Wax Banks

A couple of quick notes on how to watch Dr Horrible.

Well yes, I'm slow. This should more or less complete my earlier 'Horrible Ethics' post - to which, by the way, there were some excellent comments, which you should read, on the off chance you actually care about this arrant nonsense.

* The schema: Billy's the upstart new-media triumphalist who has no idea who even watches his show, and whose rhetoric doesn't quite match reality ('Anarchy...that I run!'). Hammer is the 'corporate tool,' the Big Business machine who makes things happen with a signature and who embodies everything the plucky creative types like Billy (rightfully) hate. In abstract terms, Penny is The Cost of the squabble between creators and big business. Billy seems to be all about Nobility and Truth and achieving his Pure Ideal - Penny, 'love,' whatever - but he's more than willing to settle for something else...

* A seat at the table: What does Billy/Horrible win at the end? Entry into a boardroom. That's his reward. 'Everything you ever...' isn't just a creepy reminder of what he's given up, it's a much creepier reminder that he's actually won exactly what he wanted. In allegorical terms, he has this great story to tell, and can't understand why everyone doesn't want to hear it. Like every goddamn blogger, he thinks 'honesty' is a style.

* Fans: The instant Horrible makes news, the fans are (ahem) all up on his joint. (Is my slanguage in step with the times?) And they don't just commemorate his awesomeness with merch - they actually produce fan art! Groupie #2 has got a little painting of Horrible (not 'Billy') at the end of the picture. Isn't that cute? She's employing her own creative talents to express her own relation to the text, etc., etc., etc. Yay fan creativity! Yaaaay!! The problem being, of course, Billy is nothing more than a thieving murderer, but hey NEW MEDIA BLOGS AWESOME

* Ethics, baby: As I said before, Captain Hammer might be a protofascist asshole, but he's also right on the merits about homelessness, thievery, poverty, 'scary alcoholic bums' (as in 'A hero doesn't care if you're...'), and - most importantly - about Billy. Talk about a perceptive reader: he sees Billy a hell of a lot more clearly than Penny, who can't even tell Billy's 'got a little crush.' Men's intuition, hmm? In the end, Hammer learns what pain feels like - but Billy fails to learn that Hammer would have been perfectly fine carrying on without him, and the fans would've shown up regardless. That's the nastiest thing about Dr Horrible as satire: Billy's obsessed with taking down Hammer and Hammer just doesn't particularly care one way or the other about Billy. He watches his video blog, sure, but he's not impressed. Meanwhile Hammer is learning, and growing, and when it comes to his big number in Act Three, he's actually inspiring! 'Your real home's in your chest,' he says. Kind of a nice sentiment when you think about it.

* User-generated content: Of course Hammer's also utterly disdainful toward everyone else's attempts to be a hero, even as he recognizes their validity. This points in two directions (curse you Whedon(s)!): yes, grassroots production can lead to 'heroic' work, but ultimately you reach the most people, and the most deeply, by putting your oh-so-precious personal impulses into a form that a mass audience can understand. Joss Whedon once pointed out that he could have made a grand feminist statement in a lecture series called 'Buffy the Lesbian Separatist' - but no one would've watched. Now he's reached millions, and indirectly (through Buffy's (proto-)feminist descendents), tens of millions. Hammer is making a related point. Again, remember the 'fan creativity' on display. Joss Whedon and his family may love fans, but the stories they tell about them are dark and ominous.

* The writers lost the strike: If you liked Dr Horrible then of course you need to listen to Commentary! The Musical, which is more musically complex, more acidic, generically unfettered, hilarious. Early on there's a brutal song about the Writers' Strike of 2008, which in Joss Whedon's view was unsuccessful. As he said back in the day:

"We need, now as much as ever, to act as if the strike is NEVER going to end. We need the rage that sends us out onto the picket lines, the passion that makes us look for alternate methods of financing and developing content, and the unity that reminds us how much the studios have taken from the community already by forcing this strike. As far as the WGA is concerned, the studios have not made one decision based on fair business practices. (Funny side-note: they've also abused writers as long as there has been filmed entertainment.) Some of the things that have been broken in these last months can never be fixed, some truths about the studios' power-grubbing inhumanity that can never be forgotten, or laughed over (as they have been for decades)."

Basically the writers slunk back to work with an almost imperceptibly improved status quo. It wasn't a labour movement, it was a power grab, and high-toned rhetoric about how most Hollywood writers are underpaid and destitute was absolute bullshit. The AMPTP brutalized the writers, conceded essentially nothing, and who's benefitting from the new order? As Captain Hammer says: 'You, and you, and mostly me, and you!'

If the goal of the strike was to make a connection with Penny, the strike failed. If it was to join the League, it succeeded. But what does it even mean to be in the League? It means approval, nothing more. Indeed it means finally having someone to boss you around ('Everything you ever...').

* Hence the arbitrariness of death: Seemed a little...excessive, killing Penny, no? Well no. Comic-book origin story, allegory about destroying creativity and lofty ideals, feminist enfilade against squabbling boy-men: these genres require a Big Death at the end. It's not excessive, it's the generic minimum.

* These are the lyrics to the villain's triumphant declaration song, written by Joss Whedon. He's frozen Captain Hammer (a literal work stoppage) and is disgusted by the silent slackjawed viewing audience around him:

Look at these people – amazing how sheep'll
Show up for the slaughter
No one condemning you – lined up like lemmings
You led to the water
Why can't they see what I see? Why can't they hear the lies?
Maybe the fee's too pricey for them to realize
Your disguise is slipping
I think you're slipping

Now that your savior is still as the grave you're
Beginning to fear me
Like cavemen fear thunder – I still have to wonder
Can you really hear me?
I bring you pain, the kind you can't suffer quietly
Fire up your brain, remind you inside you're rioting
Society is slipping
Everything's slipping away

So...
Go ahead – run away
Say it was horrible
Spread the word – tell a friend
Tell them the tale
Get a pic – do a blog
Heroes are over with

In Commentary! The Musical, Joss's only solo is sun over that scene. 'I tried to warn you - the truth never helps anyone,' he says. The song is about the futility and inappropriateness of asking about the creative process. Of the author of The Odyssey he sings:

He didn't say "Here's what it means,
And here's a few deleted scenes"
Charybdis tested well with teens
He's not the story
He's just a door we open if
Our lives need lifting

But now we pick pick pick it apart

The others step in:

Joss why do you rail against the biz?
You know that's just the way it is
You're making everybody mis...

These out-of-date philosophies
Are for the dinner table - please
We have to sell some DVD's...

Without these things you spit upon
You'd find your fame and fan base gone
You'd be ignored at Comic Con

And Whedon leads into the final verse:

I sang some things I didn't mean
OK let's talk about this scene

Not many Hollywood writers do smart comedy like Joss Whedon. But he is one angry, frustrated son of a bitch. Here's why he's worth watching: because he's angry, and sad, and he desperately wants to help everyone, and he's going to find a way to fix it all by entertaining you. And that's why he gets to make hundreds of hours of television and you have a weblog.

He's a complicated guy: A little Billy, a little Hammer, a little Penny. (Also probably some Moist.)

I finally experienced Dr. Horrible as an allegory for the end of the Hollywood studio system.

Oh my god. Fantastic. The whole second half can be heard as a spoof of blog triumphalism, the first half as a satirical look at the media landscape c.2007.

Well you know what's coming, Reader(s): A GODDAMN BLOG POST.

My means are limited,
wa.

A day on which...

...one writes 4,000 words by 2pm and returns home sufficiently caffeinated to keep going is, by at least some measures, a good day. On the other hand, it seems that almost everything that could be going wrong in the world is going wrong. And in spite of my self-congratulation I admit the obvious: 'Hype is not a plan.'

Still, it's been a good N weeks. Finished at last a draft of a novel; wrote several longish essays and am knee-deep in editing - with a pen and everything! - to a shoparoundable state; am X*10^4 words into another big writing project, vastly more coherent in tone and purpose than the last one, feeling no particular urge to stop, only to get it done and keep working; even had a looking-good job interview. My D&D character hasn't died in several months - though he no longer goes weeks without taking a single point of damage, as our party often finds itself up against battlefield controllers wielding nasty area effect spells and I can't resist the urge to get up near the front line. (The 4e duergar theurge is nastiness on stilts.) Did I just get a splash of nerd on your computer? Blogger, heal thyself.

Hell, I've even got a two-part thing about a thing that - Keith, I promise - is, uh, 'funny' and YEAH! and I'll be sending it out - Keith, I promise - to a human being other than myself pretty soon. That's 'exciting,' right?

AND!! I have in-laws! Jesus, what a weird thing to have! And they gave me two cardigans for Christmas this year, same style different colours, one of which I am wearing right now (the green one) and lemme tell you, yours truly is actually a reasonably handsome lad when he's cornered. OK, a handsome lad currently hiding under a 30-pound suit of +2 Adipose Armour (nerd again) and waiting to run around skinny and naked when the weather gets warmer. Did I tell you I maintain a food log now? With the exception of holidays, Wax Banks tracks every meal. It's...well, it works. Am back to wedding-day weight and still dropping.

All this and a trip home to see Dad and Broheem.

When things are OK they're OK. Trying not to be frightened of the feeling.

Compete Wire, $90.

Yes, you read that right.

If you haven't seen The Wire, forewarned is forearmed: after this, nearly every other TV drama will feel somehow inadequate.

Best deal I've ever seen on Amazon.

Your corporate shill,
wb.

Vay kay.

Some woman is reading a magazine called 'Gluten-Free Living.' I want a magazine! They could call it 'Dripping Hot Wax' or 'Run on the Banks.' Obviously I have mature themes in mind, for Christmas.

Merry Christmas, all.

I'm deep in the heart of nowhere in particular and will return to civilization soon! In the meantime, wish your families well and don't let the nog go bad.

Literary porn titles dying to be used.

'Peyton Plays'

'The Gropes of Wrath'

'Picnic at Hanging Cock'

(Bonus world-music/porn starlet name: 'Wry Cooter'!!)

Women are underrepresented; who cares about the Kennedy name; Paterson should ignore everyone.

1) No one gives a shit about the noblesse oblige that is by many accounts Carolyn Kennedy's main selling point as a Senate 'candidate.' If she were actually interested in taking part in the democratic process, rather than very literally buying her way into power, she'd - y'know - actually take part in the democratic process, and run for Senate.

2) Yes, women are underrepresented in the Senate relative to the general population. No, that's not the metric we should be using. Either way, the chromosomal-card strategy Kennedy's backers are using is pathetically, transparently cynical. It's her name, not her genitals, that's earning her sympathy. All this 'sop to feminists' bullshit should have died with Hillary Clinton's historic and historically crass candidacy for President.

3) According to CNN Paterson might be 'boxed in' by Kennedy's 'campaign.' Give me a break. The man has better things to do than watch this brain-dead nepotists' pageant. Fuck 'Camelot,' fuck dynastic succession, fuck 'noblesse oblige.' And, frankly, fuck the Democratic Party. Pick the best possible Senator, someone really dazzling, crazy, smart, hard-working, no-nonsense, and let the cards fall where they may. Obviously.

Gladwell's book sales are an outlier? Not really.

'Bestseller' status isn't a function of consumer sales, it's a function of warehouse sales (as is pretty widely known) - and warehouse sales seem to be at least in part a function of advertising outlay, which seems to correlate with author advance and so forth...meaning Malcolm Gladwell's own success isn't primarily a function of luck, it's a function of PR. Indeed it's 'surprisingly' deterministic given what a gol-durn crapshoot this whole human existence allegedly is.

Arrested Development, full series, $29.

Go buy this now.

Among American sitcoms, Arrested Development is the only rival to The Simpsons for density and allusive subtlety; unlike that show it's an consistent serial narrative about recognizable grotesques rather than a loopy sketch show/broad-brush satire. Without a laughing audience the single-camera show is free to attain the pacing of an animated sitcom, but tonally it careens between goofy domestic farce and a pitch-black spoof on the hugging-and-learning family stories that Seinfeld deliberately set out to destroy. Indeed AD covers much of the same ground as The Simpsons and Seinfeld, but has a gravity neither of those shows ever attained, owing to a simple, traditional (and so daring) choice: it moves its story and characters through time, dares to change their circumstances, letting the audience feel the weight of those changes. The final episode of AD rounds out the show's central narrative (Michael's stewardship of the family and its business) without shortcuts or gotchas, which is rare and impressive; but it's the other stories - the doomed, ridiculous love everyone in the family feels, against their better judgment, for somebody else - that'll really get you. AD is a virtuoso piece more tightly constructed than any other American TV show this side of The Wire, but - weirdly - it's also just a nice story about familial love, unashamed of sentimentality but too smart to wallow in it.

(All that and I haven't even mentioned Henry Winkler and Ron Howard in a series of inside-baseball TV-historical references so precise and funny you'll swear they were plotted out years in advance - plus, double bonus, if you like a little cynical-critical vibe with your sitcoms, watch for an ongoing subtext about coded/masked Jewishness in pop culture. You'll, um, plotz - whatever that means.)

It's on sale for $29 today - three seasons, from the comparatively subdued(!) first year to the symphonic madness of Season Three (best bit: Charlize Theron in a five-episode series of James Bond parodies crossed with the most uncomfortable love story of the show's run). If you hate sitcoms, go buy this show. If you love sitcoms, go buy this show. It's on par with the finest TV comedies of our time - The Office, The Sopranos, Seinfeld, even that goddamn cartoon with the terrible art that everyone likes, I forget what it's called. It's very, very smart comedy for and by[*] grownups and I absolutely guarantee you'll enjoy Arrested Development.

Go, go!

* * *

[*] Sidebar: I wonder whether part of what puts me off about The Simpsons is the feeling that it's a broad-brush social satire written by people my age and younger whose main qualification is having worked for the Harvard Lampoon - the enshrinement of college humour as a TV comedy standard, a comedy by and for smart kids. The writerly equivalent of the Student Council president's essay on Heart of Darkness, neatly typed with no errors and a few neat observations, which at this point even the teacher can't bring herself to give a fuck about. I imagine I'm being unfair, that my impressions are founded on too small a sample, etc. Well OK, but give me the heavy-handed auteurist crudity of South Park, a show that takes risks The Simpsons couldn't even begin to imagine, any day of the week. (You do realize South Park goes from idea to air in roughly a week, don't you? Think about that next time you're watching a satirical TV cartoon that was in the can for a year.)

how to put on a condom.

how to put on a condom

1) disconnect the electrodes
2) update your status message on instant messenger to keep your friends in the loop
3) make a cup of fruit-flavoured belgian/antipodean tea
4) put little beauregard in the backyard with a bowl of milk, a bowl of dog food, a bowl of liquid LSD, and the five thousand sheets of blank newsprint paper he asked for
5) update your status message on instant messenger to keep your friends in the loop
6) drink the tea
7) put on the condom
8) tilt the mirror to a more flattering angle
9) try to understand, this doesn't make you gay
10) i'm so totally not worried about that, you have no idea
11) oh that's good, that'll go into the moleskine later with a check mark AND a plus sign
12) update your status message on instant messenger to keep your friends in the loop
13) why, does it SEEM gay?

Friday night lite.

I have this neurosis that amounts to 'If I don't leave the house on Friday night I go slightly crazy and begin to obsess over all the momentous things that are happening to my friends, the important discussions they're having, the neat accidents befalling them, and I grow irritable and sour.' The reason for this is, um, I didn't get invited out on Fridays as a kid, and to a high schooler those stupid around-the-campfire conversations and bottle-of-SoCo exchanges really are momentous/important/neat. For a variety of reasons I haven't been able to shed this preoccupation in the last, er, fifteen years or so.

I have experimentally determined the proper treatment for, if not the disease itself, then the most problematic symptoms. It goes like:

* Don't sit home drinking

* Do something creative

* Make sure you leave the house during the day Friday

* Listen to upbeat music

* Or better yet, make some

* Your friends are actually kind of lame so don't worry about them

* No guys I love you! Wait PLEASE CAN I COME WITH YOU

* Shit.

One Man Guy.

I linked to this last August, but listening to it again I can't help but share it: Rufus Wainwright and a couple others, guitar and tambourine, their voices overdubbed on the second chorus, singing Loudon Wainwright's 'One Man Guy' [mp3]. Might lift you up. If things like that are your sort of thing, take a look at this too - the once-Canadian's 'Best of 2008' list.

12/30/97 MSG.

One of the two or three best shows of the best touring year of a halfway decent rock band is on sale now in glorious soundboard format. What it is: canonical versions of 'Taste' and 'AC/DC Bag,' the bustout of 'Sneakin' Sally' after eight long years, a goofy '500 Miles' cover in the middle of 'Harpua,' an unfinished 20-minute 'Hood' so good you won't mind that it turns into 'My Soul,' and a half-hour improvisatory encore including a wild 'Frankenstein' and a triumphant 'Sally' reprise. An ideal introduction to the band as well - your digital stocking-stuffer for the young music fan in your family, right there.

I got my first copy of this show on XL-II from Dave Rainie and company at a local tape-trading party up in Porter Square in January '98, something like two weeks after the show - we daisy-chained a stack of tape decks and spun five or six simultaneous copies. It sounded perfect to me. I first heard electric Miles Davis (Live Evil, not exactly the easy stuff!) a few weeks later, and my destiny was written. Some of my fondest memories of college, those. Heh: I didn't even know where Porter Square was back then. Some days I think I still don't.

Tribune Co. is bankrupt.

You don't need to ask, baby. It tolls for thee.

What is The Office now?

[I wrote this a couple weeks ago, have sat on it too long for that venue, but it's fine for this one.]

The Office started out as a sharp satire of office culture and has turned into...something else. I finally got turned on to 30 Rock this year and the two shows are increasingly similar on the surface: 'wacky workplace sitcoms' (decades-old generic staple of American TV) with the emphasis shifted from workplace to wacky. You've seen that shift before: NewsRadio, WKRP, The Wire (psych!). Did Ally McBeal go the same route? I had too many Y chromosomes to care...It's a specific version of the general shift that so many long-running serial/episodic entertainments on network TV have made: they start out about their premise (gold strike in the Black Hills, alcoholic cops, wacky DJ's, vampire with soul - a 'drinking problem' - tries to atone) and end up as depictions of surrogate families. That's why Seinfeld, maybe the greatest American sitcom, was so revolutionary: 'No hugging, no learning.' And yet watch that weepy clip show that preceded the final episode: any story you let into your living room for nine years becomes in a literal sense part of your family. (OK class: compare the end of the hopelessly involuted, earnestly sentimental Arrested Development - maybe the second-greatest of our time - to the end of Seinfeld.)

The major difference between The Office and its generic forebears - and the light-n-fluffy 30 Rock, which is basically sketch comedy blown out to episode length - might be the Jim and Pam story, which for three years was contemporary TV's most agonizing will they/won't they narrative and which, in the truncated fourth season and this, the show's fifth year - is that rare thing in successful drama, a happy relationship that's worth watching. Joss Whedon used to say, 'Happy Buffy is boring Buffy,' and Greg Daniels and his writers are testing the fates by giving us Boring Jim and Pam. It's like the third act of a Tom Hanks romantic comedy stretched out over two years, interwoven with the increasingly friendly hijinks in the rest of the office. It looks kinda...safe.

Indeed the entire show seemed to climax at the end of Season Three; had it ended with 'The Job' we'd be discussing whether The Office was the best sitcom since Seinfeld. But: we can't go on, we'll go on. Last year Jim and Pam had nothing but good times, but the season finale ('Goodbye Toby') raised the specter of Jim's pathological fear and recidivism (he keeps coming back to the officemate who jilted him twice - and for an oblivious, emotionally vacant asshole, no less!). His failure to propose (Andy's fault) was the 'cliffhanger' for the year, along with Michael and Jan's babychild and the arrival of button-cute Amy Ryan as Holly the new HR lady. But the writers weren't terribly interested in cliffs as such: Michael helped Jan a little with the baby and had a brief romance with Holly, who's gone now; Jim proposed at the outset of Season Five; Toby came back. In terms of Big Events, the major ongoing crisis at this point in the show is the Dwight/Angela/Andy love triangle, the most uncomfortable subplot the show has run.

Yet the show is richer now than it's ever been. Indeed it's started to take on a little bit of a late-Sopranos feel in terms of running plotlines and characterization. Here's what's great: while the week-to-week events are as silly as ever (e.g. last night Toby came back for a full week before Michael new he was there; then Michael called the cops on him - and remains improbably unsued and unfired, of course), the characters' emotional lives are getting richer by the week. Last year Stanley's 'Did I stutter?' episode gave Leslie David Baker (Stanley) a chance to gather up four years of rage-played-for-comedy and just fire both barrels at the unsuspecting audience; Pam went off to NYC and traced out what was essentially a fantasy arc, putting Pam's artistic aspirations and organization acumen in a startling new light - cf. Vito Spatafore escaping Tony Soprano to New Hampshire in Season Six - then fell right back into her crap job at Dunder Mifflin (just about everyone on this show, like The Sopranos, is a recidivist); Dwight has gone from just-plain-freak to needy, genuinely creepy romantic foil for the ever-more-sympathetic Andy; Michael delivered a stunning speech in the airport at the end of last week's episode, berating Dave Wallace for basically pissing all over him for several years and denying him something like true love; and check out Andy and Oscar bonding last week over romantic troubles!

(Weirdly thrilling to see such a nuanced portrayal of an ideologically homophobic, operationally egalitarian grownup frat boy - in that regard Andy is just President Bush with a smaller paycheck.)

In other words, the show has gotten broader over time in its weekly premises, taking more and more 'field trips' (beach, boat, fun run, hospital, New Hampshire(!), Schrute Farms, NYC, etc.). But at the same time it's now more serious than it's ever been about the emotional consequences of those events. Robert Penn Warren gave the true name of all stories: "Tell me a story...The name of the story will be Time,/But you must not pronounce its name." Having spent several years getting bigger and sillier in terms of events, The Office has fully embraced authentic drama, the Real Stuff, which is only: the small wins and losses of everyday life, irrespective of the black-and-white 'dramatic value' of events. We cringe to see Jim and Pam having such a good time now, sure that something has to go catastrophically wrong in a stupid Ross-and-Rachel (Sam-and-Diane) way; on TV something always does. But maybe things just go anticlimactically right sometimes. Bumps in the road might be enough. That would seem to violate every rule of serial TV writing, but that's what great shows seem to do (even though they don't - after all, Michael did call the cops on Toby this week).

I've written elsewhere that The Wire offered TV's most realistic portrayal of bureaucratic procedure, but more importantly, of boredom; the great achievement of HBO's gold-standard shows (The Wire, Deadwood, The Sopranos) is their procedural approach to domestic drama, eschewing quick-hit network melodrama and advertising-driven four-act structure, depicting Mere Living for a dozen episodes or more before finally popping the cork on a given plot. The Office ain't that; it's still a zany comedy. But in its Jim and Pam plot, in aspects of Michael's story, in the supporting cast's willingness simply to live with one another despite obvious tension, I'd say Greg Daniels's show is the closest a network comedy has come to that HBO-style storytelling that has defined (and crowned) this Golden Age of TV.

(Second class discussion: The Sopranos is in fact a domestic sitcom, an update of The Honeymooners and All in the Family, and The Office is its direct descendant.)

Enjoy this show, folks. It leads in to a funnier show (30 Rock) on Thursdays, but to my eyes there's no greater achievement in TV comedy on any channel - unless you count the news channels' political coverage, the great nauseating unintentional comedy of our era and maybe the right topic for the next article, and How Do You Do, That's Just Fine.

Old-school D&D, UNIX, and geek/hacker culture(s).

A lot of the appeal of OD&D (Original Dungeons and Dragons, Gary Gygax's 'little brown books') is the very thing that makes it unfashionable today: it's rules-light, essentially mapping wargame rules onto a shared imagined terrain - a 'multiuser consensual hallucination' if you will - and calling upon the DM (Dungeon Master, formerly 'referee') to make judgment calls whenever story progress is up in the air. Indeed, OD&D was a 'story game' only in the most basic sense; really it was a very, very flimsy (but coherent and evocative) fantasy-combat simulation with a built-in language for treating noncombat encounters. It was initially domain-agnostic, but the flavour of the original game came from Gygax's home campaign (Greyhawk).

In other words: The original Dungeons & Dragons was a compact, opinionated application with generic output and a decent API, with rich but idiosyncratic documentation for anyone who wanted to use it to develop domain-specific languages.

In yet other words, D&D used to be like a UNIX app.

Nowadays D&D is quite different from when it began: the text is less idiosyncratic and flavourful, the rules far cleaner and more robust (though not without errors, e.g. in the muddled 'skill challenge' system), the plugin architecture (the system of classes, races, and character-power progressions) more consistent and far easier for enterprising players (home developers) to use. The default setting is no setting at all; there's no personality to the generic D&D world beyond 'Go! Fight! We have magic! Everyone wants to kill everyone else. There are no guns yet.' Of course players are expected to develop their own materials to expand the game at home - but contemporary D&D culture, as it manifests online and in the official materials provided by publisher Wizards of the Coast, is about optimization and extensive mechanics, rather than metagame storytelling and freeform exploration.

(The game's dungeon designs have always been soporific: geometrical, planar, like the floors of a castle underground - which was in fact Gygax's original dungeon conception. But in a game built around miniatures and combat, as today's D&D is, the map is the outer limit on the richness of the setting - it is the territory it purports to describe. As the game initially moved away from miniatures, though, it treated dungeon maps as...maps. Both approaches have their advantages.)

This isn't to say roleplaying and storytelling with the new system are impossible - of course not! Far from it. But the original game was, quite by accident it seems, productively, generatively incomplete: its initial limitations birthed a culture of resistance and improvisation, and a style of play that today's more detailed, more mathematically coherent game mechanics attempt with mixed success to regulate back into existence.

The third, inner term here is obviously video games. I talked about those recently in the context of D&D's level of abstraction and the hidden attraction of fantasy roleplaying. That article illuminates this one, I think.

Of course one big reason old-school D&D appeals so strongly to nostalgic gamers today is nothing more than timing: they got into it when people get into things, during their lonely childhoods, and it recalibrated their expectations. Fine. Here's another reason: OD&D felt (feels) like it was aimed at adults ('For 3 or More Adults, Ages 10 and Up'!!), while the modern game is marketed to tweens, adolescents, and young adults raised on trading card games (like WotC's Magic: The Gathering) and video games. It's...unliterary.

It's possible to code up your own MUD/MOO, or even a shared online graphical space like EverQuest or World of Warcraft. No one does; there are fine worlds available. That's not unexpected, but isn't it a little sad?

The cover of the 1st edition Advanced D&D Players Handbook shows a band of thieves stealing jewels from the eye of a great demon idol. The latest incarnation of that volume (4th edition, released a few months ago) shows two big fighter types looking out at the reader, 'poised for battle.' Cover changes don't mean much, but they don't mean nothing either. You might say the difference between the two is this: D&D 4e encourages players to be someone who does amazing things; OD&D required them to do amazing things (to the ruleset - in the form of endless, unfortunately necessary houserules - as well as within the gameworld itself). The aesthetic of modern D&D doesn't encourage a DIY approach, even though the game's designers go out of their way to talk about player freedom and creativity. (And to their credit, the new edition makes the mechanics of adventure-creation absolutely dead simple for the DM - a huge improvement over the endless number crunching of 3e.)

The most important feature of D&D 4e is this: it's not built around improvised actions (though they're possible). The central behaviour in D&D 4e is 'Move, make some augmenting action, then activate one of the Powers specific to your class.' A good DM will roll with the punches if you go off-script a little; a great one will encourage you to modify the behaviours of Powers in situ, dynamically generating a robust improvised action system with suggested effects (to keep the classes distinct and their roles clear). Most DM's and players will play the Powers on the page. If you're gonna do that, why not play World of WarCraft? (Seriously.)

Back in the day there were two competing real-time strategy games for the PC: Total Annihilation and StarCraft. The former had an object-oriented plugin architecture that allowed the development of 3rd-party units - you simply defined the unit and imported it into the world, and new world behaviours emerged from its characteristics. StarCraft, on the other hand, was basically a single giant table: one unit attacked another, and something specific to that pairing occurred.

StarCraft was the more successful, critically-acclaimed game, and was perfectly balanced. T.A. felt like its loopy DIY cousin. (I owned both - but abandoned StarCraft pretty quickly.)

D&D 4e is built a lot like Total Annihilation, while StarCraft actually resembles OD&D's combat mechanics in certain ways (OD&D contained several notorious, ridiculous pairing-specific outcome tables). Ironically, though, 4e plays like StarCraft - you kind of feel guilty building new subsystems, and you can't help feeling you're going 'off the grid' when you don't utilize the system's library of deterministic Powers - while OD&D, with its enormous blind spot around the social/roleplaying/interaction portions of the game, and mapless environments existing only in shared imaginations - bred a sort of garage-band gaming culture akin to that of Total Annihilation and its ilk.

What you like you like, and you don't get to choose the day you're born. There will be plenty of players, twenty years from now, whose glorious first experience with fantasy roleplaying will have been D&D 4e. And good for them - it's a great game in so many ways. But they'll come into a hobby whose glory days have passed, which by virtue of its accessibility and cleanliness - the very things that enable it to reach a large audience - has sacrificed something of its, yeah, hacker aesthetic. It's not punk anymore. Then again, it seems like nothing is, which means something is wrong with everything - or with me - or with 'punk.'

From elsewhere.

"He tried to imagine what it felt like to be a financial-sector worker during this time, a baron of industry and professional accumulator of capital, but got distracted wondering what it must be like to be a squirrel. It occurred to him that the financial crisis was only a 'crisis' of meaning and symbol - not yet a physical crisis for the vasty majority of humans, and never to be a crisis for the furry little creatures clawing their way up and down the trees outside his apartment. Nuts would still fall from trees; squirrels would eye them warily from low branches, would hold still chewing something (gum?) watching for any sign of predators, the occasional hawk - which creature humans would find amazing, no doubt, though no one but a kid thinks much of the squirrels themselves, though (or because) the treeborne mammals get to play Rosencranz and Guildenstern to the hawk, around just to amuse and then die horribly, one by one, alone. Where's the sympathy? If the global economy collapsed the squirrels would still live as they had: huddling for warmth in winter, hiding out in tiny squirrel homes, eating easy-to-prepare meals, not reading poetry - a lot like the American bipeds they were slowly as a species learning to ignore just as they were ignored. Indeed it was hard to know which was the more oblivious race of creature poetrywise."

There's good news, but then there's good news.

This is good news. Any time voters throw criminals out of office it's a good day for you and me.

That is all.

Cheap, cheap X-Files.

If you like this ridiculous show, the entire run plus the movie - plus the original DVD extras not included on the current season box set editions - can be had for the even more ridiculous sum of $125.

That's such a good price I'm tempted to sell $100 worth of books and just buy it, damn. Though at the end of the operation I'd own...The X-Files. Oy.

Notes on one of my musical hobbyhorses: Phish 2003.

As several members of the band put it in the 'IT' documentary, Summer 2003 was a real test for Phish: to see what remained of the group that could be sustained and built upon in the years ahead. The IT festival itself, as they saw it, was the coming-out party for a whole new version of the band. They'd learned to rock, and to stay sober (for the moment), and each member of the group was playing with a new sound unlike any he'd explored yet. The group's overall sound was newly balanced, with chunkier guitar, much more pointed bass, heavier drums, and much more complex keyboard work - in other words, they sounded more like a rock band that could play funk, jazz, and bluegrass, and less like the unnameable hybrid group they'd been for most of their twenty years.

And in 2003 you could hear the full weight of those accumulated years. The group was audibly eager to get right to its collective improvisations, but seemingly from outside the songs, even of the band itself: you could tell they wanted to start tearing things up a little bit. That meant killing some sacred cows and improvising some new formulae: suddenly 'Harry Hood' wasn't the sacred feel-good thirteen minutes of years past, doubling in length and getting wonderfully ugly; 'Runaway Jim' wasn't just a bombastic country-rock vehicle for an ostentatious guitarist; the sorta-Latin dissonant nightmare 'Stash' could become an outright major-chord rocker; 'Tweezer' could rediscover its roots as a bluesy rock riff and shake off the plodding tempi of its later years; 'Ghost' would come to resemble not the porno-funk of Fall '97 but the intricate melodic interplay of 'Bathtub Gin.' Songs ballooned to a half-hour in length all over the setlist; big jams started right off, closed first sets, hid in encores. Song placement seemed arbitrary or even willfully perverse. (This tradition continued until the end of 'Phish 2.0': At one of the 2004 Brooklyn shows the band finished a roaring 'Character Zero' about an hour in to the first set, a song that had closed dozens of sets in its short existence, a song written explicitly for that purpose - and only then did they kick in 'Tweezer,' the monster improv vehicle that formed the backbone of their most memorable mid-period second sets Back in the Day.)

Yet for the first time in years the lads were also clearly practicing like they used to - Trey Anastasio's famously complex written compositions were performed without flaws, but fluidly, a feeling of discovery and appreciation flowing between band and audience, the players taking chances with improvisations inside the songs. Their sense of whimsy was stronger in 2003 then it had been since the 'Dark Side of the Moon' set in Fall '98 (arguably the peak of the band's virtuosity). In their early days they'd been a comic-prog-rock band with a theatrical flair and seemingly limitless technical ability - too manic for many people's tastes, and understandably so. But the four members of Phish had aged well: their tastes had strengthened. (At the end of their 20+ year run they were still playing David Byrne's 'Cities' - but the Beastie Boys' 'Sabotage,' another artifact of 1998's top-of-the-world jokiness, had been taken out behind the barn and put to rest.)

The first show of Summer '03 opened with a run of classics no less than eight years old: 'Stash' (1990), 'Sample in a Jar' (1993), and 'Billy Breathes' (1995); in chronological terms that's like the post-Let It Be Beatles reuniting to play a show consisting solely of songs they wrote with Pete Best. The last show of Summer '03, the IT festival in northern Maine, saw the following set on its first night:

8/2/03 II: Rock and Roll → Seven Below → Scents and Subtle Sounds → Spread It Round, Bug

The opener is a Velvet Underground tune, the closer a staple of Phish's 1999 shows; the middle three tunes had debuted only a few weeks before, and 'Spread It Round' was getting a late-second-set airing at the biggest show of the year in its second public performance. Along with the unannounced 2am 'Tower Jam' (an hourlong improvisation played from the top of an aircraft control tower), the first night second set was the highlight of the show. New sound, new songs, new attitude: a new band, it seemed. (And through June 2004 you could easily have made the argument that Phish was playing on par with its best pre-hiatus work, the canonically intense Fall '97 and 1998 tours.)

With vanishingly few exceptions, Phish didn't fail to put on a good show, night after night. Unlike their comparatively genre-bound spiritual ancestors the Grateful Dead, Phish could swing effortlessly from straight-ahead jazz standards to Floydian soundscapes to wailing funk nastiness in the style of early-70's electric Miles; not counting several hundred one-time songs (mainly covers, including the entirety of the White Album, Loaded, Quadrophenia, and Remain in Light), the band drew throughout its career on a songbook of four hundred tunes; at the height of their power and popularity in 1998, the band pulled out 238 different songs in a single year of touring, the equivalent of performing a new double-album in concert every month. (For comparison: the Beatles wrote and released a total of 214 songs in their entire career.)

Moreover, at their best Phish could do this code-switching naturally, fluently: on days like 11/22/97 (get the mp3's) or 2/28/03 the band could play a half-dozen different styles of music in half an hour as if they were born to 'em. Just listen to the second set of that Hampton show! 'Halley's Comet' flows from dark midtempo rock to clav-driven wah-wah funk, through an ambient interlude, and into the sort of downtempo 'space rock' instrumental you might find on a latter-day Flaming Lips album, before fading out to make room for an explosive version of 'Tweezer' - which is after all nothing more than a single riff with some dumb lyrics to fill the time, and which morphs from bar band funk-rock into the crisp sexmachine licks of 'Black-Eyed Katy.' The music owes as much to the white-boy cooptations of 70's jazz-rock as it does to the rock/R&B/funk sounds that preceded the emergence of that benighted genre, but Phish grew up on Zeppelin's hard rock, the minimalist nerd-pop of Talking Heads, and the Dead's Americana too - and their catholic approach to their music in 1997 reflected their diverse stylistic and generic heritage. Watch how the genially schizophrenic 'Run Like an Antelope,' with its goofy frolicking-carnival-animals opening and island-bounce coda, nonetheless makes sense on the heels of 'Piper''s life-is-a-highway backstretch and drawing room closing. And listen for the moment a little after the climax of 'Katy,' around 5:13 in, when Anastasio suddenly starts fanning that high E-string, putting an authoritative, almost martial stamp on his bluesy solo. (Plus check out the usually-restrained Page McConnell beating the hell out of his keyboard four measures later.)

It's all of a piece. At their best, Phish played the sort of music only Phish could play - not just in terms of precise technique but in their telepathic improvisation and command of an enormous range of textures to be blended without regard to commercial expectations or genre rules.

Now fast-forward back to 2003: it's like that, but louder, chunkier, more aggressive, more complex (the entire band now playing with the polychromatic intricacy of Anastasio at his peak). The pop songs were more accessible, the rock tunes got nastier (check out the band's last two studio albums for evidence of their latter-day rock pedigree, culminating in the eerie, ballsy 'A Song I Heard the Ocean Sing'). The band had lost a step in terms of precision, though compared to their sloppy nadir in 2000 they sounded like the London Symphony. But they more than made up for the technical limitations of middle age with an improvisational ease and patience that illuminated their back catalogue and brought a batch of strong new tunes into the fold. It was a fully integrated sound - check out the 12/2/03 (20th anniversary) 'Piper,' with its slow slide from that song's usual loud-n-proud rock into a dirtier, busier version of the band's late-90's 'cow funk' sound, then down to a weirdly-textured disco rock jam and out through one of their patented 'Pink Floyd if anyone in that band was capable of feeling pleasure' soundscapes. Listen, too, to the 18-minute 'Rock and Roll' cover that's the show's second-set highlight, which indulges nine minutes of Live Fast, Die Young bombast before settling into a spacey, naughty uptempo freakout with its tonal roots in barroom blues and a melodic heritage stretching back to early jazz fusion (yeah, it's as messy as this description - but perfect).

Or turn to the 7/26/03 Waves/Tweezer/NICU triptych, which showcases the band's ability to integrate textures and melodies across multiple tunes and collectively structure improvisations (check out the middle of that 'Tweezer') - along with its willingness to follow a stray rhythmic impulse, as an improvised uptempo bridge out of 'Tweezer' turns into what passes for ska at a Phish concert. (The whole show is worth the purchase - the Big Improv of set II caps a songwriterly first set that's all about the old stuff, and gives a taste for the band's compositional sensibilities...All that and a relatively low-key 21-minute 'Piper.' Overall, 7/26 offers as much bang for your buck as any 2003 show, and is a good starting point for the maybe six people on earth interested in exploring late-period Phish at this point.)

The point being: this is a band that (as far as I'm concerned) peaked on a Fall 1997 tour that was all about dark, complexly polyrhythmic improvisation and collective textural exploration; sustained that peak with few missteps through a loose-limbed 1998; completed its origin story on NYE '99 with a canonical seven-hour single set in the Everglades; struggled to reinvent itself for nearly five difficult years, completing one 18-month hiatus and finally requiring a full five years off. And yet you can listen to the Summer 2003 shows and hear music that would be the envy of any so-called 'jam band' of the last 15 years or so - a wide-ranging original rock songbook coloured by electronic dance and ambient music, New Orleans funk and New York acid jazz, the effortless ongoing improvisation of bluegrass and the unironic bombast and infectious joy of (yep) Broadway musicals. There were nights in 2003 and 2004 when Phish could play for two full hours at the intensity that used to characterize the very peaks of their 1993-1997 music. It lacked the laughing virtuosity of August '93, the fury of late '94, the sense of possibility of December '95, and the thrilling lockstep polyrhythms of '97-98. But Phish's late music went places the band could never have imagined even five years before (we'll see where they go in 2009).

They're middle-aged men now and they play like it, and that's a compliment.

Seinfeld complete set, dirt cheap - today only.

Go go go to the Amazon.com Black Friday sale - today only, 50% off the complete run of Seinfeld, the gold standard of traditional multi-camera sitcoms. $140 for nine seasons, people. That's ridiculous.

Ambiance.

I heard this [mp3] on WERS sometime in 2003 or so while driving through Kenmore Square, and nearly crashed my (ex-girlfriend's) car. It was the linear sum of several of my musical fetishes; it was like glimpsing the very top of a tall mountain through clouds and realizing the landmass you've been living on is in fact just a foothill (molehill?) Whenever I hear any a capella singers I ache for this tune. Far as I'm concerned it's the gold standard of...something.

The tune is 'Excerpts from "Rhapsody in Blue",' performed by Ambiance, a Sweet Adelines group that split up before I ever heard of 'em. You might die when you hear it. Or maybe not; but your wellbeing is your responsibility, not theirs.

Off to learn about just intonation, ciao.