Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Top 12 X-Men Collections of 2011 – New Material

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Uncanny X-Men issue #534.1, from Uncanny X-Men: Breaking Point

Today I bring you a list of the best collections of new X-Men material released in 2011, which collect stories originally published over the last 18 months of comics.

Occasionally I wonder if comic collecting as an adult is merely a shameless attempt at recapturing our youth now that we have the budget to appreciate it properly – especially as I and many other fans (let’s be honest) fetishize premiere format reprints of the comics we coveted as a kids. (Last week’s post covered the best of those from 2011.)

Is there anything to this hobby other than rewarding our inner teenage geeks?

If there’s an answer to be found in X-Men comics, it must be on this list. These are the twelve new X-Men stories that captured my imagination like those old issues I still obsess over, and I categorize “the wonder of feeling like a kid again” separately from “trying to recapture youthful feelings with a dose of well-preserved nostalgia.” [Read more…] about Top 12 X-Men Collections of 2011 – New Material

Defending Our Ride on CBSLocal Philly!

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E and I are sharing a slice of Internet Fame today courtesy of CBSLocal Philly via their auto correspondent @MikeyIl (who you may recall from my epic interview with him last summer).

Shot by MikeyIl for CBS Local.

My only prior auto-related run-in with Mikey was when he drove me to a concert in a pimped out ride he had on loan for a week to write up for a blog. Many months ago, Mikey put out the call for Philly residents with cars they really loved that were less than five years old. Feeling pretty strongly about the utility of our Toyota Matrix, E and I volunteer and wound up with an interview and photo shoot with our car! It’s our first shared press!

You can read the entire interview and see Mikey’s photos at CBSLocal Philly. As a bonus, here are a few exchanges from our interview that got wound up on the cutting room floor:

DYR: Does your car have an nickname?

E: I’m leaning towards Molly, though after Molly Weasley or Molly Bloom, I’m not sure.

 

DYR: Where did you get your car from? What/where was the dealer?

P: I didn’t even have my license when we bought the car, so a big test for us was if the dealer would actually talk to Elise about car stuff. I didn’t even know which side the gas pedal was on – I was there solely to haggle. I actually staged a walk-out mid-conversation at one dealer who didn’t seem as though he was actually listening to what Elise was saying.

Locally we work with Ardmore Toyota. Except, if you’re me, you sometimes call Toyota of Ardmore OKLAHOMA … which would explain why everyone answered with southern accents for a whole week that one time.

 

DYR: What’s your favorite or worst part of your commute?

E: I’ve driven it to work a few times. My favorite part is when I can first see the skyscrapers, and my least favorite part is when the radio cuts out in the parking garage. :)

P: I commuted to work once all summer. It was about five minutes shorter than my SEPTA commute but, unlike the El, I was not afraid of catching syphilis during the ride.

 
Oh, and this non-sequitur:

P: Elise is the best car-packing Tetris player I’ve ever known. She can make anything fit into anything.

artistic explorers

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In the rush of rehearsals and shows this fall, I flagged this quote in the hope I would later have the time to give it some deeper thought:

Every artist has an obligation to be a kind of researcher, whether its within the technical/formal aspects of their medium, the boundaries they push, or for the cultural knowledge they are producing.

Artwork by Kelsey Halliday Johnson.

The quote comes from an interview with visual artist Kelsey Halliday Johnson (via Maria’s tumblr), and it identifies why I am so obsessed not only with consuming art, but also by the process of creating art.

One of my major fascinations with comic books is the ridiculous range of people and objects that the artists must render – some of which are not even remotely based in reality. Ever since I started reading comics I have wanted to be able to draw, but even if I could draw figures or houses or cars how would I know how to draw dinosaurs or doomsday devices or dimensional gates?

Of course, that challenge faces a whole range of designers and artists – it’s not limited to drawing fantastical fights between superheroes. Does an architect know their history enough to design an addition to a Tudor Revival home?

Similarly, when I write songs I am drawing on the sonic vocabulary of every song I have ever heard before. That’s not to say I am plagiarizing. It’s more like a game of memory. That’s how Aural Training works – you learn to remember intervals, rhythms, and notes by memorizing other works that include them.

When I hear a song for the first time, whether it’s mine or someone else’s, I think, “that little melodic leap is from Juliana Hatfield; the quick chord change is David Bowie.”  My ability to hear those snippets evaporates over time as the song becomes its own gestalt; I’ve taken to jotting down the little earwigs when I first write something new so I can fondly recall them years down the line.

Can I write a song with parts I’ve never heard before? Yes. Would it come to me as easily without thousands of other songs on my brain – a lifetime of sonic research. Probably not.

Halliday Johnson’s entire interview is fascinating, I suggest you give it a read.

From the Beginning: Bruce Springsteen – Greetings From Asbury Park

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I never owned a Bruce Springsteen album as a kid. All I know about him are his cartoonishly overblown 70s and 80s hit singles. I thought it would be fun to experience his records in the original order to try to understand why so many people in my life love his music.

Bruce Springsteen – Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.
released January 3, 1973

Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. is Bruce Springsteen marking his journey from teen punk to struggling adult. It captures that very moment where a young man looks past the haze of his dreams to realize he may never escape the gravity of his small town. Even in that instant he knows that soon his recognition will fade as he, too, becomes a part of the unchanging scenery that surrounds him.

It is a bleak place to live. Welcome to Asbury Park.

There is desperation here as Springsteen tries to record the true faces of the icons of his youth – a series of greasy burn-outs and painted ladies – before he joins their sad chorus. “Blinded by the Light” is both the beginning and the end of the story. It functions as a Rosetta Stone for the record. A hopscotching bass line leaps between crazed blasts of saxophone and Bruce’s non-stop artillery of lyrics as he wonders if it’s worth it to be hobbled by the simple pleasures that surround him.

If the album was merely a time capsule of a long-since extinct mainstreet USA it would be a pleasant artifact. It is more than that thanks to the musical savvy of this nascent version of  Springsteen. He fuses the sounds of his contemporaries into something kinetic and occasionally terrifying. He rambles and yowls squeakily like Dylan, treads Van Morrison’s more soulful take on folk (especially on “Spirit In the Night”), and matches Don McLean’s obsessive need to paint every corner of a story with words.

Oh, the words. Springsteen has so much to say that he rarely pauses to repeat a refrain. Songs like “Blinded by the Light” and “For You” threaten to smother your ears in sheer alliteration, growing increasingly absurd under their own lyrical weight. As it turns out, young Springsteen had yet to master the efficacy of a few cutting phrases, which means this LP yields no anthemic choruses in the mold of “Born to Run.”

You have to start here to get there. Springsteen had to empty his mind of an indelible image of his home town and the distractions of youth, as on “Growin’ Up.” That broader, metaphorical version of him is teased here, as on the elegiac “Mary Queen of Arkansas.” It is a ballad for a figure not entirely of the world he inhabited by day, but borne of dreams of a wider America, unseen.

I’ll confess, I don’t like the album very much, yet I can’t deny that it transports me to Asbury Park, circa 1973. I see a town shattered in the shadow of the Vietnam War, full of losers and junkies trying to achieve orbit on a fistful of dope and broken dreams. “Everyone’s drunk on main street, drunk on holy blood,” Springsteen intones on the cutting “Lost in the Flood.” He wonders about the anesthetized figures that surround him, “Did you lose your senses in the war, did you lose them in the flood?”

Asbury Park is not a terribly cohesive album, but it paints a specific time and place. As his contemporaries transformed themselves with each record, Springsteen honed his rangy, biographical songwriting from cascades of words into a tool that could be held by anyone. He redefined the concept of folk troubadour, at points seeming to sing with the voice of America itself like Pete Seeger before him.

Is that so different than singing in the voice of his town? Could those later songs have emerged from the lips of a man who did not come of age afraid he would never escape? That tension between stay and go, settle down or explode has been with Bruce Springsteen for his entire career. It is as much as a part of him as the alleys and main drags of Asbury Park.

#MusicMonday: “I Can’t Wait” – Nu Shooz

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I have been stumped about a song for over a year.

Does that sentence almost defy belief? In this age of internet searches and mobile devices and song-identifying apps we are supposed to be able to find any song at any time. Do you remember the old way of doing things? I can recall more than one instance of standing next to my mother at a record store as she physically hummed a song to a clerk in the hopes they could identify it for her.

My problem? My song didn’t have any words. Or, at least, I’ve never really noticed the words before. It has this digitized “oh oh oh” vocoder riff that gets easily stuck in my head, but that’s all I knew about it. That, and that it sounded similar enough to the much more frequently-heard “Let the Music Play” that I freak out about it at least once a week in the car.

Figuring out the name of this song has become one of my top ten missions in life, right beside trying to go a week without buying anything from Amazon. I sing it to people constantly. On elevators, even. No one ever seems to know what I’m talking about. I don’t know a long enough snippet to identify it with a music app. I have nothing to go on.

Which brings us to Friday night.

It is almost midnight, and I am driving E and I home from The Muppets. It should be pointed out that this is only my fourth time ever driving in New Jersey, and I might be feeling a little bit tense.

The song comes on the radio just as I clear the toll plaza for the Ben Franklin Bridge. I have previously driven through a toll plaza exactly twice, and their lack of defined lanes completely freakw me out.

The opening vocoder riff chimes as I pull away from the toll, navigating through the funnel of madness that is the post-toll lanelessness. The singer begins to sing lyrics. Words! I must remember words! I start repeating them to myself, but they are not sinking in because the bridge is down to two westbound lanes, which renders the space between me and a concrete divider in the middle to be about the size of a breadbox. It requires every spare synapse to keep the car moving forward in one piece.

Dr. Teeth & The Electric Mayhem. Not pictured: my wife.

The vocals continue. I try repeating one phrase over and over like a mantra, but as my attention strays from the road I veer uncomfortably close to the car on our right.

“Elise,” I call over to the passenger seat, “I need you to help me remember the words. Any words.”

I do not risk a glance to my right. E had a not-small quantity of Jack Daniels at the movie and for all intents and purposes turned into a Muppet. I am riding in the car with a member of Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem. This is probably for the best, as completely sober I’m sure she would have reached across to take the wheel from me at this point.

“Hmm?” she queries, bopping along to the music not unlike a guitar-playing puppet made out of high quality felt.

“Try to remember the words. Any words. Three words. Please.”

“Sure,” she said, still bopping.

##

Flash forward to our arrival at home (or maybe the next day?). I sat down at the coffee table and loaded Google, ready to finally reveal the identity of my stymying secret song. I called to E, who was puttering around in the kitchen.

“Honey, what where the words to the song?”

“Hmm?” she queried, peeking her head into the living room.

“You know, the song from the car, ‘Oh oh oh OH oh oh ohoh.’ What were the words?”

“Oh, um… something about a door.”

“A door.”

“Yes,” she replied, sounding very certain.

“Were they opening a door? Perhaps going through the door?”

“Possibly.”

“Possibly which?” I asked, grasping for any further hint she could provide.

“There was definitely a door.”

Feel free to Google the terms 80s, door, lyrics, and “oh oh oh oh oh oh oh.” Go ahead, I’ll wait here.

No, “I Can’t Wait” by Nu Shooz is not one of the early results. I sprawled across the couch in resignation. I had come so close to solving my musical riddle, only to be foiled by my uncertain driving and E’s being a Jim Henson creation.

Yet, here we are, rocking out to “I Can’t Wait” thanks to the magic of YouTube.

How did I figure it out? Though I did not come away with any words, I did manage to acquire an indelible memory of the bassline. This morning I caught the elevator with one of my partners in insanity and music-loving, MK.

I told her about my dilemma, and when we reached our neighboring desks, I turned to her. “Okay, MK, this is really serious. You have to help me figure out this song.”

“I’m ready,” she said, fixing me with a steely stare.

I began to sing my newly recollected bassline. “Bum buh ba, bum ba, BUM ba … Bum buh ba, bum ba, BUM ba.”

MK paused for nary a second before singing the hook in reply, “Oh oh oh OH oh oh ohoh.” We had created an office acappella group worthy of televised competition. We were breaking down some hot 80s jams.

MK interrupted her vocoder imitation for a second, “Oh, I totally know this one!”

I took a breath between fat bass beats, “What’s it called?!”

My boss emerged from her office just as our neighbor Chris poked his head over the cube wall.

“It’s called ‘I Can’t Wait,'” they shouted in unison, unphased by our suddenly convened doo wop duo. Then they returned to their desks without batting an eye, as this was no more unusual than our semi-weekly Tuesday afternoon Cher karaoke hour.

“Well,” I turned to MK, grinning a satisfied grin, “that settles that.”

Now I have a few extra synapses to rub together for other purposes.