Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Personal

(to find love is to know love)

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My ability to be complimentary has been faltering, fading fast. After it, all that will be left is to analyze, to criticize, but not to enjoy.

Ask me about the last good record i bought. I’m not sure, but i can tell you about the last bad record i bought. The last five bad ones, actually.

This is just a small example. Actually, I am unconvinced that i will be able to like anything anymore in the very near future. As for my example, I’ve all but given up on buying records (one of the few true pleasures of my life; ask anyone) because all i seem to be able to do is dislike them. Going to a cappella concerts has become a sort of critical duty, as i am almost assured to whisper nasty things about them the entire time to whoever deigns to sit next to me. Riding elevators inevitably leads to a lengthy internal monologue about ugly hair styles, lamentable posture, and why some people even bother to get out of bed in the morning

My newfound inability to enjoy much of anything is infecting my free time. Why see a movie? Why eat at a new restaurant? So insidious is it that it has crept into my own art. Why record a song if it won’t be perfect? Why write at all if your words are not fully-realized and crystalline?

From there it is only a few steps to complete self-imposed isolation. Why talk to your friends if you have nothing nice to say? Why care what i’m wearing if i’ll be ugly anyway?

Have i spent all of my compliments already, along with my self-esteem? You’ve met me, so surely you’re familiar with both – at some point i’ve probably told you how wonderful, or fabulous, or beautiful you are, and you’ve surely witness me in some act of supreme confidence and hubris. Have i spent that all before my quarter-life crisis? Splurged, even, so that there is nothing left but scant ‘decents’ and ‘it was okays’?

After last month’s a cappella concert at Drexel i spent an hour or two mercilessly outlining the indelible failures that each group displayed during their performance. In the middle of this assured diatribe Maggie or Ed (i forget which; perhaps both) looked right at me (through the back of the seat or from the corner of his eye on the road, respectively) and said, “I enjoyed it because we saw a bunch of people doing what they love to do. It doesn’t matter how good they were.”

I spent some time thinking about that tonight. We saw a fun, decent mixed acappella group whose guest performer was a local singer-songwriter. Leah Kauffman. In the program she described her influences as “Laura Nyro, Fiona Apple, Joni Mitchell, and Elliott Smith.” I was first excited to hear her, and then almost immediately afterwards hostile and skeptical – how could she do anything but let me down.

She was pretty, shy but not slight, and told us she would start with a cover from Blue. Her “A Case of You” stuttered, as she plucked chords rather than strumming, and faltered slightly on that riff that traverses the length of the guitar neck. She allowed the song to taper off after the last chorus, muttering that she messed it up. After three more songs (two at the piano, and another on guitar) she slipped off stage, and the lights came up for intermission.

I am known for my ferocious reviews of singer-songwriters, but after the performance i could say nothing bad about Leah. She is 19, and she is not perfect, and she meant every word she sang to us.

She made me think of Maggie/Ed’s comment, and how i have lately lost that wonder in my life, and about something i used to say to explain why i liked singer-songwriters rather than big-voiced artists like Whitney or Mariah. “The art is in the imperfection.”

It is strangely-shaped in my mind as i mull it, unfamiliar in my mouth as i tongue its shape. If it wasn’t for Leah, i fear i might have never remembered it at all.

Leah told me that her website was broken, but took my email address she so could send me some songs.

I am glad still have the capacity to like something.

I Can See Clearly Now…

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When I first got braces (an event I bless and rue) my mom’s best girlfriend told me that she had wanted braces as a kid. So bad. But, her teeth were too nice.

She wanted glasses too, but her vision was nearly perfect. She was healthy, and pretty, and she just had this need to have some sort of artifice between her and everyone else. Why wasn’t she allowed a disguise, she reasoned, when so many other people were afforded them?

She never said it in as many words, but that’s obviously what I would have thought if I was nine year old girl in 1964.

Having had my fair share of wearing braces, I didn’t think I wanted glasses; I had pair in high school, just for reading. I thought they looked like John Lennon’s, but in them I looked look a great owl.

It was bright in California when it wasn’t raining, and Justin and Sara shopped for sunglasses with me. I subsequently became so enamored with the tiny square frames of my pair that I didn’t like to take them off. The indoors are brightly lit anyhow. I wore them in Amoeba on my second trip, peering over them at the most used CDs I had seen in my life.

Returned for LA-land to my primarily indoor habitat here at home, I promptly scheduled an optometrist appointment. And, well, when I said I was worried because I use a computer eight-to-sixteen hours a day the doctor was convinced immediately. I needed to protect my assets.

(When was your last checkup?

Um… during the Clinton administration?)

Three days later, I had indoor-appropriate glasses (I could only get away with wearing the square ones on my head at work; even on the way down in the elevator I got looks). I feel as though I have located an entirely new me, a me as sharp as I used to be, as precise and witty. I attend meetings, dinners, and soirées in them exclusively. I wear them to bed to scan through magazines. I look better in them when I sing.

I think I might call my mom’s best girlfriend to let her know that I finally get it.

Thoughts Right Now

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I don’t really like chocolate, but believe in it. I have faith in chocolate. Because, even though I don’t really like it – the dirty smell, the heavy taste it leaves in my mouth – I find that I still love to eat it. I’ve probably eaten more chocolate so far this year than I did in all of 2004. I can appreciate that it does something for the brain. Sometimes I intellectually want chocolate, even when it’s the last possible taste that I’m interested in.

I feel starved. No, wait, not because I’m just eating chocolate. I feel intellectually starved. Usually after six months at a job I’m back to class. We’re going into month eight. My body is primed to learn something new and intense. I am afraid that my brain might atrophy, and try to cram in new facts from magazines and new songs by ear.

A friend of ours is playing at South-by-Southwest this year. He’s a terrific singer and guitar player, but I am not a fan of his songwriting. I’m sad because I’ve always wanted to go to SxSW, and because I’m sure that he will break there, and I haven’t even had a gig in a bar since 2001. I’m sad because no one is singing along to my songs.

This weekend Sara visited from California. I felt like such a nerd, but all I could talk about for a third of the time is how I wanted to go back. I still can’t tell if it was because it was the perfect vacation at the perfect time, or because I really liked what I saw of LA. All I am sure of is that Sara has so fabulously evolved past Philadelphia that talking to her about something that happened in Philadelphia is like someone extolling the virtues of a horse-drawn carriage – its quaint, but outmoded.

We’re moving, Elise and I. A company who we are not fond of took over the management of our building, and if the world operated exclusively on my parameters we would move out NOW, because I don’t like people I don’t trust profiting from me. I am sick of apartments; I have decided that we must rent an entire house. I want to know that everything that happens behind the front door is my responsibility; I am sick of letting people in because other apartments’ bells don’t work.

Elise complained a few days ago that I am always home. It’s winter, I told her, and I don’t drive. And I work all day. And, I don’t have extracurricular activities to attend. And, I never want to go outside or do anything or interact with other people and find out their opinions anyhow. So, really, I have no choice but to stay home.

There is always a choice.

Thoughts Right Now

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Do you remember when i would just sit in my horrid little apartment sophomore year, just banging out as many posts as i had thoughts? Today i feel like that, only less horrid. I cleaned. I bought groceries. I took that pile of books to the used bookstore. I have every right in the world to sit and transcribe thoughts until sundown, at which point i’m going to a BYOB Mexican restaurant to drink margaritas on a work-night against my better judgment.

Anywho, allow me to digress to the though i came here to transcribe: I sometimes wonder what my co-workers do when they go home.

I mean, we see what i’m doing right now, and it’s not all that impressive, but it’s something. Some of them have children, so that pretty much explains what they’re up to. The rest? Some like sports, some go to gyms, some engage in serial home-repair. One creates terrific bead work that i’m going to make a website for sooner or later. Aside from her, though, rarely do i hear about anyone’s personal projects (aside from buying tickets, or getting in shape, or putting up gold-plated gutters).

Surely they must have projects – we are all comm people, after all – defined by our interest in devouring a enormous subset of all things, and governed by secret wishes to be star reporters or gossip rousers. Surely they must have a novel in draft form, or an article, or an experiment in social engineering. Something.

I try to ferret something out of them, but they are either entirely inscrutable or they really do just hang out and watch television every night. It’s hard for me to imagine it – being defined just by what i do during the day. It seems like a horrid fate.

We all know about my songwriting habit, and my blogging hobby, but in the last few weeks i’ve been working just as much on two others, one of which is arranging music. When you arrange a song, you have to listen to it many, many, many times. You have to listen for pitches and rhythms, tonality and feel. Sometimes you have to listen at half speed, or with a section looped indefinitely. You have to listen until your brain and fingers have absorbed the sound, and can recreate it in standard notation, however inefficient it seems at the time.

Before i ever knew about a cappella music or polyphony or even, hell, arranging, i used to arrange Tori Amos songs for guitar. I didn’t really understand what i was teaching myself at the time – i would just sit with the sheet music in my lap and slowly transcribe it into a single staff of guitar tab. Sometimes it was physically unplayable, but my software would still play it, allowing me to hear what six separate guitarists playing one string each could make of a Tori song.

At the time i barely could read music, let alone transcribe pitches and rhythms by ear. Over half a decade later I just listen to “Since U Been Gone” more than 200 times and somehow, after more than a dozen hours of magical effort, i have an arrangement.

When they return my question, volleying: well, what’s your hobby, that always sounds so insubstantial. And, right now, it is. But, by god, the TrebleMakers will perform it live at a cappella fest 2005 or lose their voices trying, and then it will be real and alive and in the air, and i’ll know just why i spent a whole week of my live living, breathing, and singing every element of that damn song.

As for my other hobby, you can have a hint: inebriated cinema. I dare not say any more, because i… erm… have to go and fix the broken thing that Gina just found.

Blink of an Eye

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I’ve tacitly decided to read a book for every week in this year, but the relationship isn’t going to be strictly one-to-one. That is to say, i plan to read books in fits and starts – two here, a handful there – with weeks off in between.

I want to talk about all of the books here because, in my eternal OCD need to track everything in my life, the thing i’ve always wanted to do the most (after tracking every song i listen to) is track all the books i’ve read in and how long it took me to read them. I finished Harry Potter four and five in about a solid 24 hours of reading, and i just finished Tori’s dense Piece by Piece in well under seven.

The problem with talking about these literary conquests is that i’m not really a book reviewer. I am too voracious of a reader, and i suspect that applying my vicious music-critic standards to books would yield extremely few positive write-ups. Plus, i don’t like immediately reacting to a book; i’m more-often-than-not wrong.

If anything, i want to wait until each book has really sunk itself into me, and then talk about the things it made me think. Harry 4/5 brought me back around to loving the intrugue of a fantasy novel. Tori changed the way i look at songwriting and my personal image, my entrenchment in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking has so far made me think every encounter i’ve hard with a person or a piece of art in the last two days. I was turned on to author Malcom Gladwell through Tom, who posted a link to Gladwell’s entrancing essay on Ketchup.

Blink is a book about the ability to (and science of) discern(ing) things in the most split of seconds. In its third chapter, it discusses the idea of implicit associations, and how scientists at Harvard are trying to measure them. Malcolm posed the question: Do i associate men or woman more with professional careers. After a brief Implicit Association test, he postulated that i probably leaned towards men. As a feminist i was a little offended, but then i remembered he was talking to the general reader, and not me. As i’m not exactly the general reader, i decided to take to the web to try some of these tests for myself.

At Project Implicit i immediately went for a gender-identity test that measured my associations of men and women with science and art. I predicted that i would come up even, or even preferring girls in relation to science; i was, after all, raised a feminist.

I was right! My Gender/Science rating was “little or no association between science and Female relative to Male.” Upbringing aside, it’s not exactly a surprising result, seeing as my best friend is a female chemist and i’m a liberal arts kind of guy.

Next, i chose a test whose result i was honestly quite interested in: the White/Black test. Though i’ve claimed to be completely racially indiscriminate my entire life, i haven’t had a close African American friend since fifth grade, and do not show much affinity for black musical artists. I predicted that i would show slight racial bias on this test. However, i once again discovered that i have little or no preference, this time regarding “African Americans relative to White Americans.”

With two neutral results under my belt, i started to become suspicious of my ability to break even on the tests (i also scored neutral on Kerry v Bush, but that’s like asking me this week how much i like the Eagles). Finally, i settled on two tests that i would surely weigh heavily on: fat vs thin and sexuality.

Rather than confirming my ability to game the test results, these two tests proved to me that the Harvard scientists have a great methodology that may suffer slightly from poor execution. The images on the sexuality test were a lame man-on-man wedding cake topper, its straight counterpart, restroom style semiotic genders standing in male/female and male/male pairs, plus the words straight, gay, homosexual, and heterosexual.

Can you spot the possible flaws? Primary in my mind is that the test lacks anything having to do with lesbians, though it professes that its “gay” designation encompasses both men and women. A second issue is that both of the visual cues were ambiguous at best; why not feature a picture of a straight couple kissing, or a gay couple holding hands? Their graphics and words for homosexuality had no connection to what i instinctively recognize about it (like the word “queer” or a rainbow flag), which left me hopelessly confused the entire time; I scored a moderately positive implicitly “straight,” but i suspect that it was due to my utter confusion.

The fat/thin test drove this major problem home with a specific example: one of the five thin-faced people looked fat to me. I consciously thought she was fat, and i instinctively drilled the “fat” key every time she appeared. Sometimes i’d catch myself just before making the mistake, but i consistently erred on her face. At the end of the test, i was told that i had no preference between thin and fat. I’ll let you, the longtime reader, decide if that statement is true.

Based on this scientific foray, some of the following statements may be true:


a) I am facile enough at computer tests that some natural biases are obscured,

b) The test has a sampling error that could be overcome by discarding words and images the user cannot identify correctly, or allowing the user to self-identify words or images that they recognize as being associated with the given categories,

c) The test measures implicit (unconscious) cultural associations, which should not necessarily be expected to match implicit personal associations, which may not be the same,

d) The test is perfectly functional, though its results are occasionally surprising,

e) After all this time being an equal opportunity feminist, it turns out that i don’t despise G.W., i really don’t prefer being thin, and i much prefer one of the grooms in a commitment ceremony to wear a wedding dress.

To the tests’ collective credit, i wasn’t able to overwhelm the tacit “societal” bias on any of them – neutral is as far as i go. Back in Blink, Malcolm subsequently informs me that over 80% of people make pro-white associations, even after repeated testing.

Maybe it’s not broken; maybe they just should screen out the communications majors after the opening survey. More thoughts on Blink et al in upcoming posts.