Crushing Krisis

The Newest Oldest Blog In New Zealand

Archives for February 2005

Beekeeping for Dummies

by

Do you want to hear a good album? Not a great album, mind you, and certainly the worst one you’ve heard by this particular artist, but one that will stay in your head for a little while and won’t disappoint? It goes a little something like this: Buy Tori Amos’s The Beekeeper. Listen to the following, in roughly this order: 1, 6, 4, 16, 19, 18, 14, 7, 8, 5, 12. Then, a few days later, sample the eight tracks i left off to see if you’d like to trade in anything.

Please, for the love of all that is Tori, just trust me on this one. Don’t do what I did; don’t sit and listen straight through this eighty-minute adventure in mediocrity twice in a row. Because, you will find yourself thinking Tori has lost her edge, or that she put out a terrible, horrid album.

Both of these things might be true, but you don’t need to think them. I thought them for you. I typed 3500 words to illustrate my point. But, much like the disc itself, it was too much of too little. Instead, as i highlighted Tori’s track listing for you, here are some of the hits.

1. Parasol (+)

What is she saying? She is saying “when i come to terms with this.” She is repeating her lines to drive them in. She is sending me a message. Do not rush, she says. Just hang in there.

Maybe it’s a self-preservation instinct. She knows this record will not survive my snap judgement, just like her past records have failed to connect with more mainstream critics. So, now it is my turn, and she is telling me about it in Tori code. She is that painting. Her pleasure is the wall that she hangs on. She has come to terms with it? She is safe in her frame. Will i keep her in her frame?

Come in, Spacedog. I can’t read you.

2. Sweet The Sting (-)

I think this is the song that got all the critics on board. Tori is playing against type; unsuccessfully i say, but perhaps just convincingly enough. The gospel choir here is a nice touch – the opposite of the soothing cushion on “Way Down,” this is the gospel that infused itself into Ray’s sexy strut – the thought that sensuality crosses easily between religious and secular, holy and sex, okay and obscene. Tori has always straddled that line, but here it is so subdued. She’s not challenging us. She is stating. It is a matter of fact.

Frankly, here you can’t see the forest of the possibly sexy composition for the trees, the cracks in Tori’s too-forward voice obscuring what she is even saying. You can’t fault the girl for not knowing how to produce funk, but you can eschew the product.

8. Mother Revolution (+)

This is a good song. I missed it the first time through, maybe because it was a little too slow-moving. I’m sortof a music-critic version of T-Rex from Jurassic Park – you can slip slow ones by me, good or bad, but if you’ve got a song that’s waving a flashlight around like a lunatic and then running into the outhouse i’m going to suddenly become real interested.

Anyhow, this is a good song.

9. Ribbons Undone (-)

Footnote: Tori, you fucking lied in your book when you said you don’t write autobiographically. You can keep telling yourself that, but we’ve all heard Little Earthquakes, and we’ve all heard “Northern Lad,” and now we’ve heard this. There’s nothing wrong with admitting that not every one of your tunes is a fairy creature floating into your head on a filament of light. Sometimes you just feel something and you write a song about your life

Just. Get. Over it.

13. Ireland (–)

In case you were tempted to think that “Cars and Guitars” was the worst Tori song ever, you have to allow me to reset your expectations. This, in fact, is the worst Tori song ever. You can even include the part of Y Kant Tori Read where she raps.

The nearly unbelievable thing is that it’s all a matter of arrangement. Tori is actually playing this wonderful legato organ part that would make the song sound dirge-like if the other instruments would stop freaking harassing it. Maybe i could stomach Tori singing about her Saab if it was in a dirge. But, this is all the kitsch of Ani doing “Wishing and Hoping” with none of the irony.

I just read a review that called this four minutes of perfection. Honestly, i would rather poke myself with something sharp for four minutes than allow this to degrade my opinion of Tori ever again.

14. The Beekeeper (++)

Just terrific – the kind of totally different but totally canonical song i buy Tori albums for. It reminds me of Bjork remixing something from choirgirl. This is the queer epic i wanted from Datura, or Happiness Is A Warm Gun, or I Can’t See New York, but the first time she’s actually delivered the epic goods since maybe as far back as “Yes, Anastasia” or “Little Earthquakes.” And, when Tori says, “I have come for the Beekeeper … can you use me instead” it sends a chill down my spine; “Plugged into a heart machine, as if you ever needed one.”

Where is the album that this was supposed to be the emotional centerpiece of? Three songs this good would be worth the price of admission, so i’d pay about $40 for that hypothetical album.

Hoochie Woman (+)

“Hoochie Woman” is some classic shit. I know it might put you off at first, but hear me out: the thing is, it’s literal and a little bit lame, but it’s so perfectly well done. You might not like it, but like “She’s Your Cocaine” before it, you just shouldn’t bother arguing, because Tori has, finally, strutted all her lounge cred, finishing the kooky lark that began with “Bachelorette,” but in the most spectacularly amusing fashion possible.

The song is written for the Bridget Jones soundtrack. I can see Renee dancing to it in my head. Freaking handclaps and gospel baritones intoning “that hoochie woman” in the background. Yes. Oh, oh, yes.

18. Marys of the Sea(++)

I said i would pay the price of admission for three good songs, and now i can’t ask for my money back. We are adrift into Tori from that first note, and it just feels so right. Maybe i do expect something from Tori … maybe it’s not the piano, or the ballads, or the shock value. Maybe it’s something smaller – the spaces she leaves, or the imaginings she piques. I’m still not even hearing the lyrics on this one. It tricks you into thinking it’s over around a minute in, and then you are meandering in ballad territory for a second. You’re confused, almost lost, Tori’s speaking french. It seems like it’s going to turn into a bad scene. But-then-there-is-a-pound-ing-draw-ing-us-in and we’re roiling again.

Roiling is, in fact, what i love about Tori’s compositions. “Hey!” she says, and it gets my attention entirely, “for now you have hijacked the sun, and last time i checked he came to light the land for everyone.”

Preach it, sister. Buy yourself something nice with that $12. I don’t hold a grudge.

Thoughts Right Now

by

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

by

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.

Never Gain Weight

by

Do you ever feel as though you are consciously flinging your well-being aside for some sense of reckless self-gratification? That you’re doing something self-destructive, but you don’t care?

Maybe you’re charging something to your credit card that you can’t afford. Maybe you’re eating something you know you really shouldn’t have. Maybe you’re drinking more when you’re already pleasantly drunk.

I have those moments every so often, though on a much smaller scale then I used to. Sometimes as I catch myself doing them – handing over my credit card, or heading into a second row of cookies, I think. Why does it seem so inevitable? What makes this compulsory?

I’m not sure what they’d teach you in counseling for any of those problems but, for me, just asking that question can change my mind. Am I getting the junky donut because I feel like I need energy? Am I buying ten new CDs because they’ll make me happy? Am I strengthening my drink because I think I’ll have more fun if I’m more drunk?

Maybe the difference between someone with an occasional bad habit and someone with a problem is the ability to honestly answer that question, and to evaluate the result.

Some days I just really feel like eating a donut, though.

This Message Will Self Destruct…

by

For a few years of my life I despised the phone, somehow convinced that picking it up could only result in unfortunate news (or telemarketing). I’m not so afraid of it now, but for a few minutes this morning I felt as though I was right back in that place.

The feeling owed to an emotionally draining weekend, and from this side of Sunday it seemed to me as if every phone message was a loaded gun waiting to fire a little bit of conflict or a touch of bad tidings – waiting to sidetrack me with more bad news or bad karma.

As a result, when my mother left me a message on both my cell and desk phones with terse instructions to page her without delay I was concerned. Not only was the lack of verbosity completely unbecoming of her, there were children screaming in the background all the while.

Where had she found screaming children, and what was I supposed to do about it? Naturally I imagined the worst. She had found a baby abandoned in a dumpster, and needed me to alert the media while she whisked it to CHOP to have it nursed back to health. She was trapped at gunpoint in a daycare center, unable to stay on the line for long. A school bus had overturned on the 95 South, and she was triaging the children until the paramedics arrived. She had to avert a national nuclear disaster in less than 24 hours of consecutive screen time, less commercial breaks.

I soon learned that, in reality, she was in Sears portrait studio, arguing with the receptionist because the software on their picture discs isn’t compatible with Windows XP (presumably holding up a line of screaming children all the while), and she called me to consult. As the anxious knot in my stomach quietly dissolved into an afternoon case of agita (odgida), I calmly explained that though the hopelessly proprietary software might not work on her computer, the pictures would probably be BMPs or JPGs scanned directly from the negatives, and that she would definitely be able to open those

I wonder if working in the hospital for so long has rendered her immune to the dramatic connotations of such terse messages. Is her day so typically filled with a string of human tragedy that she has lost the ability to discern the difference? Does she find everything to be tragedic? Or, worse still, is everything so commonplace that her emergent response is a tacit reaction?

I refuse to react to all things as catastrophic, or to live in the specter of fear – fear of the phone, or of anything else. I refuse to, unless that same fear can illustrate to me what it is I love so much about the moments after and before it. I am in love with walking, and with singing, and with loving, and with you, and I would not have it any other way.

So, call me.