Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

essays

Personal essays from Krisis on everything from parenting to immigrant life to driving, and much more.

two sides of a naked truth

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There are naked pictures of me on this blog.

What can I say? I went through a brief, months-long phase in my late teens where I was at the edge of my early-college thinness, had a web cam, and thought I was some form of internet soft-core porn star. I was young, newly single, and attractive.

Even in my youthful pride and vanity, I understood the context of my actions. I knew that by posting the images to CK I was committing them to the collective consciousness, and that they would exist in perpetuity through my every job interview or public exposure. I was okay with that. It was my choice, which I own even if I may later regret it.

This weekend one of the biggest stories on the internet was that the private photographs of dozens of actresses had been hacked from Apple’s iCloud service and posted on the internet. These images were not taken to be committed to the collective consciousness, but for personal use. The only choice made was to take them – they may have even been deleted later, only to persist in the cloud. They weren’t carelessly misplaced or lost. They were stolen.

This is not only a theft, but a sex crime – which is to say, the criminal behind it intentionally and with harmful intent removed the sexual agency from these women. Yet, the general reception to the photos was not disgust or icy dismissal. Many people rejoiced in the chance to see these stars naked. In catching up on the story, I read one particularly disturbing comment from a woman who said she loaded the photos, handed her laptop to her husband, and said only, “You’re welcome.”

I suppose he was supposed to be thanking her for acting as an accessory to a disgusting crime she was now implicating him in as well? I’m not sure.

Let me state plainly that there are important issues of misogyny to unpack here. I’m not the writer most-qualified to contend with those topics, or even list them. I’ll simply point out that few if no men had their solo photographs leaked as part of this crime. It would be just as much as a theft and a sex crime if there had been, but the crime would be in a different context.

That’s the context I find myself mulling over, since I have the capacity to do so – the one we might be discussing if this had not been a sex crime solely against women. That is the idea of public versus private communication.

(No, not in the disgusting, victim-blaming, “don’t take the photos if you don’t want them to be seen” way that I’ve seen it happening so far. We can be surprised that stars might take these photos – I personally am – but let’s not pretend that the facts that a human is sexual and that a body can be naked in front of a camera entitles us to see the results.)

At work, I lead a session for new employees on Brand Voice. The prevailing theme is that when you represent a brand you should assume all of your communication is public-facing and brand-representing. There is no private. It doesn’t matter if it’s an internal email, a comment on an elevator, or a personal posting. If you can be construed as a representative of your brand, your comment counts! Once you fix that in your brain and use it as your global filter, your risk is greatly reduced. If something runs counter to your brand, you don’t say it or share it willfully.

Celebrities are certainly aware they are brands and in any potentially public-facing venue act accordingly. These women would never have committed these images to the public consciousness, as I chose to over a decade ago. They were all clearly private – just as I expect some of my colleagues might say something in the privacy of their home that would fall outside of my recommendations in the Brand Voice talk.

What defines private? In my colleagues’ case, it’s the knowledge of their surroundings and the assumption of security. They are in their living space with a known quantity of other people, presumably safe from being intruded upon, overheard, or recorded. That assumption could be in error – someone could knock down the door at any second! But, they have a reasonable, evidence-based expectation that they are secure.

What defined private for the victims in this case? They, too, were in secure spaces. They, too, did not think they would be seen by anything other than their own camera and their intended recipient. However, once these digital photos were allowed to sync to the cloud, a whole new set of assumptions came into play.

Do you know what it means when you commit a photo to iCloud, use DropBox, divulge a personal detail on a social network, or even speculatively place something into your shopping cart in the same browser session where you have been logged in to any website, anywhere? I suspect you don’t. You assume what you are doing is private because you want it to be, and because there are some measures in place to maintain that illusion of limited access. You don’t understand the whole chain of custody of your information and how it will be used.

You may not realize the website you visited knows which ads you clicked and what you did afterward, though you would surely object to someone following you through a grocery store, taking notes. You don’t know what server your private Facebook message sits on, or what prevents it from going to another user, yet you are likely as confident (or moreso!) in the privacy of that communication than you are that a letter will reach its intended recipient unmolested. In fact, it is the digital thing is so much more fragile and corruptible.

If this sounds like it’s turning into, “So don’t take a naked digital picture ever!” it’s not. Again, just because a naked photo exists doesn’t mean everyone should be allowed to see it, just as because a woman has a body does not mean every one has the right to comment on it.

It is, “Why do we trust who we trust?” When someone tells us, “your data is private and secure,” do we understand what those words mean? Private unless what? Secure until when? My clients frequently request documentation or NDAs to confirm that statement, but it turns out the most famous people in the world just click “I Accept” on the iCloud user agreement like the rest of us and go on with their lives.

They trust just like we do. They think private means the same thing we do. The violation they are experiencing is the same one we sign up for every time we click that “I Accept” button. We’re all the same, except more people recognize their faces.

If I suddenly became famous tomorrow – joined a reality TV show, or released a hit song, or ran for public office – all of the content on this blog would become fodder for both my fans and foes. Hundreds of details about my actions and beliefs. Indecent photos. Terrible demo songs. That was my choice.

What happened to the victims of this situation wasn’t a choice. It isn’t fair or just. It’s terrible, it’s a crime, and it can never be erased. Famous or not, woman or man, no one deserves to lose their sexual agency or to be treated like an object.

And it’s all because one criminal decided he wanted to change the meaning of the word “private.”

Fathers

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Steven-1980

My grandfather, Steven, with my beautiful Aunt Joyce and my grandmother, Florence, in her kitchen – all dressed for my parents’ wedding, October 1980.

My grandfather Steven was a gym teacher.

I never knew too much about him. My relationships have always gravitated towards the women in my life, and grandparents are no exception. I spent countless Sundays at the kitchen table with my grandmother, reading the Sunday paper. We watched Golden Girls together on Saturday nights. I would hover at her elbow every Christmas, awaiting my first ladle full of her Italian Wedding Soup.

My memories of my grandfather are more scant. He was retired. He would drive down to Florida and return with a Nintendo game for me, bought from a pawn shop – cartridge only, no instructions. He was genial beneath a gruff exterior, and I never once believed he was actually mean or angry with me. He liked baseball, which I still don’t, and The X-Files, I think, which gave me something to talk to him about when we would sit in my Aunt Susan’s sun room at family parties in the 90s.

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My father Peter owns a gun shop. He managed bars and restaurants for decades. In his twenties he was a roadie for a band – lights, I think.

I know many facts about my father, but they are disconnected. They’re like a cloud that drifts through my memory, never quite coalescing into a specific narrative. He attended Central (my rival high school) and Temple (my rival college). (Funny, that.) He had a motorcycle accident in one of the roundabouts near the Art Museum that left his butt susceptible to numbness during long movies. He farms hot peppers in his spare time.

My memories of my father are many. He and my mother separated when I was three or four, but I saw him every week until I was eleven or twelve, and then every other week until school work made it impractical to spend alternate weekends away from home. I remember his old apartment with the low mattress, the bar where I spent countless Sundays watching Eagles games, and his first house with his now-wife with its bubble skylight windows off the master bedroom.

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Pete-1981

My father and I, fall 1981.

I will become a father sometime this summer. Or, I suppose, I am already. I am an account manager, a musician, and a writer.

I didn’t always know I wanted to be a father. I remember a specific point in my teenage years where – in a mix of angst and sudden, acute awareness of the world around me – I decided it would be irresponsible to bring anyone else into such an unfair and capricious world. But before that, I remember that I was always very concerned that I was my grandfather’s only grandson, and that I had to have children to continue our name to another generation.

E and I agreed a long time ago that there would be at least one child in our shared future, though the last name was (and continues to be) undecided. Over the years I’ve become accustomed to the idea. Much like our hypothetical eventual wedding would one day become reality, I knew that one day our hypothetical eventual child would arrive. I would joke with co-workers that she or he would be enrolled in military school at age three to combat all the various foibles of modern youth, but secretly I think I can solve those via limited screen exposure and regular listening to The Beatles.

(More on that, later.)

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My grandfather passed away last Thursday. He was 87.

I don’t mention this in search of condolence. To lose him was a tragedy, but not a great surprise. At Christmas my three aunts told me it might be the last time I would see him, winking there from the end of the table.

He was my last living grandparent, including those in my still-new family-in-law.

The aunts brought pictures to his viewing on Sunday night. Old black and white photographs and pages from his yearbooks. I was struck by one photo of him, smiling from his wide face, hair black as pitch in a way I had never seen. On either side of him boys struggled up knotted ropes. Some of the boys were black, others white. The yearbook was from the early 60s.

I spoke at church on Monday morning, the same one where a much smaller version of me served as ring-bearer for Aunt Susan’s wedding. She and her husband picked me up the morning of the funeral and drove me to the cemetery after the services. Two men in crisp army uniforms awaited us there. They thanked us on behalf of our country and our president, and handed my father a flag folded thirteen times before one of them played the most beautiful and somber “Taps” I have ever heard in my life. I cried, finally, beside the headstone that he shares with my grandmother Florence.

I never knew my grandfather served.

At lunch after the burial my aunts and cousins took turns sharing somewhat apocryphal stories about him. He loved teaching people things. He loved cars – or, at least, driving – and aliens, and pointing out how people were “meatheads” and “nimblebrains” while subtly showing you what you were doing right.

He was alive for 31 years of my life – a decade over my next-oldest cousin – but I didn’t have a story to share, aside from those video games without instruction books. No tale from before I was born. No specific, outstanding memory, spurious or not. Nothing he had taught me that I could remember.

I don’t think that was his fault or mine. It was just life, and the years that separated us.

My father is now in his 60s. When our child is old enough to have memories he or she might really remember – those strong, crystalline memories – he will be in his 70s, much older than my grandfather was when I was that age. My father shared so many stories about my grandfather over the weekend, but none of them sounded familiar to me. Had I forgotten, or just never listened?

Now, our child will not have any great-grandparents, but will inherit a set of seven caring and altogether hilarious (and sometimes crazy) grandparents. I can’t say what my child will know or think about my father, among them. Some days I can’t even say what I think or know about him, though I am sure that I love him very much.

We called him a few weeks ago to set up our next dinner together, and to tell him about the baby – because waiting until the dinner would have been far too long. “Great news,” he said, smiling from the other side of the phone, and then asked me about my band.

Last Friday, while we discussed the funeral arrangements for his father on the phone, my father said, “I haven’t told the aunts about you and E and the baby – it’s your news to tell. I think maybe you should wait until after the funeral is over. But, earlier this week I did tell my father about it when I visited him. I didn’t think you would mind, or that he would tell anyone else. And now he won’t, I suppose. ”

“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks, dad.”

Does the past matter after a reboot?

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To be fair, I don’t know if any of us really wanted to see a fourth film of Maguire’s puffy prematurely-balding version of Peter Parker.

We are living in the age of the reboot.

Last week, Amazing Spider-Man relaunched the webhead’s cinematic universe while the body of the old Tobey Maguire series was still warm. There’s a new Dallas series on TV. Sherlock Holmes revisionist history movies are being released alongside a present-day version of the detective on BBC TV.

So do those older, original versions matter?

Alternate Future History

Think about your favorite TV show or series of books. It’s a serialized, ongoing story that builds with every installment and references its past. You love it. You watch every episode and buy every volume. You are a super-fan.

What if there was some prior series with the same characters and concepts, but it was not a part of the current story you love? Would you buy it? This is increasingly common in our age of reboots. If you loved the new JJ Abrams Star Trek movie – which departs from the traditional Trek timeline post-Enterprise – are the other TV series and films automatically a must-watch? What about past Spider-Man movies, original Dallas, Sherlock Holmes books, Charlie’s Angels, G.I. Joe, Inspector Gadget, or Battlestar Galactica?

To me, Garfield is the perfect embodiment of Peter Parker – thin, gangly, awkward, and genuine.

Probably not. All those past series are just an alternate reality to the present ones. You don’t need to watch both.

Case Study: DC’s Crisis of Collected Editions

DC Comics  is one year into their successful line-wide New 52 reboot. Now they’re faced with a major crisis: they have a huge back catalog of trade paperbacks and hardcovers that might not matter.

DC’s rich history of iconic characters stretches back to 1938. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman – these heroes emerged as pure archetypes and over many decades evolved into the rounder, more dynamic characters they are today. There are many hundreds of older issues of their exploits available to reprint and press into the hands of eager young fans of today.

Action Comics #1, 1938

Except, today’s characters are not the same people – and I don’t just mean their personalities. DC’s Crisis On Infinite Earths rebooted everyone back in 1984, making post-1984 books the equivalent of new-Trek. Some of the characters beneath the masks of Flash and Green Lantern weren’t even the same as before! Then, after many years of tweaking, DC rebooted again last fall – creating a new-new-Trek.

What wasn’t immediately evident from those #1 issues was that some characters survived more intact than others. Batman’s corner of the DC Universe? Seemingly mostly the same, even if Bruce is younger than before. Superman? Origin retold from scratch, parents now dead, never in a relationship with Lois. Wonder Woman? Major changes in the Amazonian status quo, right down to her parentage.

Which brings me to my titular question: do DC Comics Collections matter? Yes, there are the Watchmen and the Killing Joke, the indisputable evergreen classics of the comics medium that will move units regardless of if their stories still count for anything.

But what about DC Archives, their premium hardcover reprints of Golden and Silver Age comics? What about Wonder Woman #205? Action Comics #527? The 70s Green Arrow / Green Lantern series?

Action Comics #1, 2011

None of it counts in continuity, so does it matter anymore? These classic stories have little to nothing to do with the current state of my favorite heroine. They aren’t all prohibitive classics. So, is there any point in reprinting them?

(Marvel doesn’t have this problem. Aside from some isolated soft reboots of certain characters, everything still counts, all the way back to the 40s. Every issue of X-Men is acknowledged and in continuity.)

Does the alternate past matter? You decide.

I want to know what you think. Do older stories still have a place post-reboot? If you loved JJ Abrams’s Star Trek did you immediately jump back to rewatch the original series?

And, on our case study: Should DC even bother to reprint non-seminal stories of characters other than Batman if they don’t matter in current continuity?

What do you think?

Oldies Aren’t So Old Anymore

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I have been a huge Madonna fan for essentially my entire life – I have distinct memories of spinning the 45 of “Dress You Up” and its b-side “Shoo Be Do,” which came out when I was three-and-a-half.

My father is a different story – and not just on Madonna. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him actively listen to a single song released after I was born (except, occasionally, Billy Joel). His taste in music is firmly rooted in the 50s and 60s – doo-wop, Motown, and early rock – and the radio in his car was permanently and without question tuned to Oldies 98.1, WOGL.

No exceptions, no Madonna tapes. Oldies 98.1 or else. And we spent a lot of time in that car.

When I first was old enough to care about radio stations I thought it was an annoying and restrictive rule. Seriously, no new music? How uncool was that?

Then I got to know the songs. At age five I would perform flawless choreography to “Stop! In the Name of Love” and sing along in parking lots to girl-group classics like “I Will Follow Him” and “Leader of the Pack.”

Those were the obvious oldies – Supremes and Stones, Beatles and Temptations. I’ve owned them for years. But WOGL was more than that – a never-ending stream of doo-wop, 60s pop, deeper cuts, and one-hit wonders. After years of riding around Philly with my dad, to this day I have instant and total recall whenever I hear a classic like “Lightnin’ Strikes.”

Relatively early in my life I remember asking him, “Dad, how old will I be when they play Madonna on WOGL?”

We did some math. Despite playing a lot of Doo-Wop, at the time the majority of WOGL’s songs were grouped around the late 60s and early 70s (disco was relegated to its own hour at night), so my father took The 5th Dimension’s “Age of Aquarius / Let the Sunshine” in as an average example.

“Well, ‘Aquarius’ went to number one in 1969, and now it’s a song we hear a lot on WOGL, in the 1980’s. So, it took it almost twenty years to become an ‘oldie’.”

“So, I’ll hear ‘Holiday’ on WOGL in… um… 2004?”

He laughed. “When you’re 23? Maybe. I don’t know if they’ll ever play Madonna.”

I giggled my agreement – how could Madonna ever be an “oldie”?

Now a full five years past his predicted 23, I’ve heard Madonna on WOGL. It makes a certain amount of sense – she’s an oldie to someone!

What my dad and I didn’t anticipate on our idyllic long rides was that when the oldies’ qualifying line reached forward into the 80s that the oldest tunes would reach their expiry. First it was the more obscure, one-hit doo-wop that went extinct – yes to “The Still of the Night,” but no more spins for The Del Viking’s “Come Go With Me” (very nearly my favorite song all time).

Then it was Doo-Wop entirely. Then the line crept into the sixties pop, slicing through all but the most enduring Motown and Brit Rock – stuff you can still hear on television commercials. Smaller pop singles like Lou Christie’s “Lightnin’ Strikes” went MIA. Now the midday playlist is mostly 70s classic rock and disco in the day time – where it should never show its spangled face.

Songs I once assumed would be forever woven into the fabric of my life have all but disappeared. Now I rely on random trips to the supermarket to jog my memory – that’s what it took to unearth Friend & Lover’s “Reach Out Of the Darkness” – and it’s from as late as 1968!

The same me that grew up with Madonna grew up with those songs, and this morning when Philebrity‘s Joey Sweeney posted his unfinished thoughts on WOGL 98.1 FM’s recent inclusion of hits from the 1980s into the canon of “Oldies” – complete with name-checking “Come Go With Me” – it resonated with me (and, from the looks of the comments, it resonated with a lot of other 20- and 30-somethings as well).

Yes, “Borderline” is an oldie now. But it’s on other formats, and on Greatest Hits CDs still moving thousands of units a year.

What about “Come Go With Me”? Will any eight year old Gaga-loving kid ever have the chance for that to be his favorite song? Has doo-wop seriously gone the way of ragtime and big band – a dusty antique with no relevance to today.

Probably. I guess that means when I have kids I have to alternate between Madonna and doo-wop on every car ride to make sure they know all of their musical fundamentals.

Trolls Under the Bridge

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As I spend more time working on Social Media projects at work and at home, one of the most recurring topics is “Trolls.”

It’s a broad topic. Trolls can be anything from vociferous-but-reasonable dissenters to people with an agenda of annoyance and an axe to grind. Each species merits a different reaction.

The Air Force created a terrific Web Posting Response Assessment – effectively, a Troll Taxonomy Tool & Decision Tree – to aid in selecting a response. (Here is a PDF of a recent version, for your reference.)

It’s a great tool – it distinguishes between several layers of negative responses. There are true “Trolls” (negative purely for the sake of it), but also responders are who “Misguided” (negative based on incorrect info) and “Unhappy” (negative based on a corresponding negative experience).

This simple, one-page chart has been a sanity-saver on a few projects in 2009. It forced my teams to stop a cycle of second-guessing – evaluate, respond if-needed, and move on.

That’s why my thoughts went to the assessment last night, when I received a comment notification on one of my videos. The comment was to the effect of “this dude can’t hit a note.”

I tried to objectively place my responder in the tree. Clearly he had a negative experience listening to me. He’s also misguided, because I’m definitely hitting many notes quite well in the video, and his comment wasn’t subjective.

Ultimately, though, he’s just a garden-variety Troll – spreading negativity for some intangible reason it’s impossible to dispute. So, per the Air Force, I’ll monitor it, but won’t respond.

That’s the success of more than my crack Air Force training. Three or more years ago that sort of comment would cripple my confidence. I would probably apologize for his negative experience without ever assuming he was misguided. And I would stop playing the song, probably for months!

Yesterday, he just made me smile. These days I’m a lot bigger than one or ten trollish comments. I sound how I want to sound; if I didn’t, I would have never posted the video.

That’s the same confidence you must have in your brand to make good use of the Air Force tool. If you’re unsure of the product or service you’re offering, every dissent turns into a potentially reasonable complaint.

From there, it’s all apologies, and you’ll be overrun with Trolls.