Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Ron Moore talks ending Battlestar Galactica

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Check out a well-informed, far-ranging interview with Ron Moore, creator and show-runner of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica. No spoilers for the impending Season 4.5.

Battlestar Galactica is one of the finest shows on television, and that’s not just me talking – though it has struck out on major Emmy nods, it’s run the table on critical acclaim during its run, including accolades from Time and the American Film Institute, amongst many others. It’s first season compares favorably to The West Wing in the quality of its storytelling and ensemble acting. If you’ve already exhausted the re-watch possibilities on Lost and Mad Men BSG’s mix of action and intrigue is the perfect mid-point between the two.

(If you prefer your BSG news with spoilers, head to SyFy Portal to read about the identity of the final cylon and the last scene in the series. Careful – the latter one is shocking.)

Digestifs (or, a requiem for eight solid hours of food and NFL football)

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I am finally old enough to enjoy a post-dinner recline on the couch while making inane commentary on football games, and I took full advantage of said privilege tonight after dining with Gina’s family for the first time in six(!) years.

While watching the Eagles rack up the highest score of the day Gina, Wes, and I organized the National Football League in descending order of mascot size, punctuated by occasionally less-than-fearsome cardinal cries.

Massive
Titans
Jets (jumbo)
Giants
Saints (if astral)

Huge
Bills (buffalo)
Texans (steers, or possibly minotaurs?)
Broncos
Bears (grizzly)
Bengals

Large
Lions
Panthers
Colts
Rams
Jaguars
Dolphins

Man-Sized
Steelers & 49ers (assumed to be burly and hard-working)
Raiders & Vikings (assumed to be fierce and conquest-oriented)
Chiefs
Packers (assumed to be like Steelers, but with more dairy in their diets)
Cowboys & Redskins
Buccaneers (more of an effete Johnny Depp pirate)
Eagles (massive wingspan makes them comparable in size)
Patriots (sorta bourgeois, comparatively)
Saints (if corporeal)

Small
Seahawks
Browns (if dogs)
Falcons & Ravens (split decision on which would be larger)

Tiny
Cardinals
Browns (if recluse)

Atomic
Chargers

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At this point we were all in a full-on dessert coma after ingesting Gina’s pumpkin cheesecake pie, and amidst Brian Dawkins imitations*, we also found the time to judge the five most fearsome mascots…
1. Titans – Atlas is a Titan!
2. Chargers
3. Bears
4. Bengals
5. Eagles
Honorable Mention: Saints (if astral)

… as opposed to the five most harmless mascots:
1. Cardinals
2. Ravens
3. Browns
4. Dolphins Per reader feedback, a dolphin could maul a Patriot.
5. Colts
Honorable Mention: Saints (if corporeal)

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* Everyone we know considers Brian Dawkins to be terror incarnate, and we spend the majority of most Eagles’ games commenting on the fear that he strikes into all opponents.

Tonight we determined that Batman’s interrogation of a hallucinating Scarecrow in Batman Begins was actually based on Brian Dawkins’ pass defense, and that there is likely test footage of Bale wearing a Dawkins jersey along with his enigmatic visored helmet.

I also posited a likely Dawkins’ internal monologue, but it involved a lot of cookie-monster-metal growling that I can’t really do justice in text. Maybe when my condensers arrive next week…

Amanda FUCKING Palmer

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As to the rest of my awesome weekend, there was the bit where we moved an entire house of belongings from one place to another in less than 90 minutes of manual lablor, and then there was the bit where I slept for a really long time because I was not feeling super, and then there was Amanda FUCKING Palmer.

(Actually, I skipped the bit where I walked up and down South Street belting out Dresden Dolls harmony vocals to see if I could attract the attention of anyone on the tour who would introduce me to Amanda, which in my opinion is a way more effective version of stalking than most of her fans might undertake. But, I digress).

Elise and I (and many of our other friends) are tremendous Dresden Dolls fans, so we all took the news of Amanda’s impending solo record with several grains of salt. Would it be an indulgent glamour project where she indulged all the inane songs Brian refused to drum on?

In a word: no.

Who Killed Amanda Palmer? is a fantastically layered, nuanced album that runs the gamut from heart-rending ballads to two massive pop blitzes catchier than anything the Dolls have undertaken (and this is coming from someone who has “Backstabber” tattooed on my brain – it’s my #1 most-listened to song in iTunes).

I’d tell you more about the album, but I’m already entrenched about 2500 words deep into my review of it, so it’ll have to wait. Instead, a word on the concert.

It wasn’t a concert.

At least, not in the sense you would typically expect. It was truly a cabaret – songs mixed with spoken word, mime, question and answer sessions with the audience, and unplugged performances on ukelele. It was an interactive, unconcertlike experience. At one point Amanda and The Danger Ensemble did a choreographed dance to the entirety of Rhianna’s “Umbrella” (which I had mercifully escaped hearing up until that point).

If that sounds like a damnation by faint praise … well, only a little. There were definitely points where the act of Amanda got slightly tiresome, and the show visibly bled audience at those points. In the past that blood has been me. But, on Saturday it finally felt like cabaret and not a concert, maybe due to the absence of Brian, and maybe because of how much Amanda chatted directly with the audience – explaining the funding behind her tour, or asking us to send her a text message.

It was much about atmosphere and attitude, texture and taste, as it was about playing all the hits. Case and point, perhaps my favorite song of the night wasn’t any of the ones I was hotly anticipating, but a take on her hilarious collaboration with Neil Gaiman, “I Google You” (explained hilariously via a blog comment chain by Neil), the best bit of which is definitely,

And I’m pleased your name is practically unique
it’s only you and a would-be PhD in Chesapeake
who writes papers on the structure of the sun
I’ve read each one

At the end of the night she came out for an encore of her current single, the hot horny mess of “Leeds United,” slapped onto the record complete with an “Oh! Darling” losing-my-voice single-take vocal. Introducing it (or maybe earlier), she mentioned that her record company didn’t like the video as-is because she looked “fat.”

We’re talking about someone on my list of five famous people I’d sleep with. Fat doesn’t really enter into the equation. Behold:

Right. Fat. Sure.

In any event, I loved the concert, and I’m happy that Amanda is getting the chance to make her own music away from the Dolls. If any of this sounded interesting (even if you don’t love Amanda’s music) I would suggest you check out her mammoth story of recording the record, which is more detailed and frank than any episode of Behind the Music.

(wow, that was supposed to be a short post)

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That didn’t turn out quite how I meant it to.

I didn’t even mention the Swamps of Sadness and how Artax dying is the saddest thing ever and how I’m wrapped up in my desk chair reliving all of these old emotions and that at first it was so hard to understand why I was writing the things I wrote but now I’ve been reading for so many days in a row that they make just as much sense as the present day and that I’m afraid that if I keep at it for much longer I will be nineteen again with all of the desperation and uncertainty that came with the territory.

Well, maybe it’s better off the way it is. More coherent, anyhow.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2008/11/3412/

“In the beginning, it is always dark.”

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Have you ever watched The NeverEnding Story? You know how the book seems to bleed into Sebastian’s life, with him running afoul of frightening taxidermy during an encounter with G’mork.

Today my life is something like that.

Ever since I I first transferred from Blogger to WordPress in the midst of the first NaBloPoMo (a feat I still can’t believe I engineered), I’ve also been moving backwards though the almost 3000 posts that came before, categorizing them into tidy chunks that tell the stories of my life.

I’m determined to at least categorize back into the year 2000 by the end of the month, and in my surge of personal excavation I’ve become firmly entrenched in the “Behind the Music” portion of my life – recording a seminal album while going through a horrific breakup and a nearly deadly illness. Flirting with potential entanglements Oh, and drinking a lot.

That old, unhappy, unsure me seems so alien in the present day. To catch all of the themes in those old posts I’ve had to do more than read them – I’ve had to put myself in their place. How else to remember that I hatched my plot to break up with Selina as an allegory of why I shouldn’t pull an all-nighter?

In the process of getting into character I feel like those old posts have been slowly transforming my present day life. I Trio “Will It Ever Come,” telling the story of how it was written, and then find myself re-reading the post about recording it in the studio. Yesterday I re-read one lamenting that it was hard to tell if you have a fever when you’re under a spotlight, and last night I replayed the experience at our benefit show – half sick and half in-the-moment.

This evening I have a tickle in my chest that’s scarily reminiscent of the beginnings of my legendary bout of bronchitis and pneumonia that I’m about to be rereading.

The coincidence is starting to become frightening, if only because I’ve now crossed the threshold into the worst month of my life – the torturous rehearsal process for Good Woman of Setzuan, nearly failing classes, the depths of my relationship, deaths in the family.

If this was really The NeverEnding Story I would be able to reach back into the plot to shake me out of the stupor. I remember being five and jumping up and down on the bed in my father’s hotel room, screaming unintelligibly along with Bastian as he inserted himself into Fantasia, first interrupting Atreyu’s conversation with Morla, and later by naming the princess “Moon Child.”

Or, maybe I already have – without knowing it – and the only reason that younger me broke free of his darkness was because I am sitting here, happy and healthy, willing him to get on with his life.