Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

consume

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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/

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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/

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I might not always return link love in an equal fashion, but when i am paid a true complement i honestly appreciate it and back-linking is the least i can do. In that vein, please visit Handbasket Emporium, where some sentences feature both myself and Nick Hornby (and, not just sentences saying that i want to grow up to be one of his characters, either).

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5098432/

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Today i was combed down and cleaned up and i looked like the greyscale version of me except for my hands and face which were unusually rosey; from bottom to top i ran black, grey, grey, black, silver, black, face, black. Someone has turned down my contrast, apparently. I might have had something to do with it… staying up until 6am to re-read Hi Fidelity (as if that last monster-post could’ve been inspired by anything other than the first chapter) and folding up clothes so i could stay hidden within my air-conditioned room rather than the threatening humid mess of my living room. But, here i am, back in the humidity and mess and trying to seriously commit to packing something tonight … i’m not sure what or where i’ll put it, but it’ll get packed. But, anyhow, i don’t think i’ll miss this apartment much… it was never comfortable enough to be homey, even if it represented the reality of home. Check back with me on September2nd to see if i have anything to add to that.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5070059/

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Last night’s start stop rain versus humidity gave way to gray an drizzle today, much to my delight. So much heat all week was just piling more wear and grief onto me and onto the city with every day, and today wiped everything back down to the simple scent of cement and a breeze. With the city so cool and forgiving Hillary entertained my ambitions to get out and wander. We were on second street looking for a restaurant to preface seeing Ghost World, and somehow we wound up in Pagoda.

Pagoda occupies a place in so many simultaneous sentences in my head that i can hardly discern what order i’m supposed to write them in, so please excuse the tangle.

Pagoda is nestled in a restaurant-and-Ritz-theatre district that is Old City, so there are a lot of cobbly streets and things with “independence” in their name. In front of it there is some kind of tiny square about Ben Franklin (though it is not the Ben Franklin House, which is nearby), and in it is a tiny metal model of a historic house on a tiny podium. I saw the house all of the time, because Pagoda has just recently become Pagoda… it’s claustrophic bamboo-strewn space has experienced several incarnations in my lifetime. The restaurant to occupy the building for the longest time was Waldo’s… the same upstairs balcony with a low-flying view out the two-story front face of the building but with a marbly bar extending the entire length of the restaurant from front to back with the swingy doors to the kitchen at the end and a pinball machine tucked into the back corner.

I would sit tiny in those high chairs at the bar with a can of pineapple juice over ice and a bowl of chunky round bar pretzels watching football, because i was nearly always there on a Sunday. The surroundings and everything have melted away now so much that i believe that i really didn’t know anything about the place other than the doors and the balcony and the chair and the top of the bar and the teevee. And my father behind the bar; but, he’s not something i know all that well.

Any story i could tell you about Waldo’s would just be an iteration of “and then the Eagles scored” or “and then we played pinball,” but looking back i think it was the only place i’ve ever been where i have been unequivocally happy; time has wiped away all of the pouty bored pieces of it so they are just smudged pictures around me at the bar trying to teach my dad how to play football on gameboy (“What do you mean there’s not penalties?”) or making my typical assertions (“If the Eagles lose the the Cowboys on my birthday i’m never watching a game here again, okay dad?”) or something. My last memory was from down at the end of the bar at one of those Superbowls that Denver lost, but by then we were me and my dad and his wife and i only remember it was strange being there at night on a Sunday because visitation always was over by 7pm on a Sunday so my life could get orderly again for school the next day.

Splitting time between parents was a funny thing, because weekends with my father never got very much accomplished except for stealing me away from what i was used to, and we never went anywhere because i always was back at home by sundown on a Sunday with a kiss goodbye from his rough stubble. But, i did it nonetheless, from when he lived in a tiny apartment with fish and one of the other bartenders to the wife’s adorable splitlevel house in Andora to their home in BlueBell that is anything but that to me. And, now i don’t even really call him for father’s day, because i don’t have a strong enough association with the world, but i think of him whenever i hear doo-wop on the radio because of his silly high voice that i cannot really match, or when i am distractedly ignoring the Eagles lose. Or when i see where Waldo’s used to be.

So, Hillary entertained my buried sense-associations and we ate at Pagoda and i choked back some tears. It was raining, anyhow.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5038252/