Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Not Dead, Just Floating

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February tends to be a pretty sparse month on CK, aside from the first two, whose blogging were fueled by infatuation with the Queen of Darkness and Elise, respectively.

Actually, February tends to be an infatuated month – a 28-day Fat Tuesday of topical gluttony – which is maybe why the blogging tends to drop off. In 2004 it was SongFight; last year, consuming media. 2006 was… being scruffy? I honestly couldn’t tell you.

I bring those three years up specifically, as they’ve dictated much of my month so far. The scruffiness aspect finally ended this morning, when I shaved off what I think (if we’re being fair) I can say was my first ever mustache. It was charming at first, and looked dashing in photos, but the prickliness of it finally got to me (just as Elise was claiming I had progressed past Brillo-pad stage, too; oh well).

The mustache was, in turn, indicative of my preoccupation with things other than self – as typically I am much too busy examining myself in the mirror to allow any such deviation from core residual self image – and those two things correspond to the other two years I mentioned above.

Like a square to a rectangle but not visa versa, SongFight is to Arcati Crisis. SongFight was perhaps the first time Gina and I masqueraded under our proper name, though we had certainly recorded together before as an entity. And, from our fours-years-ago SongFighting emerged “Moscow, Idaho,” which we played an utterly stunning version of on Saturday ever-so-shortly before my voice-losing escapade.

(“Moscow” is a curious story unto itself, but I’m saving a recap of that for when we have a better demo of the song.)

Like 2004’s before it, this February so far has been a very Arcati Crisis month. We performed three separate times, and this last one marked a major milestone that we just realized this morning: we’ve now played every one of our current songs in front of an audience. That’s sixteen tunes, which represents a nearly indescribable leap from last February when we knew just three or four.

In fact, with the exception of “Fisher Price” the songs which we now consider to be the most “solid” and “reliable” didn’t even exist as duo tunes this time last year – they were still relegated to the various demo discs and Blogathons from which they originated. Suddenly we find ourselves with thumb-twiddling time at rehearsals where we once were dreaming up new riffs to catalog tunes, and so far this month we’ve filled it with new songs and rehearsals with cello (!). Tomorrow we’ll be recording the few stragglers who haven’t yet made it onto one of our Live @ Rehearsal discs, and then I’ll be spending the rest of the month mixing.

I know that other bands have come farther in a shorter amount of time – after all, of those sixteen songs all had been written prior to 2007 – but I still can’t help but be infatuated with our progress.

Not just our progress, though – that’s an old-Peter model of infatuation, that restless addiction to revisiting a process and its product, rather than living in the present. This time I am actually infatuated with the present tense of us, and all that we are capable of. Could we have imagined in 1994 that one night we’d wind up on stage at Doc Watson’s a hair shy of last call with our friends bouncing and singing along to every word of our songs?

Well, maybe we could have, but in that mental image I probably still had my Spock haircut, which is not nearly as ravishing as the current one, AKA “Dean Winchester.”

Which, in retrospect, probably prompted the stubble.

Meanwhile, there is the aspect of 2007 that I am repeating – I’ve been very much absorbed in media consumption. It’s partially because I have been following the primary elections on various news sites, but really it’s just an input/output thing. I’m outputting riffs, harmonies, new songs, project plans, site maps, engagement party thank you notes – all manner of creativity. And if I don’t ingest and digest input from some other sources I’ll be left with nothing to output.

(Or, worse, I will return to my past-process addiction and just output recursive, painful feedback. Sort of like this post, but more shrill.)

(Okay, while we’re parenthetical already I just need to point out that I started talking about that whole input/output deal almost seven years ago, and at work we’re reading this horrific business book that I won’t even do the justice of name-checking, and it has a whole fucking chapter about how you need input in order to maintain output. Like, with a chart of a Pac-Man-esque circle eating and shitting information. I kid you not. So, yes, 20-year-old-me could teach this business guru a thing or two about a thing or two.)

(Any, mucho digression; do you see what February causes?)

My increased intake of media – particularly election coverage, which has been nigh-unavoidable the past few weeks – has re-awakened my love of media critique. Especially after nearly four years of freedom from the bonds of television I feel like I’m seeing messages for what they really are for the first time – often just inelegant, thinly-veiled agendas meant to obscure the actual meaning behind the message:

Disney loves to sell its girl-empowerment, but don’t look for it to offer a fair payout to the author behind one of its hugest properties, The Cheetah Girls.

Similarly, CNN trumpets its bottomless cadre of cell-phone equipped i-Reporters, but when one of their segment producers runs a hip, snarky blog that gets too opinionated he is promptly fired.

And, in perhaps my favorite example, our favorite brand names and supermarkets re-purposed plain old oats in increasingly portable and nutrionless forms until we are paying dozens of dollars on the pound for curiously un-oat-ish cereal bars, with MILK INCLUDED (TM).

I’m not sure if the sudden transparency is coming from me, or coming from the internet, or coming from the world at large having finally gone in for a look at its cataracts, but I’m loving it.

And, with ten days left to go, that is my February, so-far.

Razor’s Dull Edge

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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.

This Ain’t a Scene, It’s My Goddamned Home Town

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I could seriously maintain a blog just about Rolling Stone‘s declining credibility.

Despite occasional highlights, I usually have a hard time deciding on my least favorite element of each issue. Is the the bland new layout that completely eschews RS‘s quirky sense of design? Is it the complete lack of attention to cutting edge music or film, often in favor of a retrospective cover article that displaces a much better piece of writing? Is it the seemingly random array of irrelevant cover stars and the unimaginative photographs that document them?

Usually I go with “All of the Above,” but this issue was extra-special – RS’s annual Hot List (usually a summer issue, but I guess Guns & Roses was a more relevant cover topic at the time).

In general the Hot List was filled with boring stuff that I heard about three months ago, but one article especially made me laugh: Hot Scene – Philadelphia. (1MB JPG / 2MB PDF)

Riiiiight.

First of all, we’re certainly not the hottest scene in the country; I’d wager to say we’re not even in the top five. I could have maybe bought this designation if they focused on how World Cafe Live seems to have reinvigorated the city’s local concert scene over the past few years, but they seem to have chosen us based on the logic that our low rent allows musicians to craft their sound without having to hold down a day job.

Um, what? Maybe RS was mostly hanging out in the Great Northeast (thus the highlight of Johnny Brenda’s), but otherwise their low-rent thesis is pretty much an outright lie.

Also, though they ever-so-briefly mention AKA – a legitimate hot-pick – they prominently feature aphoto of The Last Drop coffee shop, which was already old and lame ten years ago when Gina stopped playing open mics there due to all of the creepy men that would flirt with her if she did a Neil Young cover.

Aside from the dozens of other shops they could have highlighted in Philadelphia proper, the obvious choice would seem to be Milkboy Coffee in Ardmore, which is as unavoidable at The Point was a few years ago, but with even more music.

In the 90s The Last Drop was full to the brim with pseudo-artistic posers and the trash (and high school students) who were desperately in love with them. As actual music fans we didn’t usually fit in.

Maybe that’s just the point; ten years later and that’s Rolling Stone’s target audience to a tee, isn’t it? I mean, we’re talking about a magazine with Kid Rock on its cover.

Could We Be Heroes

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In eighth grade I started writing the story that would eventually give me my longtime internet handle: Crisis.

It was half a high school drama and half a superhero comic, paralleling puberty with the onset of special powers that brought with them the life and death choices of adulthood.

I wrote and re-wrote the story endlessly. Sheaths of handwritten pages, endlessly revised files on my first word processor, and an infamous purple binder in which I worked in parallel on a sequel novella, allowing Gina to read it once a week in the back of Health class.

I never finished Crisis Team on paper; it mostly existed as a narrative daydreamed in slow moments of class and long waits at the bus stop. Still, I knew every beat of the story, and how they broke down across every chapter. If someone had sat me down at a keyboard for a week I could have typed it in a single unbroken string of sentences.

Then came Gen 13.

I can’t even remember why I ordered it at the time, but when I cracked the first issue I realized that Crisis was over before it was finished – Gen 13 copped my entire storyline almost beat for beat, and it did it’s job very well.

It was too late to change the core concept of my story. all I could do was rewrite and revise and hope to transcend our shared archetype to create something more distinct.


For the past year I’ve been reading breathless media coverage of Heroes, and how it is the next generation of television, way better than 4400, and a comic fan’s wet teevee dream.

I admit, I let my hopes get slightly up as details of the plot saturated the media and eventually leaked to me through magazines. The Wolverine/Cheerleader wakes up from an autopsy. The Japanese Nightcrawler learns how to use a sword.

It all sounded fascinating.

Now that we’ve Netflixed the DVDs my hopes are proven to have been in vain. I can’t detect anything beyond the mundane about the show, except for Mohinder’s hair. The best I can say for it is that it’s nice to watch so many standard comic archetypes being explored on screen. Not thrilling, or must-see. Just nice.

By contrast, Elise returned from her pre-Australia shopping trip to inform me that, so far, she loves it. She even powered through an extra four episodes while I was asleep and out at rehearsal.

I was annoyed for a moment by the disconnect; Elise and I share a perfectly tuned kismet sort of taste in sci-fi television shows from which we hardly ever deviate. The Pretender. Buffy. Alias The 4400. Battlestar Galactica.

A second later I was all caught up.

Elise is Gina in Health class, reading from my big purple binder. She can pick an X-Man out of a lineup, but she isn’t connected to the collective comics unconscious that stores all of those many standard stories – that place that Crisis and Gen 13 and Heroes draw their underlying structure.

I, unsurprisingly, am me, and in my mind Heroes is the same thing as Crisis – just a different medium spinning a familiar archetype.

Of course, you can argue that about almost any concept. Aren’t most of my songs just reconstituted versions of songs by other people? Haven’t I written this post about this feeling before?

What’s the difference?

The difference is the execution.

I kept rewriting Crisis, hoping that at some point my skillful execution would transcend my story.

I was hoping the same for Heroes, but it’s all archetype and no execution. The script is inert compared to Buffy (chosen one fights evil, fate) , the pace sluggish compared to The 4400 (people gain and struggle with powers, are discriminated against), and the acting pale in comparison to the revised Battlestar Galactica (original Battlestar Galactica crossed with Star Trek Voyager (original Battlestar Galactica)).

I was so hoping for something along the lines of that trio of shows – a done-to-death concept rendered thrilling through unusually outstanding execution. And, though Heroes has plenty of story, and plenty of network gloss, it’s that extra ingredient that’s lacking.

What if…

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If I was Britney Spears’ manager her big comeback would’ve went down a hell of a lot differently than the hot mess that graced the VMAs.

(First of all, that atrocious club single is not going to get her back to her bestselling days. They really should’ve got her a vocal coach and pitched a Britney unplugged with two new songs and followed up with a hybrid acousti-dance album, a la Madonna’s Music. But, too late for that…)

Spears VMAMy version of Britney’s performance would have started the same as Sunday’s – a mopey, slightly chubby, lip-sync-flubbing Brit Brit would emerge with her dancers and mime through a verse.

Then, when all looked dire (but not as dire as tonight’s performance), the song would start skipping, a la Milli Vanilli (or, for the younger crowd, Ashlee Simpson). Then the music would cut out, leaving a befuddled Britney staring into the crowd, helpless. Then, one of the male dancers would turn around and say the song’s opener, “It’s Britney, bitch.”

Suddently you would realize the dancer was her! But, instead of doing a strip-tease out of the suit (as she has in the past) she would just toss her hat to show off her crazy post-buzz hair at actual length and color, and proceed to just wail the song live without correction to the best of her ability while strutting around in a killer tailored suit.

The audacity of the emphasis on real hair and real vocals with less dancing and less skin would have left everyone’s jaws on the floor.

Honestly, I’d be good at this stuff. It’s a shame I’d prefer to get famous myself…