Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

Track-by-Track: Lady Gaga’s Joanne – “Diamond Heart” (Track 01)

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lady-gaga-joanneI’ll be dissecting Joanne song by song every day until November, when I debut some much bigger daily content!

Lady Gaga has never quite recovered from the sophomore success of the stunning Fame Monster EP in 2009. Born This Way had a handful of strong singles but was manic and didn’t have legs. ArtPop found a deliciously dirty synth sound but brought too few good songs along with it.

Her new LP Joanne is a step in the right direction, and that step is discarding the idea that Lady Gaga must always equal synth pop. It was an unwinnable equation that left her stranded on a shrinking island of radio play. Even the keyboards of the first tune on the record quickly give way to a sizzling live band sound that currently works just as well on pop or rock radio.

Opener “Diamond Heart” vibrates with the warm, fuzzy, analog sound of electric piano. Gaga plays it loosely, which pairs well with her live-sounding, unprocessed lead vocal. This goes beyond the sparse opening measures of “Marry The Night” to sound like something vintage. If “Speechless” was Gaga’s take on The Beatles “Something,” this might be her version of Linda Ronstadt. “Some asshole broke me in,” she sneers, “rag-dolled my innocence. I’ll just keep go-go-ing this dance for you.”

A tangle of electric drums break the throwback spell and drag us to the present day before everything drops away but Gaga’s voice, though the transitional phrase of “Young wild American, come on baby, do you have a girlfriend” seems wasted on the sudden focus, with the actual refrain shoved into the back half of the chorus. “I might not be flawless, but you know I’ve got a diamond heart,” she proclaims, inserts a slurred interval leap in the middle of “diamond” (the only big ascending jump in the chorus).

It definitely feels like this song came from a pair of disparate elements – the coming-of-age travelogue “Young Wild American” which could have been a solo ballad, and the stormy “Diamond Heart” which could have easily been a part of an earlier stage of “Perfect Illusion.” Both concepts are strong, but the two don’t especially match up. You can hear the creaking of gears every time the song transitions from one to the other.

Even if it’s not Gaga’s most coherent tune, it’s still a bracing opening salvo on her first solo album in three years . It rocks as hard as anything she’s released previously, and the live vibes, guitars, and drums are a good portent for the rest of the album.

Chords to play this song after the jump: [Read more…] about Track-by-Track: Lady Gaga’s Joanne – “Diamond Heart” (Track 01)

accumulate

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Last week on one of our trips to the library EV had to hold on to my belt loops rather than my hands to cross the parking lot because I was juggling a massive box of books to donate.

In it were books that E and I have been carrying around since college – over a decade now! Textbooks, college literature, and pleasure reading that has been forgotten or fallen out of favor. They travelled from our separate apartments to our combined one, then to our house on Greenwich Street, and now here to the suburbs, never once cracked open in all that time.

It never felt like we had a lot of stuff before we moved to this house. I’m not sure if it was because we didn’t have the space for it or because we were better at hiding it all.Or, perhaps it’s that we’ve given up a third of our physical space and much more of our time to the tiny third human now rooming with us. Likely some combination of the three..

I used to scoff at the idea of someone who needed to clean out their attic or garage or basement – how could you have so much stuff in there that you needed to dedicate time to throwing it all away? Yet, earlier tonight I waded into our box-strewn attic to try to reclaim my recording space for upcoming projects.

There was barely room to take a step. When we first moved here six years ago the attic felt cavernous – so large you could hold a concert or install a bowling alley. Now it is cramped, a scene from hoarders, packed to the eaves on each side with boxes of comic books, CDs, instruments, sheet music, board games, and random knick knacks I have accumulated and not yet purged.

I managed to eliminate six entire boxes from the hoard, consolidating three boxes of print samples from my old Creative Services job down to one (do I need five copies of a 2010 individual health care plans booklet?), mercilessly eliminating items from boxes marked “computer errata” (a spare copy of my original 1999 demo encoded at the wrong speed – was I hoping it would become a collectors item?), and combining several boxes of books (perhaps communications history books and grammar guides can share a space?).

Now there is room to breath in the attic – though still not enough to record. Eventually I’ll run out of obvious trash to dispose of and get down to the harder choices… books that I’ve read and still love, board games we play but not often, and stacks of handwritten revisions to lyrics.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about accumulation in this digital age. I have some friends who are notoriously sparse in what they allow into their homes, constantly pruning possessions back to a few favorites. I have further friends who eschew any physical item if they can have the digital version.

I don’t know how to get there. I’ve wanted so many things for so long that just now my urge to possess is starting to feel sated. Now the constraint is not budget but space and, terrifyingly, time.

I’ve been working on a song about this feeling before EV was born. It’s never quite finished – just one more possession I’m hauling around, although this time it’s my mind that’s being weighed down. Now that I’m nearing a half year of spending time at home as a parent, I think it’s high time to start putting these things to use or discarding them.

Are we all that we accumulate
Because I don’t want to be defined
By melted liquor bottle chocolates
That fell behind my dresser
The night we thought we ought to eat them all at once
To see if we would get drunk

Am I a thousand paper backs with creases on the spine
And every Beatles record I have bought since I was nine

I don’t want to live alone
I don’t want to be a hermit crab
Carrying my possessions inside a shell
Winched onto my back
Moving to a larger home when I’ve outgrown the last

the twin challenges of reading and other children

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EV had a 36-hour runny-nosed cold yesterday and I’d really like to blame it on other children, but I refuse to let them take credit for all of the books we read together.

On Monday I finally went to the gym at the local YMCA, five months into this stay-at-home experiment that was supposed to be at least fractionally about getting back into the shape I was in five years ago. Going to the gym by day meant depositing EV into a kid’s playroom for the better part of an hour – something that has always given me pause.

I’ve met the director at the Y and would trust her chosen child-minders implicitly, plus the environment is a room filled with toys and books without a screen in sight. The pause comes from the children they are minding. I don’t know them or their manners or what vapid TV shows they watch or what their parents have been teaching them.

It’s tempting to assign this fear of other children to a yuppy millennial helicopter parenting, and I’m sure some portion of it has to do with that, but my fear of other children influencing EV comes from my own distaste for other kids growing up. I wanted no part of them and their messy, silly, rough ways. Even though I watched all the TV they did and played with a lot of the same toys, I never wanted to be associated with other kids. I didn’t even want to be one myself, which was an easy illusion to maintain as I hung out in bars with my father and went out to dinner with my mother.

I’m not trying to raise EV to be a mini-me or to have the same mistrust of her peers that I had – to this day it remains as an unhealthy habit of keeping my peers at arm’s length. Yet, when I see kids EV’s age who act up, always have their hands in their mouth, spout nonsense words, are picky with food, yell and screech, or play rough and imitate guns, I can’t help but sneer at them just as I did when I was a little kid. I don’t want EV to miss out on important peer interaction, but I don’t want her to think that behavior is the acceptable norm, either. You can be more of a kid than I was without being a terrible little snot-nosed monster.

So, I gritted my teeth and left her eagerly exploring the play room while I huffed and puffed and lifted weights for an hour. She was perfectly cheerful when I picked her up.

Four hours later every part of my body was sore from class and EV had a definite case of the sniffles. “It was those damned runny nosed play-room kids,” I raged over internet chat to E and Lindsay. To their eternal credit as my life-parter and BFF, respectively, they replied separately but in verbatim unison: colds don’t incubate in four hours.

In other words: cool your jets, helicopter pilot.

The sniffles continued into yesterday, which put a whammy on some of our plans – I didn’t want to be the asshole parent who brought a contagious kid to the playground. (This led to me trying to explain the concept of “contagious” to EV – I love that we’re in the explaining things phase of parenting). Instead, we made a return trip the library to pick up a new batch of books to read at home. There, the librarian talked us into joining their “1,000 Books Before Kindergarten Challenge.”

“We’re starting this a bit late,” I said, trying to dissuade her from signing us up.

“It’s plenty of time!” she responded cheerily as she began to copy EV’s information down onto a registration card. “Plus, you can always count re-reading the same book multiple times.

It was as if she said the magic words. I could feel OCD Godzilla revving up in the interior of my gut, sharpening his nails within my bile duct as he contemplated that most kids were doing a SELECT ALL instead of a COUNT DISTINCT when querying their book reading – the obvious tactics of a book challenge cheater.

Godzilla and I quickly did the math. We had 24 months until Kindergarten, which meant maintaining a solid clip of 42 new books a month to hit the mark. But that was barely a book a day! We easily did 5-6 even on a slow day, but those were repeats from our own collection. Surely we could do better with 26 branches of the Delaware County Library System at our disposal and me as a stay-at-home-parent.

“Let me ask you something,” I said, giving the librarian a sly sidewise smile, “what’s the fastest anyone has ever completed the challenge.”

We’ve read 30 books in the last 24hrs and have another 20 ready to pick up at the library tomorrow. Today we cleared off our entire bookshelf to begin plotting our path through re-reading them and logging them for the challenge – which, to EV, is like letting her loose in a candy store. I quickly tired of hand-entry on the challenge sheet and switched over to a database format that would also track durations and duplicate reads.

I think we can nail this thing down in less than 100 days.

on unsolicited compliments, and how little girls should respond to them

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I’ve written about the difference between me getting an unsolicited compliment and EV getting one, and about how she is not a princess.

What those two situations – and posts – have in common is me responding on EV’s behalf, which has been my habit since she was pre-verbal continuing through the typical two-year-old stranger-danger shyness. If someone reduced her to a pretty girl or a princess, I got the claws out.

Now I’m the parent of a three-year-old who is much more attentive to the sorts of responses I dole out, and who sometimes wants to respond (or, emphatically not respond) on her own … and I’m not sure what to do. It’s one of the few situations where I find that the difference in EV and my genders is making me unsure of my parenting decisions.

2016-08-17 12.17.26That’s a big deal for me. E and I were just discussing how relatively neutral our parenting style is when it comes to gender. Aside from wearing a bathing top at the pool and some undefinable level of unconscious bias, I don’t think EV has experiencing a remarkable different toddlerdom in this household than a boy would.

We restrict certain tough play and violence, just as we would from a boy. Aside from screening out toxic princess culture, it’s not as though we’re hiding anything coded explicitly for girls from her. E and I even present a relatively similar role to EV – she’s seen both of us do most chores and caretaking tasks. We both have fancy colored hair.

I’d say the big differences are that E will put her in dresses more often and is better at painting nails than I am.

Yet, this little issue of how (if at all) EV ought to respond to unsolicited compliments has stopped me in my tracks, while E has no hesitation contending with it.

I generally respond to any remark directed my way from a stranger so long as they aren’t physically threatening, whether it’s meant positively or negatively. That’s a hard-won ease for me, rather than a chauvinistic obliviousness. I went a long time assuming any comment I received would be a mocking one. I’ve been harassed from passing cars just for walking down the street and threatened with violence because I “talk gay.” I was a strident teen, but it took two more decades for me to own my self-image enough to withstand that. Luckily, society changed a bit, too. Now I look and talk however the hell I want with no apology.

However, none of my experiences compare to the near-constant sexualization every woman fields from every comment, whether its complimentary or mocking, no matter the gender of the commenter. And, while I’ve been threatened with physical violence, I’ve rarely if ever had to walk down the street with the specter of sexual violence haunting my steps.

That’s what I find myself up against when EV receives a comment from a stranger.

The first few times, I encouraged her to say “hi” in return or “thank you.” I immediately sensed the dissonance there and the bad precedent I was setting. No one deserves EV’s attention just for talking to her. She might develop a social contract that dictates reciprocity with someone she sees frequently, but she owes nothing to strangers.

Yet, I also don’t want to encourage EV to simply passively absorb these opinions. If one of them makes her feel positive or negative, she should be vocal about that. If she doesn’t care, she should ignore them.

Last week presented a pair of examples in a span of hours.

First, at the library, a pair of young black women were sitting across from us at the library while EV carefully fussed over a book and I filled out our card applications. After observing us for a minute and laughing to themselves, they both complimented EV – one to me, and the other to EV directly. I thanked and chatted the woman who spoke to me. EV didn’t respond to the other one. She seemed for a moment as if she might press it with EV, but then let it go.

That felt fine to me. The second example didn’t. We were at a home improvement store, coincidentally being helped by another young black woman. She had been with us for several minutes, and had chatted with EV about the projects we were doing without making any comments about her appearance. When we hit a snag in my shopping, she asked an older, white, male co-worker. He answered her in an annoyed, condescending way, and then turned his eye to EV.

“Aren’t you a cutie?” he said to her.

She ignored him.

“Aww, are you a little shy?”

I was only halfway absorbing this, as I was having my own conversation with the woman, who seemed slightly cowed by her coworker’s rude response. I don’t think EV was being especially shy. She was doing a silly dance in the middle of the plumbing aisle. It seemed obvious that she simply wasn’t interesting in engaging.

Yet, the man kept talking to her in an insistent, insincerely cloying way, pressing her from all angles to respond with increasing annoyance. At this point, I was tuned in.

“What did you do this summer? Did you go to the beach? Did you make castles? Did you bury dad in the sand? Huh, did you?”

I spent an agonizing hour on post-game analysis with E last week. Why didn’t I say anything? Why didn’t I indicate to EV she shouldn’t feel the need to answer?

I know what a sincere interest in my kid looks like from a speaker of any gender presentation. Not only have I learned to see it, but whether or not EV responds she always remembers the sincere people and brings them up later. This was not that. Maybe this guy was a father of daughters of his own, but he was also probably going to make a comment about the ass of the next women who walked down the aisle as soon as she was out of earshot. I could just feel it. (And, it’s borne itself out in the following days with no remarks from EV about the conversation.)

EV’s instincts were better than mine in that moment: she was absolutely right to keep on doing her silly dance and completely ignore this guy. But the point is she shouldn’t have had to.

That doesn’t just apply to leering older gentlemen. It’s for kind young women at the library, doting teens at the pool, and every other human being who wants to ascribe value to EV’s appearance and then tell her about it and then stand there expecting something in return.

She owes them nothing, and while she seems to already sense that on her own, it’s one good choice I’m not sure how to model and reinforce.

the unglamorous life

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I am writing this missive to you from a park bench at a playground, purple and pink hair half up in a messy bun, wearing a too-large Lisa Loeb t-shirt with an unidentifiable stain on the breast, a pair of gym shorts, and a pair of sunglasses dangling from a strap on my neck so I can see the screen.

I have gone “full dad,” as they say. No, this post will not be illustrated by any photos. Whatever you are imagining is bad enough.

There was a time when I had rules about leaving the house. The dress code was strict. I had a “t-shirts permitted in public” drawer that was kept untainted by over-large band shirts I wear to bum around the house. Dress pants or jeans were the only acceptable bottoms; I would only show my bare legs in a casual setting if the temperature was over 90°. Athletic wear? Only for actual instances of exercise. And certainly not any low rise socks that show my ankles. Offensive.

Hair was to be either spectacularly curly or wrapped up in a bandana. Facial scruff had an allowable limit As for a sunglasses strap … just no.

As dress codes go, I think it was stricter than a school’s but maybe not as hardcore as a religion’s. (I do make frequent exceptions to fetch our mail in my underwear, after all).

Well, it took three years, but toddler wrangling has worn me down. All the time I used to spend on choosing and preening is now spent dressing a toddler, making sure she has juice and a head band and a snack and a change of clothes, and maybe making sure her shoes are on the right feet if time allows.

Me? Again, I’ll point out that I willingly left the house in GYM SHORTS. Yet, I also carry a 20lb bag of toddler accessories including our own toilet paper in case we find the TP on our adventures to be unsatisfactory.

(Philly TP report: Philly Zoo, thumbs down. Longwood Garden, thumbs up!)

I think a large part of it has to do with the weather. Heat wears me down. After serving four years in inescapable heat as a summer camp counselor, I spent the next half of my life scurrying for cover (or a pool) on every hot day. I want none of it – not the sweat, not the sunscreen, not the bugs. I don’t have room in my brain to process all of those annoyances.

(I can’t even tell you a time prior to this summer I willingly wore sunscreen not for the purpose of going to a pool or on a long walk. Maybe Bonnaroo? And, if you recall, I was asking to be airlifted out of that by the second day.)

I knew when I made the choice to stay home that one of the biggest challenges would be keeping things interesting in the hot weather. My mandate to create great memories aside, a toddler’s manic wiggles don’t miraculously evaporate in the heat and humidity any more than they do in the frigid cold.

And apparently my coping mechanism is “not giving a fuck.”