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.

Primer, Primest

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I love Primer.Primer Poster A

You’ve probably never heard of it. It’s an obscure, indie, sci-fi movie that’s 77 minutes long with a single special effect, shot on film for under $10,000.

It’s also the 2004 Sundance Grand Jury prize winner, critcally acclaimed, and maybe the best story about time travel ever conceived.

I found out about it in 2005 from Rabi on the day we first set up the DVD player in our house. I bought it that night and watched it three times consecutively.

It’s that kind of movie. I’ve watched it twenty or thirty times since then, almost always two or more times consecutively. It’s one of my favorite films of all time. I want everyone I know to see it, so I can debate it endlessly with them.

(If you have Netflix you can watch it right now, online, for free.)

The problem is, it’s challenging and obscure. For almost half its running time it seems to be about a needlessly-detailed, grown-up, science fair project. The final seven minutes introduce information that alters the rest of the film. By the time you realize its true intrigue, it’s over.

It’s a harder sell than any Nolan film – even though Memento and The Prestige each sketch a close iteration of its plot. Nolan gives the answers and lets you figure out the question. Primer gives you the concepts and let’s you figure out the question.

The answer is not given.

In interviews, writer / actor / director / composer Shane Carruth would say only what the movie was not. He also provided a forum on the movie’s website, where a steadily-increasing number of fans could debate the finer points of the film’s chronology.

(You could also check Wikipedia, but the answer given there is wrong. Maybe. Keep reading.)

Four years went by. Shane closed the forum to new registrants due to a flood of spam and porn. The debate kept churning. And then, something interesting happened: someone solved Primer.

Maybe.

In July 2008 a user posted to the forum that he had solved the Primer puzzle after many dozens of rewatches, and that he was writing a book about it – A Primer Universe. He claimed that he was receiving thousands of requests for the book (never mind that the forum – Primer ground zero – has only 1094 registered users). He claimed that he sent it to Shane and co-star David Sullivan, who both confirmed his theory in its entirety.

Eventually, he posted the book to a blog, leading to other forum users swearing fealty to his theory.

Primer Poster BI read the book. It only makes sense if you have the movie committed to memory. And if you do, it is mind-altering. Game-changing. It completely re-writes the movie, making significant some details that seemed routine and expository. It increases the perceived depth of Shane’s careful plotting exponentially.

If it is real.

This will be the single, most-detailed response to A Primer Universe registered on Google – and I haven’t given any details at all! All other references are mostly on social bookmarking services,a and could have easily been placed by the author. There are no reviews. There is no third party confirmation that Shane or David have read it. There is no evidence of a physical copy ever existing, though he was selling them for some time. The Primer forum users affirming it could be a series of accounts maintained by the author for this exact purpose.

The book itself is a riddle. It could be a fraud. It could even be written and maintained by Shane himself, frustrated that his fans never quite figured out his enigma.

Just like the movie, the riddle of the book is: what is the most prime? It is better to be primer, more prime than the competition.

It’s best to be primest – most prime.

And, when it comes to A Primer Universe it’s as hard to discern its primacy as it is to unravel the cinematic riddle it describes.

Happy Birthday To This

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I. The 27-Club.

Last September I turned 27.

It made me nervous.

Being a major music fan and devout lifetime subscriber to Rolling Stone, I am all too aware of the so-called “27 Club” – a musical super-group headlined by Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, Jimi, Janis, Jim, and Kurt, all of whom met their untimely ends at age 27.

My nervousness wasn’t an actual, rational fear. Just a fringe anxiety, like my utter terror at putting my hand anywhere near the blade of a food processor, even if it’s disconnected from its power source. A mere superstition. Anyway, my musical acumen certainly isn’t at risk of rivaling any of theirs, nor is my level of excess. –> Still, it hung there. The 27 hurdle. A year it would be a challenge to survive.

In the months after my birthday the challenge of surviving gave way to the challenge of getting from one day to the next. Planning a wedding and a honeymoon. Making music solo and with Arcati Crisis. Organizing benefit concerts for four separate charities, all while holding a senior position at work.–> Honestly, I was so preoccupied with life that the whole 27 Club concept didn’t reoccur to me until I was getting ready to jump out of an airplane last month. And, since that failed to kill me, I assumed I was in the clear with regard to the whole untimely end angle.

I continued thinking that until the past few days, when I began re-reading my entries from the past year in anticipation of the ninth anniversary of Crushing Krisis.

It was then I realized that it happened. I died.

If that sounds like hyperbole, it’s meant to be, but only a little bit. Truly, the past year of my life was so vastly different than any that came before that it was hardly lived by the same person.

If that sounds like hyperbole, it’s not. One of the benefits of your blog celebrating it’s ninth birthday is having the ability to make frequent, sweeping, and entirely-accurate generalizations about the state of your life.

In fact, that’s my favorite thing to do on August 26, the birthday of Crushing Krisis.

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II. Running Long.

I first floated the assumption that I was the longest running blog in Philadelphia six years ago today, and I verified it last November (with a footnote).

Having finally taken the time to vet my claim to blog-fame, I began to talk about it. At first it was clumsy to get it off my tongue, but slowly I improved from, “Oh, um, I have a blog that’s been around. For a while. Really long, actually,” to “I write the longest-running blog in Philadelphia.”

Even though I now say it with ease, it still has not stopped sounding strange. As I discovered this year, Philly is a pretty plugged-in town. Bloggers, podcasters, twitterers – the city is swimming with them. To be all three, and to be the one collectively doing it all the longest, stopped seeming like a passive achievement (like, “I lost my last baby tooth!”) and more like an active one (more like, “I pulled out my last baby tooth with my bare hands, because that little fucker was annoying me!”)

–>In truth, it took a lot of effort to get through nine seasons of Crushing Krisis. I had to learn stuff that normal people apparently don’t know how to do based on their day-to-day lives, like being able to offer pros and cons for all of the major blog CMS platforms from present back to 1999, or revising PHP arguments on the fly to get the results I want. Similarly, I know all sorts of silly details about audio production that make even my eyes cross.

I didn’t mean to get this way. Honest. It just happens when you write the longest-running blog in Philadelphia, which is also the longest-running platform for a singer-songwriter to podcast and embed his or her work.

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III. Greatest Hits, The Expanded Edition

A year ago today I wrote that I felt “as though the vast majority of my personal greatest hits record is contained in the last year of my life.”

I’m happy to report that the hits have continued – in both life and song. Significantly, I crossed off two of my biggest goals in life – seeing the Nike of Samothrace in person at the Louvre in Paris, and jumping out of a plane.

The greatest hits of my year weren’t limited to those two events. Hardly.

I planned a wedding and a honeymoon, an all-encompassing circus that stayed relatively fun right through the end, just as I predicted and insisted it would. I recapped dress shopping with my groom’s party in two parts, the first of which hilariously features my near-ejection from David’s Bridal. I recorded a song that would become so synonymous with our wedding that its lyrics wound up in the fortune cookies at my bachelor party

Then there was the actually bit where I got married. Subsequently, I reported our honeymoon adventures in words and photos.

The novelty has not worn off.

I made music both solo and as Arcati Crisis. As AC, Gina and I headlined a show and then co-hosted an open mic for over half a year, in the midst of which we recorded a Live @ Rehearsal record so definitive that it approaches being a studio album (download it free!). But, some of the most fun we had was while driving and breaking traffic laws.

Meanwhile, I realized I had an entire album of new solo repertoire waiting to be played, and I began to get out to perform it more than ever before – particularly Small & Lonely, Saving Grace, Tattooed, and sometimes Gone Baby Gone. Confidently. I even captured me on video, for once.

(Also of note, Elise now fronts her own band, putting me in the position of band-aid that she has occupied faithfully for so many years.)

I planned four benefit concerts for four separate charities – Lyndzapalooza’s Back Yard Music Fest, my own first ever live web broadcast as part of my support for Danny Brown‘s #12for12k, and a pair of impending shows for #blamedrewscancer and at work for the United Way.

Speaking of, work bled into my digital life more this year than ever before. I had the good fortune to join a project with one Ms. Britt Miller, who cajoled me into joining twitter, which in turn lead me to meet like-minded folks at Social Media Club and Tweetup events.

In turn, that resulted in my winding up a part #blamedrewscancer, for which my personal and collaborative efforts have contributed to almost $10k raised in less than 100 days!

Oh, and I jumped out of a plane. Did I mention the jumping out of a plane?

And, as usual, I did a lot more that was hard to categorize. I realized that I’ve been planning events for about two years straight. I shared personal reflections, from the election of a new president to watching my neighbor freebase cocaine at his kitchen table. I visited Erika and her fiance in Boston for a madcap adventure that wound up with us giving each other drunken facials during the Emmys. I tossed off a cover of “Dress You Up” in a single take. I wrote a social media essay on “Network Agnosticism.” I discovered that I’m living in my own teenage superhero novel. Someone even told me I’m not mean enough, which isn’t something I hear too often.

If it seems like an impossible amount of things to do in just one year, well, it is. At points it turned my life into a sort of a joke, whether that be slapstick or black comedy, as I juggled all of those responsibilities. And, amazingly, they lead me to be genuinely happy more times than not.

I flashed back on a younger me, and how I can relive his depressions through my blog (https://www.crushingkrisis.com/?p=3411 ) just like Sebastian gets sucked into the world of the Never Ending Story https://www.crushingkrisis.com/?p=3412) I began to think of my family as Asian, even before the wedding ( https://www.crushingkrisis.com/?p=3364 ).

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IV. The Year of the Phoenix.

I have a different opinion on the 27 Club now than I did on my birthday.

Twenty-seven isn’t a litmus test. It’s a proof of concept. It’s a year that that the self-realization bell curve reaches its pinnacle, where the majority of people begin to realize that the path they’ve taken can lead into a tangible future.

I can understand how that could lead you to your end, intentional or not. It leads to excess and over-extension, and to fear and doubt. You can wind up as a phoenix just as easily as you can wind up ground down to ash.

For all the successes of the past year, it contained many challenges for me too. I died a lot of deaths. In the case of my wedding, it was a rebirth as something greater. In other instances, it was just the end.

It was also the year I started shaving with an electric razor. If that’s not a major beginning I don’t know what else could qualify.

For the first time in years I am writing my anniversary post less enamored with the year that passed, and more enamored with the year to come. I seem to have finally escaped the fear that my best work is behind me instead of beyond me, farther down the vector of my life.

That is a death – finally ending my obsession with re-assessing my past in favor of a future view.

Thank you for helping that come to fruition.

Thank you Elise, for transforming my life into something real. Thank you Gina, for following this line with me, a vector connected to our destination.

Thank you Lyndzapalooza, for forcing me to innovate excel as a communicator and as a musician. Thank you Britt, Drew, and everyone else at #blamedrewscancer, for not only testing my limits, but forcing me to reconsider them altogether.

Thank you, on the other side of this screen, for reading my adventures, and for caring if and when the next installment might turn up. Thank you for watching me die 3,528 tiny deaths – once for every click of the “POST” button, and thank you for waiting for me to come back to life with every subsequent visit to this little white box.

Thank you for having the patience to watch and wait for me to finally take myself as seriously as you’ve always taken me, as a professional, a songwriter, and a blogger.

Thank you. And, happy birthday to this.

Play at playing with The Beatles. Or, just play with The Beatles.

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The pair of surviving Beatles recently appeared at E3 to hype the impending The Beatles: Rock Band, out on September 9. It represents a remarkable milestone – mass licensing of Beatles songs to a third party, cooperation of all four Beatles estates on new intellectual property, release of new studio chatter from the band, and creating multi-tracked masters of songs originally recorded live in mono or stereo. (see the full fact sheet)

In the game, you and your friends can take the Beatles from the Cavern Club days all the way to the rooftop in your own living room, not mention traipsing through their imagined acid trips. You’ll start out with 45 Beatles songs in-game, but many more will available as downloadable content – starting with the complete Abbey Road.

Assuming you already have a plethora of plastic video game instruments lying around the house, the a la carte game will cost you $100. If you need all of the plastic instruments to go with it, you’ll be dropping $250 for the full kit.

Seems like a bargain to play along with 45 of your favorite Beatles tunes, right?

Not really. Because, if you have an actual instrument lying around the house, you can buy The Beatles: Complete Scores hardcover tome for half the price of the a la carte game and learn how to play the actual music to every single Beatles song.

If you need an actual instrument to go with it, you can pick up a starter guitar or bass package plus the book for about $250 – yes, even including a replica Hoffner bass! (The scores plus drums will run you a bit more – $300-$500).

Herein lies your dilemma. Do you want to have a primary experience with the music you love, or a secondary experience?

If you’re a non-musician, you might argue, “I don’t really have a choice,” but I think you do.

You might argue, “I don’t read music,” yet you’re willing to learn an arcane method of notation in Rock Band that’s not too different from reading guitar tab, which is included in the score book.

You might argue, “I don’t have nimble fingers, a sense of pitch or rhythm, or a decent voice,” yet if you expect to surpass even easy mode on Rock Band you’ll need to hone some or all of those skills just as you would playing actual music. In fact, Rock Band is much less forgiving of mistakes with drumming and vocals than a jam with friends would be.

You might argue, “I don’t have time to practice music enough for it to be worthwhile,” yet you have time to play Rock Band two or three hours a week. That same time would serve you equally well training on an actual instrument. You could probably learn how to play “I Want To Hold You Hand” on guitar in the same time it takes you to reach your first save point.

Convinced yet?

Other Rock Band titles offer the allure of collecting disparate, virtuosically-difficult music into a video game – much of which is impossible to track down as printed music. None of that is true this time around – the music comes from a single source, the virtuouosity is in the ease of playing, and it’s all collected in a single, relatively cheap book. It’s a completely level playing field for anyone – novice to expert.

You can’t say that about any other Rock Band game or for any other artist in the history of music.

Essentially, you have no argument to buy The Beatles: Rock Band other than perhaps, “I already know how to play all 213 originally released Beatles songs, and now I’m bored.”

The game does have some redeeming features in the areas of drumming and singing – the two bits of Beatles that are the hardest to master on your own. Designers worked closely with Ringo to make the game a tutorial for his unique drumming style. Also, the game features a harmony training mode, which will allow you to voice any part in the band’s remarkable multi-part harmonies.

Based on that, if you’re a Beatles-loving singer or drummer starting from scratch I can appreciate wanting to purchase the game for some guidance. If only the game also allowed you to plug in an actual midi-guitar in to test your chops against the recordings … then I’d buy it in an insant!

Otherwise, if you’re a Beatles-lover who wants to experience playing their music yourself, my advice would be to actually play it yourself.

Breaking the tyranny of traditional ROI, or “Why I love my throw-pillows”

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Five months after the fact my wedding has taught me a lesson about return on investment – aka ROI – and it has nothing to do with the cost of our appetizers.

I could probably summarize the gist of my epiphany in a bite-sized snippet, but for me the realization was as much about the story as its moral.

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Non-traditional, in every sense of the word
Ever since the wedding, whenever we chat about the big day with our friends they continue to enthuse about the non-traditional elements of the event. I had a pair of co-best-ladies! We didn’t have any flowers!

Invariably, their lists converge on two unique highlights. One is my mother and I having our mother/son dance to Nikka Costa’s funky “Everybody Got Their Something” – not your typical syrupy slow-dance.

The other is Gina’s co-best-lady toast, a bitingly-funny, lovingly-irreverent, truly-unique roast from someone who knows me a little better than I know myself. It started with the story of how we met and wrapped up with how I’ll eventually turn into an old coot rambling around my acreage, laying rat poison and bear traps to decimate any unsuspecting wild-life that dares to interfere with my DIY recording sessions.

However, the part that stuck out to me was about my throw-pillows.

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Are your pillows your most valuable possession?
When E and I moved into our house in 2005 our living room was missing one key feature – pillows. Our couch looked nude without them and we had nothing to rest our heads on.

I spent an entire year looking for the right pillows. I tried every possible physical and online store. Just as I was beginning to despair that my perfect pillows were a figment of my imagination I finally found the right ones – on sale for $15 each.

More than three years later, the amount of time I spend rhapsodizing about the pillows is hard to believe. Any time I lay on them, walk past them, or even think about them I am known to remark, “God, I just love those pillows.” Like, even right now I am appreciating how much I love them.

It would not be a stretch to say that I’ve reflected on my satisfaction more than a thousand times in 36 months. 1000 satisfactions compared to the $30 cost is a whopping 100:3 satisfaction ratio. That means for every $1 spent I’ve been happy with my purchase 33 times over!

That’s a pretty satisfying pillow. It’s a pretty satisfying anything!

Gina told the entire pillow-satisfaction story in her speech. Her point was that since I insist on measuring my pillow-related happiness with such oddball precision it’s no wonder Elise and I are both so unusual and also so absolutely perfect for each other.

Five months later I still think about Gina’s speech almost every day, because she gave a perfect explanation of how I measured the ROI of something that seemed impractical or impossible to measure. And, if I’m valuing ROI by satisfaction, my pillows are worth more than anything else I own – even my entire home recording studio!

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Finding the value of the invaluable
Businesses spend huge swaths of their budget on traditional marketing like newspaper ads, billboards, and television commericals. Why? Not because the ROI is obvious. No, it’s just traditional – tied to familiar, easy-to-capture metrics like brand awareness or sales.

It’s similarly simple to quantify the value of my home recording studio – it has paid for itself many times over when compared to what I would pay to record in a commercial studio. It’s so valuable that I might call it “invaluable,” but its value is actually easy to measure in traditional ways.

My throw-pillows are more like digital or social media marketing – invaluable in that they’re hard to put a value on.

Except, according to Gina, I found a meaningful value – satisfaction. While my pillows aren’t saving me $165 per song, in one year the pillows “pay” for themselves by making my happy 11 times for every $1 spent. No matter if I measure by cost, time spent, or difficulty, it’s hard to find something in my life with a per-unit satisfaction ratio higher than my pillows – except, of course, for my relationship with E.

If I can figure out why my pillows were personally profitable, why is it so hard to convince people that building relationships on Web 2.0 is crucially important to their business – moreso than a $30k billboard or full page ad?

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Prove your profit in an unexpected way
As people and businesses we’re rightly concerned with justifying new expenses, and when pennies are in a pinch that’s often the safest way to make a decision. However, when cost isn’t the biggest factor in our decision that mindset can get in the way. What about when we’re trying to become happier or expand our capabilities?

The answer is that we’re all special experts in deciding how much something is personally worth to us. For Gina, it’s Dunkin Donuts coffee. For my mother it’s a trip to the beach. I just happened to take the time to prove the worth of my pillows in an unexpectedly tangible way.

Gina found a major lesson in my pillow obsession – that it’s important to be the voice that offers to value the invaluable.

When it comes to business, your potential expenditure might not immediately translate to improved brand awareness or increased sales. Just because it doesn’t result in a traditional ROI doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. People’s satisfaction with your existing products might go up. They might view your brand as more savvy, responsive, or trust-worthy. You might reap more feedback – positive or negative – about your products. Customers might become more likely to evangelize on your behalf – non-customers too!

None of those thing are as easy to quantify as my throw-pillows. They might involve competitive analysis, surveys, and focus groups just to establish a baseline. You’ll have to consider how much you would hope to improve, and how much resource time that improvement would be worth.

In proving that unexpected value you might completely redefine what ROI means to you or your company. It’s up to you to find the right measurement to prove your point.

whiling away the hours

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(1) A few years ago I saw Malcolm Gladwell deliver a speech at the New Yorker Festival that is largely recapitulated in the second chapter of Outliers, called “The 10,000 Hour Rule.”

In it, Gladwell draws our attention to a data point converged upon by countless studies of experts in a variety of fields. He says, “In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.” He goes on to quote neurologist Daniel Levitin:

In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. … It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.

Gladwell supports the rule using Mozart, Bill Gates, Bill Joy, and the Beatles as his examples. Not to say that their genius and success is purely a result of 10,000 hours of practice – the book as a whole explains other facets – just that it was an essential component of their expertise.

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(2a) 10,000 hours is a long time.

If as a child starting at age five you had piano lessons two times a week (an hour each) and also practiced an hour a day, you would clock nine hours a week. 468 hours a year. 4,680 hours a decade.

If you kept that up until age 26 you’d finally have served your time.

(2b) 10,000 hours can go by before you know it.

Maybe you got into video games at age 11. You played them every night after homework and dinner, let’s say from 7:30 to 11:00 p.m. on most nights, plus extra on the weekend. That’s more than 25 hours a week. 1,300 plus a year.

You’d be a master by the time you started college. Most kids are.

(2c) Time is relative.

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(3) In the car today Gina and I were singing in harmony to the amazing Hezekiah Jones album Hezekiah Says You’re A-OK, on the way to see his band split a bill with the equally fantastic Up the Chain.

“You know, Gina,” I said, breaking from my lead vocal, “I’ve been thinking about this 10,000 hour thing. Not everyone’s an expert at something. I mean, what do most people spend 10,000 hours doing by the time they’re 25? Watching teevee, I suppose.”

“More than likely,” she replied.

“But, think about me. I watched a lot of television, sure. Mostly, though, I read until I was old enough to write, and then I wrote and read. That’s what I spent my 10k on.”

(Perhaps she interjected, “Oh, I remember.”)

“And, you know, is it any surprise that I’m good at communications? I’m not an expert, but no wonder it’s my calling. I spent my whole life practicing for it.”

We sat and sang for a moment, contemplating that.

“What about you?”

Gina paused in her harmony. “Hmm, me?”

“Yeah. What did you spend 10,000 hours doing?”

“This. Listening to music. Singing harmony.”

“Really your whole life, right? Your mother singing, your father playing guitar…”

“Yeah, since I can remember.”

“Right. So, no matter how much I rehearse, you’ll always have the edge. It’ll always come easier to you, until I reach that threshold.”

“I suppose.”

We paused as the song wound down.

“What do you think Hezekiah spent 10,000 hours doing?”

We thought on that for a few moments, and then sang together to “Albert Hash.”

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(4) We’re not all Mozart. I might not ever be Hezekiah Jones. But, we’ve all spent 10,000 hours doing something other than sleeping, and hopefully other than watching television. Maybe something incidental that we do out of necessity or habit. Driving? Social-networking? Cleaning? Taking care of children?

I’ve put in more than my share on communications – reading cereal boxes and trashy fantasy novels, writing stories at eight on my manual typewriter and almost nine years of blogs.

I got an early start on 10,000 hours of being Gina’s best friend, which I keep padding. I’m really good at that. More recently I’ve attained well-in-excess of 10,000 hours of being in love with Elise.

I hope eventually I’ll reach my 10,000th hour of serious focus on music. It’s a large piggy-bank of time to fill.

What about you? What have you spent your life mastering, intentionally or unintentionally?