Wax Banks

Dave Sim interview @ OnionAV.

Sim speaks over at the Onion AV Club. As usual, the Onion interviewer is snarky, though in this case surprisingly restrained. Frustratingly, there's little improvisation in the interview by Sim or the interviewer - I've been spoiled lately reading interviews conducted by Lawrence Grobel, as nimble an interlocutor as could be hoped for.

Sim's a master - let's get that out of the way. Cerebus is going to be regarded someday as one of the most important comic achievements of our time, if it isn't already. He is also at this point more than a little bit deranged. I am able to see (to a degree) where he comes from in his rants about 'leftists', since a secular materialist (i.e. in his parlance 'Marxist') outlook pervades a lot of knee-jerk Left rhetoric. But he's wrong about so many goddamn things, starting with his assertion that guys are reason-based. And that's the worst bit - most of what he says, in spite of his claims to the contrary, is mere assertion, backed up with cliches like 'Once a great truth has been seen it can not be unseen.'

Let the man speak for himself:

The evidence that I see around me in society indicates that not only is thinking very much out of favor, but I'm not sure that the last couple of generations—Generation X and Generation Next, or whatever you want to call them—even know what a thought is, having been raised to be women. I think this is particularly true among leftists, which is what I assume The Onion's readership is primarily made up of. North American leftists just keep trying to relive the '60s, or to make the '60s happen again. Oasis are a pretty poor excuse for The Beatles, and John Kerry is a pretty poor excuse for John F. Kennedy. But it seems to me that that's all that interests leftists. They don't want to think: As a central example, they don't want to examine feminism as a philosophy; they want to re-experience it as a new phenomenon. For obvious reasons. It doesn't work, so there's a very strong urge to go back 30 years to when it seemed that it might work.

Whatever, man. If you're going to expand the word 'Leftist' to include 'everyone =/= to Dave Sim', you've lost me already. The aggravating thing - he's also funny, articulate, and indispensable when it comes to the creation of comix:

First, I had to get over the disappointment of how little you could fit into a 500-page comic-book story. I had pictured doing the comic-book equivalent of War And Peace with 500 pages to work with. Originally, it was going to be the relationship between the political side of Iest and the religious side of Iest, spilling over from the one into the other. By the time I had figured out how many pages I needed to do an election campaign, election night, the deciding vote, and then six issues of Cerebus as Prime Minister, the book was over and I never even got to the religious side. That was why I doubled the length for Church & State, so it wouldn't be just an A to B to C to D story. I'd be able to visit different parts of the city, and introduce "reads" and anecdotes of various figures that I had introduced. It still ate up pages like nobody's business. So I learned to mentally scale back the books that I planned up ahead, learned to realistically assess what I could get across in 200 pages without having to rush everything. My best assessment now is that I hope I was able to produce, over the 6,000 pages, the comic-book equivalent of one Russian novel, as opposed to the 12 Russian novels I'd originally intended.

As they say: give it a read. Then check out the story behind the scenes.

And let's raise a glass to, if nothing else, one of the most awe-inspiring feats of sustained creativity that I know of. Mad bastard.

Games are scary.

[Warning: speculative, half-baked, airy prose to follow.]

So lately I've played a bit of Puerto Rico - not in the past couple of weeks, but a bunch of times in the last couple of months. It's quite a board game. I have a sneaking suspicion that a computer could do quite well at it given a set of heuristic strategies. And I get a little woozy playing it, as if I'm standing too close to a piece of whirring machinery, always aware that if I lean back too far my ear will get cut off or something. Its guts are just out there waiting for the chrome to be wiped away. It feels mechanical.

It's relentlessly fun.

I think this is very very important. I think that if you're a scholar of contemporary culture and you don't know about games, you're missing something central to that culture. Here's maybe why:

Games are everywhere. The central television event of the year for many people is the Super Bowl (sad, I know, but what can you do?). Video games make kajillions of dollars a year. Congressmen of all stripes want to legislate games, some saying they're nasty speech, others (like Federal Judge Limbaugh) saying they're not speech at all. Kids and adults can play things like Everquest for days at a time. England's productivity drops by like 35% when the World Cup is on. Every kid at some point steps onto a court or field and learns a set of rules and goes to fantasy land, body and mind, willingly or un-.

Games matter if for no other reason than that we're constantly playing and even watching them. When did you last bust out a copy of Monopoly? Or scribble a game of Tic Tac Toe? Or pick up a ping-pong paddle?

But games matter for another reason. Even when there is nothing to them - even when we can 'solve' them, express them purely in abstract terms (as the pushing around of counters and the maximizing of resources on some actuarial table, the deployment of forces whose relative strengths yield some predictable probablity distribution of possible outcomes, &c.) - games give us pleasure. There is something fun about baseball, about Zuma, about Monopoly. Even Tic Tac Toe. Even Nomic! (Yes, Nomic is fun. Anyone who says otherwise has not actually gotten into a game.)

We need to know what makes games fun, what makes the reality-suspension of gameworlds and game-narratives desirable. Consider Eric Zimmerman's definition of games, which says in part:

Games are mechanisms for structuring desires.

Can you see a way in which that is slightly creepy? Particularly when it is difficult to tell the difference between, for instance, real and parodic news coverage? Or a flash game and an interactive news map? (Think of something like Majestic, a failure but an interesting one. Imagine it as less juvenile and more pervasive. A physicalized Sims Online perhaps. Why ever leave?) I'm sure you have no problem separating your life in The Sims Online from your real life. (That's a truism in game studies that always leaves 'game addicts' scratching their heads a bit. But what can you do? Gotta legitimize.) But given that a game is an environment in which players enter into a kind of contract limiting discourse and interaction and desire itself to the realm of possibility outlined by the game mechanics, is it fair to ask what else such mental activity might do for/to players?

I'm asking this partially because I already have a ready-made answer: the so-called 'magic circle' theory, which roughly holds that game players enter into a space that is held separate from 'every day lived experience', and which is known to be fantastic the same way dreams are. We know how to step out of the magic circle, and the fun of giving ourselves over to the game is generated from precisely the fact that ultimately it's under our control. Games have to offer escape from something, and that something is control, responsibility, &c. Games rationalize themselves.

Communities I think work in similar fashion. As does fashion. And religion. And politics.

I'm getting metaphorical here, and I don't mind being a bit silly in this space because, well, it's something called a 'blog' which c'mon seriously you guys. I suppose what I'm saying is: games do something incredibly well. Other facets of our social lives involve similar activities. But analyzing social structure is hard. Analyzing games is hard but not as hard, I think. They're more knowable.

We should talk about how things are gamelike, and we should talk about we come to want things while playing games. We should talk about playing games, and what that really means. Games aren't texts, they're machines.

GROW.

GROW is interesting in theory if you're a game designer and in practice if you're a puzzler. It is also pretty to look at. But really don't you have better things to do? Logic puzzles are nice, and they provide a certain thrill I suppose, but...don't you?

Hot Abercrombie Chick!

Hot Abercrombie Chick! Er, what else can I say?

Rap: dead?

The British Prospect seems to think so. The only positive thing this article has to say about contemporary rap is in praise of Eminem, which is odd and shortsighted. But here's that old aesthetic conservative Stanley Crouch describing today's rappers:

...monkey-moving, gold-chain wearing, illiteracy-spouting, penis-pulling, sullen, combative buffoons.

Snap! But doesn't this apply to most young men? The fact is, most pop music is horrible, and most rap is pop rubbish. That it's generally morally vile (and that the vacuousness of most hip hop is praised by apologists as, ahem, 'keeping it real' or 'speaking truth to power') as opposed to sentimental treacle disconnected from the realities of human relationships (ahem BritneyXtinaJessicaN*SyncJohnMayerNewRadicals&c) isn't a point in rap's corner either.

It's like literature: neither better nor worse than anything else. But without literature's long-term returns, I think. (A function perhaps of the long-term process that is the creation of literature?)

Incidentally, a bit more of the article's analysis of today's hip hop to close:

That the gangster urge has become the most popular expression of discontent among black communities is unquestionable. Its endless appetite for self-gratification, its self-destructive and inward nature contribute nothing to the community. High-profile feuds, like that between rival rappers Tupac Shakur and the Notorious BIG, which resulted in the death of both, are played out in countless copycat disputes. Reports of neglected teenagers living out the gangster dream are frequent. For many boys, the intended consequences of rap's playful fantasies are cruelly reversed - resulting in disempowerment rather than opportunity. While life isn't easy for many young black people, you have to ask if rap music and the lifestyle it preaches are the best expression of protest they have.

I think perhaps: well put?

Trane.

While you were listening to the latest offering from Nelly I was going back to Coltrane for sustenance and now you've got a 9-to-5 job and I'm reading Cerebus during the day,

and so

Who's laughing now?

That freaky dancing kid.

Elsewhere is the webpage of...that...freaky dancing kid from the Kollaboration video. Holy crap, he's my age. He looked like a dorky 12-year-old in that video!

I didn't know the human body could do that. Now that I know, seeing his other videos feels a little ho-hum. Weird, that.

Oh and also, here is an article about a Nobel Peace Prize winner who has saved a billion lives. Note: it ain't Kissinger.

Brief music thoughts.

What bands, popular today, will still matter 10 years from now? 20? 40? 50? More to the point, what new bands will matter in a few years? And while we're at it: what've I been listening to, and OH PLEASE TELL US WALLY IS IT ALL TOTAL HAPPY CRAPPY?!

The more I listen to Outkast's latest (double) album, the more I imagine it'll still get play in a few years; it just doesn't sound bound to the fahsion of its time. Both halves are excellent, though I'm surprised at how much I enjoy Big Boi's Speakerboxxx in particular. Maybe it's my distaste for hip hop/R&B on the radio, but I've not heard anything in a while that moves so seamlessly between so many styles. I take that back: Blazing Arrow by Blackalicious really impressed me in the same way. I listened to a little Stevie Wonder the other day (Songs in the Key of Life), and I get the sense that there are a few hip hop groups who'll someday have the same cache as album-makers and songwriters.

Danger Mouse's Grey Album will be only a curiosity in a few years (as will all of Jay-Z's music, I'm guessing), but it's a great listen nonetheless. I find Jay-Z's original 'Dirt Off Your Shoulder' track tiresome; Danger Mouse's reworking is a weird Tourettic flashdance freakout, a real showoff number that nonetheless manages to show off Jay-Z's vocals. After a couple of listens you all but forget that it's a half-Beatles remix. Amazing.

It saddens me to say this, but I don't think The Shins will make much of a splash. They're too good and too unassuming, musically - and the stylistic continuity of their stuff (that I've heard) makes it unlikely that they'd pull a 180-degree Flaming Lips-style about-face and enter the limelight. Saddens me, because they're the best first listen I've had in a while. I'm underwhelmed by the Walkmen's Everbody Who... album, but maybe another couple of listens will change that. And similarly bored by The Polyphonic Spree - too much art-wuss posing. (Hmm - I wonder if people will someday say the same thing about Sofia Coppola's early films? I wouldn't be surprised, though I really loved Lost in Translation - The Virgin Suicides was a bore.)

The Talking Heads' Naked dodges away from what's so terrifyingly good about their earlier music - a kind of artful simplicity that bursts forth spontaneously. Naked sounds both less controlled and less wild. Nothing is threatening to explode in that album. Pity again: because we'll be listening to the Talking Heads 30 years from now. (Was there a better song written in the 1980's than 'Once in a Lifetime'? 'Take On Me' is up there, and 'Don't Dream It's Over', and 'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For'. But none is as paranoid and as joyous as Byrne's best work.)

And REM...REM don't sound like anybody else. Not bad. (Hey I'm still listening to the Polyphonic Spree album ('Beginning Stages of...') and I'm still bored. Too bad.)

OK, a little bit of airy opinion-spouting, a little bit of disappointment! It's been a day!

Spielberg: the greatest?

OK so here is a topic sentence, which I will fill in later perhaps, for argument's sake:

The reason people don't acknowledge Steven Spielberg as America's greatest living director is the same reason John Updike isn't considered our best novelist. But Spielberg is our most talented contemporary filmmaker. [And OK I would actually put P.T. Anderson up there, and David Fincher, and I'd consider Tarantino - but honestly, anybody else?]

To briefly expand, preliminarily:

Consider what the man has done. Jaws is a genuinely moving, terrifying, and above all restrained horror film in which the villain is a fish. Raiders of the Lost Ark is an adventure/comedy/action film that has no flaws of any kind. And it's entirely possible that Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is even better in many ways (though it feels very much like a sequel). Minority Report manages to feel like several films blended smoothly with one another (and oh, one of those films is Blade Runner), yet it is singularly and irreducibly Spielberg's film, a work of total control, whose outcome is never certain and whose moral conundra are genuinely interesting. Schindler's List is a moving Holocaust movie centering around an unsympathetic German capitalist, a mix of real beauty and utter terror. It doesn't move like Spielberg's other films. (And incidentally: John Williams's score for that film is possibly his best work.) AI (and I know you probably don't like it, but I think it's one of those films you kind of have to work for) is also very spliced-together, but I think it reveals itself as a powerful film if you read it as a kind of commentary on Spielberg's film career (with the man himself represented by William Hurt's crazy scientist, and the robot playing the part of all Spielberg's surrogate film-children).

This is without mentioning E.T., Empire of the Sun, or the utterly goofball 1941. Or for that matter Jurassic Park. The man's a master filmmaker whose work is moving, scary, funny. He's too entertaining for his own good. But few if any are better.

The most beautiful songs.

For your consideration, I advance the following list of contenders for the title of 'Most Beautiful Song Ever'. Most are quite recent additions to the canon. I am, as you can see, biased toward songs in the English language. And more specifically: toward songs I already know. This list is not exhaustive.

• Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah'
• U2's 'All I Want Is You'
• Schubert's Ave Maria
• Charles Mingus's 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat'
• 'Everything's All Right' from Jesus Christ Superstar
• 'Jerusalem City of Gold'
• Carly Simon's 'Nobody Does it Better'
• 'Dear Prudence' by The Beatles
• 'Wild Horses' by The Rolling Stones
• 'Long Black Veil'
• 'My Favorite Things' from The Sound of Music
• 'You Are the Everything' by REM
• 'O Holy Night'
• 'With or Without You' by U2
• Gershwin's 'Summertime'

As I said, this list is by no means exhaustive. Have a good day.

Eternal Sunshine.

Worth mentioning: last night I saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the new Kaufman/Gondry movie (starring Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey). You should see it; it's extraordinary in a lot of ways. It's like a less disorienting, more evenly textured, more classically dramatically structured Sans Soleil, and lacks the latter film's non sequitir quality. Strip away the sci-fi premise and it's just the best breakup film I've seen (better than, for instance, Kissing Jessica Stein in that it doesn't simply leave out the doing-the-relationship part in favour of the beginning and ending parts). Jim Carrey is a fine actor, I think, and does a commendable job (his scene on his knees, in the snow, will kill you if you let it), but Kate Winslet is startling. The supporting actors also do a fine job, and the ending scenes - the surprising end of the Lacuna Inc. workers subplot - are daringly given not to the stars but to the framing story, which nicely parallels the central breakup/forgetting plot.

And the score is absolutely fucking beautiful. Jon Brion is a magician (see Punch-Drunk Love if you don't believe me, but how could you not believe me?).

I should say: I wasn't nearly as discombobulated by the spatial/stylistic/temporal shifts as some reviewers seem to be, and I didn't find the 'spatial logic' as revolutionary either. The bravura visuals - particularly the train station, the baby memory(!), bookstore, and the gut-wrenching finale in the beach house - were somehow totally matter-of-fact, which is maybe the most revolutionary thing about the movie. I wonder how complex the visuals were for the effects team - it's heartening to think that this is the sort of thing that a small team of craftsmen could do, rather than an army of engineers (as on those other Elijah Wood movies - what were they called?). The inconsistencies in the 'rules' of the memory-world are only bothersome if you are the sort of person who requires such rules. Lemme put it this way: on a television show, it's important to establish such rules and stick to them. In a near-surrealist picture like this, in which the science fiction elements are absurd on face and clearly just a pretense for getting into the hearts of two lovers growing apart, it's just not something to worry about.

And so: this is the best movie about love since Punch-Drunk Love, of which I was reminded at odd places while watching last night. Charlie Kaufman is now officially one of my heroes, and this is his best work yet - though I say this without seeing Human Nature. For all its genius-on-its-sleeve magic, Adaptation is kind of a jokey movie at times, and invested in its own concept. It's hard to feel like the people are people, if you take my meaning. Being John Malkovich is, if memory serves, a bit of a mood piece, a demonstration of brilliance rather than its fulfillment. And Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which is a fantastic movie, is a fairly conventional film centered around an extraordinary man - a fitting tribute and interrogation, a real testament to Kaufman's humanity. Eternal Sunshine has none of Malkovich's inscrutability and none of Adaptation's self-apology.

The reviewer at Slate said it was the best film he'd seen in a decade. I don't know about that - it has Fight Club and Magnolia to contend with for that title, along with others - but it's an honest and moving film. How in God's name it got made in contemporary Hollywood I'll never know.

The second greatest generation.

Heroism! From the WaPo description of the U of Maryland postgame celebration last week (evidently they played someone called 'Duke' in basketball):

"I've never been to a riot before, and I wanted to get in on the action," said Oba Opesanmi, a freshman wearing only gym shorts and socks who had just posed triumphantly in front of the line of stern-faced police officers. "We killed Duke."

"My parents went through this kind of thing with protests of Vietnam," said Jason Zarro, a sophomore computer science major. "Even though this is not of the same magnitude, it will be part of my history."

Going to jail, however, won't. "As soon as they tell us to disperse," Zarro said, "I'm going to disperse."

Amen to all that, my droogies! GO TERPS! But someone should probably keep those two imbeciles away from the microphone. It's almost enough to make me long for that nauseating 'Greatest Generation' drivel that Brokaw spouts.

Note: I said almost.

Engineering MIT.

Update: TrackBack added, 'cause I'm a Christian and all.

Scott writes, over in the comments on AmShazam's blog, a description of working at MIT that's too lovely to excerpt. [I wonder a little about the ethics of quoting it in full, but I don't wonder long.]

I now realize the importance of documenting the elements of my environment that give context and feeling to my experiences. Because, while the memories will remain, my surroundings will inevitably change.

Some of the few remaining "olde Institute" classrooms are on the second floor of Building 5. I recently spent some time working in one, hypnotized by the clanging radiators, the cool breeze rolling through the oversized iron-framed windows, the ancient slate chalkboards in their sturdy but weathered wooden frames, and the curiously narrow wooden tables bearing stray pen-marks from decades of scientists and engineers who labored in the same fashion. A faded sticker above the lightswitch, probably a product of the 1970's, urged me to save energy by turning off the lights when I left.

I was, for a time, free of the distractions of modern education: banal computer projections, lifeless furniture, and the unapologeticaly loud hiss of air-conditioning vents that audibly isolates us from the natural songs of our surroundings.

I felt connected with the real Institute. It's not a carefully-polished showcase for tourists and donors. Nor is it a continuum of programmed classes and events for the betterment of my future career. It is a unique family of the people who have walked its halls, sharing common interests and desires, demonstrating uncommon skills and inspirations. The old classrooms will be gone some day, but the Institute will always remain.

O, for a blog of fire! Scott captures something about the 'abstraction' of a university: the tradition of learning that gets somehow embedded in the collective memory and encoded in the architecture. MIT's visual aesthetic doesn't try hard to impress; the buildings are generally content to contain, to be a home. (This is what annoys me about walking through Harvard, or at least part of what annoys me. But that's a different story.) Students at other schools probably feel similarly, but (for instance) U Chicago looks like its visual aesthetic is as it is in order to inspire the necessary awe and reverance.

OK so here's a metaphor to sum up what I was trying to say above:

I get the sense that at other colleges, professors are treated as holy men, and students are just monks, slaving away in training, unlikely to ever attain that level of divinity. The beauty of the church matters.

At MIT, everyone's a monk. The reverence is for the relics and not the church.

Auschwitz.

Read, please.

The Forest (and trees!) of Arden.

Purchased: The Arden Shakespeare, complete works, paperback edition, courtesy of the repeatedly reputedly best bookstore in Boston, the Harvard Bookstore.

Rapture, here I come!

(Also purchased, for what it's worth: a $4 copy of the second volume of Caryl Churchill's collected plays. It's the one that contains Serious Money and Top Girls, both of which I read a few years ago and both of which I'd like to read again (as frustrating and concepts-first-story-second-pleasure-last-if-at-all as Churchill is).

$89 million severance.

From CNN:

A man who was laid off last week from his job at a tractor factory claimed a $89 million Powerball prize Monday with the sole winning ticket.

Tim Rivers said he and his wife, Pam, plan to buy a new house and move out of their mobile home in the town of Salem in southern Indiana.

That made me really happy to read, for some reason. I wonder what they'll do with the money. Here's something:

Pam Rivers, who works at a daycare center, said both she and her husband plan to return to school and she hopes to become a nurse.

They have a 6-month-old son, and a daughter, 4.

There is some good, sometimes.

Geeks.

Over at Spiked, an article entitled The geek shall inherit the Earth. Written by a self-professed geek about to attend her Nth Doctor Who conference. Oh but here's what she thinks about geek culture:

The criticism traditionally heaped upon science fiction and fantasy - that they are infantile and escapist genres - has always been fairly risible. There is no reason why science fiction, fantasy, and yes, even comic books, cannot be used in an ambitious way to explore the human condition, just as all fiction can. Science fiction and fantasy often provide a fascinating insight into the concerns of the times in which they are produced, from the progressive aspirations of the US science fiction writers of the 1950s, to JRR Tolkien's Catholic morality in The Lord of the Rings.

But the criticism of science fiction and fantasy fans - that we are infantile and escapist people, and socially inept to boot - sadly has a little more truth to it. Of course, there are many pastimes that people pursue obsessively, and it may seem a little unfair to stick the boot into sci-fi geeks rather than car fanatics, opera buffs or stamp collectors. But of all the hobbies and interests out there, being preoccupied with the details of otherworldly settings and characters, at the expense of being engaged with the world you actually inhabit, does bespeak a certain retreat from society into the safety of one's imagination.

Fighting words! Or rather: a real tempest in a teacup, and the self-loathing here (or is it holier-than-thou? Sometimes I can't tell 'em apart) isn't really worth picking on. So: I'm a bit of a geek, though only a bit. And PLEASE TELL US WHAT DO YOU THINK WALLY?

I think she's more right than most geeks would admit, and less right than she thinks.

The fundamental problem with 'fans', as I see it, is the all-too-common unwillingness to allow any kind of external metric for quality into discussions of the cult material. Buffy fans might love that show for its extraordinary emotional fidelity and integrity, but at the end of the day you have to recognize that All in the Family went there decades ago, in perhaps different form. You might know a hell of a lot about Mercedes Lackey or Larry Niven, but you're not doing them justice until you can put them in a literary context that includes real masters of story and voice. Far too many people read tawdry generic fantasy precisely because it's easy, because it's a familiar language - regardless of the fact that most of the stuff is just crap. Like fan fiction: nice to be a part of something, I suppose, even though it'll only ever be 9th best at best. (College parallel: you know those people who'd show up to a class on popular media and turn every single discussion into a variation on, 'How can you not understand that information wants to be free??'? Those people are motherfucking geeks of the worst kind. Fans, you might say.)

I don't know about 'infantile' as a descriptor for fans - no more infantile than dogmatic politicos or the people who made XXX starring Vin Diesel. Regardless: I was at the MIT Science Fiction Society the other day, and the people there were more than a bit uneasy about hanging out with people until we got onto the subject of science fiction - at which point the conversation quickly became really interesting, because I have no interest in reading sci fi, but the worker was willing to talk about its wider literary/cultural role. I hate the idea that there're five topics that are approved for discussion in a certain subculture, or topics that are required to enable any other conversation. (Then again, my friends are of the bullshitting about everything is noble variety for the most part, so maybe it's a personal value judgment on my part.)

OK this is disorganized and I'm going to stop here.

WGH.

The 'G' is for Saint Gerard Majella.

His last will consisted of the following small note on the door of his cell: "Here the will of God is done, as God wills, and as long as God wills."

I've been thinking about going to church, lately. Maybe tomorrow I'll head out and go to Mass somewhere nearby. I doubt that this sudden burst of interest has anything to do with playing a priest in Much Ado - but who knows?

I feel sometimes that I owe it to my parents to learn more about my religion (can I really call it 'mine'?). They wanted Catholic grandchildren. Of course that's my choice. But it's important to know. Believing without knowing - that's faith, right? But isn't our highest calling to know everything, to be everything as fully as possible?

Ludology.

Brief thought today, before I go off to Lobby 10 for a bit of booth-sitting. [On rereading the following, it occurs to me that this is really a couple of posts interwoven. Sorry about that. I've been really low on sleep lately, and with the play opening tonight, that's not likely to change until perhaps Sunday. Pretend it's all coherent.]

I've referred to myself on this blog as a 'media scholar', though I'm beginning to favour the title 'Master of None'. My Masters thesis was about video games and narrative, with some nods toward theories of education and cognition (and a smattering of film theory, but only a smattering - because honestly, who gives a damn about film theory?). I don't know that the label 'ludologist' would be particularly helpful or clarifying for what I did as a graduate student - though it's certainly not incorrect, it's insufficient. Some scholars, like Jesper Juul (now Doctor Juul, thankyouverymuch!), are committed to games as a subject, and for them it's necessary to carve out a niche in academia. A title helps do that.

But what am I? Maybe I'd be more certain about my future if I knew what it is I want to study. Video games, as a topic, are of some interest to me, but by no means unlimited interest. Most games are rubbish, just as most films/novels/paintings/photographs/critical studies are rubbish. And the internal mechanics of games are interesting to me only insofar as understanding them will lead to better games. This is emphatically not the case in literary studies, nor film theory, nor cultural studies, nor art history. Those fields (presently) deal primarily in cultural context and its intersections with internal media logics (e.g. how does the Internet enable specific kinds of fan interaction?).

The thing is, there are a million and seven games, and they offer quite different pleasures, yet ludologists seem (at this early stage in the development of game studies) to want to study all of them. A noble goal, I suppose, but it's hard to be a persuasive Expert On The Novel at the age of 30. And most 50-year-old game scholars have played only a tiny fraction of games, even within a specific medium. (I would be stunned if, for instance, Brian Sutton-Smith was an experienced game player.) There seems to be a small (but growing) public/newsmedia appetite for experts on games, but there's no need to hurry in becoming one. They'll arrive in time. But ludology is young, and dumb, and full of...well, dilettantes. That's fine - I'm one, so I can't complain - but I'm troubled by the thought that, given the peculiarities of academic disciplinary evolution, ludology is simply going to become old, dumb, and full of wrinkled dilettantes.

[This raises the question of Chris Crawford, and the related question of Janet Murray. Both are important. Crawford is to my mind an extraordinary engineer/designer who's out of his depth on the topic of 'interactive drama', and Murray seems like a sensible scholar (and engineer, formerly!) whose best-known work, Hamlet on the Holodeck, is of minimal value to game studies right now, regardless of its importance in generating excitement and interdisciplinary discourse. (I hope she doesn't read this before I apply to her PhD program - or at the very least, I hope I get a chance to explain what I mean!) But both bring unique knowledge to game studies - Crawford moreso, as a lot of people have crossed over from literary study to hypertext study and the like. And up above I feel like I'm (unintentionally?) pushing for more of these older contributors to push in at ludology from the more grounded outside. I'm not sure that was my intention, but I'm not sure it's a bad idea.]

[And oh I've got a title for them: Masters of Else.]

In unrelated news: when did you last eat BBQ sauce?

The Inflation Calculator.

The Inflation Calculator does what it says. I'm convinced that this is what the Web was made for. (Oh, and also that I might look up strategy guides for Diablo II.)

Upstate?

At last, Crooked Timber takes on a topic of some importance. What constitutes 'Upstate New York'? No one in my area (the Southern Tier, mentioned in the comments of the linked post) uses the phrase much - there's the Southern Tier and the Big City. (I exaggerate only slightly.)

Does anyone have a link to the famous New Yorker cover depicting a New Yorker's view of the world?

Delillo.

To put it bluntly:

If Pynchon had never written Gravity's Rainbow, then Delillo's White Noise would be a great and important work; then again, were it not for Pynchon's novel, Delillo's novel would never have existed. And we would be poorer, but only for lacking Pynchon.

There is no oxygen in White Noise, and it doesn't matter whether it's a stylistic choice or a shortcoming. The effect is the same: joyless, meandering, a 400-page assemblage of the best prose you don't need to bother with. (Oh but the opening of Underworld, the Shot Heard Round the World, just astonishing, inducing tears.)

Millennials.

I've been rereading Marilee Jones' article on the Millennials, the generation born around roughly 1984 and afterward. [In Jones' formulation, it's 1979 and after, which would put me just inside that group. But the article doesn't particularly jibe with my experience. Maybe that's familial counterpressure, I dunno. Regardless, there're pretty serious differences in expectations between those entering MIT now and those entering with me (1997). And so.] If you read it, and it pissed you off, and you're at MIT, then you're probably either misreading it or one of the kids she's talking about. Here're a couple more Observations on the New Generation, also from an MIT webpage, oddly enough.

The article is worth a second look, for what it's worth, though it's hardly earth-shattering. :

Millennials need MIT. Despite their good qualities, and there are many, these stunning young people need to learn to think analytically and to question more. They need a sense of context to help them sort through the dizzying mass of information they confuse for knowledge. And closer to this Boomer’s heart, they need to realize that actions have consequences, so that in the future they will be less likely to hand over their privacy – and ours – for the sake of efficient consumer service. (They don’t call these kids "the Abercrombie generation" for nothing.)

Oh, snap!

Her observations may be a little discomfiting for people my age, but they're sharp, I think. This is probably the place to mention that Dean Jones is unloved at MIT for the most part, though largely for reasons that have little to do with her analysis of the current crop of students, and more to do with them not wanting to be picked on. In her public pronouncements I find her frustratingly evasive, though perhaps her position compels such a stance. But the work her office does is both important and (by all appearances) fairly effective (i.e. MIT students are no less capable of excellence, though I'm inclined to believe that MIT is less likely to breed 'genius' than it ever has been. More on that later, perhaps).

Anyway: read the whole thing! Especially the fools taking it personally!

Insight is cheap.

Somebody get this guy a blog:

A friend once told me, when I confessed that I watch "The Sopranos" the way I flip through a family photo album -- you know, to wallow in it -- that he thinks Americans could be equally split between people who grew up in the world of The Sopranos and people who grew up in the world of Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections. (Another friend claims to have come from both: "Dad's side: Thuggish confrontation, stoicism, alcoholism, seething resentment. Mom's side: Passive-aggressive behavior, WASPy repression, self-sacrificing martyrdom, Midwestern farmer mentality, alcoholism, seething resentment.")

Maybe he's wrong, but observations like that are sharp. And they make me feel a little silly for bothering with a degree in something as airy as 'cultural criticism'. (Heh.) Of course that feeling doesn't last long: any learning is worthwhile. But I need to (quickly) find a way to turn the last two years into fodder for the next two years. Same with the last six or seven. Or twenty-five. Isn't this supposed to be the natural part?

Dresden.

A new book is out, reviewed here (at Salon). Turns out my birthday shares a much darker anniversary, about which I knew nothing until today. Much like the Tuskegee experiments, about which I blogged a little bit several weeks ago, the firebombing of Dresden is one of the dark corners of America's cultural memory - but for me, just a corner, rarely seen or visited or remembered. Vietnam's the same way, and Watergate, and Prohibition, etc.

Some things I don't think I'll ever understand.

Talking 'bout my generation.

Some kid named Marty Beckerman just released a book called Generation S.L.U.T.. It's published by MTV Books, which should tell you most of what you need to know about the text and the kid. The link is to a Salon interview - he seems pretty stupid on the whole, which is too bad.

This is not my generation, in case you were wondering. I know, we're only four years separated (he's a junior in college). But I don't particularly feel like part of any 'Generation Y' - I can tell you that much. Honestly I don't feel much link to people my age, mainly because there's no part of my belief-system that's particularly extreme (I think). I'm not a militant young-lefty, nor a reactionary conservative. I'm not fucking all the time, but I'm not bothered by sex (mine or anyone else's, actually). I've never actually taken an illegal drug (save for underage alcohol - and gimme a goddamn break), but I can dig a night consisting of five bourbons and some Outkast on the stereo. I like Dave Eggers, and Thomas Pynchon, and Salman Rushdie (more his prose than his personality). But I like the Boston Red Sox too, even if part of that is pity. And I root for Manchester United (Dad's hometown boys!). And I'll go to Phish concerts, and collect their live recordings religiously...but frankly, half of a Phish crowd these days consists of dimwitted stoners without a lick of musical or aesthetic sense. The party isn't for me.

And that's the trouble - there's no generational solidarity anymore. I have this fantasy that during the 1960's - or the 1940's, for that matter, or the first third of the 20th Century - there was a sense of being born into a set of shared circumstances. We talk about the life-paths of baby boomers - look at Doonesbury to see what I mean - and we can actually talk coherently about their generation, about their collective experience of what America means. Well, what the hell does it mean to someone who was in college when the World Trade Center was destroyed? I mean, that's the signal event of my generation, even more than the Challenger explosion in 1986 (which shook me to my core - I wanted to be an astronaut until that day) or the fall of the Berlin Wall (nuclear fears were never real enough to me for that day to impact me the way it did my parents). The great political scandal of my parents' generation was Watergate. Mine? Monica motherfucking Lewinsky. How am I supposed to learn about the world from a semen-stained dress? Jesus Christ, you old bastards, what are you teaching us?

Oh but then I'm now old enough to teach as well. And what does that mean? Kids are finishing college today whose primary method of communicating with friends for the last decade has been chat services and Instant Messenger. How do you teach essay-writing to someone who thinks almost entirely in sentence fragments and jump-cuts? Or in the other direction: how do I talk about politics with someone who voted for or against Ronald Reagan, who understood the dream of America in contrast to Cold War nightmares?

I don't know that my generation actually has a name. [Oh all this is whining, I know, but don't try to stop it. It's late at night, I'm unemployed, gimme a minute.] But I don't know that I'd take it if it did - I have my friends, and my family (what's left of it), and I like sensible trousers for no reason other than that I like them. I have peers and share a birthday with thousands, but looking over the crowd, I can't help but feel a little alone tonight.

Only one way to stop that feeling:

Make a world.

Hiking the AT.

Some people actually do this. And some of them keep online journals. And...they're astounding. And they're here.

Everyone has something extrardinary inside. Some massive project, some great contribution. Something no one else could conceive of.

So what the hell is mine?

The Elders of Zion 5th Avenue.

Ladies and gentlemen, at last we have proof of a secret Jewish conspiracy.

YO SEMITE!