Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

childhood

30 for 30 Project, 1989: “Love Will Never Do (Without You)” – Janet Jackson

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I sometimes forget the power of music as a collective experience.

Weirdly, I cannot tell you the main body of this story just yet – not until we get to 1993 or ’94, as that’s where it rightfully belongs.

What I can tell you is that music has always been one of my primary obsessions. When I was in grade school I brought my soft-covered 24-cassette case with me everywhere, which landed me in hot water at my religious school when the teachers saw song titles like “Love Shack” and “Like a Virgin.” I had the collection confiscated on school trips more than once.

In grade school no one really shared my obsession. The only music anyone was obsessing over was New Kids On the Block, and all the boys were distracted by their Transformers and Nintendo. No one wanted to talk about the music I liked, other than when Paula Abdul released the “Opposites Attract” video with the cartoon cat. As a result, I never listened to that late-80s music as a collective experience. The songs disappeared when my tape collection went extinct.

One of the tapes I played in the ground and then lost to time was Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814, released 22 years ago next Monday. Janet had a way of being constantly eclipsed by her brother and Madonna. Songs from Rhythm Nation came out on the heels of the final singles from Bad, went head to head with songs from Like a Prayer as well as “Vogue,” and was closely followed by Dangerous.

(Watch me cover “Love Will Never Do (Without You)” on YouTube. For more info on my 30 for 30 Project, visit my intro post or view the 30for30 tag for all of the related posts.)

Yet, moreso than the other three LPs, it’s Janet’s release that is the cohesive work of genius (and that says nothing of her memorable videos). Think of the singles from Rhythm Nation, chief among them the sheer audio joy of “Love Will Never Do (Without You),” and its negative echo “Miss You Much.” The slate is rounded out by “Rhythm Nation,” “Escapade,” “Alright, “Come Back to Me,” “Black Cat,” and “State of the World.” Yes, the album charted eight of twelve songs (it also had eight interludes).

How did I forget about these songs for over a decade? Why don’t we collectively treat this album like the inarguable classic it is?

Ever since I left my grade school, one of the major defining features of my friends is the music we have in common. I have always said when it comes to choosing my friends I don’t care about race, age, gender, sexual orientation, or even political leanings – as long as they have good taste in music.

How appropriate, then, that Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” was about a country united under a common beat.

Social Media has only amplified that instant bonding over music. Videos on Facebook walls, #MusicMonday on Twitter – people wear their obsession like a badge. Now, over twenty years later, I’m meeting the kids who were obsessed with Janet Jackson in 1988. Finally, I’m hearing “Love Will Never Do (Without You)” through the ears of others, as well as my own.

I’m finally having a collective experience with the music of the late 80s.

(“Love Will Never Do” charted in 1990-91, but it was released on Rhythm Nation in 1989 and I had it memorized well before it was out on the radio. Its primary competition for my project came from singles on Forever Your Girl and Like a Prayer. Arcati Crisis’s song from 1989 would surely be from the B-52’s Cosmic Thing.)

How to succeed at (the (video) game of) life.

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My life is a lot like a video game, and this blog is a lot like my life, because this blog talks about my life and thus resembles it.

(My musical other half Gina debates the topic of life being like a video game in a song, asserting that “there’s no extra lives, you don’t get big from a magic mushroom, and you don’t find coins in an underground room,” but let’s leave that argument aside for a moment.)

The timeless style of the Red Mage

I remember the first Final Fantasy, for Nintendo. It was my (and millions of others’) first exposure to the concept of an RPG. Sure, older kids had played some D&D by 1987, but that was the demonized (heh) occupation of confirmed nerd. FF brought that nerd-dom to the spoiled kids who already had their own NES.

(Nope, no bitterness there.)

In the original Final Fantasy each character was an archetype: Fighter, Thief, Black Belt, White Mage, and Black Mage. That meant you were good at that one thing, and mostly that one thing only.

The exception was the Red Mage. He could cast black and white magic, plus fight a little. Oh, and he was styling with a long coat and a pimp-hat.

This seemed like the perfect solution to six-year-old me (and probably a lot of other people, too) – why waste time with characters who are only good at one thing if you could have one that’s good at three? Why not just have a party full of Red Mages?

Of course, game developers realized this, and so the Red Mage wasn’t quite as kick-ass as we had hoped. He could fight, but not as well as the Fighter. He could cast spells, but not as advanced as the White and Black Mages. A party full of them would rock at the easy levels, but probably wouldn’t stand a chance in the end-game.

In effect, game developers rewarded specialization. The jack of all trades wound up the master of none. Also, he had a branding problem – we called him a “red” mage, but wasn’t he more like a grey mage that could also hit stuff?

(The myth of a character that’s good at fighting and hurling powers from a distance continues in video games to this day, called a “Tank Mage.”)

Maybe six-year-old me liked the Red Mage so much because I was a Red (Tank) Mage. I was good at science and math, strong at writing and social studies, and eventually on stage in plays. I’ve always delighted at being self-sufficient, which meant being good at everything.

A decade ago if asked to describe my strongest skill in one sentence, none of my friends would have answered with the same “Peter is/does [x].” I didn’t have a brand. I went on my merry way, doing everything, but I wasn’t the greatest at any of it.

That’s the story of my blog, too.

November is Na[tional] Blo[g] Po[sting] Mo[nth], a month which challenges us to blog daily. It sounds easy, but you have to maintain it through Thanksgiving! And, in some years, through getting engaged to your wife!

This year for NaBloPoMo I’m trying something a little different. I’m branding Crushing Krisis. Up above us my tagline reads:

The collected crushes of Philly singer-songwriter Peter Marinari
(The longest-running blog in Philadelphia, est. 2000)

I’m setting an expectation – this blog is not a Red Mage. It’s about the things I love the most, Philly, and being a musician.

So, this month it’s going to be exactly that. And, just like a video game, I get a new chance at it every day.

Take that, Gina.

Comfort Films

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I’ve been watching Star Wars for days.

Lest you wonder, “You mean, instead of going to work?,” allow me to explain: I’m home sick for the second day in the row – a relative rarity for me.

I’ll spare you the details and state simply that I’ve been relatively couchbound for over forty-eight hours, aside from when the constant heavy knocking on doors up and down my block (which I have begun to attribute to daytime drug deals), drove me to sloth up to the bed (there only having to contend with barking dogs).

My non-sleeping couch time has been spent watching Star Wars: A New Hope. Not the ooky remastered version. No. The original, unretouched theatrical cut that comes as a bonus in the box set.

I haven’t made it through it awake a single time, yet.

When I was home sick as a child – as sick as I have been this week – the Beta machine was my only comfort. On it my mother had amassed copies of every possible children’s show or movie shown on VHF, UHF, or HBO from 1981 forward. Muppet Movies, The Last Unicorn, Flight of Dragons, Here Comes the Grump, Neverending Story, Dark Crystal, and many more that I can’t remember at the moment.

And Star Wars

Being sick in college wasn’t the same. When you’re sick you just want something you like. You want comfortable clothes, comfort ford, and comfort films. I’ve seen hundreds of movies since then, but none really qualify (save for maybe Lord of the Rings – we did have a tape of The Hobbit, after all).

Having heard my stories of being home sick, E started buying me those movies on my first birthday when we were dating. We’ve continued to fill in the gaps over the years. Having just recently acquired the Star Wars Original Trilogy, all that remains outside of my grasp are the Muppet Movies.

I know this is ridiculous, but I don’t think I would have gotten better so quickly without Star Wars. It kept me couched and calm, intermittently napping – just like it did twenty years ago. Only now in my more mobile state am I interested in modern fare.

Do you have any comfort films?

Spike Jonze knows Where the Wild Things Are

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Ain’t It Cool News posted a monstrous, wide-ranging interview with director Spike Jonze, mostly focusing on his unusually organic approach to filming the Maurice Sendak classic Where the Wild Things Are.

If you’ve kept up with the gossip on this flick you know it was originally scheduled for release this holiday season, but its debut is now slated for next year. Was there any truth to the story floated that early test footage was flat and lifeless? The interview says “maybe,” but qualifies that by divulging intriguing details about the process of editing the performance of their child star and creating individual personalities for each of the Wild Things.

Jonze is a master craftsman, and each of the stories that unravel during the interview are fascinating – from his holistic approach to special effects to taking turns with Katherine Keener standing-in as an 8-year-old boy, and his idea to promote the film by having kids talk about their feelings (rather than hawking toys at Burger King).

Fantastic long-form journalism.

Imagine There’s No Heaven

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.