Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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The coolest part of finishing a Demo each spring? Getting to write new liner notes once a year! As i walked home from the studio tonight i was already mentally listing all of the people i’d be thanking, and i just jotted down a rough draft. So, maybe i’m getting a little ahead of myself, but it’s like writing an acceptance speech for the Oscars when you’re the underdog: you probably won’t win, but it feels good just knowing you’ve taken the time to single out all the people that mattered to your work.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/03/2910631/

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Damn, that post took about as long to get right as “Under My Skin” did today. Obviously my brain is fried… or perhaps we tripped my “perfectionist” switch at some point today. If that’s the case, someone really ought to turn it off. (postscript: Of course, in classic fashion, none of the changes i made to the post are there anymore, and i’m not making them all over again. So much for that perfectionist theory…)

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/03/2851180/

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

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Matt and I just cleaned. The whole process is really an exercise in futility because i know for a definite fact that i have more stuff than we have room to put it. Despite having thrown out two trash bags worth of discarded handouts and totally reorganizing my bookshelf the overwhelming lack of space remains an inescapable fact of my life. It’s likely that i could live in an apartment where all the walls were lined with shelves and i still would have a pile of something on the floor. However, it would be a smallish pile of something unimportant, which is why shelves turn me on so much.

Semi-pornographic obsessions with furniture aside, the apartment is clean right now. Clean. Saving me from celebrating in any fashion (perhaps through sleep?) there’s also easily my weight’s worth of miscellany covering the whole of my bed, which i’ll obviously have to displace in order to sleep tonght. I have repeatedly bemoaned my unescapable bulk of possessions, but i haven’t ever addressed why i own what i own. Frankly, i’m obsessed with material things; I wish i could just have some massively easy catchall mechanism to organize every little scrap of paper and ball of fluff that i want to keep. Sadly there is no mechanism available to me that would do just that, and i’m not nearly organized enough to be able to make good use of it.

My material possessions fall into three categories: things i use or might use, thinks i need or might need, and things i can’t throw out. The first category includes things like my entire cd, book, and comic book collections, which i could easily condense down so that they would fit onto my shelf space (but what would be the fun of that?). The second category includes clothing, half of which just endlessly sits in my drawers hopelessly relegated to being the bottom layer (and with no rhyme or reason, so that some of my favourite clothes fall out of rotation for months at a time because they were the first ones i folded after doing the wash). The third category features the aforementioned balls of fluff and also includes paperclips, half used pencils, and playbills from every play i’ve been a part of or seen. I generally wouldn’t mind throwing out everything that fits into this category, but generally i’m afraid to because all of it is is marginally useful or important in that way where it’s never actually useful or important.

Today fit into that last category, by the way. And i can’t even end it by going to sleep on my own damned bed.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2000/12/1696365/

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I have this very irrational (yet, highly rational) fear of contracting Oral Herpes. This started out as a sort of joke at parties – an excuse not to share pieces of pizza and drinking glasses with other people. As the years progressed my little rule evolved into my golden rule: The only people i’ll share anything with are people i would lock lips with anyhow. My friends all think i’m insane, of course. What most people don’t realize is that Herpes is the most prevalent sexually transmitted infection, only it isn’t just transmitted sexually. Anytime someone has a cold sore and they kiss you or share a drinking container with you, you run the risk of transmitting their infection. There is no cure for herpes. It is unsightly and easy to spot. It can weaken your immune system enough to allow other diseases to take advantage of you; by virtue of this trait is is known as a co-factor to AIDS/HIV. So, i might be overly paranoid, but my fear is not irrational. Anyhow, i hate sharing.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2000/12/1527158/