I wish there were a plural word for that.

Reading:

• The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers. I enthusiastically supported Tim Powers before ever reading him; he writes historical fantasy, what more do you need to know? Then I read The Drawing of the Dark, which was… merely okay (even though a magical beer is the central plot device), and I wondered if perhaps he wasn’t all I’d hoped. Ah, but Dark was one of his first novels, and The Anubis Gates came after some years of refinement. It’s witty, it’s inventive, it’s entertaining. It has a gripping plot and is cover-to-cover full of weird and wild characters. It’s Dickens from hell.
• Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s futurism, or future history, that branch of hard scifi that tries to realistically imagine some part of the future - in this case the colonizing and terraforming of Mars. This book proves like none other (since Riverworld) that the exceptional scifi author must be a polymath; Robinson shows an impressive command of astronomy, geography, geology, engineering, history, sociology, psychology, languages, comparative religion, literature, space travel, genetics, biology, and many other fields. Robinson executes his usual trick of having exquisitely crafted characters in a plot that redefines “epic”.  No, not plot, quite; his books don’t have plots in the same way that history doesn’t have plots. It has stories. I was humbled by the power and majesty of this book - and it’s just the first in the trilogy.
• Road Dogs, by Elmore Leonard. First time reading Leonard. I looked forward to it. He’s known for his pacing; as he says, “I skip the boring parts.” I was surprised to find such a talky novel. Most of the novel is dialogue - great dialogue, with real rhythms and poetry to it, but little happening none the less. A fun novel, but not quite what I expected. It breezes through and is done with. An entertaining diversion - nothing humbling or majestic, but I wouldn’t be unhappy if I’d written it.
• The Bootleg Inn, by Jason Sauchuk. My buddy’s debut novel, about a haunted hotel in Nova Scotia. Not bad!

Watching:

• Planet Earth, BBC. As good as everyone says. I got goosebumps at the glorious thirty-second shot of the great white catching a seal.
• Inside the Medieval Mind, BBC4. It’s okay. I’ve learned a few new things, but it’s pretty clear that the cinematographer and director were bored as hell. Every shot is so edgy it makes my eyes bleed, and the soundtrack is rattling, disturbing, grating - that’d be fine if it were a slasher flick, but the guy’s just reading some monk’s letter from seven hundred years ago.

Playing:

• Dragon Age, Bioware. Great stuff. Game o’ the year.
• Final Fantasy XII, Square Enix. I made it to the endgame! … now I have to grind for ten more hours to beat the final boss.
• Wolverine: The Origin: The Movie: The Game about the Movie, Raven. Surprisingly great for a tie-in game. Crazy, silly violence. But it’s a good God of War-style combo-based brawler at heart. With RPG elements! Which everything should have. Breakfast cereals! Why shouldn’t I get better at eating them as I eat more? Shaving! I should be better at it, with all this experience.
• Tales of Monkey Island: Rise of the Pirate God, Telltale. My love for this company is so boundless that I actually pay for their games. It’s been a good year for Monkey Island fans. The final chapter is as good as the rest.

Listening:

• Stuff. Things. None of your business. Though the new Christmas song from Jens Rushing is pretty good.

Posted in Games, Music, Reading, The Glass Teat | No Comments »

This is not a subjective opinion. It is objective fact, which I dispense like lightning bolts. You are welcome.

2009 was a slow year for music that I paid attention to, but there were still a few good releases. I spent another year wondering if Gillian Welch and Sufjan Stevens have given up on music altogether. No word on that. A new Sufjan song surfaced, and it was weird.

Since the greatest joy of criticism is negativity, let’s consider the most disappointing new album of the year.

When the Decemberists signed to Capitol Records, we all panicked that our favorite indie pop band had sold out. This record proves that they definitely, definitely have not. The sound is denser, the lyrics darker, everything about the album is unwelcoming. The trees on the album art need more thorns. A glance at the ratings on the album’s wiki shows that media had no idea what to make of this crazy record; they’re all over the place, from superlative to abysmal. The record swerves from insane to horrific to treacly over its fifty-eight minutes, always remaining interesting, but never really becoming fun or very pleasant. It’s music you have to work at to enjoy. It’s difficult and demanding; sometimes the difficulty holds real richness, and sometimes it’s just a mask over an empty shell. It was a good record to listen to two or three times, particularly for the crunchy metal riffs and Shara Worden’s valkyrie wails, but it is not the classic that the band was primed to produce at this point in their career. Can we judge it against our expectations? Of course we can. That’s the whole definition of “disappointing”. On its own merits, it may be “interesting” or “curious”, but against our expectations, it is “disappointing.”

Runner-up: The Dodos’ “Time to Die”. The last thing this band needed was a vibraphonist. They traded grit for gloss and lost much of what made them so unique.

Runner-runner-up: Devendra Banhart’s “What Will We Be”. Since “Cripple Crow”, he’s gone into weirder and weirder diversions - who can forget the Yiddish-pop of “Shabop Shalom”? Everyone can, actually. I did until just now. While “What Will We Be” yields a few excellent tunes, like the opener and the single “Baby”, much of it is consumed by mushy tropicalia. What we want is “Cripple Crow II: The Crippling”.

Produced in previous years, and therefore ineligible for the prize of 2009’s best album, a few records that I’ve discovered this year make frequent appearances in my playlist. They bring me joy, and are worthy of mention.

• The aforementioned Dodos’ debut Visiter, recommended by Joel. Long songs with complex arrangements and, as Tom Waits once said about Bob Dylan bootlegs, “with the seeds and pulp left in.” String buzz, random studio sounds, hoots and hollers; you can feel the roots of these songs even as they spin into wild and complex crescendos. See “Joe’s Waltz” and “Jodi”.
• Basia Bulat’s Oh, My Darling is sometimes so romantic that it’s obnoxious (”It was the first time I fell in love/ the first time I felt my heart/ the first time I sang out loud all through the night” - VOMIT), but the well crafted folk-pop and the singer’s voice, which can be described as a variety of cloths or foods - velvety, silky, honeyed - keep the record a quick, pleasant listen, one I find myself returning to time and again. (Joel recommended this one as well.
• My friend and bandmate Nick Kleeman recommended Devotchka, because I recommended Basia Bulat to him, and he said that he’d seen her, opening for Devotchka. Wiki describes them as gypsy-mariachi punk, which is a sound I need to know about. Their back catalogue is less approachable (so I haven’t approached it), but their 2008 A Mad & Faithful Telling is a beautiful, mad record that evokes nostalgia for I’m not quite sure what. My days in the Saint Petersburg trapeze troupe, I guess.
• Captain Beefheart’s Safe as Milk and Trout Mask Replica. I’ve been investigating this thing known as “the past”, and some interesting work was done there. Without Beefheart, we would not have had Tom Waits, for which we owe his sanity-smashing work a debt of gratitude. Whenever I feel insufficiently deranged, a listen of “Electricity” scrambles me properly.

Despite this year’s general downturn in quality music specifically manufactured to please Jens Rushing, which coincides with the general downturn in the quality of everything else on this miserable planet, a few albums pierced my dense mental barriers, erected to protect against disappointment in our failing petroindustrial society.

The second greatest album of the year is:

A.C. Newman’s Get Guilty. You may know Newman as the red-headed frontman of the New Pornographers, the pop genius who gets all those talented people to work together and who owns the same copy of Jorge Luis Borges’s Complete Fictions as me, but he’s also got a pair (a “brace”, as we say in Korea) of solo albums to his credit. The first, 2004’s The Slow Wonder, was pretty good! Get Guilty is the evolution of that.

I don’t know how this guy writes songs. They have structures that are discernible but not really recognizable. They have riffs that are sucked back into the song’s greater purpose. They have lyrics that make no sense at all but seem full of meaning. Newman’s versatile voice ties it all together.

And the best album of the year is…

That picture shows nothing less than a beautiful, talented woman wielding a sword while riding on the hood of a muscle car. I feel like I don’t even need to talk about the album now.
If you listened to her 2006 Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (and if not, your life has been a miserable waste), then you know the kind of songs she writes: baroque, ornate, subversive, rooted in Americana but often darting into unexplored dark alleys. You also know that she’s been maturing ever since her honky-tonk debut The Virginian; each album has been more complex, more sophisticated, and (happily) less countrified than the last. The Virginian is hardly recognizable from Middle Cyclone. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good album, but her growth as a songwriter and arranger has been exponential.
In Cyclone, we get a song about a tornado that loves a person, a song about killer whales and killer elephants, songs about prison girls, pharaohs, and mollusks. It’s weird, dark, and beautiful. Case recorded it in a barn, and at points you can hear the swallows nesting in the rafters, the wind gusting through the doors, and thirty uninterrupted minutes of frog song. It’s the best album of the year, filled with all the poise and confidence of a beautiful woman who once appeared semi-nude in some photo shoot years ago and who rides on the hood of a car while wielding a freaking longsword.

Posted in Music | 2 Comments »

Reading:

• The Travels of Marco Polo, by… Marco Polo. Do you know who’s the greatest, most benevolent, richest ruler of all time? Kubilai Khan! Yes, perhaps 25 million Chinese perished under his rule, but, still, he’s a helluva guy! Haha. That said, the Khan, who built roads, established a courier system and some rudimentary forms of welfare, was probably a cut above the rest of thirteenth century rulers. He was the strongest in an age when nation-states went to the most psychopathic bullies in the playground. Though I am curious as to how conscientious he may or may not have been. Both Marco Polo and Robert Shea (in his Zinja books) give a very sympathetic portrayal of the Great Khan. And he inherited his empire, and the onus to keep it running (and the only way empires can continue to run is by - what, children? Anyone? Anyone? Further conquest! Correct!). But the fact remains that his final conquest of China killed 25 million people, more than all Hitler’s concentration camps combined. Hohum. The actual book itself is rather dry, often a plain recounting of exports and populations, but there are cultural notes that are invaluable, and occasional folk tales or legends that are fascinating.
• Nine Princes of Amber, by Roger Zelazny. I understand “Amber” fans are fanatics in the unabbreviated sense, but I don’t see why. The book is fine. It is unexceptional fantasy. Maybe it improves in later installments.
• god is not great, by Christopher Hitchens. Finished this one recently. Hitchens isn’t interested so much in the philosophical argument for atheism as in the historical argument against religion, for which he provides ample fodder. Interesting and enlightening.
• Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser. Reading this with the wife right now. I always knew fast food was bad, but GODDAMN. Not this bad. I always thought, “Oh, it’s unhealthy, tastes like offal, and degrades your quality of life.” I had no idea it was so complicit in the crapification of America. I enjoy blaming George Bush for every ill of the nation, but it was mostly the happy, prosperous marriage of fast food and the automobile that fucked us up so badly.
• The Truth, by Terry Pratchett. I’m listening to this audiobook while I work out and wash the dishes. It’s like any other Pratchett book - that is, fun characters who are deep but not terribly broad, an engaging plot, beautiful witticisms and turns of phrase, lots of little pointless (but enjoyable) vignettes.
• Yes, I’m reading four books at once. How is this possible? My uncompromising experimentation with my own brain chemistry has yielded amazing results.

Listening:

• There is nothing new under the sun. At this very moment, it’s Vashti Bunyan’s Lookaftering, a gorgeous album that somehow did not change the world. I got the Dodos’ newest, but it has not captured my heart.

Watching:

• The Prisoner. You may know this one. From the 60s. A guy resigns his job for private reasons, and he’s kidnapped and brought to the mysterious “Village” until he explains why he quit. Ensues numerous mind games between the prisoner and the Village. It’s an Orwellian study of free will versus conformity, and it’s also good scifi/spy fiction, or “spy-fi”, if you must. It influenced Lost, but this show has more originality and meaning in a single episode than that latter-day leviathan has in a whole season.
  The most thrilling aspect (to me) is that this bold, bizarre, unique work of art was the product of one man’s mind: Patrick McGoohan, writer, producer, director, star. A brilliant actor, a savvy storyteller. (The AV Club’s obituary for him opens with: “Patrick McGoohan was a son of a bitch.” I don’t doubt it. He was a badass.) The fact that he could bring his unique vision to life so vividly gives me an intensely fulfilling sense of accomplishment by proxy. I am proud of our modern era, proud that someone took the chance on this insane-seeming project with this insane-seeming creator. In Simmons’s Ilium/Olympos, a character dying of radiation poisoning reflects on how grateful he is that he could be of the same species as Shakespeare. That is how I feel for the producers of The Prisoner. This is bold, uncompromised art, produced with a lot of someone else’s money, for popular consumption. It is refreshing in this age of Heroes, season 4.
  That said, it probably couldn’t be produced these days. No one would take a chance on something so bizarre. AMC’s upcoming remake promises to be quite tamed. … but I’ll watch it anyway.

Playing:

• The World Ends with You, developed by Jupiter. I’ve tried to get into this critical darling three times now, and have finally succeeded. At first I thought the combat sloppy and frantic. Now I see the method to the madness. The story has gripped me. The J-Pop soundtrack and the beautiful character art always appealed to me. Now I understand the opinion that this is a modern classic, a work of unvarnished, unmatched originality in a traditionally stale genre. Too bad no one bought it, and they’ll never make a sequel, or anything remotely like it, again.
• Gun, developed by Neversoft. The guys behind Tony Hawk made a Western game! How weird. But it was quite good, especially for 2005. Video games are so technology-dependent that only the exceptional age well, and while the graphics are often hideous, the hit detection spotty, etc., the gameplay itself is still solid. It’s got a small open world, where Dodge City, Kansas, and Empire, New Mexico are less than a mile apart, and where you can trample passers-by to death with your horse and then scalp them, if you want, though the game never explains why you might want to. But it tells a good story (if a bit over-the-top), and the shooting is fun throughout the game’s short span. Recommended, if you see it in the bargain bin.
• Final Fantasy XII, STILL. It’s good. I get most of my gaming done at work, and the PS2 resides at home, so progress is slow.The story makes no sense, so I know it’s Final Fantasy. I read a plot description on wikipedia, and I still don’t know what the hell’s going on. The combat has grown on me. It makes transparent the repetitive nature of JRPG combat, and it may spoil all JRPGs for me in the future.
• God of War, at times. Brutal, fun, bloody, hard as hell at times. I switch to this to blow off steam when FFXII gets boring.
• Can’t wait for Dragon Age. I’ve been following this one for three years now. I play - nay, devour - everything Bioware releases, and this looks amazing. November 3rd! Or 4th! Something. The first Assassin’s Creed alternately bored and amazed me. A sequel is greeted with cautious optimism. I would love to play Brutal Legend, but Tim Schafer has turned his back on ME, the loyal fan who bought Psychonauts (for $35, on sale), by not releasing it for PC. I would’ve totally bought it legitimately, too. Sigh.

Posted in Games, Music, Reading, The Glass Teat | 2 Comments »

I don’t know if I like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but I like their song “Maps”. Can someone please tell me how to feel about them? Thank you.

Posted in Music | 2 Comments »

The Dodos are a good band, with good music.

Norfolk & Western, which to me will always be the band that poached the Decemberists’ drummer, have a good sound. Their actual songs aren’t always memorable, but the textures, the tones they go for are unique. I like bands named after railroads.

Good Omens, the Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman collaborative novel, is quite fun. A lot of good jokes, and some interesting things to say about humans. It’s sometimes a bit too cute for its own good. And so far it seems overwhelmingly Pratchetty rather than Gaimany. The plot is a bit more gripping than usual for Pratchett, but plotting isn’t exactly Gaiman’s strong suit either, is it?

Collaborative novels are a weird beast. I wonder if I’ll ever write one, and with whom I would write one. It could be fun - it could lead to great things, like this novel or the Illuminatus! trilogy, where Shea and Wilson kept trying to one-up each other. At worst, the writers’ unique voices could be lost; a lot of the Larry Niven books I’ve read are collaborations, and they may as well have been written by just one person. The Trillium series (Andre Norton, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Julian May gave each author a character to play with, which seems a sensible way of handling things. Personally, I wouldn’t like relying on someone else to get their work done. However, I know that when two like-minded people get talking, ideas spark in ways they don’t when working alone.

Further thoughts:

The Satanic Verses is quite the book. There are books that I finish, thinking, “I could write something that good, some day.” And there are books that totally astonish me with their fire and brilliance and make me painfully aware of the… (shall we say) modesty of my talent. These books are the totems of culture, the books that are remembered for transcending competence and entering the realm of the inspired.

Etrian Odyssey II is just like the first, but better.

Painkiller is a fun game. It is only fun, and nothing more. How did I miss this one first time around?

Posted in Games, Music, Reading | No Comments »