day: “Video” – Aimee Mann

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Do you have an artist in your collection who snuck up on you as a favorite, although you later realized they’ve been  consistently amazing the entire time you’ve been listening to them?

I have a few, but none so prominent as Aimee Mann.

I can still remember my first listens to her LP I’m With Stupid. In fact, you can too, since they were a topic of one of my earliest blog posts! That places my entire Aimee Mann fandom within the life of Crushing Krisis.

Despite my early obsession with her I’m With Stupid and Bachelor No. 2, I fell off as a listener after that. I can explain exactly why in two words: “Jon Brion.” He’s now a composer of film scores, but back in 2000 he was a vintage-tinged, often-whimsical producer whose trademark sound was completely entwined in Mann’s songwriting on those two discs as well as on Fiona Apple’s When The Pawn (although you might know him better as the producer of Kanye West’s second and third full-lengths).

As much as I enjoyed Mann’s songwriting, I was convinced that it was producer Brion’s sound that made the songs stick to my brain. This was emphasized for me when I picked up Mann’s next LP, Lost In Space. It had a soft mid-section, and without Brion’s production to perk the tunes up I couldn’t really find an anchor in them. I kept buying her albums out of habit, but I would glom onto a song or two via shuffle and would be unaware of the rest.

Luckily, I am not the only consumer of my record collection. I have so much music in my library that E rarely shops for random new tunes; instead, she simply goes spelunking into my archives to try a new artist she’s never heard before. Sometimes this yields artists who I am cool on but she falls in love with, like Imogen Heap.

In the case of Aimee Mann, she had been listening each subsequent LP of hers into the ground while I had been blithely ignoring them, creating her own universe of favorite songs, dissected lyrics, and connected themes.

I had been dimly aware of her interest, but it wasn’t really until we caught wind of Aimee Mann touring last year that E’s love for her bled back into my own consumption. I bought us tickets to see Mann for E’s birthday, and all of a sudden I was exposed to an entirely new portion of her catalog that had been on my iPod for years but that I’d never heard before.

I realized that as much as I loved Jon Brion’s sound, that in some ways it had been obscuring Mann’s songwriting craft. I had been tuning in for the best guitar hooks and totally missing the devastation of her lyrics.

Now E and I have our own merged mythology of Mann, a shared constellation of stellar songs embedded in our universe of love for each other. Even EV6 has gotten in on it, with her own favorites to listen to and sing along to.

For me, this entire process is memorialized in “Video,” from 2005’s Forgotten Arm. It’s a terrific example of Mann writing about depression (as is the entirety of 2017’s Mental Illness), made memorable by its mostly single note melody above a see-sawing two-chord change.

Tell me why I feel so bad, honey
TV’s flat and nothing is funny
I get sad and stuck in a cone of silence

Like a big balloon with nothing for ballast
Labeled like a bottle for Alice
Drink me down or I’ll drown in a sea of giants

Yet, the song is about more than depression. It’s about memories, and how once we create a core memory of something we love we will play it back a thousand times until it becomes just a symbol of that love.

And tell me, “Baby, baby, I love you
It’s non-stop memories of you
It’s like a video of you playing
It’s all loops of seven-hour kisses
Cut with a couple near-misses”

There’s no more perfect a description of music for me than that, both as a consumer and a songwriter. Each song is a capsule of memories and feelings that I can play on a loop, with the song itself eventually replacing those fleeting memories and flimsy feelings, like tree sap turning to amber.

I’ll always have those two Aimee Mann albums I loved on my own, but now I treasure every other song after them, because when I hear those songs they play back videos of E and EV6 across my brain.

she can read (much to my amazement)

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Much to my amazement, our nearly 4-year-old seems to have quite suddenly gotten the hang of reading.

Actual reading. Not just spitting back memorized texted in a simulacrum of reading. I still remember the first time I witnessed that, because it was the day we told all our friends we were pregnant. It was our friend M’s daughter’s third birthday, and she “read” me an entire book from front to back. I was in total shock that she could read so many words and so quickly, until her father pointed out that she had simply memorized the entire thing.

Jumanji Cover

Our copy of Jumanji came with a CD of the audiobook narrated by Robin Williams. I put off playing it for EV6 as long as I could but finally the asking became more constant. I let her follow along with the book on the couch while I cried silently in the kitchen.

EV6 has always been good at memorization. It started one night when she was still impossibly small when she spat back the final page of Nightsong at me during her bedtime reading.

That was just the beginning. Since then I’ve heard this girl recite dozens of her books back at us – including a word-for-word rendition of Jumanji, and that is not a short children’s book.

Her current favorite thing to memorize is comic books, which I suppose must be slightly easier to do since you can focus on dialog balloons as if you are learning the script of a play. She has the entirety of the first 20 issues of Lumberjanes committed to memory. Sometimes she’s got it down after hearing it only two or three times, it’s amazing.

It’s amazing, and it keeps her nose buried in books all day every day, but it’s not reading.

I haven’t been too fussed with pushing reading skills on her while I’ve been staying at home. That’s in part because I learned to read so late, and partly because I feel like America’s school industrial process is overly quick to push advanced reading and math skills on kindergartners who aren’t always developmentally ready for them.

Despite that, I also haven’t ignored the skills. We’re always sounding out the words we encounter during the day and having little spelling bees on the refrigerator. I’s exclusively directed play and that’s fine. She’s three. I don’t expect her to read.

Or, didn’t expect her to read, because that’s what she’s been doing for the last week. [Read more…] about she can read (much to my amazement)

35-for-35: 2016 – “Mountains” by Dirty Holiday

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[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]This is actually a post about the 36th song from 35 years of my life.

I’ve never understood how “Best of the Year” lists can come out in December. There’s a whole extra month of things that might be the best! There’s more year – more context – that hasn’t happened yet!

The lists should come out in January. I blame Christmas. Some might say I have declared a war on it.

I think “Best of Year” lists should come out in the following January, or maybe even March or April. Who can even know the shape of the year without a little time and hindsight? How many of these 35 songs would I have chosen right at the end their years rather than after? In many cases, I hadn’t even heard them year.

I don’t know what hindsight will tell me about 2016. It was tempting to pick “Blackstar” or “Lazarus” as a reminder of those brief first 10 days of 2016 when it seemed everything was possible before the sad, awful mess of this year set in. Maybe in hindsight one of those will be my song of 2016.

For now, my pick is a song from just two weeks later. Actually, it was the first thing I heard other than David Bowie after his death. The song is “Mountains” by Dirty Holiday, a moniker for one of the many projects of Philly singer-songwriter Katie Barbato.

It also happens to be EV’s favorite song of the year.

This will forever go down as the first song I discovered and loved at exactly the same time as EV. She was sitting at our dining room table the first time I played it from my laptop, and as she requested Dirty Holiday’s Nobody’s Sober EP again and again it grew to be our favorite song amongst a strong crop.

There’s something about how the song picks up from a bluesy, acoustic strum to something larger .The arrangement and production is a perfect fit for this tune. In particular, I’d describe those organ parts as “lurid” – so swirling and colorful that there is almost something prickly and sinister about them, lending a different meaning to Barbato’s tossed off “da dut da” above them.

One Wednesday over the summer I brought EV to the Academy of Natural Sciences to see the dinosaurs for the first time. However, in documenting the story on the blog this summer, I skipped my favorite part.

EV and I reached the intersection of 19th street and Walnut, where 19th is interrupted by Rittenhouse Square. As we crossed from the west side to the east, we very literally bumped into Katie Barbato and her husband Matt. We hugged hello, and then I leaned down to introduce EV.

“EV, this is Miss Katie.” Then, it dawned on me that EV knew exactly who Miss Katie was. “EV, it’s Katie Barbato.”

Here is an artist’s rendering of EV’s face in that moment:

steven-universe-star-eyes

Katie, Matt, and I chatted about Katie’s record and my purple hair for a few minutes while EV hid behind my legs in awe. There we were in the middle of Center City, and her papa was talking to A ROCK STAR FROM THE IPOD. She did not say a single word to Katie or Matt, but as soon as we said our goodbyes the only thing she could talk about for the rest of the day was, “Did you know that I met Katie Barbato?”

Requests for “Mountains” saw an uptick after that, which I didn’t even think was possible.

You can buy the entire Nobody’s Sober EP at BandCamp for $4. It is five songs long and each song is way better than a dollar, so that is a steal.