Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

Filmstar and The Substitute People

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I want to tell you about one of my fantasies.

(Don’t worry, it’s work safe.)

I fantasize about being a substitute person.

If you don’t know what that means, you clearly don’t watch Elizabethtown as much as E and I do. At one point, Kirsten Dunst’s Claire – a perennial second-place finisher in a life and love, muses:

60B!

You and I have a special talent, and I saw it immediately. We’re the substitute people. I’ve been the substitute person my whole life. … I like it that way. It’s a lot less pressure.

I’ve always had the fantasy of being the substitute person, but it took Claire to put words to it. Usually my fantasy goes like this:

A musician I really love – let’s say, Amanda Palmer – is in town, but they are touring without a certain band member – usually a guitarist or harmony singer. I’m at the concert, and when they start to play one of their big hits they stop and ask, “Does anyone know the [guitar/vocal/cowbell/whatever] part to this song? [I raise my hand.] You do? Come up here and try it.”

And then I get up and, of course, play the solo or sing the harmony to perfection, because I am obsessed with it. And then they ask me to sit in for another song. And another one. And then I hang out with them after the show and they fall in love with me.

Sort of like Courtney Cox in the “Dancing in the Dark” video.

I’m sure you have a similar fantasy, even if you aren’t a musician. Maybe it’s about stepping in with a sports team, or filling a hole on a big project in your office. It’s the opposite of the Actor’s Nightmare, where you’re stuck on stage with no idea what to do.

The allure of the fantasy is that we’re the substitute people. Just like a substitute teacher, no one is expecting us to do much more than fill a hole. Then, when we are amazing (or, at least, more amazing than adequate), they fall in love with us.

Having the substitute fantasy doesn’t mean you don’t like your life. I love being half of Arcati Crisis. But, every time I listen to E’s Filmstar demo record I catch myself thinking “I could walk right up and play all of those bass parts, if they needed me to.”

Well, two weeks ago life put my fantasy to the test when I wound up behind a microphone at a Filmstar rehearsal with a brand new bass hanging off my shoulder.

To make a long story short, Filmstar found themselves without a bassist, and I was called on my flippantly mentioned substitute-person fantasy of playing with the band.

I did know their songs pretty well – well enough to noodle along to their EP. Well enough to play bass on all fifteen of their songs? I didn’t necessary know every key, chord, and rhythm.

Oh, and there was the little detail of my not having played bass for seven years.

I decided that didn’t matter – I wanted to be their substitute person. E asked me to fill in on a Thursday. My new bass arrived on Friday. I arranged all the songs for myself on Sunday. I knew all fifteen of them for rehearsal on Wednesday.

We played every one.

This photo of me playing bass is nine years old, and this is as big as you're ever going to see it.

Was I awesome? No. Am I a bassist? Not by trade. But as a substitute person I was solid – I showed up able to fill the entirety of the hole in their lives, probably better than they anticipated I could.

I don’t know how long I’ll keep substituting with Filmstar, or if I’ll keep loving it. At some point a long-term substitute becomes your permanent solution, and surprising adequacy turns into lingering disappointment.

I’ve decided i don’t want to think it through that far. For the moment, I’m living my fantasy, and playing in an awesome rock band with my wife.

Sometimes we get we want in the most unexpected ways. What’s your substitute people fantasy? Have you ever got what you wanted?

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For example, I received a free meal from a local kitchen service for my job. I wrote a specifically disclaimed piece about that for my work blog. Here, I might make this in-passing mention within a post on a different topic: “…and that time I ate an awesome free meal from [CHEF]!”

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get elevated

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I wrote that last post on the El.

For those of you not acquainted with Philadelphia, we have exactly two and a half brands of subway. One travels north to south. One travels east to west. One spends half its distance traveling from the center of the city to the west, and then emerges from the ground.

(I always laugh when people find the Philly subway system confusing. They’re named unambiguously and barely make a turn. Paris – now that’s confusing.)

The “El” is short for the Market Frankford Elevated Line, the east to west subway named thus because it runs along Market Street & Frankford Avenues and because after it exits the central part of its route in either direction it runs along elevated tracks. Creaky, red iron, elevated tracks that tower overhead, dripping rain that smacks as it hits your scalp.

Nothing in the world skeeves me out like the El. In fact, for several years at the old house I boycotted it entirely. However, it’s a reality of traveling to and from the new house.

The grime of it is paralyzing. The navy blue floor is encrusted with untold months of flotsam at every crack and corner. The blue seats are not plastic but a sponge-like blue fuzz that seems engineered to attract and retain dirt.

Then there are the people – the degenerate, tactless people. I have heard of and witnessed people doing things on the El that you would never witness elsewhere in public – let alone on public transit. Vandalism. Performance art. Investigations of personal hygiene. Sex acts.

The charming combination of environmental grossness and personal grossness is enhanced by the claustrophobic layout of each car. To a New Yorker – accustomed to their wide, hard-plastic benches and center-of-aisle poles – it probably seems like an amusement park ride.

A tiny, disgusting amusement park ride.

Whenever I ride a carefully tuck my limbs into my body like an Olympic diver, trying to avoid contact with something or something that will give me syphilis or leprosy.

Carefully tucked into myself, I pull out my laptop, and log in remotely to work for 29 blocks of elevation, before shutting down and doing my best to hold my breath and stay absolutely still for 10 blocks of subway.

The first thing I do every day in the office is wash my hands.

man (just me, actually) vs. nature (mostly this one bird)

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I have been waking up early almost every day at the new blue house.

Some of that awakening has been of my own volition. Other of it is due to an east-facing window.

However, largely the inspiration is avian in nature.

When we talked about owning a house in a speculative fashion, people would say the same sorts of things. “You’ll always have projects,” was a common response, and I’d never dispute it. Another common one was, “Oh, you’ll have a yard! There will be birds singing.”

No, really, people say that.

I would consistently respond, “Yes, I need to figure out how to poison them all.”

It’s not anything I have against birds, per se. I have a friend who disputes the very nature of birds. Like, “feathers, hollow bones – that shit is just unnatural.” She regards each sample of the class with guarded skepticism, as if it could be a carrier of bubonic plague or infectiously bad credit scores.

That’s not the nature of my problem. Birds are fine as a concept. I just don’t like things that make uninvited noise (other than, obviously, me). Birds fall into the same offensive category as small dogs, train tracks, and babies.

Which is an entirely other topic.

Birds know no reason. At least trains pass and babies are usually hungry or tired or want to chew on your remote control.

Why is the bird chirping? Like, this morning at 4am when the species of bird I refer to as “Digitalis Clockus” – which earned its name because its brief, repetitive, perfectly-pitched warble is louder than my digital clock, even when it is positioned across the street in a neighbor’s yard where it would be technically trespassing for me to poison it or beat it to death with a wok – began chirping, why was it chirping?

Why, gentle readers, must it not only begin to chirp, but chip that piercing, non-snoozeable-but-very-alarming chirp every morning between 4:07 am and 5:15 am? Why must its circuit carry it from our neighbor’s broad yard across the street to the towering dogwood beside my window?

I have encountered it once in close quarters, in the lower boughs of said tree. I assumed my avian foe would be approximately the size and shape of one of those totally over-the-top Hammacher Schlemmer alarm clocks that light up and vibrate and make bagels, but with wings.

Nay. It is a tiny, mottled, gray thing that I could probably fit whole in my mouth.

If I thought that it wanted to fly into my mouth I would put the poison right on my tongue, like a tiny, toxic hit of LSD, and wait patiently for my avian friend to swoop into my maw.

That would be better than waking up every day at an average time of five forty-one in the morning.