Charge Shot!!!

The Burdens of Command: Mass Effect 2 Review

2010-02-10T07:00:00.000-05:00

After four days of serious binge-gaming, skipping workouts, and sidelining my already-minimal social commitments, I decided to take a brief break from Mass Effect 2. Commander Bryce Shephard, my space marine protagonist, had just totally blown it. I thought his relationship with Miranda Lawson, a slinky commando, was going somewhere – until he ordered her to back down from a near-gunfight with another crew member. After the perceived slight, any attempt to talk was ignored, and further attempts to reconcile were given the cold shoulder.

He made a leadership decision, I told myself. He made the right choice. But I couldn’t stop chewing over the scenario. I slumped into a strange funk, pouring successive vodka cranberries, justifying my logic.

Right or wrong, Shepard’s call had its repercussions. I lost Miranda. She was killed in action. Sure, it was a suicide mission to begin with, but it didn’t blunt the cold, lonely ache of staring down at her casket.

Mass Effect 2 is a game about choices. As Shepard, commander of a starship on a suicide mission, you choose where to go, what to do, and most importantly, who to trust, love, fight, kill and save. While the game’s fate-machine is less complex than it might seem at first, Mass Effect 2 is a powerful, deeply personal journey. It is simply one of the best games of this generation.

If you know the basics of Mass Effect 2’s story – you’re sent on a suicide mission; members of your team can indeed die – this review is spoiler-free.

Welcome Back, Commander

Gamers new to the franchise might feel a little disoriented by the complexity of the Mass Effect universe. Here’s the short version. In 2148, humanity discovers technology that flings them across the cosmos and drops them at the doorstep of a wildly diverse, intensely political galactic UN called the Citadel. While mini-wars erupt in the fringe territories, the Milky Way is enjoying a lull of peacetime.

As Shepard, commander of the stealth frigate SSV Normandy, you are the bearer of bad news – an ancient race of sentient machines called the Reapers are preparing to purge known civilization. Surviving both galactic politics and legions of cyborgs, Shepard saves the Citadel, securing humanity’s place among the stars. He’s the hero.

Mass Effect 2 begins two years after the epic conclusion of the first – for reasons plenty obvious to the gamer, but smothered by the spoiler blanket – and the galactic landscape is different. While humanity continues to gain political traction, the Citadel is burying its head in the space-sand over the Reaper threat, forcing Shepard to work with Cerberus, a pro-human fringe group of dubious ethics.

Led by the Illusive Man, a Colonel Kurtz-ish figure voiced by Martin Sheen (irony!), Ceberus thinks that a string of attacks on human colonies are harbingers of another Reaper attack. Rather than adopting the Citadel’s see-no-evil policy, they send Shepard to investigate.

It’s obvious Bioware wanted Mass Effect 2 to be its The Empire Strikes Back – a darker, more complex and morally ambiguous sequel, superior in sophistication and execution to its predecessor. Make no mistake: Bioware could have reproduced Mass Effect with minimal adjustment and scored high marks with the critics. The fact it they started practically from square one, reinventing not just the mechanics but the very concept of Mass Effect, makes its accomplishment all the more overwhelming.

Mass Effect 2 is the first time since Half Life 2 that a game has exceeded my expectations. And as a devotee of the original, rest assured that my expectations were absurdly high. Taken as the sum of its parts, I can safely call it my favorite game on the Xbox 360.

Talk, Shoot, Strip-Mine

Here are its parts: Mass Effect 2 is a role-playing game with an emphasis on character and conversation; it is a cover-based shooter a la Gears of War, linear but tactical; it is an exploration game similar to the Star Control series, in which you shuffle your little starship around a vast and colorful galaxy, scanning planets and collecting (read: strip mining) resources.

Mass Effect 2 The Shooter is a dramatic departure from its predecessor. Mass Effect walked and talked like a shooter, but retained the statistics-based, dice-rolling core that drives most RPGs. Consequently, the action felt detached and plastic, lacking a certain oomph.

Bioware disposed with the dice for ME2, and the benefits are widespread: Shepard runs faster, turns sharper and slides into cover like a brass-balled space marine, not the product of a spreadsheet. Combat feels emphatic, kinetic, alive in a way Mass Effect never was. I’m sure many ME veterans will fire share my first impression: This is how it should have been all along.

As an exploration game, ME2 is both enhanced and reduced from its former self. In ME, players explored planets in the Mako, an armored personnel carrier that seemed somehow lighter than air, bouncing off rocks and pirouetting off cliffs. It was a nightmare to control, and made exploration a tedious affair.

The internet cried out against the Mako, and Bioware listened: the quirky APC is nowhere to be seen in ME2. Exploration is instead conducted through a planetary scanner – you move the reticule until a handy mineral-o-meter goes bananas, and then you launch a probe to reap (strip mine) the goods. It’s more efficient than Mako-prowling, but it’s too shallow to be anything more than a diversion (side note: check out the descriptions Bioware appended to each planet. Dudes did their homework).

But ME2 truly shines as a role-playing game. To really get at the heart of this game, we need to revise our definition of an RPG. Everything’s been simplified – or, more charitably, streamlined – from ME. Instead of allocating skill points, you’ll simply upgrade a character’s talent along four tiers. Instead of juggling inventories and upgrading individual weapons, your party will automatically use the most powerful or advanced weapon at their disposal. No more upgrading the weave of their armor, the barrel of their gun or the ammunition in their clip. That kind of micromanagement is gone. Hardened RPG fans may bemoan its loss, but I hardly missed it.

Instead, the focus is quite simply on playing a role. You’re commanding a suicide mission, and your success depends on your ability to recruit the right people and earn their trust. Every decision has a repercussion, and Bioware has gone to immense lengths to ensure that ME2 doesn’t boil down to one or two main cause/effect paths.

Through their actions and words, players craft a character with unprecedented depth and detail. You can credibly view your Commander Shepard not as a videogame avatar, but as a creation of fiction. Even more so if you import your character from ME – almost every decision you made in the first game has some ripple in the second. Bioware ensured that I returned not just to a franchise, but to a character, distinct and utterly unique.

I mean, when I stepped onto the deck of the SR2 Normandy, I felt a rush of fondness and familiarity that I haven’t felt in a videogame since, well, picking up the crowbar in Half Life 2.

An Issue of Character

Some have criticized ME2’s main quest lacking the depth and complexity of its predecessor. How loudly can I disagree? I think it points to a shallowness endemic in the gaming community. ME’s story was complex, yes, but not particularly deep. We’ve seen the “Aliens attack from the outer reaches and only one man can stop them all” story before. It’s Halo. It’s every space marine yarn ever spun. It doesn’t matter that the Reapers are a race of thinking machines that older than cosmic dirt, or that they roll around every few millennia to obliterate sentient life in the Milky Way. With all due praise to Bioware, it’s all been done, and better.

But Mass Effect 2, like all good fiction, is first and foremost about character. You’ll spend most of your time gathering your crew and gaining their trust. You’ll drop by their quarters for a chats, which you’ll look forward to, thanks to top-notch writing and voice acting. Over the course of the game – for me, 30 hours of substantive playing – you’ll become attached to them. Particular favorites are Mordin Solus, the Salarian scientist with a highly-caffeinated delivery (you can get him to sing a Gilbert and Sullivan number with enough coaxing) and an ends-justify-the-means outlook, and Thane Krios, a stoic reptilian assassin with a monklike disposition and deep, tragic guilt. When Thane confessed that I was the first friend he’d made in 10 years, I teared up a bit.

I was absolutely terrified to lose any of them.

And lose them you most certainly can – this is, after all, a suicide mission, and Bioware isn’t screwing around. One of my friends lost two on the final mission; An IGN.com writer ended up losing all but two. I played my cards right and only lost Miranda Lawson. And believe me, that loss haunts me.

But ultimately, I know exactly why Miranda died. It’s simple: I sided with the other crewmate in the squabble. I assumed that Miranda would get it, seeing as I’d been successfully wooing her for a while. I assumed, in essence, that she was more human than she was.

I could gloss over the math with an explanation – Miranda didn’t trust me, and wasn’t fully focused on the mission, therefore – but really, it’s a simple if-then statement. If Miranda scorned, Miranda die. It somewhat undermines the otherwise convincing humanity of Mass Effect 2’s cast. If I’m meant to truly value and fear for their safety, their fate shouldn’t be left to such simple mechanics.

While I’m quibbling, let’s get this out of the way: why do otherwise sophisticated games (hi, Bioshock) rely on shoot-the-glowing-weak-points boss battles to resolve their main quests? I mean, is this just some sick homage to all the games you’re better than?

That said, the tenor of humanity running through ME2 is far beyond anything in its class. In a recent post, Destructoid’s Brad Nicholson said he simply couldn’t stop thinking about Mass Effect 2. This is the mark of good, powerful storytelling – it sinks its claws into you. It occupies your idle moments. It has Nicholson, and me, and legions of gamers straining towards the future, aching for Mass Effect 3.

Keeping up with which Kardashian has been to the White House

2010-02-09T17:00:00.000-05:00

To paraphrase from the Oscar-nominated film "Up in the Air" - Grown men love athletes because they make millions of dollars and date supermodels. Children love athletes because they follow their dreams.

What Oscar-nominated actor George Clooney didn't mention: Celebutantes love athletes because, if they're successful enough, they can provide a one-way ticket to the White House. Not to live there in any official capacity - just to visit.

For non-diplomats, meeting the president is a rare honor usually reserved for kids on field trips and a select few who happen to be attending the right event at the right time. One of our illustrious contributors here at Charge Shot!!! is one of those select few, and has a photo to prove it.

But another group of people that get a special introduction to the commander in chief are the members of a professional sports team that has recently won a championship. This group was not overlooked by reality TV stars and celebrities-for-no-reason Khloe and Kim Kardashian.

CHAPTER 1: How Khloe Made It

On August 27, 2009, television socialite Khloe Kardashian threw a party at LA's Halo nightclub to welcome LA Laker acquisition Ron Artest to town. At the party, she met Artest's new teammate Lamar Odom and sparks immediately flew. Kardashian and Odom became romantically involved, and after a whirlwind month-long romance, the two got engaged. They were married September 28, just in time to feature the wedding on a special two-hour season 4 premiere event of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. (The special premiered November 8, 2009 and drew 4.1 million viewers.)

Fast forward to January 25, 2010. The happily married couple made their way to the White House, along with Odom's Laker teammates. President Barack Obama hosted a meeting to congratulate last year's NBA champions, and everyone on the team got a "plus one." Khloe and the other Laker wives got a personal tour of the White House before meeting the prez along with their hubbies.

CHAPTER 2: Kim's Aspirations

Rewind to Khloe and Odom's wedding. The ceremony took place two months after older Kardashian sister Kim split up with her star athlete boyfriend Reggie Bush, running back for the New Orleans Saints. Kim couldn't accompany Bush back to the Big Easy when time came to start practices because of her commitment to filming her series, and the pair split rather than deal with the complications involved in a long-distance relationship for another year (they had been dating since 2007).

But when younger Khloe tied the knot, it reminded Kim how much she missed having Reggie in her life, so she jumped on a plane to Nawlins immediately after the reception to try and win back her man. At this point in time, the Saints were 3-0 and would not lose a game until December. We all know what the Saints went on to accomplish in the playoffs, and when Obama throws his annual congratulatory get-together for the Super Bowl champs, you can bet your shares in D-A-S-H clothing boutique that Kim will be there with bells on (barring a second breakup, of course).

CHAPTER 3: Illegitimate Attempts

The Kardashians are not the first socialite family to try and infiltrate the inner sanctum of the White House. We all remember the embarrassing events of November 24, 2009 where a prominent Virginia couple - Tareq and Michaele Salahi - somehow made it past security to attend a state dinner honoring the Prime Minister of India. They waltzed right past the secret service (they were screened for weapons, so no one was in any immediate danger because of the mixup), and although a reporter purportedly recognized them and knew they weren't on the guest list, they still made it right down the receiving line and shook hands with some of the most influential men in charge.

Apparently if you look the part and play up your charm and influences, security will pay you less attention than regular old gatecrashers. Hey, it happens to hot girls in clubs all the time, albeit on a much smaller scale.

Just who are these infamous Salahis, who thought they could so brazenly jeopardize our national security just to have some cool pics to post on their facebook pages? Tareq Salahi is a polo aficionado and scandal-magnet, most of which stem from controversial dealings involving his family's now bankrupt Oasis Winery, misuse of proceeds raised by his various "charitable" events and foundations, and widespread bill-skipping in general. His wife Michaele Salahi (nee Michelle Holt) is a model, lobbyist, and professed former Miss USA pageant winner and Washington Redskins cheerleader. However, both organizations have repeatedly denied these claims.

Michaele is also an aspiring reality TV star, having been in talks to star in the upcoming "Real Housewives of D.C." series. In fact, a camera crew from said series attempted to accompany her into the White House on that fateful November night, but were turned away at the gate.

Maybe the Salahis' party crashing was just a stunt cooked up by the "Real Housewives" team to jazz up the premiere of their show. Maybe the Salahis are just entitled dicks who spend money they don't have and go places they're not invited. Maybe both. But either way, they should learn a lesson from the Kardashians: you're only famous enough to get a legitimate invitation to meet the President after you've starred in a trashy reality TV show, not before.

Another lesson the Salahis can learn from the whole situation: it's not necessarily fame or power or money or influence that makes it okay for obscenely wealthy socialites to show up at the White House - it's just who you're sleeping with.

24 in 24 Words – Day 8, Hour 7

2010-02-09T15:00:00.000-05:00

Episode 7 - “10:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m.”

Spoilers after the jump!

Cherry Jones twiddles her thumbs while President Slumdog evils up the place. Starbuck plot is still dumb as hell, but Euro Jack kicks ass.

This Week on Audiosurf Radio – Pop/Rock Piano Edition

2010-02-09T08:32:00.000-05:00

A recent running topic on Charge Shot!!! lately has been the outdated catalogue of music genres. As Jordan wrote a few weeks ago, many of the terms are obsolete, especially the ones less concerned with the music itself, like “indie” or “alternative.”

This week we’ve got Sunspot, who straddle variations on mainstream rock, calling themselves the “Cheap Trick of geek-rock and Van Halen for nerds.” Pretty ballsy comparisons there, guys. They hail from Madison, Wisconsin, a beautiful town that doesn’t get nearly enough attention. So good on you, Sunspot, for striving to raise Madison’s profile even just a tick.

Providing a nice counterpoint to Sunspot’s alternative rock is the piano music of Italy’s Livio Amato. I can’t read Italian at all, but if you do, you might enjoy his website.

Enough stalling, let’s get to some rides.

You know that section of your now-shuttered record store labeled “Pop/Rock”? It was chock full of albums filled with tracks that sounded like “Neanderthal.” The bass line switches between a bouncy mainstream punk feel and a rumbling, monster-in-the-basement sound. Sunspot has some metal aspirations – crunchy riffs abound – but they refuse to fully commit. I imagine a band meeting where someone points to a framed Foo Fighters poster on the wall and tells the guitarist to ease up a bit. To be honest, I didn’t have much time to consider the music, as I was incredibly distracted by the lyrics. The opening lines, “Virtual murder, pixelated death/We can kill each other, with no regrets,” sound like a comment on violence in the Internet age. The words don’t get much more sophisticated than that, however, and the prechorus line “Now I’m fucking my PC” just grates on me. The ride is rather perfunctory, an afterthought to an afterthought of a song.

The first couple bars of melody in “No Place Like Home” call to mind traces of The Beatles’ “I’ve Just Seen A Face.” It’s not one-to-one, but the notes he’s using as touchstones between phrases remind me so much of that chord progression. I suppose invoking the Fab Four is rarely a bad idea, especially since here it’s preceded by a thumping bass that only would’ve made it on a Beatles record in a Ringo song. The song’s about shedding your hometown like so many molted skins – a sentiment many can identify with as they start post-collegiate life. The music and lyrics don’t quite live up to their promise, however, leveling out to become four minutes of completely inoffensive rock. Toward the end, a few sweeping red curves spice up the ride. Just don’t expect any epileptic fits on this one. Those aiming for places on the leaderboard should definitely aim to nab the Butter Ninja bonus for collecting nearly all of the yellow blocks. I didn’t see too many along the way, which should make that an easy addition to your score.

“Crepuscolo” is surprisingly vibrant for a piano-only track. There’s plenty of traffic to slough through, even if it doesn’t always match up with Amato’s dexterous fingers. Upon hearing the alternation of dense chords and spritely melody, I was instantly reminded of several titles from the indie game scene. Specifically, I’m thinking of the opening music for Today I Die, a touching little game by Daniel Benmergui. The rising arpeggios connote an emotional buoyancy, someone’s rising feeling that they can surpass the obstacle before them. Not a bad message for someone playing Audiosurf, trying to make it to the end of the track unscathed. The traffic activity did confuse a few players, however. Ko Tao points out, “Almost all of my other piano tracks are 2-digit traffic and straight uphill, no matter how intense the actual music is.” The challenge here is a surprise, but a pleasant one.

Just like “Crepuscolo,” “Sogno Agitato” generates a high volume of traffic for a piano track. The only other instruments are some light strings in the background, but they do little more than support the movement of the piano. Shocked may not be the right word, but I did find it curious that there’s another piano piece out there called “Sogno Agitato,” by someone named Suzanne Ciani. I couldn’t find anything linking the two, so it must simply be coincidence. Babelfish informs me, rather circuitously, that the title means something like “agitated dream.” I definitely hear Amato invoking the journey of a dream: starting sweetly, adding turbulence, and then building hopeful suspense. Surfinonbeatzzz believes it “sounds like a movie score. In the first part somebody died and in the second part that somebody was born.” Conversely, hellfaucet describes it as “sexy, suspenseful bathtime music (in winter).” I wonder what sexy, suspenseful bathtime music sounds like in spring.

Author’s Note

All songs were played on the Pro difficulty at least twice using the Eraser and Vegas characters. Nothing witty to say this time around, sorry.

The Agony and the Ecstacy of Being a Comic Book Fanboy

2010-02-08T19:30:00.002-05:00

Reading comic books is an experience akin to being a baseball fan. You pick a particular book, character, writer, artist, or publisher based on some early personal experience and you stick with them for years, through thick and thin, boom and bust, feast and famine, just like a sports team. No matter how tough the going gets, they're yours and you'll always come back to them.

For me, my character of choice is Spider-Man and my house is the House of Ideas, Marvel Comics. My devotion to America's favorite webslinger can be traced back to a routine doctor's appointment around the time I turned five. As it is with most children, visits to the pediatrician were fairly traumatic and my boomer parents knew the best way to get me to go through with them was to present me with rewards for being a tough little trooper. My childhood doctor's office was located next door to the College of Comic Book Knowledge, a comics shop seemingly built into the front of its owner's house.

Spider-Man came into my life via an unusual route, Ren & Stimpy. In kindergarten, I was a humongous Ren & Stimpy Show fanatic (and I still am). On that first voyage to the Comic College with my father eighteen years ago, I bought a Ren & Stimpy comic, but specifically a crossover comic: "The Amazing Spider-Man vs. Powdered Toast Man". While Powdered Toast Man may have been the first superhero I was exposed to (and I do mean exposed), Spider-Man was the first to capture my imagination. Trade paperbacks of The Very Best of Spider-Man (featuring the origin story among many other classics), The Return of the Sinister Six (where Doctor Octopus concocts a scheme to poison the world's cocaine supply and thus turn the 80's ruling class of coke addicts into his loyal minions, I read this when I was six years old mind you), and a Spider-Man vs. Venom collection soon followed.

My youth was one of worship for my Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, Peter Parker was my hero and idol. My moral compass and life model. In my young eyes, he could do no wrong.

So you can imagine I might have been disheartened when, a few short years ago, Spider-Man sold his soul to the Devil.

In a controversial move, Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada took over an arc called "One More Day/Brand New Day" of The Amazing Spider-Man, Spider-Man's and therefore Marvel's flagship book, from its regular writer J. Michael Straczynski. Quesada's brief time as author saw Aunt May mortally wounded by a Kingpin-backed sniper's bullet meant for Peter in the wake of Marvel's Civil War. Despite being friends with Doctor Strange, having a good working relationship with several gods and otherworldly beings, being a member of Earth's Mightiest Heroes- the Avengers, and you know...being a superhero, Peter had no means to save his beloved geriatric aunt from the sweet embrace of death. However, an opportunity to save May's life came from Mephisto, a demonic character and the Marvel Universe equivalent of Satan. Mephisto, Prince of Darkness and Father of Lies, offered to prevent an elderly woman with a long history of health problems from dying in exchange for erasing Peter's marriage to Mary Jane from existence.

In essence, Lucifer un-opaquely offered Spider-Man a retcon.

Retconning (from "retroactive continuity") is the unfortunate but oftentimes necessary comic book practice of erasing confusing, inconvenient, politically incorrect, or unpopular events from the continuity of a long-running title in an effort to keep things making sense. A good (or maybe a bad) example of retconning might be the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy; Boba Fett used to be a silent badass with a mysterious past, but when Episode II came out he was clone of some douchebag named Jango and was responsible for the Clone Wars. A recent comic book retcon is the inclusion of Captain America as being part of the Weapon X project that would eventually create Wolverine and other characters.

It was clear from the beginning that Quesada was making this drastic change because he hated Mary Jane Watson, Peter Parker's longtime love interest and wife. Quesada felt that a character as schlubby and down-on-his-luck everymanly as Peter Parker lost his edge if he got to come home to a really hot supermodel. Now, this isn't the medium for me to debate the merits of the Mary Jane character, but I will say that I have been an MJ fan since I was a little boy so I think Quesada is a hack and deserves to be put up against a wall and shot for his crimes against all of us Peter Parkers of the world who would just like to daydream that they could have a beautiful redhead as a girlfriend who didn't mind if we dressed up in red and blue tights and stayed out late fighting crime.

IamnotprojectingIamnotprojectingIamnotprojectingIamnotprojecting...

Anyway, Quesada's move of making Marvel's avatar of common decency and underdog goodness strike a bargain with the forces of evil to save the life of the only mother he ever knew at the cost of his marriage, not Mary Jane's life or soul mind you, she still exists in Marvel continuity but she and Peter just never got together, was pretty lame and was seen by most fans as such. It's a really transparent effort to correct some of the in and out-of-universe screw-ups perpetrated by the Marvel bullpen and a classless grab at making the books closer to the movies. Spider-Man had recently revealed his true identity to the world on national television at Iron Man's behest during the events of Civil War, which saw the Marvel Universe split down the middle between heroes who wanted to disclose the truth to the public in the name of security and those who wanted to keep do-gooding the old fashioned way (there was a whole national security vs. privacy thing in there that was beat over your head pretty thoroughly). After Mephisto's reality-altering magic spell, everybody oh-so conveniently forgot that Peter Parker was Spider-Man and writers no longer had to deal with that messy factoid. Mary Jane was gone and Peter was back to his old "I can't pay the rent!" bachelor crises, and Harry Osborn was brought back to life for good measure. Whatever.

This all happened around the time of Spider-Man 3's release, so my faith in comic books was pretty much shattered for a short time. But Marvel has recently promised a move away from these big, confusing, and uncharacteristically dark crossover events like Civil War that make retcons so necessary in favor of a new direction called "The Heroic Age". The current literal crossover to end all crossovers Siege is set to resolve all this and begin a return to good old fashioned comic book storytelling. Siege depicts a Götterdämmerung-like battle in Asgard between the forces of evil led by the former-Green-Goblin-current-Iron-Patriot Norman Osborn and his Dark Avengers (long story) and a resurrected Captain America and every good guy ever.

Marvel has ensured readers a new equilibrium will be established after these events conclude in the spring, I can only hope that, for the sake of the medium, Mary Jane is a part of that.

Thoughts of an Aspiring Music Snob: Week 45 - The Roots

2010-02-08T12:00:00.001-05:00

Chris is trying to compensate for his lack of musical knowledge by immersing himself in one new artist each week. At the end of the week, he will write up a brief summary of his opinions. You can read about the origin and parameters of this project here.

I've been doing this project for almost a year now, and I've listened to a lot of interesting music. But thus far I've skirted around one of the biggest forces in popular music today - rap. Except for a brief dalliance with OutKast last summer, my rap listening has been entirely music that is decades old - Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest, and Run-D.M.C.

I don't know why I've been avoiding rap music. It's not a question of taste - what rap I've been exposed to I've found intriguing. But there's something very intimidating to me about the entire field of hip hop, even more so than most popular music I know nothing about. My parents exposed me to classic rock, and the white-boy indie music that's churned out today is not terribly far from my nerdy academic sensibilities. But I can't shake the feeling that I'm not the targeted audience for rap music, and there's something about that that makes me feel like a poser merely for listening. On Friday night, as I kicked back in my khaki shorts with a glass of wine and a crossword puzzle, I couldn't help but notice that the Roots CD I had put on didn't really fit the rest of the scene. I kept waiting for the Cool Police to come in and tell me to turn that music off and put back on a violin concerto or Vampire Weekend or something. In my mind's eye, the Cool Police always look like my black neighbors, who I'm certain are judging me through the walls when I listen to this.

This is all ridiculous, of course. If you haven't heard, we're living in a post-racial world now, and hip-hop is arguably the most influential and prominent genre in popular music today. The counter-cultural icons of yesteryear are now thoroughly mainstream (Exhibit A: Last night's Superbowl half-time show), and I'd argue that rap artists, from their politically-charged lyrics to their crazy celebrity antics, are the true musical superstars of today.

Which means I should probably buckle down and start listening to more rap and stop worrying if that slightly tan looking dude is judging me for listening when I have my window rolled down at a stop light. But it's a different kind of music, and as a result I found it hard to do this week's write-up. Rap music has its place in the history and present culture of popular music, but it also has its own traditions and rules which I'm hardly familiar with. (What's with the skits? The nicknames? Why does every other track have a guest vocalist?).

I'm also not as familiar with even the basic terminology, so I hope you'll forgive me as I try and wade through this. I'm going to try and make an effort to put more rap artists on my listening list, and hopefully I'll learn enough during the process to not embarrass myself when I talk about it.

If I approach something entirely the wrong way, don't be afraid to berate me in the comments. But just keep in mind that I'm a skinny white kid with a Beethoven bumper sticker on his car that's trying his best.

WEEK 45

ARTIST OF THE WEEK: The Roots

WHAT I KNEW BEFORE: Really, I was only familiar with the Roots because they're currently the house band on the subpar Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (in fact, they're probably the only consistently good aspect of that show). I was intrigued enough by their all-over-the-place style of jamming to choose to listen to them for a week; as it turns out, their recorded material is somewhat different in tone, the most notable distinction being the lack of a full-time sousaphone player (seriously).

MY LISTENING: I listened to Things Falls Apart (1999) every day this week, and to Phrenology (2002) three times, as these seemed to be the two most highly-acclaimed Roots albums. I also listened to Game Theory (2006) and Rising Down (2008), as those were the other two Roots albums that happened to be available at my local library.

WHAT I LIKED:

Like I said, most of what I can compare the Roots' music to is older rap from the 80s and early 90s. And, in that regard, their music is lot denser than old-school hip-hop. Gone is the single rapper laying lyrics atop a single tape sample; rather, the Roots' tracks are intricately layered and deep, in the sense that it feels there's a lot of textural levels of the music to explore. Part of the Roots' claim to fame is that they use few recordings during their live performances, rather playing all the backing beats themselves. This sort of performance certainly shows through on their CDs, as the tracks are filled with complex drum parts, backing vocals, squealing guitars and electrifying keyboard parts. It could have ended up sounding flashy and overproduced, all glitz and no substance, but I think the "live performance" aesthetic helps to ground these songs. That most of these tracks wind their way through funk, soul and other disparate genre influences only makes it that much more interesting.

The Roots are also deep in another sense - their lyrics tackle serious subjects like domestic violence, while name-dropping prominent black figures like Chinua Achebe and W.E.B. DuBois. I wasn't expecting the music from a second-rate late night show's house band to tackle such subjects, so I was surprised to discover that a lot of the Roots' music is grounded in this political and social activism. It wasn't exactly what I was expecting and so it took a few days for me to get on board with this sort of music, but by Thursday I was admiring the well-crafted, very intelligent lyrics. "Inevitably, hip-hop records are treated as though they are disposable," implores a voice in "Act Won", the opening to Things Fall Apart. "They are not maximized as product, not to mention as art." The Roots, at least, seem to be trying to change this.

WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE:

I don't think I listened to a single Roots album this week that was less than an hour long. It seems like with each CD they're trying to outdo themselves, cramming everything they possible can onto the disc. To call it "overambitious" would be an understatement; every album is another attempt to make the definitive alternative hip hop masterpiece, and I'm not sure if they ever really succeed. I'm all for incorporating a variety of influences into your music, but the endless sound collages and spoken poetry went a little too far for me. A few times, like "The Return to Innocence Lost" at the end of Things Falls Apart, and the epic "Water" on Phrenology, degenerate into what amounts to a bunch of sounds cobbled together to drift aimlessly for ten minutes at a time. I much preferred the Roots when they concentrated their efforts on shorter, less artsy tracks.

WHAT I LEARNED: I usually do my listening while working on schoolwork or cooking dinner, but I'm not sure if rap music is best suited for those endeavors. The Roots especially were a different kind of music, more emotionally draining and in-your-face, harder music to multitask to. I was able to appreciate the music more while driving, or going on a walk, when there was nothing else to distract me. Whether this is a phenomenon that applies to all hip hop, or just the Roots, remains to be seen.

FURTHER EXPLORATION WOULD ENTAIL: I really have no idea where to begin. Wikipedia tells me that Roots frontman ?uestlove headed a "neo soul and hip-hop informed musical collective" called the Soulquarians around the beginning of the century, with other musicians like Mos Def and Q-Tip (who I've at least heard of), and Talib Kwali (who I actually saw perform once). I suppose this would be a place to start? Perhaps?

BEST SONG YOU'VE HEARD: "The Seed 2.0"

For the second week in a row, the default choice, as it's possibly the only song you've heard.

BEST SONG YOU HAVEN'T HEARD: "The Spark"

NEXT WEEK'S ARTIST: Van Halen

Writer’s Jukebox – Regina, Country, and More Country

2010-02-08T07:36:00.000-05:00

I had grand plans to present a trifecta of Steph, Gene, and Jordasch this week. Steph’s always good for name-dropping artists I had no idea she’d be interested in. Jordasch often serves up unique takes on bands I’ve gotten complacent about. And Gene…I treat his stuff like an exciting fantasy novel, filled with kickass groups whose names I’d swear weren’t real. Too bad Gene got a big fat job and couldn’t participate (congrats?). While I can’t even begin to fill his ginormous Italian shoes, I will attempt to fill his slot for this week’s Jukebox.

Of course, the week I replace a writer is the week I’m the odd man out. Both Steph and Jordasch are riding the country train this week, while I’m off in the indie songstress world. Weird, right?

Craig – Is it possible to get tired of Regina Spektor? Mmm…nope.

I spend a lot of time in transit listening to podcasts, so I don’t move through new music as often as I’d like. On the occasion that I spend more than five minutes in a car, I usually end up just choosing something I’m familiar with. Example: I threw on Them Crooked Vultures today. I believe I’ve said more than enough about them.

Would it surprise you (given the prevalence of TCV) that another artist getting regularly play on my iPod is Regina Spektor? I picked up her latest album Far in the fall, and I circle back to it about once a month. Some of her vocal theatrics – glottal stops, what might as well be yodeling, adorably amateurish beatboxing – can be excessive, but she makes up for it with clever metaphors and soulful crooning. “Two Birds” tackles its central image from every possible angle, painting a heartbreaking image of an all-too-common relationship. The chorus of “One More Time With Feeling” - “Hold on, one more time with feeling/Try it again. Breathing’s just a rhythm” – gives me chills. I can’t imagine anyone who’s had a loved one in the hospital wouldn’t be similarly affected.

My favorite track on the record by far is “Dance Anthem of the 80s.” It runs the gamut of Regina’s tricks, from a weird Sibelius voice interlude to stuttery vocals to athletic melismas. It’s silly, epic, and endearing. On her previous record, Begin to Hope, I could listen to her sing the word ‘better’ forever. On Far, it’s how she sings ‘sleep’ in this track. Just beautiful.

Stephanie – Who knew Alison Krauss had protégés?

My boyfriend has been trying to balance out my musical preferences by exposing me to Metal, and so I naturally have to balance out his Metallica with my Bluegrass -- my secret long-time love. Being a devoted fan of 27-time Grammy darling Alison Krauss, I’m willing to give anything she produces or endorses a reasonable chance. This attitude is what led me to discover an album called Secrets by Sierra Hull, the new 16-year old sensation of the picking world.

Hull is a precision mandolin player who is highly talented while still having enough baby fat on her cheeks to be cute rather than pretty. Her vocal and instrumental talent is shocking for someone so young, though it’s hard to accurately judge the quality of a young artist that is backed-up by one of the most established bands in the genre. Supported by Alison Krauss and her Grammy-winning band Union Station, it was hard for me to believe that the album wouldn’t sound good. Hull is clearly vocally influenced by Krauss, singing with a clear voice that has a gentle simplicity and strength. I have always appreciated how Alison Krauss hit her notes without an over-excessive amount of vibrato (often with none at all), and this is a talent that Hull has set out to imitate in her music.

I would recommend this album to those who appreciate and enjoy strong female vocals and the gentle harmonies of bluegrass, but Sierra Hull is still quite obviously young. More interesting for me will be seeing where her career goes from here. Will it follow in the footsteps of her sponsor and mentor with a successful long-term career brimming with awards, or will she fizzle out and fade into the recesses of time?

Jordasch – T. Bone Strikes Again

I'm of two minds when it comes to country music: I grew up listening to it with my dad in the car on the way up to our lakehouse, but it's not a form I've been comfortable with until recently. I'm still not completely at home with it; I went to my first country concert this past summer and felt, more like anything else, like I was at the zoo. Except all the animals drank Miller Lite. Incidentally, I enjoyed the hell out of myself.

So although I regard country fans (and some country artists) from a nebbish, This American Life-esque perspective, because of my upbringing (and the fact that country aims almost unfailingly at familiarity) there's something about the genre that feels natural to me. I was understandably excited, then, when I heard about Crazy Heart, a tantalizing bit of Oscar bait featuring a Waylon Jennings-like outlaw country star played by Jeff Bridges. The movie's not perfect, but the soundtrack nearly is. In addition to a introductory course of classic country music going all the way back to honky tonk pioneers like The Delmore Brothers and the Louvin Brothers, the Crazy Heart soundtrack features some of the best original music since O Brother, Where Art Thou? (not coincidentally also written by T. Bone Burnett). Tracks like "Fallin' and Flyin'" feature the kind of plain-spoken wisdom that has characterized great country music since its inception. Jeff Bridges' voice possesses just the right amount of grit and whiskey to be completely appropriate for the material. A truly outstanding listen that also happens to feature the front-runner for the Best Original Song Oscar ("The Weary Kind"). I'm smitten.

That and a bunch of Spoon.

After the Jump: Space Buttresses

2010-02-07T21:39:00.000-05:00

Subscribe to the podcast via the feed, or find us on the iTunes store!

Another week, another podcast! This one concerns itself largely with Oscar nominees and also some other things, including Ernest Borgnine, our music libraries and the forthcoming Bioshock 2.

Music this week is from the Emerald Hill Zone in Sonic the Hedgehog 2, a game which you can play on literally anything with a screen, from Game Boys to refrigerators.

The Late Shift: A Belated But Pertinent Book Review

2010-02-05T15:00:00.002-05:00

I grew up in an expressly Letterman household. For years, I never even understood that there was even another late night show to choose from. 11:35 pm meant that Letterman's smug grin was gracing our screen, no argument, end of story. It wasn't until I got my own 11-inch television for my sixteenth birthday that I sometimes stayed up late and watched Leno, in an act of teenage rebellion surely unmatched in the history of youth.

Still, by that point in time, the fabled Late Night Wars of the early 90s had become stagnant. My parents had passed down rumors of the former vitriol between Letterman and Leno, but that conflict seemed like a relic of the past by the time I started watching late night shows around the year 2002 or so.

However, the recent late night spat between Leno and Conan has inspired many television critics to go back and compare that First Late Night War to the Second. Though sadly out of print, Bill Carter's 1994 book The Late Shift was available at my local library, and I checked it out in order to gain a little perspective about the battles for that coveted 11:35 slot, both past and present.

A bit of history: while today we're awash in network and cable programs to watch after the news, once upon a time, there was only one late night variety show. Johnny Carson reigned as King of The Tonight Show for thirty years. As he was preparing to retire in 1990, David Letterman was viewed as the natural successor. Letterman had risen from his humble beginnings in rural Indiana to host his own show at 12:30, Late Night with David Letterman, and his humor was widely acknowledged as being smart and edgy, though though not necessarily very marketable. So when Carson retired, The Tonight Show went to Jay Leno, a stand-up comedian of some moderate acclaim who had guest-hosted the show a few times in the past. Critics considered this a financially smart but artistically cowardly decision - promoting the mediocre but more palatable host over the more unconventional wildcard. The decision made Letterman so upset that he eventually left NBC to start his own show on CBS.

Let's see: we have a younger, quirkier host who is more popular with the younger audience, being passed up by the brass at NBC who prefer to stick with the status quo - a vanilla, unthreatening, boring choice. Does this sound familiar?

Karl Marx told us that history happens twice, one as tragedy, once as farce. He might have gotten it backward - while Conan's recent dismissal is an undeniable tragedy for The Tonight Show, (one in which both Conan and Leno seem genuinely offended), the Letterman-Leno skirmish of 1993 plays out more like a comic opera. Carter chronicles how, after Leno had been hosting The Tonight Show for a few months, NBC went behind his back and offered the show to Letterman. But Letterman smelled something fishy; he desperately wanted to host the legendary show, but his distrust of the NBC Network led him to jump ship and set up a show at CBS - a show that, for the first time, was a consistent challenge to The Tonight Show in the ratings.

The conflict boils down to a lot of mid-level producers standing around in a office talking about contracts, but Carter has the skill and wit to paint very vivid characters, giving the reader what feels like a true insiders' glimpse of how television works. The most memorable character is Helen Kushnick, Leno's agent. Kushnick is portrayed as a spiteful harridan who ruled The Tonight Show with an iron fist - first planting false rumors to newspapers hoping to push Carson into an early retirement, then demanding that NBC give Leno contractual rights to The Tonight Show, and finally blackballing celebrities who dared to appear on any other talk show (this decision helped drive The Arsenio Hall Show to an early grave, as celebrities were too scared about incurring Kushnick's wrath to appear there).

Kushnick is the true villain of the story. Leno, on the other hand, is portrayed as sincere guy, if a little too naive for show business. I came away from the book with a new respect for Leno the person (if not for his sense of humor); he's a man with a dogged work ethic and a good deal of loyalty to his friends and coworkers, a man who often doesn't seem to understand how the system works. Leno's puppy-eyed Oprah interview, in which he expresses bewilderment at being the bad guy, makes much more sense to me after this book. This is a man who lives life convinced that everyone is out to get him and he is always the victim. In one memorable scene, Carter chronicles how Leno was so worried about his future that he hid in a closet during a staff meeting to eavesdrop and make sure he wasn't on the chopping block.

Letterman is also portrayed as insecure, but a different kind of insecure - a man prone to temper tantrums after recording his show, believing that he'd done a horrible job. And some of Letterman's battles are truly petty (at one point, Letterman almost lost his chance at an NBC contract because an executive was upset he was uninvited to a party Letterman threw).

But, colorful characters aside, the true value of this book comes from the history of television it so engagingly presents. Before reading this book, I had never realized what a cultural institution The Tonight Show is. The book portrays all the major players tiptoeing around the legacy of Johnny Carson (a major part of Letterman's decision to leave for CBS was that Carson advised him to do so). For thirty years, The Tonight Show was all there was after prime time, and my young self hadn't quite realized how sacred such a show is in the land of Hollywood.

The most fascinating part of The Late Shift, to our modern sensibilities, is the chapter at the end chronicling Conan O'Brien's rise to prominence after Letterman's departure for CBS. The book takes great care to emphasize how difficult it is to put on a nightly variety show, evening after evening, and still manage to be funny and friendly (Chevy Chase and Pat Sajak were two memorable failures). Here was a young man who had literally no performing experience, picked up from the SNL writer's studio to head one of the most taxing enterprises in television. That we know that Conan eventually rose to the very top (if but for a brief time) only makes the story more remarkable.

However, the more I read this book, the more I realized that Conan was never Tonight Show material. This is no knock against his abilities; I think he's a very talented star. But I realized how much the Johnny Carson aesthetic still dominates the cultural force that is The Tonight Show, even twenty years later. Conan was never at his funniest during his seven month tenure, hedged in by demands to cater to the lowest common denominator while still retaining his youthful, college-aged audience from Late Night.

Letterman realized that the weight of The Tonight Show's history would infringe on his style, and eventually gave up the job of his dreams to obtain more creative control at CBS. Here's to hoping Conan lands on his feet at some other network in September, one that gives him more freedom. In the meantime, the Second Late Night War will eventually fade into history, simply one more notorious event in the chronicle of an American television legacy. Who knows what will happen next?

Although if the Third Late Night War is destined to be a struggle between Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon, whoever wins, we lose.

Taking the Super out of Superhero

2010-02-05T08:12:00.000-05:00

Every culture needs its mythology. The Ancient Greeks told stories about a Pantheon of horny, buttinsky gods and goddesses. Royals and commoners alike of Elizabethan England flocked to the theater to watch plays about horny, buttinsky monarchs. In the United States, we have superheroes.

Superheroes. Men and women possessing incredible abilities. Moral lessons woven in the very fibers of their being. Garish costumes aside, they represent the best (and sometimes worst) that mankind has to offer. Superheroes face insurmountable obstacles and somehow find a way – occasionally with the help of some super friends – to surmount them.

To accomplish great feats, many costumed crusaders wield superpowers. You know the drill. Superman flies (among other things). Cyclops shoots lasers out of his eyes. Batman’s…rich (more on that later). These flashy powers make great fodder for videogames, which thrive on subtle variations of the “Go there, Shoot that guy” template. There’s also a high chance that someone into comics is nerdy enough to care about videogames. Bingo, bango, established customer base.

There’s just one problem: games rarely get superheroes right.

Modern games, in an effort to hook the stereotypical, increasingly time-crunched player age 18-34, routinely dole out rewards. Ignoring the social disease that is the Gamerscore (mine’s 9689, by the way), developers usually award the player new abilities and mechanics as the game progresses. I say modern, but this practice goes all the way back to the original Nintendo (Famicom, for any Japanese readers out there). Just look at the Mega Man or Metroid series and you’ll see franchises based on the careful dishing out of powers and upgrades to reward the player for time spent with the game.

Unfortunately, this organizing principle of player empowerment is at loggerheads with what is alluring about superheroes. Part of a superhero’s appeal is his or her vast array of abilities. Translating this to a game means locking key aspects of a hero’s identity (i.e. his powers) behind arbitrary experience and upgrade systems. No one wants to play as Superman unless they have full access to his considerable arsenal: flight, ice breath, laser eyes, x-ray vision, super strength, et cetera (I’m looking at you, Superman 64). It also rarely makes sense for superheroes to improve at wielding their abilities. No amount of punching dudes in the face is going to justify an increase in the range of Spider-Man’s Spider Sense.

These scenarios often result in the player starting a game with a Superhero Lite, stripped of his memorable powers until later in the game. This is rarely justifiable in the fiction without making it some kind of origin story. And seeing as how the major comic houses reboot a character every five years or so, I generally don’t trust game writers – with their short resume of impressive stories – to handle the task of explaining why Magneto can’t pull iron out of people’s blood at the beginning of the game but please just wait until he gets to Level 15 when he can cast Kill You So Fast With Your Own Blood. Games shouldn’t waste time toying with the fiction; they should enable players to play through it.

Attempts to skirt the issue of funky fiction typically result in less than stellar original properties. Take 2009’s Prototype. Developer Radical Entertainment has experience making games based on the Hulk, and it shows. You play as Alex Mercer, a douche of a protagonist the likes of which haven’t been seen since the first Assassin’s Creed. A mish-mash of free-running, clunky espionage, and helicopter-kicking, Prototype feels less like any sort of superhero story than a love letter to breaking shit. Mercer handles like a drunken gorilla and so does the narrative. I used to wonder why companies so rarely launch new superheroes. Now I know. They end up with crap like this.

The luxury an absolutely forgettable story like Prototype’s affords is the ability to justify why a superhero might gain new powers along the way. He’s discovering the full extent of superness, one hollow plot twist at a time. Real superheroes don’t have this luxury. Tomes of canonical backstory exist in online repositories, supplying nerds with ammunition to call shenanigans on any incongruous plot lines or character reinventions. The rich character histories are double-edged swords for game designers, providing years of minable fiction but sowing a minefield of logic problems for those with even a passing knowledge of superheroes.

Marvel’s tried to obscure the issue by stuffing Smash Bros. levels of fan service down the player’s throat. The Marvel: Ultimate Alliance series operates under the assumption that nobody will notice that Wolverine getting better at regenerating makes absolutely no sense when they can control a party of Iron Man, the Hulk, Johnny Storm, and Deadpool. It doesn’t help that this Throw the Comic Encyclopedia At You technique is also an attempt to disguise Gauntlet-style gameplay so shallow the Charge Shot!!! crew renamed it simply Combo! Yes, Iceman can surf on frozen air molecules, and Jean Grey can summon Phoenix abilities. But it’s all so abstracted that the rewards feel minor.

An outstanding exception to the rule is Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum. And I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that Batman is one of the few superheroes without any real superpowers. Sure, he’s rich and smart and sneaky, but he isn’t the fastest being in the known universe or an Omega-level mutant or imbued with the power cosmic. He’s a guy in a suit with some gadgets. This fragility factors heavily into the gameplay of Arkham Asylum. Engaging armed enemies is almost certainly suicide, so stealth becomes incredibly important. Trapped on the island, Batman is at the mercy of villains like the Riddler, Scarecrow, and Joker, and must play along with their schemes until an opportunity to strike presents itself. There are of course logic issues regarding his upgradable armor and equipment (why doesn’t he just grab the Ultra Batclaw the first time he goes to his cave?), but an excellent Scarecrow sequence toward the end totally justifies all of the gaminess. Plus, he starts the game with enough combat prowess and a well-stocked inventory of tools that the player feels like Batman from the get-go, not some neutered Dark Knight knock-off. Few games so accurately capture what it would feel like to actually be that badass. Videogames will continue to rely on the world of superheroes (just as film has) because it’s so familiar it would be hard not to stumble into an audience. But that’s no excuse for stale design tropes impinging on the superhero experience. Batman: Arkham Asylum set the bar high by telling a cohesive, compelling story that hits all the Batman touchstones without trying to reinvent the wheel or cripple the hero. I refuse to play another superhero game that fails to live up to its protagonist’s promise.

My Music Library, Past and Present

2010-02-04T07:30:00.000-05:00

For a site so preoccupied with the here and now and, indeed, the distant and murky future, it seems we do a lot of griping about how we’ve lost something in this digital transition - that our Modern Lifestyles lack an intangible quality that no one can quite describe but everyone wants to complain about.

Most of those complaints center around the decline of the physical product, of the tape or disc that we can hold and look at and show off. It wasn’t so long ago that music buffs wanted to be John Cusack in High Fidelity (yes I know it was also a book but raise your hand if you read the book, yes that’s what I thought), with a gigantic meticulously-organized music library taking up an entire room of your house.

I knew a guy like that in high school. I wanted to be that guy. When I sat down late this past Sunday to clean up my iTunes library, I realized that I had become that guy without even knowing it. It didn’t feel as good as I thought it would.

The Big Bang: My Music Library’s Chaotic Ascendancy

Personal anecdote time: I was a late bloomer when it came to music. I didn’t own my first CDs until the turn of the millennium or so, and I had only been mining my parents’ music library for a short while before that. Back in those heady days, the ancient computer I had in my room was barely suitable for playing MP3s, and the only place to get those was Napster, where a 5 kb/s file transfer rate was cause for celebration.

As such, CDs still reigned supreme, and once I had a job I was in every two-bit used CD store I could find snapping up obscure albums by the Meat Puppets and Live, trying valiantly to flesh out my underdeveloped taste in music. This was the way of it for several years.

Then, in late 2003, I scraped together every cent I had and bought my first laptop, a Compaq Presario 2175us that is actually still running to this day – this was a time when having a laptop itself was a novelty, regardless of the shittiness of said laptop’s innards. That laptop came with Windows XP, and Windows XP shipped with Windows Media Player.

This opened my eyes to a whole new world of music organization – instead of my increasingly cumbersome CD shelf, I could import the songs to my hard drive. For the first time, all of my music could fit under my arm. That was the beginning of the end for my physical music library, and I only brought my CD collection to college for one semester before giving it up as a pointless, backbreaking endeavor.

Goodbye, Discs: The Digital Revolution

Now, up to this point, the acquisition of new music was always a memorable and personal experience – at its peak, I could tell you where and under what circumstances I picked up every CD in my collection, and I knew most of them front-to-back. This is because acquiring new music was more of an investment – by the time a CD was nestled in my shelf (organized in alphabetical order by artist), I had to go out, find it, risk the potential scorn of anyone with me or of the hipster douchebag at the checkout counter, and finally pay for the thing. Of course I’m going to listen to it.

Not so now. I sat down this weekend to do the first ever full-scale purge of my music library since it started on that first laptop in 2003 – some of the files are that old, and have survived an iTunes migration, several computer replacements, and a near-catastrophic 2006 incident that deleted about half of everything. Those songs were in the minority – most was music acquired haphazardly through college, where my music library quadrupled in size in a year and I borrowed everything I could get my hands on.

This means that there are songs in my music library I have never listened to. There are artists I know nothing about. There are entire albums that I don’t remember acquiring. In just a couple of hours, I had deleted four hundred songs, and there’s a lot more to go through.

None of this is bad, necessarily. I’ve been exposed to more music than seems possible in a very short time, and I’ve found it all more easily than anyone could have just one decade gone. But still, as with so many things, there’s a Something that isn’t there anymore. I’m not as deeply and personally connected to my music library anymore, and I don’t think I’m the only one who feels this way.

One’s music library can be a reflection of one’s personality – you can learn a lot about someone by thumbing through their songs. My music library still is a reflection of me in most cases, but even with the undergrowth cut back a little it’s not as concise or as telling as it was five years ago. Mixed in with my favorite songs and the artists with whom I identify are albums and songs I’ve never gotten around to, stuff I had been recommended or that I thought would be interesting to listen to that I set aside for a rainy day and never picked up.

Likewise, some of the music that I do remember adding to my music library is less dear to me because it was much easier to come by, and because other music was easier to come by – with most songs just a couple of clicks away, it doesn’t take much time to find something new and keep what’s in your ears right now from making as deep an impression as it would if it was the the only album you could find in the store.

Now, Let Me Boss You Around

Today, take a minute to examine the stockpile of digital music you’ve acquired and take some time to really get a good look. Delete some things you know you’re never going to listen to (so long, The Dead Milkmen’s Beezlebubba), or some music you thought you’d try that you just didn’t like (check you later, Interpol’s Antics).

After that, reacquaint yourself with an old, forgotten favorite (Slim’s Interstate Medicine), or go out of your way to listen to something for which you never made time (Gomez’s Split the Difference). Not only will you like yourself for it, but it’ll also give you something to tell us about in the comments!

Mopping Up Culture Vomit: Film Years

2010-02-03T16:37:00.006-05:00

Though we're already in the second month of 2010, I'd argue that the celebration/mass picking-apart of the films of 2009 isn't over until they hand out those golden naked guys. The name "Golden Globes," incidentally, sounds a bit stranger in that context.

It's old hat (and quite fun) to rail against each year's crop of Oscar nominees, but I endorse a more chronologically-inclusive brand of movie-bitching. Sure, you can argue about what the best movie of the year is, but you might come dangerously close to coming to a consensus. If you're really in for an interminable bout of critical wankery, forget best films of the year: how about best film years? Batman Begins (eh), Pulp Fiction (better), and Sin City (GAH) as my three favorite movies of all time. Oh adolescence, how you humble me.

It took a quintessentially liberal arts film class (which I took during my freshman year, in 2005) at my alma mater to put me on the path towards filmic elitism (I think I may have mentioned the guy in this class who said, "This movie has no plot like a painting has no plot." Gross).

It was just a few years after my nose began to turn upward, then, that 2007 rolled around. The year of 007 (sorry) had a profound effect on the way I consider each year's film landscape. At the beginning of both 2009 and 2010, I've found myself thinking, "Well, that was no 2007."

2007, after all, was a veritable embarrassment of silver screen riches. It brought us a spectacular post-modern action/comedy (Hot Fuzz), a brilliant Barry Lyndon-esque western (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), two of the best animated films in recent memory (Ratatouille and Persepolis), two radically different, but equally incredible, documentaries (No End in Sight, perhaps the best documentary on foreign affairs ever made, and King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters), and, lest we forget, two automatic entries to the "greatest films of all time:" There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men.

It's really the presence of these two last films that secures 2007 a place in the annals of film history. It's rare, after all, that one classic film is released per year, let alone two. 2007 was such a great year for film, in fact, that it led the A.V. Club to introduce a short-lived feature (which I'll be damned if I can find) debating what the best year for film of all time might be.

Among people who actually think this kind of crap is important, 1939 usually emerges as the front-runner. That year brought us Stagecoach, The Rules of the Game, Gone with the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and The Wizard of Oz. Fairly unfuckwithable, especially considering those first two make my personal top ten list.

The 1970's were also a particularly fruitful decade for filmmaking, and 1975 sticks out even in an excellent period. '75 is home to Dog Day Afternoon, Barry Lyndon, Jaws, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

But what might have caused such artistic kismet? It's hard to say, especially considering the vast differences between the film climates in which these two years sit. 1939 is situated smack-dab in the middle of the Golden Age of Hollywood, when the filmmaking industry was dominated by the so-called "Big Five" studios (Fox Film Corporation, RKO, Loew's, Paramount, and Warner Bros.). These studios earned their "big" status by being fully (vertically) integrated corporations (that is, having substantial holdings in production, distribution, theater chains, and contracts with talent). The system didn't afford talent with much (any) freedom, but that didn't seem to tangibly reduce the quality of films produced.

The '70s saw filmmakers truly shaking off the yoke of studio oppression, experimenting with more frank depictions of sex and violence. Movies like The Godfather, Taxi Driver, The Exorcist, Chinatown, Halloween, and Apocalypse Now were violent and nihilistic on a level that would have seemed inconceivable during the studio era.

These two eras, then, have only the excellence of their filmic output in common, which begs the question: what climate encourages the best filmmaking? A unified studio system that puts talent under constant pressure to produce? Or a more ad hoc approach to filmmaking, as we have in the modern era?

It doesn't seem that either force exerts a conclusively positive pressure on filmmakers. And, because of this, it's hard to argue that any significant change in the filmmaking landscape (like, for instance, the rise of independent film in the 1990's) will have a truly positive or negative effect on the quality of films.

In the end, it's a crapshoot.

Reader’s Rehab: Bolano's 2666

2010-02-03T07:00:00.003-05:00

Ex-English Major Syndrome can be broken into two components:

Biblio-amnesia

Symptoms: Inability to clearly recall the plot, setting or characters of a book read as recently as a week ago; confusion of plot, setting or characters with another book; omission of plot elements or characters.

Biblio-anxiety

Symptoms: Inability to commit to a given book for more than half its length; sudden conviction that one should be reading something else entirely, right now; perpetual guilt for being unread in the Russian formalists, the new critics, the new historicists, the deconstructionists, Proust, Joyce, Tolstoy, Bellow; Cervantes; preoccupation with the physical act of reading; literary amnesia.

I majored in reading. I store my books in three separate shelving units. If there’s one constant in my 25 years, it’s a book by my bed. So it feels strange to realize that, in the past few years, I feel like I’ve only really read a half-dozen or so books.

Accredit it to any number of excuses. I work. Sometimes I work out. I’m supposed to wedge a social life in there, right? But when it comes down to it, I do my most significant reading on the toilet, before bed or during my lunch break – times when there’s nothing better to do.

Am I just lazy, or is there some deeper trauma? In order to find out, I resumed a book that stopped me cold a year ago: Roberto Bolano’s 2666.

I chose Bolano’s posthumous opus in hopes it would serve as a truth serum: do I read because I’m conditioned to read, or because I love to read?

2666 was a publishing event. By the time Natasha Wimmer had finished translating its 893 pages, Bolano had already been dead five years. Wimmer’s translation of The Savage Detectives had been published to rapturous acclaim in 2007, and her Chilean novelist, dead by liver failure (via heroin), was more than popular – he was in vogue. The line for 2666’s launch party stretched around a New York City block. Bloggers blogged, twitterers twittered, and the Bolano was suddenly the new Marquez. Even Time Magazine named 2666 its book of the year.

Given its sheer dimensions, I suspect 2666 is a book more bought than read. From where I stand on page 272, it’s fantastic, but it’s something of a Ulysses, Joyce’s oft-lauded, seldom read masterpiece – a book not read, but conquered, picked up for the self-satisfying audacity of the project.

Am I just trendy, a literary poser? I didn’t make it through The Savage Detectives, and as with my first waltz with 2666, I halted after the first section. But I remember liking Bolano’s seamy realism. It was funny – and not the cold, mannered “funny” you might point out in some stick-up-its-ass book like Johnathan Franzen’s The Corrections. It made you laugh, smile, and genuinely happy to be reading (as opposed to, say, overdosing on prescription painkillers. The Corrections and I parted on bad terms). No, Bolano came to his readers with a forceful, persuasive romanticism, mouthy and cocksure and full of heart.

So I settled down with a cup of coffee and flipped to book two, “The Part About Amalfitano.” Amalfitano is a mentally displaced professor freshly arrived at a university in Santa Teresa, Mexico (a stand-in for Ciudad Juarez). As the chapter wears on, his displacement verges into schizophrenia, but before he hangs a geometry text on the clothesline, we learn about his wife, Lola, and Bolano’s magic crystallizes.

It was Lola, Rosa’s mother, who always traveled with a weapon, never going anywhere without her stainless-steel spring-loaded switchblade, Amalfitano remembered as he smoked a Mexican cigarette, sitting in his office or standing on the dark porch. Once they were stopped in an airport, before Rosa was born, and Lola was asked what she was doing with the knife. It’s for peeling fruit, she said. Oranges, apples, pears, kiwis, all kinds of fruit. The officer gave her a long look and let her go. A year and a few months after that, Rosa was born. Two years later, Lola left, still carrying the knife.

A simple story told with simple language, set to the casual cadence of an afternoon conversation. I would kill to write like this, I thought. It was a reoccurring sentiment as I rolled through book two, especially as Bolano guides his character into madness, succeeding where so lesser writers dependably fail.

Is this why we read? To admire? To gawk at 2666 like American tourists gawking at Michelangelo’s David?

For some, perhaps. English majors are taught not to bother explaining a book’s greatness – in some schools of thought, “greatness” is relative and irrelevant, at best a selling point and at worst a product of historical pressures. They see “great” as a hollow and counterproductive descriptor.

And I agree. Calling a book “great” fails to do anything more than set it among books like Great Expectations. In terms of nuts-and-bolts analysis, it’s useless to the critic.

But there is, under all the analysis, close-reading and deciphering, a reason we read. And who says it needs to be any more complicated than a need to read a great book?

Maybe 2666 is teaching me how to read again.

Business Models: Play it Safe or Risk/Reward?

2010-02-02T16:43:00.003-05:00

Ever notice how there seems to be less and less original content making its way onto movie screens lately? We've seen a dramatic rise in remakes, reboots, spin-offs, and adaptations of proven material in recent years, which points to an overall shift in the industry away from what's novel and towards what's established. Of course, if you're going to finance a movie, it's a safer bet to throw your money behind a franchise that millions of consumers have already thrown their money into. But a lot of times focusing on what's established isn't quite as lucrative as focusing on what's establish-able.

The cover article of this week's "Variety" magazine outlines the new business practices taking shape at the Disney company under new CEO Rich Ross. Disney's strategy for 2010 and beyond is to "make movies that define the Disney brand - and that can be exploited on TV, DVD, online, and through games, theme park attractions and merchandise at its Disney Stores." Hey, it never hurts to have a diversified revenue stream, right?

But what if diversity in money-making areas comes at the expense of diversity in content? Here's a direct quote from Ross: "Going forward, we will focus almost exclusively on making branded films from Disney, Pixar and Marvel." (Disney acquired the comic book giant on the last day of 2009.) A Spiderman reboot that puts Peter Parker back in high school will probably net a fair bit of coin for the Mouse House, but how much potential for expansion is there when your five year plan basically consists of trotting out slightly different variations on well-worn themes?

What we have here is a spectrum of business models. On the one hand, we have Disney's strategy: playing it safe and banking on consistent performers to continue performing consistently. On the other hand, we have a strategy that's usually taken up by smaller and more independent studios: find a premise that's interesting or compelling, then try to get people to see it. This is the motive behind film festivals like Sundance, the 2010 edition of which just completed some pretty high profile sales. Sundance topper John Cooper: "We were showcasing the best, most original work, not what might be commercial. But all of a sudden, what's good has commercial potential."

To bring in a non-entertainment related example, Sports Illustrated's Tim Marchman recently gave a pretty good rationale for adopting the Sundance business model: "the hardwired human desire to hit a jackpot. [Baseball t]eams are more willing than they should be to bet a lot on the small chance that a player will be really great, and curiously uninterested in paying for a sure thing." Suffice it to say that if such great baseball general managers as Billy Beane or Brian Cashman were to apply for a job at Rich Ross's version of Disney, they'd promptly be laughed off the lot.

I don't mean to keep picking on Disney - I'm sure most big studios operate in the same way - it's just that I just happen to have their upcoming slate ready to hand. Alice in Wonderland and Prince of Persia come out this year. They're redoing 80's era classic Tron. Robert Zemeckis is re-adapting Beatles-inspired Yellow Submarine. There's a couple of movies based on Disneyland park (Jungle Cruise and Tomorrowland) and one based on a snippet from a Disney legend (The Sorcerer's Apprentice starring Nicolas Cage as presumably the Sorcerer - he's a bit long in the tooth for the apprentice). And then it's off to sequel town: National Treasure, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Enchanted are all getting companion pieces sometime sometime down the line. And that's not even counting the inevitable Marvel-inspired comic book fare.

Of course, the proof is in the pudding, and no one can say for sure whether this slow and steady tactic in terms of content development will eventually win Disney the box office race. The fact that two of Disney's 2009 remakes - Zemeckis's 3D Christmas Carol and The Rock vehicle Race to Witch Mountain - failed to impress certainly isn't encouraging for the rehash-everything-you-possibly-can strategy. But maybe it's just a question of scaling down and picking projects carefully - Ross recently nixed a McG remake of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea because he didn't think it was sufficiently brandable.

And if it's a question of branding, I'm inclined to trust Rich Ross, the mastermind behind Disney Channel mega-franchises High School Musical (two sequels, a stage show, a reality TV spin-off, numerous video game adaptations, and High School Musical on Ice) and Hannah Montana (movies, concerts, and an actual music career for star Miley Cyrus). He certainly earned the right to make the big decisions for Disney, and it appears he's going to make some lucrative ones.

But what will be the consequences of such box-office/branding inspired decisions? We'll see Disney's coffers increase for sure. On the surface, the plan looks like it's nice for the consumers, because it provides lots of movies that lots of people will want to see. But in fact, this system really just treats each audience member as a walking cash machine with a smattering of freewill - just enough to decide which big-budget tentpole productions he or she wants to patronize on any given weekend.

But the real consequences of such business practices have to do with the way the films themselves are treated: as commodities to be exploited rather than as pieces of art. I realize that distribution and marketing are handled by different groups of people than the actual creative teams that make the movies. But how must a director feel when his film is financed by a corporate-structured megastudio that only cares about his work insofar as it turns a profit at the box office?

Sure there are people who get into show business for its artistic aspects, but the terms will always be dictated by the corporate types, because they're the ones that have all the money. Because, at bottom, show business is a business, which are usually best run by businessmen. If you think this is a revoltin' development, let me leave you with the immortal words of Arthur Jensen from Network:

"The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live to see that perfect world in which there is no war and famine, no oppression and brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for which all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused..."

And the Losers Are...

2010-02-02T14:23:00.013-05:00

Oscar nominations were revealed today, and with the expanded field of ten Best Picture candidates, there's a pretty interesting group, ranging from the artsy (An Education) and the politically relevant (The Hurt Locker) to action flicks (Avatar, District 9) and feel-good schmaltz (The Blind Side).

However, what fun are the Oscars without criticizing the Academy's choices? While the expanded Best Picture field might have ensured everyone's favorite movie got a nod (well, almost everybody's - sorry Star Trek fans!), there are still some crucial roles overlooked in the other categories. Below, a brief summary of who I feel should have made the list

1) Matt Damon for Best Actor in The Informant!

Why is the Academy so quick to recognize the hams in overwrought melodramatic tearjerkers, and so slow to acknowledge that it takes just as much skill to play a role for laughs? In The Informant!, Matt Damon is Mark Whitacre, a chubby, bumbling white-collar worker, and he plays it so well that the audience forgets this is the same man who played super-soldier Jason Bourne. Damon's portrayal of Whitacre will simultaneously have you howling with laughter, wanting to punch him in his mustached face, and even feeling a little bad for the guy.

2) Michael Stuhlbarg for Best Actor in A Serious Man

In A Serious Man, Stuhlbarg plays unlucky professor Larry Gopnik with the perfect touch of naive confusion and existential frustration. He spends the entire time reacting to things going on around him, but rarely has a film contained such a passive character who still manages to dominate the screen. His role is simultaneously restrained and over-the-top, which is very difficult to pull off. Black comedy is a tough genre, but Stuhlbarg toes the line between comic and tragic perfectly.

3) Alfred Molina for Best Supporting Actor in An Education

Molina plays Jack Miller, a plump working-class parent in 1960s Britain who wants only the best for his daughter. At the beginning of the movie, the audience suspects it's going to be a standard "mean domineering father" role, but by the end, Molina has created a far more complex character - a man who is simply confused as to how to raise his child. For once, the audience feels sympathy not only for the rebellious door-slamming teenager, but also for the angry father on the other side of that door.

4) Duncan Jones and Nathan Parker for Best Original Screenplay for Moon

For what amounts to a slow-moving film set in only one room where Sam Rockwell talks to himself for two hours, Moon is surprisingly suspenseful. In an homage to classic 1950s style science-fiction, the movie takes one interesting concept and teases it out to its inevitable conclusion, but it's done with such style and grace that the viewer can't help but admire the sheer craft of storytelling that the movie achieves. Science fiction is often dismissed as immature or juvenile, but Moon is a masterpiece of threading a narrative out of very minimal elements.

And finally, Razzie nominations for the worst of 2009 cinema were announced yesterday. I have less to quibble with here (although GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra was sort of a fun movie for a lazy Saturday morning). But I feel the Razzies overlooked one crucial film:

5) Knowing for Worst Motion Picture

Yes, I know that Roger Ebert listed it as one of the year's best films, but one should take that more as the evidence of the critic's growing senility than anything else. I attended Knowing hungover with a group of friends, not expecting much. I got even less - a ridiculous faux-Twilight Zone scenario that would make Rod Serling blush. The concept is ludicrous and inconsistently applied, the conclusion is mind-blowingly absurd, and Nicolas Cage's bug-eyed confused-face style of acting is the worst I've seen since the remake of The Wicker Man. Even discounting my hangover, this was one of the most surreal cinematic experiences I had in 2009.

24 in 24 words – Day 8, Hour 6

2010-02-02T12:44:00.001-05:00

Episode 6 - “9:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.”

Spoilers after the jump!

Leoben only has eyes for Freckle Face. Dr. Andy Samberg gets shafted saving Russians. Pervy Drone Pilot ogles Chloe’s ass. Jack’s guest hosting Sprockets.

You can catch up on our concise 24 coverage here. Did we miss something? Leave it in the comments!

This Week on Audiosurf Radio – When I Snap My Fingers, You’ll Be French Edition

2010-02-02T08:33:00.000-05:00

If you listened to our most recent podcast, you know that I’ve no use for genre labels in electronic music. I’m overwhelmed by the in-depth lexicon that accompanies such a relatively young field of music. Trip-hop. House music. Psychadelica. Dark house. Was it made electronically and doesn’t sound like chiptunes? Then it’s techno. I need no other descriptors.

France’s BS may have weakened my stance on this front, however. Despite making music that (in my opinion) generally exceeds expectations for the trance subgenre, he does rely on the trademark ka-thumping bass beat that underpins every melody ever heard on a techno dance floor. Prolonged exposure to this repetitive beat can cause a sort of hypnosis, a sort of – dare I say it – trance.

All that said, I’m usually not the biggest fan of trance music. BS piqued my interest with his willingness to stray from the beaten path. I am worried, however, that I only like his music because he’s subliminally conditioned me to with hidden messages embedded in his songs. Next thing you know I’ll have dropped off the grid only to reappear in six months on the streets of Paris walking invisible dogs for change.

But that’s a problem for another day. Hit the jump, mon ami!

The Songs

Halfway through my first ride of “Galaxie,” I could tell this was going to be a hard week to write about. The main issue is that it’s hard to discern unique elements of the music, as it’s almost purposefully designed to be played in the background while you take drugs and dance or something (I don’t know what the kids do these days). I don’t know if in my previous forays into trance music I’d actually experienced the titular state, but I most certainly drifted off once or twice during “Galaxie.” I didn’t get bored or sleepy. Just…went somewhere else. Maybe it was that damn thumping bass, pounding my cerebellum into submission. Or the odd cacophony of noises playing over it that transported me to another world. Midway through the ride, a series of fantastic waves in the track woke me from my dozing. One second I was completely out of focus, the next I was in one of those amusement park wave pools. Following an excellent final downhill (which felt more like a quick progression of small, exciting drops), I ground out the final forty-five seconds of track attempting to get a Clean Finish. The track’s even keel at the end just dragged out the (ultimately unsuccessful) process. I strongly prefer tracks that run to the finish line instead of dilly-dallying. Gives me less time to contemplate all of the traffic I’m missing.

The opening of “The Dark Side of the Light” calls to my mind’s eye images of Japanese people driving fuel-efficient hybrid cars. Don’t ask me why. I can’t begin to explain. Lebeth’s correct in the news preview: there’s a distinct lightness to this one that frees the music from stereotypical sweaty dancehalls. I also exclaimed audibly (to no one in particular) my pleasure when the drums first kicked in, supplementing an already catchy digitized loop. I’d been so lulled by what preceded it that I’d been caught off guard by the conventional beat that song had so far been lacking. Speaking of overwrought techno conventions, the large uphill climb features a piano. But hold on a second, it’s used fairly well. Most piano breaks in electronic music ruin the mood completely and come off as the artist’s cheap attempt to sound “musical.” Here, it complements the digital music perfectly and creates another opportunity for BS to obscure the inevitable thumping drum entrance. Several Audiosurf users confessed to the song distracting them from playing, booking them tickets on express trains of thought leading far away from the present moment. User osta lavesta flat out claimed, “best song ever heared [sic] in my life.” For me, the track is by no means life-changing, but it is drastically more than the sum of its parts. Play this song and see if you agree.

Nothing about “The Game” grabbed me. From the moment the disjointed Cortana voice started singing, I unconsciously decided to keep this one at arm’s length. It doesn’t help that she’s not really singing about anything in particular (assuming actual words are involved at all). Her vocals are only a half-measure. Their presence irks what part of me is at peace with instrumental music yet only teases the part of me that enjoys elegant lyric writing. Still, the music possesses a certain levity for trance music. Perhaps its how he’s mixed down the bass to avoid punishing subwoofers. It doesn’t dominate the soundscape, allowing more ephemeral noises to bubble up and dissipate in a genre known for persistence. Easily the weakest of the three, “The Game” illustrates BS’s strengths while acknowledging his faults.

Author’s Note

All songs were played on the Pro difficulty at least twice using the Eraser and Vegas characters. I may end up tracking down “The Dark Side of Light” for my iTunes library, despite its generically dichotomous title. I could see myself running to it or popping it on in the car during a long drive – you know, that moment three-quarters of the way through when you need a pick me up and a distraction rolled into one. I usually just use Journey for that, but I’m willing to make exceptions.

A Decade of Dreck #23: My Baby's Daddy

2010-02-01T14:00:00.001-05:00

Charge Shot!!! is celebrating the end of the decade in the most masochistic way we know how - by watching and writing about the 100 worst movies of the last ten years as defined by film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Click here to see RT's complete list, click here for more about the Decade of Dreck project, and click here to see all of the movies we've done so far.

My dad is quite the film buff. He has a breadth and depth of knowledge about movies that never ceases to impress me. Every time I think I can out-nerd him in terms of having seen some weird/obscure/foreign/whatever movie, he will always one-up me. Case in point, he rented 2001 for me before Star Wars, which I think is a pretty unique act for a father to perform concerning his eldest child. The reasoning behind his showing me a trippy, philosophical, hard sci-fi film by one the most revered director's in history before the one that has toys made out of it is beyond me. Maybe he's just a good dad, though I think delaying an 8-year-old's exposure to Star Wars for any amount of time is borderline criminal. Anyway, for his most recent birthday the one gift he asked me for was the newly released Criterion Collection DVD of Jacque Tati's Play Time, an almost dialogue-free French film (why my dad hates Wall•E, I don't think I'll ever know) that is as arty as they come.

Conversely, my youngest brother Teddy owns My Baby's Daddy on DVD. My parents' house therefore has the unique honor of housing both a copy of Play Time and today's entry.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that movies about parenthood or more generally movies featuring babies in a prominent role tend to suck. The Rotten Tomatoes Worst of the Worst for the decade now past has at least five, and those are just the ones whose baby factor I can deduce from the poster art and plot synopsis; Lord only knows how many more baby movies lie in wait. My Baby's Daddy has the uninspired distinction of attempting to blaze trails that are already blazed: it brings nothing new to several genres and subgenres that have had their horses beaten long past the moment that they had shuffled loose the equine mortal coil.

Baby's Daddy's plot is familiar enough. Three lifelong buddies- G (the pretty much always affable Anthony Anderson), Lonnie (Eddie Griffin, whose Undercover Brother, the one movie of his that I like, was rendered redundant by the holy-crap-awesome Black Dynamite last year), and Dom (Michael Imperioli, Christopher from The Sopranos) simultaneously get their girlfriends pregnant. This sequence of events (i.e. scenes of unprotected sex followed by scenes of girlfriends angrily telling the leads that they're pregnant) is so poorly directed that I was pretty sure that the girlfriends all told our heroes that they were knocked up the morning after. Now I've never been confronted by a lady telling me I got her pregnant but I think it generally takes more than eight hours to tell if you're going to have a baby. Am I wrong?

Anyway, the trio now has to go through the motions of a parenthood movie: they get peed on, handle poop, and complain until they learn that growing up and having a family of your own is better than chasing skirts and partying all night. However, because this is a movie, if you go with the flow and decide to raise a kid properly you can also have your wildest dreams (being a boxer, inventor, and record producer respectively) come true in adorable baby-centric ways.

This movie deserves the tagline "Having Children Made Him a Father. Taking Care of Them Made Him a Man." as much as Tyler Perry's Daddy's Little Girls does and that my friends is an impressive accomplishment.

The strangest part about the experience of watching My Baby's Daddy was that there were parts I was actually pretty close to liking. Anderson's storyline in particular was much more entertaining to follow than his accomplices. If you had reduced Griffin and Imperioli to roles tantamount to Jason Segel and Jonah Hill's in Knocked Up and kept the focus on G (Laziest. Character name. Ever.) this movie might be something close to passable after a re-write or two.

Worth noting, G's girlfriend is played by Bai Ling, and is therefore Chinese. Their son is named Bruce Leroy. Now, I'm as in favor of a Last Dragon reference as the next guy, but really?

Griffin in particular is troublesome. He starts out the film as the "nerdy" (i.e. having the most mannerisms resembling those traditionally associated with white people) friend in the group. He's literally just doing the same voice and wearing the same glasses he did when he fell under Denise Richards' white she-devil spell in Undercover Brother. In order to free himself from his harlot of a baby mama's grasp and to win the heart of the pretty single mom in his parenting class, Lonnie has his friends give him a makeover and he becomes a jive-talkin' player who dresses like a pimp. The problem with this is that his dream lady was the one who made the first move, dropping a line on him that goes something like "Aww your son is so cute, but he's not nearly as cute as his father". So, you need your buddies to give you a makeover (wow that sounds gay, not that there's anything wrong with that) to charm this woman who has already made really inappropriate passes at you in front of your goddamn children? That seems counter-intuitive. When that doesn't work, and whenever Griffin seems to be in the doldrums, he reverts back to his nerdy self, glasses and nerdy haircut and all though he otherwise seems to have been utterly transformed into a standard Eddie Griffin character for the rest of the time. He's honestly like Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde.

This incongruity could probably be explained by the fact there are clearly two sets of writers on this thing. The first is made up of Griffin himself and Damon "Coke" Daniels, a guy whose nickname I will let speak for itself. The other two are the guys who wrote Van Wilder. My guess would be that Goldberg and Wagner, the Van Wilder guys wrote this movie and that Griffin and "Coke" were brought in after Griffin signed on to give it a more "urban" (i.e. black) flavor. The whole thing reeks of third-rate punch ups; punchlines nobody asked for are shouted from off camera any time there is dead air.

I won't ever bother discussing Imperioli's plotline except that it involves his girlfriend becoming a lesbian and that the screenwriters probably derived their understanding of female homosexuality from either Gigli, porn, or both. Clearly there was enough time between Sopranos seasons and Christopher needed money to support his heroin habit.

Pleasantly surprising however is a supporting turn from Method Man as Anderson's ex-con cousin who learns some lessons about maturity of his own. There's nothing particularly funny about his character but holy crap if seeing Method Man go around being Method Man isn't hilarious. The main characters live together in the house of Lonnie's uncle Virgil (played by John Amos, who is either the dad from Good Times or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs from The West Wing depending on who you ask) and they have a poster of the cover art of Limp Bizkit's Significant Other on the wall in their living room and it's fairly funny to see Method Man walk past that particular album considering he raps on it. Also, seeing a member of the Wu-Tang Clan interact with Bai Ling's Chinese family is surreal and meta-humorous on a sublime level.

Thankless bit parts are given Amy Sedaris, Scott fucking Thompson, and the 6'5" Black Guy Who Played the President in The Fifth Element (as a Suge Knight-esque producer with the hilarious name of Drive By, his record contracts solely of the words "DON'T FUCK WITH ME") but their combined contributions are so minimal that you can't block out the festering mediocrity and badness of the rest of the movie.

When even the best movies about arrested adolescents becoming parents don't have great staying power (I'm looking at you, Knocked Up) the worst of the lot must be pretty goddamn terrible. My Baby's Daddy falls flatly in the latter category.

My Baby's Daddy is ranked #45 on the Rotten Tomatoes Worst 100 list with 4% freshness. Its RT page can be found here.

Thoughts of an Aspiring Music Snob: Week 44 - Vampire Weekend

2010-02-01T07:00:00.003-05:00

For a brief time in high school, I played drums in a band called Crash Pulse. Crash Pulse had two songs in their repertoire - "Louie Louie" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" - both of which conveniently used pretty much the same chord progression and required no actual singing capabilities.

Fortunately for our neighbors, Crash Pulse's lifespan amounted to one Saturday afternoon. Later on, in college, I helped play avant-garde versions of "Workin' On the Railroad" with some friends in a group called Matricidal Tricycle. There was also The Subtle Doctors - the name co-blogger Andrew Pankin and I adopted for our Guitar Hero duo. And just last month, I joined a Rock Band ensemble known as Butter Dick.

Why do I mention these short-lived novelty musical acts at all? Because each and every one of them sports a better name than Vampire Weekend.

Wikipedia tells me that Vampire Weekend derives their name from frontman Ezra Koenig's amateur film of the same name. So I watched the trailer to the film, which somehow has ended up on YouTube. It looks awesome. I totally would go to the theater to see a schocky B horror pic called Vampire Weekend.

But as a band name, it really irritates me. I'm not sure why. Maybe because it contains a little too much of the "Look how quirky we are!" vibe. Maybe it's because the band name suggests some sort of ridiculous association with the supernatural that's never actually fulfilled ("We get a lot of requests from what seem to be goth kids on MySpace," says bassist Chris Baio, as if confused as to why).

Good band names are hard to come by. Even "The Beatles" is a pretty lame pun on The Crickets and the word "beat". But Vampire Weekend? I've been in plenty of drunken joke ensembles over the years, trying to think of a band name this bad. I almost have to give them credit under the "so bad it's good" clause.

Vampire Weekend? Really? Vampire Weekend?

And if you think this opening section is an incoherent rant, oh boy, just keep reading...

WEEK 44

ARTIST OF THE WEEK: Vampire Weekend

WHAT I KNEW BEFORE: When I started making my first tentative steps into popular music last year, I noticed that Vampire Weekend was generating a lot of buzz. I queued up their most famous song, "Oxford Comma", on Grooveshark, only to turn it off after about thirty seconds, absolutely disgusted at the high-pitched nasally melismatic vocals, the meaningless references to obscure punctuational practices, the peppy, repetitive, thin-sounding organ. I haven't gone near them since...until last Monday, that is.

MY LISTENING: I listened to the eponymous Vampire Weekend (2008) every day this week, and their new album, Contra (2010) three times.

WHAT I LIKED: Vampire Weekend has gotten a lot of press for their catchy and unique rhythms. Most publications usually refer to them as African-influenced, or something like that. After listening to them all week, I'm pretty sure the constant references to African music are nothing but an image that the band perpetuates (much like their Ivy League blue blood personas), to separate themselves from the hordes of other New York indie ensembles. But that's not to say that they don't deserve credit for these rhythms. The beats throughout most of their songs are playful and distinct without ever being overindulgent, and they're also a hell of a lot of fun, bobbing through skillful syncopations and keeping the listener guessing as to which beat is going to be accented next. And I can appreciate any band that knows how to use a marimba.

Most tracks are constructed with minimal instrumentation, leaving such rhythms plenty of room to breathe. I think this minimalism is another essential aspect of the band, and one that hasn't gotten nearly enough press. There's catchy melodies and neat little rhythmic sequences, yes, but a lot of the magic of these songs comes from the band's restraint. Their refusal to elevate their thin sounding melodies and wispy keyboard lines is what makes their songs so good. As a result, the tracks feel both intimate and intricately-constructed, the pop equivalent of a small mechanical music box.

WHAT I'M STILL NOT SURE IF I LIKED OR NOT:

Like I said, I'm pretty sure the whole "We're upper-crust East coast prep school kids thing" is played up for more than it's worth, to give the band an identity. But behind this very deliberate image, I feel that there's still something in their attitude that I object to. Vampire Weekend's music is wry, cynical, and somewhat removed from the world. This helps give it a twist of that aesthetic irony that hipsters seem to eat up. I think that this disillusionment is perhaps the defining trait of our generation. But when your music is so reserved, it ends up almost having no effect.

A middle-aged professor asked me a few years ago what, exactly, my generation believes in. I replied that I don't think my generation believes in anything. We're cynical and jaded, mocking idealism in all forms, too disillusioned to even summon the energy to act the iconoclast. People my age tend to go through life laughing at the naivete of any direct expression of emotion or sincere social idealism. I'm not sure that this is a good thing, and I haven't figured out if Vampire Weekend is a merely an effect of this sort of droll apathy, or just another cause. I'm not even sure if it makes a difference, but (for me personally, at least), the overall effect of their music was something I wasn't entirely comfortable with. Like a miniature piece of clockwork, or an 18th-century symphony, I could appreciate the craftsmanship that went into the creation of their art, but in the end, their art seems nothing more than the sum of this craftsmanship, with no real emotions or ideas attached.

This criticism isn't entirely fair. Especially by their second album, Vampire Weekend has gotten better at expressing sadness and longing ("I Think Ur A Contra" might be the best song on the disc). But too often mere disaffection is substituted for this longing, and even their happier songs often sound too cautious, too scared of genuine expression. It's as if the band is so hyper self-aware of their own identity that they're afraid to use that identity to say anything interesting.

But in the end, it's easier to hide underneath your cardigan than project your beliefs to the world to be criticized, isn't it? I suppose I can't blame them. But I can't say their music did that much for me, either.

Does this criticism make sense? Am I totally off-base here? Like I said, I still haven't quite worked out my feelings as to this particular aspect of their aesthetic.

WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: As I said earlier, their name. Vampire Weekend? Really?

WHAT I LEARNED: I learned about the following things: horchata, kwassa kwassa, Nicaraguan rebels, and what a mansard roof is. Tell me this band isn't trying too hard to portray themselves as upper-class preppies.

BEST SONG YOU'VE HEARD: "Oxford Comma"

Because, let's face it, it's quite possibly the only song you've heard by them.

BEST SONG YOU HAVEN'T HEARD: "M79"

This may only be because I have a soft spot for harpsichords.

NEXT WEEK'S ARTIST: The Roots

After the Jump: Long-Term Marriage Potentials

2010-01-31T22:00:00.000-05:00

Subscribe to the podcast via the feed, or find us on the iTunes store!

Rob is gone drinkin’ (or something) this week, which left Craig and I to our own devices – we thought his absence would help us focus a bit, but without him there to be the focus of our disdain our attention wanders a bit.

That’s why, in the course of nearly fifty wonderfully rambling minutes, we manage to talk about Apple's iPad, the Cookie Monster virus, the evil of iTunes, the goodness of Amazon, Michael Pachter’s weird video game show, spam email, and so much more.

A note! For those of you who have deigned not to listen to the podcast in the past because “listening to nerds talk about video games for an hour is lame.” The format we seem to be settling in does include video games, but they take up much less time, freeing us to elaborate more on general pop-culture news and discuss posts that have gone up on the site.

What I am saying is that the podcast perhaps 400% cooler now, please come back.

Music this week, nerdy as ever, is the boss music from Final Fantasy IV, which really fits our podcast in that it is tense and dramatic. Our podcast is at least this tense and dramatic every week you guys.

Writer’s Jukebox – Lion Kings, Orwell, and Record Stores

2010-01-31T20:31:00.000-05:00

When was the last time you purchased music from a record store? When was the last time that record store wasn’t a chain store like ~~Tower~~ ~~Virgin Megastore~~ FYE? When was the last time it wasn’t from Wal-Mart or Target?

I’m not sure, honestly. I think it may have been Edgar Meyer’s Uncommon Ritual, which I only bought because I was on a huge bass/cello kick at the time (still am, in fact) and couldn’t wait for the thing to come from Amazon.

This week, Chris bemoans his options for real-life album purchases, specifically on his quest to obtain new surf rock. Pankin’s dreaming up Disney-inspired rock operas. And Boivin delves deep into David Bowie’s concept-album period.

I don’t have a clever message to get you past the jump. Just read on, will you?

Pankin – King of Pride Rock N’ Roll

Who doesn't like a good trip down nostalgia lane? That's why I've recently gotten into the music from Disney's The Lion King. "Circle of Life" (the one from the actual film, not the pop-synth version) came up on my shuffle recently, and since then I've been obsessed with wanting to make a rock arrangement of the song. (How sweet would it sound to play that funny little flute solo with Slash-style lead guitar? And what if lead vocals were by Eddie Vedder rather than Carmen Twillie?) I must admit that because of my sorely lacking music theory, I still haven't been able to figure out some of the chords at the end.

I've also been checking out the live local music scene, and by "checking out" I mean returning to hear my old favorites. Paul Chesne's sound can best be described as countrified rock/soul taken straight-up with a beer on the side. He and his band have a tremendous live chemistry, which I can't translate for you over the internet, but he does have two albums and an EP out that you can download for name-your-price on his website, www.paulchesne.com.

Other than that, it's just been the usual, such as working my way through some of Rush's newer and more under-appreciated stuff, and grooving out to John Bonham's 20-minute live drum solos.

Boivin – Bowie on the Beach

I've been down in sunny Naples, Florida for the past five days visiting my grandmother. This is what happens when you let your elderly relations know that you have a more than passing interest in musical theater and art history, they fly you to the other end of the country to see shows and go to lectures on the nude figure in art. Ugh, FML.

Needless to say, I've been putting a lot of time in on the beach, working on my tan (and since I got the skin from my Irish side, doing my damndest to avoid sunburns), reading books, and listening to my iPod. Of course, these can all be combined into a simultaneous activity by sunning myself on the beach, reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, and listening to David Bowie's Diamond Dogs.

Dogs is of course Bowie's concept album based on George Orwell's dystopian masterpiece (which I'm reading for the first time- I know, right?). More accurately, it's half a Nineteen Eighty-Four concept album and half a concept album about the glam rock apocalypse. The album's first half (or "side" as our ancestors termed it in the turbulent period of man's ascendancy) fits the latter description, opening with Bowie's alter ego Halloween Jack's battlecry "This ain't rock 'n' roll, this is genocide!" and shaping up to something more akin to George Miller than George Orwell. This is all of course because Side One is something of a coda to Bowie's glam rock era, a swan song to the days of Ziggy Stardust. Side Two is straight up Nineteen Eighty-Four with titles like "We Are The Dead", "1984", "Big Brother", and "Chant Of The Ever Circling Skeletal Family", all references to Orwell. I've really been enjoying the hell out of the book, and any album that has "Rebel Rebel" on it is fine by me as well.

Side Two's opener, "Rock 'N' Roll With Me" is one of my, if not my favorite Bowie song of all time. When Bowie eventually kicks the bucket (which will probably never happen), this is the track they should play at his funeral.

Chris – Trying to be Hip, Thwarted at Every Turn

Vampire Weekend aside, I didn't listen to anything last week. And I'm whiny and bitter about it.

I was going to pick up a new surf-inspired album I had heard about - Astro Coast by Surfer Blood. From what I understand, it seems right up my alley. I have a soft spot for surf rock, and since the band is from Florida it would give me the added satisfaction of supporting the local team. Additionally, this would be the first group I've talked about for Writers' Jukebox that is less than ten years old. For once, I would be hip.

But when I drove to Tallahassee's sole record store on Monday, I was greeted with a sad sight. Clearance banners were draped across the windows, the walls were stripped bare, and most of the merchandise was boxed up. The store was closing. While most of the remaining records were 50% off, I can't say I want to pay even half-price for A Very Vince Gill Christmas or other leftovers of similar quality.

So there's not really a good option to buy music in Tallahassee anymore. Wal-Mart and Best Buy both have marginal music sections, but their CDs are targeted toward 13 year olds (Ke$ha) or 65 year olds (Barry Manilow) with nothing for anybody in between. I spent the rest of my week thoroughly annoying my friends by bitching about the decline of independent businesses in America at every opportunity.

On Saturday, I finally caved and went for the online purchase. Astro Coast is for sale for five bucks on Amazon.com. And even though this is half the price I would have paid for it in a store, it seems less fulfilling to procure it this way. But I suppose I'm at the point where I'll take what I can get.

The album is dead. Long live the album.

A Decade of Dreck #22: Deal

2010-01-31T16:00:00.001-05:00

There are a lot of problems with this movie. The first one is that it’s a poker movie.

There are plenty of moderately successful sports movies, but one can only manage so much respect for a simplistic and cliché sports message even if they’re a dedicate of the game. But this is a card-gambling movie – Texas Holdem no less – and it also sucks. I have a casual interest in Texas Holdem which is what made me willing to select this movie, and that helped it from being a complete waste of my time. It also helped that I watched it in two pieces, once during a slow hour at work and once while I was eating dinner.

First I’ll start with some positives to get them out of the way. The movie had a plot, and I count myself lucky in that regard. It also had an old Burt Reynolds, which was sort of neat. I didn’t feel like the movie was actively trying to be more than it was, so at least I wasn’t fooled. It wasn’t too long, so I didn’t feel like too many precious minutes were lost. I didn’t hate it either, and that was important.

That’s about all I’ve got.

Here’s the plot: A hot-headed college youth named Alex Stillman opens up the movie by humiliating his friends in a friendly game of poker. He follows up by wining an online cash tournament for something like $20,000 because of his superior understanding of the odds. His parents disapprove of his lack of enthusiasm about law school and his underperformance at the job daddy pulled some strings to get for him, and so naturally they aren’t thrilled to hear of his success at poker.

Alex’s online win grants him a bid to a casino tournament where he’s spotted by retired poker great, Burt Reynolds, better known as Tommy Vinson. Unlike the other big names dropped during this movie, Tommy Vinson is not a real poker player, nor is Karen “Razor” Jones – the woman who humiliates Alex with brutal, early defeat. Jones is played by Jennifer Tilly whom some of you may know as the voice of Bonnie Swanson from Family Guy, while others might recognize her as the real-life lady poker star and girlfriend of another poker elite Phil Laak, aka “The Unibomber” (No, poker-innocents, that’s a real nickname). Laak also makes a cameo – as himself unlike Tilly -- along with a few other famous poker players such as Antonio Esfandiari and Mike Sexton.

Something about Alex’s massive failure attracts Tommy’s attention, and he approaches him outside the Casino with an offer to train him. Alex accepts, and we learn that Tommy’s retirement came after his wife threatened to leave him if he didn’t give up poker, so all this must be kept secret from Tommy’s wife as well Alex’s family.

I’ll give away a major plot secret: both Alex’s family and Tommy’s wife drop their reservations and forgive everyone with open arms and unwavering support, because that’s totally the way real life works. I suppose when you’re on the verge of winning millions of dollars, you can be forgiven for almost anything, even if it’s losing hundreds of thousands of dollars throughout your entire life through reckless gambling.

During the montage of poker-training scenes in which Alex seems to do little else besides suck at poker and spend tens of thousands of dollars that the movie never explains why he has, he meets a young and attractive but otherwise boring girl named Michelle … twice, for about a five minutes each time. I’m not entirely sure why she appears on the cover. Not only does Michelle suck at being interesting, but she sucks at being an even remotely well-written character, and her lines are even worse than the already low quality of most others. Later we discover that Michelle is actually a hooker that Tommy hired to boost Alex’s confidence, and after a brief confrontation with Alex, she never appears again.

This climactic revelation forces a rift between Tommy and Alex, and after Alex storms off with the promise to quit the entire venture, Tommy signs himself up for the big Holdem Main Event that Alex has been training for, defying his wife’s will. By quit, apparently Alex meant play, and the two of them head down a long road of exciting, action-filled poker scenes towards their inevitable face-off at the final table. Alex gets his revenge against Jones, and eventually concedes his victory towards his mentor by folding the winning hand on his all-in.

The film was amateur, predictable, and often goofy. Plot turns were dull and unexplained. The poker itself even had a number of flaws that I recognized, which struck me as odd from a movie that took so much care to drop such big names.

Picking this movie off of an abominable list like this wasn’t a bad decision, and for that I’m grateful enough to withhold most of my bitterness about the glorification of poker. It’s gambling, and for every single twenty one year old hot-shot winner, there are thousands of poor schmucks who lose their lives to poker. Until the first epic Holdem movie emerges that wrestles with even one single complex and heart-wrenching theme, they’re all just going to be movies about less-than convincing chumps in less-than believable and idealistic scenarios. At the very least, because of that fact, I can’t fault this one for being much less than I expected.

Deal is ranked #35 on the Rotten Tomatoes Worst 100 list with 4% freshness. Its RT page can be found here.

The Top 5 Games That Ruin Friendships

2010-01-30T20:30:00.000-05:00

I have written recently about the concept of collaborative gaming, and like any good train-0f-thought, it led me to start pondering the opposite end of the spectrum: competitive gaming. In a world where the masses fear the isolating effects of video games -- the loss of family values among them -- fingers are pointed at all sides, and some noble developers strive to produce the perfect “family” game.

There are plenty of fun, feel-good, home-style board games that deserve lots of praise for their creativity, and some video games have been popping up that deliver a surprisingly comparable effect. However, there are some games that, despite their developers intentions (or perhaps as a direct result of them), fan the flames of ire between the players, be they on a physical board or a back-lit screen. I reflected on the worst of such games, and I have composed this [angry] list for your reading pleasure.

#5: The New Super Mario Bros Wii, multiplayer

It was after an extensive debate that I finally placed this game on my list, and it appears at the lowest rank because of my personal bias. I love this game, but it can understandably cause some tension if you have any shreds of pride in your platformer skills. Not only can it be extremely frustrating when players bash into each other in mid-air while trying to escape the shooting death-lava or a sinking foothold, it’s also reasonable to hypothesize that the developers must have had some malicious intentions when they programmed in the ability to pick up other players and throw them around without their consent. I have, on multiple occasions, been hurled off the edge of the screen by my partners, a martyr for the Big Coin cause, without having any say in the matter. While I thought it was hilarious at the time, I can see how others might see it differently.

#4: Halo 1-3

One of the more ubiquitous titles in gamer households, Halo’s multiplayer can be fun and an amusing opportunity to exorcise your inner immaturity, releasing it before it can escape in front of your boss or your girlfriend. Regardless of which version of Halo you prefer, the diversity of game-rules, the detailed maps, and the grounds laden with weapons can add spice to any individual or team battle between your and your buddies.

But while stat-lines such as “Boobz was killed by Mexicans” or “Big cocks was killed by AIDS” can provide hours of entertainment, it’s only so freaking funny when Boobz just can’t catch a break and keeps getting annihilated only seconds after each respawn. The taunting laugher and the vicious smack-talk begin to haunt Boobz until he or she tosses down the controller and storms out of the room. And there is always that one jerk who is way way better than everyone else. After a few friendly battles, the dominant player or team combination begins leech the fun out of the game, and so the rules have to be altered or exaggerated to add some chaos in the attempt to even the odds.

But this is a risky business too, and it usually precedes the conclusion of play by about fifteen minutes. The unpredictability of chaos combined with the frustration of repeatedly losing (or as in the case of our theoretical Jerk, who we will call Elite Skillz, the frustration of having your game style altered by whiny losers) can lead to boredom, which can lead to a reckless desire to give up winning and focus on ruining the game for others.

# 3: Mario Party 1-358

It’s hard to accept that anything with the word “party” in it can be evil – especially when it’s populated by something as benign and adorable as the Mario cast. But don’t be fooled, my friends. This four-player video/board game in any of its evil incarnations can destroy the bonds of friendship as strongly as any demon.

The mini-games are a ridiculous combination of goofy luck and button-mashing, and if you’re new to them you have absolutely no hope of ever winning one except by blind luck. The game layout is designed to increase the random distribution of negative events and items, allowing everyone to get their fair share of the frustration. Yet somehow the most negative event always seems to happen to you. You’ll think to yourself, “I’ll get that star as long as I don’t role a one!” And lo, by some miracle, you will always get a one.

It doesn’t matter which version you choose, they’re all the same. I’ve seen smack talk that would make your mom blush, and tantrums that would embarrass a five year old.

# 2: Diplomacy

I know that the writers and many of the readers at Charge Shot!!! are intimately familiar with the board game Diplomacy, but I haven’t met many other people who are, and that’s probably for the best. The whole point of this terrible game is to make allies out of other players and then subsequently screw them over, ideally in the most diplomatic way possible.

The game shares some similarities with Risk, primarily in that the overriding goal is to conquer territory. Another unfortunate commonality is that eliminated players are rewarded by being allowed to abstain from the twelve hours of play that follow their humiliating defeat. The mechanics of the game are pretty simple: up to seven players fill spots in Eurasia, and then they all attempt to invade one another. There are no dice, there are no cards, there is only purposeful and collaborative movement.

Each round consists of fifteen minutes spent talking and planning, each player writing their exact moves before the turn begins, with the theory that players acts simultaneously, eliminating the advantage of a turn-based game. Since all moves are very simple and involve a single-space movement per turn, successful invasions depend on the strength of numbers, and in most cases, this requires the support of your “allies.” If your allies lie to you, promising support and then failing to give it (attacking, say, you instead) you’re screwed, and a chump to boot.

It’s not hard to see why this game can ruin relationships. Surviving Diplomacy requires thick skin, and the ability to realize that in this game, it is completely reasonable to assume that even your closest friend is lying to your face.

# 1: Monopoly

Screw Monopoly! What a horrible, horrible game. And no, Hasboro, producing a million versions of themed Monopoly does nothing to improve the actual playability of your dark and sinister attempt to teach children that capitalism kills. I hate Catopoly even more than I hate the original, and don’t even get me started on Nintendopoly.

The point of this game is to bankrupt your opponents and become supreme chancellor of of your cyclical square-shaped economy by buying and mortgaging properties, utilities, and transportation systems with reckless abandon – often for hours and hours at a time. When you finally go bankrupt, forced by the die rolls of fate onto the hotel-lined stretch of doom set up by your salivating opponent, you’re simply eliminated from the game entirely because now, as a homeless top hat figurine, your existence is meaningless. You sit and watch as the person who took you out absorbs your hard-earned properties and dominates the rest of the game ruthlessly.

Isn’t it somewhat telling that all the would-be monopolists go to jail so often? When the player in the lead accidentally does to go to jail, he or she can happily remain there, safe from the feeble rent fees of puny small-business opponents, and unflinching at the eventual forced $50 dollar bail. And why does passing Go allow you to collect miscellaneous money from the sky? That doesn’t make sense!

This game is an evil attempt to teach our children that success comes in the form of owning property, amassing money, and exploiting your peers, which is totally unlike real life.

Oh hell. That is totally like real life.

The State of the State of the Union Address

2010-01-29T15:00:00.001-05:00

Last week a friend brought up the fact that he prefers the AFC and NFC Conference Championships to Super Bowl Sunday. The Super Bowl has evolved into a media spectacle, a circus that Americans feel compelled to watch, and something that almost never lives up to the hype. The Conference Championships, on the other hand, provide a day of great football, free from all the overexposure.

Sometimes I feel the same way about the State of the Union address. If you're looking for in-depth policy analysis, lengthy debate or nuanced political theory, you're not going to get it here. But still, one feels compelled to tune in; it is, after all, mandated in the Constitution that the President needs to do this, and there's something immensely satisfying about the speech. It's a summary of the previous year, an agenda for the next, a rallying cry for the President's party and an admonishment addressed to the opposition, all rolled into one. One feels like a patriot just for taking an hour to watch, and by the time that the President concludes that "The State of the Union is strong!", I'm always ready to stand up and sing our national anthem.

Only this year was different. Obama used requisite "strong" moniker right at the get-go; the conclusion, however, was reserved for speaking about how to strengthen the union, rather than reiterating that everything was fine. The tone was subdued and darker, and Obama had a hard line to straddle - admitting that times are tough while still trying to instill the speech with his trademark optimism and "Yes We Can!" mentality.

At times, he almost felt like a game show host (especially toward the middle of his speech when he started giving away tax incentives to all sorts of people), but other times he was the stern parent, using the classic "I'm not angry...I'm just disappointed" rhetoric. He took some well-deserved shots at Congress (one friend texted me: "This whole speech is just Obama telling the Senate to do its job"), and a somewhat low blow at the Supreme Court. Obama was simultaneously a raging populist harping on the banks, a somewhat defensive apologist for the stimulus, an ambitious idealist, a resigned pragmatist, a jokester, and a stick-in-the-mud who takes himself too seriously. He both was a Washington insider, and an everyman who took pains to separate himself from the politics of Congress. He donned many hats over the course of those seventy minutes, and the result was more than a little dizzying.

The content of the actual speech contained few surprises (even the biggest shocker - Obama's pledge to allow gays to serve in the military by the end of the year - was leaked a few days previously). His agenda remains the same, though perhaps expressed in more eloquent terminology. Create jobs. Pass health care reform. Convert to alternative energy sources. By this point, most Americans have made up their minds on these issues one way or another, and though Obama tried to make the argument that even dissenters should at least be willing to listen, I don't think he (or anyone) harbors the illusion that this speech will sway any minds.

But content is never the crowning achievement of the State of the Union address. Rather, it is the very form that the event takes that is the most important, even if that form seems almost anachronistic. The Founding Fathers conceived of the speech as a way to keep track of what the hell the President was up to, making sure that wily Executive Branch wasn't getting too out of control. The summaries were dry, formal, and often delivered in writing. It wasn't until the Wilson administration that Washington's practice of reciting the speech in person was brought back; the advent of radio a few years later led to Calvin Coolidge delivering the address over the airwaves as well, changing the audience of the speech forever.

Now, of course, the President uses this time to indirectly address the American people - talking to Congress is only a formality. This was perhaps a necessity before the ubiquity of television; now, however, we're in an age where the White House has a Twitter feed and the President's Weekly Radio Address has turned into a weekly Youtube address. The Internet is chock full of both news organizations and independent political blogs, and there's quite a few cable news networks that track every move and every comment made by pretty much every politician, twenty-four hours a day. America knows what's going on, right? Why sit down and listen to this stuffy old-fashioned speech, a speech filled with arguments and statistics we've heard a million times before?

In the past, Obama has been good about peppering his speeches with catchy sound bites, pithy quotes, phrases like "Yes we can!" that are good fodder for campaign buttons but don't actually mean anything. Last night, however, I noticed a distinct lack of those kind of rallying calls. But this is not a bad thing. Obama was not focused on the cheap feel good moment; rather, the speech was looking very firmly into the future. Most State of the Unions do this, albeit in a hazy, nebulous fashion. But on Wednesday, quite emphatically, Obama was calling for a long-term vision.

You can love Obama or hate him, but you've got to respect the sort of lengthy perspective of these kind of speeches. We're more connected to the political world than we've ever been before. Politicians are on Facebook, Congressional bills are available to read on the Internet, there are three different C-SPANS in my basic cable package alone. We have a lot of this information at our fingertips, but as a consequence, I worry that we're growing too focused on the short term. As pundits track daily poll movements, and audiences focus on irrelevant sound bites and Freudian slips, the news media (and yes, us bloggers) have lost their sense of perspective. Every day I can turn on the radio and hear the progress on the health care bill (or lack thereof), but far less often is there any sort of context, any sort of long-term look at where America is coming from on this issue and the possibilities for its future beyond the next election.

But the State of the Union forces us to think about this sort of stuff. For one night out of the year, our brains instead can look at the big picture, the way this sort of thing might eventually be addressed in history books. Now, we shouldn't think like this all the time, or we'd end up wallowing in abstraction and what-if scenarios. But once in a while, a larger perspective is a good thing. A cohesive speech, devoid of rallying calls or overused slogans, filled with references to our country's past history, is even better.

I think the state of the State of the Union address is strong. A 70 minute speech might seem a bit lengthy for our modern, 180-character attention spans (Obama is already receiving some flack for his loquacity), but I believe it's important to pay attention to these lengthy endeavors. There are never easy answers in the State of the Union, nor should there be. But a good form of this speech might force Americans to ponder questions they might otherwise not want to think about. This is a good thing.

So, if you missed the speech, find it on YouTube. Or dig up a transcript and read it, if you haven't got the time to wade through the ponderous punctuations of applause. Depending on your political affiliation, you're going to walk away thinking the speech is inspirational or thinking that Obama is the biggest con man this side of Bernie Madoff. Either option is fine. Just as long as Americans set aside their truncated CNN news summaries and spend time thinking about the speech at all, our country will be on the right track.

Microsoft: An Indie Enabler?

2010-01-29T13:16:00.004-05:00

While it's tempting to imagine Microsoft as some sort of bad influence on developers with a chronic indie problem, I believe Arkedo founder Camille Guermonprez meant it politely when he called the company an "enabler." He was referring, in an interview, to the Indie Games channel on Xbox Live, the perenially, and perhaps inevitably, confounding channel for XNA releases. Microsoft has had trouble communicating the identity of their Indie Games project since it launched, and its status as the red-headed stepchild of the Xbox Live family hasn't gone unnoticed by the press or potential developers. However, where Indie Games is succeeding, disappointing and changing appear to be part of a larger flux in the Live environment.
Whether or not it is intentional, describing Microsoft as "enablers" of the format's muted success carries with it a backhanded critique of the company's enthusiasm. Certainly, Guermonprez is a dutiful and much welcome contributor in the Indie Games roster, the Arkedo series being some of the best received and executed games available with the service. In fact, Guermonprez applauds the freedom that Microsoft has given XNA developers, and for not wearing "a publisher hat" in regards to game content and description. Concerns have been voiced that Microsoft is too hands off in their approach to the XNA community. Hobbyists and dedicated developers are given equal emphasis, pricing options, and promotion on the Indie Games channel, so it's difficult for users to find the most fully-formed entries. A look at the top grossing Indie Games of 2009 tells the tale. While the number one spot belongs to I MAED A GAM3 WITH Z0MB1ES!!!1 (ironically at that) with $160,000 in sales (!), two separate controller massage "games" made it onto the list, one edging out Who Did I Date Last Night for the number six spot. The system in place seems to benefit smaller development budgets and very simple execution.
Of course, this is not unlike the Apple's App Store, which Guermonprez suggests, may change the way Microsoft approaches Indie Games. The inflexible pricing regiment of the Indie Games channel will hopefully be the first thing to go. Microsoft has repeatedly had to defend the Microsoft Points currency on Xbox Live, and the one, three, and five dollar price points imposed on Indie Games seem to be arbitrary restrictions dictated by the dollars to points conversion rate. More pricing increments may give XNA developers more control over how to project their games to users.
The Indie Games market is still too small to attract many developers. Meanwhile, XBLA is becoming a haven for big projects from relatively big studios. There exists a considerable gap between the awareness of and attention to XBLA and that of Indie Games, despite the latter resembling the early years of the former. Perhaps Microsoft needs to throw its weight behind another The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai phenom in the XNA community. It would be encouraging to see an non-Avatar focused indie game that demonstrates the possibilities of XNA to be promoted on the Xbox welcome tab, next to the McDonald's ad and supplication to tweet from your 360. And while I respect Microsoft's democratic handling of how each indie is displayed on the channel, there must be a decent way to highlight wholehearted efforts by dedicated studios. It's not too late to realize the potential of the format. And how could it hurt to have a legion of budding developers owe you one?