Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

The Kill Krinkle Club is something of a modern day, living fairy tale.  Where the allure of a picture book can draw you inside the fantastical imagination of a life unencumbered with the pressures of adult living.   The world can be viewed, once again as a place of magic.  Where pirates, monsters, castles and fireballs can all come and go at the whim of an uncluttered mind. 

The band explains that Krinkle is a mental phantom, a rain cloud in our minds that deters our ambition.  Krinkle makes us content in a life of banal pursuits in support of the status quo.  He will hamper our potential and quash our dreams.  “We must kill him” they say; and say it they did as the band took to the streets in downtown Toronto.  Dressed in a bunny ear hat, brightly colored clothing with gold seams, pointy boots, toy cameras, pop bottles and sunglasses, the Kill Krinkle sang their manic philosophies from rooftops, car tops, pools and fruit stands, endearingly smiling and relating funny anecdotes the whole time.

For that day at least, Krinkle was dead.  The band’s energy was contagious as doubts, pressures and unhealthy expectations were seemingly pushed aside as they talked, walked and sang on the streets with us that day.

Some things are better left unsaid and so I didn’t pry into the circumstances of how the philosophy for the Kill Krinkle Club came to be. Even if the band’s personal history is left to the imagination, what is so genius about their philosophy is that it’s so universally relatable.  Everyone should want to kill that mental phantom and now we have a band that’s singing about it and it's been given a name!.  Stress is a perception, not a fact and there is a relationship between a mental outlook and its determination of future events.  Possibly, the concept is a regression in service of the ego as Ernst Kris may have called it, and it could be influenced by quantum mechanics as Justin, the guitarist and singer of Kill Krinkle related to me over dinner that day.  Either way, their inspiration is contagious.