Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

consume

Sound and Vision

by

On Friday night I attended the New Artists opening at Muse Gallery, a third of which was the art of one my increasingly close friends, Jennifer Vessels.

I was one of the first guests to arrive, and I got to experience the art of all three of the new members in a nearly empty room to the hypnotic sound of Dante on his hang drum. I had seen some of Jennifer’s work before, but smaller, and as prints – never up close, original, and with all of the beautiful texture that each of her collagraphs contain.

Each piece was labeled with title and price, and though I understand that the intent of the show is not necessarily to sell the pieces, the concept of selling a piece of physical artwork is so strange to me. I could sell one of my songs, but I would always be able to play it. Elise could sell a photograph, but it would just be a print – a single version of an original negative.

I marveled at that, lost in the detail of her lines and colors on a second walk through the gallery. How to be Jennifer, so entangled in music and light that she can contain them both on a canvas, yet able to part with a piece, never to see its texture again.

Ladies of Oscar

by

These actually happened to be the top two movies on our queue prior to the Oscars, and we got one on each side of the ceremony.

.

Best Supporting Actress Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton – One of my favorite actors, but she barely notches enough screen time for her billing, let alone for an award. And that doesn’t even take into account her lackluster performance. Her accent slips in multiple places, she has no good dialog save for her big scene with Clooney, and there she barely holds her own.

(Meanwhile, Clooney chose not to get into character whatsoever, leaving the whole affair with the air of a double-feature episode of Law and Order. The in medias res fails utterly because nothing interesting happens between the tease and the fulfillment.)

.

Best Actress Marion Cotillard in La Vie En Rose – One of the most notable performances I’ve seen this decade, and certainly in line with the strength of Helen Mirren’s win last year for The Queen. I know it’s easy to be impressive when you’re aping a real live person, but Cotillard goes beyond tricks of impersonation we’ve seen in other recent biopics to portray the actual heart of her character – without doing any of the singing.

(That she maintains that heart through an utterly bewildering series of narrative shifts in an overall average film is even more impressive. It would have been embarrassing if she didn’t win.)

.

That all said, they gave two of my favorite acceptance speeches of all time. I’ll let you decide which film we saw prior and which we saw post.

My report on Oscar’s best men coming never, because I don’t have a hair on my body that wants to watch either of those movies, even if I like one out of their three directors.

(ps, In case you need to fine tune to understand our taste, the next movie we received was Ratatouille, which is surely one of the most disappointing movies I’ve ever seen, especially after watching The Incredibles two or three times in the last week.)

The Element of Fire

by

Dear Author highlights Martha Wells’ The Element of Fire, my favorite modern fantasy book not written by Steven Brust.

As impressive as Martha’s compelling characterizations are, they are possibly surpassed by her clever world-building. How many authors create a beautifully rendered Elizabethan environment for their first novel – complete with an accompanying well-defined (yet largely unseen) faerie realm – only to fast forward the entire world to turn-of-the-century technology in a sequel with nary a backwards glance? And, furthermore, then advance again to radios, pre-WWII tall ships, and zeppelins in her subsequent trilogy?

As delightful as her evolving world proved to be, none of Elements‘ sort-of sequels quite match the incandescent magic of the original, which you can download and read in it’s entirety for free.

Imagine There’s No Heaven

by

When I was in grade school a frequent topic of conversation and consternation was heaven.

As the Born Agains would have us believe, every thought we had or action we performed – from doing math to running on the playground to watching television at night – had a direct relationship to our eventual destination. Heaven. So, we ought to pay good attention to every decision we made, lest we get diverted from said destination, thus sharing the fate of the gays, Jews, catholics, &c.

It mostly seemed like bunk to me from the start – did god really care which version of the Our Father I recited, so long as I was still name-checking him? Or, to put a finer point on it, did he mind if I listened to a tape of the B-52’s Cosmic Thing on the bus to our field trip?

I didn’t think so, but my principal did. He, and the entire staff of the school, shared that same opinion about all popular music, which increasingly lead me to rebel in tiny ways, like asking if we could pray for Gloria Estefan when she had her big accident (“we don’t pray for those people”) and writing The Immaculate Collection as my favorite album in a survey for class (“it’s Conception, and it’s not an album, Peter” … “No, not this one”).

If you think you understand where they were coming from – that the B-52’s and Gloria Estefan and Madonna were actively sexual and inappropriate for grade school – then you’re only seeing a symptom of their insanity, rather than the depths to which it ran.

.

I was a precocious reader, and by fourth grade I had exhausted the Nancy Drews and every other Young Adult novel in the school library. My mom, who was in danger of being run out of house and home by fueling my voracious reading habit with monthly trips to the book store and weekly trips to the library, decided I could start reading her books as long as she read them first to screen for anything truly inappropriate.

At the time my mother (and most of America, I suppose) was on a heavy Stephen King kick. All the classics – Pet Cemetery, It, The Stand, and every other one that wound up as a movie. Some of them she rightfully screened from me for a year or two, but others she passed along.

One was The Eyes of the Dragon, which was not horror so much as a dark fantasy. Or, at least that’s what I remember from the first 20-or-so pages, because after that it was snatched away from me (on yet another field trip) by a teacher.

“Where did you get this?”

“From my mother?”

“You shouldn’t steal books from your mother.”

“I didn’t steal it, she gave it to me to read on the bus.”

The teacher clearly did not believe me, but my mother – as always – came to my defense. “He’s a smart kid,” I imagine she argued, “and he needs stimulation.”

Of course, they couldn’t be trusted to trust my mother, and so I received long, personalized sermons from everyone from my teacher to the janitor about why reading Stephen King books was a bad idea. Why would I want to jeopardize my spot in heaven for some gory horror novel? It just didn’t make sense.

Well, they were at least right about that. Every time I thought I had them figured out they’d find a new way to paint me into a decidedly unheavenly corner. Reading fantasy books was frowned upon if the fantasy wasn’t directly derived from god. GI Joes were not an appropriate toy, because they had guns (nevermind that they all supported Iraq #1, and I’m sure Iraq #2 as well). And, AIDs was a plague the gays deserved, and anyone else who caught it was just collateral damage.

It was around the time of that last one that I decided I was definitely not going to be a Born Again Christian.

.

So, yes, they talked a lot about heaven. Or, at least, a lot about getting into heaven. Not so much about heaven itself.

It seemed strange to me, that they were so focused on getting to a place they didn’t know much about. It seemed analogous to begging your mother to go to an amusement park without knowing how many loops the roller coasters had.

(Clearly my Stephen King reading had left me a little remedial in studying up on the concept of Faith.)

(Or, maybe I’m just not wired that way.)

Gradually, I started to make my own concept of heaven that would match all of the tedious effort they put into getting there.

The whole point of heaven, it seemed, was to be awesome. Clearly it was always blue-skied. All of the food would taste great. You would never have to sleep, and you could re-watch television shows you missed by mistake.

(Yes, heaven imported TiVo from the future. Heaven is that awesome.)

God, I decided, was sortof a hard-ass – what, with all the smiting and sending Jesus to pal around on Earth for three decades just to get himself killed. I mean, the “only begotten son” bit just didn’t ring true to me – god was definitely the same Old Testament hard-ass he always was, he just looked softer because he had a kid. I had seen the same thing on television.

God was effectively Gargamel – old, batty, mean, and chasing around little people who barely came up to his shin with a big club. But, in a wacky, non-threatening, recurringly eposodic way.

By contrast, Jesus was definitely John Lennon, walking around singing “Imagine” – or, if you asked very nicely, “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” It definitely put his “bigger than Jesus” comment into a particularly ironic light, I thought.

However, I determined that the greatest feature of heaven was that you would know everything anyone ever thought about you. Not in an intrusive way … just a tally. Like, Leah, the girl I had a crush on for four years, would be able to see every distinct time I thought about her. Or Victor, the bully, would be able to discern the times I feared him versus the times I just felt sorry for him.

It made a certain amount of sense to me; if you were going to spend the rest of your life mingling through the clouds, you ought to be on equal footing with each other.

(Slightly later I amended the list to include people being able to get a tally of how many times people thought of them while having an orgasm, with a second tally indicating how many times that was during an orgasm had with someone other than you.)

(In retrospect, that might not be the kind of thing you find out in heaven.)

.

I still remember our last exchange with anyone on the staff in the sharpest possible focus. It was after our sixth grade end of year assembly, and we were all running around behind the stage drinking carbonated punch, which I claimed made me feel a little tipsy since I had never drank anything carbonated before in my life.

My mother was talking to the wife of the school’s principal, and as I ran past her I overhead this snippet of conversation…

Mom: “It would be nice if you held some events where they could just socialize together.”

Wife: “Oh, yes, that’s always nice.”

Mom: “Maybe even something like a dance.”

Wife: “A dance?”

Mom: “You know, with music? Around this age the kids in public schools and Catholic schools start to have dances.”

Wife: “Oh no. No. No no. We could never…”

I don’t remember anything else. Maybe I zoomed out of earshot, inebriated on bubbles. Or maybe my mother excused herself and ushered me out to the car. Either way, it was the last time I ever set foot in the building, or spoke to any of them other than my best friend Monica.

.

I still dream about them sometimes, about the teachers and janitors and principal’s sons. Sometimes I dream that I am 10-years-old but still myself, desperately trying to escape their serpentine corridors without notice. Sometimes I dream that they invite me to a twentieth reunion and I try in vain to explain to them how they made me so hateful and distrustful of religion.

Sometimes I dream that they all wound up being gay, and that they each confessed to me in turn that they were afraid they would never get to heaven.

I really hope they all get to heaven, since their whole lives have been dedicated to the practice – to the exclusion of school dances, Stephen King novels, and Madonna albums.

I wonder if when they get there they’ll see how much time I’ve spent worrying about them.

I wonder if they’ll care.

Razor’s Dull Edge

by

E and I just got in from a sneak-preview of the new feature-length Battlestar Galactica episode, Razor, which doesn’t air for another two weeks.

We didn’t have to sign any confidentiality whatsits, so I suppose I’m free to divulge whatever plot points I see fit.

However, it’s hardly worth it – there’s nothing shocking or titillating present for any well-read BSG fan. The sole delights are Michelle Forbes portraying Admiral Caine’s descent into her ends justifying any means necessary, and an impressive turn from the slight Stephanie Jacobsen in the lead role – as newly introduced Kendra Shaw.

Past the leading ladies Razor is a empty husk of less-than-gripping retconned plot. The twin stories it portrays are both extraneous – the Pegasus history just as grim as you imagined it, and the Battlestar present (actually, occurring just after The Captain’s Hand) is an inexplicably unmentioned adventure in vintage Cylons, hybrid models, and nuclear warheads. The acting in the Pegasus half is up to BSG par, but the present is plagued by limp, frequently stilted performances the two Adamas, with Kara Thrace escaping with a few good scenes (especially with Kendra).

Also, keep an eye out for a too-long, horrifically lazy young-Adama flashback that would have been so much more effective as a patented, heavy on the gravitas Edward James Olmos speech intercut with a few illustrative frames. Nevermind how they plan to explain why he’s never mentioned it before or since.

Without a single true shock to its credit, Razor is drab filler that supposedly presages the major revelations of Season 4. I can’t say that it has inspired any additional fervor from this fervent fan. If anything, it just emphasizes why BSG’s lease on life is drawing to a close.