Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

books

The Belly of the Beast

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The closest I had ever been to a casino prior to Saturday was my twice-yearly reading of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, so when we stepped onto the floor of the Tropicana I half expected a neon carousel full of lizard-people to greet me.

It would have been better than the real thing; shabby carpets whose patterns snaked from side to side as they stretched across a hazy room filled with a fleet of leggy middle-aged waitresses in weird black corsets and hundreds of chain-smoking, hollow-looking gamblers, with a few cigar-smoking rotund gamblers thrown in for good measure.

I suppose I could have inferred the haze and the zombie-like patrons from Hunter, but i had been hoping for something more psychedelic.

In Vegas, maybe, but the nine of us were in Atlantic City. Wes and Karen sat down for winning streaks at black jack while I milled back and forth, nearly having my legs broken when i mistakenly wandered into the service-space between two active craps tables.

It occurred to me that there was really no instruction for the beginning gambler; I couldn’t have even sat down at a black jack table, let alone craps or some poker variant. While the hollow-cheeked undead of Atlantic City elbowed their way past me to get a closer look at the craps game I wondered if they all just expected me to buy some chips and lose until I understood … until I realized that anyone who spent any amount of time wondering about that wasn’t fit for gambling in the first place.

Eventually the more serious boys headed to poker while the rest of us made a pass at the slot machines, where I spent my first (and perhaps only) $3.25 on gambling before declaring that the fleet of corseted grandmothers were not going to keep me inebriated enough to make my gambling cost-effective.

We retreated towards the sports bar and, as the whir and hum of the shabby casino room faded behind us and as the ceiling gave way to rows of wicker fans and then impossibly-bright false-clouds, I thought that perhaps I liked casinos very much so long as I didn’t have to go into the casino part.

Either that, or calculate just how much I had to gamble in total to have my drinks and roomage completely comped and spend exactly that hour-by-hour over the slow course of a day. Because I’d rather spend my money on a steady and sure flow of Southern Comfort than whip it away on the whims of an eight-deck shuffler.

Eight hours later and we were all thoroughly drunk (some of us already hung-over) and mourning our poor Eagles while singing karaoke, me and Gina and our entire table screaming back the pitches of Bohemian Rhapsody at the pitch-deaf lump who had the (intentional) misfortune of selecting the song, and then carrying our scream-singing into the cool night air and back to Philadelphia as i sang the pitches i still could with my husk of a voice.

It took me the better part of Sunday to recover from the experience – just sleep and water, no speech or food, until finally this morning I felt as though the rest of me had returned from AC, where it had somehow become entangled in the hazy air on the casino floor.

Stops Just Short of Calling Tolkien “A Little Bitch”

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The fascinating Hero Workshop posts the following excerpt from a recent article:

A greedy, smaller-than-human creature finds a treasure in the depths of a river. The treasure is a ring of great power which exerts strange influences on its owners including giving them the ability to disappear but always to bring danger or death to its owners. A hero enters the fray armed with a reforged sword that had been broken. Various races of humanoid beings attempt to gain control of the ring by magic and by heroism until it is finally brought at great cost and sacrifice back to its origin where it is purified by fire. The last pursuer perishes along with the ring.

Sound familiar? Is that because you’re familiar with Wagner’s opera tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung, AKA The Ring Cycle?

Don’t worry, i’m not either. At least, I wasn’t until I read Caroline Leech’s fascinating article about Tolkien and Wagner. Did Tolkien borrow from Wagner, or are their stories both so commonly archetypal in theme that they could hardly help to intersect?

Regardless of the answer, Welsh National Opera’s dramaturge Simon Rees offers the follow summary opinion:

The more I look at the two pieces, the clearer it is to me that Wagner produced a piece of extraordinarily united and unified work that you can tap from every angle and it remains as sound as a bell. And that Lord of the Rings is the conception of a very much lesser imagination, though still a very interesting and powerful piece of writing.

“Basically Wagner is for grown-ups.”

Ouch.

For some additional background on The Ring Cycle the the First Timer’s Guide, or the Wagner Experience @ uTexas, or ever-trusty Wikipedia’s articles on each of the four parts: Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung. Or, if you are musically inclined, examine the collected vocal scores, all available via the Indiana University Digital Library Program.

Oh Well (A Trio of Links)

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I’ve been so busy playing other people’s songs for the past week that i’m having temporary amnesia when it comes to playing my own songs for the first of what is hopefully a final Trio of Trios for you.

In the meantime, here’s the second in what I hope to be a tradition of presenting a Trio of Links every time I’m not quite ready with a Trio of songs when I planned to be. This Link Trio is drawn from NaBloPoMo blogs I’ve already highlighted in my series of site reviews.

The first link is In The No, the inaugural PodCast from A 1,000 Times No.

In it, blogger Jen interviews Tom Zoellner, author of The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire.

The podcast is a fascinating hour on the history of the diamond ring, partially about the history of diamond PR and how it has become “the semiotic of royalty.” Tom was also the co-author of An Ordinary Man: An Autobiography, the novel that became the film Hotel Rwanda, and he also discusses that book.

(Extra-bonus: Jen is connected with a cappella u, and her theme music is a cappella!)

The second link is Grand Rounds Volume 3, Edition 9, as hosted by Doctor Anonymous.

Grand Rounds is an ongoing event hosted in round robin fashion by a number of different medically oriented blogs. It highlights the best medical writing from recently updated blogs. Though the writing is medical, it isn’t necessarily technical – some of it is on topics like coping with the emotional ramifications of disease.

My final link is a post that all hobbyists should read at In A Minute Ago, titled Five Ways to Nurture Creativity.

I’m of the firm belief that it’s important for everyone to have at least one hobby that isn’t passive (like tanning or watching television), and I spend most of my free time trying to engage actively in something.

People become the most enamored with your creative output when you are engaged and confident in your work, and blogger Sharon provides five universal suggestions for getting to that point. One of the suggestions that is made is making a space for your hobby. This seems so simple, but it has been hugely impactful on my hobbies.

In prior apartments my computer was in my bedroom or living room, respectively, which made it hard to sit down to focus on blogging and recording music rather than focusing on sleeping or socializing. Especially when my computer was in the living room both hobbies declined to all-time lows. Now that I have my own office/studio it’s much easier to delineate serious, uninterrupted personal time devoted to either or both.

(Sharon also suggests keeping a visual journal, but this could just as easily be a small text pad, or memos to yourself – the point is not the medium, but quick instant-feedback on an idea that you can tap into at a later time).

Taking hobbies seriously dovetails with possibly the most important thing I took from my creative studies in college: Don’t apologize for your art! If you release creative output into space you shouldn’t defuse it by offering a retraction regarding its quality or content. Whether you make a mistake, or just felt the performance was a little too risqué, you have to allow it to stand on its own for the audience.

Of course, this doesn’t apply to the creative process itself – that’s what preparation and practice are for. A photographer will take some crap shots that never get printed, and an actor will discard many approaches to a line. However, an imperfection in a final product or performance is part of its art.

That doesn’t mean you can’t afford to be human – your humanity might be the most attractive aspect of your work. Just don’t allow your human flaws or self-deprecation to obscure what is so fascinating about you to begin with.

ps: I had hoped to record a Fiona Apple song for my last influences Trio, but i didn’t have a guitar arrangement locked down. Though it isn’t necessarily what i would have played, here’s a highly superior “Oh Well” from the unreleased Jon Brion version of Extraordinary Machine.

The Long Tail of Things I Enjoy Doing

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I’ve recently been reading The Long Tail, which I was originally turned on to completely separately by the original Wired article and via author Chris Anderson’s brainstorming blog (still ongoing).

I haven’t formed a complete opinion on the book yet (I should probably finish it before doing that, eh?), but something I have enjoyed so far is that certain passages have made me put the book down to do my own research, or to start my own discussion. A good book should do that!

It isn’t really necessary to understand what “The Long Tail” means to appreciate the rest of my post, but if you’re interested Wikipedia can tell you, or you can just trust me to summarize it as follows:

The Long Tail is essentially a model (not necessarily of business) where end users have an tremendously huge number of choices – a number typically impossible to amass in any kind of bricks and mortar establishment (think of Amazon’s book and CD selection vs that of Borders or the currently liquidating Tower).

Given this huge number of choices, it turns out that significant user demand for choices continues far past the initial popular choices – ranging even beyond the choices typically offered in a more limited format such as a bricks and mortar store. For an eBusiness such as Amazon or Netflix that incurs relatively low cost to keep these seemingly infinite choices in stock, a significant portion of their profit will be generated by those more obscure choices that a physical storefront would never offer – in effect, the “long tail” of the choices being offered.

Anyhow, back onto my topic.

One passage that had an extremely visceral impact on me as a read was this one: Labor – forced, unspontaneous and waged work – would be superseded by self-activity. [Eventually] nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes … to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

It isn’t author Anderson’s writing – it’s a quote from The Pro-Am[ateur] Revolution: how enthusiasts are changing our economy and society by Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller (DL it here), who are in turn quoting Karl Marx’s writing from between 1845 and 1847. And, though Marx’s meaning is diluted when taken out of context, the quote resonated with me.

(Marx’s point is that Communism will ultimately find success in the many crafts of its people, as society will “regulate the general production” through the varied skills of its members. For more on the idea of crafting, visit Craft Research)

The quote resonated with me because of a certain conversation I had towards the end of high school. I was talking about potential college majors to my good friend Robert (who I owe a call), and he said something akin to, “Peter, I want to be a jack of all trades, and a master of none.”

Now, I was familiar with the phrase, but I had never thought of its practical application to a person. Why would anyone want to be halfway good at everything and perfect at nothing? It seemed unfullfilling to me at the time.

Robert’s words reverberate in my head from time to time as I take up yet another new hobby – piano-playing and MYSQL, as of late. I don’t know that I have a hope of mastering either skill, but it hasn’t stopped me from pouring time and energy into either. So, am I a jack of all trades, and in the process have I mastered nothing?

Marx’s quote resonates because it gives Robert’s some perspective. According to him – and I agree – none of us are meant to function solely in a single dimension of production. Yes, most of us have a proverbial “day job,” but our passion carries us to work just as feverishly at acting, or mountaineering, or homebrewing, or any of the other interests of my many friends, and we shouldn’t necessarily despoil that passion by attempting to thrust that work into focus in our lives by majoring in it or making it our business.

I love communications as much as everything, and it’s a perfect thing to take up my 9-to-5 because I would never contrive quite so much communications to work on in my free time. What if I do spend my weekends struggling to debug my own code or master a new instrument? It doesn’t mean I have to get my degree in IT or Performance – if I did I might not like either as much.

That’s just one instance of the trains of thought departing from The Long Tail station; even if it’s not a superior book, it’s a superior catalyst.