Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

consume

by

All of these things are true.12. “Real Men” is strangely propulsive, with each piano upswing leading to a tiny crescendo and another downturn, the inverse of the preceding song. Coming from a man this lament for real men would seem self-assured and chiding, but Tori reducing this collection of girls back down to their boyish opponents makes her point better than anything else in the arsenal. She invokes her warring sexes again here, pointing out that this is truly a cold war… with no real casualties but with deep rooted scars that even her friend Time might not heal. Her narration of trading uniforms and places seamlessly ties together her concept of borrowing these pieces from their fathers… girls can play along, and sometimes they can find out what a real man could be to them along the way.

Of course, they are just girls still, young and awkward in all the wrong places, but here they have all opened up these strange spaces in their father’s works where they had left something out, or where they had assumed too much about the girls that they were speaking on the behalf of.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5774142/

by

If you let go of Tori’s concept and free-fall through Strange Little Girls it is bound to disappoint; aside from the mellow tone and the lack of organic piano this album is different than Tori’s normal work because she is so far removed from her subjects instead of being a part of them. “Strange Little Girl” is the appropriate entry-way because it is the most like her own work… told in third person but obviously implicating herself over the course of the song. The farther away from that mold you venture on this disc the more tenuous the connection to Tori becomes, until some of the songs are just out and out covers.

Ultimately i can’t help but think of this disc as a failure, because it doesn’t work as a record and doesn’t really do what Tori claims she had intended. However, there are places that Tori has taken these adopted girls of hers that they had never been before… places that expose the fallacy and security of the men who originally narrated them. None of these versions wholly precludes their original, but all of them follow the rule of covers: don’t touch a song unless you want to add your own voice. In this respect Tori was unfaltering, and i suppose the only thing i could blame her for is that the voice she added was not entire the one i had been expecting.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5774101/

by

Hi, Tori.

I realize that you want to make music and that you want to be at home with your family and that you want to use up your contract, but in the future please refrain from recording such an obviously momentumless album with such obviously momentumless songs on it after you just released a rather underdeveloped disc with an equally underdeveloped (and, frankly, boring) live album. I swear, it’s getting so that i can smell this stuff from months in advance… You have albums worth of unreleased material, an archive of an entire plugged tour of songs, and probably the best ear for piano arrangements in all of music business. So, why this?


The anonymous “Strange Little Girl” shines while the timeless “Heart of Gold” seeths with garage-rock stomp, but “Happiness is a Warm Gun” is indelibly stamped with impenetrable Toriness and “’97 Bonnie & Clyde” is the sort of clumsy lark that you’re supposed to finish and then promptly shove onto a beeside or soundtrack. In the middle are the mostly solo “Enjoy the Silence,” “Time,” and “Real Men,” all of which are as arresting as their riginals while still somehow missing something integral. Album opener “New Age” is somber but entrancing, and the surprising “I’m Not In Love” is familiar and yet completely not. However, not even Tori’s eccentricity can save “Rattlesnakes,” “I Don’t Like Mondays,” and “Raining Blood,” which could have all been left in the bargain bin where they were found.

Of course i have a history of hating about half of my favourite albums for at least a week each; however, if a dedicated fan thinks a disc falls flat upon his or her first listen you should definitely take that into consideration (even if you take it with a requisite few grains of salt).

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5767893/

by

I have this thing for cheesy kid movies where the dorky boy wins over the heart of the popular girl and the respect of his parents and/or peers. Or, rather, i did have a thing for those movies, and now i just have a thing for staying up past 2am to watch them on SuperStation.

The movies always surprise me with their ability to keep the remote out of my hands… this jaded anti-pop anti-teey-bop consumer who barely even gets out to indy flicks once a year stays rooted to the spot. At some point last summer i was home and idly flipping past HBO and i spotted Jamie Lee Curtis and i stopped to see what movie she was in, because i always stop for Jamie Lee, and that’s where the newest chapter of this tale began.

The movie is House Arrest, and the concept is simple: parents are headed for divorce, and so the kids lock them in the basement to work it out. Other kids from school bring their own problem parents into the picture, and hilarity ensues.

The movie is formulaic at best, and that’s probably the reason i like it so much. It is aimed at kids… boys who do not feel in control of anything. It is aimed at the rejects who got thrown into trashcans who would love to garner the respect of the school bully. It is aimed at the ones who pined after the pretty silent girl but never thought to treat her like an everyday person (even though it wouldn’t have gotten them anywhere). And, most cruely, it is aimed at the children of parents hopelessly mired in divorce, separations, and endlessly bickering and remarriage.

So, yes, for those of you following closely, i am the target audience of this movie, and it waylays me hopelessly on my living room floor lying on my stomach with my feet up in the air with full knowledge that Jamie Lee will make up with her husband, and that Jennifer Love Hewit will fall for the simple hero of the film and that the bully winds up being a big softy after all. I fall for it every time, hook line and sinker.

I’m not sure that i really want anything that the movie is offering, but in a way it represents some alternate universe from mine where i had romance hard-coded into my neurons instead of the pop music representation of it. Of course, having nowhere to learn romance from, all i had to turn to was pop culture to educate me. It’s like when in High Fidelity we’re told that “The unhappiest people i know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but i do know that they’ve been listening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives.” We’re posed the question of what comes first: the music, films, and culture … or the misery?

I say it all depends.

Some people learn happy endings from their own family and friends, and some people learn them from television and music and movies, and when it comes down to the crux of the matter those of us “who like pop music the most” are expecting a different kind of resolve. We are looking for tidy tied up packages that are easy to fit our minds around, and not uneasy reconcilations and marriages built to last despite rocky foundations. We simply haven’t encountered the concept; hollywood deals wholesale in reconciled parents, and in first kisses in front of the entire cafeteria, and in happy resolved endings. House Arrest is aimed at me because i am trained to appreciate tidy happy endings, and because i want to be able to expect them in my own life even though i know they are as likely as gold records on my wall.

Do i wish that i had a happy two parent home, or that i had good giggly friends who i could idly play football with in the yard, or someone to surreptitiously kiss when we thought parents weren’t all watching? To me it’s apples and oranges, because my life wouldn’t resemble my life if i had any of those things intact. I once just lived a solitary existence resisting advances, and it wasn’t the best thing to do. I have the urge to take meticulous mental notes during these movies so i can apply the things i’ve learned against my life should i ever find myself trapped in a time warp and able to replay my adolescence from where i last saved the game.

In reality, i suppose i am saving up happy endings like the points on the back of a G.I.Joe box, hoping that someday i can put them all in an envelope and send them away for some sort of happiness in return. Here’s for hoping i don’t have to watch House Arrest too many more times to redeem my limited edition prize.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5316575/

by

I’d just like to point at that Nick at Nite is running Cheers this fall. Yes, that’s right, Cheers. It was bad enough when Happy Days graduated from daytime syndication to Nitely showings, and i could excuse the addition of The Wonder Years because it was a quirky show and it was set in the era that is the bread-and-butter of the channel’s programming. However, Cheers is from the 80’s. Cheers ran in my lifetime; in fact, it used to be my favourite show. I remember being in sixth grade and desperately trying to stay awake through the movie-length finalé and not quite making it and having to glean the last details from my History teacher the next day inbetween classes. There is (lamentably) a show still in first run Must-See-TeeVee downward spiral that features a character from Cheers.

I remember when Diane episodes were prime 7pm syndication fodder, and then where we were upgraded to the shinnier funnier Kirstey Alley episodes. And, then, they slowly started trickling away, giving way to Coach, and then The Simpsons and finally Friends. And, i suppose just one more measure of how old you are is how many of your favourite shows are syndicated, and how many more are owned by a Turner Network, but somehow it doesn’t all add up in my head. When i was little i knew that Bewitched was a better built affair than Gilligan’s Island, and that i’d take Donna Reed over Dobey Gillis. But, inexplicably, Donna has been absent from the N@N schedule for years, and Gilligan is up next after I Love Lucy, the Christmas marathon of which i still have recorded on a Beta tape that still works in the Sony Beta Machine that’s older than i am.

Yesterday this page turned a year old, and in a month i’ll be twenty. However, i’m starting to get the feeling that age isn’t so much the years that pass so much as it is the scenes you remember. And the episodes you forget.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5316234/