Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

journalism

Oblermann, At Length

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I love words.

I was notorious as a child for needing something to read at any idle moment. Eating breakfast? Better hope that cereal box has lots of copy on it. Long car ride? Multiple paperbacks required, just to be safe.

The internet has taken the edge of my constant need to consume the written word, but I sometimes get intellectual heartburn from all the junk food of message boards and user comments I devour to keep my gears spinning. Even worse than the junk are insubstantial articles – 500 and 1,000 word affairs that get me all spun up and then just stop.

I vastly prefer, and eternally adore, longform journalistic writing, especially in the form of media critique. It’s a style of writing I love to consume, and the style I enjoy writing the most. You can trace my appreciation back to being hooked on the reviews at Furia.com in the nineties, and more recently in Jacob Clifton’s poetic, academic, polemic recaps of Battlestar Galactica.

Last weekend the piece that caught my extended attention was from the New Yorker – a complete recounting of the personal history and personal psyche of Keith Oblermann.

Based on the sheer word count that has been devoted to Oblermann recently, I’m assuming you know who he is. You have to remember, I don’t consume these people on television – just through their print coverage and occasional video clips – so I commensurately don’t understand how famous they are to actual teevee viewers. However, even from my detached vantage point Keith Oblermann’s name and face seem to have reached zeitgeist levels of recognition.

I used to enjoy Keith’s critical essays on MSNBC dot com long before I knew he was an on-air personality because he didn’t do the typical journalistic dance of balance when someone was clearly in the moral right or wrong. He just spoke the truth, which sometimes meant speaking out against his topic of discussion. Yet, he wasn’t an op-ed writer – he was just a reporter. He just reported the truth.

Given the recent backlash against him, it seems that Keith (or, at least, his public persona) has undergone a translation from truth-speaking broadcaster to liberal figure(talking)head, held in apposition to make-pretend journalists like Bill O’Reilly.

The difference, I think, is that Keith has aggressively shifted the focus of his considerably audible and influential voice away from the morally black and white and into the politically gray. He’s still engaged in a mainly journalistic pursuit, rather than an opinionated one.

As discussed in the feature-article, Keith recently punctuated a special commentary by commanding our commander-in-chief to “Shut the hell up!” Of course, most of Bush’s words and actions seem more morally black than politically gray to any rational human being, but it is a bit beyond the pale to viciously criticize a sitting president from your anchor chair.

However, Keith has also turned his focus into the Democratic fray to slam Hillary Clinton for invoking the assassination of RFK when discussing why the nominating process might (and, per her, should) continue through the summer. Unlike Bush, this is clearly a gray area, or at least gray enough that a nine-minute retort seems a little overboard … possibly the vented hot air of a gasbag.

As the hot air continues to vent, and as the dissenters continue to get in line, the picture of the New Oblermann becomes increasingly crisp. He is not just liberal Bill O’Reilly, or liberal anyone else, because he’s not simply espousing liberalism. He’s espousing truth and logic, much in the same way Jon Stewart does, except he does not have the shield of “Fake News” to hide behind. And, sometimes to highlight the illogical he needs to rachet up his own rhetoric to full blast to make sure there is no mistaking his commentary for equivocation.

Sometimes Keith Oblermann needs to be illogical to attach the illogic.

A commitment to truth and logic in real news is a scary thing – something many Americans haven’t experienced in their lifetime, and certainly not anything they’ll catch on their local six o’clock news. Keith is treading into untested waters with his brand of journalistic critique. And, even if it’s all just hot air, right now you can hear the bones of the rest of the mainstream media establishment creaking in the wind.

Or at least that’s what it seems like from my teevee-abstaining, mainstream-media-eschewing vantage point.

UK

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I’m not sure why all of my wedding posts have to wind up with such a maudlin tone. I think I’m just in the maudlin phase of wedding planning.

Now for something completely different.

I love reading UK tabloid papers – so much gossip for one island! And, i love the almost rudely authoritative way they’re written. Almost makes me wish I was a journalist over there, except I suppose most of them are assigned to the Amy Winehouse deathwatch.

I’m not one of these teeny-bopper pervs with a countdown clock marking the time left before the next Disney diva becomes legal, but I will admit that I’ve been rooting for Emma Watson (aka Hermione) to blossom into a classic bombshell rather than just a vaster forehead with ever-twittering brows.

Her brief see-through underwear incident of last month aside (Certainly an 18th birthday is the most appropriate occasion, n’est pas? And, see-through underwear is a bit different than commando), she is knockout stunning in this photo presaging her as the new face of Chanel’s Coco Mademoiselle fragrance.

Also, I might have to buy this book that this cynical article about fabricating the next Brit Boy Band was sourced from.

Oh, and these pants…

The Suppression of Don Siegelman

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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?

Not Dead, Just Floating

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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.