Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
by krisis
No matter how badass you look with you new buzzed hair cut, scruffy visage, black wifebeater, and “don’t fuck with me” carriage, an entire exercise in acting can be ruined when you remind the dry cleaner not to forget your black shirt because it’s “part of today’s outfit.”
Up until that point i was doing really good character work, though.
But, really what do pissed off looking potential West Philly gang members usually say when the dry cleaner tries to steal their favorite shirt?
by krisis
Everybody has something that makes them feel real. Or, realer, if you already believe in yourself. Attention and applause generally fit the bill in the circles i move in, but sometimes the thing you really need is a little more tangible. Money. A nice place to live. Gourmet food.
Despite my obvious predilection for both applause and attention, there are some other things that i require to feel as though i am an actual and worthwhile corporeal entity that is actually meant to take up space and breath. Or something like that. Things that make me feel as though things are going well and i really ought not to go frolic in traffic anytime soon.
One of those things, for those of you who don’t pay much attention, is music. Whether i’m listening to it, making it, or just hearing it in my head, my life feels like nebulous between station static without a soundtrack to tune in on. I also need something to do … doing nothing or participating in something passively tends to make me stir crazy in a very short amount of time. Thus my general distaste for television, past the obvious Friends fixation and American Idol addiction. The list goes on and on, with varying assignations of importance, down to the little things: Jeans that make my ass look good, for example.
There was one thing that was missing from the assemblage that makes up the difference between my current glib happiness and the droll existence i lived late last year; one especially tangible item that my life seemed to beg, nay, yearn for. I was certain that having it would make me happier and increase my quality of life.
Elise bought me the blender about two weeks ago.
For two weeks it just sat on my kitchen shelf, looming like a Northern Star over my blended-drink-less life. It was an invitation to smoothies and daiquiris, health shakes and margaritas … in effect, an invitation to increase my happiness and well-being in the area of semi-liquids. And it was still snuggly nestled in its cradle of Styrofoam and cardboard … until Tuesday night. That night i gathered girlfriends, roommates, and our general partner-in-crime SL and her beau. All of us were ostensibly assembled to watch the aforementioned American Idol program, but we had the secondary purpose of breaking in my blender with a jumbo-sized TGI Friday‘s premixed Mudslide. And break we did.
Three days later, and i am noticeable a more chipper person than i was before i slit the tape on the top of the blender-box open. It isn’t that having a blender is about getting really sloshed, though – as we found out yesterday – getting a few drinks into me makes mopping the kitchen a lot more fun. It’s just one of those appliances i’ve always felt as though a real person might own. I mean, how can you be real without the capability to make milkshakes? Eventually i’ll need an entire kitchen full of widgets and whatsits to make me happy, but for now i’m happy to have a ten-speed jumbo-pitchered blender to brighten my days.
Anyway, point being, i have moved on step closer to my materialistic and self-centered version of Nirvana. Now all i need is a gold record and abs of steel.
What about you?
by krisis
I don’t know when i stopped just writing songs as a hobby and started occasionally referring to myself as a singer-songwriter. How can i really draw a line there? How does someone go from doodling to being an artist? I doodled for a long time, writing good songs that never left my own bedroom – akin to sketches in the margins of a notebook. Now i take myself seriously, constantly revising and re-recording each song until i feel as though it has reached its end point – and even then occasionally pulling it off the shelf to be aired.
I cannot pinpoint the day that i began to take myself serious enough to say so out loud, but i can promise you it had to do with my next song. Earlier this evening i told someone via IM that practicing songs was like sanding down a chunk of wood until it becomes a perfectly smooth sphere, and that i only had one or two songs out of over a hundred that had reached that point. This song, if no other, has gone there… to the point where i can get lost in the nuances of one silly little riff and then forget the lyrics entirely. I have played it so many times, in so many different ways, that it’s as if i have come back around to it being new again and i am now discovering it for the first time.
It takes a big song to fill that void, and it didn’t start out big. It still isn’t, actually: just three chords, three verses, and what was once just some fortuitous ad-libbing. When i sing it, i feel famous. It makes me sweat because i move to it underneath my guitar as my fingers dance back and forth across the riffs i have unearthed, there shape and arrangement changing on every beat. It makes me frustrated when it will not sound out correctly, and it makes me glow when i change something about it only to make it more interesting to perform.
It’s late, and a lot of bloggers are getting a little weepy, but this is how i always feel about song 25/24. Earlier tonight i tried my best to open up a new side of it for you to see, and i encourage you to click through to older audio of it through its lyrics file so that you can hear the differences i am talking about. I’m under no illusion that, as a result, you will take me any more seriously as a musician. But, maybe you’ll just be able to understand how i can feel like this about something so simple that anyone who has performed on it has irrevocably altered.
Thank you for reading, thank you for listening, and goodnight.
by krisis
On my lunch breaks i walk two blocks north of work to a corner store that has obscenely cheap deli sandwiches and 2-for-$1 packs of cookies. On Tuesday i was walking out with my sandwich and a quart of lemonade when two giggling Hispanic girls brushed by me to get into the store. I glanced back at them, perhaps to admonish them for their rudeness with a cross stare, and it was then that i noticed – round biceps connected to sturdy shoulders, lips widely enhanced with liner and gloss, and what was surely a painted-on Cindy Crawford mole. Neither of the two caught my glance as they moved deeper into the store, and i headed back to my daily grind of endless vinyl records.
It had just started to rain on Friday when the bus pulled up to the corner of eighteenth and Walnut streets, and clutching my brand new sheet music book underneath my decidedly non-waterproof jacket i stepped on to the crowded vehicle without taking much notice of what route it was. Only after i had dropped my last token into the machine and started moving up the aisle did the electronic announcement from the PA proclaiming the bus’s route number register with me: it wasn’t my bus, but it would get me to within two blocks of my apartment. A quick mental comparison of waiting in the rain for the next bus crowded with rush hour passengers or just sprinting two blocks after i got off left me resolved to stay on the alternate route.
The slight blonde girl in front of me smirked apologetically as the momentum of the bus forced her to lean back towards me; she was shorter than me, and pretty despite the dull red sheen of acne that followed her low cheekbones. She was too short to reach the over-head rail to steady herself, and so she gripped the back of the seat next to her for support. The bus was one of the new ones, with their strange dais of seats in the back, and i discovered that i was just barely tall enough for my hand to get a solid grip on the stainless steel bar that ran parallel to the ceiling. Sans my inhumanly large headphones and pressing the book against my chest with my left arm, i averted my gaze from the precariously balanced girl in front of me – letting it rest on the floor by my feet.
The shoes were wicker, like lawn furniture, with a chunky heel and an open front to reveal toes painted a shade somewhere directly between red and pink. My attention was drawn back up as the blonde girl excused herself again, this time to the woman whose seat she was standing next to, and when i swung my gaze back around i was confused. Confused, because it was the tired face of a man that stared back at me from the space approximately above the reddish hued toenails. His hair was a faded red and hung just below his ears, tucked back behind the left one. His shirt was tie-dye all in shades of blue and had a scooped neck that revealed skin once-fair but rendered ruddy from exposure to the sun. He was crammed into a pair of jeans that cinched him tightly at the waist, which created an illusion of the hips that he sorely lacked. My confusion was alleviated, for the most part, when at the tapered cuffs of his blue jeans i found the ankles that lead to those familiar toes sitting upon their wicker thrones.
They were the feet of a man, obviously, although i had chosen to ignore it when i examined them previous to give their owner the once over. My gaze swung back up to his face, sad and tired as he clung to the same overhead bar that i was using to steady myself. I imagined that my face looked not entirely different from his at that point, wearied from the day that had preceded it. That was all i had to be weary about, though – my slim frame and curly hair rarely draw any prolonged scrutiny from passers-by. His face, i suspected, could have been equally as weary of this as it was of the long week that was coming to a close.
With some amount of apology in my eyes i turned my face back towards the blonde, who was precariously advancing on a seat that had just been abandoned. I followed her towards a second empty seat across the aisle, forgetting for the moment about the painted toenails and their owner. When i finally took my seat i slid my cd player out of my bag and rested my giant headphones over my ears, and when i glanced up from my hands’ sure operation of the walkman i was encountered again my the man, this time with his back to me. His blue shirt had a similar scoop on its back, and it revealed a set of undisguisedly wide shoulder blades. His illusion was not as solid as the girls’ from the corner store… only as deep as his clothing, and his toenails.
As far as i’ve ever known, Philadelphia isn’t exactly renowned for its gender-bending community. Every so often i pass by a man with impossibly nice cheekbones or women with too-wide shoulders, but no so often that i’ve ever stopped to recollect it afterwards. I welcome the sight without any prejudice, but my reactions are inevitably bi-polar in nature. The girls left me grinning widely at their oblivious slide past me while glibly chatting and smiling; after all, i immediately pegged them as girls, and so they should be happy.
The man on the bus left me somber as i stepped off into the light rain, forgetting entirely about my planned sprint back to the apartment. There is something especially tragic about not being who you want to be to begin with, and not being able to turn yourself into that person even when you try. After all, i’m still mentioning him as “the man on the bus” when that was obviously not his intention. It was an inward sigh that greeted my smug thought that he might be happier with my malleable frame to work with rather than his own; just because i am not met with scrutiny doesn’t mean that people aren’t assuming i’d rather be in their place or shape if given the choice.
I’ve noticed that the ones that show you that they’re thinking it are usually the most wrong. My sprint began.
by krisis
I have had my ups an downs with Dan Savage’s Savage Love column, and the particular letter that was pointed out in my comments the other day fits nicely somewhere in the middle. Specifically, the first half is an up, and the last paragraph is a down.
While Dan’s opening is indeed quite Savage, it’s also sadly true; the easiest way to stop being mistaken for a homosexual is to stop “acting” like one. Of course, the harder way to stop being mistaken for a homosexual is to only cultivate friendships with people that avoid such idle and generic stereotyping based on shopping, cooking, and Madonna. I enjoy shopping because i’ve had to shop with my mother my entire life, i enjoy cooking because i think it’s one of the sexiest things you can do with another person, and i enjoy Madonna because i’ve always loved music and she’s always been good. So, if those traits (and others) make me “gay,” then… well, then i’ll take the dictionary definition, thank you very much.
Savage hits the melancholy nail right on the head with his second paragraph… that most women would love to meet men like myself or the writer of the letter, but that they would love to meet them so that they could have them as friends. Witness this exact reaction in my friend Lisa, who refers to me as her sassy gay friend. When it comes right down to it, she doesn’t really care whether or not i’m gay — she’s just in it for the sass. The point that was brought to light that i never thought about is that women do want to think they’re bringing out the sensitive side in their men, and so a pre-sensitized guy can seem like sort of a letdown. Of course, not all women subscribe to both of these rules (thank god); some girls like a guy who’s a little bit ambiguous, perhaps for the exact reason that they bring out the guy in him rather than the sensitivity.
The down about this particular column’s closing is, for once, not one i have with its author. The letter writer in question is so superficial of a skirt-chaser that he’s “cultivated” the traits in question, and so Dan dismisses him by telling him to “[B]utch it up a little bit. Shop a little less, care a little less, and listen to Madonna a little less.” I would say the same thing to the man in question, maybe even adding “And try being yourself for once.” I’m sure he was thinking it, though. The down, for me, is that Savage isn’t really addressing the question in my mind, which is “What about if that is yourself?” I can surely be blamed for any sexual ambiguity i present in the form of lap-dances and suggestive commentary, but Savage is essentially endorsing that artificially touchy-feely men should drop the pretense, so i’d assume he’d similarly endorse laying off the pretense of being more of a guy’s guy as well.
So, what’s a girl’s guy to do? In my opinion, not a whole lot — other than believing in the things that make you yourself. No, most girls don’t find sensitive men overwhelmingly attractive (unless they’re fronting decent emo bands, and then it’s open for discussion). However, the girls that do tend to fall for the softer sort of guy are more confident about themselves, i think … enough so that that don’t need a alpha male to lead them around by the arm. This doesn’t mean they’re perfect, or self-confident, or what you’re looking for … but they are probably free from playing the more typical parts of the daily boy-girl game most people subject themselves to.
Mention Madonna a little less? Maybe. Give fewer lapdances to “Queer?” For sure. Change? Never.
