Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
by krisis
If there’s anything I do like about religion it’s the element of mythology that comes part and parcel with it, which is why I delight in articles like this recent one in Time magazine, implying not only that the Ark of the Covenant is a real, tangible artifact, but that it had been used for centuries by African Jews as a drum filled with gun-powder.
Take that, Indiana Jones.
by krisis
I’ve been reading a lot of Huffington Post to stay up-to-date on the election cycle, although I often find myself the most intrigued by their non-election content.
This week Larisa Alexandrovna brought to light that a seemingly benign broadcast blackout of 60 Minutes in Alabama last week was likely connected to a shockingly Soviet attempt by the Republications to keep former governor Don Siegelman out of the sight and mind of his former electorate – a campaign that has lead to an election slimly lost by recount and a suspect conviction that has lead to his imprisonment.
It sounds too outlandish to be true, but the most disturbing part is that once you delve beneath the surface of the story the details of Republican opposition and flawed justice get even more incredible. For the background on Siegelman’s story, and it’s disturbing connection to Rove’s tenure in the White House, please see Larisa’s summary on alterna-news site The Raw Story. (Or, read her series, The Permanent Republican Majority: 1, 2, & 3).
Also in the government-coverups department, is the CDC trying to cover-up a major cancer threat?
by krisis
I must engineer a perfect storm of daily routine in order to go to bed – or, more accurately, to fall asleep – at a reasonable hour.
I half-joke that my circadian rhythm runs long, but its pulses run short. Left to my own devices (i.e., an interpersonal “constant dark) I will tend to regulate to a roughly 26 hour day with sleep in multiples of just over three hours, and my intellectual pursuits don’t tend to peak until somewhere in hour fifteen – relatively late in a 26 hour day, and prohibitively insomniac in an actual earth day.
That natural state isn’t especially agreeable with a five-day work week. It used to be that on Sundays I’d have to beat my body into submission with a heavy dose of benadryl, which left me leaden in Monday morning meetings. Lately I’ve attempted to coordinate an intricate assemblage of coincident events – a sunrise clock, regular meals and exercise, a balance of heavy thinking and fun – distributed to the appropriate hours to leave me pleasantly drowsy somewhere prior to midnight.
The ultimate irony is that even if I get to sleep at a so-called “reasonable hour” and wake up appropriately early for a responsible business person my resulting day will be devastated – I’ll either drift off too early, or be jazzed and awake much too late. Either way, two “normal” days in a row are few and exceedingly far between in my life.
In discussing this issue recently I fielded several recommendations for Melatonin supplements.
Melatonin is a naturally occurring hormone that – amongst other roles – helps to regulate circadian rhythms. Its production is hindered by exposure to light, which means if you live in a constantly illuminated environment (i.e., offices at home and at work, stages awash in spotlight … you know, all the places I live) your bodily levels are most likely out of whack.
Curiously, its sale as a supplement is illegal in some locations, such as Germany and New Zealand. Even more curiously from a body chemistry standpoint, it’s synthesized from tryptophan (AKA, the thing about turkey that makes you sleepy), which is in turn synthesized via of serotonin (AKA, the euphoria-causing agent that LSD mimics, and that heavy use of MDMA/ecstacy depletes). Supplemental users report that heavy doses can induce vivid and/or lucid dream states.
(I went through this whole “brain chemistry of drugs” phase when I first read The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test and Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, especially the latter, because Hunter kept taking drugs I had never heard of before, let alone understood the effects of.)
Knowing all of this about Melatonin before it ever hit my tongue lent it a certain air of panacea, even if it was to be a placebic panacea. And, sure enough, every night that I’ve taken it I’ve been to bed before midnight and awake before 7:30 – yes, it’s induced multiple “normal” days in a row!
However, it has also had a certain side effect – maybe also placebic, but no less curious if that’s the case.
Though shorter, in a circadian sense, my days are definitely longer. Or, maybe just the hours.
I don’t really know how to explain it appropriately. It’s not so simple as time going by slower, or that I’m moving more quickly.
For example, today I finished my usual amount of work, and went to my usual amount of meetings, and when I sat down to pack up I realized it was 2 p.m. rather than 5 p.m.. I had arrived around my typical time, and I didn’t feel exhausted, or restless – I simply felt as if I had lived an entire workday of life already. Except, most typical workdays don’t come equipped with a spare set of three bonus hours to get a jump on the to-do list of the next day.
That isn’t the only example, either. I’ve been more productive at home, and I’ve been waking up feeling more fully rested – even hang time between slams of the alarm button feel distended. The situation is rendered all the more unusual because I am typically an innately good judge of the passage of time – Elise used to jokingly use me to reset stopped clocks because I was so on-the-mark in my elapsed-time estimates in the absence of common giveaways like television shows or church bells.
It’s quite palpable for a placebo effect, and if it isn’t one then it’s certainly difficult to quantify effectively. If my prior days were 26.5 hours long and have now been scaled down to fit into an actual day then each of my prior hours are now compressed into less than 55 minutes, which still would only have yielded a nearly imperceptible bonus of a half hour by 2 p.m., and certainly would be hardly noticeable in the eight-minute interval of my snooze button.
So, what’s the answer? Am I just well-rested, and as a result experiencing a higher quality of life? Is it completely a placebo effect, soon to be followed by incredibly lucid dreams (though, actually, I’ve always had those)? Or, is it truly some subtle form of hallucination wherein I perceive myself to be moving at a completely speed than time itself?
And, more alarmingly, if the latter is true does that mean that everyone else has been moving at this speed all along and I am just now catching up? Or was I previously moving at a normal speed within my extended day, and am now dashing to and fro with an apparent sense of urgency to all who surround me?
by krisis
February tends to be a pretty sparse month on CK, aside from the first two, whose blogging were fueled by infatuation with the Queen of Darkness and Elise, respectively.
Actually, February tends to be an infatuated month – a 28-day Fat Tuesday of topical gluttony – which is maybe why the blogging tends to drop off. In 2004 it was SongFight; last year, consuming media. 2006 was… being scruffy? I honestly couldn’t tell you.
I bring those three years up specifically, as they’ve dictated much of my month so far. The scruffiness aspect finally ended this morning, when I shaved off what I think (if we’re being fair) I can say was my first ever mustache. It was charming at first, and looked dashing in photos, but the prickliness of it finally got to me (just as Elise was claiming I had progressed past Brillo-pad stage, too; oh well).
The mustache was, in turn, indicative of my preoccupation with things other than self – as typically I am much too busy examining myself in the mirror to allow any such deviation from core residual self image – and those two things correspond to the other two years I mentioned above.
Like a square to a rectangle but not visa versa, SongFight is to Arcati Crisis. SongFight was perhaps the first time Gina and I masqueraded under our proper name, though we had certainly recorded together before as an entity. And, from our fours-years-ago SongFighting emerged “Moscow, Idaho,” which we played an utterly stunning version of on Saturday ever-so-shortly before my voice-losing escapade.
(“Moscow” is a curious story unto itself, but I’m saving a recap of that for when we have a better demo of the song.)
Like 2004’s before it, this February so far has been a very Arcati Crisis month. We performed three separate times, and this last one marked a major milestone that we just realized this morning: we’ve now played every one of our current songs in front of an audience. That’s sixteen tunes, which represents a nearly indescribable leap from last February when we knew just three or four.
In fact, with the exception of “Fisher Price” the songs which we now consider to be the most “solid” and “reliable” didn’t even exist as duo tunes this time last year – they were still relegated to the various demo discs and Blogathons from which they originated. Suddenly we find ourselves with thumb-twiddling time at rehearsals where we once were dreaming up new riffs to catalog tunes, and so far this month we’ve filled it with new songs and rehearsals with cello (!). Tomorrow we’ll be recording the few stragglers who haven’t yet made it onto one of our Live @ Rehearsal discs, and then I’ll be spending the rest of the month mixing.
I know that other bands have come farther in a shorter amount of time – after all, of those sixteen songs all had been written prior to 2007 – but I still can’t help but be infatuated with our progress.
Not just our progress, though – that’s an old-Peter model of infatuation, that restless addiction to revisiting a process and its product, rather than living in the present. This time I am actually infatuated with the present tense of us, and all that we are capable of. Could we have imagined in 1994 that one night we’d wind up on stage at Doc Watson’s a hair shy of last call with our friends bouncing and singing along to every word of our songs?
Well, maybe we could have, but in that mental image I probably still had my Spock haircut, which is not nearly as ravishing as the current one, AKA “Dean Winchester.”
Which, in retrospect, probably prompted the stubble.
Meanwhile, there is the aspect of 2007 that I am repeating – I’ve been very much absorbed in media consumption. It’s partially because I have been following the primary elections on various news sites, but really it’s just an input/output thing. I’m outputting riffs, harmonies, new songs, project plans, site maps, engagement party thank you notes – all manner of creativity. And if I don’t ingest and digest input from some other sources I’ll be left with nothing to output.
(Or, worse, I will return to my past-process addiction and just output recursive, painful feedback. Sort of like this post, but more shrill.)
(Okay, while we’re parenthetical already I just need to point out that I started talking about that whole input/output deal almost seven years ago, and at work we’re reading this horrific business book that I won’t even do the justice of name-checking, and it has a whole fucking chapter about how you need input in order to maintain output. Like, with a chart of a Pac-Man-esque circle eating and shitting information. I kid you not. So, yes, 20-year-old-me could teach this business guru a thing or two about a thing or two.)
(Any, mucho digression; do you see what February causes?)
My increased intake of media – particularly election coverage, which has been nigh-unavoidable the past few weeks – has re-awakened my love of media critique. Especially after nearly four years of freedom from the bonds of television I feel like I’m seeing messages for what they really are for the first time – often just inelegant, thinly-veiled agendas meant to obscure the actual meaning behind the message:
Disney loves to sell its girl-empowerment, but don’t look for it to offer a fair payout to the author behind one of its hugest properties, The Cheetah Girls.
Similarly, CNN trumpets its bottomless cadre of cell-phone equipped i-Reporters, but when one of their segment producers runs a hip, snarky blog that gets too opinionated he is promptly fired.
And, in perhaps my favorite example, our favorite brand names and supermarkets re-purposed plain old oats in increasingly portable and nutrionless forms until we are paying dozens of dollars on the pound for curiously un-oat-ish cereal bars, with MILK INCLUDED (TM).
I’m not sure if the sudden transparency is coming from me, or coming from the internet, or coming from the world at large having finally gone in for a look at its cataracts, but I’m loving it.
And, with ten days left to go, that is my February, so-far.
by krisis
Of course, if you’re going to start losing your voice in the middle of your last song and subsequently fuck up the lyrics because you are so confused about why it is suddenly so hard to sing, it will be a song you know by heart and can sing backwards and forwards in your sleep and in elevators, and Gina will cast sideways glances at you to make sure you’re not dying or frothing at the mouth or anything, because your sudden lack of ability to hold it together would typically be accompanied by a medical emergency.
And, well, it was a medical emergency – we’d spent too long in the chilly green room and played through the song on whispers and didn’t get to warm up and I had pushed too hard on a falsetto part on the song before and all of the other terrible things you should never, ever, ever do to your voice, and my voice rightfully gave in the first time it was asked to flirt with the top of the staff. But, why that song, you know? What would be the justice if you messed up a song that was, you know, hard, or that you were a little shaky on the lyrics on anyway?
A shitty end to an otherwise pretty cool evening.