Crushing Krisis

The Newest Oldest Blog In New Zealand

florida

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Standing at the deli counter in the middle of Ft. Lauderdale on Christmas Eve wearing board shorts and a bright orange t-shirt that i had inadvertently shrunk to a prepubescent size in the wash, it occurred to me immediately that the striking blond man with the “Got Lube?” shirt was going to hit on me. I just knew. It was like a sign from god.

Christmas in Florida was absolutely bizarre, to say the least. At three in the afternoon on C-day i found myself firmly planted on my grandmother’s couch eating bonbons while attentively viewing the Trading Spaces Marathon while my mother lounged out by the pool. I eventually walked down the hall to the condominium of my retired lesbian 2nd-cousins to borrow a deck of cards, and proceeded to play solitaire.

Those two incidents pretty much sum up my trip to Florida, aside from how my mother was flagged down at the airport and — after an extensive search of her person and property — was forced to discard her “bang’s scissors.” Which, honestly, she was more likely to kill someone with in Florida than she was on the way back from it, but safety regulations are safety regulations for a reason.

Happy New Year.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/01/390155447/

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If you were to ask me to talk about my biggest hobby, i would simply say, “Music.”

If you were to ask me to elaborate on my favorite elements of music, i would reply, “Hearing it. Making it.” Or, more explicitly, i enjoy being a fan of music and being a writer of music. One can involve being very critical of other people’s work, while the other requires an unending faith in my own.

Sometimes i have trouble reconciling the two. For example, in a book of my agonizingly chosen flying-to-Florida collection of music, the new Bright Eyes disc faces a burned cd of my recent trios. I have no qualms in admitting that i am skeptical about Conor Oberst’s new effort as Bright Eyes; i was skeptical before ever hearing a song by Conor and continue to feel that way now that i have bought a third album of his. He’s not so different from a previous version of me; a recent Rolling Stone article featured a picture of his slight vegan frame with a guitar almost dwarfing it, singing about heartbreak in a style whose lineage includes Brian Wilson and Bob Dylan.

I happen to really enjoy my new Trios;though the imperfections of my performances are more noticeable when crisply preserved in digital format, i delight in hearing the sound of my own voice captured in such a faithful fashion. I have worked hard for that voice… failing auditions, slaving at voice lessons, struggling through choir. Singing and singing until the sound of my own voice became transparent to me; hearing myself on a recording of “Tangling” or “Excuse” feels the same as performing the songs live. I cannot distinguish anything about my vocal performance other than whether i am hitting the notes i intended to. I cannot be critical of it

Conor is just about a year older than me, and i don’t think he is much of a singer. His bio calls his vocal stylings “quak[ing] with the tumultuous energy that only youth can produce.” Tumultuous energy sounds very much to me like unsteady notes and failing vibrato. There are parts of his album Fevers and Mirrors that i physically cannot consume — he screams, yowls, stretches his voice past the breaking point. I do it too, of course, all rock singers do at some point. But, to me it never sounds as rough… as pained. And, i am doing it for my website… him, for an international audience of consumers..

I ostensibly bought his new disc Lifted to review it, but i know that i am really casing up the competition. In the past i have wondered at the success of others who are only slightly older than me, and whose work i adore. Now, i am wondering about the success of someone who i could very plausibly be; who shares the exact years of pop culture inundation with me, if not some of the same influences. I happen to think that i sing better than him; i also think i write more accessible songs. But, i am in college, and he is on the road. I am on the dean’s list, and he is in Rolling Stone.

My two favorite hobbies will be staring each other in the face deep inside my bookbag as i walk through the metal detector this morning, bound for Fort Lauderdale. They will both air themselves, probably more than any other music i will have with me. And, when my family asks me what i did this year, all i will say is “i am on the dean’s list.”


Merry Christmas.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/12/90080825/

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But, i miss it. I miss going to sleep with the huge book splayed open somewhere in the middle on the pillow next to me. I miss sneaking a peak forward to see how long i had to wait for another Pemulis appearance. Infinite Jest became a placeholder in my life for the dependency that it reviles … on entertainment, on liquor, on drugs, on other people … watching the characters in their endless dance of all of the above and even more left me free to do what i needed to do in my life without feeling the elastic pull of any of my various addictive tendencies in one direction or another.

As soon as i finished the last seven pages my grandmother was in the room, chirping like a bird. I had somehow managed to stave her off by showing her how close to finished i was, but i found myself without a defense and my first thought was “i need a drink.” I’ve never needed a drink before; in fact, i haven’t been drinking especially often lately. Suddenly, it became the focal point of my day: coming home to my empty apartment and getting blitzed enough so that everything was fuzzy around the edges like a peach and i could simmer quietly down into silence and sleep. Imagining the slippery slope to unconsciousness i might take later was enough to save me from the endless bickering of my septuagenarian family-members, and to get my on the plane.


When i left the hospital i wanted, more than anything else, to be somewhere other than in my own head. Yes, i wanted to go home. Yes, i was hungry. Most of all, though, i was craving an opportunity to poke at my perceptions and rattle my reasons. I wanted to feel disconnected in a wholly opposite way from how i felt in the hospital. And, i did. It was perhaps the most excruciatingly stupid single night of my life, but i woke up the next morning with that binge-stupidity as a tangible buffer between my sick and confined self and my well self — the two never saw an intersection because i made sure to remove myself from where they might’ve met.

This has become the function of substance to me, suddenly … separation. I’ve always thought that anything potentially addictive would be dangerous when it stopped just being fun and started being useful and i was entirely right, but i managed to forget about the entire situation while i had that thick book on my pillow filled with its own endless fucked up addicts to draw my escapism from. Now it’s gone, and i am set back to my continuing reality.


And, importantly: alone — no more characters to keep me up at night. So, maybe it wasn’t a reaction to the novel, but to the mental company it provided.

I’m not sure. I’m going to sleep on it.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/8138240/

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I finished Infinite Jest this morning on the floor of my grandmother’s bedroom in Florida. It’s over. Done. Completed. 1088 pages in a cover with the exact same colors as my second demo cd, starting while marooned in a hospital bed and finished while marooned in an retirement condo.

Somehow finishing it only seems like half as much an accomplishment as starting it. Starting a 1k+ page book, especially this particular 1k+ book, you need motivation, interest, and all of your wits about you as you are introduced to a seemingly endless cast of characters in no specific order, chronological or otherwise. You also should probably keep a notepad and several bookmarks handy. And make sure to rotate your reading posture every few dozen pages so that you don’t lose any limbs.

The great failing of Infinite Jest – and, believe me, it definitely fails – is two-fold. The first problem i (inevitably) had with it is that it featured a total lack of editing. Yes, everything was spelt as it should have been, and the grammar and syntax was impeccable where applicable. In fact, the writing was nearly perfect. The problem was that there was too damned much nearly perfect writing … too good to want to skim over, but absolutely non-vital to the story. Endless footnotes regarding the manufacturers of the umpteen prescription drugs each character is addicted to. Lengthy passages in ebonic street-slang to introduce a minor character who has no cumulative effect on the story at large. A complex subplot about the pursuit of happiness that is basically never resolved. David Foster Wallace is a great master of prose, but that’s all he seems to be … his plot doesn’t resolve it’s three major thrusts — my second major problem with the novel: the entire latter two hundred pages feel like a digression rather than a progression and the damned book ends with a wholly irrelevant flashback that would have been better suited as an introduction of Don Gately rather than an end to the book. I’m all for novels that leave readers with questions, but we are left in the dark about Hal, Orin, Pemulis, Stice, Wayne, Gately, Joelle, Marathe, Steeply, and all of the rest of our favourites; a re-read of the opening passage will give you an idea of where they all wound up, but not how they got there.


Essentially, Wallace set up a Jest too Infinite to follow through on; namely, a riveting and perfect novel so grand in scope and scheme that he is unable (or unwilling) to end it in any way in keeping with the rest of the novel. Yes, this is part of the jest, but it is also the mark of a sloppy conceptualist who should have had an editor take a hatchet to revisionist US history, endlessly tepid passages about Himself’s youth, the 20+ little buddies introduced in one lump sum, Hal’s sidebar trip to teddy-bear-land, and what turns out to be a novel in itself about Gately. Yes to the hilariously unnarrated conversations within the Incandenza clan. Yes to the laugh-out-loud Estachon game that makes Quidditch look like bumper-bowling. Yes to Pemulis and his hat full of narcotic wonders. Yes to Marathe and Steeply’s debate on the pursuit of happiness. In fact, yes to the entire world-weary tone of a society that is addicted to everything, including entertainment, and doesn’t know when to stop.


In a way the end of the novel is the perfect allegory for the the film that is the perfect allegory for the novel, but in failing to deliver the goods on any of the nearly dozen major plot threads he had been weaving together the entire time, David Foster Wallace ultimately proves himself an inept cock-tease of a writer who couldn’t help but throw all of his many tricks at the reader without every taking the time to bring anything quite to a climax.. Because, frankly, despite every indication that you’re headed there, you aren’t.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/8137700/

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Airports and planes are abuzz with holiday spirit of rushing and nastiness and “the air is safe now; i’m staying away from buses.” At Ft. Lauderdale’s Terminal 4 there was a two-hour-long line to the Air-Tran ticket counter that almost nearly turned into a riot thanks to yours truly, a young married couple from Delaware, a model toting a small terrier in a carry-on, and my 80-year-old grandmother. I still have yet to figure out which of the five of us managed to convince the other four not to pummel the people cutting in line to death with our luggage. Furthermore, i had a gun slightly inclined at me during the whole metal-detector ordeal, and i think one of the kids sitting behind me on the plane was trying to peel the other one’s face off while being beaten back by a bag of complimentary pretzels.

Yes, Christmas. Can you feel it? I have exactly 20% of my Christmas shopping done and our DSL hardware is in UPS limbo and my brain would have exploded in Florida if it wasn’t for Jill with her sensible car and our Mexican Cuban restaurant — you have to love a fine dining establishment that features entrees like “Chicken Chunks” and “Fried Beef” without qualifying them with any sort of description. None. Whatsoever. But, they had bitchin’ sombreros…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/8136899/