After the Jump: Horse Voice

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We all get sick sometimes! For me, this week was one of those times, but I was still more than willing to dope myself up and help record a podcast for you ingrates.

This week, listen in for an enchanting discussion in which we discuss Oscar buzz, Tim Burton, cussing pirates, Nintendo, Hot Tub Time Machine, and the fact that some Italians eat cats.

Music this week is Robo’s theme from the immortal Chrono Trigger, which sounds a lot like one of Chopin’s Nocturnes.

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Writer’s Jukebox – This Ain’t Your Top 40

Try to recall the last time you saw a jukebox.  Maybe it was an old-fashioned, scroll-through-album cards one in a skeezy diner.  Or perhaps one of those obnoxious touch-screen fiascos populating bars these days (the kids do hang out in bars still, right?).  Whatever it was, I can guarantee you it did not contain what we’ve on tap this week.

Gene’s jamming to some Afropop, a genre I didn’t know I needed until he brought it to my attention just now.  Pankin evaluates the Oscar nominees for Best Original Score.  I’ve done my fair share of griping about the Oscars (mostly unabashedly ill-informed whining about the Best Picture category), but I’m at peace with the Best Original Score lineup.  I’m happy to see someone articulate what each score does so well.  And Jordasch’s been listening to crazy amounts of my favorite radio news quiz, Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!

Try and find that kind of variety in your bowling alley’s Tim McGraw-machine.

Gene – Indestructible Afropop

I know I'm a little late to the game, but I found a copy of the Indestructible Beat of Soweto Vol. 1 over the weekend and have been listening to it ever since.  It's really no wonder why Afropop has become such a lodestone in popular music recently; every track on this compilation is standout.  It hit the US in 1986, the same year as Paul Simon's Graceland, and became a bigger commercial success than anyone imagined, probably in no small part because Ladysmith Black Mambazo contributes the final track.  Shanachie Records was kind enough to included translated lyrics and considering how joyful the entire album is, it's amazing how many songs deal with marriage, anxiety about getting married or woes about marriage rituals.  Newlywed or not, it's definitely worth your time.

Pankin – Oscars, A-hoy!

Seeing as we’re smack dab in the middle of Oscar season, I’ve decided to check out the music that was nominated in the Best Original Score category.

Avatar (James Horner, 8 noms, 1 win): Horner creates a recognizable riff to represent a sense of unbelievable wonder, which is woven together with his best take on otherworldly tribal rhythms and textures. The rest of the score is well-developed (if thematically pretty standard) symphonic background fare.

Sherlock Holmes (Hans Zimmer, 7 noms, 1 win): It’s nice to see an old Oscar favorite branch out into something different. I’ve always enjoyed his music, although a great deal of it he straight up pirated from himself. But his score for “Sherlock” is bouncy, quirky, melodically driven, and almost totally devoid of the bombastic-ness for which he’s known.

Up (Michael Giacchino, 2 noms): A masterwork of theme & variation, Giacchino takes a simple waltz theme and smoothes it out so as to either tug mercilessly at your heartstrings or beefs it up to go seamlessly with an action sequence. This one’s my pick in terms of pure musical and emotional merit.

Fantastic Mr. Fox (Alexandre Desplat, 3 noms): This delightful folksy romp perfectly captures the sensibilities of the children’s book on which the film was based while also staying true to the overall feel of a Wes Anderson project. The music can perfectly underscore a touching moment or let you know the characters are in danger without ever becoming unsettling.

The Hurt Locker (Marco Beltrami, 2 noms, & Buck Sanders): Eerie and dissonant sounds abound in this haunting score. I’m not sure whether it’s supposed to represent the barrenness of the desert or the sense of loneliness and terror accompanying such a harrowing profession, or both. I am sure that it’s pretty darn effective.

Jordasch – Wait, Wait…Don’t Chow Me!

Why is all the music I listen to not actually music?

Because I was never given specific orders to cease discussion of my non-musical listening-habits, I'll continue to write about the stuff I listen to that doesn't involve singing or melody (I guess that could include metal/industrial noise, but I digress).  My glorious return to a menial job stuffing envelopes has allowed me to listen to that GIGANTIC backlog of podcasts I have in iTunes.  Actually, "had" is closer to the truth, since I chowed through my roughly 15 hours of Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me! episodes from the past few months and am now in the process of making This American Life my bitch.

Wait, Wait seems to epitomize everything that's sublimely unhip about NPR: it's a game show (lame) featuring comedians/panelists,Hollywood Squares-style, (lame lame) telling topical jokes (more like Lame, Lame...Don't Tell Me!).  But with its listener limerick challenges (led into by host Peter Sagal saying something like, "It's time for [announcer] Carl Kassel to dust off a copy of his favorite book, Rhyme and Punishment"), cheesy faux-journalistic theme music, and often inexplicable guests (Neil Sedaka?), Wait, Wait achieves a sort of perfect uncoolness.  Where other modern game shows actually delude themselves into thinking they might be cool (see Howie Mandell's John-Travolta-in-his-last-two-movies goatee on Deal or No Deal), Wait, Wait goes straight for the dork jugular, wringing the guilt out of a guilty pleasure (the panelist comedy game show) simply by being self-aware.  Sagal loves nothing more than a bad pun, except maybe poking fun at how "indoor" NPR listeners are ("Youth is wasted on you people").  Plus, instead of Whoopi Goldberg or that guy who hosted America's Funniest Home Videos who isn't Bob Sagat, we get writers for Real Time with Bill Maher,brilliant dysfunctional comedians, and the president of the Authors' Guild (who, incidentally, sounds like a drunk cowboy).  And they're all weird-lookin', 'cuz it's radio!  NPR, I could kiss you.

Oh yeah, and even though my iTunes seems to indicate I haven't been listening to shit that isn't a podcast lately, I seem to remember listening to some Sigur Ros and Randy Newman (Sail Away is my SHIT).

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Sportertainment: When The Whims of The Fans Taint The Merits of The Game

The product changes at the whim of the consumer, the government answers to the voting population, and professional sports teams are at the mercy of their fans.

This is the way that our society works; the natural order by which “the little guy” is imbued with a modicum of control over things larger than himself. While this is an invaluable system for many operations, sometimes I wish that the mass of sports fans would just shut the hell up and leave their damn teams alone.

The fickle and capricious entity that is “the fan base” has nearly total control over the path that a professional sports organization takes for a number of reasons, some sensible and others troublesome. In the purest sense, a professional sports team’s function is entertainment – that’s their business model. A movie can be artistic, but it requires money and that money comes from attracting viewers. A sports organization may love the game and may wish only to display the talents of dedicated athletes engaged in skilled competitions, but to do so it must obtain its primary income from those who pay for tickets or merchandise.

Just as I have felt agonized over the careful balancing act between art and entertainment in the film industry, so have I become frustrated with the similar conflict between my love of a sport and its role as an entertainment medium. I project my hopes of teamwork, dedication, hard work, and responsibility onto my local team and instead find it subject to the whims of opinionated sports bloggers who play fantasy sports online to satiate their irrational urges to control. And no matter how noble, how respectful to the purity of the game that a general manager wants to be, he or she must always act with the underlying understanding that the ultimate goal is to put fans in seats and money in vendors’ registers.

My bitter acknowledgement of this duplicity usually dissuades me from becoming involved in professional sports organizations, though it’s not hard to sweep me up in the excitement despite my ethical and self-important reservations. I became a dedicated Mariners fan in 2001 when the team won a record-tying 116 games and I haven’t been able to wean myself away since.

Yet through all of my life in Portland, I have never been tempted to become a Blazers fan until last year. A team of young, energetic athletes who never gave up, fought hard for each other, gave back to the city, and acted as role models to their community was easy to root for. Even their bitter defeat in the first round of the playoffs was a glorious defeat, worth watching every heartbreaking moment of. As this year’s season reaches its peak, I sadly watch as the raging, mercurial fans pour comments across the internet, which slowly worm their way up the organization. I fear that my hopes of purity will be lost in the gluttonous struggle for faster championships and bigger piles of money as dictated by a bunch of jerk fans who know exactly how much power they have to complain.

The Trail Blazers joined the NBA in 1970 and failed to qualify for the post-season for six years. It wasn’t until the ABA-NBA merger of 1976 and the drafting of Bill Walton that the team had  winning record, and the Blazers won their lone NBA championship in 1977. Starting that year, the team began a sellout streak of 814 games -- currently the longest-standing in sports history -- that did not end until 1995 when the team moved to a larger facility. Since then, Portland has continued a strong pace of consecutive sellouts even during the rough years. This sounds like a dedicated fan base, right?

During the 1980s the Blazers were a consistent presence in the playoffs. But because they never advanced beyond the conference semifinals (what sports-writers cutely like to call “struggling”), coaches were fired and replaced. After the team was purchased by billionaire Paul Allen, coach Rick Adelman nursed the Blazers back to the NBA finals in 1990 and 1992, and in 1991 they posted a league best 63-19 record. However, because of their failure to win championships, Adelman was fired. Naturally, that kind of utter failure could not be tolerated

… wait, what? The failure of going to two NBA finals and posting a league-best record?

Despite controversial moves, the team still appeared in the postseason for 21 straight years from 1983 to 2004 when the pressure of micro-managing and championship-obsession finally caught up. During the 2000’s, the “Jail Blazers” showed repeated patterns of irresponsibility and disrespect. Numerous players were arrested for marijuana possession and animal abuse, and Bonzi Wells famously told Sports Illustrated, “"they [fans] really don't matter to us. They can boo us every day, but they're still going to ask for our autographs if they see us on the street.”

In 2007 the team was resurrected by the miraculous combination of Kevin Pritchard becoming the General Manager, rookie of the year Brandon Roy, and Paul Allen building an incredible staff to rebuild the team’s image and win back the city. They did a spectacular job is just two years.

Heading into this season, everyone was salivating over playoff hopes. Players’ faces covered city buildings; they have inspired the love of fans of all ages. Unfortunately, a slew of freak injuries (including one to the head coach during a scrimmage with his short-handed team) have seen the team struggle to meet the exceptionally high expectations placed upon them. While they’re still in the playoff hunt, a competitive conference may end up edging them out.

Fans have lost their minds over this. Pushing for trades, crying for the firing of Coach McMillan and constantly criticizing the lineup, Blazers fans can’t possibly accept the idea that not making the playoffs would not in fact be the end of their team forever. A talented group of incredibly dedicated athletes are trying desperately to maintain their optimism, unselfish play, and team chemistry in the face of trade rumors and whiny bloggers in only the third year of this ethical 180 degree conversion. 

A few weeks ago, Pritchard and Allen traded away two popular players for a short-term, high-risk, unfamiliar player from LA, sending a message that the immediate satisfaction of a playoff berth is more important than long term goals, more important than team chemistry, and more important than all the attitudes they were trying to build about dedication, drive, and teamwork.

Sports fans are just like every other entertainment-hungry viewers. They don’t know how to look back, other than to count how many years it’s been since the last championship. It’s easy to ignore 21 consecutive playoff berths; it’s easy to forget which past mistakes lead to dark times.

What do people root for in a sports team? Why the loyalty? It’s obviously not the players, the coaches, the front office or even the stadium, since those things are transient. Is it just about the name and the fame? It should be something deeper. Of course the ultimate goal is to watch your team win it all, but it should also be about winning with certain values that you share. For me, it’s integrity, dedication, and cooperation – elements than many fans are all too ready to forget about.

I know there is no real reconciliation between the merits of a game and the necessity for entertainment. I am familiar enough with history and with professional sports that I am prepared for the inevitable disappointment. I just wish that fans weren’t so fickle, and that watching sports could be as pure as looking at art or watching film…oh wait. Damn.

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Google Implores: Put Your Songs in Our Cloud

After reading what Chris wrote yesterday about the impending revelation/massive-copyright-debacle that is Google Books, I was reminded of a piece I recently read on Wired.com about Google’s forays into digital music.

Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk (great name, by the way) uses Apple’s recent purchase of Lala as a jumping-off point to discuss the future of Google’s relationship with the music industry.  Lala, in addition to offering a broad catalogue of purchasable licensed music, allows users to store their digital record collections on the ubiquitous cloud.  Uploaded music can then be streamed by other registered users, fostering a sort of global, mp3-swapping community. 

But the key aspect, as Buskirk asserts, is the use of the cloud.  Google already owns YouTube, which – now coupled with Sony and Universal Music’s Vevo – has long since surpassed television as the primary channel for music videos.  Plus, any Internet-ready smartphone can easily stream songs via YouTube.  Are you reading this on your iPhone?  Go listen to “Ali in the Jungle” or this crazy Russian song.  Why?  Because you can.  And because Google has the power to give its properties search priority.  So when you Google a song, it can put whatever music service it may purchase (or invent) at the top.

Plus, it looks like Google is eyeing Catch Media, whose selling point (like Lala’s) is “the ability to suck a user’s music collection up into the cloud and serve it to them on a multitude of devices.”  Couple this with Google’s not-so-secret plan to give us all super-fast Internet access and you’ve got digital music coming out every possible wazoo in nanoseconds.

This all sounds exciting, but I’m not sure if I’m as ready for the cloud as I like to think I am.  Call me old-fashioned, but I quite enjoy knowing the physical location of the hard drive on which my music sits.  It’s splitting hairs, I know, but at least then I can claim ownership of actual bytes of data as opposed to simply owning thousands of listening licenses, which is exactly what a shift to the cloud would mean.  It’s hard to say you own a book on your Kindle.  What you actually own is the right to bring up specific lines of text (or recorded sound waves, in the case of music) whenever you want. 

Sure, the cloud looks appealing.  But until we’re certain what we’re losing by taking flight, I’m happy with my feet firmly planted on digital soil.

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Opting Out of Google Books

Grab the nearest book you have lying around. Any book will do. Open it up to the copyright page, and you should see a fun little warning that tells you something to the effect of "All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission."

What a nice piece of advice! Now, go to the Google Books website and search for that very book. If the one you chose happened to be one of the ten million that Google has scanned into their database, there's a good chance that you found your title. Even if no preview of this book is available, Google still provides a "snippet view", which allows the user to search for specific phrases from the text, all sheltered under the doctrine of fair use. More liberal publishing companies might have allowed Google to feature a few pages, or even entire chapters, as a "preview" that is viewable online.

"But wait!" you exclaim. "Isn't that a violation of the copyright, specifically the part about not reproducing the text, transmitting it, or storing it in a retrieval system?" How does Google get away with this hat trick of transgressions? In the fall of 2005, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers sued Google for just this reason, citing "massive copyright infringement". Even Google's claim that the Google Books project is nothing but a digital library catalog with an impressive search function doesn't hold water. It's true that Google allows full text view only for those works in the public domain, or for those which they gained permission. But the fact that the texts of millions of other books are stored in Google's servers is still a violation of copyright, even if these books are unavailable for public perusal.

This case has been bandied about for the past five years, as Google has struggled to settle with the authors and publishers who initiated the lawsuit. At the same time, the issue has become more and more relevant. Not only has Google's book scanning continued unabated (currently they have scanned ten million books, compared to a scant total of one million in 2007), but other similar digital books projects have fallen by the wayside. Microsoft pulled the plug on Live Search Books in 2008, and any other similar projects lack Google's ambition and seemingly limitless funds. This means that if the Google Books project ever comes to fruition, it will be an effective monopoly. Google wants to make the case that it is providing all the services of a public library, but public libraries are supported by tax dollars and answerable to their citizens, whereas Google's control over such a database leads to questions of censorship or unfair promotion.

Last October, a settlement was reached in the lawsuit between Google and the authors and publishers. The proposed settlement - which has yet to be made official - calls for Google to disperse money to victims of copyright infringement, and set up a copyright collective that is dedicated to finding the rightsholders of out-of-print books still under copyright protection, and dispersing payments to these authors or estates. Google would remain free of future litigation concerning copyright, and presumably Google and the authors and publishers of America would work together toward actually squeezing some sort of profit out of this massive digital library.

So, does this mean that everything is hunky-dory, now that Google and the publishing industry have made up? Well, not exactly. For one, the settlement still presents several significant legal problems, including the question of monopoly; the courts still have yet to decide as to whether or not this proposed settlement will be legal. Additionally, a lot of rather significant authors are pissed off at the deal. Science-fiction author Ursula LeGuin resigned from the Author's Guild in protest. And there are other organizations besides the Authors Guild - genre-specific guilds like the SFWA and MWA, who argue that they were not contacted at all during the negotiations, and that the Authors Guild does not necessarily speak for all authors. The proposed settlement does give authors the ability to opt out; the list of thousands of names, from Thomas Pynchon to Michael Chabon to the sheet music publisher Boosey and Hawkes, indicates a substantial number of writers unhappy with the agreement.

These authors have several legitimate worries. Questions of a digital monopoly aside, there is also the fact that the proposed settlement gives Google nearly a third of all revenue stemming from the sale of digital copies through Google Books. Standard publishing companies have always taken a cut, but these also help authors promote their materials and allow them to earn a living. What has Google done, the argument goes, to deserve a portion of an author's revenue, beyond illegally scanning the book in the first place? Such a quibble may seem rather petty now, but if there is a subscription service to Google Books in the future, Google stands to profit quite heavily when the old-fashioned publishing industry goes down the toilet. A third of all book revenues is not a bad profit for merely scanning a shitload of books at the right time.

Not to mention those "orphan books", whose copyright holders are missing. While authors do have the opportunity to sell digital copies of their books elsewhere, Google has a de facto monopoly on books whose copyright holders are unaware of their renewed life; in this case, Google receives 100% of the revenue when no one steps forward to claim the rights. With no rightsholder present for these works, they will never be sold through a competitor's service. In effect, Google has become the sole owner of thousands of these orphan books, merely by gathering them up while no one was paying attention.

Google, however, argues that they are providing a valuable service by digitizing these books, making them accessible to millions who might not otherwise have a chance to purchase the titles. The term "out of print" would become anachronistic; according to Google's plans, all books under copyright could be sold online in perpetuity. Google makes the case that this allows for thousands of authors to sell books that might otherwise have languished in discontinued obscurity.

There are arguments on both sides, of course. But what I find most fascinating about the entire issue is how forward-looking Google was in this endeavor. The company began scanning every book in the world in 2005, when things like the iPad and the Kindle were just distant dreams. Now, as e-readers become more and more relevant, and possibly stand to reform the entire publishing industry, Google's wish for a digital archive of every book in the universe doesn't seem so silly. No one wants to sit at their desk to read a Harry Potter novel, for example, but what if there was a portable device that allowed you to access Google Books? For a monthly subscription fee, you could access and read any book in the world through this device, and Google would make the appropriate payments to the rightsholders of the books that have been accessed. It would be like Netflix Streaming, only with literature.

It sounds great for Joe Consumer, but perhaps the authors are right to be scared by this sort of deal. As the recent spat between Amazon.com and Macmillan Publishing shows, publishing companies and digital distributors might not always agree on what a fair price for a digital copy is. The lack of competitors means that, if the publishing industry continues its long decline, Google will be the sole corporate transmitter of literature.

There are plenty of ethical questions about the nature of copyright, the flow of information, and the existence of literature as a solely digital phenomena, that I don't have time to get into here. But it's worth considering what the world of books would be like if it were remade in Google's own image. There are pros and cons, and no easy answers.

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Divinity II: Ego Draconis - Knights, Dragons, and Bugs, Oh My!

I’m sure you’re looking at the title of this article and thinking, “What the hell is Divinity II: Ego Draconis?”  A few weeks ago, I was in the same boat.  It wasn’t ‘on my radar,’ as we consumers of media like to say.  It’s an unfortunate RPG that gets released sandwiched between two of BioWare’s most highly-anticipated games.  Let’s just say the news cycle was preoccupied.

Here’s what I knew about the game prior to its release:

- It’s an RPG.
- It’s a sequel in a European dungeon-crawler franchise and is the series’ first 3D entry.
- You can turn into a dragon.

Call me crazy, but that last one was enough to pique my interest.  Lots of role-playing games tout – among such features as ‘intriguing narratives’ and ‘60+ hours of gameplay’ – a unique gameplay hook, usually related to if not outright using the phrase ‘battle system.’  Think Fallout 3’s VATS Targeting System, Final Fantasy XII’s Gambit System, or the timing-based attacks of Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story.  However, none are as blunt as Divinity II’s bullet point: Be a Dragon.

I couldn’t help but wonder how the rest of the game would measure up to the potential of this one simple promise.  Or how it would make good on that promise.  I got a chance to answer these questions after developer Larian Studios and publisher cdv Software were kind enough to send us a copy. 

Divinity II runs on a version of the surprisingly versatile Gamebryo engine.  Other notable titles to use the engine include Firaxis’ Civilization IV, Warren Spector’s upcoming Epic Mickey, and the aforementioned Fallout 3.  I mention this because anyone who’s spent anytime in Fallout’s Capital Wasteland will recognize the myriad chinks in the engine’s armor.  Framerates stutter.  Lighting alternates between being moody and evocative and someone-please-light-a-torch-I-can’t-see-shit dim.  Geometry (boxes, rocks, etc.) will inexplicably trap your character, leaving you with no option but to boot up your most recent save.  And it best be recent.  Being an O.G. computer RPG, Divinity II autosaves incredibly infrequently.  Save often, or be prepared to lose hours of hard-fought progress.

However, I can’t promise you that frequent saving will, ahem, save you from drastic setbacks.  I regularly encountered game-crashing bugs: cutscenes would end without returning control of my character; occasionally, I’d load a save and just be dead.  A recent patch reduced the occurrence of these bugs, yet failed to eradicate them.  I persevered in spite of these issues, but I’ll admit to having jammed on the power button and walking away more than once.

It’s worth noting that I’m playing the 360 version, and it’s possible some of these issues (specifically ones of graphical fidelity) may not be as prevalent on PC.  I’m also not one to harp on technical issues (I quite enjoyed my trek through Fallout’s buggy mess).  But I can’t remain silent when a game’s underlying code so clearly hinders the overall experience.

And Divinity II is certainly an experience.  Its world, Rivellon, is dense with fiction.  Like, rainforest dense.  Scores of searchable crates and barrels (yes, it’s that old school) contain, among other things, innumerable tomes, letters, and books – fleshing out the world to the point of super saturation.  It’s impossible to discredit the ambition on display; it’s clear the team has thought about this world a lot.  I couldn’t bring myself to actually read every damn pamphlet or book of limericks I picked up, but the promise of bonus experience or skills points made sure I cracked the spines on most of them.

The actual plot, buried beneath layers of backstory, plays out without much fanfare.  You play a newly-minted Dragon Knight, out to save the world from dragons and a returning evil dude named Damien (subtle, huh?).  It’s not long before you find yourself fighting Damien’s minions, aiding dragons, and eventually becoming one. 

It’s a shame, however, that the main conceit of Divinity II – as I said, being a dragon – occurs so late in the game.  It’s not until the last fourth of the game that you gain the ability to become a mythical flying lizard at will.  Controlling your dragon form feels a lot like an all-range mode adaptation of the on-rails Panzer Dragoon games.  You fly around, blasting enemies with fireballs, razing enemy anti-air emplacements.  Rarely do the dragon portions (which are generally separated from quests on foot) challenge the player, which is a welcome change from the rest of the game’s criminally insane difficulty.

I don’t consider myself bad at games.  And I’ve been playing RPGs for a while, so I feel like I have a more-than-basic understanding of character building and combat techniques.  But I have to wonder if I’m missing something mechanically in Divinity II because the act of progressing forward often reached Sisyphean levels of difficulty.  I’m talking hurl-your-controller, save-after-every-kill hard.

This is mostly an issue of imbalance between the game’s various systems.  Enemies, as far as I can tell, never respawn.  When the going gets tough and you desperately require gold (which only drops intermittently) to purchase a much-needed healing potion (which costs way too much), there’s no opportunity to grind your way out of the predicament.  It wasn’t until the latter half of the final chapter that I felt even with the game’s curve, before that having spent hours feeling woefully inadequate. As I said regarding the game’s technical issues, this is all a case of a game getting in the way of itself.  In addition to the looming “I, of the Dragon” concept, Divinity II’s two devices worth trumpeting are the mindreading mechanic and the Battle Tower.  The ability to read minds (a power wielded by the Dragon Knights) is an excellent subversion of the tried-and-true dialogue tree.  For the cost of some experience points, you peer into an NPCs mind and occasionally glean useful information.  It might be the location of an item, useful quest info, or an embarrassing secret that will force a sheepish shopkeep to lower his prices.  The mystery unravels a bit once you realize that a big XP cost means a big secret.  I’d like to see someone build on this mechanic, as I think it has potential to really freshen up a somewhat dusty mainstay of the genre.

The Battle Tower is one of the more unique hubs I’ve experienced in an RPG, though, like the whole dragon thing, it comes a little late to fulfill its full potential.  An interesting midgame quest has you rounding up skilled personnel with which to staff your tower: an alchemist, a trainer, a necromancer, and a smithy.  You choose between two of each position, and the people you don’t pick get fucking murdered.  Why?  I’ve no clue.  But it’s incredibly savage and kind of cool.  After the survivors move into your tower, you can use them to craft items, beef your skill tree, and construct a minion out of spare body parts.  A neat ripple effect of the staff selection process is that each person has their own set of sidequests, providing ample endgame content for someone who’s slogged their way through a punishing first half. 

And for me, that sentiment rings true for Divinity II as a whole.  The game takes a sharp turn for the better just before the plot’s final push.  Your abilities will feel useful.  Your Tower will produce support items at a reasonable enough clip.  Dragon flight/combat is fun if not a little wonky.  Save a few recurring bugs, the end of the game satisfies.  If only it weren’t such a battle getting there.

You can purchase Divinity II: Ego Draconis for the PC or Xbox 360 for $39.99.  If you’re trying to decide which platform, may I (having only played the Xbox version) strongly suggest the PC.

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The new Ivy

Last night, Jon Stewart inadvertently made the most compelling case for allstu that has ever been. The February 24th episode of The Daily Show started rather puzzlingly with Mr. Stewart apologizing for a quip he made in his warm-up for the show in which he unfavorably compared Kenyon College to Columbia University. One can only wonder about what he might have said, although it was apparently incendiary enough to warrant an apology. To his credit as a comedian, Stewart manages to trash Gettysburg College and then all liberal arts schools within his opener, jumping into his top stories after muttering "good luck bartending." As an alumnus of Kenyon, it's always strange to hear the school's named mentioned in a broader context, especially one as confounding as the apology for an untelevised jab. More often, I get clips about its "new ivy" status from the alumni magazine emailed to me from my parents, so it's weird to see it targeted in such a specific and lightheartedly derogatory fashion. I would imagine Kenyon students are organizing a a communal protest against the quip right now and if they're not, they aren't worth the obscenely high tuitions their parents pay to let them waste time organizing protests instead of studying. To reconcile my excitement from hearing about the school with my instinctive urge to defend it and my nearly two years of casual distance from it and my complete lack of knowledge about Columbia University, I'm going to guess at what Jon Stewart said:

1. "Boy, we have a good show tonight. I'm sure glad my writers didn't come from Kenyon College and that they graduated from Columbia University or it would be really fucking terrible."

2. "Hey did you guys hear the one about Kenyon College and Columbia University? They are both schools, but one is better. It's Columbia University!"

3. "What's the difference between Kenyon College and Columbia University? My dog Richard could get into Kenyon College and he's an asshole."

4. "I know a guy from Kenyon College with a drug problem. It's very sad. Go Columbia University!"

5. "How many Kenyon College grads would take to get into Columbia University? None!"

6. "Go to Columbia University, where you can graduate faster than Kenyon College students can vote!"

7. "What's with all the hair in the coffee at Kenyon College's cafeteria? Now I know why there is hair in the coffee at Columbia University's cafeteria because that is where Kenyon College kids get jobs and that is all they know about coffee."

I'm pretty sure these are unforgivable. Continue...

Musings on Game Replay Value

Playing a good game again is, more than anything, like re-reading a favorite book. Its secrets have been revealed to you, and you’re familiar with its twists and turns. You’re back not because you want to know what happens, but because what happened, how it happened, and those to whom it happened are worth revisiting. Maybe it’s not new, but it’s comfortable.

As time has gone on, though, I find that I replay games less. To be more specific, the games I replay are rarely recent – I can count on one hand the games released in the last five years that I’ve played more than once in single-player mode. I guess today I wanted to talk about it.

Simpler Times

That the games of yesteryear are fundamentally different from modern games is a given. As gaming systems have gotten more sophisticated, games have also gotten more “sophisticated,” at least in that they are more media-rich than old games. Fully orchestrated soundtracks, generally competent voice acting, and what passes for a written story accompany the detailed three-dimensional worlds of today’s major releases, where once a 45-second loop of digitized beeps would accompany a blocky avatar from the left side of the screen to the right.

One of the very things that lures one back to those older games is that simplicity. The games of twenty years ago don’t put on any airs, they don’t make you sit through long, unskippable cutscenes, their control schemes don’t sag under the weight of their own complexity. At that point, games still owed much to their arcade ancestors, and most games from this era are much easier to simply pick up and play.

Length isn’t everything

With this simplicity also comes a welcome brevity, in a world where a six hour videogame is considered short and, in some genres, forty hours is just about average. You really need to be invested in a game that long, and frankly there are few games that long that really justify their length.

I like short games because they’re plucky and they’ve got something to prove – I’ll use the four-hour Portal as Exhibit A, and the similar-in-length Katamari Damacy as Exhibit B – both games, incidentally, on the short list of recent stuff I’ve played end-to-end more than once.

Both Katamari and Portal, as well as any number of other older games, have to cram all of their sweet, sweet gameplay into a shorter amount of time, resulting in a distinct, more memorable experience. Do you remember doing all of the five-dozen fetch quests in Borderlands, or the precious minutes you spent wandering from one end of Shadow Complex to the other? No, you don’t, except perhaps as some dim unpleasantness best left forgotten – this is called padding, and it’s one of my least favorite videogame habits.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

In a shorter game where specific sections really stand out from the rest, it is inevitable that some parts of the game will hang around in your memory for years – we all know where to find the hidden 1-up mushroom in world 1-1 of Super Mario Bros., for example. With each subsequent playthrough, you remember more, making the game that much easier to navigate.

This is something I like to call comfort gaming, and it’s a great way to fill an hour if you’ve got some downtime – the best games (the Mario series, the better Mega Man entries) make mastery of the game as entertaining as was playing it for the first time. If you pull off an impressive series of jumps or gun down a robot master without taking any damage, you still feel a sense of accomplishment – at least insofar as people feel they’re accomplishing something when they’re playing video games.

Different Priorities

New technology doesn’t just make games more complex, but it lets us play games in different ways than we could decades ago. Xbox Live and its competitors have brought online gaming to the masses, allowing us to blast each other in the face even when we’re miles apart.

Online gaming has ushered in an era where the multiplayer mode is just as if not more fawned over than the single-player mode. Several high-profile releases have shipped with gimped, stupid, or otherwise disappointing single-player modes (I’m looking at you, Halo 2 and Modern Warfare 2), but have lived on because of their online multiplayer. This is where you find the replay value in modern titles, which means that single-player aficionados such as myself are often left in the cold.

Overload

Last but not least, we need to take note of the sheer number of games available for us to play these days. There are no fewer than six current and viable game platforms on the market, and that number shoots up rapidly if you account for stuff like the iPhone that just games on the side.

We complain perennially of the October-December rush, the deluge of games that comes with the holiday season, but 2010 is seeing high-profile releases packed into all the months of the calendar. If you want to experience even a fraction of what’s worth experiencing, you don’t have much time to go back and cover ground you’ve already explored.

The End

I can’t say whether this problem I have with replaying modern games is limited just to me, or if it’s a wider thing. I also don’t know if it is fair to lay the blame at the feet of the games, as I do here – it’s possible that it’s a function of my diminishing free time as I get older.

It is different when you’re younger, after all. Your game library is dictated not by what’s out and what’s good, but by what relatives pick you up for birthdays and holidays. I know I played the Super Nintendo version of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers way more times than it probably deserved, but when your game library is more limited perhaps your familiarity with the games you do have goes up.

Anyway, you should tell me what you think in the Comments section! Thanks for reading my blog post today you guys.

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Oscar-Shot!!! 2010 (Part 2 of 3) (EXTRA-JEWISH EDITION)

Oh, hi. I didn't see you there.

WELCOME BACK TO OSCAR-SHOT!!!!!!!1

A Serious Man, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen

Coen brothers movies are hard to review. I've never seen a poorly-made Coen brothers film, but I have seen movies by them that I enjoy more than others. Burn After Reading, for example, isn't one of my favorites. But it's hard to impugn the thing from a non-taste perspective: the narrative is tight, the performances are wonderful (especially Brad Pitt, who should stick with comedy), and the dialogue is a strong point, as always with the Coens.

But I took very little away from the film. I didn't feel like I had just ingested a sharp satire of spy films or American paranoia. I just laughed and then left. This exchange sorta sums up my feelings about the movie:

CIA Superior: What did we learn, Palmer?
CIA Officer: I don't know, sir.
CIA Superior: I don't fuckin' know either. I guess we learned not to do it again.
CIA Officer: Yes, sir.
CIA Superior: I'm fucked if I know what we did.
CIA Officer: Yes, sir, it's, uh, hard to say
CIA Superior: Jesus Fucking Christ.

The Coens have made a career out of being pointless, though. Fargo was wonderful, but you'd be nutty to try to torture some philosophical/political subtext from it.

So when the Coens cross over into something approaching commentary, they grab my attention even more. Maybe it was just wishful thinking, but I felt like No Country for Old Men (my favorite Coen brothers movie) had quite a bit to say about a declining sense of traditional morality, especially in reference to the great John Ford/Anthony Mann Westerns of old. The sheriff in Old Men is essentially powerless to stop the forces of evil in his town. He's no Wyatt Earp.

A Serious Man, I think, had something to say, too. The Job-ish story of a hapless physics professor named Larry Gopnik (an Oscar-worthy Michael Stulhbarg), who endures a series of really unfortunate events, has much to say about Judaism's sense of divine justice and balance. Why does Larry, a seemingly just man, lose his wife (Sari Lennick) to slimy widower (you hate to put those words together) Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed)? Why is he forced to abandon his own home for a crappy roadside motel, which Sy refers to as "eminently habitable?" And why are his children (Aaron Wolff and Jessica McManus) such little shits? Maybe it has something to do with the Jewish fable (starring famed Yiddish theater actor Fyvush Finkel) that serves as a prologue to the film. Or maybe he's just a loser.

I see that as the fun of the Coens' filmography: it's always a blast to argue over whether their films actually mean anything. Or if they're just fucking with us.

ProgOSCARcator says:

Unlikely. It's great to see the Coens nominated, but I can't see this (wonderfully) super-Jewish movie getting a statue. I'll say 3%.

Inglorious Basterds, dir. Quentin Tarantino

What a welcome surprise this was! I had basically written QT (that's an annoying set of initials) off after the Kill Bill's and Death Proof demonstrated that the guy was more interested in listening to the sound of his own voice than making a good movie.

So when my every attempt to nitpick and dissect Inglorious Basterds failed miserably, I was happy to be wrong. Basterds, as we know from those great "ONE. HUN-ERD. NAT-ZI. SCALPS" trailers, follows a group of Jewish Allied soldiers ordered to assassinate the German high command and, more generally, fuck some Nazi shit up. They're led by Lt. Aldo Raine (there's Brad Pitt again!), and they find a mortal enemy in SS Colonel Hans Landa (played by future Oscar winner Christoph Waltz), better known as the Jew Hunter. Oh, and there's a B-plot involving a bangin' Jewish girl played by Melanie Laurent, who has her own bone to pick with the Jew Hunter. But although Laurent is solid, we're pretty much waiting for Waltz or Pitt to get back on screen.

Basterds works, first and foremost, because it doesn't let Tarantino's famous film geekery (and related need to comment on the art of filmmaking) get in the way of telling a good story. The unapropos dialogue is also toned down here. Nearly twenty years after Reservoir Dogs (and half a century after Breathless, which really pioneered the concept of non-plot advancing dialogue), we get it, T: it's funny to hear a bunch of killers talk about Madonna. But don't make half a movie (Death Proof) out of it.

But here, the two longest tangential conversations (I won't say which ones) serve both to showcase Tarantino's admittedly witty sensibilities and heighten tension. Listening to Christoph Waltz talk about nothing is waaaaay more nerve-wracking than listening to an average person talk about gutting his family.

ProgOSCARcator says:

I want this to pull off an upset SO BAD, both because it's legitimately one of the best movies of the year (which isn't necessarily synonymous with being a Best Picture nominee) and because it would confirm what that fortune teller told Harvey Weinstein. And with the new voting system (which forces Academy voters to rank their choices for Best Picture), this scenario is apparently slightly more likely.

I'll say 15%.

Another short version this week 'cuz I've got the flu (AKA, I feel like actually Culture Vomiting). Boohiss.

SEE YOU FOR AN EXTRA GIANT OSCAR-SHOT NEXT WEEK. Continue...

The Art of the Album: Okkervil River – Black Sheep Boy

Great albums aren’t made by great music alone.

At least, not for me. Had I not heard the great albums of my life – Meadowlands, The Wrens; Heartbreaker, Ryan Adams; You Forgot It In People, Broken Social Scene; Ghosts of the Great Highway, Sun Kil Moon – when, how and where I first heard them, their greatness might be something less. Something different, at least.

Maybe this depends on whether you’re the kind of person who scores their life with music they feel really, truly speaks to them. It’s a forgivable narcissism, if only because it happens so seldom: You hear a song, and think, I was meant to hear this right here. Right now.

So it was last week, when I downloaded Okkervil River’s Black Sheep Boy on a lark and fell totally in love with…well, falling in love.

Because Black Sheep Boy is, if nothing else, one big love song. It’s spliced with violence, despair and self-destructive wanderlust – love turns out poorly, love leads to wreckage. Love is a broken son of a bitch, his voice ragged from screaming: “Come back to your black sheep man.”

Okkervil River is hard to pin down. Not even Pitchfork can find an adequate descriptor – unless you think alt-country, avant-folk or the dead-eyed ‘indie rock’ really describe anything. Think Connor Oberst of Bright Eyes, vocal chords ragged from a too much whiskey and too many bar sing-a-longs – now rough him up with a bareknuckle brawl behind some west Texas bar and slap on 15 no-luck years . That’s what Okkervil River sounds like: rangy, worn-out; burnished instead of brilliant.

They met in a New Hampshire high school. After parting ways for college, they reconvened in Austin, Texas (of course they did). It was 1998. Will Sheff wrote the songs, Zach Thomas played bass and mandolin, and Seth Warren played drums. Today, Sheff is the only original member still with Okkervil River.

Their first album, Don’t Fall In Love With Everyone You See, was published by Jagjaguwar (Bon Iver, Dinosaur Jr.) in 2002. Pitchfork welcomed them with a 7.2, which I think is their equivalent of an approving locker-room slap on the ass.

They got their name from a short story by Russian author Tatyana Tolstaya (of course they did).

It was their third album, and it was a concept album. If that didn’t scare the execs at Jagjaguwar, it should have – “concept album” is practically synonymous with “overwrought, overambitious and overextended.” The concept, in this case, was Tim Hardin’s song “Black Sheep Boy.” It reads more like a poem than a folk ditty:

Here I am back home again, and I'm here to rest
All they ask is where I've been, knowing I've been West
I'm the family's unowned boy, golden curls of envied hair
Pretty girls with faces fair
See the shine in the Black Sheep Boy
If you love me, let me live in peace, please understand
That the black sheep can wear the golden fleece
And hold a winning hand
I'm the family's unowned boy, golden curls of envied hair
Pretty girls with faces fair
See the shine in the Black Sheep Boy
Here I am back home again, and I'm here to rest

Okkervil took Hardin’s weary, prodigal wanderer into the studio as a motif. He emerged blown messily across 11 tracks. Black Sheep Boy starts off with a more or less rote cover of Hardin’s song – brisk, benign, relaxed, with soothing strings.

Then we hear the tense opening chords of “For Real.” Sheff moans into the microphone, sinister and simmering: “Some nights I thirst for real blood / for real knives/ for real cries.” The chorus explodes, but keeps some tension in reserve; the song slinks through distorted guitars until it hits the end of its patience. And when he yelps “I don’t want to hear you say it shouldn’t really be this way / ‘cause I like this way just fine,” he sounds ready to smash everything in the studio. You can hear his spit hit the microphone. The song careens towards its scorching outro with Sheff howling “You can’t hide.”

This isn’t going to be a happy album.

The dark, twisty imbalance of “For Real” is given ballast by the daydreamy “In a Radio Song.” The song floats with the lightness of a passing thought, even though it’s a fantasy involving grisly animal death and being ambushed by hunters. “We’re fucked, we’re fucked, we’re fucked,” Sheff muses. If so, “In a Radio Song” is a gentle death, lulling us to sleep with ambient street chatter towards its coda. That’s a kind of love, I think – it seems like a nice way to go.

“Black,” a bouncy revenge tune about finding the man who kidnapped and raped your love one, surprising him at dinner and ripping out his throat – or worse, telling his new wife and kid what he’d done. Keyboard notes float above a brisk drumbeat and lighter-than-air guitar. Sheffield sings with a crooked grin: after all, if “wrecking his life / the way that he wrecked yours” isn’t love, what is?

Not every track on Black Sheep Boy is so dire. “Get Big” is a post-coital love duet between a detached older man and his too-young lover. “Take your medicine,” Sheff sings, “and I won’t ask / where you’ve been. / Live your lost weekend, / because I know you wanted it / to get big, little kid.” It’s a more tempered perspective than “For Real,” and songs after – “A King and a Queen,” “A Stone” “The Latest Toughs” and “Song Of Our So-Called Friends” choose levity over intensity, spreading conflict over intelligent arrangements and light instrumentals. “A Stone” proceeds with all the ease and confidence of an afternoon walk, though it ponders the tragic gap between loving someone and loving the idea of someone.

Okkervil muster everything for the narrative “So Come Back, I Am Waiting,” unifying the album in a single song. The Black Sheep Boy croons through verses counterwieghted with stone-heavy guitar and an arrangement of cornets, sounding almost funereal as the song slowly leans forward, gaining momentum. They lasso in every aspect of the Black Sheep Boy – horned like a satyr, lying through a microphone, killing with charm, loaded down with self loathing. And pleading, waiting, for someone to come back. The metaphor reaches a moment of truth when Sheff unleashes himself on the climactic verse, screaming his lungs to pulp with “I’m waiting on hoof and on hand / I’m waiting, all hated and damned / I’m waiting I snort and I stamp” before dissolving into “I’m waiting, you know what I am. / Calmly waiting to make you my lamb.”

It’s as triumphant and complex an ending as anything I’ve ever heard. To land a metaphor carefully contrived over the length of an album – a metaphor extrapolated from someone else’s folk song – is as ambitious as it is risky. But even as my nerves sizzled, I remembered an earlier verse, an admonishment from the Black Sheep Boy:

So why
did you bawl
from the spell of some old holy song
some liar laughed as he composed,
some liar I loved to control?

For all its damn-the-torpedoes passion and low-fi scruff, Okkervil River is deliberate and high-minded. Sheff’s songwriting can verge on obtuse – really, who’s running to the dictionary to look up “abecedarian?” – but their arrangements smack pleasantly of people who listen to a lot of music, and prize above all a well-executed, subtle and complex rhythm. Sheff plays the character of a caterwauling romantic, but it’s just a character – the man behind the sheep mask is holding a thesaurus.

I called Black Sheep Boy a love song. The album’s murder/rape/deceit index may seem too high for love, unless you’re a sociopath; but listen. Just listen. When Sheff croons, almost slurs, “There’s plenty of ways to make you mine tonight,” you feel something tremor in his voice. You’d have to be soul-dead not to hear it. Or maybe you’re just me, gnawing over failed relationships in the dreary introspection of February, looking for a commiserate soul. Looking, as it turns out, for Black Sheep Boy.

Desert Island Tracks: “For Real,” “Black,” “Get Big,” “So Come Back, I Am Waiting”

Note: The video to “So Come Back, I Am Waiting” is set to Sin City. Do yourself a favor, minimize the window and listen to the song.

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TV Ratings and Target Demographics

If ever you chanced to examine the ratings of your favorite TV show, you likely encountered a slew of mystifying numbers. Even without knowledge of the intricacies of the Nielsen Media Research company, you've probably figured out that you can judge a show's general performance by using what I call the reverse-Golf method of statistical analysis: the larger the numbers, the better the show is doing.

For those of you interested in a more comprehensive explanation, here's a real life example:

The line for NBC's broadcast of the Opening Ceremonies for the Vancouver Winter Olympics on Wednesday, February 10 reads as follows: 9.0/27, 32.64

Those numbers, from left to right, signify rating, audience share, and total viewers. The first two numbers only apply to adults from ages 18-49, the key target demographic for most primetime shows. If you're interested in why the market is segmented in this way, please, by all means, Continue...


Now that you've followed me through the jump, let's dissect what these terms really mean.

RATING - a numerical value applied to a television channel at a particular time, represented with a single decimal place. One rating point represents one (1) percent of all televisions tuned to the channel in question during the time period in question. So in the above example, 9% of all televisions in the country were tuned to NBC for the opening ceremonies.

AUDIENCE SHARE - an integer with the same applications as a rating. One audience share represents one (1) percent of all televisions in use that are tuned to a particular channel at a particular time. Again, in the above example, 27% of all televisions that were powered on at the time were watching the Olympics. The main difference to keep in mind is that audience share does not take into account inactive televisions.

TOTAL VIEWERS - represents how many millions of people watched a particular program at any given time. Pretty self explanatory. The all time record: this year's Superbowl, which drew 106.5 million viewers. (The previous record was the series finale of M.A.S.H.)

Except for Total Viewers, most ratings resources will usually only give information for the target demographic of adults 18-49. Certain channels at certain times (Nickelodeon, Disney, etc.) shoot for a demographic in the younger range (persons 12-33). Very rarely do networks (such as PBS) aim for higher demos; 25-54 is usually the highest you'll see. What makes that 18-49 demo such a slam dunk?

Let me answer my own question with another question: Why do networks care about ratings? It's not so they can feel good about themselves that people are watching their programming. It's because of advertisers. Networks pull a large percentage of their income through various corporations who are willing to shell out big bucks for the privilege of advertising their products during a certain time slot. The more people watching during that time slot, the more people will see the commercials, and thus the more people likely to purchase the products in question.

This business model operates under the assumption that your average American TV-watching human being is a highly suggestible herd animal, who operates under the "monkey see, monkey buy" principle. Some apologists for the human race (or at least for the American people) may dispute this premise, but many years and hundreds of billions of dollars have shown that the current system ain't broke, and that no one involved intends to try and fix it.

So why are these advertisers so hell-bent on showing their commercials to adults between the ages of 18 and 49? What makes that age range so special? Well, I've got a few theories. (And, as always, the comments section is open to readers with theories of their own.)

First, let's look at the low end of the spectrum. 18-year-olds are first-year legal adults. Most of them are either preparing to head off to college or just entering the workforce. It's the first year in most of their lives where they're afforded certain freedoms, such as smoking and heading overseas to fight for their country.

As is the curious case of the human psyche, as the freedom of these newly christened adults increases, so also does their impressionability. For the first time in many of their lives, they're out from under the wing of their influential and highly regulatory family circles, high school guidance counselors, etc. They have the freedom to make more and more choices on their own (including choices about goods to buy and services to use), and they'll welcome any advice or suggestions, even ones that come from their TV sets during breaks from their favorite shows. And, most importantly, 18-year-olds have no one who can legally restrict them from making whatever purchases they desire.

As we move up in the age range, we see our target demographic start to grow up and become more mature. Perhaps they find steady work, advance within their chosen field, and find themselves with a little disposable income. Some are very likely to get married, settle down, buy a house, and start a family. Their young, impressionable days are nearing an end, but their accumulation of responsibilities is at its peak. And, as is usually the case, the more things one has to take care of, the more things one finds that one desperately needs.

People occupying the upper end of the age range in question are those entering the "distinguished" phase in their careers as human beings. Perhaps a touch of gray around the temples. Hopefully some job security. A well-developed family/social life. Still at least a decade away from retirement and/or mid-life crisis. These dudes and ladies in their mid to late 40's are the sobering glue that holds this demographic together: less impulsive than their barely legal counterparts, wiser and more discerning than the mid-rangers.

As we move over and above the target demographic, we start to see people who are increasingly out of touch with the most advanced technologies, the coolest new products, and reality in general. Words like "crotchety," and old adages about dogs and tricks come to mind. They're also more likely to be hopelessly set in their ways, and thus less likely to be swayed by newfangled commercials, what with the jingles, and the flashing lights, and the kids these days with their short attention spans.

It's not that these older demos watch any less TV than younger Americans; they just tend to watch programs that air at times largely ignored by big ticket advertisers. Because the same impulse behind older folks not not being influenced by commercials is also behind older folks not caring about the hot new primetime shows on the big four networks.

And thus the cycle endlessly repeats itself: the networks plug their shows to the key 18-49 demographic for the sake of advertisers who want to plug their products to the same broad group of people. And until this New Media I've heard so much about catches up with broadcast television, there's no end in sight. Continue...

24 in 24 words: Day 8, Hour 9

 Episode 9 - “12:00 a.m. to 1:00 a.m.”

Spoilers after the jump!

Jack and Freckles get romantic, but The Man makes her a scapegoat. Terrorists want to bomb the US again, yawn. Starbuck’s underwhelming conclusion disappoints.

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

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This Week on Audiosurf Radio – The Professor Is Real In Edition

Some bands and artists have great names: Gnarls Barkley, Led Zeppelin, We Were Promised Jetpacks!.  Others have hilariously  bad ones: Shitdisco, Kathleen Turner Overdrive.  And others get by on some really superficial puns.

Professor Kliq is an awesome name.  It registers with me on a visceral level.  I instantly imagine him as some kind of 4-bit video game protagonist – the star of whatever cockamamie, exclamation-point-laden backstory was printed on the back of an Atari game’s box.  “The mad scientist Professor Kliq’s experiments have gone awry!  After the Professor crossbred kangaroos and bunnies, the resulting bunniroos quickly bounced their way out of his secret underground laboratory and are running amok in Metro City.  You must rescue them in the exciting new game Hop To It!”

In reality, Prof. Kliq is Mike Else, a twentysomething DJ now studying music at Columbia.  He seems like a cool dude (I inferred this from his website).  And it doesn’t hurt that all of his music’s free.  Thanks, Creative Commons.

We’ve got three songs of the Professor’s after the jump, plus plenty of user comments.  They’re slowly becoming my favorite part of this running feature.

The Songs

“Sewage” is the aural equivalent of an Incredible Journey-like venture into the brain of a British teenage technofiend with ADD.  Is that comparison a little hard to follow?  So is “Sewage,” and I mean that as a compliment.  The Professor refuses to ground himself in one beat for very long.  What starts as a quirky array of buzzes and whirs quickly morphs into a rollicking percussion ensemble.  It’s head-boppingly infectious, a good instigator for some angry, I-just-downed-three-pints dancing.  I tend to furrow my brows at techno tracks with what Audiosurf user JaguarFiend calls “pleasure moans,” but they’re handled here with such whimsy – laid to almost humorous effect over the most barebones loop in the whole song – that I actually enjoyed their reprisal just before the final push.  I’m sure this one will have its detractors.  The ride itself isn’t magnificent, and I could see how the song’s rougher edges would turn away some listeners.  But I rode this one a second time almost immediately.  I paused only to read comments.  Then I went back and played this song a third time.  A fourth is most certainly in order.

“All Control” really comes into its own when the “We have lost all control” loop lurches forward into high gear, complicating the underlying percussion and sending Guile-like shockwaves through the track.  Immediately following this opening salvo, the Professor inserts a little more whimsy.  A simplified version of the main melody (for lack of a better word) sounds as if it’s being played on a pawnshop Moog by a child eager to help out in his older brother’s garage band.  The rhythm is punchy, almost too precise.  User Ko-Tao argues that “This stuff doesn’t even come across as music.”  I disagree.  While the Professor largely employs sounds familiar to stalwarts of the electronica genre, his insistence on constant variation and frequent molting of beats is more musical than most of the trance music I’ve been exposed to.  Will the Text-to-Speech utterance of “We have lost all control” wear on your ears by the end?  Probably.  Just don’t let that dissuade you from riding an excellent song.  And to be fair, my favorite section of the ride was the last uphill that featured, instead of TTS Lady, a random dude who may as well have been spouting gibberish. 

The sprawling length of “Bust This Bust That (2nd Movement)” hurts the overall experience.  “Sewage” and “All Control” felt more focused, whereas here the Professor’s out to riff.  Out to display his madd skillz.  And he has them.  No argument there.  But about halfway through the track, I got the distinct impression he was sampling himself the way Girl Talk samples the broad spectrum of popular music.  Trying to predict even the next ten seconds of music is near impossible.  It’s like playing a game with an opponent of vastly superior skill: the chess genius thinking 35 moves ahead, the tennis champ setting you up three points in advance, the twelve-year-old on Xbox Live programming new glitches while he waits for you to respawn.  Expect a challenge, aurally and mentally.  The ride’s brimming with swathes of red, neatly organized for your matching pleasure.  Just don’t accidentally paint them all away in the madness that follows.  Oh yeah, and a reverse corkscrew toward the end livens things up even more, as if this one needed further complication.

Author’s Note

All songs were played at least twice on the Pro difficulty with the Eraser and Vegas characters.  All user quotes are taken from the Comments section of the in-game post-ride report.  The mob was generally 50/50 on the Professor.  SurfinOnBeatzzz (extra points for extra Zs, my friend) threw his weight behind him, saying “This guy deserves the support right here, he’s got serious talent and ridiculous creativity.”  akaCol, modest as they come, offered a contrary view, “I haven’t got the faintest clue when it comes to music, but this song is awfully terrible and terribly awful.”  As articulate as that may be, I’ve got to side with Beatzzz on this one.

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"Fly fatass, fly!" The Confessions of a Kevin Smith Fanboy

It is March 2003. A flabby teenage boy is dropped off by his father at the Coffman Memorial Union at the University of Minnesota. He is just a few days shy of his sixteenth birthday. He wears the shirt worn by the lead character from the movie Mallrats. He has come here to see his idol: filmmaker Kevin Smith.

The auditorium is packed. The boy feels overwhelmed and isolated by the mass of college students and Gen X-ers. He takes his seat, but is soon alerted by the PA that those wishing to ask Mr. Smith a question should form lines down the aisles of the auditorium. The boy wastes no time and rushes to the very front of the line forming nearest to him.

The boy has seen every one of Smith's movies, he owns them all on DVD. He has read every one of Smith's comic books. He is prepared. Wow. I can't believe I'm really going to get to talk to Kevin Smith!

Smith comes onstage. The auditorium erupts into hysterical applause. Smith thanks them for coming and offers a brief anecdote about his love for the great state of Minnesota. The audience laughs at his jokes and applauds his mention that he filmed Mallrats at the local Eden Prairie Center.

The boy's palms sweat profusely. A lump the size of a large amphibian forms in his throat.

Smith asks for the first question. He looks directly at the boy. The boy feels as if the eyes of a god are upon him; the gaze piercing his flesh and reading his very thoughts.

"You sir," Smith says. "What's your question?"

The exact words uttered by the boy are lost to history, but scholars believe it to be something relating to an appreciation for the recently-released film Daredevil and a commendation for Smith's "Guardian Devil" arc in the titular superhero's comic book. Smith thanks the boy. The boy then asks about the possibility of a Daredevil sequel, having recently heard a rumor that Ben Affleck would only reprise the role if Smith were to write the script. The boy also inquires about the possibility of using elements of "Guardian Devil" in the possible future sequel: perhaps an inclusion of Matt Murdock's crisis of faith and the appearance of Spider-Man villain Mysterio.

Smith asks "You're a big Daredevil fan, aren't you?"

The boy responds with the affirmative. He is a big Daredevil fan.

Smith ponders this. "You do pretty well with the ladies, don't you?" he says. The crowd laughs. "I mean, I've done alright in my time..." Smith gestures to his own sizable girth with his hands. "...but they must be all over you."

The boy has been insulted by his hero in front of an audience of hundreds, maybe thousands. He can do nothing but laugh. It has been an honor, sir.

Smith apologizes for his crack at the boy's weight and answers his question concerning Daredevil. No, there are no plans for a sequel yet; the movie has been out for about a month. No, I probably won't be involved. No, "Guardian Devil" will probably not figure into it if it ever happens.

The boy thanks Smith for his answer. Smith thanks the boy for his question. The boy takes his seat. A bittersweet smile adorns his face.

I have just been called a fat fanboy by Kevin Smith: King of the Fat Fanboys.

If you couldn't figure it out, that teenage boy was me, age fifteen years and I was seeing Kevin Smith give one of his patented talks that he's now become so famous for. In my younger, high school days, Kevin Smith was my object of worship. He was my absolute favorite filmmaker and as far as I was concerned, my own personal screen avatar. He was the first writer-director I ever became obsessed with, the first screen artist whose work I would follow. He made me a movie buff years before I would ever care about film in general. I watched every featurette, listened to every commentary, followed every rumor and bit of Internet news about his upcoming films. Kevin Smith made me the man I am today.

Now of course, this was a long time ago: Smith and myself have both grown and evolved in our own special ways, for better or worse, and it might be hard for a casual observer to note the differences and the ways we've changed. The Smith of 2003 is not the Smith of 2010, just as the Boivin of 2003 is not the Boivin of 2010.

About a year after my fateful encounter with the artist, his career took something of a nosedive and altered course, perhaps irreversibly. His 2004 film Jersey Girl bombed horribly and became a commercial and critical pariah. This is best blamed on the fact that the era saw the loathsome heights of the Bennifer phenomenon and the simple fact that Jersey Girl was a near-complete change of tone for Smith, not to mention a paint-by-numbers family comedy as opposed to the raunchy stoner/geek outings of his earlier career. Jersey Girl, a deeply personal expression of Smith's own feelings of fatherhood (it was dedicated his recently deceased father and was inspired by the birth of his daughter Harley Quinn- best/nerdiest name for a kid ever) became an something of an albatross around Smith's professional neck, a burden he continues to bear to this day. Whenever someone needs to chide the man, they need simply shout "Jersey Girl!".

Take a moment to consider that whenever someone shouts "Jersey Girl" at Kevin Smith, it's a vicious insult, but whenever somebody shouts it at his fellow Garden Stater Bruce Springsteen, it's out of love.

The post-Jersey Girl years have seen a general consensus form that Smith has become an obsolete relic of the mid-90's period of Miramax indie dominance. He has seen a genre he helped to define, the "man-children make vulgar pop culture references and complain about their station in life" film, usurped from him by young Turks like Judd Apatow. I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with my younger brother and his friends where I've recommended Clerks only to be welcomed with "The 40-Year-Old Virgin was funnier."

Indeed, Smith is something of a dinosaur by modern Hollywood standards. He came onto the scene in 1994 in the same class of Weinstein-guided auteurs like Quentin Tarantino and achieved notoriety and adoration by pioneering the burgeoning practice of interacting with fans on the Internet, making posts and answering questions on the forums of his website. As was told in the story that opened this post, Smith also has a successful practice of going to colleges and theaters around the country on a pretty regular basis, displaying his talents as a raconteur and artiste with an above-average accessibility to his fans. These talks, collected on a series of DVDs, are really damn funny. Just check this one out, where he answers at length about his involvement with Tim Burton's aborted 90's Superman reboot.



Kevin Smith was social media-ing all over the place while Twitter and Facebook were just gleams in their fathers' eyes.

Smith has always seemed to keep himself buoyant on an odd combination of both irrational love and irrational hate from fans and critics and in the chaotic era of the Internet's ascendancy, his willingness to interact with his fans and detractors was novel. It even served as something of a macguffin for Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.



But now, when every goddamn celebrity has numerous means of promotion on the Internet, Smith is hardly exceptional. Of course, he tweets like a motherfucker and has a weekly podcast with his longtime producer Scott Mosier, but his high level of accessibility is no longer so special in this day and age.

His most recent movie, Zack and Miri Make a Porno seemed like an attempt to ape the Apatow brand's stranglehold on American cinematic comedy of the past half-decade, featuring Apatow regulars Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks in the title parts and a supporting turn by Craig "Darrel From The Office" Robinson. However, it performed below expectations at the box office (though it did turn a profit in the end) and left Smith feeling somewhat crestfallen.

Perhaps Zack and Miri's perceived failings are why Smith has turned to his newest project, Cop Out (opening this Friday!). Originally bestowed with the borderline brilliant title "A Couple of Dicks", Cop Out is a buddy cop comedy of Lethal Weapon proportions starring the wackily mismatched duo of Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan. This marks the first time that Smith has directed a film from a script he didn't write, it may therefore be the most dramatic departure of his career. He's clearly playing it safe and distancing himself from his status as a cult filmmaker and attempting to move into more commercially viable territory; TV spots for Cop Out have been raiding the airwaves non-stop since the Super Bowl and none of them mention Smith's involvement.

What does the future hold for Kevin Smith? That will probably depend on the success of Cop Out. The press gained by Smith for his recent Twitter fisticuffs with Southwest Airlines over his being ejected from a flight for being too fat (a misunderstanding to have him tell it) probably won't hurt Cop Out's chances. Then again, they might have just reminded everyone that the movie was directed by Kevin Smith.

In terms of projects further down the pipeline, Smith has begun making plans for a movie based on the Warren Zevon story song "Hit Somebody!", the ballad of a hockey enforcer with dreams of scoring goals. This sounds like it has the potential to be Smith's latter day opus; he's a lifelong hockey fan and the sport has currents through literally every one of Smith's movies. He's also announced ambitious plans to make a fan-financed horror movie called Red State that probably won't happen because of the logistics of getting fan donations from Paypal, but it certainly would be cool to see happen, even if only to fuck over the current state of "independent film".

Kevin Smith has had a storied career of professional ups and downs, and for better or worse I still remain a fan of his. Perhaps not as rabid as those heady, pre-Jersey Girl days, but a fan nonetheless. I wish him all the best with Cop Out and plan on seeing it this weekend; even if he did call me a pathetic fatass in front of a massive audience. He's made a career out of doing the same thing to himself, therefore I consider it a compliment. Continue...