Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Crushing On: J. S. Bach’s Lute Suite in C minor, BWV 997 performed by Evangelina Mascardi

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As a rule, I try not to let social network algorithms touch my life.

Why would you let the whims of an algorithm meant to keep you on a site change your priorities, dictate your schedule, or change your mood?

Yet, sometimes… sometimes you peek into the vast abyss of the algorithm by mistake and you see one tiny glimmer within it. Not a distraction. Not a waste of time. Not a cheap piece of disposable joy.

It is the glow of something extraordinary. Something life-altering on a deep, meaningful level that you will carry with you.

Here is Evangelina Mascardi playing J. S. Bach – Suite in C minor BWV 997 on a period-accurate 24-string Baroque lute entirely from memory, recorded a year ago. It was composed for (and typically performed upon) a Lautenwerk (lute-harpsichord) – a keyboard instrument.

(If you don’t have the patience to watch all 24 minutes, at least go watch the final movement. Just extraordinary.)

While watching this I had… I don’t know if I would call it an “epiphany,” but it was a moment of extreme calmness and presence within my own body. Not just a moment, though. Entire minutes. It is one of the most beautiful juxtapositions of composition and performance I’ve ever seen and heard in mylife.

19 thoughts

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When I wake up early in the morning for a meeting with my team in the states, one of the first things I do afterward is visit the 8YO’s room. She claims she will wake up at 6:30am to read; she is a voracious reader. The alarm goes off, and she shuts it off and continues sleeping. “No reading today?” I’ll ask, as I give her a kiss on the cheek.

In 2012 when the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting happened I remember sitting numbly at my desk at work. We were just one month pregnant. “How can you send a child to school in this country?” I thought to myself.

She likes to have a whole orange sliced up into wedges at part of her lunch, no matter how incongruous that is with the rest of lunch. But, you have to transfer each half orange as a perfect bisected globe onto her plate so she can be surprised anew that it’s actually comprised of wedges. She’s a slow eater. So slow that I can cook my lunch, eat, and tidy up while she’s still eating. Yesterday I finished all of that and then stood behind her chair, my hands resting on her shoulders while she ate.

In 2015 when the Charleston church shooting happened I remember solemnly saying the victims’ names out loud to keep their thought alive.

In 2016 when the Pulse nightclub shooting happened I was a stay-at-home parent. I remember watching the Democrat filibuster in real time while tweeting and blogging about it, and calling my Senator and representative. I was crying so hard that day that I think I asked someone else from the family to visit to play with the kid. I remember thinking, “How can you raise a child in this country?”

In 2017, almost exactly five weeks ago to this very day, E had a job offer in New Zealand.

In 2017 when the Las Vegas concert shooting happened we had just moved into our first house in New Zealand. I remember frantically checking on my former bandmate, Ashley, who was in Las Vegas and attending that music festival. She was already on her plane home, and it was one of the longest days of my life waiting for her to land and reply to my messages.

In 2018 when the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting happened we hadn’t even been in New Zealand for six months. I remember thinking, “even after Pulse, nothing changed.”

Later in 2018 when the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting happened I remember loading and reloading the profile of a friend in Pittsburgh, only for him to later affirm he was okay but that was his synagogue on his block.

In 2019 when the Christchurch mosque shooting happened I was sitting at my desk at the Ministry of Business, less than 10 feet from the Chief Executive of the ministry, watching as her office transformed into the war room. I felt physically sick. Didn’t we leave America to move away from this?

Later that same day, Prime Minister Jacinda Arden told our nation and the world that New Zealand’s gun control laws would change.

Just 18 days later, all but one member New Zealand’s parliament voted in favor of a ban on (and buy-back of) semi-automatic weapons.

I saw news of a shooting in Philadelphia and rushed tearfully to Facebook to check that my friends were all okay only to realize it was a headline from several years ago. It had already happened, I had already grieved it. I just didn’t remember. There have been so many mass shootings in the United States this year alone that I cannot remember them all and the ways they all made me feel. I can’t remember all of the places I’ve been when I heard about another shooting this past decade. I can no longer remember all of the names and stories of the victims that seemed so indelible to me at the time. I still say their names when I look them up to remind myself.

Yesterday as news emerged that 19 children and 2 teachers had been killed in the Uvalde, Texas school shooting I stood at the kid’s chair, my hands resting on her shoulders while she ate. The kids were her age, in her grade. 19 children. 19 families who would never get to linger in these little moments with those children every again.

10 years ago I wondered if we could raise a child in a country that would allow Sandy Hook to happen and not doing anything to change it.

5 years ago we decided we could not.

Today we live in a country that has banned the kinds of weapons most often used to perpetrate these murders.

Every day I live in grief for every child who has died to gun violence in America, but also for those who walk into school each day wondering if this will be their day. Children younger than my own child. Children who I know and love and children I’ve never met.

Every day I wish America would change.

RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 7, Episode 2 – Snatch Game: recap & power ranking!

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I’m back to discuss the second episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 7’s back-to-back streaming premiere of its All Winners season.

If two Drag Race episodes in one day each packed with eight iconic champions wasn’t big enough to begin with, I have two more words for you: Snatch Game.

“Snatch Game” is an off-colour pun on the old TV game show Match Game, where contestants filled-in-the-blank in a phrase in an often-vain attempt to match what a panel of celebrities would fill in on their own cards.

Drag Race introduced it as a celebrity impersonation challenge in Season 2 and it immediately became a regular feature of every season of every franchise (except for All Stars Season 1, but we don’t talk about that).

One of the reasons Snatch Game has become such an iconic, enduring challenge on Drag Race is because it makes the show more accessible to a wider audience. Even if you don’t care about drag, this is a pre-packaged game show skit with easy-to-grasp rules, like a parodic round of Jeopardy on SNL – with the added thrill of each cast member improv-ing their own answers.

In recent years, some All Stars season have used the format of other TV game shows under the “Snatch Game” title, mimicking The Dating Game and Family Feud. Season 7 is back to the standard format… with a twist: every queen has to impersonate two celebrities on two different panels of the show!

I am old enough to have grown up watching all of these cheesy, campy old celebrity-driven game shows in syndication on daytime TV. In fact, they were one of the best things about staying home from school! Now, these camp curiosities have been relegated to special cable channels and YouTube clips. It makes me wonder how the challenge lands for younger audience members (and queens) who never experienced these things firsthand. To them, “Snatch Game” is primarily a Drag Race reference!

There’s no fear of that with this cast. They’ve all been through this gauntlet before. They’re all queens who have shown an ability to reference a massive amount of pop culture across their runs and reigns. And, half of them – Jinkx, Trinity, Shea, & The Vivienne – are previous Snatch Game winners!

If there was ever an episode a casual fan could enjoy, this is the one! I’ll cover every step of the episode in detail, including every celebrity impersonation and the slick “Pleather Principal” runway! Plus, at the end of the recap I’ll update my Episode 1 power rankings to show where the queens stand after another week of Legendary Legend badges. (Want to skip right to the power rankings? Go for it!)

Readers, start your engines! And, may the best drag queen… win! [Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 7, Episode 2 – Snatch Game: recap & power ranking!

Music Monday: “Wet Dream” – Wet Leg

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Music keeps you young.

It sounds like one of those pithy phrases you might find on a decorative wall hanging into the home of a not-so-young person. (Full-disclosure: at this point I am a not-so-young person.)

I’ve always said that music is essential to me. It’s something that fundamentally makes me happy. The more I’m listening to music and playing my own, the more cheerful and productive I get in every area of life. One of the difficult parts of making the switch to a fully-remote life during the pandemic was a lack of commute – not because I like commuting, but because it is where I got my required one hour of music a day.

As music has come and gone from my daily routine in the past few years, I’ve realized that it’s not only my mood that changes when I have tunes in my ears or beneath my fingers. I feel like my actual age oscillates. New music makes me feel mentally and physically younger.

That might sound delusional, so allow me to explain by way of Wet Leg.

I’ll be honest, when I heard there was a hip new band named “Wet Leg,” I did not leap to listen to their music. Hip bands with clever names and ironic, punny songs come and go every year, each putting their own tweak on the current trends in pop production. After a few years of not connecting with them at all, I felt like hearing each successive entry just made me feel older. I just didn’t get what the youths were into, which made me decidedly not a youth.

Then, one day last in 2021, I happened to see the YouTube thumbnail for Wet Leg’s “Wet Dream” video, featuring lead singer and guitarist Rhian Teasdale dressed like an erstwhile modern day pilgrim wearing a pair of oversized lobster claws.

“Okay,” I thought, “it’s a hip band whose first song shares a word with their band name and is accompanied by an ironic video. I am going to hate this. Here we go.” [Read more…] about Music Monday: “Wet Dream” – Wet Leg

A Krisis on Circuit 42! – Podcast Appearance

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I had the pleasure of sitting down with co-hosts Ian and Stephanie for this week’s episode of the Circuit 42 podcast!

I walked with a list of recent comics to discuss, but we wound up having a wide-ranging discussion that covered Drag Race, drag artists as superheroes and superheroes as drag, Bettie Page and Elvira in comic books, Rob Liefeld being a terrific “idea guy,” the unique power of Kickstarter as a marketing platform, the woes of international comic fans, and much more!