Charge Shot!!!

Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T02:07:00.004-04:00

Becoming a "Mac Guy" has been one of the happier accidents of my life so far.

I had used them in childhood - memories of playing Oregon Trail, first on an Apple IIe and later on some of the earliest Power Macs, are vivid - but when our family finally got a computer it was a hand-me-down, and it ran MS-DOS. I familiarized myself with the operating system (and later, Windows) and in high school and into college I adopted the popular dissenting viewpoint regarding the Mac question: Macs were expensive, and they were weird, and only stupid idiots used them.

Fast forward to the summer of 2007, and I've just landed my first job in IT, albeit as a part-time student worker. Higher education being what it is, Macs were in abundance, and despite barely knowing the first thing about them (I didn't figure out how to install programs for weeks. Weeks.) I now had to work with them if I wanted my ten bucks an hour. And I needed that ten bucks an hour.

Over the next four years I amassed much knowledge of Macs, almost entirely through trial and error and vigorous, frequent Googling. This newfound expertise was instrumental in getting me a new job over this past summer. I can say without hyperbole that I owe a debt of gratitude to Apple for my current employment and the perks thereof, and to my profession I owe much of the experience and expertise I employ daily in writing about technology. That's the happy accident.

And that's just professionally. Even when I'm not working, I can't get by without my MacBook Air's low weight and high battery life. I depend on my iPhone all day long. I'm using Apple products for much of the time that I'm awake, and whatever you think about them or the company that makes them, they've had a visible and beneficial impact on our day-to-day lives. It's hard to deny the innovations they've made and the trends they've set, even if (perhaps especially if) you're a Windows die-hard or an Android fandroid.

No one person is responsible for any of these inventions: behind each of them is a dedicated and talented team of engineers; designers; programmers; marketers; laborers. But Steve Jobs, perhaps more than any working CEO today, contributed incalculably to the products his company makes. His fingerprints are all over every single one of them.

He died today, and that's really, truly a shame.

After the Jump: Late Night Jimmies

2011-07-31T22:00:00.001-04:00

END TRANSMISSION

Three Years of Utter Misery: A Charge Shot!!! Retrospective

2011-07-30T14:00:00.002-04:00

It is with a heavy heart that Charge Shot!!! passes from my life. To think that was so short a three years ago that Andrew, Craig, and Rob asked me to join them on this little adventure of theirs. I was honored, of course, but confused. You see, as some of you may remember, in the turbulent era of Charge Shot!!!'s ascendancy, this was a strictly video game blog. Strange as that may seem now, considering how much "new millennium culture blog" has come to mean to me (with all its lack of meaning), we once had so narrow a mission. But that's the blog the Founding Fathers wanted to write, and hell if I would turn down such an laurel as being chosen to contribute.

But you see, I didn't really like video games anymore. Sure, I played Mario Kart and Smash Bros. even more than the average college student, but I hadn't put up the funds for a new game in years. I didn't even own a seventh generation system in my own right. I didn't feel like I had a right to spew my thoughts on these things at all. But hey, I liked to write, and my senior comps were almost done (mine were on the evolution of knightly roles in medieval literature and history) so why not take the excuse to hang out online with my nerdy friends?

What had started as a somewhat awkward social obligation blossomed into a hobby, and later into a genuine passion. And I couldn't do any less than thank the readers, editors, and fellow writers for the experience.

Something I noticed since I started "working here" is that my posts have made a transition from rage-tinted expressions of frustration that video games weren't like they were in my 64-bit heyday to me pretending that exploring the hollowness of modern pop culture's nether regions wasn't a blast to me.

Yes, I suppose that my masochism is finally out of the closet. To continue with the Green Day theme, I have been, and always shall be Charge Shot!!!'s dominated love slave.

I never really thought about it, but my favorite Charge Shot!!! memories all happen to involve me being sad and angry and in pain from some terrible movie or TV show playing in front of me. Look back to the bad old days: there's my Shackleton-esque expedition to the Spike Video Game Awards (the twenty-first century Nuremberg rally), the fact that I paid my own goddamn money to see Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, and do we even need to bring up the one-man Decade Of Dreck?

Even going back to my first podcast appearence, when the four of us talked about how bad the Doom movie was and the similarities between the far superior Mortal Kombat film and porno flicks. I'll always remember Skyping the editors from the comfort of my college apartment's basement laundry room (I needed the privacy) only to have future Charge Shooter!!! Jordan Pedersen walk in on me and awkwardly appear on the podcast. All this blog seemed to do was make me miserable, and I loved every minute of it.

Then there were the happy times: my two Octobers of horror movies, sixty two in all, was honestly-to-blog a big turning point in my life, where I went from scared little boy to genre savant. And then there was Mad Men, oh my sweet Mad Men. Both these were great in their own right, except for that part where I had to write blog posts every day for the former or late Sunday night for the latter. Man, even when I was happy it sucked.

Except New York Comic Con, that was an all-time high for me. I got to meet Bruce Campbell because of this blog!

Yes, Charge Shot!!! is ending for now. And part of me will appreciate the fact that I don't have to worry about getting giving up a spot in my Netflix queue for prospective Decade Of Dreck entry Harry And Max (Read the synopsis on that one!) but it still saddens me to leave this behind for now. Perhaps some day, one or some or all of us will muster up the will to do this whole blogging thing again further down the line when we're more settled as human beings. I think Decade Of Dreck or Nights On Bald Mountain could certainly pop up again in the not-too-distant future as a solo blog, but for now:

SEE YOU SPACE COWBOY ...

Oh Hey…I Almost Didn’t See You There

2011-07-30T06:18:00.000-04:00

In November 2008, three bored friends, recent college graduates, started a blog. As Andrew said Thursday, it was born out of both shambling careers and a desire for communication. We plugged away at our gaming blog, starting a few features, aborting a few others, until we felt the need to expand.

So we expanded. Widened the aperture of our discussion to include entertainment, technology and, most importantly, food crimes. Of course, this required fresh blood and renewed vigor, so we enlisted some good friends to bolster our ranks. They’ve served us well.

I wrote a lot for this site. Two years of Audiosurf Radio. A dozen or so Battle.blog entries. Countless op-eds on gaming, television, music, theatre. Reviews on everything from a book about bike-riding by David Byrne to a B-list fantasy game about turning into a dragon (copy provided by the publisher for review purposes). It wasn’t all gold, but it wasn’t all crap either. And I’ll take that.

I also regularly contributed to our podcast – even taking on the hosting duties after Robert departed. One regret is not having the time or resources to properly market it. We always felt it had immense potential but never quite found the audience it deserved. Also…I’m still waiting on that digital soundboard.

To our readers: thank you so much. We did our best to scare you away with overly-navel-gazing manboy game talk. We tried harder to win you over with in-depth interviews with bright minds from the indie gaming scene. Then we invited our friends over to write some stuff our non-gamer friends might enjoy. Thank you for joining us, whenever you climbed aboard.

To friends of the site – developers, PR folk, etc. – thank you for your time and respect. Despite much self-deprecation, we always tried to take our endeavors seriously (especially if someone else’s time or product were on the line). Some of the site’s highlights included interviews of generous length and kind retweets and links from a variety of outlets. The Internet can be a scary place, and it’s comforting to find kind strangers out there.

And to the staff: it’s been a blast. I am proud of the work we did here and of the work that it has either allowed you to do or will drive you to do in the future. And I’m honored and grateful that you etched out time in your schedules to contribute to our project.

Seeing that it may be a bit of time before I have a platform to “properly” review something, let me pass judgment on a few things real quick:

- Louie, now in its second season, still rules.

- You’re an idiot if you’ve never watched Deadwood.

- I still can’t believe The Killing got me.

- Monday Night Combat is an amazing way to turn one hour of leisure time into four hours of leisure time.

- The Pale King is book of great ideas with some confusing passages and bizarre editing choices – which makes sense ‘cause Yo It Wasn’t Finished.

- I work in theatre, I teach theatre to kids and young adults, and I like theatre: but I’m not a huge fan of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

- Turntable.fm is the shit.

- I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: go play Portal 2.

- The Kills. The Kills.

- And Ender’s Game is still my favorite, no matter what Orson Scott Card does.

So long and thanks for all the hits!

Thoughts of an Aspiring Music Snob: Week 117 - Queen, and the Conclusion

2011-07-29T14:00:00.000-04:00

Chris has been 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 would write up a brief summary of his opinions. You can read about the origin and parameters of this project here.

The final installment requires a bit of reflection. I'll try not to be too self-indulgent, but I am listening to Queen this week, so that might be difficult.

It is with sadness and a tad bit of relief that I'm ending this written feature after nearly two years' worth of writing about new music (well, new to me, anyway). But it's also with not a small amount of pride; I've managed to go above and beyond the original point of this project, which was to teach myself a little bit about popular music. This is not to say that I'm a music snob yet, but I'm ready to advance to the next level. An "intermediate music snob" perhaps.

When I started this project, it was to acquaint me with some of the bigger names in popular music and start to piece together its history. After 117 weeks and some change, the project has evolved to the point where I'm able to look into more niche genres and lesser-known acts, and start to connect the dots myself. I'd still hesitate to even begin to call myself an expert, but I realized when I could easily place Faust within the context of post-war German avant-garde music, or the Pretenders within the context of the post-punk era that gave way to 80s "alternative" rock, I was not really a neophyte any longer.

I don't know if I'll ever be a full-fledged music snob. For one thing, I don't think my tastes are discriminating enough. This project has taught me that I like all sorts of music, and there's very little that I find offensive enough to avoid entirely. If I'm going to be a music snob, I can't be the type who turns up one's nose at entire bands or genres. Maybe because a lot of this was new to me, I found myself liking a lot more than I disliked (as any given post will probably attest). I'm not sure why this is - I still am pretty tough on books I read and movies I watch, and I can approach those with a much more critical eye. But even the worst weeks of this project found me admitting that the Act of the Week could be all right. I don't have it in me to loathe music. I'm glad that that I can still find most music new and exciting.

Music fandom is also a rabbit hole that goes deeper and deeper the further you explore. Even after two years of frantically burning through entire discographies in a week, I still feel like I know very little. Venture anywhere on the Internet, and you'll find someone who knows more than I do and is willing to debate the merits of, say, rare B-sides and bootlegs and out-of-print live albums. This project gave me an opportunity to take a broad look at a lot of artists, but I sacrificed the depth of really getting into a single act. I'm looking forward to being able to approach music at a slower pace, in my own time, and maybe not approach my listening so methodically.

Doing my research every week was still a bit of an adventure, and I'm willing to admit that it might be harder to become a full-fledged snob of popular music than classical. When I was getting into classical music in late high school and early college, there was a wealth of easy ways to get information. When I decided I liked symphonies, I checked out some books on the symphony. If I liked Schubert, it was easy to find a good scholarly work on the music of Schubert. The scholarship on classical music is so good that making connections, discovering influences, understanding context, analyzing the music itself, was very easy to do. There was a lot of guidance.

In contrast, even after nearly one hundred of these posts, I'm still at a loss when searching for good information on a lot of popular music. There's not really an easy place to turn to, and a lot of weeks I found myself triangulating between Wikipedia, critical reviews and interviews to try and piece together a history of any given act. There are a few books on popular music, but most of them are written by journalists and rock critics and approach the subject in a more informal way (and a good deal of them are more sycophantic than scholarly). I was hoping to find some sort of Grove or Grout equivalent for popular music that could easily lay out a narrative history for beginners.

But its not out there. Allmusic and Wikipedia are good starts, but they provide very short entries. And sites like Pitchfork already assume a base level of knowledge on the part of the reader. Looking for a primer on say, krautrock, is difficult, and objective sources are almost impossible. There's certainly a need for a good scholarly beginner's history to almost every genre in popular music, from rock to hip-hop to electronica. I feel a lot of aspiring music snobs still learn first-hand from others, trading those rare books like Krautrocksampler and old CDs and explaining the context.

Being a music snob also means immersing oneself in the culture, something I don't have the time or money or inclination to do. After seeing both the National and Sufjan Stevens in concert last fall, I do want to make a concerted effort to get to more live shows. My current locale isn't conducive for that (even those two concerts required driving through multiple states to get to), but it's a facet of popular music I haven't explored very much.

At the end of the day, though, I'm starting to feel comfortable with my own opinion on music. In the beginning, I was suspicious of my own tastes, and worried that I would commit some awful faux pas by liking the wrong band and therefore ruining my chances at snobdom forever. Two and half years later, I'm over it, and more than willing to state in public that Urge Overkill is really good even if everyone forgot about them, and the Sonic Youth kind of suck, critical acclaim be damned.

In this way, maybe Queen was a good band to listen to for this final week of the project. I had selected it not knowing in advance this would be the last week, but it fits all the same. Queen seems to be anathema to a lot of rock critics (Rolling Stone called them "fascists" back in the 70s, but they also labeled Devo and Kraftwerk this way, so maybe it was just a moniker Dave Marsh rolled out when he didn't like something). They're loud, silly, childish, ludicrously over-the-top, and they don't even really take themselves all that seriously. I suppose all that stadium-anthem posturing and those soaring melodramatic opera-influenced ballads are pretty ridiculous. If this were the early days of the Project, I might be careful as to how much I admitted liking them.

But you know what? Queen rocks. Their bombastic operatic pretensions are palatable because the band is very clearly playing it up as a joke. This is a breath of fresh air compared to, say, punk rock in the 70s, whose music pretended to be Hip and Uncaring and Iconoclastic but really took itself very seriously. And it's wonderful that Queen became such a huge sensation when their music was so fucking weird.

Yeah, "Bohemian Rhapsody" is overplayed, but who'd of ever thought that a song like this would reach the level where it could suffer from overexposure? Somehow Queen managed to combine the progressive and the avant-garde with populism and mass appeal, and they got away with it, multiple times with multiple singles. Even the detractors have to give them credit; Queen might be silly and sophomoric and have no lyrical depth, but they never pandered. In its own way, "Bohemian Rhapsody" (and the entirety of A Night at the Opera, my central album for the week) is an incredibly risky work, especially with how much money went into it. What should of been a cult-classic somehow became one of the defining songs of rock and roll.

But to end this project, I'll leave you not with "Bohemian Rhapsody," but with another strange success story, a Broadway-style anthem sung by a gay man that's become a symbol of macho sports victories. It's another song that's silly but you can't help but enjoying yourself. And it seems a suitable song to go out on.

A thank you goes to the editors for giving me my little corner of the Internet to explore this. And thanks for reading, and thanks especially for all those who made recommendations for me or pointed me in certain directions. There's a lot of acts I never got around to, but while my writing may be done, the listening has only just begun.

Art House in the Middle of the Street #0: The End's Not Near, It's Here

2011-07-28T20:10:00.001-04:00

The end is here. The Earth is one continuous, blighted landscape. Fossil fuels are as distant a memory as the great prehistoric beasts from which they originated. The wastes are ruled by marauding psychopathic biker gangs. Either that or a somewhat minor culture blog is calling it quits. I can't quite remember.

Ending a feature mid-stream as I'm doing with Art House is a somewhat disappointing resolution. Then again, I really only proposed the thing so I could have an excuse to watch a Janus movie every week. And because I still own the box, I could ostensibly keep doing that. Chances are, though, that I probably won't.

Why not? With a few purely enjoyable exceptions (Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast), the movies contained in "Essential Art House" aren't what you'd qualify as "easy watches." They can be agonizingly slow (Ozu's Floating Weeds) or terrifyingly sere (Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain).

Mostly, I'm tempted by the easy stuff. I'll rewatch the same episodes of Parks and Recreation or The Wire, or spend time in the tidy and safely rebellious world of Veronica Mars before I jump into any kind of difficult art. This reflects both my casual intellectual cowardice (a minor fault, all things considered) and the fact that I rarely have two hours to set aside to watch, you know, a movie. So many of the entries in "50 Years of Janus Films" will probably sit unwatched for much longer than they would have if this feature were continuing.

This is akin to most Americans' view of classic literature. Sure, I could pick up Joyce's "Portrait of an Artist" and read it for funzies1. But most likely, those classics I never read in school2 will remain unread. Sad, but true.

I for one viewed Charge Shot!!! as an opportunity to revive obligatory3 arts consumption in my own life. Watch, read, think about those things that I wouldn't otherwise but that were also "good for me."4

But there comes a time in all our lives when we have to start doing things not because we're forced but because we actually want to do them. If there's something keeping me from watching a classic art film each week, perhaps I should consider watching them, you know, not every week. I don't wanna eat Brussels sprouts with every meal.

Needed a second picture. Chose this one.

I can't speak to each writer's individual motivation for wanting to bring Charge Shot!!! to an end, but I think we're all at the point where we no longer need to erect artificial walls for ourselves to vault over. I do enjoy writing about film and television, but I've realize I want to actually write film and television. So I put my time into making that a reality. One of CS' erstwhile editors is in Iraq right now, because it's his dream to work for a newspaper's international bureau.

I think that's at least partially why we do things in groups: to motivate one another to do what we wouldn't do on our own. Books clubs, cross country teams, charitable organizations: with more people around, it's harder to slack off.

In the end, though, you won't stay in those groups if you don't really want to be there. And if you really do want to be there, the nature of the group doesn't matter much (as far as your own personal achievement is concerned, a least). To put it another way: we all do what we want to do, no matter who it's with. Sounds a tad fatalistic, I know, but that's not my intention: I'm exhorting personal initiative, if anything. Nobody's going to make you do something you don't want.

In other words, the end of Charge Shot!!! is indeed goodbye for now. But as bittersweet as this moment is, I know I view it more than anything as a righteous kick in the ass: "No more excuses, buddy boy. You gotta figure this shit out for yourself."

See you soon, Charge Shooters; in this life or the next.

Next Week - Life

- Photo courtesy of DisputeAbout

1 I tried, by the way, and failed.
2 To give you an idea of my high school English department's crapitude: they swapped out Catcher in the Rye for Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees and had us read Lance Armstrong's biography for summer reading.
3 Obligatory insofar as "You have to do it, or Andrew will yell at you."
4 I won't refer to hard art as "medicine," since that implies that you're "sick" if you don't consume it.

All Good Things...

2011-07-28T07:30:00.002-04:00

Dear readers: It is with mixed feelings that I announce to you that Charge Shot!!! will cease updating this Sunday after the posting of our 100th and final podcast.

The editors and writing staff came to this decision unanimously after lengthy discussion, though we didn't do so lightly. Increasingly busy schedules and waning interest in the unpaid, weekly grind made it a necessary choice, if not an easy one.

And now that the time comes, I find myself not knowing quite what to say. This site started when three bored college friends, frustrated by lack of career options and afraid of falling out of touch, decided to spend their free time writing about video games.

It ends nearly three years and more than two thousand posts later, having carved out a tiny corner of the internet for itself, and having done some things I'm pretty damn proud of: we've done some great interviews with indie game luminaries, we've gotten press passes and sent some people to conventions, and we've done some very good op-ed and news writing that could go toe-to-toe with anyone's, anywhere. I used it, to my benefit, in my last job interview. I've gained some of the unique tightrope-walking skills that come from evaluating and critiquing the work of my close friends, while also maintaining my friendships with those people. It hasn't caught fire and it barely makes enough ad money to pay for itself (and neither of those things were really the point), but it has been rewarding in completely unexpected ways.

To the writers who made it all happen: it has been my pleasure. To the readers, especially those who have stayed with us for most of this ride: thanks for stopping by.

Movie Review: Captain America: The First Avenger

2011-07-27T16:08:00.000-04:00

I received this poster as a consolation prize for
having to sit through the 3D version of the film...

I've never followed Captain America, either through the 210 million copies of his comic books that have flown off newsstand shelves since his first appearance in 1941, or through the various movie serial and television adaptations that have popped up since then. Until a week ago, pretty much my only exposure to Captain America in any type of media was that one episode of the X-Men animated television series* that shows a flashback of Wolverine fighting alongside the First Avenger himself back in the "Big War." (You'll of course remember that Wolverine is actually much older than he looks, and that his mutant healing power keeps him young and fresh... insert nerdy guffaw here.)

* Before I continue, let me just say that I'm so happy that episodes from this solid show are easily available online, without having to trudge through the various incomplete bootleg versions on the YouTubes. The above-linked episode is from the latter half of Season 5 where animation quality suffered as they were rushing to complete their various storylines before the show ended. But many of the earlier episodes are extremely well done and deal with more advanced and deep themes than you'd expect from a typical Saturday morning cartoon. I'd wholeheartedly recommend it; several steps below Batman: The Animated Series, of course...

Thus when I saw Captain America: The First Avenger last Thursday at the Arclight Hollywood (but not in the Dome), I was able to approach the story fresh, with no preconceived notions instilled by pesky, more original versions of the story. I was able to put myself squarely and firmly in the hands of Paramount Pictures and director Joe Johnston's 21st Century interpretation of the character. And I must say, I was not disappointed.

WARNING: The rest of this review includes {[(SPOILERS)]}. Turn back now if you know nothing about / want to stay ignorant of the Marvel Universe and what they're planning on rolling out cinematically in the near future.

Usually my first instinct when presented with a comic book movie is, "Really? Another one? I'm all for mining resources from other art forms to create interesting stories for films, but it seems like studios should be seeking to adapt the best comic books rather than every comic book in existence." But Captain America is different - it's the most recent in a series, a pre-planned combination of films based on Marvel Universe characters, that will all culminate next year in Joss Whedon's super-pic The Avengers. If you're interested in seeing more about The Avengers, go see Captain America, and stay all the way through to the end of the credits. You Marvel fans will crap your pants in excitement.

But back to the actual movie. The story takes place in the 1940s, which is good because that's when Captain America made his first appearance for Timely Comics, the precursor of Marvel. It also makes sense because the 1940s was when America was most able to support a patriotic superhero. It was during the heart of World War II, we were at the helm of the Allied Forces, doing battle for what's right against a power that can only be described as Evil. A 2010s Captain America would be wearing Hurt Locker-esque desert fatigues, steeped in billions of dollars of debt, and obese from a diet consisting of mainly high-fructose corn syrup. Honestly, Captain Planet would be a more appropriate superhero for our country in this day and age than Captain America...

No, Americans always seem most righteous and powerful when they have Nazis to punch on the jaw, which is why Captain America's arch-nemesis is Red Skull, the leader of a special high-tech, occult-driven offshoot of the alternate universe Third Reich. In the movie, he gained superhuman power from an incomplete version of the serum that turned a scrawny Steve Rogers into the incredible Captain America - but he suffered horrible side effects (pictured) due to his being impure of heart. I don't know if this jives with Red Skull's origin story in the comics and I don't particularly care to find out. I don't want to uncover anything that could potentially dampen my admiration of Hugo Weaving's stellar performance as the villain.

The casting of Weaving as Johann Schmidt/Red Skull was almost a little too on-the-nose, as the talented Aussie has carved out a niche for himself by playing over-the-top evil geniuses (Agent Smith, voice of Megatron). But I'm sure the producers at Marvel Studios asked themselves why they should settle for hamburger when they could have steak, and made the obvious (and perfect) choice. In the words of one of my fellow movie-goers: "Whenever he opens his mouth, gold comes out," in this case in the form of his perfectly crafted Nazi-German accent.

Chris Evans as the Cap did a very nice job, once I was able to get over his previous foray into the Marvel Universe as the Human Torch in those two ill-advised (and apparently non-canon) Fantastic Four movies. I still don't know how they made him short and scrawny for one half of the film, and then large and muscular for the rest of it. Was one version the real actor and the other enhanced in post? Were they both digitally altered? Were... neither? (Hey, Robert DeNiro put on 60 pounds for the end of Raging Bull, what's to prevent Chris Evans from gaining or losing a few inches or some muscle mass here and there?)

I saw the movie in 3D, though not by choice - the special members-only screening to which I was invited displayed the post-converted version in all three glorious dimensions. The result was about what you'd expect from movies shown in 3D that were not shot in 3D. The image was darker than it seemed like it should be, and there was maybe one or two scenes where the increased depth of field and jump-out-at-you effect made the slightest difference. So in ranking the movie, I will try to keep the drawback of a subpar 3D conversion from altering my opinion.

Overall, Captain America was a solid superhero pic, in the classic Summer Blockbuster fashion, with a fun origin story, a villain in every way worthy of the hero, and a strong cast of supporting characters (I'm looking at you, Stanley Tucci with your lighthearted accent, and Tommy Lee Jones with your "I'm too tired to care, but I still make it work" vibe). Patriots, fanboys, and critics alike should agree that this depiction of The First Avenger is the perfect last piece of the puzzle before we are introduced to the whole gang together in 2012.

Rating: 76 Congos.

Movie Review: Tekken: Blood Vengeance

2011-07-27T10:41:00.003-04:00

Charge Shot!!!'s esteemed co-editor Craig and I made a man-date to see a dumb movie. The plan, originally, was to see Transformers: Dark Moon Rising (or whatever it's called). But it seemed the universe had other plans for us. Because yesterday, at 7:30pm, in selected movie theaters all across the nation a special, stupid, crazy, confounding film aired for one night only. Last night we happened upon Tekken: Blood Vengeance in 3D, and I don't know about Craig but I don't think I'll ever be the same.

Here's what I knew about the Tekken video game franchise before going to see the movie. 1. It was one of those serious fighting games. The kind where smashing buttons would only get you past the first round at an arcade. 2. There was some weird half-man, half-leopard guy you could play as. 3. There were bears. I went into the movie expecting to be somewhat confused. Luckily for me, the movie featuring characters from Tekken had very little to do with the video games! There wasn't even a Tekken Tournament!

So that's the first major complaint: the story. A movie called Tekken should, in my mind, feature a fighting tournament. Instead, we are treated to two different movies smashed together, each one devoid of all tournament fights. I say two movies only because they did that classically bad thing some action movies do, which is engage you in a story until the climax, and then all hell breaks loose and everyone goes crazy.

Most of the film was about a young heroine Ling Xiaoyu (who rides a panda!) who is blackmailed into tracking down a young man at an international school. There are two rival companies hoping to obtain this guy. He was most likely tested on and now has some incredible power. Along the way Ling befriends a plucky, sort of strange girl who "has a crush" on said boy. Then it turns out the strange girl is a robot, and she has chainsaw arms and Gundam wings and they fight until they realize they are friends again. Yup.

The story progresses with the girls, now on the run from both companies, finding out more about this guy they're after. Eventually there's a showdown at Kyoto Castle. "Hey, Giaco, do you mean a showdown between the guy and the girls?" No, dear reader, no. I mean a showdown between Jin Kazama (leader of one corporation), Kazuya Mishima (leader of the other corporation) and their grandfather/father Heihachi Mishima. Up until their twenty five minute epic devil battle, we see Jin and Kazama for a total of four minutes of screen time. Our hero stands back and let's the big boys fight. Yes, in the end the robot girl plays a big part in saving the day ("It was the love of a robot that saved us," Jin explains to Ling) but really this is all about the three generations of Mishima men beating the piss out of each other. Also they can transform into devils.

The battle sequences were good. They were adequate. They suffer from this modern notion that a fight has to be baffling and impossible to follow. That fists and kicks and throws have to happen so fast no one knows who threw it or, god forbid, who's winning the fight. This is why I returned Marvel Vs. Capcom after playing it for a week. Call me old fashioned, but if I'm winning a fight I want to know it! There were some cool moments, of course, but I never felt like too much was at stake.

The music throughout the film was good. It leaned a little toward the industrial side of things from time to time, but it was still fairly exciting. And it should be, it was composed by Hitoshi Sakimoto, the guy who made game music for everything from Ogre Battle to Final Fantasy Tactics.

The visuals were very good. The CGI was crisp and clean looking, and most everything looked the way it should. The 3D, however, was incredibly lack luster. I'm sorry, but if you only play with depth of field in your "3D" movie... then it's not 3D. There were characters with chainsaws for arms, characters that shot lasers, characters that threw debris and none of it came out at the audience. The deepest 3D moment was when Regal Cinema's "Please Put On Your 3D Glasses Now" screen came up, and a pair of glasses floated out over the audience.

There's a specific problem with bad anime movies (and for all intents and purposes that's what this was) and a lot of Japanese pop-cinema in general. A bad live action movie from the West is usually just dumb. A lot of beefcakes smashing into each other or a romance that piddles. But when an anime is bad, it's not just bad, it's confusing. That's the main problem with this movie. It confuses where it should delight. Now, to be fair, I had no business going to see a Tekken movie (I was more of a Tobal No. 1 guy). I know I'm not their target demographic. But seeing as half the audience spent the whole movie laughing, I guess I wasn't alone.

Thoughts of an Aspiring Music Snob: Week 116 - The Pretenders

2011-07-25T07:00:00.004-04:00

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.

"We're paying tribute to James Honeyman-Scott and Pete Farndon," the Pretenders' Chrissie Hynde announced upon the band's induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005, "without whom we wouldn't be here." Honeyman-Scott was the original guitarist for the group; Farnon the original bassist. Both met with tragic, early deaths because of drugs, which is probably why Hynde went on with the observation that, "on the other hand, without us, they might have been here, but that's the way it works in rock 'n' roll."

"That's the way it works in rock 'n' roll" is a sobering statement, especially in light of Amy Winehouse's premature death over this past weekend. The music industry has always had an unfortunate closeness with a drug-induced brand of hedonism that is often too easily laughed off. But the Pretenders (and Winehouse) show that fame and fortune often come at an unfortunate price. The vast waste of talent, the sheer fucking uselessness of these sorts of deaths, are both tragic and infuriating.

The Pretenders are a strange cross of the "burn fast and bright" kind of rock band, and the "elder statesmen" type that continue to release albums long after anyone's stopped paying attention. Half of the band's members were dead within three years of their first LP, and drummer Martin Chambers would soon after quit due to the emotional problems of losing those two members. But lead singer Chrissie Hynde has had a remarkably long and productive career that still continues. The Pretenders are one of those strange bands that still technically exist in some capacity even though they stopped being "The Pretenders" decades ago.

There's an old philosophical problem called the ship of Theseus - if you take Ship A, and start replacing it plank by plank, at what point is the ship no longer Ship A? Or can we still consider it the same object? It's the sort of question easily applicable to rock ensembles with rotating members. With very few exceptions, most bands fade away after a major change in lineup. Yet, to my surprise, the Pretenders' Learning to Crawl is quite a good album, even with only half the original band. So perhaps it might be worth paying attention after the switch sometimes, after all.

WEEK 116

ARTIST OF THE WEEK: The Pretenders

WHAT I KNEW BEFORE: Very little to none. Some of the songs (especially "Brass in Pocket") sounded vaguely familiar, though I don't think the Pretenders is necessarily one of those bands that's achieved eternal radio ubiquity the way some other groups from that time period have.

MY LISTENING: I listened to Pretenders (1980) every day this week. I also listened to Pretenders II (1981) three times, and Learning to Crawl (1983) twice.

WHAT I LIKED: I think what I liked most about the Pretenders is how versatile they are - it's hard to really categorize them at all. You can sort of trace their influences back to some classic rock and also punk and maybe some new wave stuff, but they're also sort of anticipating some alternative rock that would come later in the 80s (The Smiths' Johnny Marr was a big fan of the Pretenders' guitar work). The Pretenders were a band that just happened to flower during a transition period in the musical world, and so they're standing with just one foot in a lot of camps.

But even apart from genre influences, the band is adept at jumping from hard rock to more melodic pop on the same album. Chryssie Hynde delivers the best iteration of "Fuck off!" in the history of music in "Precious," a fast-paced, loud-riff rock song. But we also see some tender, beautifully melodic pop ballads in songs like "Talk of the Town." She's unable to be categorized as the "wild female rocker" or the "emotional female singer," but she is a little bit of both.

The aforementioned James Honeyman-Scott's guitar work also keeps the songs interesting - half the time he's playing straight loud riffs, but then there's the jangly proto-R.E.M. guitar solo in "Kid," and the strange solo that fits perfectly with the mysterious aura of "Private Life." His guitar work is able to play off of Hynde's songwriting in just the right way; his work embellishes the songs without ever making him the focal point.

The Pretenders undoubtedly lost something when Honeyman-Scott passed away, but Learning to Crawl is a surprisingly solid album for all that, even if it's a bit more pop-heavy than its predecessors. "Middle of the Road" and "Back on the Chain Gang" are both solid hits, and "My City Was Gone" is one of the better songs I've heard about Ohio.

WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE:

Sometimes the Pretenders can be a bit corny. The whipping sound effects on "Bad Boys Get Spanked" (already an unfortunate title) are a bit over the top, and "2000 Miles," the group's Christmas song, is a too sweet for my taste.

But really, the Pretenders records I listened to were surprisingly consistent, with only one real dud ("Thin Line Between Love and Hate"). The band was adept enough at switching between several different styles, so things never really get stale, and Hynde's songwriting (and the songs she borrowed from then-boyfriend Ray Davies) are strong all the way through.

FURTHER EXPLORATION WOULD ENTAIL: The Pretenders have another six albums after Learning to Crawl, but no one seems to have much to say about them, and at some point they could probably be considered Hynde solo albums. I'll stick with these albums, thanks.

BEST SONG YOU'VE HEARD: "Brass in Pocket"

BEST SONG YOU HAVEN'T HEARD: "Space Invader"

This is far from one of their best songs, but I'm a sucker for instrumentals.

NEXT WEEK'S ARTIST: Queen

After the Jump: Staned

2011-07-24T22:56:00.000-04:00

Subscribe to the podcast via the feed, find us in the iTunes store, or download the MP3 directly!

I CAN SEE THROUGH YOU

THROUGH TO THE REEEALL YOUUU

Sunday Reading: Mac OS X Lion Review

2011-07-24T15:16:00.000-04:00

As you may or may not know, Apple released a new version of Mac OS X this week.

Doing an in-depth review is a bit outside of the scope of what we do here, but I wanted to make sure y'all knew what I thought, so if you've got time you should read the massive review of it that I helped write for Anandtech. A quote that sums it up:

"For those of you worried that Apple's "back to the Mac" marketing push would result in an OS X version that sacrifices functionality in favor of imported iOS features and reduced capability: those fears are, by and large, unfounded. The iOS-inspired functionality is mostly laid over top of a foundation that's more or less OS X as it has been since Leopard - a solid, mature and full-featured desktop operating system.

That said, the usefulness of individual Lion features will likely come down to your individual needs and work patterns. Most should appreciate solid new features like Versions, the new Mail, and the much-needed enhancements to FileVault, but features like Launchpad and the UI overhauls of iCal and Address Book are of dubious benefit to users, and other heavily-promoted features like multitouch gestures and the Mac App Store are already available to Snow Leopard users.

Even so, at $29, there is really no reason not to buy Lion..."

So go check it out!

Saturday Morning TV: Baseball Friends

2011-07-23T11:02:00.000-04:00

You know what I love more than home runs?

Spotify is Here!

2011-07-22T15:00:00.000-04:00

Before last week, you might have heard rumors of Spotify, the music streaming service that has taken Europe by storm. For the past couple of years, Americans have had to make do with vague stories of the Promised Land - a realm beyond the ocean where you could legally stream any track...for free! For those of us stuck toiling away in the United States, it was hard not to greet these tales with a healthy dose of skepticism. Is Spotify really all that great, or is this another case of our cultural inferiority complex?

Last week saw the long awaited debut of Spotify in the United States, and now we Americans can judge for ourselves. It's currently invite-only, but it's relatively easy to garner an invite (I got one in thirty seconds after a quick Google search led me to a Spotify promotion on the Coca-Cola website). And it turns out that our European counterparts were not wrong, and Spotify has a lot of promise. If it really takes off, it could conceivably change the way we listen to music in the same way Netflix changed the way we watched movies.

THE COMPETITION

To be clear, Spotify is far from the first streaming service to try and capture the American market. Pandora is probably the most well-known one, though I don't think it's turned a profit yet. But Spotify seems to be deliberately distancing themselves from Pandora, to the point where they removed the radio function from their US release. Pandora randomly plays songs based on listener preferences, while Spotify allows the listener to queue up their own chosen playlist.

Other streaming services in the US, such as Rhapsody and MOG, suffer from the fact that there's not a free model; both of these services require the user to subscribe and pay a monthly fee. The get the most out of Spotify, you can do this and pay for the "premium service." But Spotify, in a wise-business move, has also introduced a free, ad-supported tier. By setting the initial entrance fee at nothing, the company is hoping to win you over and convince you to start paying for the service. Spotify has also benefited from the fact that it's been unavailable in the United States for so long, because this got people talking. There's a lot of buzz surrounding the service that its competitors never got, to the point that Spotify's American release was framed as some sort of event.

Finally, there's Grooveshark, which up until this point has been my service of choice, especially for my numerous listenings for this site. LIke Spotify, Grooveshark allows one to queue up specific tracks for free. The problem is that Grooveshark is of questionable legality, and its unclear that Grooveshark pays any label that doesn't file a copyright infringement claim first. By sealing deals with each major record label before their release, Spotify has set themselves up to be the law-abiding "good son" to Grooveshark. Hell, Spotify just looks cleaner, and has better organization; Grooveshark's library is poorly organized and makes it a chore to piece together the album you want to listen to.

THE LIBRARY

Spotify offers three tiers - the "Free," the "Unlimited," and the "Premium." The site brags about all sorts of features for each tier but, put simply, the Unlimited Service costs $5 a month and gets rid of ads, while the Premium Service allows streaming on mobile devices. In the future, the Unlimited or Premium services will be the only way to listen to more music than the time limit (in Europe, 20 hours a month), but as part of their big American roll-out, Spotify currently has unlimited hours of listening on even the free tier.

The service boasts a fairly sizable music library, but (as with any legal streaming site) it's always strange what is and is not available. The Beatles, of course, are not there. Neither are Metallica, Led Zeppelin, or AC/DC. Pink Floyd has all of The Wall, but Dark Side of the Moon is missing a track, and there's only half of Wish You Were Here. The Pretenders (my artist of the week) have their first and third albums available, but not their second. Yet other classic rock artists you would assume to be difficult to negotiate a contract with - Neil Young, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan - have the bulk of their discography available.

But Spotify's true value comes in being able to stream new music. As someone living in a city where the radio stations are dominated by gospel and country, I can't describe how nice it is to be able to easily and legally queue up new releases. I did a couple of searches for every major release I could think of from the past twelve months. Radiohead, Fleet Foxes, TV on the Radio, Bon Iver, the Beastie Boys, Kanye West - all of these artists have their most recent albums available for streaming. With this service, you might never have to buy a new album again.

Their library even yielded some more obscure stuff. On the college radio station, I heard an interesting track by the 80s electronic group YOU, an act so obscure that they don't even have a written entry on Allmusic. On a whim, I looked up the album Time Code, from 1983. Sure enough, Spotify had the whole thing available for streaming. It's not Lester Bangs' Basement yet, but we're getting there.

THE SERVICE

Spotify has a lot of other services that I haven't really taken advantage of yet. You can devote some space on your hard drive for a Spotify cache, which would allow you to continue listening even if your computer is offline. There's Facebook integration, which allows you to browse what playlists your friends have made and listen to them yourself. And, of course, there's the Premium mobile phone app, which sounds like a good deal the more time I spend on Spotify.

Yes, so far I've stuck with the free version, though there's a good chance I'll start paying once the free unlimited listening time goes away. Are there ads? Yes, but not so many that they detracted from the experience (although, unlike Pandora, the ads pause themselves if you mute your speakers - there's no escape!). For the amount of music I listen to while at my computer, $5 or $10 bucks a month would make Spotify totally worth it, and I appreciate the ability to listen to full albums that I'm not sure I want to buy.

That being said, Spotify is not perfect. The search function is still a bit problematic, and took me some time to learn to use modifiers (you can search by genre, timespan, and so on) in order to narrow in on what I was looking for. And, like every other music service in the past ten years, Spotify is absolutely abysmal at cataloguing classical music. Someday, I still hope, there will be a service that realizes the value in cataloguing classical tracks by composer, genre, conductor and ensemble, and a service that treats multi-movement works as complete pieces, not like albums that yield "singles" of specific movements. But, in this sin, Spotify is no worse than any other service.

The more annoying thing is the absence of a radio function, which was included in the European Spotify. When I first downloaded the application, my mind hit a blank on what I wanted to listen to. There were some recommended playlists (aka, paid ads), and the ability to browse through the Top 100 tracks and albums listened to by other Spotify members. But if I want to listen to new music in the vein of, say, Björk, I have to know what I'm searching for. Spotify will not randomly play tracks for you; you have to have a specific artist in mind.

Perhaps this is Spotify trying to distinguish themselves from Pandora, which is easily the most widely-recognized music service available in the States. Spotify seems to want to play nice with these other companies so far; for example, they also allow the user to scrobble his or her tracks to a Last.fm account, a nice touch that I'm glad they included.

As it stands, Spotify is certainly worth the current price of nothing, and could easily justify spending the small monthly subscription fee for the more premium tiers. The first few days I had Spotify, I was almost a little disappointed; I dove in expecting to be introduced to all sorts of new music, and the service doesn't really do that. But I kept returning to Spotify throughout the week. Everytime I heard a track on the radio, read about an artist that sounded interesting, remembered that I really meant to see what the big fuss about Mumford and Sons was all about, I could easily turn to Spotify. After a week, I was wondering how I could along without it.

A Decade of Dreck #59: Modigliani

2011-07-20T14:06:00.002-04:00

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.

Ah, the starving artist: you are torn between your passion for your art and a world that doesn't understand your genius. Must you compromise your vision to stay afloat or will you die knowing you've changed the world? Nobody makes movies about the former, so if you please, you may begin hacking up blood due to Consumption at your leisure.

Yes, it's that very fact, nobody makes movies about sell-outs, everybody makes movies about crazy artists who upend their field, that doomed Modigliani from the start. Sure, it could be relatively easy to make a movie about the life of the Italian painter, he certainly has a decent enough life story, but why do it well when you can just do it? That might require something like giving some thought to it, having some talent, and scripting interesting characters we care about for reasons other than that their works hang in the MoMA!

Amadeo Mogigliani certainly deserves a fancy historical biopic as much as, if not more than, any other modern artist. It has all the elements that make the fancy historical biopic film interesting: doomed love, genius, a captivating setting, famous friends- it should be pretty simple to make a halfway decent one of these things, just take the formula for Frida and change the names and you've got it!

I jest of course, this was probably exactly what the people behind Modigliani did, and this was the crappy end result.

I've always liked Modigliani, and when I heard his life's story had been made into a movie, I was certainly interested in seeing it. He was born into a Jewish family in Italy and moved to Paris to join in the wild bohemian circles of the early modernist painters such as Picasso. Living as an outsider, Modigliani had a legendary appetite for drink, drugs, and women. This ultimately culminated in his falling in love with and knocking up a beautiful Catholic girl named Jeanne Hébuterne, and needless to say, her well-to-do family was less than enthused with having an artist, let along a Jewish one, impregnate her.

The film claims it wishes to deal with themes such as Modigiliani (played here by Andy Garcia), the ultimate outsider, trying to find acceptance in the world with his art. Indeed, the filmmakers wish to remind of you of this at every possible opportunity as every other scene a bigoted French character will bring up how Jewish Modigliani is, and he'll respond with something like "Mi scusi" or "Che bella", because, you know, he's Italian, lest we forget, and that's all the Italian Italian people are allowed speak in English language movies.

We receive periodic updates on how Modigliani's quest to be accepted is going, but most of the movie is spent with him playing grab-ass with his famous friends. "Well if it isn't my rival, PABLO PICASSO! And our mutual friend JEAN COCTEAU! What's your opinion on this DIEGO RIVERA?" (It should be noted that for much of this movie, the actor playing the supporting role of Rivera wears a sombrero, lest we forget he is Mexican). There isn't really too much of a plot to this movie, it's like someone found a college freshman's Art History 102 notes and wrote a screenplay based on them.

Also, Udo Kier is in this movie as Max Jacob and I'm contractually obligated to lose my shit whenever I discover Udo Kier is in a movie.

Besides being an excuse to show us a bunch of famous artists whose names we recognize (if not their art) hanging out together, the film opts to completely rewrite the genre trope of the debauched, self-destructive, alcoholic, drug-addled genius by doing nothing original with it. Modigliani spends just about every scene either drinking a big bottle of wine or sniffing some early-Twentieth Century cocaine. So yeah, he's pissed or high in every scene, but there's just no reason for us to care because the filmmakers have made his character nobody worth caring about. He's self-destructive, and we know why (nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I'll go get drunk!) but it's done so half-assed it's not even worth getting invested in: just because you tell us why a character is the way they are, doesn't mean you've earned the audience's emotional investment; make us care, please.

One of my favorite scenes in the film consisted of Modigliani and some of his artist friends sitting in a cafe while a bunch of soldiers hoisting the Tricolore march off to war. "What's going on?" says somebody. "Oh, it's World War I." says another (I paraphrase, of course). That's it, the most shocking and disturbing event in Europe's history is given one line of dialogue, even though it's aftershocks profodundly influenced the protagonist and his colleagues' art immensely. Whatever, it's just the upending of our culture, no need to integrate this into our new art movement.

Also, there's a montage of Modigiliani and some other artists working on their entries in a portrait contest; lots of shots of artists looking passionate and painting furiously. This would be hokey enough, but for some reason it was considered acceptable for a French guy to rap over the soundtrack. Yup, in a classy period piece set in 1920, you have somebody rapping over a Moby-esque beat. I'm not outraged at all, just confused.

Modigliani gets everything wrong. It has everything people love about biopics, and therefore everything people hate about biopics. Can we give the tired genre a rest now, please?

Modigliani is ranked #53 on the Rotten Tomatoes Worst 100 list with 4% freshness. Its RT page can be found here.

Album Review: Black Lips - "Arabia Mountain"

2011-07-20T06:57:00.004-04:00

"Dude, they are conjuring up those demons. Basically they're taking spells out of that book, or they're taking demons out of that book and working it into a song that basically conjures up these demons, man." This is a quote from what sounds like a found audio clip, spoken by a guy with a 1991 California accent. It comes in as the music fades on a song about Spider-man getting molested as a child. It's the third track on Arabia Mountain, the newest release from the blissfully sloppy, lo-fi, "flower" punk band Black Lips.

Black Lips hail from Georgia, coming of age and popularity in the Atlanta scene that fostered bands like Deerhunter, Mastodon, The Coathangers, and King Khan and the Shrines. They're notorious to a certain extent. Their live shows have included vomit, blood, piss, etc. They are, as one of their earlier songs proclaims, Bad Kids. But their live shows are only an extension of the raucous, wild good time that is a Black Lips record. Arabia Mountain is no exception. And even though they collaborated with famed producer Mark Ronson the album is still uniquely Black Lips. In other words: It's still a slime-covered gem!

This partnering with Ronson sent shockwaves through the core fanbase. Words like "toned down" and "cleaned up" were thrown around as the audience waited to see what these two very different musical entities would come up with. Even the Lips themselves seemed a bit shocked that they were able to land Ronson for the job. The band had never before recorded with a producer, but for this, their seventh album, they decided to give it a shot. As lead guitarist Ian Saint Pé explained in a minidoc about the union of Ronson and Black Lips, "When we were thinking about people we wanted to work with, that Amy Winehouse record sounded really dope, that was Mark Ronson. So we put some feelers out and Mark Ronson was totally down."

The album itself is complicated. It is a lot of things. It can be bright, it can be brash, it can be haunting and nasty and dirty. Most of all it is exciting. Every song is so different from the ones around it. But at the same time every song has that unmistakable Black Lips scruff to it, that ring-of-dirt-around-the-collar feel. The songs are quick and pounding, with only two of the sixteen songs clocking in over three minutes long.

The instrumentation on the album features everything from hand-claps to Theremin. The opening track, "Family Tree," slides open with a saxophone (an instrument they've barely used in the past). But when the song gears up the sax gives the whole song a sort of slimy feel. It shouldn't work, but it does. You really get the feeling the every instrument is being used to its full potential (toward the end of the song the saxophone devolves into a noise solo reminiscent of James Chance).

The singles released so far are "Go Out and Get It" (video above), "New Direction," and "Modern Art" (video below). "Go Out and Get It" is a pumping summer fun anthem. It begs the listener to just go grab what they want from life. From a band as wild and (seemingly) free as Black Lips, this advice comes off as heartfelt, not cliché. "New Direction" is a jangling song about "going on a vision quest." We get snippets of a psychotropic experience through lyrics like "I want to laugh and I want to cry,/I want to spit but my mouth's too dry/I wanna run but I can't because my legs won't go/where did they go?" And then there's "Modern Art" which starts off with the lyrics "K-Hole at the Dalí/seeing the unknown/well it might have been a molly/'cause my mind's being blown." Black Lips have never been shy about their use and abuse of drugs. It is, for better or worse, a part of the American Experience. And if these southern sloppy kids are anything, they're experienced Americans.

These are three fun songs, but the real standouts in the album are "Don't Mess Up My Baby," a gang-vocal warning against overstaying one's welcome (and using up all the drugs). It suggests that the subject of the song "settle down and have some children 'cause your brain is fried." The earlier mentioned song about Peter Parker's childhood molestation, "Spidey's Curse," paints a dark and inventive picture of the web slinger. "Peter Parker's life is so much darker than the book I read," croons guitarist and singer Cole Alexander. It's messed up and inventive. It works.

Finally, I have to mention the track "Mr. Driver." I've been obsessed with this track (as I have want to do). It's been on repeat in my house for days. It will soon overtake "I'm Just Beginning to Live" as my Most Listened to Song on iTunes. There's something about it that just feels hopeless and strange, with lyrics that scream and plead "I want to BLEED on my Squire." Give it a listen. Tell me what you think. I don't have words to express the way I feel about it, but I feel very strongly about it.

Arabia Mountain delivered everything I wanted from a Black Lips album. Snotty youth, brash musicality, inventiveness, experimentation, drug culture and the absurd. If you can get into it, you'll get way into it. I'm sure of it.

What If Rupert Murdoch’s Empire Were Hacking All The Way Down?

2011-07-19T07:18:00.000-04:00

Rupert Murdoch owns a lot. That sentence doesn’t even need an indirect object. He simply owns a lot. Of newspapers, of movie studios, of television networks, of television programs, of websites, of magazines, of record labels. He even owns fifty percent of Australia’s National Rugby League. Chances are that of the thousands of pieces of content you interact with everyday, a good third to one-half of them link back to him in some sort of gold-plated game of Six Degrees of Rupert Murdoch.

He now owns one hell of a scandal. Murdoch’s News Corporation is the parent company of News International, which published the British tabloid News of the World. It’s recently come to light that News of the World engaged in phone hacking to illegally obtain information. Earlier this month, British prime minister David Cameron called for a massive government inquiry into the affair, hoping to address claims of hacking and police bribery.

High-ranking British police officials are stepping down. Members of Murdoch’s empire are being arrested. The United States is now getting involved: the FBI just began investigating whether or not News Corp’s violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act with the alleged hacking and bribery. Oh yeah, and they might have accessed the voicemails of victims of the 9/11 attacks and the 7/7 London bombings.

Rather than wade into this quagmire and attempt to report on it (there’s plenty of that going on already), I’d like to speculate on what the world would be like if such underhanded behavior pervaded the furthest reaches of Murdoch’s empire. Cue the dream sequence music.

At the Movies

LOS ANGELES – Police inquiries into the phone records of James Cameron reveal that he did, in fact, plagiarize much of his mega-grossing blockbuster Avatar from previous sources.

“Of course I’ve seen Fern Gully!” Cameron can be heard telling his manager in one voicemail. “I cried for the environment three times, but my heart never raced. My eyes never bled from too many dimensions. when it ended, I didn’t feel irrational pangs of loss for a made-up place I’ll never visit. Plus, it needed more knife-wielding robots.”

Law enforcement officers obtained the Cameron tapes after investigators found hacked voicemails on a thumb drive in Cameron’s desk. Recordings on the drive include messages left by Robin Williams, J.R.R. Tolkien’s grandson, and a phone conversation between Kevin Costner and his agent just before filming began on the modern classic Dances With Wolves:

“I’m really excited for this one, Hank. I can’t wait to play a white guy who gets taken in by non-white guys and then convinces those non-white guys that I, a white guy, am just as good at being a non-white guy as they are.”

Avatar was distributed by 20th Century Fox, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, a renowned phone-hacking intelligence agency.

More than a Game

SAN FRANCISCO – Girls gone wild! Police in the Bay Area bust several IGN babes for illegal voice messaging ring. The babes reportedly left sultry and suggestive messages in the voice mailboxes of several prominent members of the games press, primarily targeting major personalities within the videogame blogosphere.

“We just thought it would be a bit of fun,” said veteran babe Jodi O’Connor. “We didn’t think anyone would get hurt. It’s not like these guys have girlfriends or anything.”

Contrary to popular belief, some members of the enthusiast press do have girlfriends, some even have spouses and families. Bad gaming habits can be incredible stressors on even the most solid of relationships, so these guys don’t have much wiggle room when it comes to upsetting the old ball-and-chain.

“I play about 25 hours of Black Ops every week,” said a senior editor at a small gaming blog. Though we can all find his articles online, he declined to comment without anonymity. “Black Ops is my beat. I spend all day at the office writing and editing reviews, but I have to play Black Ops every day at home to keep up to date, even if it means foregoing sex with the wife.”

“So when some girl calling herself HoneyPi starts leaving messages on my phone,” he continued sweatily, “I’m in deep shit. My wife’s a catch, man. She likes Phoenix Wright and Pokémon. I can’t afford to lose her because of this.”

The babes did not act alone it seems. “We don’t know how to do that hacky stuff,” said O’Connor. “Some of the boys from IT helped. We all promised to take pictures with them that they could send home to their mothers. Yeah…that’s not going to happen.”

IGN is a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which declined to comment. Murdoch’s chief executive babe Rebekah Brooks was recently arrested in the News of the World phone hacking scandal.

Take Me Out to the Ballgame

DENVER, Col. – The Colorado Rockies are in need of a new mascot. Dinger, the purple triceratops who has called Denver his home since hatching from an egg at Mile High Stadium in 1994, was arrested last week on charges of illegal wiretapping.

Reportedly distressed by recent allegations that Dinger is not actually a triceratops but a torosaurus, Dinger allegedly tapped the phone lines of several prominent paleontologists in hopes of blackmailing them into dropping the accusations against his dino identity.

“I don’t have anything to hide,” said Ana Gradelby, Associate Professor of Paleontology at Tufts University. “I’m just trying to do my job. Accuracy is tantamount to good science. If we have evidence that triceratops was actually torosaurus, I will not hesitate to share that with the public, no matter how many five-year-old hearts get broken in the process.”

Dinger was not available for comment. His handler, a hippie named Steve from Boulder, did hold a press conference the afternoon of the arrest.

“The Dinger’s just plain tweaked about the whole thing, ya know?” said Steve. “He never meant to hurt nobody – okay, maybe he did. But he was hurting, too, ya know? You wouldn’t wanna get up every morning, look in the mirror and call yourself a human only to go to work and have some drunk archaeologist calling you a monkey, would ya? Didn’t think so.”

Rockies majority owners Charlie and Dick Monfort also declined to comment. Minority owner News Corporation issued the following statement: “Dinger sure as hell didn’t learn that from us! How could he? We don’t even speak Torosaur!”

Snap Back to Reality

Fade out the dream sequence music. Of course I’m just having fun here. The story’s still developing, and we won’t know the full extent of the corruption or the potential ramifications until the investigations have concluded, which could take months or years.

It’s just amazing to me how many pies have been pierced by Murdoch’s wrinkled old fingers. The Rockies, seriously? I didn’t really dig into Fox News because I’m sure The Daily Show will be skewering them better than I ever could over coming weeks. The Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal published an editorial defending itself (and Murdoch a bit) while also pointing a few fingers back at other outlets.

A little bit of mockery won’t change the situation. The impossibly high stakes of this scandal mean it can only be touched by the most powerful branches of relevant governments. News Corp is tied into how millions (perhaps billions?) of people receive news and consume entertainment. If some joking helps you follow such a huge story, then this silliness was well worth it.

The End of the Midnight Madness: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2

2011-07-18T14:40:00.005-04:00

"Wingardium Leviosa!"

"Expelliarmus!"

"Alohomora!"

"Avada Kedavra!"

Hearing those pretend, faux-magicky-language spells shouted out by tween voices, watching them flick their substitute wands (anything from a twig to a drumstick to a chopstick to a sewing needle) with grandiose flourishes, checking out all the robes, cloaks, scarves, glasses, lightning bolts drawn onto foreheads... let's just say it takes me back. I was there, nine years and four months ago, when the first installment of this storied seven-book, eight-movie franchise exploded onto America's silver screens. I was standing in line (in those barbaric times before assigned seating), waiting anxiously to rush in and claim the best seats for our group of young, fresh-faced aficionados of witchcraft and wizardry. I was watching with wonder as Harry Potter's bespectacled face first filled the screen and I was listening as John Williams's majestic score first filled my ears. And I haven't missed one film since.

Looking out over the sea of eager fans, the old and the young, the costumed and non-costumed, those desperately trying to hold onto one last shred of dignity and those who had long ago abandoned all hope - you could tell it was the end of an era. Now, almost 20 hours and more than $7 billion later, we were all about to take part in the last midnight showing of the last Harry Potter film EVER. And you could tell that everyone was thinking the same thing: IT'S FINALLY ABOUT TO END!

Haha, I kid, I kid! Everyone was very excited and emotional about the series drawing to a close. Especially those of us in our generation, who had very nearly grown up with these crazy kids, and followed them though many wondrous and varied adventures. Think of what we've seen Harry, Ron, and Hermione go through in the seven movies since we met them back in 2001: they go to school, someone tries to kill them, they save the day, they go back to school, someone else tries to kill them, they triumph unexpectedly in some task, they go to school again, someone... :::come to think of it, maybe it is just about time for this series to gracefully take a final bow...

...sitting in a tree...

But the beauty part about HP 7-2 is that it doesn't start at the beginning of another nondescript school year. It puts you right in the middle of our three heroes' quest to find "horcruxes" (pieces of Voldmort's soul) and destroy the Dark Lord himself. (They're all using his name now; the whole "You Know Who" angle actually gets an explanation and a nice payoff by Dame Maggie Smith). But that's about all I remember from the previous film in the series. That and a vague recollection of Ron quitting the band for a while. And of course the image of the ghostly forms of Harry and Hermione making out (pictured) is forever burned into my retinas.

But the grand prize for creepiest imagery in the Harry Potter film series has to go to {[(SPOILER ALERT)]} that creepy Voldemort fetus that's just hanging out with Dumbledore in Harry's imaginary "you've-just-been-killed-but-have-the-choice-to-come-back-to-life" room. Aside from that soon-to-be-plastered-all-over-the-internet image, the only redeeming quality of that sequence - plotwise and execution-wise - was that it gave us an excuse to see more of Sir Michael Gambon as Dumbledore, even after he died in movie 6. He's the cherry on the cake of a very impressive cast across the board for these films.

But as far as the story behind that sequence goes: Am I alone in thinking that Harry's unexplained ability to come back from the dead constitutes an unforgivable blight on the whole series? I mean, I get the Jesus metaphor (or even possibly a baptism metaphor?), but Jesus is a deity. It makes sense that he would have superpowers. Harry Potter's just a guy. What makes him so special except that he's "chosen?"

Maybe it would be easier to understand had I read all the books, but I stopped reading after the fourth one. I know, I know, I quit reading before the books start getting really good, everyone says. But why should I continue on with a dull and predictable literary effort on the blind promise of it improving, when I could get a much quicker and more dynamic retelling at the theaters? No, uh-uh. At least I enjoy the movies; the books make me feel like I'm plodding through molasses.

And when I say I enjoy the movies, I mean more that I enjoy the experience of going to see the movies. I don't know if they'd stand up to repeated viewings, especially plotwise. I enjoyed catching snippets of the endless marathons that seemingly took over all of cable TV for the week leading up to the Big Event. But the real excitement in seeing a movie like this lies in being a part of the record-breaking flood to the box office on opening night. It's getting dressed up in costumes for the event. It's listening to the screams of dozens of tween girls as the lights dim (although for us, that didn't happen until at least 3-4 minutes after the movie had started. Plus the whole thing was out of focus. I know it's a late show, but Pacific Theaters should've done better for this milestone.)

It's also seeing the debut of the Dark Knight Rises teaser trailer... BUT OH WAIT, we didn't get that either. And it's not like it was limited to 3D screenings. I guess we just got the short end of the stick, having to be content with Warhorse and Happy Feet 2. That was a disappointing aspect of the proceedings, but all in all the seventh movie provided a very adequate and action-packed cap to this - dare I say - magical franchise. I'm sorry to see it go, but I had fun watching it leave.

67 Congos

Epilogue

19 Years and 351 Days Later.

It's been nearly two "HPCycles" (what used to be called "decades") since Warner Bros. decided to re-release the Harry Potter Octoilogy every ten years, each film coming out on the ten-year anniversary of their original release dates. I thought the Midnight Madness was finally over that night all those years ago, when I wrote that blog post about it, my 45-year-old self says to himself, as he waits outside the old building that used to house a "movie theater," a relic from when large spaces in the physical plane were necessary for large crowds to gather. Because now, in the year 2030, everyone is linked to everybody else through the Internet connections in our minds!

Or something like that. And there are flying cars and robots and junk. And everybody has kids, yet nobody looks any older. That was back when I saw film 7-2 for the first time in theaters, my future self's interior monologue continues. To think that people actually thought Warner Bros. would just let the franchise die back then. Rather than make some biting commentary about the greed and lack of originality in movie studios these days, my future self just shrugs and heads into the building. The floating robotic attendant scans his retina and teleports him into his assigned seat. He grins as the popcorn and soda he telepathically ordered materialize in front of him. Hey, it got me shelling out for a ticket showing after showing. And I don't even like Harry Potter.

Thoughts of an Aspiring Music Snob: Week 115 - Björk

2011-07-18T07:00:00.000-04:00

Yup, it's a picture of the swan dress. It's the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Björk. Admit it: it's the first thing you thought of too.

Björk is one of those musicians whose fame as a celebrity has somehow managed to eclipse her fame as a musician. In the United States of America, where she was never as popular as in the rest of the world, it's possible that many people only know the singer from her exotic-sound monosyllabic moniker and her famous cygnine Oscar garb. Until this week, I don't think I had ever heard a piece of music by Björk, even though I totally knew who she was as a public figure.

It's nice when my musical ignorance yields these surprises, and a figure I dismissed as a mere European novelty actually turns out to have talent, a willingness to experiment, and some great music to back up her image. I had assumed Björk was some sort of faux-classical easy listening - an Icelandic Yanni, if you will. Instead, she stocks up her influences to Stockhausen, Brian Eno and Kraftwerk, which is a pretentious list but also a surefire way to make me take notice and realize that I'm really going to enjoy this week's music.

I suppose part of my surprise, I have to admit, comes from the gender issue. I'm used to my electronic music coming from men - either stiff, robotic men, or deejays hyped up on trance drugs. When you look at the small, delicate figure of a Scandinavian women, you hardly expect her album to yield the heavy electronic stomp of "Army of Me."

Put simply, don't just an artist by her gender. Or her wardrobe. This Björk week has not only been one of my favorite weeks so far, but also one of the biggest surprises.

WEEK 115

ARTIST OF THE WEEK: Björk

WHAT I KNEW BEFORE: Apart from the swan-dress, almost nothing.

MY LISTENING: I listened to Post (1995) every day this week. I also listened to Debut (1993) and Homogenic (1997) three times, and Vespertine (2001) once.

WHAT I LIKED: Björk is at her best when she starts blasting electronic noises to create some sort of terrifying vision of Scandinavia, filled with volcanoes and trolls and pixie-ish sopranos with child-like yet fear-inducing voices. "Army of Me" is a brilliant opening track, and somehow Björk's voice, which seems so thin on its own, manages to meet the electronics on their own level. Instead of getting drowned out, her voice fits with this kind of orchestration in a way that I wouldn't have expected.

It gets better on Homogenic, probably my favorite album of the week, which goes even further into this strange sort of apocalyptic electronica. "Hunter" combines drums, computers, and strings to great effect, and on "5 Years," Björk's voice barely manages to rise above the fray. Things could easily turn cheesy with these soaring ballads and electronic experimentation (and some might argue that they do), but it's too Björk credit that she still manages to craft the electronics to fit her own vocal style, rather than experimenting for the sake of experimentation. Björk often dances around a melody, her voice stuttering and jumping from pitch to pitch in a way that emulates the electronics in the background, and this keeps the listener on edge. You're never quite sure which way things are going to go next.

Björk's earlier stuff might not convey the terrors of Ragnarök in the way that Homogenic does, but there's still plenty of good stuff to be found on Debut and Post, and in some ways her vocal talents are given a better show on these albums. "Violently Happy" has her stuttering and stalling through some fast-paced beats, like a gloomy ghost that's haunting the dance floor, while "The Anchor Song" takes things slower and allows Björk's voice to beautifully stand on its own. Really, Björk's vocal tricks alone are worth the price of admission, but the fun and strange and often terrifying instrumentation is what puts it over the edge. What's amazing about her music is not the electronics alone (of which I don't think she's doing a whole lot of brand-new stuff), or her voice (of which there are hundreds of well-trained sopranos), but that she uses instrumentation and voice as specific tools for her own brand of pixie-demon-electro-pop. Nothing ever feels extraneous, even in the songs that are bursting with what seems like hundreds of sounds. Björk knows what sort of atmosphere she wants to achieve, and uses whatever crazy tools are on hand - crotales, vibraphone, synthesizer, strings - to do it.

WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE:

There's a few points where Björk's genre-hopping got old, especially when she decides she's going to be a lounge singer on "It's Oh So Quiet." Yeah, it's impressive, I guess, that she can howl like that, but the song is one of the few times that Björk crossed the line and went from deeply emotive to corny. Similarly, when Björk breaks out the harp for "Cover Me," I'm less than entertained. There are a few songs I liked that were sparsely orchestrated and featured whispers, but mostly I preferred the loud melodies and obnoxious electronics.

"There's More To Life Than This" also got annoying, but that's more from the sound effects than anything else.

RANDOM DEMAND OF THE WEEK: Why hasn't Björk done a Bond song yet? I think she could do an awesome Bond song.

FURTHER EXPLORATION WOULD ENTAIL: I guess if I wanted to get hard-core, I'd pick up 1977's Björk, made when she was only eleven years old. More realistically, the next step is probably Medúlla, which is almost entirely a cappella. I wonder if I will like Björk as much without the benefit of her bag of electronic tricks.

BEST SONG YOU'VE HEARD: "Hyper-Ballad"

Björk does a lot of songs that start soft but build to some epic musical climax. But I'm a sucker for that trick, and "Hyper-Ballad" is really the best of them. And it has the catchiest chorus.

BEST SONG YOU HAVEN'T HEARD: "Jóga"

I guess this was a minor hit in Europe, but it never charted in the US, so I'm going to assume you haven't heard it. It's the best example of how "strings+synth+Björk"="awesome."

NEXT WEEK'S ARTIST: The Pretenders

After the Jump: The Many Emmys

2011-07-17T22:04:00.000-04:00

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Hey, look at us being all on time with the podcast this week! As long as "10:00pm on Sunday" counts as "on time" for you guys. Probably it does.

This week! We talk about the Netflix price hike, Canada's Internet caps and the legislation surrounding same, the Emmys, the possibility of an Android tablet from Amazon, and more!

Thanks for listening! See you next week!

Sunday Reading: A Prank Customer Letter

2011-07-17T10:49:00.001-04:00

In the generational shift from letters to email, I fear we’ve lost something. It’s not the care with which one chooses words while writing in ink. It’s not the intimacy of sending someone a physical manifestation of your feelings, be they love, anger, worry, etc.

We’ve lost a good deal of pranking.

Think about it. Pranks rely on anonymity, something social networking and modern email etiquette have slowly eroded. Anything you don’t recognize immediately gets sent to your Spam folder before being deleted.

You have to physically deal with a letter. Sure, you can throw it away afterwards, but it’s likely that you’ll at least tear open the envelope, read the handwritten or typed text, and then discover that someone was playing a joke on you.

Just check out some of this letter from R.J. Bumpass, sent to the Blum Manufacturing Company, a cowbell producer, in 1957.

“By golly everything has happened to me expect a spudnixt falling on me. Several evenings, couple weeks back was flagged by some indians, were broke down. Did not get to bed untill 2:00 or 3:00 o’clock. As far as I am concerned, people better be where they are headed that time of day, I am not stopping.”

This is either the rant of a crazy person looking to buy more cowbells, or it is a well-crafted prank letter sent for the amusement of the Blum Company. You can read the rest of the letter here. Meanwhile, I’m off to locate a functioning Underwood. I’ve got some letters to write.

Book Review: George R.R. Martin - "A Dance With Dragons"

2011-07-15T15:00:00.000-04:00

"It has been a while between books, I know," George R.R. Martin admits in the introduction to his new novel. One can only imagine this line being delivered wearily, the response to thousands of fans clamoring for the next installment in the epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire. It's been six years since the previous book, and that book only featured half the main cast. Long-time readers haven't met up with certain characters in A Dance with Dragons since 2000. That was eleven years ago. Bill Clinton was president. It's been a long time.

So it's hard to approach reading A Dance with Dragons as one would a regular book. The build-up, both from the long wait and the exposure from the HBO series, has led to increased expectations and a reader base large enough to single-handedly revive the fortune of some bookstores. It's hard for a book to live up to that sort of anticipation. Additionally, there's the personal element to consider. When I last read about some of these characters, I was fourteen years old. It's a bit jarring to pick up the new book and realize that absolutely no time has passed for these characters I left eleven years ago.

After three immensely enjoyable books, Martin ran into a bit of problems with A Feast for Crows in 2005. The book featured only half of the main cast, and they happened to be the least interesting half. Fans missed their favorite characters, questioned the slowing pace of events, and wondered if publishing a half-book wasn't just a way to sell something while working around some sort of writers' block. Excited as I was about Dance, I was also a tad nervous. Martin's been writing these books for close to two decades. What if he's lost his touch?

Luckily, Dance at least acknowledges and corrects some of the inherent problems of the previous volume. It's perhaps not up to the quality of the first few installments, but it also speaks of an author who took some criticisms to heart and publicly stated that he wanted to avoid a disappointing conclusion ala Lost. The book is meatier, the characters more interesting, the pace livelier, and the quanity of "Holy Shit!" moments is substantially higher.

The cast of Dance alone makes for a big improvement. Like Feast, most of the plots feature complicated political machinations and sometimes-directionless travels through exotic locations. Unlike Feast, the cast of characters this time around makes it seem worthwhile. Here we have a horny young queen choosing between suitors who just want her dragons, a drunken patricidal dwarf stumbling through exile, and a sullen young bastard commander preparing to fight ice zombies. There's also prophetic wizard-priests, pig-riding midgets, triple-crossing mercenaries, a fleet of violent seafaring raiders, and a guild of assassins who double as a religious cult. In short, there's a bunch of pulpy, larger-than-life personalities and delightfully complex webs of alliance and betrayal, which make Dance a fast read even with its 1000+ page count.

Martin has also grown somewhat as a writer in the past decade. He used to work in Hollywood writing for television, and the first book in the series read like a screenplay - fast-paced, dialogue-heavy, quickly switching between one scene and the next. Dance takes more time moving the plot along, but this does not make it dull. On the contrary, this allows Martin to take more time to explore his world, embellish locations and cultures, and let his characters breathe and grow. While the story may not move as quickly, the quality of writing more than makes up for it.

But if the fifth book in series also makes the best of some of Martin's strengths - vivid locations, memorable characters, left-field plot twists - is also exposes some weaknesses that have been inherent in the series since the beginning. The level of violence, especially sexual violence, still remains uncomfortably over-the-top; I give Martin credit for not whitewashing medieval society, but he has yet to learn that it's often more effective to fade the black and let the reader fill in the details. Dance is still filled with detailed descriptions of death, dismemberment and rape, but by this point in the series these events seem less shocking and more a chore to read through. You can only hammer home the point that life sucked for peasants and women so many times before it grows stale. The most shocking and memorable scenes in Dance aren't the gritty ones.

More importantly, Martin's penchant for employing cliffhangers has only gotten worse. Perhaps again stemming from his screenwriting roots, the first few books in the series were tightly plotted, each character with their own arc and each plot with a beginning, middle and end. In Dance, this sort of plotting is gone, and the novel doesn't reach a conclusion so much as just sort of fizzle out, as if Martin figured he wrote enough pages and sent it off to be published. Each of the first three books in the series can be read as books, well-structured with their own conclusions. With Feast and Dance, the books read more as a continuing serial than a planned narrative.

How much this bothers you probably depends on how quickly you want the plot to wrap up, because while Dance packs a lot of plot into its pages, it ends with the main narrative seemingly little advanced. Nearly every character is left on some sort of cliffhanger, to the point where it considerably cheapens the narrative. It's like a sword-and-sorcery soap opera, that perpetually leaves you hanging on Friday to convince you to tune in next Monday, the story running in circles without ever developing. (This is most blatant in the chapters about the young queen Daenerys Targaryen, where it's very clear that she's simply treading water until other plotlines intersect with hers). Newer fans might not be bothered, but if you've been waiting years for some sort of resolution to certain plots, you're probably going to still be waiting. Martin has proved he still has it in him to craft an engaging, entertaining story, but not that he has it in him to tie up the myriad of plots and bring everything to a conclusion.

Martin himself has admitted he is unhappy with the large number of cliffhangers in this volume, but he couldn't reach a good stopping point that would still feasibly fit within a single hardback volume. On the one hand, one might think that if Martin tightened up his narrative a bit, he'd have room for a more proper conclusion. On the other hand, excessive subplots, sizable casts and prosodic bloat are half the fun of lengthy fantasy series such as this one. But the lack of a fulfilling climax makes one wonder why, exactly, this book took six years to write, and whether or not Martin simply pushed back his structural difficulties into the next volume.

In the end, this makes Dance not quite as good of a book as the first three, but certainly more entertaining than the endless travelogues and vapid politicking of Feast. There's some great characters, a truly epic scope, and an urgent feel to much of the story. But the abrupt conclusion and several plotlines that are a little too languidly-paced make for a book that seems to have sacrificed a rousing finale for too much filler and build-up. Martin is back on track in terms of entertaining; let's just hope that he can now work on actually bringing this story to a close. And that it doesn't take another decade to see these characters again.

The Uplifting Pessimism of Louie

2011-07-15T07:14:00.000-04:00

We all have dark spots in our brains. Dimly lit corners out of which the nastiest, most unseemly, deplorable thoughts emerge. Like vermin, they scuttle back to darkness the second we shine light on them. We prefer them that way. Few of us have the courage to go in after them, even fewer have the courage to invite them into the light.

Louis C.K. has such courage.

At forty-three, Louis C.K. (née Szekely) has lived a more thorough life than most of us ever will. He’s written for The Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, The Dana Carvey Show, won an Emmy in 1999 for his work on The Chris Rock Show, written several screenplays, created a sitcom on HBO, starred in several comedy specials including the Emmy-nominated Chewed Up.

Why call C.K.’s life ‘thorough’? He’s also gotten married, gotten divorced, and shares custody of his two daughters with his ex-wife. He’s been through enough crap to know that every bright sun comes with its own dirty gray lining, and he’s unafraid to share that truth with his audience.

You’d know all this if you watched his FX show Louie, for which C.K. recently received Emmy nominations in acting and writing.

Louie, like so many stand-up-centered sitcoms before it, shows C.K. playing a fictionalized version of himself. He walks the streets of New York, cares for his daughters half of every week, and works on new stand-up material in basement clubs for small audiences. Newly-divorced (he and his real-world wife divorced in 2008), he struggles to meet and date women, finding his age, his career, his body, and his children to be major roadblocks.

In between scenes, C.K. performs in the Comedy Cellar, delivering jokes only tangentially related to the episode’s narrative. These aren’t the thematic bookends or jumping-off points of early Seinfeld. They are parallel thought processes drawn unfiltered from the leaky tap that is C.K.’s mind.

The stark negativity and despair that comprises much of C.K.’s worldview is accompanied by so much humor it’s hard not to find it somewhat comforting. His pessimism and acknowledgement of everything frustrating and degrading is so extreme that it makes our own foul thoughts so much kinder by comparison.

C.K.’s particular brand of observational comedy will often veer suddenly into taboo, and C.K.’s earnest desire for explanations of all things awful and hush-hush undersells the shock value. In a stand-up segement from Season One’s “Dentist/Tarese”, Louie, with bemused sincerity, posits, “If we minded child molesting less fewer kids would die.” He logically defends the statement, daring us to stay with him and laugh instead of booing him outright for having the gall say anything remotely so offensive. He knows it’s wrong. We know it’s wrong. And yet, people are laughing. By telling the joke, he’s asking why.

Written, directed, and edited by C.K., Louie provides no cushion between its subject matter and the audience. The viewer’s completely at the mercy of C.K., as is the character Louie. C.K. employs slanted camera angles and disorienting jump cuts when other sitcoms would merely have Louie generically “freak out”. He channels the crucifixion sequence from The Last Temptation of Christ, only it’s elementary schoolers performing the event under the disdainful eye of an old man who represents the two millennia’s worth of Catholic guilt. He kills a hobo, raises our hopes that Louie might actually connect with someone, then uses the hobo’s death to ruin everything.

Not all of C.K.’s fanciful flights click, but his short film/sitcom/sketch comedy structure’s pliant enough to absorb the occasional misstep. The aforementioned episode “Dentist/Tarese” from the first season features a dentist’s chair dream sequence involving Osama Bin Laden, terrorism, and banana fellatio that I didn’t particularly care for. But it rebounds with a (wholly unrelated) poignant and amusing story wherein Louie courts an uninterested grocery store clerk, pushing and pushing until he winds up dangerously close to stalker territory.

Louie’s loose structure could be a deterrent for those weaned on more conventional comedies. Not every plot gets closure. Characters disappear and reappear with abandon. There’s little explanation or context for the stand-up sections, but we should be used to that by now: characters on Modern Family and The Office talk to the camera without the faintest justification. C.K.’s likened the show to visual stand-up, a coalescing of quick punch lines and short films.

In more cohesive episodes, absurdities give way to grounded, truthful moments and vice versa. The second season opens with Louie’s pregnant sister Gretchen visiting. She goes into labor and the scene descends into chaos. His neighbors arrive, offering to watch his daughters and accompany Louie and Gretchen to the hospital. Louie’s forced to trust complete strangers in an emergency, only to be humiliated when the labor turns out to be a mortifying false alarm. We’re welcome to laugh at the high-stakes hilarity; we’re also asked to bear witness to a man learning a lesson about humility and generosity.

Louie is ultimately about a man discovering what type of man he’s become and how much room for change he has left. Louis C.K.’s turned an incredibly honest, unflattering mirror on himself. He’s a father who’s still figuring out what realities that job entails. He’s a comedian who uses humor to shock, to probe, to guard, and to (often unsuccessfully) woo. He’s an inquisitive misanthrope who would love to look on the bright side of things but just can’t, with good conscience, ignore the bad.

All this considered, the Emmy nominations should be no surprise: he’s also an artist of great courage and talent who makes light of his own darkness.

All-Star Tuesday: One Year Later

2011-07-13T15:55:00.000-04:00

About a year ago, I was fortunate enough to attend last year's MLB All-Star Game in Anaheim. Yesterday I was fortunate enough to liveblog the Home Run Derby, which featured an exciting, last-ups victory complete with a record number of home runs hit in the final round by the Yankees' Robinson Cano. Just when I was beginning to think of the #HRDerby as dull and repetitive, they come back with an exciting nailbiter - kind of like how whenever MythBusters starts to get too stuffy and science-y, they pull out a sequence featuring Kari Byron running through some obstacle course or something.

And yet even after all the fun I had last year, and all the fun the fans in attendance have, and all the fun players appear to be having on the field, getting the chance to fraternize with the best and brightest in the sport, there's still a contingent arguing that the All-Star Game is obsolete? Because of TV ratings? Come on! Everybody knows that TV ratings only exist for the benefit of advertisers and every advertiser knows that the climate of the industry is gravitating away from the 30-second TV spot and towards more new-age, interactive means of reaching consumers.

The All-Star Game is about so much more than TV ratings and showcasing the world's best commercials (the same cannot be said for events of other major sports). It's all the things Mr. Fetter notes in his "Atlantic" article: a break from the grueling baseball season, and a (better) way to decide home field advantage in the World Series (than simple alternation). But it's also about so much more. It's about... well, I won't spoil it in the opening; you'll have to hit the jump to find out.

As a baseball fan who is particularly interested in lineup construction, the All-Star Game provides a first hand look, not just at what a roster made up of the best players in the league would look like, but how they actually play together over the course of a competitive contest. I know this is the case for the All-Star Game in any sport, but just because it's widely true doesn't make it any less true for baseball. The process of selecting the rosters is also highly interactive, allowing fans that truly care to pour over the stats and select the players who truly belong.

Furthermore, in weird, crazed, incredibly unlikely alternate universe where I was not a baseball fan, or had only cursory interest in the great sport, I could imagine the All-Star Game as a tremendous way to gain an understanding of which players are the highest regarded by both the fans and the top managers. I know the All-Star rosters are a little skewed in terms of which players are straight-up the most talented, what with the fan vote essentially being a popularity contest, and so many players declining the opportunity, and every team having a representative no matter what. But it's a very good starting point for potential scholars of the game.

So the game is not only fun for fans before the game, during the game, and after the game, it also provides a (probably) significant economic and cultural boon for the city that gets to host the game. When I was in Phoenix for a pre-season exhibition game, I could see that the city was advertising for the festivities well before the season even started, and I can't imagine they didn't reap some kind of benefit from that.

And beyond the fans and locations, the game looks like it's a great experience for the players. Not just for the perennial All-Stars (excepting the no-shows), but especially for the young first-timers who get to spend a couple days hob-nobbing with their (and our) heroes, learning from them, picking their brains, and just hanging around them absorbing some of their greatness and using it to augment their own.

So I know the All-Star Game isn't going anywhere, despite what the Nielsen box says - if only because high-powered agents love sticking All-Star appearance clauses in their clients' contracts. By the time I post this, we still won't have next-day returns, and I honestly don't know if the declining trend will continue. I hope it doesn't, if only to lend some more traditional legitimacy to the practice of filling up two midsummer nights' worth of primetime programming with more baseball-related activities. But even if viewers are gravitating away from the game, it doesn't mean that people who enjoy it can't enjoy it a little more to make up for it.

The New World of Board Games

2011-07-13T10:44:00.000-04:00

It's been a beautiful week and a half here on the coast of the Delaware Bay. I've tanned. I've been chased off the beach by those fat, biting flies that crave ankle flesh. I've floated in the dead calm brackish waters. And, seeing as I'm the oldest of three, I've played board games. A lot of board games. In fact, it feels like I've taken a trip through a board game museum this week.

And all this play time has, in some small way, been enlightening and sad. I've played the games of my youth, the games of my parents' youth, and brand new ones released in the last decade. They don't make these games like they used to. But if they did my seventeen year old sister probably wouldn't play them. Let's talk a walk through the water-damaged and dusty cardboard halls of board game history. I mean come on, it's the summer, what else are we going to do?

Ancient Games

I wish there was a counter that automatically tallied how many times I've played Checkers in my life. In the hundreds? Thousands? How many times have I said "King Me?" Playing this simple, ancient game after playing complex current games was refreshing. There's no order of play beyond a simple "Me, then you, then me, then you." Nothing's needed but the board, those familiar, ribbed checkers, a friend and some forethought. This ancient game, like Mancala (another family favorite) seems so completely uncluttered.

The Golden Age of Gaming

I'll admit that I'm a sucker for Monopoly. It's the elephant in the room. The game you want to play and absolutely don't want to play. You know it will suck four precious hours (at least!) out of your life, but if you're hyper competitive how can you resist? Playing Monopoly with my friends has always brought out the worst in us. The whiners whine the loudest during Monopoly. The cheaters cheat the hardest. The easily bored give up almost immediately. But this is an old game and it still has so much of the classic "game-ness" to it. Like Scrabble, both games exude a sort of early 20th century need to entertain.

Scrabble, too, is a family favorite. Playing Scrabble against my siblings has always been a self-induced proving ground for me. I'm the writer in the family. I have to score the highest in the game (I almost never do). These games are old fun. They're what most people think of when they think of board games. But the 1980's saw a sharp new revitalization in the world of cardboard and plastic pieces.

The Silver Age of Gaming

Until I wrote and did research for this article I assumed Pictionary was a game from the first half of the 20th century. In its simple premise and immediate gratification I saw an older-world view of having fun. I was shocked to find it created and released in the mid-1980's! I like Pictionary because it naturally changes depending on who you're playing with. Play the game with your college friends and it turns bawdy. Play with little siblings and it's an exercise in explaining how ancient items worked ("No, they're called Jacks and you throw a rubber ball and snatch them...forget it!").

Now Scattergories feels like an '80's game. The social, board-less game of words and association screams new generation. These games were good games. A lot of games that came out in the '80's and early '90's were good games (Trivial Pursuit, Mousetrap, Hungry Hungry Hippos). So what's gone wrong for the new generation? What else but the internet.

The Modern Era of Board Games

It should come as no surprise that board games are losing steam. We're at a point now where most young people (under 20? does that sound fair?) have been so inoculated by the quickness of the internet that playing a board game has little appeal. And why should it? If you can blast your best friend's head off in videogame without having to go to his house, why would you want to schlep a big box over and set it up. A particularly tech-drowned college classmate of mine once bemoaned having to play Monopoly, calling the set-up of the board "loading time" and saying the game was slow and "laggy."

Today's board games attempt to combat that in various ways. Some address the issue of speed and, in my opinion, fall flat. As fun as Scrabble SLAM! may sound, the game is poorly designed. Using cards with letters on them and a fast, competitive gaming mechanic. But you can only use your cards to make four letter words. Lame.

A whole crop of these games were released by Hasbro. Bastardizations of classics with terrible titles like Sorry! REVENGE, The Game of Life Adventures, Monopoly DEAL and Yahtzee HANDS DOWN. They're all aimed at being fast to keep the flow of the game continuous, and they all loose the essential qualities of their predecessors.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel. The Cranium brand of games keeps expanding, is wildly popular with the youth, and invites the gamer to sit down, suck it up, and have some fun. We played both Cranium Turbo Edition and Cranium Pop 5. Both concessions made to the youngest of our clan. The Turbo edition of Cranium still took a good hour to play, but the questions and answers were fast paced and, to my surprise, very difficult (how do you hum the "Hotel California" to a 17 year old?). Pop 5 is all about pop culture, so the game's shelf life won't last long, but it forced us to get up and act, to draw and even to sculpt with clay! If the future of the board game has to go anywhere, I hope it follows it's brain and goes the Cranium route!