Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Dear To Me

by

I don’t write a lot of open letters.

I remember when I lived on 64th street in that grand, old, dilapidated house. It seemed so vivid at the time, but in retrospect my life there seems so one-dimensional – as if I didn’t begin to be the person I am now until I left.

We used to talk all night on instant messenger. My computer was in the dining room, far away from any comfort at all. It didn’t matter, though. I could sit forever and talk to you. Idle chatter. Guess that Tori lyric. Whatever.

I used to send you songs, especially that one summer when I really started writing them. I’d dash one off and email it right to you. I trusted you so much with them – I don’t think I’ve ever let anyone that close to them before or since. I let you in on these little secrets of mine, and wove some of yours in too, and you always accepted them so graciously, sometimes even replying with another snippet your oblique novella (never finished).

It all got so different when I moved just around the corner from you. I don’t know why. On one hand, it let us be close friends instead of just remote acquaintances. On the other, I was near you so much, being constantly reminded that I was just idle entertainment; I was no main act. I’m always cautious to say that I fell in love with anyone, because it’s hard to love in only one direction, but in my way I know that at the time I was in love with you.

You knew. I know you knew, and knew it then, and would remind you occasionally in case you had changed your mind. You were always quite kind about it, really, because you let me into so much of your life (I’ve never been sure why).

I still hold some of those memories – stupid memories – so close to my heart. The stupid movies we would go to see, the time we put an old shoe into Andrea’s Christmas gift so she wouldn’t know what it was, the time you took that perfect self-portrait of your hair and your bangs and I decided that it had to be the cover of my album. And the music; you made me listen to Rufus Wainwright, and told me how the song was about how his lover had died of AIDS, or the first time you made me listen to Elliott Smith and Built To Spill, or the first time I made you listen to Dilate. So much good music in your room.

I’m really sorry for whatever I did to you. I think I talked about your life too much, as if somehow a tiny piece of it was owed to me. Or, maybe was a little too mean to you in my songs; both are crimes I’ve gone on to repeat. I don’t know; sometime that Winter I did something to erode the closeness, and you just went on living.

I’ve gotten over lots of girls – you’ve seen me do it once or twice. But, you know, I’ve never really gotten over you. I don’t think it’s because I never got to kiss you because, let’s face it, how many of these girls have I gotten to kiss, really? I just think it’s because you always let me feel so safe, and so cool, and I just don’t have that anymore. I guess I’ve never really had to lose anyone else that I’ve loved.

I’m sorry, you probably didn’t need to read any of this. I was just singing one of those songs and I realized that I really do miss you.

I’m sorry.

Postal Service

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In grade school I found the concept of Pen Pals stultifying; try to find one kid to strike up a slow-motion exchange with via handwritten letter? Handwritten letters took too long to write, were too hard to read. Why not just trade phone calls? Or, at least, typed letters.

It was third grade, and my teacher absolutely refused to allow me to type my letters. I had a typewriter at home, my little blue manual on that folded into its own suitcase, on which I would peck away grade school murder mysteries and horror stories. Having recently received a note from my incredibly square Wisconsin friend, I anticipated a dreaded letter writing exercise in class the next day. In a pro-active academic turn (still rare, to this day) I got out my steely blue friend, and pecked away.

The next day in class, when the teacher told us that we would be writing out our replies, I raised my hand. I had brought mine, I pointed out, and it was already neatly typed.

My teacher was not amused. I couldn’t get out of the exercise just because I could type. I would still have to write out my letter.

Defiant, I struck back; I would love to write my letter in the horrible, awkward, cursive of third grade, but surely I would be allowed to place my wonderfully neat typewritten note into the massive envelope that would shuttle letters to our sister-school of hopelessly sheltered born agains in WI?

She was aghast. A typed note? No no no.

At this point the details become a bit muddled; to the best of my recollection, I may have refused to write out my letter so that she would be forced to use my typewritten one. She may have taken the typewritten one from me and insisted I write one from scratch. All I recall is that I was flustered, and made to turn my desk to the wall and write my note by hand, possibly in duplicate.

I can’t remember if my mother found out, but I suspect if she did she probably just had a hearty laugh. For all of my critique of her, one principal she has stood by is that no child should be restricted by a lowest common denominator (she knows the phrase, but god help you if you ask her to show you what it means with fractions), in the same way refused to let teachers force me to show my work on repetitive addition tables in first grade when I had already figured out how to multiply.

I hate when I figure out how to do things the fast way but am restricted by a classroom (or a world) of slow movers.

I’m No Al Gore, but…

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I have an obsession with connectivity.

If I have five free minutes at work, waiting for a phone call or finishing lunch, I immediately connect to my favorite people and topics on the internet.

I always say I had been waiting for this my whole life, and people think I’m trying to say that I am Al Gore and that I invented the internet. I’m usually at a loss to describe what I mean, but I have finally thought of a good example.

When I was five or six, He-Man toys were all the rage. However, being the equal opportunity battle coordinator I was, I also wanted to have She-Ra toys to fill out the gender ratio. I had nearly every He-Man toy, and I know for a fact that I had every single She-Ra. Except for one.

Spinnerella. She was one of the last of the series to be released, with the result being She-Ra didn’t take up all that much shelf-space in the action figures department anymore. My mother and I were intent on finding her – we had just found her net-tossing friend and, my personal favorite, Entraptra and Perfuma. Just one more She-Ra to make my fantasy world complete.

To this day I’ve never seen that damn toy in person. We went to every toy store in the Greater Philadelphia area to look. Were we supposed to cross state lines? Call stores around the country? In 1986, how were we to coordinate our search?

In my tiny, five-year-old mind, I remember thinking how silly it was that I couldn’t find that one toy. It obviously existed. Knowing what I know now about action figures, I’d wager to say that my spinning friend may have been short-shipped, or may have appeared with lower frequency in each case. However, at the time, I just knew they were out there somewhere, and couldn’t get over the mystery of why they had to be so damned hard to find. Surely there was a store that had too many of her that they couldn’t sell? Surely some girl had gotten two for her birthday, and had an extra?

I may not be Al Gore, but even then I knew there should… there had to be a way to connect to a larger group of people with the same interest. Some kind of a collective intelligence.

The internet came as no surprise.

Oh, What a World

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Despite the dreary day, I was singing to myself as I left the house. What’s a dreary day in the face of good sleep and getting paid today? Nothing, I say.

Anyhow, the day, it was dreary, and I was turning the corner, being Rufus Wainwright under my breath when, quite suddenly, a squirrel comes tumbling down the screen door of the pizza parlor on my corner to land at my feet, a nut secure between it’s jaws.

We exchanged glances.

Not wanting the squirrel to go into a mad panic when he would effectively have to run through me to get away, I continued my musical stroll.

Much to my surprise, the squirrel began to follow me.

Odd, I thought.

Still singing under my breath, I returned my glance from my new companion to the ground in front of me only to noticed a smattering of tiny birds pecking away at the sidewalk. As the squirrel and I approached them, they sedately looked up at us and then took wing – not in a mad escape, but to rest in the limbs of the tree I was about to pass under. And, one of them began chirping a lovely, regular melody, which caused me to pause in my walking (but not my singing).

Yes, in fact, it did sort of work as counterpoint to the Rufus Wainwright song I was singing under my breath.

Rodent sidekick, check. Flock of cooperative melodically gifted winged friends, check. Unassumingly singing a beautiful song, check.

Life was playing some sort of peculiar trick on me, and that I was in the middle of a Disney cartoon musical. A very peculiar, live-action, Disney cartoon musical, with “Gay Messiah” on its soundtrack. So, really, more like Moulin Rouge.

Taken with the whimsy of the moment, I began singing out, and sweeping my overcoat around me, which seemed to fairly alarm my squirrel friend, still with nut in mouth, but he did not flee. As he had yet to be spooked, I went into all-out pirouettes, now singing more or less at the top of my lungs.

It was around then that the construction workers renovating the house on Osage must have noticed me. I felt their dreary-world glares weigh in on my cartoon musical extravaganza like sopping wet cotton blankets. I stopped mid-spin, letting my voice catch in my throat, and looked to my animal backup-singers for some support.

Squirrel had fallen several steps behind me, and was idly munching his nut, paying me no heed. My aviary chorus had ceased their song, and were nowhere to be seen.

The construction workers continued to stare, quite dumbly.

Hands shoved into pockets and intently showgazing I resumed my walk.

I hate musicals.

Art as Reduction as Art

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Picking ten favorite songs is a labor that I do not envy. Yes, it is easy to name ten, dash them off of the top of your head, but are those ten you could live with? Ten you love now, will continue to love a decade from now, and would have loved a decade before their release?

However tempting it might be to rattle off a list of greatest hits by my favorite ten artists, these songs are more than just that. I might not pick these songs as the ten I would bring to a desert isle, but they would undoubtedly be the ones stuck in my head while I was there. Not really the best, and not all my favorites, but definitely ten of the most enduring songs in my collection.

My list is rooted in the 90’s, where my taste was truly formed, but for me they are about moments, not tastes. Each chord is a suspended image, and each image a thousand words I could never hope to express so succinctly as they are summed up by a melody or hook. Please excuse my attempt to sum each up in a single paragraph.

Lisa Loeb, Stay

-There is something remarkable about a song with no chorus and no hook that can capture the nation’s imagination so completely that it goes to number one without any label backing at all. Every songwriter hopes to write one song so perfectly formed; the irony is that Lisa actually has dozens.

David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust

– I do not like concept rock, or epic rock, but Ziggy Stardust is both without being either. Petite and digestible, half autobiography and half imagination, it is the centerpiece of one of the most subtly crafted concept albums of all time.

Madonna, Vogue

– Coming at what is now the middle of a career, Vogue is a snapshot of all that is Madonna; at once celebrating and debunking glamour, cribbing musical notes from the latest dancehall trend, and turning something that should have failed (her classic spoken word interlude) into a mark in the public’s consciousness. Not as simple as “Lucky Star” or as incendiary as “Like a Prayer,” but still a perfect pose to strike.

Ani DiFranco, Untouchable Face

– Such a simple kiss off, but only so much as it was an attempt to outwardly distance herself from someone that was not so far away as she might have liked. The eight seconds of silence that come before the first reverbed chord are the sweetest anticipation in my entire collection.

The Supremes, Stop In The Name of Love

– I challenge any five-year-old to not want to mime along to the chorus. Pop in it’s most undiluted form.

The Beatles, Oh Darling

– How do you choose one song by the Beatles rather than an entire album? I hardly know, but I do know that every time I hear this I feel the wind in my hair as my mother and I speed across the Whitman, bound for cheap hotels and salt water taffy. Each note triggers another frame of the ride; the song is an 8mm film strip, peeling at the edges as Paul’s voice reaches its own.

Sheryl Crow, All I Wanna Do

– Alanis might have been the angry woman of my generation, but Sheryl was our beatnik. Later proclaiming that love was in fact a good thing, her lateral advancement of sound never surprises me so long as I keep this in mind; how all the good people in the world floated away like so many balloons in the video, finding themselves suddenly weightless in the face of this carefully careless tone poem.

Carole King, I Feel The Earth Move

– Yes, she may have penned the now-clichéd words that have become as famous a feminine mantra as Aretha’s demand for Respect, but echoes of these clanging chords and chunky guitars can be heard all the way from Tori Amos to Garbage; it seemed excessive to list my favorite songs from that when I could just as easily include this one.

Weezer, Say It Ain’t So

– How can a song about sharing an apartment and reminiscing about an estranged alcoholic father be so primary in my personal glossary of rock? Because, perhaps, it is a perfect marriage of angst and that glimmer that there is perhaps something beyond. Until then, though, you are drowning in the flood of distorted guitars quoting riffs back and forth into a stunning crescendo that slowly leave you the way it began – minor, discordant, and so simple that it cannot help but be familiar.

Veruca Salt, The Morning Sad

– There are a lot of songs about the morning after, whether it be literal or figurative, and for me this one is symbolic of them all. How wrenching, when you know that an attachment so vital has suddenly lost its luster, so that you find yourself suddenly trading on the afterglow of what you once felt to even register a reaction. Perfect rhythms, perfect harmony – perhaps one of the finest pop songs never to have hit its mark and, sadly, effectively the last single of Veruca Salt as it was once known. I wonder, could they have known how apt their words would be in a few years time?

I’m sure I could come up with a different list tomorrow. I’m sure next week I will kick myself for leaving off “Morse Code Love,” “You Wanna Be Starting Something,” “Hallelujah,” “Losing My Religion,” or “Closer To Fine.” To artificially reduce your love of music to a list of ten is the most artificial of exercises, to be sure, but through it you might grow to understand exactly why the undertaking seemed so hard in the first place.

(Per Desh’s nod to this week’s XPN countdown.)