Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Year 02

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Have you ever wondered why you look so funny in pictures?

It is apparently a misconception that thirty frames per second is as fast a speed as the human eye can appreciate. Tests have proven that our eyes can discern the increase of quality between footage shown at 30fps and 60fps, and past double that at 129fps; an average would seem to be from twenty-five to fifty. Still, there is definitely an upward limit of how many individual subdivisions of a second our eyes can discern before something appears to be in a wholly fluid state of motion. Furthermore, our ability to enjoy movies (24fps), television shows (30fps), and computer games (90fps+) is aided and abetted by other functions of our human machinery … specifically our (somewhat selective) abilty to perceive motion blur.

A typical point & click camera has an approximate shutter speed of a sixtieth of a second if you’re using a flash, which i do on almost all occasions. Shutter speed denotes how quickly the shutter opens and closes when it does all of its camera magic to get an image onto your film. To crib from my last link a bit, this means that something moving 60 miles per hour would probably be a blur in my own flash photography; the object would be moving 17.6 inches in a sixtieth of a second – plenty fast enough to be blurred in a photograph.

My camera catches a glimpse of something which occurs in an amount of time as proportionally small compared to a second as a second is compared to an entire minute, which is something the human eye usually refrains from observing unless it’s paying very specific attention. Totally forgetting for a moment about angles and lighting and contrast and all of that, a camera is probably more likely to capture a likeness of you that you don’t recognize than it is to reaffirm what you saw in the mirror this morning. The click of a shutter can capture our brightest smiles just as easily as it can catch that strange inbetween moment before the smile has fully formed or that slow downturn of lips after a false photo-smile has been prematurely disposed. Add to that the lighting, and what angle the shot is from, and what color the wallpaper is … it’s almost a wonder that we recognize ourselves at all.

The photo newly appearing to the right of this block of text is how i really look; rubber-stamped and approved as an faithful likeness of myself. On the way to and from Boston i took seventy-five pictures; only a few of them actually caught the images i thought i was seeing at the time, and i don’t think Elise & I look especially like ourselves in any of them. Nonetheless, here are 42 of them, so that you can judge for yourself.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/05/85065726/

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The El slipped out of its tunnel into the plainest sort of gray, getting inevitably closer to my stop. Spring Garden. The gentle rocking of the car on the tracks tends to lull me. That, and i was staring at the people. A woman in a flower print brown skirt reading a trashy looking novel (in which i could definitely make out highlighted passages); a man who looked halfway made of bronze with shiny low-gauge piercings and a cycling backpack (i felt like the reflection from his newly shaved head was staring at me); a massive wall of hairspray and blue eyeshadow crammed into shoes that were obviously not quite large enough (pinky toe was trying its best to convince the rest of the foot to let it come back to hang out for a while); a little girl with a broken foot secured within men’s extra-large gym socks and ace bandages (sitting across from her mother, holding a large manila envelope marked Extremities, and it took me a minute to figure out that it was an x-ray of a foot rather than a script of the play).

Stepping out of the train felt like stepping into the color gray: it was as though someone had taken a crayon of that color and plunged it directly into the sun. Dripping over my shoulders, working at the edges of my eyes. I stood for a moment half-in the door of the train as a man took the stairs up to the platform two at a time and wrestled his pockets for a token.

At 8:25 in the supermarket this morning a woman with a full cart of groceries let me cut in front of her in line with my Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Kix, & Orange Juice. The cashier gave my pajama bottoms and inside out t-shirt a cursory examination before i commented “all we had was milk” and she cracked a grin. The receipt paper made an odd sort of crinkle against my $1.75 in change and the flannel of my pocket as my flip-flops thwopped one-two-one-two down 44th street to my house.

The gray somehow got into my head, and my mouth and ears are just that lazy crayon mess. How, oh how, am i supposed to sing tonight?

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/04/85035640/

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I did not get an Easter basket this year because i did not get Easter this year, and so i do not get to complain. Still, it somehow feels like that interminable bunny took a long hop over my life while he was on his route. Lindsay didn’t even go home, and yet she returned on Sunday evening with a basket chock full of fake grass and foil wrapped chocolate.

I ate all of her Smidgens; really, it couldn’t be helped. I was told to eat them, but not told from which basket i should take them, and since everyone has a basket with Smidgens you could hardly expect that i would’ve known that i had devoured all of the peanut-buttery bunnies in Lindsay’s basket which, truth be told, i’m highly skeptical of in the first place. After all, how the hell did the rabbit know where to find her?

On our way to work this afternoon Lindsay shoved a fistful of shiny chocolate eggs into the side pocket of her new Gap bag, leaving a spare few littering the crinkly grass in her basket. It was those few i found myself eyeing a few minutes ago. We have a bag of seasonally wrapped Hershey’s Kisses, but i didn’t want those; i wanted the last vestiges of chocolate to be found in that pastel wicker basket, those gleaming pieces buried under strands of what is, for all intents and purposes, Easter tinsel. Yes, tinsel. Let’s not kid ourselves.

Looking back upon my encounter with the basket, i couldn’t tell you why i craved those room temperature eggs rather than the firm kisses i could have eaten. All i know is that now there’s only a few lemon jellybeans and a lonely misplaced kiss left in that pile of matte green tinsel, and they’re all safe from my appetite. For now.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/04/75054025/

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“Photo is a major with personality,” i opined to her as we sat in the plastic institutional chairs and eyed the machine that was whirring and drying her prints. “Smells like a beach in here,” i told her, not meaning to go on to make fun of New Jersey, but doing so anyway. Minutes beforehand there had been four of them along the wall-length sink, all with their odd developing cylinders and odd-smelling chemicals. A major with personality, expressed in the cuts of their jeans and the way they agitated the shiny containers with their spools of film safely ensconced from any possible outside influence.

I followed her into the darkroom without really thinking about it; after all, i was along to watch her develop film. I should’ve noticed the quizzical look on her face before she shut the door, as afterwards i couldn’t make out anything at all in the broom-closet sized room that she had just plunged into pitch darkness. She had to brush past my entire body to turn the bolt on the door, and i interiourly chuckled at the thought that the entire scene might have a more seductive tone if she wasn’t intent on her film. “I suppose it’s just like flirting with me while i play guitar,” i thought to myself as i carefully slid down the wall to sit on the ground in front of the door, “i hardly even notice.” I was told not to move, and i was unable to see, and all there was for a few minutes were the odd metallic clicks of the reel and my eyes desperately trying to make out any vestige of the dull red light of the main room through the door. My fingers looked slightly less black than the rest of the blackness, but the wall kept coming as a surprise.

The girl at the end of the sink had on jeans that fit her hips awkwardly, riding too high up off of her thighs and low from her waist to show off the bottom of a swirling tattoo on the small of her back. For a second it reminded me of how Anastasia’s jeans used to fit her, unselfconsciously dorky and sexy at the same time, and for that second i imagined that it was her tapping her shiny container against the sink. Just my imagination, i chastised myself. Instead, the dull metal thuds that rang in the air were the product of a taller, darker girl who somehow managed to seem entirely plain despite her angular features. I suppose it was that… the ability to exude careful plainnness and inattention… that reminded me of the parts of my Senior Year spent idly hanging out on Anastasia’s bedroom floor. I had just been mentioning it to Elise the other night, and i had found myself immediately self-conscious of my mentioning another girl who i had written a song for.

“A major with personality,” i said, and as i surveyed the room for a second i found myself thinking of Anastasia, who maybe was the first quirky girl with a camera i really got to know. There’s something about the clicks of a camera, the sureness of the fingers, the rotating it ninety degrees around the careful eye. Something about plastic binders full of black and white photos and sheets of negatives makes me think of her, although now she doesn’t even seem to talk to me in the odd moments i run into her on instant messager. I don’t think Elise was too jealous; after all, it’s not much use being envious of someone who never really cared for the songs i wrote about her over three years ago. And who never took my picture.

It must be something like watching me tune my guitar — that’s what i had thought when i watched Elise carefully advance a fresh roll of film earlier. An unrelenting attention to the instrument that acts as an extension of her eye, and my ever increasing ease with the shiny silver tuning instruments of my guitar and the chiming harmony the strings should wind up in when i’m done.

Her pictures versus my songs; a fair trade, i suppose. Except, now i owe her several thousand words more of them.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/04/75051512/