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Personal

on fathers and borders

June 17, 2018 by krisis Leave a Comment

Here are some thoughts on Father’s Day (even though it isn’t Father’s Day in New Zealand until September.)

A year ago today our immigration process had just gotten underway. I would’ve told you it was difficult.

It wasn’t. It was complicated, but easy. We arrived in New Zealand as a family with a place to live, albeit a temporary one, and our belongings on the way.

Today, there are asylum-seeking people who walk into the US with everything they own and the first thing that happens is they lose their children.

I cannot stop thinking about it. We’re the same – parents looking for a better life for their children. I had more privilege to wield and more support, but there’s fundamentally nothing different about EV and I compared to the children being torn away from their parents at the borders of America.

I have made a lot of difficult, life-altering choices in the past five years for the sake of being a parent – choices I would have never made before a child existed in my life. Every one was so she could gain access to some aspect of life, some aspect of happiness, that I was not afforded.

To think that there are parents out there making harder choices, ones motivated by the realities of violence and poverty, and that the first thing that happens to them in the United States is that they experience persecution and having their families shattered – possible irrevocably shattered… [Read more…] about on fathers and borders

Filed Under: thoughts

suddenly September

May 20, 2018 by krisis Leave a Comment

Last week, many music fans sneered at Taylor Swift’s country-tinged cover of Earth Wind & Fire’s “September.” EW&F’s original was suddenly sacrosanct and not to be covered – and especially not with banjos! How dare she!

There is a prevailing trend in music fandom and cultural commentary right now to dismiss any acoustic cover of a pop, R&B, or rap song as minimizing the impact of the original or whitewashing it in a generic way.

While I recognize that there is an amount of inherent bias in people only enjoying a song once it has been covered by a white singer on an acoustic instrument, the idea of summarily discarding all such covers seems wholly ignorant of the power of music as an artform.

Before music existing as recordings, it existed as sheet music and oral tradition. There was no concept of hearing the song “the way it was meant to be heard.” Yes, you could follow the marking in the transcription perfectly or exactly mimic the way that song was taught to you. But music was necessarily spread by reinterpretation.

This extended into the era of modern recorded music in the form of cover songs. In the Doo Wop era it was common for the same song to be recorded by multiple acts. The Beatles got their start covering R&B hits like “Please Mr. Postman” in a rock style. Later, Earth Wind & Fire had a massive hit covering The Beatles’ “Got To Get You Into My Life” in an R&B style (for the Sgt. Pepper’s movie). Both covers broadened the appeal of the originals without erasing their impact.

This process is rife with theft and appropriation, and I don’t mean to suggest that we’re worse off now that originating artists are able to receive and maintain attribution more readily. However, I think this new trend of sneering at “earnest” covers is a bad thing for music fans and critics alike.

The furor over Swift’s cover of “September” made me think about one of the most popular songs of all time: Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” … which is exponentially more known as a Whitney Houston song.

As with “September,” both versions of the song are recognizable as the same work with the same inherent structure. Houston’s version strips the slide guitars of the original and adds in many tired R&B and soft-jazz tropes that are the equivalent of a country banjo. She also lengthens notes and adds melisma.

Houston used the good bones of the song to broaden its existing appeal. In that case, the broadened appeal was to bring the song first to a R&B audience, and then to the wider pop audience. Nothing about her cover lessened the original or erased its impact (and made Dolly Parton a TON of money).

Many people discovered Dolly Parton through that cover. I discovered Nicki Minaj through Karmin’s cover of “Super Bass.” Some kids today will discover Earth Wind & Fire through Taylor Swift’s cover of “September.”

And you know what? Others won’t.

Some people – me included – just dig acoustic guitar and piano covers and have little use for more produced originals of *any* genre.

That’s fine.

There is nothing inherently “better” or sacred about an original or grander arrangement of a song, just as there is nothing inherently better about playing a song on an acoustic instrument. If the song itself is good (rather than just the arrangement), it will still be good performed in any medium, from electropop to acappella.

And what if someone says, “I never liked that song until I heard Swift cover it acoustically”? Is that such a bad thing?

Maybe they don’t like male falsetto voices. Maybe they don’t like squalling horns. Maybe they just connect with Taylor Swift. I heard elements of the lyrics and chord progressions in the Swift cover that I never once heard in dozens (if not hundreds) of listens to the original. I unironically love it. It made me appreciate the song more.

The entire resistance to whitewashed acoustic covers is itself a cover. While the original argument was one about how white singers and people who play their own instruments got extra validation for their work compared to black artists or people who don’t play instruments, that has trickled down to “Chad and Becky should never cover that Beyoncé song.”

I think that watered down argument is just as dangerous as people who feel Beyoncé doesn’t deserve to win awards because she isn’t the sole songwriter of her music. You can decide not to like the “Chad and Becky” cover as your own cover of a very valid cultural critique, but there is nothing inherently broken, wrong, or impermissible about them covering the song.

Music is unique as an artform because it so readily invites mimicry by even the most untrained performer, and at this time stringed instruments and pianos are the most readily available means of reproduction other than the human voice.

To the banjo players of the world, I say: cover all of the classic R&B your little pickin’ fingers can pluck!

And to all of the music fans in the world, I say: love what you love, but when it’s a cover be willing to interrogate why you love it more than the original.

Filed Under: thoughts Tagged With: appropriation, Earth Wind and Fire, Taylor Swift

RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 10 Power Rankings, Episode 02 – PharmaRusical

March 31, 2018 by krisis 1 Comment

This week the 13 queens of Drag Race split into two teams to perform a musical parody of outrageous pharmaceutical advertisements. It’s a weird challenge that brings to mind the early seasons of the show, when challenges were deliberately ridiculous and meant to poke fun at the absurdity of other reality programs.

Slotting a straight-up performance challenge (complete with choreography from Drag Race All Stars alumnae Alyssa Edwards) after a classic design challenge really shakes up our ranking! Only a single queen holds on to her spot from last week’s ranking and ten of our girls wind up with an average between 6 and 10, which shows just how much the tables have turned from last week.

All right, readers – start your engines. And may the best woman … win! [Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 10 Power Rankings, Episode 02 – PharmaRusical

Filed Under: thoughts Tagged With: drag, RuPaul's Drag Race, RuPaul's Drag Race Season 10

Batwoman Book Club, Week 1 of 4: Detective Comics #854-863

March 10, 2018 by krisis 3 Comments

After some technical difficulties earlier this week, I’m proud to present the first week of our Batwoman Book Club!

The format of this round of Book Club is slightly different than the last two rounds. FanGirl and I are pre-recording our discussions rather than live-streaming, which allows me to do fun things like break the video into segments, insert the interior pages we mention, and occasionally turn FanGirl into an anime character with hearts for eyes.

This embed is the first of four parts of our Week 1 discussion – each video ends with a link to the next part.

This first week sees us covering Batwoman by Greg Rucka and JH Williams III in its entirety. It was Batwoman’s first solo story, and nearly a decade after its release it still feels like the pinnacle of superhero comics craft.

In our videos, we spend time discussing Batwoman identity as a lesbian, the color looks from Dave Stewart that separate the many parts of Batwoman’s life, why speaking entirely in Alice In Wonderland quotes can be a bad thing, and why you can get away with more tragedy as a writer when your characters have agency.

Want to catch up with the reading assignments all this month? Here’s our full schedule for the month – visit the Guide to Batwoman to learn how to collect these issues.

  • Tuesday, March 6: Detective Comics (1937) #854-863
  • Tuesday, March 13: Batwoman (2011) #0 & 1-11
  • Tuesday, March 20: Batwoman (2011) #12-24 & 0
  • Tuesday, March 27: Detective Comics (2016) #934-940 & 948-949 + Batwoman (2017) Rebirth & #1-6

Filed Under: thoughts Tagged With: Batwoman, Batwoman Book Club, Book Club

Crushing Comics S01E076 – Absolute Sandman, Vol. 4

February 21, 2018 by krisis Leave a Comment

Today I mean to talk about Clue, but wound up sharing a story from my days of digging into eCommerce data at RJMetrics. Then, I open my final Absolute-sized tome, Absolute Sandman Volume 4, and talk about knowing when (and how) to end things.

Want to start from the beginning of this season of videos? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.

Episode 76 features The Absolute Sandman, Volume 4.

Filed Under: thoughts Tagged With: Absolute editions, Clue, DC Comics, Neil Gaiman, Sandman, Vertigo

The Glorp

February 15, 2018 by krisis

Imagine that there is a scary beast native to your area. The Glorp.

The Glorp is an important part of the food chain. It’s actually part of your culture to respect it. There are more and more Glorps every year, and they are only legal to hunt in very limited situations. Having that many Glorps running unchecked is wreaking havoc with the environment.

The Glorps are starting to show up in town. While they don’t naturally prey on humans, in some situations they can be violent towards people. People have died.

For a long time, many people say, “There’s no doing anything about it. You know the Glorps are sacred.”

When the first feasible Glorp Control Plan is proposed, those people say, “There are so many Glorps, how can we possibly stop them from killing people?! Even getting rid of SOME of them won’t make a dent.”

When you try to reason with them, they insist, “Just be careful of Glorps. Honestly, the Glorps also attack each other, so having Glorps around is sometimes the best deterrent to other Glorps being violent towards people. If you see something, say something.”

Finally, due to overwhelming popular opinion, local government authorizes a Glorp hunt to legally thin the population down to the 20% mark. The Glorps won’t be endangered at all at the 20% mark, and there are rules about the size of Glorps that can be hunted.

After a long, difficult period, the Glorp hunt is a success! There are far fewer Glorps and now there is a Glorp breeding control program in effect. Of course Glorps are still dangerous. Glorps are scary beasts. But, now they are functioning appropriately as a part of the food chain. They aren’t showing up everywhere.

One day, a few months later, a Glorp does wander into town, and it kills several people. The details are unclear right now. It could be that it was one of those small ones that wouldn’t have been hunted. It’s very tragic.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

Do you think the Glorp hunt should have never occurred since it didn’t get rid of this recent killer Glorp?

Since the Glorps are culturally important, should Glorps have been left to multiply unchecked?

If the majority of people in town told the government they were okay with some check on the Glorps and half the government did nothing, how should the people have responded?

Glorps started showing up disproportionately at schools, killing about half a class of children every 3-5 school days. Prior to the hunt, should children have simply been homeschooled if their parents were concerned about their safety due to Glorps?

Occasionally, Glorps would show up and kill people at movie theatres, clubs, and concerts, despite anti-Glorp safety measures. Would you continue going to those places, knowing a Glorp attack could happen? How would you take measures against becoming a Glorp victim?

Filed Under: thoughts

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