Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Archives for August 2010

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?

I just want to understand

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At the bottom of my basement stairs, I realized I was defeated. Or, at least, foiled in this particular instance.

The floor of our basement was covered with water two inches thick, and our water heater was hissing and spewing a fountain of water from its top.

I had an idea how to turn off the water. I had a plan to pump out the water. But I had no idea what was wrong with the water heater, or how to fix it.

Defeated.

.

If we wrote out a list of my fundamental character traits, one is that I have to understand how things work.

I don’t have to fix every problem myself. I can delegate and rely on help from other people. But, bottom line, I have to understand what the problem is, why it’s happening, and what’s being done so that it doesn’t happen again.

I’m discovering that this is going to be one of my major challenges as a homeowner. When something breaks or explodes or just mysteriously stops functioning, people expect you to step back, call a contractor, and repeat the serenity prayer under your breath.

Yeah, I just don’t roll like that.

If the primary three letters in my life are frequently OCD, the next trio are DIY. Do It Yourself. DIY is why I know how to do almost everything I know how to do.

When Blogger wouldn’t republish archive pages in 2000 I taught myself how to code PHP. When i wanted to record a studio album I minored in music. Last night I completed disassembled a backup drive with a blown power supply down to the last screw and installed it into another computer, rather than contemplate sending it away for repair.

All that said, I’m still a little intimidated by DIYing the house. It’s one thing to take apart a hundred dollar hard drive, and another to conduct demolition on a multi-hundred thousand dollar house.

So, when we bought the house it was a special challenge to find the right sorts of inspectors and contractors and insurers that could satisfy my need to understand.

We took our best shot. The Great Water Heater Explosion of 2010 tested both our vendor-selection and the limits of my understanding and my serenity.

Our Home Warranty company suddenly had clauses that were nowhere in our contract, and when I called to understand where they explain their coverage, their answer was basically “we don’t; no one has ever cared.”

They were dismissed.

Then we had a plumber quote twice as much as we thought it would be to replace the water heater, without really breaking down how he arrived at that number.

He never got a call back.

Basically, until I’m comfortable with in-home DIY, “understanding” has becoming my homeowner’s litmus test. If someone is afraid to make me understand – because they don’t want to be questioned, or they don’t want to empower me, or they want to charge me too much money – then they aren’t going to touch our house.

In the end we replaced the water heater for HALF of that initial quote in a single day.

Next challenge? The electrician whose lack of attention fried the aforementioned hard drive, to which his solution was to bill us another $1,200 for a dubiously defined solution he couldn’t help me to understand.

I understand that I can’t fix everything and I can’t know everything. But, at the very least, I can understand everything.

That’s all I ask.

But I Regress, pt. 1

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With the launch of my monster definitive guide to collecting X-Men comic books as graphic novels, I have officially become a fifteen year-old.

Allow me to explain. Or, to begin to, as I’m sure this is a multiple-post-spanning story (just as that website feature was a multiple-month spanning obsession to research).

A few months ago Philly-local social media mover/shaker/sandwich-connoisseur @MikeyIl threw a series of events for the Ford #FiestaMovement. One of them was an all-local art show, featuring work by my partner-in-fame Britt Miller, as well as Eddidit and others.

Being Britt’s unpaid intern / personal assistant / life coach and a faithful supporter of friends and local artists, I got my ass there – even though the event was smack in the middle of negotiating the price of our house with our Realtor over the phone.

(Literally. Drunk friends: “What are you doing?” Me, to phone: “Hold on a second.” Me, to friends: “Oh, I just got another few thousand dollars knocked off the price of our house.” Drunk friends: “Wowwww.”)

Where was that fateful art show held?

Brave New Worlds. A comic book shop.

Here at Crushing Krisis I haven’t ever fully explained my addiction to comic books, c. 11/1991 – 4/1996.

X-Men #24, one of my favorite comic covers.

It was a brief but tumultuous affair. Comic books combine my love of serial narrative with an OCD urge to make meticulous, alphabetical lists. They created a 10-year-old who would do anything to earn $40 a month to pick up every book bearing the image of Wonder Woman or an X-Man.

(Seriously, I’m surprised I wasn’t peddling coke for my neighbor. It’s a good thing my guitar habit didn’t get to drug-running levels of expense until after college, when I was salaried.)

For only collecting for four-and-a-half years, my comic collection is prodigious. Not only did I collect new issues weekly, but in the pre-spreadsheet days the adolescent OCD Godzilla in my soul – a mere tadpole, at the time – compiled lists of back issues by hand… lists twenty and thirty pages long, complete with estimated budgets and timelines for purchase. Every few months my father engaged my whim, and I checked off line after line.

I was hardcore. The guys at the comic store treated me like I was twice my age (now ironic) because I was so on top of my shit with my pull lists and my back issue pricing and my discussions of the Magneto’s morality and if the ends truly justified the means.

Then came the internet. AOL dial-up cost by the hour, and I was hooked on it within minutes of my first sign-in in January of 1996. Four months later my wallet issued an ultimatum: limit my internet usage, or jettison my comic addiction – now complicated by Marvel’s 90s’ decadence of holographic covers and limited series.

The real decider was probably a demo of Warcraft II, a living digital board of Risk I could play over and over again with my friends over my 14.4 baud modem.

I dropped the comics and never looked back.

Until last month.

(To be continued! In the meantime, if you’re a closet x-fan who wouldn’t know a pull list from their elbow, check out definitive guide to collecting X-Men comic books as graphic novels – the easiest (and cheapest) way to be an adult comic book fan.)