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.

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.

Loving

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There were kittens in our yard, but now there are not.

You were going to get a whole post about the joys of kittens and the joys of pet fostering, with a smattering of Bob Barkerisms, but we returned from work to find said kittens and accompanying momma gone from the yard.

So, no wacky kitten pictures with captions in stilted lolzcatian English.

Honestly, I’m only mentioning it now so that in five years I can recall when it was we found the kittens in our yard.

So, for historical reference, the apparent close of the kitten incident happens to coincide with the first day of legal same-sex marriages in California.

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Just as I am a feminist, I am an advocate for civil rights for everyone, and that includes the GBLT community. I honestly don’t understand how anyone can not be an advocate and an activist for both, because each movement is rooted in a simple concept: equality for all.

As we celebrate the landmark California Supreme Court decision and the many beautiful unions that it will yield, I was also reminded today of another beautiful union – this one fifty years old.

The union in question was of Mildred and Richard Loving, two Virginia small-town sweethearts who in 1958 found themselves pregnant and decided to wed in neighboring Washington, D.C.

Back in Virginia, five weeks after their wedding the couple found themselves on the receiving end of an unfriendly visit from the local Sheriff’s department because they were in violation of the state’s Racial Integrity Act.

Richard Loving was white; his bride Mildred was black.

The Racial Integrity Act made their marriage – and, for that matter, any marriage between a white person and someone of another race – a felony.

This post isn’t meant to be a history lesson- you can read other sources detailing the Loving’s arrest, or their subsequent exodus from Virginia under threat of imprisonment, and how – nine years later on June 12, 1967 – the Supreme Court of the United States overturned the Racial Integrity Act in their landmark Loving v. Virginia decision.

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I know most people (maybe even you, reading now) see the Lovings’ story in black and white – literally and figuratively. However, laws like the Racial Integrity Act were leveraged against couples of any interracial combination across the country. If it weren’t for the Loving’s and the unanimous SCOTUS decision their case garnered, interracial marriages might never have become as visible and accepted in mainstream American society. (And, similar laws lingered on the books for decades until the last one was repealed in Alabama in 2000.)

If those same laws were prevalent today it might not be legal for me to marry Elise. And, it certainly would have been illegal for her parents – one white, the other Chinese – to marry and have children.

Consider that for a moment.

All of these years I’ve been one blessed white male in the multi-ethnic sea of America. I never experienced any personal discrimination to cause me to believe in feminism or civil rights, but I believe in them because equality should be for everyone, without strings attached.

Little did I know at age five, or age twelve, or age twenty-two that my blessed life would benefit from the battles waged before me in the most meaningful way possible – because they cleared the way for me to have and hold the love of my life.

Could you imagine denying us legal recognition of our happiness just for something as trivial as the colors of our skin?

Your answer, I suspect, is “no.”

Then, consider that as of today one of my co-best-ladies and one of my dearest friends can only legally marry each other in two states in the country, solely because they are both women.

Why is it that we can all imagine denying them legal recognition of their happiness just for something as trivial as their gender?

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In my mind, the two are the same – the two couples, the two imagined denials, and the two inevitable, ineffable sets of basic human rights.

Just as I advocated for those rights before I ever knew they would effect my life so directly, I will continue to advocate for them even after my marriage is legally recognized – because everyone should have the same rights as Elise and I, regardless of race or gender.

That’s feminism. That’s civil rights. That’s equality.

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As I write this post there is a tiny dent in the dish of cat food we put out in the yard, hoping to lure back momma and her four stray kittens.

And, at the same time thousands of Californians have had the imagined denials cleared from their path to a legally recognized life of loving.

I’m not tired, I just sleep.

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I must engineer a perfect storm of daily routine in order to go to bed – or, more accurately, to fall asleep – at a reasonable hour.

I half-joke that my circadian rhythm runs long, but its pulses run short. Left to my own devices (i.e., an interpersonal “constant dark) I will tend to regulate to a roughly 26 hour day with sleep in multiples of just over three hours, and my intellectual pursuits don’t tend to peak until somewhere in hour fifteen – relatively late in a 26 hour day, and prohibitively insomniac in an actual earth day.

That natural state isn’t especially agreeable with a five-day work week. It used to be that on Sundays I’d have to beat my body into submission with a heavy dose of benadryl, which left me leaden in Monday morning meetings. Lately I’ve attempted to coordinate an intricate assemblage of coincident events – a sunrise clock, regular meals and exercise, a balance of heavy thinking and fun – distributed to the appropriate hours to leave me pleasantly drowsy somewhere prior to midnight.

The ultimate irony is that even if I get to sleep at a so-called “reasonable hour” and wake up appropriately early for a responsible business person my resulting day will be devastated – I’ll either drift off too early, or be jazzed and awake much too late. Either way, two “normal” days in a row are few and exceedingly far between in my life.

In discussing this issue recently I fielded several recommendations for Melatonin supplements.

Melatonin is a naturally occurring hormone that – amongst other roles – helps to regulate circadian rhythms. Its production is hindered by exposure to light, which means if you live in a constantly illuminated environment (i.e., offices at home and at work, stages awash in spotlight … you know, all the places I live) your bodily levels are most likely out of whack.

Curiously, its sale as a supplement is illegal in some locations, such as Germany and New Zealand. Even more curiously from a body chemistry standpoint, it’s synthesized from tryptophan (AKA, the thing about turkey that makes you sleepy), which is in turn synthesized via of serotonin (AKA, the euphoria-causing agent that LSD mimics, and that heavy use of MDMA/ecstacy depletes). Supplemental users report that heavy doses can induce vivid and/or lucid dream states.

(I went through this whole “brain chemistry of drugs” phase when I first read The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test and Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, especially the latter, because Hunter kept taking drugs I had never heard of before, let alone understood the effects of.)

Knowing all of this about Melatonin before it ever hit my tongue lent it a certain air of panacea, even if it was to be a placebic panacea. And, sure enough, every night that I’ve taken it I’ve been to bed before midnight and awake before 7:30 – yes, it’s induced multiple “normal” days in a row!

However, it has also had a certain side effect – maybe also placebic, but no less curious if that’s the case.

Though shorter, in a circadian sense, my days are definitely longer. Or, maybe just the hours.

I don’t really know how to explain it appropriately. It’s not so simple as time going by slower, or that I’m moving more quickly.

For example, today I finished my usual amount of work, and went to my usual amount of meetings, and when I sat down to pack up I realized it was 2 p.m. rather than 5 p.m.. I had arrived around my typical time, and I didn’t feel exhausted, or restless – I simply felt as if I had lived an entire workday of life already. Except, most typical workdays don’t come equipped with a spare set of three bonus hours to get a jump on the to-do list of the next day.

That isn’t the only example, either. I’ve been more productive at home, and I’ve been waking up feeling more fully rested – even hang time between slams of the alarm button feel distended. The situation is rendered all the more unusual because I am typically an innately good judge of the passage of time – Elise used to jokingly use me to reset stopped clocks because I was so on-the-mark in my elapsed-time estimates in the absence of common giveaways like television shows or church bells.

It’s quite palpable for a placebo effect, and if it isn’t one then it’s certainly difficult to quantify effectively. If my prior days were 26.5 hours long and have now been scaled down to fit into an actual day then each of my prior hours are now compressed into less than 55 minutes, which still would only have yielded a nearly imperceptible bonus of a half hour by 2 p.m., and certainly would be hardly noticeable in the eight-minute interval of my snooze button.

So, what’s the answer? Am I just well-rested, and as a result experiencing a higher quality of life? Is it completely a placebo effect, soon to be followed by incredibly lucid dreams (though, actually, I’ve always had those)? Or, is it truly some subtle form of hallucination wherein I perceive myself to be moving at a completely speed than time itself?

And, more alarmingly, if the latter is true does that mean that everyone else has been moving at this speed all along and I am just now catching up? Or was I previously moving at a normal speed within my extended day, and am now dashing to and fro with an apparent sense of urgency to all who surround me?

Endlessly Avoiding Perfection

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Heading East recently shared a theory that each artist has only a single great “story” inside of them waiting to be released. A particular quote really resonated:

Some artists escape by fashioning alternate versions of their story, never actually telling it perfectly, always leaving a bit of mystery in the center, always working their way around and around the one truth they know, but maybe these artists are doomed too as they will always fall short…

Though I don’t agree completely with the one-story-only theory, I do believe that each artist has a limited amount of ways to portray any single given archetype within their sphere of art, with each attempt a facet of a perfected portrayal. As alluded to in the quote, the artist has a choice (though not always a conscious one) of spending a lifetime drafting an incomplete version of their truth, or of crafting one version that is crystalline in its perfection.

I certainly feel that way about songwriting. I used to specialize in a particularly jilted sort of breakup song that I spent most of my time writing and re-writing. Suddenly, early in 2005 i wrote “Regrets,” and I was suddenly no longer bound to tap and retap that archetype for my material. Since then my songs have expressed a much wider array of emotions – I freed myself by closing a door on a particular story.

Penning that perfect story is a frightening concept; what if you finish it too soon? What if you don’t have any other important stories to tell? Yet, as daunting as those questions are, if you let them handicap your creativity you’ll never attain that perfect story. And that means you’ll never get to try your hand at its sequel.

How Radiohead is trying to rehab a rapidly melting industry (but they won’t go, go, go).

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(1) One of the major benefits of Radiohead’s release strategy for the forthcoming In Rainbows hit me squarely on my walk to the subway this morning: no leaks.

The release of each of Radiohead’s last three albums has been an event. Not just a manufactured Kanye v. 50 affair, but an honest-to-goodness critical and popular bomb dropped on the record buying public. And, no thanks to their savvy fans, each record tends to leak ahead of the disc release.

I never had the impression that Radiohead minded leakage, per se, with Johnny Greenwood saying the following about a two-month early leak of Hail to the Thief

Shame it’s not a package with the artwork and all, but there you go. I feel bemused, though, not annoyed. I’m glad people like it, most of all. It’s a little earlier than we’d expected, but there it is. (WP)

You can read between the lines there to understand a few things about Radiohead. They value albums as an experience. They enjoy designing the collateral that accompanies them. And, as illustrated by their never-ending iTunes holdout, they aren’t crazy about badly encoded versions of their work.

All three factors lead to a band that’s “bemused” by leaks rather than “annoyed” – they think it’s quaint that anyone is making an effort to obtain an early version of an incomplete product.

By offering a pay-what-you-will download of In Rainbows two months ahead of the physical release the band gets to leak on their own terms. They can independently master their disc and shuttle it straight to their service provider for upload, with no studio interns to smuggle a pre-master or label reps to swipe a final copy.

Furthermore, fans get the music on Radiohead’s terms – not some nth generation digital-to-analog-to-digital transfer encoded to an MP3, but a direct-from-source version engineered to the band’s specifications.

It is, in a sense, the best possible leak.

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(2a) The Radiohead situation got my awesome co-worker Chris and I talking about the current rapidly-failing state of the music industry.

Record companies sit on what for decades seemed to be an inexhaustible resource – audience-facing intellectual property in the form of sound recordings and publishing rights, and artist-facing deep pockets that control access to big producers and hype machines. However, those resources were inexhaustible only because the means of distribution and production were highly controlled.

As a nominal example, take Fleetwood Mac. Much to my teenaged consternation, for over a decade there was no single greatest hits CD on which you could purchase a particular trio of their biggest classic rock hits, namely “Landslide,” “Rhiannon,” and “Go Your Own Way.” Yes, their single disc hits package leaves off “Landslide.”

Why? Who knows, but it’s as good of an illustration as any of the record companies and their inexhaustible resource of intellectual property, which remained valuable due to scarcity. Scarcity driven by selectively signing bands and selectively releasing their work, by holding on to publishing and sound recording rights, and through cross-promotions and radio payola, to name just a few of the channels metered with a heavy hand by labels.

At the crux of the matter is a business paradigm that’s all sewn up in old media. Record companies still want to act as a broker of music between and artist and their fans, and their preferred method of business is still retail transactions – physical or virtual.

For all the talk of the threat of file-sharing and the relative oligopoly of the digital music market, it’s the business model that’s sucking the life out of the music business. Unless you’re Radiohead (or Ani DiFranco) putting together a gestalt album package, what does album intrinsically mean? Why sell albums? Why sell? Why not let listeners subscribe to an artist like a magazine that doles out singles instead of issues?

Because that system doesn’t really require middleman, does it?

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(2b) Recently the tables have turned on the record industry and its previously inexaustible seat of power.

iTunes is returning the business to it’s single-oriented 45 days, killing per-track margins. Its a la carte nature combined with p2p makes it harder than ever for companies to reap extra album sales by repackaging the same release or through judicious exclusion of key tracks.

Meanwhile, songwriting artists are wising up and shopping to smaller labels and imprints to get more out of their publishing rights or make deals to own their own masters, and label power over FM radio is being eroded by satellite, internet streams, and the almighty iPod.

Suddenly that seemingly never-ending glacier of resources is melting at the labels’ feet while marquee names like Madonna take their business elsewhere because their major moneymaker is no longer their records but their overall brand. Artists major and minor are increasingly make their living from merchandise, publishing, and live shows, painting labels quite plainly as outmoded loan sharks hoping to advance money and support in exchange for the brand and intellectual property. And, the artists are finally – rightfully – balking at the concept.

They no longer need labels – labels need them.

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(3) Of course, record labels know they are about to be sitting in a lukewarm puddle resources, and they’re taking every action to prevent their leverage from melting.

Amy Winehouse was withheld from the American market for years after her strong debut with Frank, including several months after her blockbuster sophomore effort Back to Black dropped in the UK to massive acclaim.

Why wait? Universal Island wanted to drum up a perfect storm of stateside media coverage for their critical darling, and they wanted to ride a huge post-Grammies wave of attention on other UK imports who recently followed the same strategy: Gnarls Barkley, KT Tunstall, and Corinne Bailey Rae.

Amy shipped a big hit – score for Universal. However, it was just a single disc, and Amy hasn’t been anywhere near a studio for follow-up due to her whirlwind US promotional efforts. Six months later she’s canceled her first major headline tour for a stint in rehab, and is being haunted by bad press wherein her family is urging listeners not to buy her record until she cleans up her act. Universal Island is now pushing out Frank to American soils, but there’s no telling if she’ll be good for a follow-up hit.

None of that is the label’s fault, per se. What is their fault is letting the business artificially lead the music – trying to manufacture a hit with art that was already in the world by keeping Winehouse bottled up in the UK when she was fierce and ready to tour behind a fresh disc.

America got her second-hand, and it shows.

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(Epilogue) Radiohead is engaging in the antithesis of the Winehouse strategy – they’re letting the music drive the business, and it makes an astounding amount of sense. Release digital the second the disc gets out of mastering to hit rabid fans and major tastemakers. Then drop a special package for the die-hards and collectors. Finally, after drumming up a holistic, naturally occurring storm of interest, release a more traditional version of the disc for retailers to shill to the masses.

Not only does it make sense, in that order no one feels slighted by buying all three releases – no one is getting teased out by eighteen extra-special limited edition versions of the disc, it just runs a natural course: leak, premium, normal.

Kudos to Radiohead for breaking free not only of their label, but of the industry paradigm. I hope everyone votes early and often with their wallets handy.