Adam O'Neil
12/28/06
Relic's Company of Heroes is GameSpy's 2006 game of the year, and I tried out the demo. Typical of strategy games, it has an overhead, birds-eye-view of the battlefield, but--surprisingly (to me, anyway)--it also lets you zoom and pan the camera to a great degree. You can zoom down an almost 1st person view. It's pretty amazing. Sadly but not surprisingly, the game requires a lot of CPU power that my poor 1.6Ghz machine doesn't put out. It ran pretty choppy, and I don't expect to buy it.
More important always than graphics is playability--or how it balances difficulty and reward. I'm a student of game theory and I'm always trying to understand why certain games work or don't. I struggle with this; I find it hard to explain why one game works and another doesn't. In a nutshell, I dislike strategy games where you must gather resources, and Company of Heroes is one such game. I felt it was too complicated, and therefore I didn't bond with it right away. (Which probably means I'll never bond with it.)
The complexity shows up in two ways that are unfortunately endemic to strategy games today. 1) Company of Heroes requires resource gathering, a mode of play in which you must gradually acquire things or items that expand the game's playability. Resource gathering is poor game design because it creates "earning anxiety"--a constant worry that you don't have enough resources. This is too much like real life. For the same reason that it's no fun in life, it's no fun in games. Resource gathering is also a distraction from the game's real objective--beating the enemy. Granted, Company of Heroes puts a new twist on this that I almost like. You gather resources by capturing territory--as opposed to games like Age of Empires where you mine, chop wood, and farm. On the face of it, capturing territory is a good way to get rid of non-combat objectives found in many strategy games, but it still leads to earning anxiety, which is not fun. Think about Chess. You don't have to earn the pieces. They're given to you at the start of the game for free. It's what you do with those pieces that matters. Strategy games should be like that.
2) I didn't play it long enough to tell for sure, but I had the feeling that Company of Heroes was falling into the same trap as many other strategy games in which it offers too much choice in how to upgrade your units. If you've ever felt stumped by a long restaurant menu or felt unable to make an investment decision (or felt badly about one you'd made), this is the same ill feeling that many strategy games create unintentionally. There is a widespread misconception that more choice = more fun in a game. Rather, the truth is that fun is dependent on reward and the illusion of difficulty.
12/13/06
Recent viewing:
12/4/06
Went to a poetry slam last night. Good lord. I'd been to several in the early 90s. Slam poetry is a mixture of confession and preaching that I pretty much feel superior to. A couple of the performers last night did have a good stage presence. By brute force they moved and embarrassed me with the baldness of their emotional wounds. At their worst, slam poets speed-ramble angrily, incoherently. If by chance they say something interesting, they kick it away before it can take hold and develop. I wished I'd taken some notes because I did have specific suggestions for people on how to improve. I don't remember them now.
Some bullet point recommendations for slam poets.
My mother
had a boyfriend
named Glen Baxter.
Let that be your mantra.
When I say "strive to be understood," I'm not saying you should write in any particular style. I'm saying that you should enunciate and deliver so the audience can recall several lines from your poem afterwards.
11/30/06
I think U2 wants me to like them again with their new radio single "Window in the Sky"--I think it's called. The song is happy and soaring, but tuneless. The triumphant kick drumming and Bono's proud singing cannot mask the absence of good melody. Melody is everything. I'll always treasure U2 for "The Joshua Tree," "Achtung Baby," and "Pop" and a few other singles, but these guys need to get in a fight and make up again to really get back on track.
Thanks to a recent "Indie Spotlight" on iTunes, I discovered Jill Barber and bought 3 songs right away. It's straight-up folk/country music, very touching and seductive. I don't usually go for that, but I couldn't resist her. Check out the song "Hard Line" on the album "For All Time." She'll give Lucinda Williams a run for her money.
I'm also lately doing push-ups to a band called The Sword. They call it "retro heavy metal"--this rich, majestic, powerful sound. Satisfying, ambitious, pounding melodies that handily crush today's rap-metal tantrums. Their Norse mythology references lends a little faux mysticism, always a plus.
If you need a good dance tune, check out Scissor Sisters "I Don't Feel Like Dancin'." This is great, if a little generic. (It's greater than it is generic.)
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FYI, I'll be offline for a couple weeks since I'm moving and will lost Internet access at home for a couple weeks.
11/26/06
The other night I shot pool and talked a little philosophy at Barley's with a friend and his co-workers. An unexpected treat. Verbally, I'm slow on the draw to articulate my position very well, but find it much easier in front of the computer:
I don't really care for the label "agnostic." To my ear, it sounds like a cop-out, even though I suppose it's technically correct when used about me since I can't really claim that I know for sure God doesn't exist. But this is something that can't be known anyway--by definition. It is my position that anything that "can't be known" is not true.
Every major religion has criteria for determining who's included and who's excluded in it. Religions wield their respective world views as weapons--dividing, cutting up people and the earth with vicious and relentless abandon.
I am also bitterly disgusted by the idea that Jesus "died for our sins." This is a vestige of ancient religions that used human sacrifice routinely. Like those ancient religions, Christianity needed the blood spatter of human sacrifice to attain legitimacy. People at their stupidest crave ritual violence when faced with the enormity and cruelty of nature. They think nature respects it. The most well-meaning and otherwise sane people today wear crucifixes to commemorate the supposed exchange of our sins for Jesus' life, but they are not so different from the ancient Aztecs if they think that ritual killing actually helps them or means something on a cosmic level. The idea is revolting to me. It is absolutely offensive to me to think that the wrongs of one people can be corrected by the suffering of an innocent--but that is precisely the crux of Christianity. It offends me to think that there's some kind of eye in the sky presiding over and approving these "exchanges," these transactions of suffering. I defy anyone to explain to me why this isn't bullshit.
My position is that spirituality (like sexuality) is natural and human, but that the language we have for describing it, communing in it is under-developed, relying on bogus belief systems based on the supernatural. It's also my position that spirituality is morally neutral--absolutely not the synonym for good ethics that many people assume. Exactly as sexuality can bring out the bad in people, so too can spirituality. (The 9/11 hijackers weren't atheists.)
11/18/06
Saw "Stranger Than Fiction" last night. It was okay. I was swept up in the spell of Maggie Gyllenhall, and I enjoyed Will Ferrell's low-key performance. The premise was interesting: it's about a guy who hears a voice in his head that's actually the thought process of an author controlling his life.
But the moral of the movie is that books are dangerous, that literature is just snobbery at best, homicidal hocus pocus at worst. The good life can be found--instead--in baking cookies, hand-holding, and "giving thanks to God."
Sorry folks, not buying it--notwithstanding my love of cookies and human touch. Good books are tools for living. And I ain't talking about the Bible. I'm talking about Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine. John Ashbery's Flow Chart. Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which--in particular--got me to relive a painful personal memory and escorted me through it safely. Any adult who's not in his life made a strong connection with or at least enjoyed a piece of writing is what I'd call an idiot.
And the bit about "giving thanks to God"--from Emma Thompson's voice over in the end....I have no respect for that way of thinking. It's easy to thank God for good things that happen, but bad things are a different matter. Some religious people say that we're too stupid to know what's good or bad for us, since God is infinitely wiser than us. To those people I say, Okay, go jump off a cliff--if you don't know the difference between good and bad. As you're falling, take comfort that it's the will of God. The rest of us ate from the Tree of Knowledge a long time ago. Other arguments are variations on the "we're too stupid" argument. If we're that stupid, then we wouldn't know good, either.
One author I know of, Harold Kushner, bravely concluded--as I understand it--that God is not really omnipotent. I haven't actually read his book. (When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Amazon) Kushner is a rabbi who faced up to the fact that you can't have both a loving and omnipotent God at once. He's one or the other, not both--if the words "loving" and "omnipotent" have any meaning at all.
11/17/06
Since high school, I've been a huge fan of My Bloody Valentine. They are a founding member of my musical consciousness. In front of me on the wall, I have three 11x17 color copies of the original CD box art from "Glider" and "Loveless." (I have the original cardboard CD boxes, too, from 1990 and 1991, respectively. You remember when CDs used to come in those 15" boxes?) Right now the pictures are just nailed into the plaster. Some time after I become an adult, I'm going to get them framed.
I had the color copies made at a local store called Iris Photographics. They're still here in Asheville and they do high-end photography shit. Anyway, the girl who made the color copies for me back in the day had ripped stockings, an artsy, Wilma-type haircut and these big rimmed glasses. Obviously, she was into MBV. Why didn't she say so?
I have more to say about MBV, but lack the patience to finish it now.
11/9/06
More bands that I wish existed:
11/3/06
Listened to Elastica for the first time yesterday--their self-titled CD. It's a surly punk-pop girl band from Britain. They have one male member who--judging by the CD sleeve art--is holding his own against the "girl power" of the rest of the band. I think this works because--at least on this album--everyone is more into the music than themselves.
The first song "Line Up" is a bit hostile. I will warm to it in time, maybe. I take it as a sign of great sophistication when a band leads with its more intimidating song instead of its radio hits.
The song I heard that initially piqued my interest was a snippet of "Car Song" played on This American Life. My favorite song on whole disc is "Waking Up." (Spin class instructors take note.)
11/2/06
"Jet Li's Fearless" was pretty good. I was transfixed for a few seconds near the end when the hero is fighting his climactic battle. Several forces pull at him: his Chinese countrymen cheer him on to avenge national pride, while regret from a lifetime of fighting weighs on him. But the mutual respect shared with this opponent energizes him--and energized me. He was at home in the eye of this storm. I was grateful for a martial arts movie that could summon this kind of feeling.
10/26/06
A little thing nagging at me from "This American Life" a couple weeks ago. It was a recap of "favorite interviews" and one of them was an interview with a transgendered...um...woman wanting to be a man. The dude admitted that after he started getting testosterone, he "understood physics better" than he had as a woman. The interviewer sort of scolded him for controverting what feminism has insisted is merely a false stereotype about gender--that men are better at science and math, etc. The interviewer said, "Sir, you've set us back 100 years"--by his subject admitting that there really might be a biological explanation for sex-based aptitudes. It's not just a conspiracy of the patriarchy, in other words.
My thought was that if the sexes are really so similar--as political correctness and feminism say--then what's the point of changing sexes in the first place? If they're the same, then why go to the hassle of changing sexes? Why get testosterone? Obviously because there must be some fundamental differences between the male and female consciousness. Some are not satisfied with their sex and feel they must change it. They wouldn't feel this way if they didn't deep down believe in sexual differences--an idea that feminism denies. If this difference manifests as one sex being "better at physics," then I don't see what the big deal is.
10/25/06
Recent listening:
10/19/06
Heard a band recently that I highly recommend: Rodrigo y Gabriela. Hell-raising classical/flamenco guitar--all acoustic, no singing (that I've heard so far). I grabbed the song "Tamacun" (which I'd actually heard on the radio) from iTunes as well as a stunning cover of "Stairway to Heaven."
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I watched "Tears of the Sun," the other night. I'd seen it before. It's not a great movie, but there are things I like about it. There's some authentic-feeling Navy SEAL covert ops stuff that I love. In one part--the most gripping part of the movie--the SEAL team comes upon a village that's being attacked by--I don't know--"Nigerian rebels" or something. (The movie takes place in Africa.) Peasants are being slaughtered. One dude is stuffed through a car tire and doused in gasoline. The Navy sniper saves him by shooting his two captors with a silenced rifle (--an M4 SOCOM, I think). The rest of the SEAL team enters the village and kills the raiders with knives and silenced pistols. They stop the attack, but the Navy team is too late to save many of the villagers.
If ever there was a good use of American whoop-ass, this would be it: decisively stopping ethnic cleansing on the ground. Indeed, this is the controlling idea of the movie--that American military whoop-ass can achieve good in the world. I entertain this fantasy myself in limited amounts, but what a guilty indulgence this is. The movie "Black Hawk Down" is a much better reflection of how good intentions can go wrong, and it remains one of my all-time favorite movies. Despite the mainly bad outcome of the battle of Mogidishu, there was still some astounding tactics and bravery on display.
BHD was criticized by the left for focusing mainly on the American deaths and side of the story. Can't argue with that one. The best I can say is that liberals forget why we were there in the first place. It was a rare case of altruism--and, as such, under-gunned and underestimating of the opposition. People have said many times we shouldn't have been in Somalia in the first place, that it "wasn't our war," and so on. Can't argue with that one, either. The thing is, the wars that are "ours" are way more dubious--morally speaking--than our involvement in Somalia's civil war. Except for our fight with the Germans in WWII, "our" wars and covert operations have been pretty ugly in moral terms.
"Tears of the Sun" tries to atone for the U.S.'s failure to stop cruelty around the world--in Rwanda in 1994, for example, or in the Balkans throughout the 90s. You could find quite a few other cases around the world--ongoing and in the recent past. Darfur right now. Atonement is a worthy aim, I guess, but in a movie it can be achieved only through self-deception and willful loss of perspective. It's better--as in BHD--to accept the enormity and scale of suffering beyond our ability to correct. This is a more powerful, affecting statement.
10/11/06
Tried the new Battlefield 2142 demo for about 45 seconds. (After a 45-minute download.) Not much fun, but I was never a fan of the Battlefield series to begin with. The Battlefield series is all multiplayer-based, a style of play I've never cared for--with the major exception of playing Quake 3 with Amy or my brother on our little LAN. In multiplayer games, you're interacting with real people through their online avatars, and there's this whole social dynamic thing that's intimidating and difficult to navigate. With this kind of online game you must "choose a server" to play on. (The other flavor of multiplayer games--massively multiplayer online games or MMOs--are a bit different; they're played on one giant server with thousands of players, usually requiring a paid subscription.)
Anyway, with a game like Battlefield there might be a thousand servers to choose from at any one time. Anyone can start a server, and people make up these stupid name for them like "Fucktard's Elite Revenge NLPP (nO laMe peOplE plEEz)." So, you start the game, and you see all these ridiculous server names. All you can do, basically, is just pick one at random. And then you start playing.
The concept behind Battlefield is pretty cool. It attempts to model actual real-world combat between two opposing teams. (I forget the maximum number of players--it's something like 32, I think.) The "2142" part refers to the year, so this game is full of futuristic crap--all of it well thought-out and nicely done, frankly. (I don't like how there's no blood in the game anywhere. The publisher, EA Games, has some kind of rule about that. I find that kind of prudishness insulting--but...they didn't ask me...)
Basically, you're a lone soldier--though part of a team--trying to kill everyone on the enemy team. You run around on this large...well...battlefield shooting at everyone who's not on your side. You can ride in and drive vehicles of every kind, which is pretty cool. But here's where it breaks down. Playing the game well requires teamwork. You have to know how to give and receive orders, and how to understand where to go, what to shoot at and when. I don't see how this works in Battlefield at all. Every time I've played online (--I tried a couple times with the previous game Battlefield 2--) it was just a total free for all. I had no clue what I was supposed to do or who was in charge. It was stupid. Supposedly lots of people know how to do it, but it was never clear to me.
10/10/06
I'll be curious to know what comes of this upcoming summit on school safety (described here at CNN). I was flummoxed (whatever that means) by this statement in the CNN article:
Bush is expected to ... encourage people to ask questions at home about whether their schools are prepared for emergencies.
I'm disappointed if the prevailing attitude among people is that "preparedness" is the solution to school violence--as if school violence is just some new freak weather pattern that schools--and only schools--must now "prepare" for. Tactically, what does it mean to "prepare" for a shooting rampage by an enraged child or psycho adult? I'm asking--what does it mean? It doesn't mean anything. If there was a realistic Rainbow Six mission based around a school shooting, you'd loose every time. In fact, there's a reason why this kind of mission doesn't exist in the game in the first place. It's because you can't win them.
Availability of guns is a root problem, here. As is a systemic loss of discipline in children in general. Schools can no more "prepare" for shooting rampages than we can repeal or re-write the Second Amendment.
10/6/06
Add to my list of favorite books The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I read it last Sunday in a single sitting, more or less, which I've never done. I almost cried at the end, but fought it.
It's about a father and son on a long walk. They're alone, mostly. The boy is about 10, and he was born right after a nuclear war. It rains and snows all the time, and the snow is gray. Between them they have a shopping cart, a pistol with three bullets left, and not much else. They spend all day looking for scraps of edible things and trying to keep warm. And this isn't as bad as it gets. Cannibalistic gangs roam the land that make the Taliban look as scary as your homeowner's association.
This is the real Mad Max. This is Mad Max without the false heroics and car chases. I was left stunned and sad and grateful for this book. McCarthy's honesty about how bad things can get is "weapon grade."
Since becoming an older brother 24 years ago I've dreaded the idea of fatherhood, parenting. To me, the vulnerability of children in this mean world is an obscenity. I want to shake people who don't grasp this. In reading McCarthy's book, I've had to face this fear, see it through. I guess that's what I'm grateful for. Not that my mind is changed about child-rearing. Hell no.
But my new Beck album sounds better.
10/5/06
Beck's new album "The Information" is very strong in the first half as is the title song. The songs are built around great rhythms and have these thick, gorgeous baselines, heavily punctuated with all manner of electronic burps, squawks, and clinking things. It's amazing how he can make electronic music sound really new, strange, and pleasing. I do miss the melody and heroism of "E-Pro" from his last album. On this new album, nothing quite makes me stand up and cheer. But I do stand up and move around, and I'm smiling a lot.
10/04/06
Heard a story recently on NPR about NetFlix: they're offering a million dollars to an individual or team of programmers who can develop an improved movie recommendation system. I love problems like this, but I'm pretty sure there aren't enough movies out there worth recommending. I'm also not very receptive to recommendations in the first place unless the recommender knows me well enough. This may turn out to be the crux of the problem: creating a system that makes customers feel understood. That would be really hard to automate, but this clearly is what marketers want to do some day, and is what programmers should focus on.
Considering the widespread awfulness of movies, the system will need a sense of humor--the ability to make ironic recommendations that appear to contradict the customer's taste--but don't. Use of irony is a sign of understanding. Another sign of understanding is avoidance of "1-off" recommendations. For example, because I like "The Matrix," it doesn't mean I like fake purse copies like "Underworld." Both movies have attractive women in tight black outfights doing martial arts. (At least I'm pretty sure "Underworld" has this.) Because I like "Conan the Barbarian," it does not mean that I like "Conan the Destroyer." These kinds of mistakes--conflating superior and crappy movies based on superficial similarities--is something my ideal system would not do.
9/22/06
Cycling jersey design I'm thinking of. Obviously, I haven't factored it into garment shape, but this is the graphic concept.
I saw a LeeBoy asphalt paving machine recently--two of them actually, and I love them. I love the proud silliness of the name "LeeBoy"; I love the blazing orange crusted with black tar that you see on those paving machines. (Cycling jersey printing technology is not quite advanced enough to convey the nuanced beauty of black tar-crusted blazing orange, so I didn't try to reproduce that.)
The particular paving machine I saw was an "elite" model (so it said), and I loved that as well. I would plaster the word on my jersey at odd angles and in different directions. Over-repeating it like that is an ironic form of self-effacement that cyclists strive for and consistently flub in actual conversation. (Cyclist talk--particularly among strangers from larger cities--is a noxious mix of boasting, pleas for validation, and superfluous technical jargon.) It's best to let your jersey do the talking when possible--particularly among strangers from larger cities.
9/19/06
On a Sam Harris reading rampage: The End of Faith over the past weekend (in between bouts of Ridge Racer) and am now half way through Letter to Christian Nation. (Thanks, John, for the Accent on Books gift certificate.) Basically, Harris says what I've been saying and thinking for a long time--except that he says it better.
In a nutshell, Harris' position is that reasonable people must find the courage to speak out against religious extremism of all kinds, to stop being polite towards faith-based irrationality and meanness. Therefore, I take his writing as a kind of calling. He rips Islam pretty hard in End of Faith, but does not spare Christianity. He is not against spirituality in principle, and disavows the dogmatism of shallower expressions of atheism. But he clearly speaks against religion of all kinds. It is music to my ears.
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In other news, I thought of a game concept. If BattleMechs really are militarily bogus (as I've tentatively suggested), why not prove it in a simulation game where you fight mechs. Imagine driving around Bogata, Colombia in a Land Rover while six 100-ton Dire Wolves (aka "Daishi") closed in from multiple directions. (It would be kind of like the AT-AT invasion in the beginning of "Empire Strikes Back.") Your job would be to coordinate the counter-attack--to ascertain the mech locations and direct aircraft and long-range missile attacks. All while trying to avoid being blown up yourself.
9/17/06
Finding myself on a long tangent of thought regarding the design of "mech games," after having played yet another bad one this weekend on my dad's Xbox 360. ...Confirming again that games really aren't improving. Graphics get better. The hardware gets more expensive and powerful, but games are not getting more fun. The other game I played this weekend, Namco's "Ridge Racer 6," was awesome. The number 6 on that title should tell you something: that there's something good in the game worth perpetuating. The first "Ridge Racer" came out in 1995 (I think it was) for the Sony PlayStation, and its core design principle of pure exhilaration and faintly surrealist anime style (happily trading away hard realism) have made it, IMO, the finest car racing game series ever.
The word "mech" warrants some explanation. The word is short for "BattleMech." It comes from a 1984 paper-and-pencil role playing game called BattleTech. The subject of BattleTech is "31st century combat." BattleMechs are the primary weaponry of that combat. To quote from the Wikipedia article on this, a BattleMech is "a bipedal war machine about 30 to 40 feet tall, and massing 20 to 100 tons." The Wikipedia article about BattleTech is borderline interesting. The thing that will amaze you is how detailed its science fiction universe is, how carefully it's been imagined. I've always loved sci-fi stuff like this, but I particularly like the pulpy silliness of it, its earnest naiveté for believing that the human species will survive the next 100 years at all. It's the product of adults lost in a trance of middle-school-level creativity. Check out the artwork here to understand what I mean by "pulpy silliness." I love it, by the way. I'd love to return to my middle-school level creativity.
A major force in computer gaming today is the transformation of these old paper-and-pencil games into playable video games. You might be surprised to know that, after 20 years of trying, gaming technology is only just starting to get good at role-playing games, IMO. They require enormous artistic and technical labor to approximate what was once purely imaginary. Players who grew up with the old paper-and-pencil games have stupendously high expectations of computer-based versions of their games, and it's taken forever for gaming technology to start to meet those expectations. (Part of the problem has been video game designers' misguided attempts to translate literally old paper-and-pencil rules directly to the video game medium--without considering the impedance mismatch between the two media. I think of how little fun I had trying to play Baldur's Gate, an overly literal implementation of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.)
Getting back to BattleTech and mech games. Mech games simulate combat among these lumbering "bipedal war machines." You go thumping across a great landscape, firing lasers, missiles, and whatnot at enemy mechs and other vehicles. In between episodes of war and destruction you usually get to customize your mech in various ways, balancing armor, weaponry, and coolant. (Lasers generate heat, and so you have to think about adding things called "heat sinks" to your mech.) The BattleTech universe defines a rich and believable science around mech technology that I find enjoyable to daydream about to this day.
The first mech game I ever played was "Mechwarrior" for the Super Nintendo in 1992, I guess it was. Then we got "Mechwarrior 2" for the PlayStation, which would've had to have been 1995 or 96. I lost interest for a while, but picked up "Mechwarrior 4" for the PC (developed by Microsoft) some time ago. It was decent, but no Ghost Recon. I guess Microsoft still owns the BattleTech rights or whatever, because no one has continued the series. There have been quite a few BattleMech look-alike games over the years. It is exactly one of these "look-alike" games that I played this weekend: the unfortunately titled "Chrome Hounds." (GameSpy review here.)
I hated "Chrome Hounds" for these reasons:
So of course I got to think how I'd redo this. I have a couple of general recommendations for mech games that I'd like to develop in a longer document.
I have, at the same time, a whole set of thoughts questioning the military practicality of BattleMechs in the first place. This got me thinking about Donald Rumsfeld and his efforts to "transform" the military--essentially to lighten it and make it faster. Rumsfeld would never approve of BattleMechs, and I'm starting to think I wouldn't either. This is probably his and my only point of agreement in our respective worldviews. Let me explain.
On the modern battlefield, stealth is the primary guarantor of survival. Not armor. Pile on the armor, and the enemy will simply shoot you with a bigger gun. Destructive power is cheap. You can't armor yourself enough to protect against every kind of weapon. The best you can do is not be seen in the first place. This explains the military's fixation on stealth technology.
Rumsfeld probably dislikes most heavy weaponry such as tanks and howitzers. Armored vehicles are both expensive to transport around the world, require lots of fuel, manpower to maintain, and complex logistical infrastructure to support. Worst of all, armored vehicles are relatively slow and cannot see threats near and behind them--particularly in urban environments. (Sending tanks by themselves without infantry support into hostile cities is the best way to have them destroyed.) Granted, in the BattleTech universe, everything is basically free, and technology has solved just about every one of these problems but one. An honest simulation of large, upgright, slow-moving war machines would have to admit that they're vulnerable to long range and air-to-ground missiles. Anything standing tall can be knocked over. For all the appealing fierceness and majesty of the BattleMech, I cannot shake the idea that they are relatively easy to target and knock over with long range missiles. They are not stealthy, and I cannot believe that their armor is enough to protect them from--what would have to be--the staggeringly destructive power of "31st century" weapons.
I happily admit that a game built around the concept of being 40 feet tall and destroying everything in sight is cool, but I don't think I can buy anymore the idea that it's militarily plausible. One way I could make it work is if such a game was intentionally pulpy and silly in the way the BattleTech universe was in the first place. Subsequent video games have tried to make it look serious and believable, and this could be a major error.
9/7/06
A little embarrassed, initially, that I published a clearly-unfinished entry about Rumsfeld, etc. I let it stand, however, as a metaphor for my incomplete thoughts on current military happenings. My difficulty forming a complete thought. I can't decide if it's more noble to ignore all that stuff and talk simply about music and games, or if it's more noble--a civic duty, almost--to express an opinion on what's happening in Iraq and so on. I don't know. I'm setting that question aside.
The thing I had been about to remark on about Rumsfeld was regarding a speech he gave recently to the American Legion. He likens critics of the War on Terrorism to those who believed in appeasing Hitler. He also blames the media for harping on and hyping bad news like the Abu Ghraib thing, and stuff like that. Blah blah blah.
Two paragraphs stood out.
Not so long ago, an exhibit -- Enola Gay at the Smithsonian during the 1990s -- seemed to try to rewrite the history of World War II by portraying the United States as somewhat of an aggressor. Fortunately, the American Legion was there to lead the effort to set the record straight. (Applause.)
Your watchdog role is particularly important today in a war that is to a great extent fought in the media on a global stage, a role to not allow the distortions and myths be repeated without challenge so that at the least the second or third draft of history will be more accurate than the first quick allegations we see.
I would have written these paragraphs as follows:
Not so long ago, an exhibit -- Enola Gay at the Smithsonian during the 1990s -- seemed to try to acknowledge the guilty conscience we as Americans have as a result of dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not to mention the firebombing of dozens of cities, all or mostly non-military targets. Fortunately, the American Legion was there to lead the effort to suppress any kind of wussy, divisive, and frankly un-American soul searching on the matter. Besides, we had to drop the bomb to tell the Soviets who was really boss in the world. (Applause.)
Your watchdog role is particularly important today in a war that is not exactly a war in the usual sense, but rather a public relations effort to persuade Americans that they should support any kind of military engagement that our administration sees fit to pursue.
Now, for the record, I do believe Japan deserved a serious beating for the Bataan Death March. I still don't have a definitive opinion myself on whether the a-bomb should have been dropped. I guess I should be glad that it doesn't matter what I think.
[I have thought more about this and decided that my own indecisiveness here is due to a confusion of moral and strategic questions. The prevailing argument has been that the bomb made strategic sense. On the face of it, this is hard to argue since it did end the war quickly. (Some say Japan was already close to surrendering in the first place, making the bomb unnecessary.) On the moral side of it, I would have to say that building the bomb in the first place made all moral questions of it meaningless.]
/
I finally beat the game Crimsonland. The main thing I dislike about it is that you can't choose your weapon. You can only refuse the individual weapons offered at random, and so many of them are ineffective. It's still pretty fun, though. Following a link from the Crimsonland site, I came upon the game Master of Defense. I played the demo, loved it, then bought the thing and played it straight through. I regretted the purchase a bit later, due to its shortness, but the concept is great. A convoy of monsters travels a winding road to your base. You must position shooting towers along their route in such a way that you kill all the monsters before they reach your base. You win by reading the terrain and figuring out the best places to put towers. Good stuff. Wish it had more levels or that the monsters were a little bit smarter, maybe. I don't know.
Yesterday I bought an iPod, a 2GB Nano. I took it back later the same day. I realized that I'm just not an iPod kind of guy. The reason I got it was for biking at the local cycling track. For the longest time I've dreamed of time trialing to Pink Floyd's "One of These Days"--a frowning, brooding track built on a Taoistly simple bass line with heavy delay pedal. After the bridge (consisting of wobbling white noise and a monster who roars the song's title), a piano barges in, the cymbals crash, and the guitar takes off. Good stuff.
Anyway, the bummer with the iPod is that the ear buds are uncomfortable, and the wind mostly blocks out the music. The device itself is hard to mess with when it's in your back jersey pocket inside a sweat-deflecting Ziploc bag. The thing is too expensive. I risk getting tired of the music I love by having access to it everywhere I go. I was not crazy about the user interface. I had trouble reconciling the circular finger movement of the touch pad with the straight up-and-down scrolling of the display. The center button had no obvious intrinsic meaning. I've always thought that Apple's expertise with user interfaces was overrated.
In the back of my mind somewhere I hope one day to be a better-educated listener of music, and the iPod is not an educational tool. It's a pacifier, really. Also, I don't like the look of people who are hooked up to headphones in public--for the most part. It looks kind of immature, or something. It reminds me of that back-to-school look of kids with backpacks and unbuttoned flannel shirts worn over Old Navy t-shirts. Bogus.
8/27/06
My feedback on iTunes recommendations feature:
So far I'm not very impressed by the recommendations feature, but it's definitely something you should refine and develop over time. Some examples of "bad" recommendations:
The choices for responding to a recommendation are not quite right. I find myself thinking, "I like that artist, but have no desire to purchase anything by that artist." Example: Mr. Mister, recommended by way of John Parr's "St. Elmo's Fire." I have all the Mr Mister I'll ever need in the song "Kyrie." It's not quite right to say I dislike Mr. Mister. I really do like that one song. But I'll never buy any more.
Sometimes, I'm resistant to a recommendation, but I'm not quite prepared to say I don't like it. Example: I was recommended something by Death Cab for Cutie by way of a song by Weezer. I had struggled with the Weezer purchase for a long time, not believing I was quite cool enough. I enjoy but have mixed feelings about Weezer to this day. And now you want me to consider Death Cab for Cutie. I'm not ready to say I don't like them (although with their profoundly stupid name you couldn't blame me), but I need some good reason for checking them out. I wish there was a button I could click that said, "Give me a better reason to check this out."
/
Other musics recently considered/exposed to:
8/26/06
THE CONFRONTERS
Which of the incredible lies will prove true?
Ah, you ask me things
I wish I could not ask myself.A fire burns in a fireplace.
Cups are on a sill.A man is working. He moves along. There is so
much to learn, so many teachers.A dog howls from a roof.
Is it a wolf? Someone wants it to be.In short there are these topics.
In winter and in summer there were.
The other seasons mediate
and end up having more topics."Hives with no bees," you said.
Which is how I remember them
through a bloodred transparent curtain, that looked
like rubber.The various inequalities are parceled out,
now. There are suburban subdivisions
with no shards of land left on them.
Impatient dawns arrive.
I opened up Can You Hear, Bird to a page at random and found this poem I hadn't seen before. I liked it. The signal is pretty strong from start to finish. That's really the most you can hope for from one of his poems: "a strong signal from start to finish." I recall a professor of mine admitting his misgivings about Ashbery. My professor was recalling from an interview somewhere in which Ashbery himself admitted that he doesn't know what his poems mean. My professor thought that was a problem.
It is a problem, indeed, for English departments and their quest for meaning through conventional, stair-step methods. When it comes to poetry in school, I'm a believer in focusing more on recitation and performance rather than explication and analysis. Good performance requires comprehension of the text in the first place. Turning that comprehension into quality written analysis is a distant second step behind the first of simply memorizing poems. Not until you get poems burned into memory can you hope to say intelligent things about them later.
The critic Harold Bloom made this point for me in his book How to Read and Why. He was talking about Shakespeare. He said, in so many words, that you won't experience the pleasure of Shakespeare by simply passing your eyes over the text several times and having a class discussion. You have to see performances--perhaps multiple times--memorize (or come close to memorizing) the text, internalize the text. I have yet to give a shit about Shakespeare myself, but Bloom's statement is not far from my own--and true about many things not just Shakespeare.
My thoughts about Ashbery remain ajumble, but let me leave you with some bullet points:
More seagull snapshots. You know they reduce to brownish blobs like old Bible camp photos. The beach is indeed one aspect of the vast Sunday school of the world, waiting for church to be over and go home. It has the look of openness to suggestion and the finished ultimate look that together characterize life. And the humor, is there anything mildly funnier than footprints on a beach. Life comes naturally there, and goes too: no sense worrying about naturalness with so much natural fuzz (fuss?) everywhere, in corners, in bushes, and the aired mystery of the open field (?). Briars come ask you for ideas, and afterwards your blessing.
Even where I cannot finally grasp his meaning, which is much of the time, I remain convinced by the extraordinary power of his language as it flashes on its way from somewhere to somewhere. At times it seems like higher mathematics; I can sense the "elegance" of his solutions without being able to follow the steps by which he arrives at them. In short, he is a poet from whom one takes a great deal on faith, but one does it voluntarily. His conviction is contagious.
The bit about taking him "on faith" sums up my admiration perfectly.
8/23/06
Some years ago I came across a negative review of John Ashbery's 1995 book of poems Can You Hear, Bird? Wish I could find it now. It was a college professor somewhere. His point was basically that the poems were totally meaningless, that Ashbery--sometimes lauded as among the greatest living poets--is really an "emperor with no clothes"--a sham.
I'm a hardcore Ashbery fan from way back, from 1992, when I read a review of his book Flow Chart. (The review itself, by Helen Vendler, was enchanting in its own right, and jump-started my interest in Ashbery.) I got Flow Chart, struggled through it. I started collecting books by Ashbery; I have a dedicated shelf today. I read them as well as I could, but Ashbery is a difficult read. Probably my biggest error with Ashbery is having pretended to like his poetry more than I actually do. Over the years I've gotten more impatient with him, and have not bought every book he's published. (I passed on Chinese Whispers, for example. And his latest whose title I can't remember.)
Despite all that, Ashbery has meant a lot to me over the years. In a nutshell, you could describe his work as melancholy meditations on aging, loneliness, and the troubled human mind itself so wildly and vividly imagined that they overpower and transform the melancholy into a foreign substance. His very best poems transport you to a peaceful, nameless otherworld, beyond the crutches of your religion and other comforts you insist on.
Here's the opening of Girls on the Run.
A great plane flew across the sun,
and the girls ran along the ground.
The sun shone on Mr. McPlaster's face, it was green like an elephant's.Let's get out of here, Judy said.
They're getting closer, I can't stand it.
But you know, our fashions are in fashion
only briefly, then they go out
and stay that way for a long time. Then the come back in
for a while. Then, in maybe a million years, they go out of fashion
and stay there.
Laure and Tidbit agreed,
with the proviso that after that everyone would become fashion
again for a few hours. Write it now, Tidbit said,
before they get back. And, quivering, I took the pen.Drink the beautiful tea
before you slop sewage over the horizon, the Principal directed.
OK, it's calm now, but it wasn't two minutes ago. What do you want me to do, said Henry,
I am no longer your serf,
and if I was, I wouldn't do your bidding. That is enough, sir.
You think you can lord it over every last dish of oatmeal
on this planet, Henry said. But wait till my ambition
comes a cropper, whatever that means, or bursts into feathered bloom
and burns on the shore. Then the kiddies dancing sideways
declared it a treat, and the ice-cream gnomes slurped their last that day.Inside, in the twilit nest of evening,
something was coming undone. Dimples could feel it,
surging over her shoulder like a wave of energy. And then--
it was gone. No one had witnessed it but herself.
And so Dimples took off for the city, which was near and wholesome.
There, with her sister Larissa, she planned the big blue boat
that future generations will live in, and thank us for. It twitched
at its steeling moorings, and seemed to say: Live, like life, with me.
The description on the jacket is the better than anything I could hope to come up with--and interesting by itself--, so I will simply quote it:
Girls on the Run is a poem loosely based on the works of the "outsider" artist Herny Darger (1892 - 1972), a recluse who toiled for decades on an enormous illustrated novel about the adventures of a plucky band of little girls. The Vivians are threatened by human tormentors, supernatural demons, and cataclysmic storms; their calmer moments are passed in Edenic landscapes. Darger traced the figures for his works from comic strips, coloring books, and other ephemeral sources, filling in the backgrounds with luscious watercolor. John Ashbery's Girls on the Run creates a similar childlike world of dreamy landscapes, lurking terror, and veiled eroticism. Its fractured narrative mode almost (but never quite) coalesces into a surrealist adventure story for juvenile adults.
I never got very far in Girls on the Run, probably getting no more than a few pages into it. I don't feel a need any more to strain myself. I love the first three opening lines. Ashbery is a consistent genius with opening lines. I love the image of beautiful tea and sewage slopping over the horizon. It starts to break up when "Henry" starts talking--about being a serf and whatnot. I lose the signal there. Don't understand the lording over the oatmeal. I like the ice-cream gnomes slurping. I love "Dimples could feel it." I love the "city near and wholesome." I lose the signal around "planned the big blue boat." What does it mean to "plan a boat"?
Ashbery does that--comes in and out of reception. Parts of it have a pleasant, clear ring--however wacky they are literally. Other parts may be grammatically murky or sound just awkward. I lose patience quickly.
Here's a short poem--the first from his collection Your Name Here.
THIS ROOM
The room I entered was a dream of this room.
Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.
The oval portrait
of a dog was me at an early age.
Something shimmers, something is hushed up.We had macaroni for lunch every day
except Sunday, when a small quail was induced
to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here.
Couple things to note. 1) I love this poem for its poignant expression of longing, a touch of guilt, a pang of remembrance. Beautiful beautiful beautiful. 2) A lot Ashbery poems are dream-inspired. I think this one is typical in that respect. 3) The curious line 6 "something shimmering, hushed" is important. This is a trademark Ashbery device of having a vague, mysterious thought or image hanging in the air surrounded by clearer language. It has the effect of a light source casting a richer, deeper shadow over the piece.
What else can I share with you? Here are the first few lines of Flow Chart I shall try to recall from memory:
Still in the published city,
but not yet overtaken by a new form of despair,
I ask the diagram:Is it the foretaste of pain it might easily be?
Or an emptiness so sudden, it leaves the girders whanging
in the abscence of wind, the sky milk-blue and astringent.
We know life is so busy, but a larger activity shrouds it.
And this is something we can never feel,
except through small signs put up to warn us
that are as soon expunged in part or wholly.Sad grows the river god as he oars past us downstream
without our knowing him. For if, he reasons,
he can be overlooked, then to know him would be to eat him,
ingest the name he carries through time
to set down, finally, on a strand of rotted hulks.
I had it mostly right. A lot of my line breaks are wrong, but I didn't fix them above. The poem continues like this for 200-some pages. This thing is very difficult reading at times, but I consider it a strong but uncontrolled ally in my own struggles, whatever they are.
8/18/06
Kunstler is in some trouble with his readers for his staunch pro-Israel position. I respect him for his writing ability and because he seems to be a truly independent thinker: he rips the White House apart without qualm (always nice), but also refuses to tow the liberal line much of the time. My sense is liberals are his biggest audience, and I think they feel betrayed now because of his pro-Israel stance.
I don't know what to think. I think it's a waste of my brainpower to have any strong opinion about what's happening over there. That shit over there hit the fan a long time ago; and the accounting--of who has sinned more and how often--is pretty messed up. If you don't admit it then you're an idiot. Our own accounting is messed up. Our treatment of the native Americans, slavery, the atom bomb, top 40 soft rock. Try balancing those books. Imagine there is a single, final number summing everything. Are you ready to accept that number? Of course not. Whatever the number, you delete it and insert your own--the number you've carried with you since the first times you were left alone at the school bus stop.
Speaking of the bomb, I'm reading James Carroll's House of War, a history of the Pentagon. Very interesting stuff, but slow going. I don't know what I think about the bomb--the decision to drop it, etc. This kind of agnosticism is a luxury of 21st century suburbia, I think. This business of me lounging on a hot Friday afternoon claiming I don't know what I think about the bomb. I did read a poignant comment or quote from somebody in House of War that "there's nothing you can do with a nuke that you can't do with an ice pick." Part of me really agreed with that.
I have not seen "Miami Vice" yet. Not quite sure I really want to. I might just want to watch some original episodes of the TV show via iTunes.
Speaking of TV shows, I'm still 3 episodes away from finishing season 5 of "24." That show has gotten a bit crappy, but I'm still hooked. A lot of the dialogue is wooden and plain. I keep wanting to add some shuck and jive to it, some quickness and curl. Nobody listens to me.
Microsoft has a new Flight Simulator game coming out: Flight Simulator X. Like I give a shit. I did notice an interesting design feature of the sail plane you can fly in it. The fuselage "droops" downard in the front and back. This lowers the plane's center of gravity a bit--below the point of pitching rotation where the wings connect. My guess is that this has a stabilizing effect. If I ever build flyable balsa models again, I'll remember this.
I haven't played Ghost Recon in many months. I am back to playing Quake 3: Arena, which came out in 1999. This game won't quit, thanks both to the rock solid gameplay and to the large number of user-created levels that extend the original game. I tried the Quake 4 demo when it came out and didn't like it. It's based on Doom 3 technology, which means that the graphics are super-detailed; but as a trade-off, the levels are very cramped and linear, discouraging any tactical creativity. The monsters are too few and powerful. Ditto with the new game Prey that came out recently. (I tried the demo and dissed it within 15 minutes.) It's based on the Doom 3 engine, and its levels are attic crawlspaces, even with the M.C. Escher perspective gimmicks that game has.
8/2/06
Love Disturbed's cover of Genesis' "Land of Confusion." I went ahead and paid the dollar for it. a) I always liked the original song. b) I like it when bands pay homage to past artists--particularly when they cross genre or cultural boundaries to do so. Genesis and Disturbed are pretty different acts, from different "sides of the track," I'd say. And yet here Disturbed has made a kind of peace offering to them. That doesn't happen often. My one concern about the song is that the lyrics are vague enough to let conservatives think this song is rooting for them. They couldn't make that mistake with Green Day's "American Idiot," which was banned from my local rock station for that reason. (Some rock station...I know.)
7/30/06
Trying to read some of Gregory and Mary Catherine Bateson's Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. Technically, the book is a father-daughter collaboration, but Gregory died before they could do any real work on it. Mary assembled and edited her father's extant writing that was intended for the book. She adds her own stuff as well, clearly marking it as such. It's an odd pairing of voices, and no doubt a tough editing assignment for Mary.
You have to know the word "epistemology" for the title to make any sense. At the risk of insulting your intelligence, let me tell you that epistemology is the study of how we know--whether through the senses (direct experience), secondhand from books, or inspired intuition. "I saw it myself", "I read it somewhere", or "I just felt it" are all statements of epistemology. The core difference between religious people and non-believers can be thought of as sollely a difference of epistemology.
Whenever you ask someone "How do you know?" you're asking them to explain their epistemological position--their criteria for distinguishing knowledge from nonsense. Someone tells you that an airplane crashed and you ask, "How do you know?" They answer: "I saw it on TV." In effect, the person is saying, "My epistemology allows knowledge to come from a TV. My way of knowing includes the TV." Someone says, "Jesus loves me." You ask, "How do you know?" The person says, "The Bible tells me so." That's another epistemlogical position: that certain books have special status whose statements can be taken on faith alone, without evidence or proof.
Bateson's book, then, could have been titled Angels Fear: A Way of Knowing About the Sacred. I'm interested in any book that thinks it can change my mind about the sacred, the supernatural, or religion. That's why I picked it up in the first place, after running into an old college professor of mine by chance recently who recommended it.
I gotta say the book isn't really working. I've read bits from a couple chapters, and all of the introduction. I'm not seeing him address the core question of how to know about the sacred--"the sacred" being his shorthand for totally non-denominational religious belief. The closest he comes that I've seen so far is in these paragraphs from the introduction:
It is, alas, too true, however, that muddleheadedness has helped the human race to find "God." Today, in any Christian, Buddhist, or Hindu sermon, you are likely to hear the mystic's faith extolled and recommended for reasons that should raise the hackles of any person undrugged or unhypnotized. No doubt the discussion of high orders of regularity in articulate language is difficult, especially for those who are untrained in verbal precision, so they may be forgiven if they take refuge in the cliche "Those who talk don't know, and those who know don't talk." If the cliche were true, it would follow that the vast and often beautiful mystical literature of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Christianity must have been written by persons who did not know what they were writing about.
Be that as it may, I claim no originality, only a certain timeliness. It cannot be wrong to contribue to this vast literature. I claim not uniqueness but membership in a small minority who believe that there are strong and clear arguments for the necessity of the sacred, and that these arguments have their base in an epistemology rooted in improved science and in the obvious. I believe that these arguments are important at the present time of widespread skepticism--even that they are today as important as the testimony of those whose religious faith is based on inner light and "cosmic" experience. Indeed, the steadfast faith of an Einstein or a Whitehead is worth a thousand sanctimonious utterances from traditional pulpits.
Italics original, but emphasis mine. My big problem is that he doesn't say what these "strong and clear arguments" are--the ones that are "rooted in improved science and the obvious." Don't ask me what "improved science" is or "high orders of regularity." (???) He has my attention, but he's not saying why, exactly, I should believe in the sacred. He's essentially asking me to take it on faith--in effect that the "vastness of beauty" of religious writing is its own proof. Sorry, folks, this won't cut it.
What am I missing?
The only reason I know about Bateson is because this college professor I mentioned had almost used Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind as a text in a class I was in. Instead, we ended up using Richard Tarnas' Passion of the Western Mind, a fast-reading, deep and non-judgemental history of philosophy from Socrates onward. Passion is a neat book, very clear. I checked out Bateson's Ecology of Mind out of plain curiousity, and had the same annoyed reaction then (10 years ago) as today.
In our brief conversation the other day, this professor of mine pointed out Bateson's argument in a nutshell--that the scientific method "occludes" certain ways of knowing. (He said it more clearly than Bateson himself.) I mentioned Carl Sagan. "Sagan never went beyond what he could easily explain," said my teacher, something like that. Sagan hung out in the "well lit" areas of cosmic philosophy, in other words.
7/28/06
A little sad to report that M. Night Shyamalan's latest movie "Lady in the Water" is kind of boring and lacks the cathartic climax that "Unbreakable" and "Signs" have. [Caution! Mild spoilers ahead.] I understand that the plot for LIW comes from a children's bedtime story of Shyamalan's own invention--an idea that I like, in principle. The movie does try valiantly to awaken in us a child-like sense of wonder, to reconnect us with the primal comfort of hearing stories. Unfortunately, it's really self-conscious about this--with characters making references to the story they themselves are in. Made my eyes roll a bit.
The movie opens with a short animated segment that lays the mythical foundation for the movie. It's drawn sort of like cave-man art so that it looks archetypal and authoritative, but it has modern ideas slipped in--a crypto-feminist complaint about alienation of the sexes and a not-so-cryptic statement about men being the root of all evil, the inventor of war, and so on. (I used to be really bothered by stuff like that, but am not so much any more.) Anyway, the problem with this beginning is that there's a voice-over talking along with the pictures. It would've been so much more effective if only animation and music were used. (The music was pretty generic, unfortunately.)
I was gonna give the movie a chance, of course, but the spoken voice-over in the beginning counted against it. I knew for sure the movie was in trouble when--about 45 minutes in--Shyamalan's character (--yes, he himself has a significant part in it, and no, he's not much of an actor--) walks in on Cleveland and the water-nymph girl, who're just talking. (Cleveland is the main dude's name.) She looks sort of traumatized and is wearing nothing but a blanket. Shyamalan's reaction doesn't make sense. He acts like he recognizes her and mumbles something about being on pins and needles. When this happens to me--when I walk in on friends and see them with freaked out scantily-clad women--I give a nervous laugh and say Oh dear in a pinched North Dakota accent. (This might be outside Shyamalan's range as an actor.)
More unconvincing dialogue follows, but Paul Giamatti (Cleveland) does a great job in a scene in which he grieves for his own lost family. His outpouring of sadness becomes a spell of healing cast on the Lady herself, curing the cuts on her leg where an evil boar-like monster has scratched her. I thought that was good.
Oh yeah, the monster! There's a mean boar-like creature stalking the Lady, intending to do harm against her for some reason. I never caught why, exactly, and frankly I forgot to wonder. (A true monster doesn't need a reason.) The creature can flatten itself against the grass, hiding in plain sight. It rises slowly like an inflatable termite mound, and then it walks toward its target almost unseen. Nicely done. Unfortunately, the monster doesn't get to do much, and I don't like it when monsters aren't allowed to be themselves--to be violent and inflict real harm--but I can understand why Shyamalan wrote it this way. When monsters are allowed to do their thing--they take over the movie (I think of "Jaws" and "Cujo") and obscure any Message the director has for the audience.
7/17/06
Re-reading a bit of Carl Sagan's Contact, a novel in which a radio transmission from another world is picked up on Earth. The story has as much to do with the transmission--the Message, as it comes to be called--as with the conflicting philosophies of how to interpret it. Religion versus science again, a debate that never gets old for me. I find it necessary to keep thinking through my own position, even though my position hasn't changed. I'm definitely a "science guy." Science is the hero of Sagan's book, but he treats religion with great fairness, you should know. He shows (rightly) a fundamental but subtle commonality in the two modes. Both religion and science are driven by awe, curiosity, amazement.
Here's a passage worth quoting. The protagonist, astronomer Ellie Arroway is debating religion with preacher Palmer Joss. Joss asks:
"Don't you ever feel...lost in your universe? How do you know what to do, how to behave, if there's no God? Just obey the law or get arrested?"
"You're not worried about being lost, Palmer. You're worried about not being central, not the reason the universe was created. There's plenty of order in my universe. Gravitation, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, superunification, they all involve laws. And as for behavior, why can't we figure out what's in our best interest--as a species?"
"That's a warmhearted and noble view of the world, I'm sure, and I'd be the last to deny that there's goodness in the human heart. But how much cruelty has been done when there was no love of God?"
"And how much cruelty when there was? Savonarola and Torquemada loved God, or so they said. Your religion assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they'll behave. You want people to believe in God so they'll obey the law. That's the only means that occurs to you: a strict secular police force, and the threat of punishment by an all-seeing God for whatever the police overlook. You sell human beings short.
"Palmer, you think if I haven't had your relgious experience I can't appreciate the magnificence of your god. But that's just the opposite. I listen to you, and I think, His god is so small! One paltry planet, a few thousand years--hardly worth the attention of a minor deity, much less the Creator of the universe."
"You're confusing me with some other preacher. That museum was Brother Rankin's territory. I'm prepared for a universe billions of years old. I just say the scientists haven't proved it."
"And I say you haven't understood the evidence. How can it benefit the people if the conventional wisdom, the religious 'truths,' are a lie? When you really believe that people can be adults, you'll preach a different sermon."
The chapter goes on for a while, then ends with Joss asking:
What is there in the precepts of science that keeps a scientist from doing evil?
I'd have to answer honestly--not a heck of a lot. I'd have to say that science alone doesn't really shape the moral character. I think there does have to be a little spark of goodness in a person, a fundamental consideration for others. I think that spark precedes religion or science. My biggest resentment towards religion is that it claims ownership, a copyright on that "spark." Among my most treasured beliefs is that you can be a good person without accepting religion nor anything supernatural.
7/2/06
I bought my copy of Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae some 10 years ago, during a personally difficult time. I was in college and had a lesbian girlfriend. I was jealous--profoundly and cripplingly jealous of her love of women. I felt very alone about it--in addition to the loneliness and bottled rage. The few people I told--including a therapist--tried, but didn't really understand where I was. I turned to books. I looked at various "men's issues" things: Robert Bly's Iron John and Sam Keen's Fire in the Belly. They both have useful kernels of truth, and I recommend them, but they didn't speak to my specific situation. I wanted more. The only books I ever found that is specifically about straight people in mixed-orientation relationships is Amity Buxton's The Other Side of the Closet: The Coming Out Crisis For Straight Spouses and Families. And it just pissed me off--and still does. (That's why it's still on my shelf.) Buxton is too scared of offending anyone--being mistaken as anti-gay. She glosses over the eroticism, the pornographic details of this depression, my depression. She's determined to convey an essentially positive message, even if it's a lie.
So anyway, Paglia's book is different. It did not "come to my rescue." It did something better. It told the effing truth that men really are at a certain disadvantage around women and always will be. Girls rule and boys drool says the t-shirt. It was a huge relief to me to see this admission on paper, backed up by intense, lengthy analysis.
From the preface:
I reaffirm and celebrate woman's ancient mystery and glamour. I see the mother as an overwhelming force who condemns men to lifelong sexual anxiety, from which they escape through rationalism and physical achievement.
From page 3:
Sex is daemonic. This term, current in Romantic studies of the past twenty-five years, derives from the Greek daimon, meaning a spirit of lower divinity than the Olympian gods (hence my pronunciation "daimonic"). The outcast Oedipus becomes a daemon at Colonus. The word came to mean a guardian shadow. Christianity turned the daemonic into the demonic. The Greek daemons were not evil--or rather they were both good and evil, like nature itself, in which they dwelled. Freud's unconscious is a daemonic realm where nature reigns, where they is no law but sex, cruelty, and metamorphisis. Day itself is invaded by daemonic night. Moment by moment, night flickers in the imagination, in eroticism, subverting our strivings for virtue and order, giving an uncanny aura to objects and persons, revealed to us through the eyes of the artist.
From page 97:
Apollo is a tyrant, Dionysus a vandal.
...
Dionysus' amorality cuts both ways. He is god of theater, masked balls, and free love--but also of anarchy, gang rape, and mass murder.
From page 170:
At the moment, The Faerie Queen is a great beached whale, marooned on the desert shores of English departments. Spenser is a hostage of his own critics, who have thrown up a thicket of unreadable commentary around him. Renaissance studies are woefully over-specialized; a lurid era has been reduced to a jumble of multilingual footnotes. ... The Faerie Queen has been ruined for many students by the numbingly moralistic way it is taught. Spenser spoke to other poets as a bard, not a preacher.
From page 320:
Coleridge did his best work under Worsworth's influence. After they separated, Coleridge languished poetically and never matched his early achievements. The nature of their collaboration was this: Wordsworth was a father/lover who absorbed Coleridge's self-punishing superego and allowed his turbulent dream life to spill directly into his poetry. The supreme irony, as we shall see, is that everything that is great in Coleridge is a negation of Wordsworth. This is the son's ultimate revenge upon the father. Wordsworth's leading moral idea of nature's benevolence is annhiliated by Coleridge. Coleridge sees the chthonian horror in nature that Wordsworth could not acknowledge. The vampires of Christabel and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner are the true nature-mother. Wordsworth reawakened sleeping pagan nature-cult, then flew from the spectres he had roused. How easily Wordsworth was assimilated into bourgeois nineteenth-century culture. His Protestant moralism was his barrier against the daemonic. It is pagan Coleridge, not Protestant Wordsworth, who is the begetter of nineteenth-century archetypal vision.
So anyway, there's that. I've read less than a quarter of its 700-some pages, but I've gotten what I want from it. I still consider it one of my top 10 books, but doubt I will ever read all of it. (I don't believe you have to read a book completely to form a worthwhile opinion about it.) Most of the book's chapters each deal with a different major author--Milton, Shakespeare, Spenser, Dickinson, and so on. Paglia has much to say about how certain major authors are still visible and relevant in contemporary culture. That stuff is very interesting--much more scandalous, erotic, and reprehensible then you've been told about in school, probably.
Now, the truth is I don't really care about Coleridge or Wordsworth or Milton or Shakespeare, for that matter. I might one day. I do have some authors I actually do care about, that I'd like to talk about at some point.
6/27/06
This morning about 3:30 I heard a man come outside and call aloud--to a dog or cat ("Ralph!") or he was calling for help. It was a couple doors down, someone I don't know. A minute or two later, there was a siren, but I couldn't tell where it went. My brother and I have been kicking around a few story ideas, and this incident connected with an idea of his that I am embellishing. I call it "Man With Good Hearing." A middle-aged man not handsome in shorts wakes up suddenly very early, alarmed by something. He stumbles onto the beach, walks a half mile or so, and finds a large whale has beached itself. Anyway, the man has a wife who's in a coma somewhere, but the man's been sleeping at another woman's house. His in-laws discover this and it becomes a problem for the man.
I continue to work with my "Seven Seekers" concept--about the sissy liberal son of soldier who wants to know why members of his father's unit abandonned him on the battlefield. The father had been captured and his execution videotaped. The son hounds one of the men, who eventually befriends him, leading to confrontation with another man supposedly responsible for the father's death.
My "Quake" concept is pretty well stalled. This is to be our "magnum opus" action/war movie. The magnum and the opus are weighing me down.
I read Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars recently. It was pretty good, I think. Most enjoyable were quiet stretches when characters wander the Martian surface for long periods.
6/11/06
Finished audio book No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. Like Blood Meridian, it's tragic, violent and amazing. More accessible than Meridan. No Country is about a dude named Lewellen Moss who takes a brief case full of money from a crime scene. Well, it's mostly about that. It has some elements of a traditional thriller--complete with very creepy bounty hunter. Moss turns out to be a clever guy, and we hope his cleverness will prevail.
A traditional thriller is driven by traditional heroism, which depends on certain falsehoods unacceptable to McCarthy--namely that cleverness alone can defeat evil. This is his greatness--his honesty about the way of the world--and therefore the reason No Country is not a traditional thriller and an awesome book.
It's interspersed with monologues from older man Sheriff Bell. Bell's looking for Moss--but he's several steps behind--and therefore not in much position to help. Bell turns out to be the real protagonist of the story--and I think it's exactly his goodness that makes him unable to help. Bell's not stupid, but he comes from an earlier, more innocent time. He sees how far today's world has fallen.
I recommend it highly.
A movie adaptation seems to be in the works.
6/7/06
A little embarrassed of my purhcase of a song by Switchfoot: "Stars." What can I say? I like the tune--most of it. I hadn't really realized it was Christian, even though I kinda shoulda known--from the soaring, anthemic, overly happy power chords similar to Creed's. I'm a scowling liberal who knows very well that religion is the opiate of the masses, and so...I feel a need to explain myself when I buy a song like this. (Which is pretty rare.)
I still sing out loud without hesitation with Paul Simon's "You Can Call Me Al"--even at the line "amen, hallelujah." And one of my all-time favorite CDs is Simple Minds' "Once Upon a Time"--and it's pretty overtly Christian. The music is so seductive; I don't question it. Another band I love: Midnight Oil made music with raw, non-denominational conviction; their Christian identity was secondary. Oh, and Sam Phillips. I've been into her for many years, and she started out in contemporary Christian rock (as Leslie Phillips). She ended up being too liberal for that scene, though, and wound up in more mainstream rock, although she was never that popular. But let it be known that I am a huge fan of hers.
5/30/06
The kid in the grocery store parking lot who was pushing carts back to the store thought I was weird when I pulled in and didn't get out of my car immediately. He saw me nodding in strong agreement with something--arguments against continued funding for NASA, perhaps--when, in fact, I was listening to Katrina and the Waves' "Walking on Sunshine." This is the rare song that I like a lot but don't feel like owning. The song is best when it occurs randomly, offered up by the local 80s radio station. This is the last and only pleasure of the radio these days: the occasional song as gift. How rare that is now.
But anyway...
I've been reading Jim Kunstler's blog for a good while now. I don't remember how long. He has a knack for castigation and persuasive doomsday predictions about the end of our oil supply, what it will mean, and stuff like that. I read him as much for his style as his content. Anyway, he said something pretty inflamatory in his last post:
In all the blather about the sufferings of women the past quarter-century, not a whole lot of attention has been paid to the dearth of meaningful roles for men, both socially and in work, and the drawn-out adventure in Iraq has stimulated a recognition that the passivity of "consumerdom" is not enough to keep society sane.
In my opinion, this must even redound into our politics, especially the politics of the Democratic party, if it is going to survive. It has to be re-masculinized. It has to allow men to come back into the centers of power, including the power to speak the truth -- even if the truth hurts somebody's feelings.
Emphasis mine. A lot of people took offense at the "re-masculinized" term--saying in various ways that "we already live in a patriarchal society--and look where it got us." And so on. To me, however--and as usual--Kunstler's line is music to my ears. Even so, more explanation may be needed on the "centers of power" men are supposedly excluded from now. I read "centers of power" as men's minds, but Kunstler doesn't say that. I would have to agree that we live in a patriarchal society, but would add two things: a) more or less all men, including the evil patriarchs, were raised by women, b) there are gazillions more powerless men than powerful.
5/24/06
Dreamed that I was being taunted and threatened by some guys. I was at a gas station at night, sitting in my car alone. We took all your gas, one of them said. Several of them had surrounded me. I woke up then, afraid. Once in a great while I have dreams like this, and I keep regretting not having the courage to let them run to completion. I faintly recall a couple of times when--faced with a threat--I became lucid and imagined a weapon into my hand. This would cause the dream to end prematurely. If dreams are instructive, I don't think the "inner instructor" likes to be contradicted--the lesson to be interrupted, as it were.
I'm opposed to reducing dreams down to the "lessons" within them--even though this is useful to do. I'm not so interested in the symbolism of dreams. I'm more interested in the feelings that dreams cause, the images presented, the storylines followed. I like dreams that resist easy interpretation.
I started recording my own dreams as part of journaling assignment in high school, and have kept it up ever since, more or less. In the last couple years, I did finally figure out that a great many of my dreams are not worth recording. Obsession with one's own dreams is kind of vain, and so I've let up on the record keeping. Now, I wait for the really striking dreams to write down.
I believe there are poets who use their dreams as starting points for poems. I'm pretty darn sure that John Ashbery does this routinely. My own dream recounts sound like Ashbery poems. If I had to write a poem right now it would go
In a trance among fireflies, barefoot, I punted the glass bottle.
The problem with Ashbery's dream-inspired poetry is that often the dream ends before the poem does. He tries to maintain the dream trance voice, by talking in his trademark nonsense voice, but it's clear he's already awake and the spell is broken. Such poems don't know how to end. They wander a bit until the page is filled. I have more to say about Ashbery another time.
The task is to let dreams run to their natural endings. It's possible to do
this when awake, but it takes a disciplined, undistractable imagination. I
don't really have it. I have some poem fragments I've been carrying around
for over a decade. I have not sat down with them long enough to see where
they go. One of those things I "might get around to" one day.
5/11/06
Listened with great interest the other day to an interview with Sophie Freud, granddaughter of Sigmund. I consider myself Freudian, I guess--more so than Jungian. I believe that calling oneself "Jungian" is a subtle capitulation to feminism, and so it's mainly on that principle that I don't buy it. It's not that I dislike Jung. And it's not that I particularly agree with Sigmund. I see and respect in Freud a grave, unflattering honesty about human nature, whereas in Jung I see more embellishment, romanticism. When comparing philosophies of human nature, I believe the more depraved, embarrassing, and simpler one tends to be true.
My impression of Jung comes mainly from the book Gods in Everyman by Jean Bolen, a book that I recall being very cynical about the father-son relationship in particular--several times comparing it to Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. (Jungians, it seems, are into that Joseph Campbell, Hero With a Thousand Faces stuff, of which the Star Wars mythology is a popular interpretation. I'm wary of identifying too strongly with mythological stuff--interesting as it is--because of the gross overestimation of self it leads to.) Bolen thinks of men as fallen creatures requiring redemption by the female, a position I find insulting.
My impression (and appreciation) of Freud comes mostly from a piece in New Yorker by Adam Gopnik in the 8/24/98 issue. It's one of my all-time favorite articles from the magazine. In it, Gopnik recounts his own therapy experience. There are several hilarious or transfixing paragraphs in it.
...while Freud may have been wrong in all the details, his central insight was right. His insight was that human life is shaped by a series of selfish, ineradicable urges, particularly sexual ones, and that all other things that happen in life are ways of toning down these urges and giving them "acceptable" outlet. An actual, undramatic but perilous world of real things existed, whose essential character was its indifference to human feelings: this world of real things included pain, death, and disease, but also many things unthreatening to our welfare. His project--the Freudian project, properly understood--was not to tell the story of our psyche, the curious drawing-room comedy of Id and Ego and Libido, but just the opposite: to drain the drama from all our stories. He believed that the only thing to do with the knowledge of the murderous rage within your breast was not to mythologize it but to put a necktie on it and heavy shoes and a dark-blue woollen suit. Only a man who knew that, given the choice, he would rape his mother and kill his father could order his spaghetti...in anything like peace.
From the interview the other day, I understood that Sophie disagreed mostly with her grandfather on the role of sex in the psyche. It seems that all women with any background in psychology love to disagree with Sigmond on this topic, and for that reason I can't shake the feeling they're reading from a feminist script. I listened to Sophie intently, but with a skeptical smirk.
Personally, I think Sigmund had indeed oversimplified things--by the doctrine of "penis envy" for example. Were he able to see, let's say, the July '93 Penthouse, I tend to think Sigmund would have had farther to travel before coming up with a theory of female sexuality. Again, what I respect in Freud is the boldness, simplicity, and unsentimentality of his position--not the specifics of his theories.
I will not argue with you about the role of sex in the psyche. It would be pointless. Highly personal observations and attitudes affecting to be scientific. I can smell that mistake from a great distance. I think it's okay for men and women to disagree about and be unable to communicate on certain things. No forced or feigned understandings.
5/7/06
Brainstorming on team control models for a tactical shooter game. I think I have something. What we've had since Rainbow Six is the many waypoints model in which a set of points defines the path of travel for a team. My problem with the many waypoints model is that it demands too much precision, too many clicks. My other problem with it is that it reduces a soldier's individual decision-making ability--or it masks that they have no decision-making ability.
What I propose is the objective model. In this, you draw one point on the map--called an "objective"--and you set some rules that control how soldiers approach that objective. You don't specify the exact path of travel, which leads to micromanaging--the bane of any game where you control AI units. Instead, the soldiers find their own way to an objective, converging on it with a certain maneuver you specify.
There shall be three types of objectives: attack, avoid, and defend. You can draw as many objectives on the map as you want, but the ideal number might be two or three--a mix of attacks and avoids. You can add and remove objectives at any time. There are three rules of engagement: close as possible, on sight, far away as possible. There's one modifier for all rules of engagement: wait for attack order. When activated, the wait for attack order prevents soldiers from shooting until you shoot first or give some other signal.
When you draw an "attack" objective on the map, the rule of engagement (ROE) determines how soldiers move in to attack. When ROE is "close as possible," this causes soldiers to get stealthy--since, getting as "close as possible" to a target requires them to avoid detection until the last possible moment. There is no explicit command to "be stealty." The "on sight" ROE is equivalent to GR's "assault" ROE--"shoot on sight," basically. The "far away as possible" ROE is intended for snipers. When used, the sniper looks for the farthest point from the objective to which he still has a line of sight but that's also closest to his current position.
You'd use "avoid" objectives to prevent your people from being seen by the enemy, or to keep your men from engaging too early. For example, there might be a watch tower on a hillside with a sniper in it. You don't want to kill the sniper too soon because it will give away your presence before you intend to. Drawing an "avoid" objective on that will cause all soldiers to find concealment when moving through lines of sight from the tower. They won't shoot at the sniper. This is how you "steer" your men through sensitive map areas. You will eventually have to remove the avoid objective to make your men engage an enemy previously marked to be avoided. An avoid objective has a radius that you can change to set how large an area it affects.
The "defend" objective causes your men to converge at a point (or a friendly vehicle or other unit), surround it, and face away from it--ready for threats from any direction.
The other big thing I want to do in a tactical shooter game, as I've mentioned before, is have AI players remember and learn from their own mistakes.
5/4/06
Read this letter in latest New Yorker:
In his review of Daniel Dennett's "Breaking the Spell," H. Allen Orr writes that religion, as a social and political force, is "sometimes prone to excess," with the result of "intolerance, fanaticism, and, yes, terrorism" (Books, April 3rd). But it's worth noting that the great terrors of this century have all been perpetrated by anti-religionists: Hitler, Stalin, Mao. Fanaticism is clearly not the sole province of the faithful, and religion may in fact be a moderating force in the world.
I've heard this argument before, and I don't buy it. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were actually pro-religion: the religion of themselves. If you're looking for a good example of anti-religious, that would be me--not Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. By the way, the word "fanatic" comes from the Latin word fanaticus which means "inspired by god." So, yes, religion and fanaticism do go hand in hand.
/
The Ghost Recon 3 demo has been out for a few days. I played it a few times, about 20 minutes in total. I didn't really like it. My computer isn't fast enough for it, so that's part of the problem. But I never completed the one mission in the demo. I got mad at it and gave up. It was humiliating, since I've been playing GR1 on "hard" difficulty for a number of years.
The urban setting of GR3 offers little concealment--compared with the woodland environments of GR1. It's difficult to sneak up on anyone, and so fights break out quickly with little time to maneuver. This is a bummer because the new command map is too complicated--requires a lot of precision. I would display it, fumble a bit with it, then switch it off because I was taking too long with it--accomplishing nothing. I'd seize up--lie still too long and then get shot. I repeated this a few times and then uninstalled the thing. Good-bye Ghost Recon. What an anti-climactic end to five years of waiting.
The other large bummer about GR3 is the inability to switch to different soldiers. The "cross-com" thing--a high-tech eyepiece installed in your helmet that gives you navigational and situational awareness aids--is supposed to make up for this--partially--by letting you see what your soldiers see. You just can't control what they do, unlike in GR1. The argument against allowing you to change point of view to different soldiers centered on how unrealistic this is. I don't buy it. Realism should never impede gameplay.
I want a tactical shooter game with this in it:
Link to my feedback posted at GhostRecon.net.
4/25/06
Re-reading Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, partly as an excuse to avoid thinking through my own Quake story--which I envision as being based on McCarthy's novel. There's a good article on the game Quake at Wikipedia. The original game doesn't have much of a story--and doesn't need one. I'm not big on the idea of games having "stories" anyway. I strongly believe in the letting the player's imagination fill in the blanks.
There isn't much to link Blood Meridian and Quake besides the violence. BM takes place in the American southwest, in the 1850s. Based on historical events, it follows the adventures of a mercenary gang hired to scalp and kill indians. The protagonist is a boy known only as the kid. He's part of this gang, and he gets in trouble by having a shred of mercy on the indians. The gang leader is a mean guy named Glanton, but Glanton's right hand man is the arch villian of the story--Judge Holden. The judge is pretty much an embodiment of Satan, as far as I can tell. At one point, he befriends a small Apache child, bouncing him on his knee for a while before scalping him. And so on.
Anyway, the kid is ultimately left alone to stand up to the judge. But the book is too honest, too tragic to let the kid win--by swashbuckling or any other way. There is a nicely done gunfight near the end, but the judge's evil is overwhelming. No one can really stand against him. This I find painful to accept, but my struggle to accept it has given me much more to chew on than, say, the Lord of the Rings, that ridiculously overvalued epic. Lord of the Rings is empty spectacle--empty of horror. Without horror, there is no satisfying thunderclap of justice in the villain's defeat. It is that thunderclap of justice that we crave in action/adventure stories--or in the Iliad for that matter. Lord of the Rings does not deliver.
Not sure I could tell you where the justice is in Blood Meridian nor what its ultimate pleasure is. I appreciate the honesty of its tragic message. I love the conflict between the kid and judge--the universal truth of it--that good men really cannot defeat bad men. I love its refusal to romanticize the native Americans. I love McCarthy's trance-like voice and his mastery of an old American dialect. I love the brutal, enormous landscape of the old southwest. (But am really glad I didn't live there in the 1800s.)
You are right to wonder what all this has to do with Quake, a first-person shooter game developed by Id Software, released in 1996. After 10 years, Quake still grips my imagination. I am not so interested in how it plays. I'm pretty much done playing it. It was the first big game to make real use of the Internet, but I don't really care about that. It plays okay, but it's overly difficult in the later levels, I think. It's a bit too linear, too cramped, despite the expert level design. You play a lone soldier navigating rusted out underground military bases, dungeons, castles, and cathedrals of a dreary otherworld. You fight waves of monsters and zombified humans. There really isn't much to it--relentless waves of combat alternating with an ill, lonely feeling. (The soundtrack by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails has several brilliant moments.)
As I said, the Quake game offers little in the way of story--providing little explanation as to what's going on and why. This is fine with me. There is a little blurb of a story that came in the original instruction booklet, and it involves teleportation, an enemy from another dimension, and so on. What's cool about it, in fact, is the proto-Christian occultic horror elements (--borrowed loosely from the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, I found out much later--his so-called "Cthulhu mythology"). Quake has all this fire and brimstone stuff, violent religious symbolism everywhere, which I love. The final boss of the game turns out to be this Lovecraft-spun evil fertitlity goddess called Shub Niggurath. Wiki that if you want; there's fun stuff to read about that and Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos.
Anyway, the Quake story I imagine takes place here in America some 800 years from now. Everything is pretty much destroyed. North American population is about one million. People are doing their best to survive in the wasteland, settling the land very much as in the 1850s. Towns contract with private security companies to defend them against hostile neighbors, although in effect this translates into ethnic cleansing operations. One such company is Azathro Security. (Bizarrely, there is a commerce infrastructure in place that allows companies to exist and do business--but with only intermittent sanity. Azathro is headquartered somewhere far away, in a high building somewhere.) Anyway, Azathro keeps a force of five or six companies, human soldiers rotated in and out of cryogenic sleep as needed. (Robots had been tried extensively but all but abandonned due to limits of artificial intelligence that were never overcome. Most security companies of the future find that some relatively inexpensive neuroscience done to real people can create a better soldier than what can be built from computers and metal.)
Anyway, one town or city in particular has contracted with Azathro to purge a mysterious race living near them. Azathro does this, engaging in skirmishes and slaughtering people of this strange race. Azathro's violence builds momentum, and they eventually turn against the people who hired them. The story follows one soldier in particular who gradually awakens to the truth that what they're doing is wrong, and tries to get out of it--much to the disappointment of his superiors. In a nuthsell, this is the plot of Blood Meridian.
4/17/06
Yeah, I kinda like the new INXS song "Pretty Vegas," but not enough to spend a dollar on it. It's been getting some play on my local radio station. I've liked INXS since 5th grade, and I have high expectations. My problem with the new song is twofold. 1) The song itself--while crafted pretty well--plays it a little too safe. It doesn't rock with enough abandon. 2) INXS' cool factor is really up in the air right now. The latest numbers seem to show that I'm too cool for a reconstituted INXS. I feel sort of honor-bound to dislike any "new" INXS. I suspect other people are in a similar quandary over their INXS brand loyalty.
The other reason I don't just buy the song is because I've made several impulse purchases lately on iTunes that I don't feel great about. I got three songs by The Vines when all I needed was two. I also got something from the new Morrissey album that I'm not sure was really necessary ("You Have Killed Me"). I got my first Soundgarden song, "My Wave," for its rollicking 5/4 hook that's like a motorboat in a choppy sea. Sadly, the refrain is weak. I never have thought much of Soundgarden.
I also got Pat Benatar's "All Fired Up," which is a great tune, even though I bristle at such melodramatic expressions of faith. I got two songs by Juana Molina. She was in my Amazon wish list from, like, two years ago. Her songs remind me of dozing off in a moving car, watching the trees pass by.
4/4/06
Tried reading some more Hawkes: The Lime Twig, which I had sort of forced myself through years ago. It was as I remembered: intriguing premise but the language is inordinately difficult, impossible to follow. I get through chapter 1 and stop. It's about some people who steal a race horse with intent to race it under a different name. Some high-powered criminals find out and try to take over the plan themselves. That much I paraphrased from the blurb on the back because I can't really make heads or tails of what's going on at all.
The opening chapter is fascinating. It seems to describe the travels of a quasi-homeless mother and son in an around some city in England in the 30s and 40s. From the point of view of the son. There are descriptions of them sharing rooms, putting up a divider within the room so they could each have some privacy. Their depressingly makeshift cooking contraptions. There are leaks in the ceillings, dra
