Recently, my therapist told me we had a limited number of sessions left because he is moving to another state and taking some time off from being a therapist. I was confused because, I guess I’d assumed that the therapist-patient relationship was an indefinite one, or at least one, that if it were to end, would end on my own terms — perhaps with me rushing out of my therapist’s office in to the sunshine with my arms wide open ready to embrace life and love and happiness without crippling anxiety and depression, maybe while “Beautiful Day” by U2 played in the background.

Unfortunately, like most of my relationships, this one with my therapist is ending abruptly and without me feeling ready for it. (Abandonment issues! Hooray!) Obviously, I hadn’t previously considered the possibility that my therapist was also a real person and might someday need to move on.

When my therapist told me he was quitting being a therapist, I had many questions. Here are some of the immediate ones:

“Wait, what?”

“What?!”

“Wait, you’re quitting being a therapist? But…but you’re MY therapist! I thought this would go on forever and you’d be coaching me through my panic attacks as we grow old together! It was going to be romantic.”

“Are you even ALLOWED to do that?!”

“What about all your patients?! I mean, I know I’m self-obsessed, but this time, it’s not just me here.”

“You’re just going to abandon us all?”

“But you haven’t heard all my f-cked up stories! And what about the f-cked up stuff I haven’t even done yet? There will be so many of those! Don’t you want to stick around for that?”

“Is that it? You just drop off the face of the planet after everything you know about me and we live our separate lives never to speak again?”

“Can we keep in touch?”

“Is that weird?”

“Like, can we still talk? We used to talk so much and now there’s no protocol for saying ‘Goodbye.’”

“Would you want to be pen pals and maybe listen to my b-tching and moaning via letter?”

“Can we be friends now?”

“Are you going to write a book about me?”

“Seriously, why are you doing this?”

“Did you not hear me when I said ‘Everyone always leaves me in the end’?”

“You can’t just stop being a person’s therapist! Haven’t you seen The Sixth Sense? Won’t one of your disgruntled patients just show up at your house and shoot you?”

“I’m not going to shoot you, no! I’m just saying.”

“Am I supposed to find a new therapist now? I’m not going to liiiike anyone else!”

“What if I hate them? What if they don’t get me like you do? What if they’re mean?”

“What about all we had together?! All we shared? You’re just going to throw that away?”

“How is it so easy for you to walk away?!”

“Was I the last straw? Were my problems too intense?”

“…Or worse, were they too ordinary?”

“I can have weirder problems! Will you stay if I say that I think I go for men who are just like my father? Do you ever wonder if the Earth is just like, a reality TV show for aliens? Is that narcissism? One time, I ate toilet paper when I was a kid because I read a story about a goat that ate garbage and I wanted to see what it was like and oh, god. Okay, maybe I was like, actually a teenager in that story?”

“Don’t leave me. I’m not ready.”

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1. “Wonderwall’ by Oasis

If someone ever told me “You’re my wonderwall”, I would whip my penis out and be like, “Hi. It’s yours. Take this forever.” There’s a hybrid of sweetness and sadness to this track that provides it with more depth than the average one dimensional love song. Because good love should always make you a little sad, you know?

2. “I Only Have Eyes For You” by The Flamingos

The best love songs make it possible for you to feel like you’re in love for the duration of the song. Even if you’ve been single for some time, you can play the song and feel like you belong to somebody. That’s what “I Only Have Eyes For You” does for me. It makes me safe and comforted, which is rare for a love song to do when I’m not in a relationship. It’s also just a hauntingly beautiful song.

3. “When The Sun Don’t Shine” by Best Coast

Ugh, I’m going to get so much crap for including a Best Coast song on this list. Whatever. I advise you to just listen to the song and hear the lyrics, “I just want to tell you that I’ve always loved you” without melting into sentimental mush. The earnestness in which it’s delivered coupled with the precious jangly guitars is almost too overwhelming for my heart to handle. A lot of the best love songs are just simple. Phil Spector and early Beatles built their fortune around delivering straightforward lyrics about love. Sometimes the most simple sentiments are the ones that can leave us breathless.

4. “Ten Storey Love Song” by The Stone Roses

The Manchester music scene wasn’t necessarily known for their love songs. They were more into being depressed and making everyone else around them depressed as well. But The Stone Roses were different. Their music was upbeat and cheerful with swirling guitars and energetic drumming. Their track “Ten Storey Love Song” is a sickeningly endearing song about building…something? For someone you love? I don’t actually know but I can say that it all sounds super sweet and charming.

5. “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails

This is not your mother’s love song. It’s raw, graphic and intense, but I also think there’s heart underneath the cold industrial beat and rough vocals. “You get me closer to God?” I mean, gee thanks! Plus, that piano part at the very end is so sweet!

To Asian dude standing next to Kurt Cobain freaking out at the end of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

Dear Asian dude,

So you’re going to University of Washington in Seattle, majoring in (uh) Mathematics, and you see a casting call for this new band in town. It’s being filmed in an abandoned gymnasium near your apartment, and they need someone diverse, preferably with a bowl-cut. You have the Tuesday off and figure why not. The video shoot goes fairly well. One of the ironic-goth cheerleaders is into Asians and it just might be (x+1)(x-1)= splooge for you tonight. Good times since you came here from Korea you are thinking, then at the song’s emotive climax, Kurt smashes his ’64 Fender Mustang and sort of “alternatively” freaks out. You are like “Jesa Clist mista, get a glip!” but he’s all A DENIAL!!! A DENIAL!!! A DENIAL!!!, etc. You see, Kim Su, in America the kids are pretty fucked up; got something to do with capitalism, generation x, or something. I’m sorry you felt your physical safety was in danger, but Kurt kind of got lost in the song. As you know, he is no longer with us, as painful as it still feels to say and think about what happened. I hope you got your B.S. in Math, maybe got a job at a software company, and are now happily married in Vancouver, Canada with a beautiful former goth cheerleader. I hope (x+1)(x-1)=’d splooge after all, and that there are little Kim Sus running around. Sing the chorus for me again Sir, and I shall close my eyes to our shared yesterday.

Sincerely,
Jimmy Chen

The etymology of Hipstamatic, the iPhone app which mimics the effect of Holga cameras, is obviously “hipster” due to such demographic’s penchant for both iPhones and photography. Through a combination of different lenses and film, the photos feature artsy aesthetics such as saturated hues, blurriness, over-exposure, and various film distortion originally attributed to Holgas’ inaccuracy and low-fidelity. They boast to “[bring] back the look, feel […] from the past,” which points to a hyper-accelerated sense of time, given that Holga cameras were invented only in the 80′s.

Those bored with the built-in standard set of film and lenses can buy “Hipstapak” sets of specialty film and lenses named after some of the most hipsterish places on earth: Williamsburg, New York; Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan; and Portland, Oregon—each with their own distinct “local” severity and zip-code narcissism (I suspect the Berlin Hipstapak to be next).

It’s endearing how the detached cynicism with which hipsters confront their surroundings is tempered by a sentimentality for “old” things, namely, these circa 80′s photos—and how those compromised photos resembled the inception of photography in the 1840′s. It’s as if we (short of being a hipster, I do have the Hipstamatic app, and must use the first person collective here) are ever-presently grasping into the past—one which had always been aestheticized and never truly experienced—at a more romantically lonely high school or early college time where everything looked like some Anton Corbijn U2 video. MTV taught us that black & white and blurry was deep.

Through flickr and facebook, users are encouraged to “share with your HipstaFriends,” and one soon realizes that the consumer has become the product. Of course, the über-hipsters, those with a more Marxist political spin, are beyond consumerism and cast techy MAC-centric hipsters away as yuppies. (Let us not get into the inextricable overlaps between hipsters and yuppies re: socio-economic entitlement and fiscal agility, only to say that we often define ourselves by who we resent.)

One Hipstamatic testimonial reads “I *love* the photos that come out of this app, it makes just about anything look amazing,” key point being that lack of a photographer’s discretion (subject, composition, light, etc.) is compensated for by superb effects and a passive sense of intrinsic artsyness. In the testimonial, the asterisk-to-emphasis html formatting is purposely not translated—as if they, those two asterisks, were stars in one’s eyes, blinded by digital cosmic radiance, finally in love with how the world looks.

Information on Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the “circus rock ‘n’ roll drama” whose Broadway premiere has now been pushed back to the fall, is scarce so far. What we know now, though, is that it’s directed by Julie Taymor, of Across the Universe and The Lion King fame; that its songs were written by U2′s Bono and The Edge; that its costume design is by Eiko Ishioka; and that it will involve Spider-Man fighting a host of villains: Electro, the Rhino, the Green Goblin, Carnage, Swarm, the Lizard, and Swiss Miss.

Wait–who was that last one? Swiss Miss is a new addition to the Spider-Man rogues’ gallery. Her Ishioka-designed costume has been described as white dominatrix gear, and apparently involves corkscrews and rotating knives. She’s also a genuine anomaly in the world of Spider-Man, who’s been fighting bad guys for close to half a century now. And they’re almost inevitably bad guys. Spider-Man has no villainesses from comic books interesting enough to put in a musical because, historically, his relationship with costumed villains is all about his alter ego Peter Parker looking for a replacement father and failing to find one. That doesn’t seem to have been an intentional theme–but it’s present anyway, and it’s turned up in the three hit Spider-Man movies, too.

The central canon of Spider-Man stories is the forty-odd comic books about the character by artist Steve Ditko and writer Stan Lee that were published between 1962 and 1966. An endlessly inventive and very odd cartoonist, Ditko gave Amazing Spider-Man a sense of constant motion and trembling tension. He had a remarkable knack for action and grotesquerie and urban landscapes and broad comedy. His spindly, contorted figures inspired the style of every subsequent Spider-Man cartoonist. And he drew almost all of the series’ villains as old men–much older men than Peter Parker, men old enough to be his father.

Peter’s father, in fact, is conspicuous by his absence in those early stories: he wasn’t named or even mentioned directly until 1968. As the first Spider-Man story begins, Peter is a teenage boy, living in Queens with his elderly aunt and uncle. Uncle Ben is murdered within a few pages, and the disaster that drives the rest of Spider-Man’s career is Peter’s realization that he could have saved his second father’s life.

After that, Peter’s blown it. Again and again, Spider-Man finds himself fighting men who represent one model or another of bad fatherhood. The Tinkerer, Electro, Dr. Octopus and the Lizard are all scientists, like Peter, but instead of mentoring him, they turn on him. (Before director Sam Raimi’s plans for Spider-Man 4 were scrapped a few months ago, he had been pushing for the Lizard and Electro to appear in it.) Kraven the Hunter is the bad father as alpha male, bloated with his own machismo and his need to prove his superiority. J. Jonah Jameson, the editor of the Daily Bugle, where Peter works, is a furious, pompous, unsatisfiable father who parcels out precious crumbs of respect amid torrents of abuse.

And then there’s the Green Goblin, Spider-Man’s chief enemy–but it wasn’t clear what kind of father he was until Ditko left the series. In their first issue together, Lee and new artist John Romita put the crown on the series’ bad-daddy motif. The Goblin, they revealed, is the wealthy, successful Norman Osborn, who seems at first to be a good father to Peter’s friend Harry–but turns out to be the worst kind of father, the kind who passes along his legacy of violence and lies to his son. The Green Goblin went on to murder Peter’s girlfriend Gwen Stacy a few years later. (By that point, Gwen’s own father, police captain George Stacy, had been killed off as well. In Spider-Man stories, bad fathers never stop coming back, but good fathers are doomed.)

Spidey occasionally got to fight women: he tussled with Medusa, a supporting character from Fantastic Four; he had a run-in with the Black Widow, who dropped in from the pages of The Avengers. (“How can I fight her?” he asked on that issue’s cover. “She’s a female copy of MYSELF!”) But he didn’t get an actual recurring villainess to call his own until the Black Cat first appeared in 1979. (In more recent comics, they’ve developed what can only be described as an enemies-with-benefits relationship.)

That brings us back to the curious case of Spidey’s new hot-chocolate-inspired, castrating-weapon-wielding adversary. It’s hard to imagine a Broadway extravaganza like Turn Off the Dark not featuring a woman as one of its central characters; unfortunately, the 48-year history of Spider-Man comic books simply doesn’t offer many options. Taymor and Ishioka have created an option of their own, and it sounds like Swiss Miss will be a visual spectacle in the tradition of Ditko and Romita’s inventions. But it’s the painful undercurrents of masculine identification in Spider-Man’s early battles–the sense that he was fighting the substitute fathers he could never again have–that made them more than just a spectacle.