Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Sunday Morning

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The party was a huge success, and I probably have enough leftovers to last me all week (which is good, because I’m going to need to skip lunch for a month to repay my party debt to my budget). Also, Elise is now graduated, or commenced, or whatever, and along the way her arrangement of the Star Spangled Banner sounded fantastic, took everyone by surprise, and garnered lots of random congratulations out on the lawn after the ceremony was over.

Lots of post-party mopping awaits me downstairs, but i thought i’d unload some scant links on you all first.

A Bookslut interview with the founder of Guys Read, a non-profit organization that encourages boys and men to find literature that’s right for them. I’ve been a reader almost my entire life, but that’s probably because my mother always bought me the right things to read, so i am pleased and fascinated by this cause (found via Neil Gaiman).

Word has it that Blogathon is a go, and will be held on August 6th. I’ve never liked the last-minuteness of the planning of the ‘Thon, because it sells short the opportunity to support it and it disqualifies possible participants who have a life and like to plan ahead for it. I myself already have plans for August 6th (i’ll be on stage!), so it looks as though my participation with the ‘Thon has ended. I might still be doing some promotional writing for the event, and otherwise wish them the best.

MusicLab is a study on how you like music. I haven’t done it yet, but in exchange for being a test-subject you get to download all sorts of free indy tunes. Link probably from Coolfer.

Also from Coolfer, a cool girl band Jessie Diamond and the Thousand There was another band i wanted to link to, but i lost their link. Instead, read the best guitar-oriented interview with Ani DiFranco ever.

Okay, off to mop.

More Screaming

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What a beautiful day!

Okay, enough positivity, now for more introspection. This weekend reminded me of two things that I know and say all the time, but don’t put into practice nearly enough.

First, not coincidentally, is practice makes perfect – whether it’s practicing your singing or practicing what you preach. After a lengthy runs on some of my lesser played songs this weekend, my voice is warm and limber. The only way to keep it that way is to use it every day.

Second, the only reason to be afraid of an honest critique is if you deny its veracity (on some level, at least). This was evoked by two things specifically – a rather comedic exchange between a book-reviewer and a nasty Christian-publishing-house rep, and a reviews of an Off the Beat CD.

In the case of the former, the publisher just can’t take a negative review, and rather being constructive and trying to build a relationship with the reviewer, the rep lashes out. Repeatedly. In the case of the latter, former OTB music director Ethan Fixell took the lament that Off the Beat’s 2002 CD entailed too much “screaming” as a compliment – he and the group half-jokingly titled the next disc “More Screaming.”

How much truth existed in either review? Was the book truly that terrible? Who knows. I don’t think Off The Beat does all that much screaming – they just like to produce records that sound as authentically rock as the songs they cover. To a trained a cappella reviewer, though, that might come off an awful lot like screaming. I am sure that in each critique there was some element of truth, but for the artist it was how that truth was handled that was most important.

I can’t be afraid to record songs just because my voice is imperfect. It won’t get any better unless I sing, and hear myself singing; it’s unreasonable to expect perfection. Maybe I’m going to be flat, or scoop a lot, or use too many diphthongs – but, maybe I’ll convey exactly what the song means to say. And, once I do that, I have to be willing to hear all about those flat, scooped diphthongs, and to either own up to them or proudly say, “I meant it that way.”

Then, only then, will I get better.

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.

All While Shivering Like A Junky

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I really don’t get sick all that often, but, boy, when i get sick do i get sick. All weekend was spent either shivering or sweating to death, with the periods in-between spent reading the first issue of my Atlantic Monthly subscription. Mmm, highbrow magazines with senses of humor.

I love reading technical descriptions of how musician’s make their music happen, but the mass media isn’t usually too keen about asking about songwriting methods, guitar tunings, and rehearsal processes. Drowned Madonna did a terrific interview with Mike McKnight, Mad’s touring technology director. Even more revealing is an early rehearsal set list.” Some interesting tidbits: “Crazy For You” down a whole step (guess she’s too good of a singer now to wail like she used to), an originally included rock version of “Love Profusion” (the Headcleanr Rock Mix released on her 2004 EP is probably one of my top ten Madonna songs of all time), and “Dress You Up” in Eb (which is, um, the key that it’s actually in). Almost makes me wish i had shelled out $300 to see the damn concert.


Also in this vein, Tori Amos’s Piece By Piece – half biography and half breakdown of her songwriting process – comes out February 8th. “In passionate and informative prose, Amos explains how her songs come to her and how she records and then performs them for audiences everywhere.”

Meanwhile, now that i own an iPod i’m much more interested in the idea of PodCasting than i was previously. Reading some descriptions of the phenomenon shows that it’s essentially just providing audio content in an RSS format so that people can aggregate it with a souped up RSS reader/stripper/downloader for future listening. I suppose i was suspecting something more revolutionary, but in blogland every invention to aid the lazy is a world event. Trio is, of course, perfect material for a venture into PodCasting, as it’s RealAudio format has become a bit of an antiquity. We shall see.

One Good Move is a quicktime video blog, which is great way for persons like myself who have quit the teevee cold turkey to hold their own at the water cooler. The movies don’t last forever, so make haste and watch Michael Moore sharing an “Over the Rainbow” duet with Phantom of the Opera starlet Emmy Rossum. Hilariously cute. Also, Ashlee Simpson being booed at the Orange Bowl, another classic clip in her quickly growing scrapbook of terrific televised moments. The Daily Show clips make me wish you could subscribe to just one cable channel (though, i suppose i’d need a television for that, eh) – anyone out there a Daily Show bittorrent fiend who can point me in the right direction?

Also, reminder to self: Gawker can be funny when i know what the hell they’re talking about.

Yes Said

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I’ve been having a very inside day. I’ve been inside with my thoughts and for a while I went out walking with flip flops on, but i’m not sure that that was the best idea.

I’ve been reading about Tori. She sent us all this darling little Christmas email in our inboxes where she is obviously being prodded by her website people into saying her little script thing, but she’s obviously having a bit of fun with them at the same time. There’s this very excellent little Tori covers site i just found, but i can’t really see it right in Firefox. You should go download Firefox. But, anyhow, I’m – I’m living Tori’s life in this little two hour microcosm on YesSaid, i don’t think i’ve ever realized what a wonderful little site it is.

It’s just so amazing that you can be so much a public figure that someone is cannibalizing your yearbook, you know, and posting pictures online. That’s the internet. And, reading all these quotes from her, you see this wonderful little progression, from this girl playing piano bars to this astounding woman…

My dear roommate totally lost my train of thought. It’s off the tracks. We’ve sent in the sniffing dogs to go look for it. Sometimes i picture what i would be like if i lived alone; i don’t think it would be very entertaining. As much as i am, um, obviously obsessed with myself, my inspiration comes very much from outside myself. Even if that inspiration is, you know, thinking oh my god would you please shut up or what is that shitty music you keep listening to, go find some taste. Not that those are reactions i need to typically have to any of my roommates. I mean, they’ve all had decent CD collections.

I digress. ‘cuz, i remember where i was: What’s funny is that you can read Tori talking about the same thing so many times in so many different places. And, in a lot of cases, her quote is almost verbatim. But then, others, other stories come out a little different every time. I think i’ve heard maybe two or three distinct versions of the “Playboy Mommy” story, where she falls down the stairs and she thinks of the first line of the song. But, “Space Dog,” i feel like the few times she’s spoken about that she’s said it verbatim. Those same words. (it reminds me a lot of this page, actually)

“Space Dog” is very nearly my least favorite Tori song, though it has its moments, but i can definitely appreciate those emotions. She is… she is calling something in, you know? She has tuned in on something, and is reverberating. I try for that, but a lot of the time when i get there i don’t know where to go. It’s a very… getting there is very holistic experience. Just now i was almost there – you have to engage your attention very steadily, and you into this state – reading without realizing, and just lipping along to the words to the music and running my hand through my hair over and over, and i go into this sort of trance.

I, i get there and I know i’m there and that, you know, just about anything can come out of that. I’m thrumming, i am a pitchfork or something, just buzzing violently. I could just sing, or think of this perfect guitar lick, or write some perfect post.

And then Elise starts fussing around the house and making these little mouse noises and asking why the lights are on. She is, like, foraging in my thoughts, she is just chewing right through my creativity, there it goes, as if it’s some little bolt-hole she’s working on. But, at the same time, it belongs to her in a way, because if i lived alone i wouldn’t have anything to start from at all. Like, striking a pitchfork in the vacuum of space. Would it even vibrate? There would be no sound, so does it even matter if it was even vibrating?

And poof, i get this jumble, mess aborted trance. Some perfect moment interrupted, and all just spilling out at once.