The Smartening and The Artening

I just wanted to quickly point out that in Japan, the best-selling video game for the last two weeks running has been the latest in the series of Professor Layton games. In the UK, a recent release of an older Professor Layton game has also apparently been a great success.

I am cheered by this news because these games are little more than compilations of old math and logic questions, spruced up with beautiful hand-drawn backgrounds and old-fashioned animated characters.
When you play a Professor Layton game, the experience typically goes as follows: you wander through a lovingly drawn area reminiscent of the LucasArts-heyday backgrounds on Curse of Monkey Island, click on a quirky character who looks like a reject from The Triplets of Belleville, and he or she says something like “I will give you this shiny gold coin if you can help me, young man. I have a rowboat, a fox, a chicken, and a bag of feed...”

Each game has over a hundred hard-core logic puzzles, disguised by an atmospheric point-and-click adventure interface. I’m usually turned off by games that lean heavily on reheated old puzzles, like the infuriating “Tower of Bozbar” and “Peggleboz” from Zork Zero, but Layton’s design somehow makes the old logic chestnuts addictive and charming.

The fact that these adorable games are so popular shows that there’s an enormous audience out there for creative video games which are both highly artistic and educational. Of course, people have been similarly excited about the success of Brain Age for a couple of years because it’s educational, but to me the Professor Layton games are much more interesting because I have to assume that they appeal to a younger crowd than Brain Age. Some of those nearly half-million Japanese people who’re already playing the newest game must be children, and it’s nice to think of their little brains stretching to figure out how to row that fox and chicken across the river. (hm - note how that phrase I just wrote, “how to row that fox” is like a tongue twister or something. Four different vowel sounds from “o” as the second letter in a word. English spelling must be so annoying for learners).

Also, nothing against 3D backgrounds or animation, but the fact that these are hand-drawn 2D is a tiding of great joy to me, both for nostalgic reasons and because I think it’s an eye-pleasing use of the small DS screen, where 3D environments can look like a blocky mess. There’s clearly still a place in the gaming industry for people who can draw and paint old-fashioned backgrounds, and that’s a nice thought.

In conclusion, everyone who has ever complained about how video games are violent or detrimental to children should please, please just shut up forever. This possibly includes, with all due respect, our next president.

We Did It!

photo source

Newsweek Is-Weird

Look at the odd hyphenation in the following extract from this Newsweek article:

“It is eerily quiet at Barack Obama's headquarters, an open expanse that takes up the entire 11th floor of an office tower in Chicago's Loop. It's nearly as silent as a study hall, which is appropriate, since most of the 20- or 30-somethings in it wear jeans and T shirts.
...
Like FDR and Ronald Reagan, Obama is an innovator in organizing and communicating. Roosevelt was the first to rely on labor unions, and he talked intimately to voters through the then new medium of radio.”

What made them not hyphenate the two phrases screaming out for it, “T shirts” and “the then new medium&rdquo? I guess you could make a case for “T shirt”, but the other thing is just a mess. The then new medium? Really? The author later goes on to use “reaching-out” as a noun. Ick. In the same article, I also found Newsweek’s quaintly Victorian insistence on two periods in “Ph.D.” a little strange, but that’s a different matter-entirely.

The impact will blow trees back and crack statues

My favorite era in rap music was roughly ’94 to ’98, when East Coast hardcore was at its height. I loved the gritty, verbose, cryptic, violent sound of the Wu Tang Clan, Gravediggaz, Mobb Deep, the Boot Camp Clik and related groups. It was dense, paranoid and clanking music best suited for headphones on the subway.

Hip hop didn’t get any more anti-commercial than the GZA, who epitomized the cold world of the mid-’90s’ stern, Biblical-prophet wordplay, while his groupmate ODB rapped like a street-corner drunk a few seconds from toppling over, crooning and ranting at passing cars. Somewhere between those two poles, between sesquipedalian urban Jeremiads and raving homicidal lunacy, lay the essence of the Wu era’s greatness, and it was all set to great beats from the likes of the RZA, DJ Premier, Havoc, 4th Disciple and Da Beatminerz.

For a few years, it seemed as if everyone was weaving dense lyrical webs of comic-book, kung-fu, Scarface and militant Five Percenter references over ominous beats. It all came to an end sometime before the turn of the century, when, to make a long story short, a shrewd buffoon named Puff Daddy dominated an era of dumber, openly superficial, radio-friendly rap which increasingly incorporated baleful R&B caterwauling (the kiss of death as far as I was concerned).

Things got even worse as Nelly-style silly sing-song cadences and lyrically vacant Southern rap started to catch on in the ensuing years. Instead of lyrics like Deck’s superb alliterative/assonant “Poisonous paragraphs smash ya phonograph in half / It be the Inspectah Deck on the warpath / First class leavin mics with a cast / Causin ruckus like the aftermath when guns blast / Run fast, here comes the verbal assaulta / Rhymes runnin wild like a child in a walker”, we had “It’s getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes”. Mo’ money, mo’ problems, indeed.

I thought for a few years there that hardcore hip hop was dead. As usual, I just wasn’t looking in the right places. People like Jedi Mind Tricks and M.F. DOOM were keeping the torch lit, and the web made it possible to find those few groups who were still putting out quality music. But for the past few years it’s usually been a depressing trickle rather than a steady stream of new stuff, and my old favorites seemed to have run out of steam.

Then, over the last couple of months, two albums from old favorites dropped which together have resuscitated my faith in hip hop. Heltah Skeltah, always the standouts in the Boot Camp roster, had been absent for almost ten years. Half of the duo, the hilarious Sean Price, had been putting out solid stuff, but it just wasn’t the same. Now there’s a new Heltah Skeltah album out, and it’s great. Don’t judge the following track by its slightly comical intro - things really get rolling around 0:30.



In addition, a great collaboration album between two of my favorite artists, one which plays to both of their strengths, recently came out. While they usually outshine anyone they share a track with, on their own solo albums, Killah Priest and Chief Kamachi can both be monotonous (Priest’s problem being a sometimes low-energy delivery and Kamachi’s Achilles heel being repetitive spoken hooks). The perfect solution was to have them combine forces on a tag-team album, and the result is electrifying. These elder statesmen of mythological-themed hip hop rap with infectious urgency, as if someone’s just slapped new batteries in their backs.



That’s all I wanted to say - I was worried there for a few years but clearly hardcore hip hop is back from the dead, and if you liked any earlier works from these artists, check out the new albums today.

Late Bloomers and Slow Burners

Two things coincided today which had me thinking about Yeats’s ferociously powerful late-period poetry, and about one of the greatest fruits of that elderly incandescence, his “Among School Children” with its memorable chestnut tree (not pictured), the great-rooted blossomer which is leaf, blossom and bole at once.

The first was a touching article in the New Yorker which dwells on the work of an economist at the University of Chicago named David Galenson, who has been trying to study whether artistic genius and precocity are really as linked as we think. It turns out, to my great personal relief, that there are artists who try to “find”, and artists who try to “search”, and that the searching kind of art can take decades and decades before coming to fruition. The article’s story about the author Ben Fountain, and the years it took for him to gain success as a writer, and the support he got from his family, actually had me kvelling at work.

The second thing which set me thinking today was my absurdly delayed appreciation of most recent album by my favorite band, Sigur Rós. Without exaggeration, I’d say the first fifteen or twenty times I listened to the album, it left me cold. True, the first time I heard the new album was unfortunately in an airplane, and I missed half of what was going on because of the ambient engine noise, but still, I felt like my favorite group had let me down. It seemed like a barren, repetitive album.

Then, about two weeks ago, something clicked, and I swayed to music with brightening glance. I was listening listlessly to Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust or, as I think of it because my bad German is better than my atrocious Icelandic, Mit (einen) Summen in (unsren) Ohren spielen wir endlos on my way to work, and the October sun lined up perfectly with the east-west grid of my neighborhood in Bangkok, and shone pinkly through the mist between the skyscrapers, and the entire world seemed to be singing out to me in joyful harmony through my iPod. I suddenly realized that the album was f*cking brilliant from start to finish, that it was one of the best albums I’d ever heard bar none, and for the third time in my life my daily commute made my day. (The first time involved a hot summer day, Weezer’s Pinkerton, a malfunctioning Honda Accord, and Route 6 in Connecticut, the second time involved Sigur Rós’s “Vaka”, a snowy winter morning, and Munich’s Tram 17.) Here is a picture of me this morning striding sweatfully yet manfully down Soi 51 on my way to work, in silent awe at the musical genius of Iceland’s finest.

I’ve listened to the album almost nonstop, over and over again, every chance I’ve gotten since. And not just certain tracks - I’m talking front to back. But - and here’s the point - it took me at least twenty listens before I had the “damn dawg this is a great album” epiphany. This is my favorite band we’re talking about here, and it still took months for their album to grow on me.

What happened to cause me to suddenly appreciate this music so deeply? Was it because the album is more subtle than their previous work? Is it just something that takes a while to become comfortable with? Or had I changed in the interim? Or was it the setting in which I heard it, riding the BTS above Bangkok at dawn, which caused everything to come together? How can we know, as Yeats asked, the dancer from the dance (or in this case, the music from the listener from the surroundings)?

Whatever happened, I wonder about the other things in life which I’ve been exposed to and been left cold by 19 times... just waiting for that magic number 20 to click. Imagine the authors whose work I would love if I read one or two more books. I can only hope I am lucky enough to have enough time on this planet to appreciate more of the masterpieces which I’ve overlooked in the past.

John McCain Is A Colossal Jerk

I urge you to leave this blog at once and read this great Rolling Stone article on John McCain’s life story. He is actually a much more despicable privileged asshole, f*ck-up and failure as a human being than our current president. He is a vile jerk and a horny, bitter, coarse little man. He’s been making all that pretty clear on his own over the past few weeks, but this article kind of completed the portrait for me.

p.s. I’m linking to the “print” version of the article, because no sane human should be forced to click through ten pages of hyperlinks to read one article.

Anastasius of Sinai

Rembrandt is one of those painters who (whom?) I normally admire, but don’t love. Perhaps it’s just because his name comes up so often that I have tuned him out, or perhaps it’s because some of his paintings in the museums I’ve frequented, like his creepy self-portrait in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek, seemed somehow unpleasant to me. But I just stumbled across a painting of his which I haven’t seen before, of the learned Anastasius of Sinai, which captures what, to me, was great about Rembrandt. The murky light, the weight of the sage’s body, the strangely comfortable solitude. It’s a picture that distills old-school learnedness to its essence: a man, a book, a desk, a window. I could have done without the elaborate Turkish carpet/tablecloth, but nobody’s perfect.

Use Your Allusion

This painting is of Dante and Virgil, strolling through Hell’s lobby, bumping into Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan. This sort of pow-wow, I understand, used to happen all the time.

There is an entire category of enjoyment which has recently all but vanished from my life.

I refer to the belatedly recognized allusion.

A slow-fuze ticking time bomb in the brain that explodes into kaleidoscopic bunga-bunga api of awareness and delight. The independent discovery of something in one artwork which was inspired by another, and which in turn transforms one’s appreciation of both works. The countless matryoschka-embedded Fabergé “Easter eggs” squatting complacently behind the trompe-l’œil Potemkin-village façade of every great work of art. Note that France and Russia appear to be the birthplaces of all artistic deception or concealment.

Anyway, in other words, I miss the nice feeling you get when you hear or read something and then later find out that it was a quote from somewhere else.

Why is this feeling scarce of late? Wikipedia. Google. Etc. Whenever I get that mental twinge which tells me I’ve heard something before, within seconds I can now find out exactly where I’ve heard it before. My mom used to tell me that instant gratification was a bad thing. I still don’t see her point of view at all, but I’m closer to it than before.


What am I blathering about? Well, one of my very favorite albums of the past several years, and of all time, really, is White Chalk by PJ Harvey. One of its best tracks is “When Under Ether”, a mesmerizing, haunting song sung by someone etherized on a table, watching the ceiling move, with hints that some disturbing medical procedure has just taken place. Here is the song.



Here are the lyrics (emphasis mine).

The ceiling is moving
Moving in time
Like a conveyor belt
Above my eyes

When under ether
The mind comes alive
But conscious of nothing
But the will to survive

I lay on the bed
Waist down undressed
Look up at the ceiling
Feeling happiness
Human kindness

The woman beside me
Is holding my hand
I point at the ceiling
She smiles so kind

Something’s inside me
Unborn and unblessed
Disappears in the ether
One world to the next
Human kindness

On first hearing, the song instantly made me think of “The Yellow Wallpaper” (I wasn’t born yesterday, after all) and of a couple of Harvey’s previous songs which seemed to deal with abortion or the death of a child (come back here, man, gimme my daughter, etc.). But there was something else about the song’s lyrics which sparked a fire within my head, and my dull, slow brain was unsatisfied for about a year. Until a rainy Sunday afternoon last week, when I happened to be re-reading Eliot’s Four Quartets, and in particular “East Coker”. What did I see but some lines I’d read 15 years ago in high school or college, but half-forgotten (emphasis mine):

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

Harvey’s customary brilliance at visceral allusion, which started with the brutal Biblical tales of her first album Dry, and only got more complex from there, should have prepared me, as this was not her first exercise in dredging up a great English(-language) poet in an odd place - there was, for example, her unexpected Yeats homage B-side “The Northwood” - but I nevertheless, as I scanned Eliot’s lines, felt a quick cold satisfaction of awareness. Art had spoken to art across the decades, and my brain had traced the thread between the two without recourse to any crude series of tubes. I had found and enjoyed an allusion, and its path from my ears (when I heard the song) to my eyes (when, a year later, I re-read the poem) didn’t involve anyone but the artists and me, and for an instant I felt as if we three, the great poet, the great musician, and the listener/reader, were one. A Hermetic trinity, as it were, of artistic appreciation.

As I said above, this is a particular type of joyous recognition which I experience less and less frequently lately, and which I feel future generations will probably not be able to experience at all, because any snippet of text is now able to be checked against all of humankind’s previous snippets of text, and every allusion can be instantly deciphered via online search. I’m sure future generations will develop ever-more-subtle and relevant and intricate types of artistic expression and reference, so there’s really nothing to worry about in the grand scheme of things, but I’d like to take a moment of silent mourning for the loss of my dear, old friend, the belatedly recognized allusion, and for the demotion of our human brains, which were once our primary means of remembrance, to second fiddle after the omnipresent, pan-memorious Spiritus Mundi of the Internet.

Ache Superior

For some reason, I’d never heard of the online comic Achewood before about two weeks ago, although I realize in retrospect that I’ve seen bits of it used as avatars or posted on message boards for years. The website has like eight years’ worth of comics on it.

In few words: I have just spent something like five straight evenings reading Achewood every spare minute I had. I have been getting home from work and reading Achewood like my life depended on it. I have been poring over Achewood like it was a Ptolemaic stele and I was Jean-François Champollion. It is funny, obscene, melancholy and somehow comforting in its depiction of friendship, although I suspect that it would appeal more to males than females. Check it out. Note: the two things I’m putting on here are not representative - the strip usually isn’t about hitting broad targets like bad grammar or Comic Sans, and is usually more strange and subtle. But I thought these items stand well on their own without any knowledge of the characters.

Goodbye, David Foster Wallace

One of my favorite authors is dead, by his own hand, at the age of 46.

It’s hard to think of another stranger whose death could have been more upsetting to me. David Foster Wallace was not only incredibly talented and funny, but his writing always had a humane and optimistic streak which I always respected, although I couldn’t share it. I read with bemused cynicism his article about how inspiring John McCain was and his monumental review of a dictionary which turned into a meditation on democracy, but at the same time I felt comforted that he was out there, being idealistic when it would have been easier to be nihilistic. I envied him his apparently sincere and principled search as much as I enjoyed his winningly, self-deprecatingly complex writing style.

The fact that he seems to have given up that search in suicidal despair only adds to the ache I feel at his death. I had several paragraphs more written, but I don’t want this to seem like a ripoff of Wallace’s sesquipedalian style, so I’ll just stop. I will miss him.

In almost every picture I’ve ever seen of him, Wallace was wearing a colossally silly-looking do-rag (à la Prison Mike), so I’ll just reproduce the cover of his best-known book, a cover which I feel represents both his refreshing style and the wide-open breadth of his unfortunately-curtailed literary ambition.