Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

consume

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There’s really no point in my buying books anymore. Or maybe there is. It’s gotten to the point where purchasing and reading a book nearly equates to buying and watching a movie; i should probably just rent either the first time to see if they’re worth the expense. Reading a book is now totally analogous to watching a movie for me; if i don’t get through all of it in a sitting or two i’m tempted to just give up on it, and if i like it a lot i’ll gladly go back to it as soon as time allows.


I don’t ever remember reading a book twice back-to-back. A book is the sort of thing you have to digest, and let swirl around in your brain until you reconcile it nicely. There’s no point in going back so soon to read each and every one of the words again. Reading is an experience controlled by the reader, and as much as i can stop at a sentence written in Italian to translate it word for word i can just as easily gloss past it as well as the boring chapter that follows. Movies don’t allow such a luxury; movies are a medium that the viewer has no power over. We have freeze frame, and rewind, but we can’t slow the action without distorting the medium in which the story is told

Or, maybe you don’t believe me and you’re pretty quick on the trigger with your slo-mo button. I just read approximately 1400 pages in four days and i’m wholly dissatisfied. 1400 is two days worth, at the most. Or, i could have sat down and watched the three movies back to back in under nine hours. Usually i’d say that i wouldn’t have appreciated them nearly as much that way, but this time i’m not so sure.

Quick and biased remarks on the novels of Thomas Harris: Red Dragon – 6/10, badly plotted and lacking suspense where it should possess it. Silence of the Lambs – 8/10, practically a shooting script and excellently constructed. Hannibal – 4/10, several hours of my life that wouldn’t have necessarily been spent better but that i’ll never get back either. It’s not necessary to read them sequentially, but you should at least watch Silence before reading Hannibal.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/02/2333682/

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I read too fast for my own damned good. Yesterday i decided to go on a smallish shopping spree with my credit card to see how close i could get to maxing it out without being rejected from purchasing something. In the madness, i hit Borders and picked up Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon and a sweet oversized edition of Silence of the Lambs. I’m not sure what suddenly spurred this in me, but recently my girlfriend’s roommate has been powering through Lambs, and i always meant to read it, and i sorta want to go see Hannible. So, i suppose the plan was to get through the two of them soon enough to buy a non-movie edition of Hannibal to read before i go see the flick in a weekend or two. Or, as it turns out, maybe this weekend.

First of all, you have to understand my unholy hatred of movie-edition paperbacks. I hate them. Hate them. While having the image of a main character to aid me in visualization is always helpful, i’ve endured too many ugly movie-photos like the ones on the covers of The Beach or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, both of which previously featured superb cover work. Even worse, the new edition of Hannibal doesn’t even use the creepy zombie-like picture of Anthony Hopkins from the movie posters – instead it substitutes some awful and nearly amusing picture of him preening with a large straw hat on. It isn’t too threatening.

Borders had two copies of the non-movie edition, but i didn’t want to get ahead of myself. Paperbacks cost quite a lot now ($8 for a paperback? Does anyone else miss the 90’s yet?), and i didn’t want to sink nearly $30 into three books that i might not even like. So, i bought Red Dragon so i could finally read it & Silence of the Lambs, which looks nice if nothing else. I finished the dense 450 page Dragon in under 20 hours of intermittent reading; started around 4pm yesterday and completed noon today with rehearsal, sleep, and class coming inbetween. I was proud of myself. I’ve been known to finish 500 page books in well under eight hours in the past, but i tend to lose my momentum when i don’t read a large book all in a single sitting.

So far my impression is that Thomas Harris is a tremendous writer but a nearly equally inconsistent author who relies on too many plot devices and explicit histories in the place of actual suspense and horror. Much as in the movie of Silence of the Lambs, where you become excited by the chase rather than the whodunnit, this novel reveals the killer early on and becomes a book as much about him as about the protagonist (who’s a much better character). The protagonist is vivid, logical, and entangles himself and the reader frighteningly deep into each murder. On the other hand, the killer’s history is boring, contrived, evokes little pity, and surprisingly does nearly nothing to set the reader up for his near schizophrenic behaviour near the end of the novel. In fact, the book took a downturn as soon as it dropped the pretense and mainly focused on the murderer. And, i’ll never look at dentures the same way again.

Lambs is 350 pages in super-oversized soft-cover format, and it looks to be a bit more firmly put-together than Dragon. And, of course, it has a lot more of Hannibal Lecter in it. One thing i’ll hand to Harris as an author is that he crafted the ultimate chiller of a villain in Hannibal; in his new forward to the first novel he portrays the writing of Lecter’s first scene as though he viewed it from a corner where he was huddled in fear the entire time, fending off the urge to bolt out the door as well as the cackling of other inmates in the asylum. His description of writing Hannibal seems apropos, because i would hardly expect someone to deliberately conjure this sort of killer from the depths of their own imagination. A monster is hard to create, and much easier to develop in small strides as he crawls into the cracks of your psyche and makes you scared to even write him. Lecter definitely had that effect on his author, and now i can hardly wait to get Silence of the Lambs out of the way so i can run back to Borders tomorrow to buy a lovely copy of Hannibal.


Who knows, i might even wind up seeing it this weekend…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/02/2296596/

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Matt’s amp is buzzing. To get any kind of volume out of it you have to turn up the Gain knob, which distorts the signal a little and leaves you with this constant amplifier hum. It feels expectant, as thought some rock band’s big sound is going to come crashing out of the amp any second in a tidal wash of big guitars and growling bass, but really it’s just me sitting on the floor trying desperately to read sheet music from the Bass Cleff of a Tori Amos book.

The apartment is otherwise empty. I did a lot of wash yesterday, so the bedroom looks somewhat organized. In here is another story … everything scattered – papers, cds, jackets, shoes. It’s really the fault of this weekend; i didn’t spend much quality time with the apartment this weekend. Saturday night Drexel had their homecoming dance and i have this single glowing picture of me with a tie tied around my head as though i was some kind of savage, sweating like a horse and smiling madly. I love to dance, that’s all there is to it.

It took me fifteen years to learn how to do the mashed potato correctly. I’m not sure that the learning curve is so steep … i think instead i had to spend time learning all sorts of other little rhythmic pieces of the puzzle before i could put it all together. A decade and a half is a long time to have spent doing anything. I’ve been in school for fifteen years now… i’ve been out of my first house for fifteen years… i’ve had my Thundercats for fifteen years. it’s funny, i only have a decade on my closest cousin and he won’t ever know the same things i knew as a child. Thundercats, GI Joes, Madonna, George Michael, Casey Kasem’s countdown, Johnny Carson, Ronald Regan, the Gulf War … all of those things are vivid emotional and psychological building blocks of my life.

I’m the only one of my cousins that will remember my Grandmother. My nine-year-old cousin Dale wouldn’t have any memories of her active and laughing since he was five or younger, and all of my other cousins are only four. I’m the youngest person in the family to know her; we spent hours sitting at her kitchen table playing solitaire, lying on her living room floor watching Golden Girls every week, eating Golden Grahams before i got picked up by my carpool on the way to middle school. Last night i was on the phone to my mother and she reminded me how long my father’s mother had been in a managed care facility … time had shrunk it down to only a year, but she was out of her own home months before we left my home of sixteen years in SouthWest Philly (which she owned).

That was almost three years ago. It’s been a long time since i’ve sat and played solitaire with her, but to me it doesn’t really seem so expansive. She’d always get up and dance when she won… singing “Let the Good Times Roll” and dancing around the kitchen. I eventually learned to jitterbug so i could join her, but by then it was too late.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/01/2182260/

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A quick check of Patti’s website reveals that two decent songs were indeed booted from the record to make room for some of the newer material. I pray that i’m just having a terrible day, and that this record will rock my socks off tomorrow, but i doubt it (seeing as i even managed to listen to my demo cd today, which usually bugs the hell out of me). Indicator of the problem at hand? Producer: Freddie Katz. Front Cover Photo: Freddie Katz. I’m not sure why Patti would want someone else so involved in her music after making such a stunning solo debut, unless she’s fucking the guy. The woman’s a genius and she played every damn guitar on her first album, leave her alone!

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/01/1936804/

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In a continuation of the trend of women from the Alanis Era just now releasing some dubious second efforts, today i opened my mailbox to find a padded envelope from Patti Rothberg‘s management containing a copy of her new Candelabra Cadabra. Patti was (by far) my favourite of her ilk (also including Joan Osborne & Tracy Bonham), and i’ve held out hope for a spectacular second effort for years now. My first disappointment came when Patti was dropped from her label a few years back though she had recorded a “promising” disc tentatively titled My Name is Angus. Apparently this project got flushed as Patti dropped off the radar for another couple of years before resurfacing with her own domain name and acoustic shows throughout the Northeast Corridor. I attended one and was encouraged… Patti played a crop of wry new songs intermingled with her classics and was in good humour. The only down point was the presence of her overbearing and totally awful new sideman, Freddie Katz. Freddie played his guitar too hard, sang badly, and generally detracted from Patti’s overall presentation. He looked like a pirate with his hoopy earring and his black jeans. I think he might have been drunk (whereas Patti just managed to douse her guitar with Corona when she tried to get the lime to sink).

A sleek vinyl single was released at the same time as her new shows and it was terrific. It showed great sonic evolution while retaining the biting wit that makes Patti’s songs so unique. However, well over a year later her long-awaited second disc is nothing but disappointment. Gone are the fluttering acoustic guitars and clear but throaty lyrics, replacing with wanna-be indy-gal posturing and overly loud electric guitar played by good ol’ Freddie. A cover of the Bowie classic “Moonage Daydream,” boppy “Dish It Out,” and the charmingly cynical character in “Wry It Girl” are nearly the sole high points on this dismal effort which doesn’t once manage to display words or noises that hearken back to the genius i was expecting. And, lest you think that my comparative criticism is unfair, you should know that i would have never touched this album if i didn’t already like Patti … everything from the campy gothic lettering to the murky red photo on the back of the booklet screams “bargain bin” and the music doesn’t do much otherwise.

I hope beyond all hopes that the album grows on me, because it sincerely hurts me to not like it. Some of these songs were fresh and new in concert, but these arrangements and production values have a stranglehold on their livelihood. I hope that Patti and her album find the right audience and i wish her continued success, but i’m not sure i’ll be shelling out $16 to be a part of it next time…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/01/1936715/