Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Year 16

bad breakfast of hallucinatory champions

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I close my eyes and drift into the hallucination like a piece of flotsam being carried upward by the wave of music flowing in my ears. It lasts for a second, maybe five, but it feels like I’ve glimpsed a whole day of some alternate earth where an arbitrary detail of the laws of physics or nature has been altered.

The trolley lurches to a halt. I lose the alternate earth. It disappears in a wink, along with any memory of it. We are two stops before mine – enough time for two, maybe three, alternate days before I absolutely must pull the ripcord and bobble my way to the front of the vehicle.

Does this happen to you? I always assumed it was universal – that adding music to a state of half-awakeness yielded a kaleidoscope of unknown realities. Maybe it’s not. Maybe it is a form of synesthesia that I’ve always had, which might explain why I am and have always been so obsessed with music, and also with the literature of psychedelia.

This week at work we discussed Breakfast of Champions.  We have a book club at work, that’s a thing I should probably tell you. I hated it, a little. The book that is, not the club. I love the club, partially because it inspires me to do things like read my first Vonnegut novel despite mostly hating it while I read. (Later, other members of the club confessed they thought it was a terrible idea to read Breakfast of Champions as a first exploration of Vonnegut, but they did not want to intercede in our plan.)

I didn’t like the book for a few different reasons. Primarily, it was basically the worst in medias res ever. It says what will happen at the end, spends an entire book describing the rather dull steps leading to that point, and then the thing that happens turns out to be relatively inconsequential. It’s an entire book of prologue to some interesting thing of which we only catch a glimpse.

Despite hating it a little, I’m very happy that I discussed the book with other humans(/robots). It helped me to pull out the things I loved about it. One was the synopses of the bizarre sci-fi stories of author Kilgore Trout, our of our protagonists (sort of). He invents stories of alien worlds that would fit perfectly in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Our club debated which otherworldly tale was our favorite. The world of eating petroleum where real food is considered pornography. The world where all art is assigned an arbitrary value and venerated appropriately. The world where language is as beautiful and distracting as a song, so anything serious like a law must sound deliberately ugly.

As I popped out of the final micro-hallucination of my commute, it occurred to me that my fractional alternate dimensions were a lot like Kilgore Trout’s stories. Each one of them change just one or two fundamental things about reality, all seemingly droll in summary but potentially dull if explored at length.

Maybe having a form of synesthesia is just a way to know you are a robot programmed to ingest music and output the fantastic.

“you look like a god”

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IMG_20150916_0845539942015-09-15 18.05.25
To be fair, in conversation it came out that David meant a god from Wicked + Divine, which made way more sense, but it was still a hilarious comment. If only I was drawn by Jamie McKelvie!

That’s as opposed to this morning, where the glowiness of the blue was muted down to nearly black thanks to leave-in conditioner.

On the whole, I am really loving this hair … and not just because it’s so easy to look like a Dragonball Z character.

#MusicMonday: “Open Window” – Sarah Harmer

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At 1:30 PM on Saturday it was raining in Maryland.

I love the rain. Maybe it’s because I’m not a hot weather person or someone who spends much time outside. I think it has more to do with the cement porch on our row home on 64th street growing up. I would sit on the stoop when it rained and watch it come down safe from the storm, and enjoy that spicy cement petrichor of the city that followed.

I love the rain, but I’ve also never planned an outdoor wedding in a state park. That’s what I was considering at 1:30 PM on Saturday as our car idled at the foot of a little hill that lead up to the pair of pavilions that would house our good friend Karen’s wedding to her partner Matt. From our position, the rain seemed less lovable.

Karen was one of my earliest and most-persistent theatre friends at Drexel, and we worked on a run of shows together. She is like a Chaotic Good version of a typically mean Kristen Schaal character. Also, she is a experienced alto, a lawyer, and a librarian. As with E, she is one of those human beings that can and will achieve seemingly anything set before her.

I finished lacing up my boots and we mounted steps set into the hill. It was raining hard and I tilted my head sideways to keep my lacquered blue hair safe under E’s umbrella, lest my Super Goo [actual product name] run down my face in rubbery sluices. We did not know anyone in the pavilion. We picked up a pair of programs mounted on wooden handles, a bit spongey from the rain. Printed on the rear was SATB version of Charles Welsey’s “Hallelujah.” We squinted at the first measure to see if the starting pitch in bass was a G or an Ab and E gave me my starting pitch.

It rained during the ceremony, which was delightfully rooted in literature, law, and pop culture. At one point a sustained peal of thunder caused the pavilion to shudder, and while some guests winced Karen grinned madly and gave us all a thumbs up. It was an extremely Karen moment. Inside the pavilion there was love.

After the ceremony, we guests shuffled through the rain across a stone patio to a second pavilion. Inside this one there was magic – lights and glass and color and a murmuring of friends reuniting. I hewed closely to Hillary and her husband, who I can never spend enough time with, and their friend Amanda, who I have met a half a dozen times yet never had a conversation with. We discovered a guest book was full of empty pockets and were supplied with library cards on which we could write our notes.

I decided to catalog the check-outs and returns of our relationship, Karen and Peter: A Brief History (abridged). There was a gap in the middle 00s as we graduated and Karen accumulated degrees, which ended on E and my wedding day; Karen sang “Open Window” for our first dance. I still remember our first listen to Sarah Harmer’s record, driving around in Karen’s dinged little car to buy groceries or supplies for a fraternity event. The memory is mirrored by dozens (if not hundreds) of occasions of E and I singing through the entire You Were Here LP in our car, trading harmony and vocal percussion, me crying during the refrain “Lodestar” every single time.

I looked up from my sketching of our timeline to see that it wasn’t raining anymore. The sun was low and obscured, casting a pinkish hue across the cement patio between the two pavilions. It was perfect light – a sustained “magic hour” to capture every wedding memory in photograph. (“Are you a photographer,” our neighbor inquired later as I extolled the virtues of the light. “No, I learned it from E.” “Oh, she’s a photographer? “No, she’s an an engineer, but her degree is in photography.”) I heard a certain melody lilting through the air…

Here, witnesses appear
And recognize how sacred
Love can be when stated

I leapt up from my seat on our bench to find E already on the patio waiting to dance. We spun slowly and whispered the melody into each other’s ears, pausing occasionally to smile away a potential sob.

As the song ended, a whirling dervish of smiles and flowing white enveloped us in a muscular hug: another perfect memory with Karen.

Are my eyeballs really only worth $4 to you?

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I hate commercials.

Every since 2004 when we gave up live television and I purchased my first iPod I have been completely removed from the concept of advertising you are forced to consume. Sure, I still use the internet and read magazines, but the ads can be ignored or the page turned. I will never wait through a pre-roll ad to watch a video – I either give up, or silence it and come back a minute later. Every time some great new streaming service pops up and it has ads, I skip it. If I’m going to consume advertising it will be by choice, and I’ll stop when I feel like it.

My one weak spot is Hulu. Hulu saves me from needing live TV, but it comes with the necessary evil of a handful of commercials. During the regular TV season, we typically have a scant 2-3 shows we keep up on each week, but that exposes us to 10-20 minutes of commercials. That’s not to mention season-long binges of their Drag Race archive.

At first I thought my armor was unbreakable – after a decade going without, they would just bounce off of me brain ineffectually. Plus, I had spent a lot of that time being a marketer, so now I can dissect a message easily. They’d have no effect on me.

I was a little bit right for a little while, but then I noticed they were starting to wear me down. Despite picking apart each ad spot, I actually found myself having opinions about car brands and laundry detergents! It heavily disincentivized me from using our Hulu subscription, even if it meant paying three times as much to watch the same show ad-free on Amazon or iTunes.

Then, earlier today, I saw this:

And I responded like this:

I immediately steered my browser to Hulu and steeled myself for the potential charge. I figured the cost of renting my eyeballs for 10-20 minutes a week plus binges would be high, but I told myself it would be worth it to free myself from the yoke of forced advertising.

It turned out we were talking about a difference of four dollars. I was so livid I stopped dead in the middle of updating my subscription. All of that time sending advertising across my eyeballs and into my brain, time I’d rather spend watching another episode or writing or sleeping, was only worth four fucking dollars. For a mere $36 a year I could have stayed ad-free – that’s a week of cheap lunch in Center City! Of course I would pay that!

It was one of those moments where I really considered the massive capitalist machine in which we are all mere cogs with no say in our fates. If it only cost $4 to escape ads on Hulu – a rare network that can quantify its exact amount of impressions and demographics, how cheap might it be to get away from them elsewhere? How much could I pay to live my life completely free of the spectre of advertising in a CPC environment where I’ve already proven myself to be a non-clicker, like on YouTube, Facebook, or Google? How much to get an ad-free version of Rolling Stone or ride on a bus with no advertising? I suddenly have the feeling that for all of this passive junk my eyes and ears are bombarded with I could just empty my change jar and make it all go away.

(It reminds me of early in the life of CK when Blogger was free and always broken, and I would send screeds across the internet to Ev begging to pay him anything it would take to get just slightly better service.)

You might say, “You’re crazy! You’re privileged! You’re volunteering to give your money away!” But, let me ask you something – what is crazier? Paying the actual cost of a thing I want to consume and then consuming it, or constantly having my content diluted and my time wasted in exchange for spending nominally less money? Say, four dollars. Which in turn reminds me of this crude comic, which speaks an ultimate amount of truth to all of these things we think we get “for free.”

I refer to this constantly at work. Constantly.

I refer to this constantly at work. Constantly.

If you’re willing to give all that control away for $4, I hope you spend it on something you really need.

Me? I updated my subscription.

Why female comic characters matter (to a baby)

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If we were to look at the pie chart of activities of my life (which would still be a terrible use of a pie chart because even when looking at proportional representation out of 100% it’s harder to compare the relative sizes of things in that format – death to pie charts) it would be obvious that comic book reading takes up a not-insignificant amount of my time.

If we are in a room with this comic book EV needs to run to it and bring it back to me to page through. Spidey who is a girl AND is in a rock band? Is there any better thing in the multi-verse?

If we are in a room with this comic book EV needs to run to it and bring it back to me to page through. Spidey who is a girl AND is in a rock band? Is there any better thing in the multi-verse?

That meant that EV had a lot of comic books read to her from as soon as she could be propped up to semi-sit-up on her own. Yet, even when she didn’t even have the means to escape from my reading, her attention span wouldn’t necessarily last an entire issue, let alone a whole trade paperback. That changed quite suddenly when I read her Kelly Sue DeConnick’s Avengers Assemble: The Forgeries of Jealousy last summer, a story primarily staring Spider-Girl at its center. EV sat transfixed by the whole thing. She let me read the entire book to her multiple times in one sitting.

I didn’t think too much of it – I just love reading DeConnick’s dialog, so maybe that did the trick, which also explained EV staying put in the fall for Captain Marvel, Volume 1: Higher, Further, Faster, More. The realization didn’t hit me until I read her the critically acclaimed, newly-Hugo-winning Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1 (and to E, who lingered in the room, feigning not paying attention but actually listening quite closely).

That baby would sit still to read books with female heroines.

I tested my theory. Spider-Man? A few pages. Hulk? No interest. Thor? Barely a glance. Storm? Entire issues. The lady version of Thor? Glued to the pages. Spider-Gwen? She picks it up every time we walk up to the attic. Hell, one of her first few dozens words was “Lumberjanes” so she could request the comic of the same name (which I dislike; maybe more on that later).

Tonight we read the first few issues of Ryan North’s delightful Squirrel Girl (recommended highly for kids!) while EV spent the entire time hanging off of me and giggling with glee.

What’s interesting about those books is that they include varying amounts of action and extremely distinct artwork, but they are each about more than a superhero who happens to have breasts. They feature women being women. I don’t mean doing “girl” things. I mean as heroes, their women are distinct in their voices, actions, hopes, and fears from male characters. They could not simply be gender-swapped.

The exercise lead me to look through EVs other books with a critical eye. Most protagonist characters in baby books default to male – the female is almost always the mother! And do you know how many books we have that feature a father in something other than a vestigial, dismissal role? Only a handful I can think of – Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, Gaiman’s delightful Fortunately, The Milk, the classic Make Way For Ducklings, and my favorite, Maurice Sendak’s Pierre. However, of those, three of the protagonists are male and three have mothers as the primary female.

In case you are ever wondering – representation matters. Even a baby who cannot say a single word will tune in to media with a character she identifies with more readily than one she doesn’t. I didn’t have to run a very length or scientific experiment to figure it out. When we’re asking to see Black Widow on Avengers merchandise or wondering if we could see Miles Morales – a black, latino Spider-Man – onscreen, it’s not just because we like those characters or are demanding diversity for diversity’s sake.

We want the next generation of real life superheroes to see themselves in the media we allow them to consume.

(Little does EV realize that I have every issue of Wonder Woman from 1975 to present sitting in the attic, waiting to be read to her.)

(I’m also excited to capitalize on her Spider-Lady Love when Silk hits TPB later this year, since she is a rarely-represent female asian hero that’s not the sex-bomb yellow-face routine of Psylocke.)