Life Happens …If You Let It

23 03 2012

I’m blowing the dust off this bitch. For a long time I felt like I didn’t have anything important to say, and honestly I didn’t. Instead of half-assing my way through crippled excuses at worthwhile thinking, I buried therealkfish. That isn’t to say that exciting shit wasn’t popping off left and right. There was just something about all of it that seemed really self-serving, and somehow less than blogworthy as a result. Truthfully, it was completely self-serving. I had to do something to reassert my independence. To allow myself the complete freedom to do, think, and act, exactly how I wanted to without the stifling social laws of the workplace, of living with roommates, or even seeing other human beings. However, this liberating little adventure hasn’t been completely devoid of moments worth documentation. Sometimes it takes a random act of emancipation to open up possibilities that couldn’t have existed beforehand.

Three months ago I quit my job and moved to a cabin in the gold country. Bam. Fuck you world, time for me to jet. I felt stifled, bored, and most of all entirely unfulfilled suffering through every week to do my best to enjoy two days of freedom. It wasn’t working for me, so I removed myself from the situation. I finally had the freedom to get back to the things I love: making music, reading, writing, drawing, hiking, riding my bike, most of all being free to do whatever the fuck I want whenever I feel like doing it. One of the things I yearned for most was the feeling of playing music for people. There’s something truly special about creating art for people to enjoy at the exact moment it’s being created. At the time I hadn’t played a live show in 5 years. Less than a week from moving up to the cabin I received this email:

Hey Ninja, wanna go on tour?

My boy Banah is in need of a guitarist & bassist and told him I know just the people.
Let me know what you’re pondering Koi Fish

-Lindonesia

Though a little cryptic in its colloquialisms, one need only really digest the first line. After more than 5 years not playing live music, the opportunity landed in my inbox. Christian (“Lindonesia”) and I auditioned and got the spots. Keep in mind, at no other point in the last few years would it have been at all possible for me to do this. I wouldn’t have even been able to seriously entertain the idea. But, after just leaving my job, I could, and did, say yes. Doors opened when I allowed them to. We toured California for a week and are looking forward to a full west coast run for the month of May. Granted, I have been up here not working for 3 months, and I have no idea how I am going to swing rent and pay my bills and still have enough left over to front a month on tour. It hasn’t been easy, and at this point I’m quickly running out of money and starting to look at the realities of what this decision has cost me. But you know what? All of the costs have been monetary. I can always make more money. When I was working money wasn’t enough to satiate my rabid desire that life be a fucking adventure, and this solitary jaunt to the middle of nowhere has been exactly that.

One of my favorite quotes right now is from Hellen Keller: “Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.” We’ve all tasted the lack of fulfillment of waiting for paychecks and the two weeks granted to you each year for the freedom to do what you actually want with your time.

Fuck that, live an adventure.


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The New Facebook: As I See It

7 10 2011

This years ominously titled f8 Conference, held September 22, 2011 in San Francisco, announced the newest iteration of the world’s favorite social network. Aside from the usual outrage from users scared of having to take three minutes out of their Facebook stalking to become familiar with the new UI, there are actually quite a few significant changes to the Profile as we have come to know it over the last few years. The most significant is that the Profile will not longer be set up as a profile page per se, but instead more of a social timeline, better coalescing previously piecemeal information into a more streamlined and better accessible whole. For a rundown of the changes, I recommend you check out Brian Solis’ analysis (http://bit.ly/ra7wYE) of the new features. Of particular note is the new Open Graph feature for Facebook Apps. This feature allows the Apps you connect to your Facebook page, “to contribute contextual activity to the Timeline automatically through action verbs. …Facebook apps will populate your storybook, based on the permissions you set” (qtd. from the Solis analysis above). This means that Apps will automatically update your Facebook page with things like “Kyle is reading _____”, “Kyle recently watched ______”, etc.,  depending on which Apps you have linked to your Facebook and which permissions you set for them. This takes the time and effort from having to constantly update your interests with new information, meaning that Facebook will better reflect the current status of your offline life, online. Beyond the obvious cool factor and increased integration, this feature has some relatively serious implications for users.

Let me digress and remind you that Facebook’s worth has been estimated at right around $100 per user. This is a free service that is somehow worth over 50 billion dollars. How does this happen? Well friends, Facebook is valued based on its marketing potential. No venture capital has been put into it on the basis that it is the world’s foremost social network. That statistic on its own is worthless. People are putting money into Facebook’s access to all of the intricate details and interests of every one of it’s members. As anyone who has ever taken out a Facebook Ad can attest, the possibilities for target marketing are nearly endless. That’s because Facebook offers anyone wanting to advertise with them access to filters that very precisely allow someone to pinpoint their target audience. Want to take out an ad for only male college students in California, who like a certain band and are friends with someone who likes another related band, who enjoy skateboarding, and street art? Go for it. Facebook allows anyone that capability, for a price. They aren’t selling your information like scum of the earth telecom providers, they merely charge people for the ability to place an ad on the sidebar of the Facebook pages you look at.

Think about this in light of the new improvements to the Facebook service. Facebook hasn’t created a better social network. They’ve created a better marketing machine with a pretty face. Marketers are now able to target you based on real-time information being updated via your Open Graph apps. Let me break this down further. The information on your Profile used to be based upon whatever you manually typed in—meaning that your interests were probably the same from 2005 when you set up your Facebook in the first place, that you didn’t put Paramore in the music section (even though they have the most plays in your iTunes) because you have a reputation to uphold, that your secret affinity for Real Housewives Atlanta somehow didn’t make the cut even though you take care to make sure that you DVR each episode, etc. This manually entered information was what marketers used to target your wallet. Now these areas will be populated with up to the minute information about your life, interests, and how you spend your time. Remember also, that these apps are made by companies who are attempting to turn their own profits. Their reason for having the Facebook integrated app in the first place is so that they can market their service via your Facebook page. (Spotify’s Facebook app integration led to 3.4 million new users in a week long span, more than doubling the previous user count). What I’m trying to say here is that you aren’t being given a free profile page on Facebook. You are being given the page to become a subject of the single most highly targeted marketing system in human history. That little ad on the side of your page is about to get a lot better at showing you things you are actually interested in.

I’m not sure I’m ok with that.


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Distracted.

26 08 2011

Sit down. Fire up the computer. Pull up a word document. Write three sentences. Use the need for a thesaurus as an excuse to get on the internet. Spend the next half hour checking Facebook and Twitter. Back to work. Reread the first three sentences, condense the first two into one and delete the third. Try and recapture the mindset from a half hour ago. Write five more sentences. Cell phone rings, pick it up, talk for 10 minutes. Ok, back to work. Reread the six sentences on the screen. Write two more.

It’s unfortunate that this seemingly hypothetical hour of “work” is a fairly accurate assessment of my time spent trying to get things accomplished. And the hypothetical didn’t even include the nonstop barrage of text messaging happening throughout the hour. Basically, I’m really fucking distracted all the time. No, I’ve never been diagnosed with ADD, but damn if I can’t seem to get anything done in the time I have to do it. I find it nearly impossible to keep my head in the game and handle something through to fruition without some type of external distraction getting in the way. There are just too many things, pulling too many ways, raping and pillaging my attention span until I’m not even sure what it is that I’m supposed to be doing anymore.

Here is my new initiative: No multitasking.

Banned: texting, the internet, social networks, phone calls, any other random shit that needs to be done, but isn’t the task at hand.

Not banned: Kicking ass at one thing at a time. Finishing that thing. Moving on to the next one.

I’ll let you know how it goes.


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Art v. Commerce

8 08 2011

Art thrives on risk. Taking an abstract idea, filtering it through a unique vision and creating something new, is in itself a risky activity. Truly great art exposes ideas in a new way, forcing those witnessing from their comfortable universe to view through the intended lens of the artist.

Commerce thrives on stability. Making calculated decisions, measuring analytics, and responding accordingly is necessary for growing and maintaining wealth. Commerce requires measurable results that can be repeated with predictable outcomes. Risk is an inherent enemy of this type of operation.

The worlds of art and commerce may have never collided so catastrophically as they have in today’s independent music industry. Not only are artists expected to produce captivating content, but they are also charged with simultaneously fronting a business enterprise. DIY musicians must be constantly cognizant of the commercial aspects of their art, and balancing these conflicting ideologies has proven difficult to orchestrate. Creation and logistics require different types of thinking, even different sides of the brain, to work out the intricacies of the particular problems associated with each.

The trend I have noticed amongst independent music artists in the last few years is that they seem to be spending lots of time focusing on the business side of their craft, while neglecting the art that is the basis of the enterprise itself. Let me be clear: artists make art. Anything else is a distraction from the primary objective. Now in no way am I advocating the days of the label model, where artists gave up the control of their business (music) to a record label, who, under the guise of the artist’s best interest, made the business decisions, took the profits, and after recouping, hopefully paid the artists some small percentage of the proceeds. I think it’s great that artists now have the opportunity to steer their own ship as far as their business is concerned. My issue is that I see literally hundreds of mediocre artists spending their days hustling the back alleys of social media trying to boost their follower numbers in hopes that they’ll find some type of success, while altogether ignoring that it’s their art, not their notoriety, that is holding them back. People have things backwards. What’s the point of having 20,000 Twitter followers when the content you’re creating isn’t enthralling enough to keep them interested? Content is king, and always will be. If you aren’t creating content so good that it cannot be ignored then you need to reevaluate your focus.

Artists please stop spending all day grinding out new ways to play your music for people. Spend all day in the studio. Realize that truly great content will ALWAYS sell itself. Perfect your art, the rest will happen organically.


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Things I Despise

1 08 2011

There are very few things that I can say that I truly hate. In fact, off the top of my head I can think of only two, and these two may even be able to be condensed down into one umbrella hatred. For the purposes of this post, however, I’ll give them each their own independent existence. I hate:

-Laziness

-Lack of Initiative

I write this now because I am guilty of both. There’s no Casey Anthony justice system failure in this one, no hung jury, nothing. I am indefensibly guilty on both counts.

In the last 103 days I have written a grand total of one blog post. That’s one quarter of a year with a single post to my name. The worst part is that this post was an excuse, a stay tuned message utterly devoid of captivating content, lacking entirely any modicum of critical thought or artistry. “Hey world, I’m still alive.” It should have said something along the lines of “Hello world, I have been incredibly lazy and will use this as an excuse to forget entirely the things that really matter to me while I get caught up in bullshit activities that don’t mean much.” That would have been a much fairer assessment of how I have been spending my time. And not only have I allowed this neglect to reach its infertile fingers into the microcosm of this blog, but (more importantly) it has halted my music production like a truckload of cocaine at the border. Why? Well here is where I start explaining that I have been working and going to school and interning and that August is the first time since January that all I have on my plate is working full time. But for what? That’s all true, but it’s all bullshit. People make time for the things they love, and let me assure you, I am in love with words and music. So what is it then? Honest answer:

Laziness and lack of initiative.

I have used the excuse of being busy with other things (my “life” getting in the way) as a means to shirk the responsibilities I have to do what I love. Yes, responsibilities. Writing, both music and prose, is something I not only enjoy, but am skilled in. I hold myself completely accountable for pushing myself and continually pursuing greatness in the things I am passionate about. Lately, I have hardly even given myself the respect of sitting down to do them. This is completely unacceptable. What could possibly be more important than doing the things that set my soul on fire? Going to school? Working? Interning?

Fuck that.

I have not finished anything that I’ve started in 2011. Not one thing. I’ve been floating amidst the fuzzy, comfortable waves of the status quo, perpetuating my own laziness with excuses and creating nothing of value. The two things I can say I truly hate have replaced the burning furnace of creativity that I pride myself on.

But they won’t anymore.

 

 


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Writing About Writing

24 03 2011

“The first draft of everything is shit.” -Ernest Hemingway

Truer words may have never been spoken. Sitting down and creating coherent prose off the cuff is a daunting task, even for the genius that was Mr. Hemingway. I have come to realize this particular point much more acutely in the short time since starting this blog. This being my first attempt at writing any original content since college, I have been reminded quite blatantly of the difficulty that comes along with the creation of original content worthy of putting on the page. Sitting down to write after a long day of work, or school, or both as is my current case, does not lend itself to the creation of literary masterpieces. Even coming up with bullshit rants seems taxing after a 13 hour day. Even still, I find that the greatest challenge for me is not sitting down to do it, it’s accepting the inevitable shitty first draft. I never allow myself the ugly, childish, disorganized draft that facilitates the eventual cohesive final product. You know, the first draft that you wouldn’t show to anyone, ever. The one that is so bad it makes you reexamine your life and want to retire from creative thinking altogether. Either that or put a fist through the monitor glaring at you with your pathetic prose. Regardless of how you deal with the insulting mindfuck that is the first draft, the real difficulty is realizing its necessity. Without putting together some type of rough outline, the work can become a case study in meticulously finding the perfect word for each situation, while missing the flow of the piece as a whole. Micromanaging the first draft, as I always somehow manage to do, leads to the death of coherency. I have spent ten minutes (not an exaggeration) fastidiously crafting a perfect sentence, using all the words with the correct connotative references to whatever it is that I’m trying to describe, orchestrating the proper cadence, and rearranging everything to perfection, only to move on to the next sentence and forget entirely the trajectory of the section I’m working on. Fifty perfect sentences don’t make a perfect written work. Fifty perfect sentences can create fifty different wonderful worlds of creative prose, and still lack the continuity and flow of a well written piece. I can’t tell you how many times I have spent hours writing an excruciatingly small number of sentences only to abandon them in their infancy on the church steps of my computer’s trash can because, though great sentences, they don’t coalesce into the whole I had originally envisioned.

And here it becomes obvious why the shitty first draft is so invaluable—it allows a stream of consciousness flow of ideas to be recorded as it happens, unhindered and uncensored by self-criticism. It permits thought to be articulated in its entirety, before it can be cannibalized by our internal editorial filters, allowing the essence of the idea to exist in the form in which it comes to us. The shitty first draft is the record of an original idea, in all of the chaos and imperfection that accompany creative expression.

These moments of inspiration should not be subjected to the constraints of censorship, as doing so has the potential to stifle the original idea before it is fully formed. In other words, let the first draft be gloriously shitty. Turn the censors off. Create something. Worry about word choice and run-on sentences later.

“Art is what we call the thing an artist does. It’s not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human. Art is not in the eye of the beholder. It’s in the soul of the artist.” -Seth Godin


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A Letter to Rick Rubin

10 03 2011

Dear Rick-

I received my copy of Adele’s new album “21” a few days ago. I bought the CD, wanting higher sound quality than the usual Mp3, to allow me to better hear all the nuances of Adele’s majestic voice  in a relatively pristine audio format. After putting the CD in my computer and firing up my studio speakers I relaxed and prepared to spend an hour doing nothing but listening. I took in the first few tracks but track four stuck out. “Don’t You Remember,” as it’s called, seemed to have audible distortion laced throughout the song. I played it again just to make sure I wasn’t mistaken. No, it was there, clear as day. My mind immediately raced through the potential causes, but upon hearing a crescendo I knew the answer. Overcompression. Damn, some jackass hammered down on the compression ratio and steamrolled the dynamics to the point of fuzz. I was dismayed, certainly, but willing to accept someone’s mixing error. I settled back into listening, but by the time “He Won’t Go” hit my ears there was definitely a slight distortion lacing the more instrument heavy portions of the track. At this point I started to get flustered. Why would someone use such an aggressive mixing style on what are essentially pop ballads? I couldn’t think of any sensible reason behind it, but I wasn’t happy. Pissed off, but not letting the obnoxious grit distract from my listening experience, I continued letting Adele sign her sorrows at high volume. Three tracks later, more distortion. ‘What the fuck,’ I thought to myself, ‘this has to be some kind of mistake.’ Annoyed enough at this point, I pulled out the liner notes for the CD—I had to know what was going on. When I found the line for production credit on “Don’t You Remember” I realized that the overcompression on these tracks wasn’t an accident, it was your signature.

Look Rick, you are responsible for discovering and producing some of the best music ever made. Your track record speaks for itself. However, Adele is not Jay-Z, nor The Red Hot Chili Peppers. Those artists and styles lend themselves well to your steamroller compression tactics, but I find it hard to justify using the same production methods on “21.” In my opinion, you shit on greatness.

You left your sonic fingerprints all over this record, and honestly, I find it inappropriate. The role of a producer is to guide the music toward the pinnacle of whatever it is that the song is written to express. This includes help writing and arranging, but also employing recording and mixing techniques that complement the musical direction. When you mix tracks (or supervise the mixing of tracks) the expression of the song should reign as creative director, not you. Your job is merely to interpret the vision and make it real. You took mellow pop songs and applied your signature aggressive mix to all of them, effectively tagging each with the graffiti of your style.

Luckily for you, most people won’t notice what you’ve done to these tracks. Those of us who love audio, have. We aren’t happy, Rick.

Respectfully,

Kyle Fisher


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Wholesale Patriotism

14 01 2011

There are few experience’s I find quite as glaringly American as shopping at Costco. It’s true, buying groceries may not have the same rabid nationalism as the Fourth of July, but flag waving, fireworks, and plentiful Budweisers aside, going to Costco gives Independence Day a decent run for it’s money in terms of glorifying the American zeitgeist. Where else are overabundance, reckless overconsumption, and unnecessary competition celebrated so vehemently? There really is nothing more ludicrous than a few thousand people in a building, carts filled with 80 ounce jars of Best Foods mayonnaise (the twin pack), a box of 48 Jimmy Dean Griddle Cakes, and a cube of toilet paper the size of a Mini Cooper, shoving one another for one toothpicked cube of room temperature havarti. An interesting moment arises while standing in line for the latest toaster oven prepared snack when those waiting with you come to the realization that there can’t possibly be enough samples to go around—that’s when the character assessments begin. You see them doing the mental math, noting that there are only three samples for the four people in line, and you discover that the Filipino man to your left is shooting furtive glances your way, sizing you up to see how adamantly you are prepared to defend your right to “first come, first served.” You’re both wondering if there is another tray of moderately heated snacks seconds away from being pulled out of the toaster, or if the last remaining paper cup will need to be fought over. The tension is palpable.

The experience is magnified by the fact that there is only one Costco for all 800,000 residents of San Francisco, compounding the problem by exponentially increasing the amount of shopping carts per acre of warehouse space. A Sunday afternoon Costco run feels like the consumer equivalent of volunteering for Birkenau. The sheer number of people creates an ant farm effect, with everyone vying for the same space, attempting to steer carts toward their next purchase through the labyrinthine concrete corridors. The number of carts is excessive, that’s for sure, but this would be less of a problem were it not for the fact that each of them is indiscriminately stacked to the limits of their tensile strength with enough wholesale goods to bring Port-Au-Prince back from the brink of extinction. If every 115 pound soccer mom was deftly maneuvering corners with the handling skills of an Andretti, piloting their lineman’s sled of a shopping cart effortlessly through the masses, that would be one thing. Unfortunately, the reality looks more like the I-405/US-101 interchange in the dark heart of rush hour. Confused, scared, and unsure of their next move, people halt the momentum of their carts in order to contemplate a mid-aisle change of direction, failing to realize that the inertia of the load will do everything in its power to prevent being nudged toward the next impulse buy. This blockage creates catastrophic consequences for anyone naive enough to believe in forward progress. The pathway clogs faster than arteries at the mercy of a KFC Double Stack, locking everyone involved in the perpetual clusterfuck.

Regardless of the sense of armageddon that befalls me every time I set foot in Costco, I can’t help but walk around fascinated by the sociological experiment that its particular brand of large-scale consumerism engenders. It’s the train wreck theory in action. I know that I’ll see things I don’t like, things that might make me angry or disgusted, but I make the journey, knowing that I will leave with a stomach ache and a sense that the world is, in fact, going to shit. But I mean really, where else could I possibly go that would highlight our addiction to consumption more poignantly?

Well, I guess there’s Walmart.


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