Wax Banks

Worldbuilding is storytelling: complication, complexity, and micronarratives.

My recent obsessions taken to a 3,500-word extreme! Go read (and if you're an RPG nerd, you should be following Philippe's blog anyhow).

The Hurt Locker.

The Hurt Locker is an excellent film, painfully intense from beginning to end and generous in its treatment of its characters and world. I recommend seeing it in the theatre if possible.

That's it for my review. Go see The Hurt Locker.

The rest is a misplaced complaint. (Spoilers follow.)

The dominant theme in recent Iraq War dramatizations has been the surreal, arbitrary nature of the war. Nothing about the soldiers' on-the-ground experience is connected to the narratives put forth by mainstream media outlets (in their role as government PR services), and beyond the usual war-is-hell, soldiering-is-strange, fight-for-your-brothers, innocence-gets-lost, it's-tough-coming-home material that makes up nearly every war film ever, Hollywood has had little to say about the Iraq War other than 'This makes little sense.' The Hurt Locker fits this mould: the film doesn't make any statements about the Iraq war as such. Rather, the film's declarative content is right there in its epigram, the first frame of the show: 'War is a drug.'

The Hurt Locker is the story of a drug addict endangering the lives of the people around him by feeding his addiction; more specifically, it's a recidivism story rather than a redemption story, so the ending shouldn't come as a surprise, though you may come away disappointed in the characters.

(Let's say up front that the movie is a drug too: at a tense point in the extraordinary mid-film mercs'n'snipers sequence I hissed out 'Kill the motherfucker' at one of the onscreen American soldiers, disturbing my wife and filling me with a potent cocktail of self-loathing and self-justification for the rest of the running time.)

The plot of The Hurt Locker involves three soldiers on an ordnance-removal squad: two provide cover, supplies, and communications, while the third (James) puts on an enormous space-pillow suit and defuses roadside bombs and IEDs and the like. It's an action/suspense movie, and the material is all guns and near-death and warrior antics. (The most incredible plot point in the film is the main character's simple statement of how many bombs he's defused. It's also the lead actor's best moment - an unbelievably complex show of emotions in no more than fifteen virtuosically-uncomfortable seconds.)

The story, on the other hand, has little to do with explosives; the film is ultimately a study in how the intensity of war denatures and distends the human heart, and what effects war-addiction has on soldiers and civilians alike. The story is told effectively, though not definitively, if you know what I mean.

If you spend two hours watching a film with (what you take to be) its central question in mind, you can start to believe that you're entitled to an answer; that's a reasonable assumption but incorrect. This belief is even stronger when the film makes its major concerns clear from the outset. The central plot question of The Hurt Locker is, as always, 'What happens next?' More specifically: 'Will they make it?' More editorially: 'Will James get his coworkers killed?'

This is only mechanism, though. The story-motor is a different question altogether: 'Why is James like this?' It's voiced by a couple of characters in the film, most memorably by James himself. The answer, in keeping with cinematic-Iraq-war standards, is 'I don't know.' Or rather, the answer is in the epigram - 'War is a drug' - and perhaps you'd be justified in thinking this both an elegant bit of storytelling and a frustrating piece of halfway-analysis.

Toward the end of the film, the war-addict returns home to his ex-wife and baby. At the grocery story he faces a vast aisle of scrupulously art-directed cereal boxes; after a moment's existential crisis, he grabs one with a look of mild but manageable irritation on his face. Our 'hero' is a quick-witted, intelligent man, and a hardboiled fighter - and newly attuned to the complexities of human lives and so forth, as prompted by his latest experiences in Iraq. We get two minutes of domestic footage, and he chooses to be redeployed to Baghdad. Roll credits.

James's final choice feels inevitable - i.e. believable, a correct storytelling decision - but I wanted The Hurt Locker to stay with him and take a chance on rendering his less intense (but no less complex) life at home with his ex-wife and kid. The upshot of the film is that he can't function anymore in an environment other than the life-or-death insanity of war, where he's both an effective fighter and technician and, occasionally, a mortal danger to his allies. Fine. The psychology of our 'hero'/loose-cannon is convincing and complex, and The Hurt Locker is a rich and honest treatment of its subjects in their main environment. But we only see them against the backdrop of the war. Which is a fine choice but now I'm preoccupied with the alternatives for some reason. Is that my fault or the film's?

I came away from The Hurt Locker desperate to find out how a smart, capable, emotionally-complex man like James - a hero - handles his few days or weeks at home. How do his survival mechanisms fail, exactly? We know that they fail, hence his voluntary redeployment, but I'd have been just as happy or happier had the film condensed its bomb-squad material into an hour and followed the processes of James's mind on the home front for another hour. How does war-addiction manifest in the world beyond the battlefield? How would the tightly-wound pragmatist James, who feels no apparent bloodlust but whose vengeful-romantic streak nearly gets his squadmates killed, respond to the armchair viciousness of America's war-cheerleaders? How is a man so clear-eyed about his addiction (in his moving monologue in the baby's bedroom) so easily overtaken by it?

But then I'm asking for another movie entirely. To hell with that. The Hurt Locker does what it sets out to do; I'm tempted to say it does so flawlessly. Now, two days after going to the theatre and a thousand words into a 'review,' all I want is to see the rest of the story, the missing piece. Y'know, the bit with women and kids and conversations in English and our hero actually managing a life that isn't prescribed in every way. For whatever reason, I demand to know the details of his failure, the mismatch between the world of war and (merely) the world. I want a good answer to a new question. To hell with that too. I wonder what else is playing this week.

If.

If a fella comes off as a pretentious overcompensating ass in his writing, but his wife's been in the ground just a little while and he's obviously having one of those what-is-life,-really? periods...do you hold it against him? What kind of person does that make you? Or him, really?

Too long; didn't read.

In 2001 (02? 03?) Zhan suggested I take a look at two community (i.e. 'Web 2.0,' i.e. 'social networking') websites: MetaFilter and Plastic. He was killing a lot of would-be thesis-researching time on those sites at the time, as I recall.

Plastic was the smartest, funniest Slashdot-like site back then.

MetaFilter was the deepest.

I sent my $5 for a MeFi membership, joined Plastic for free, and pissed away many many hours reading and occasionally ranting over the next mumblemumble years.

Plastic's gone and MeFi celebrates ten years of dilettantism, inanity, dogmatism, and genuine love this weekend. Here's to Matt Haughey, the most successful community architect on the Internet, and to the blue, green, and grey.

Trying to figure out the history of fantasy roleplaying games. One in particular, for the moment.

[Why do I care? Because tabletop roleplaying is extremely important in the evolution of modern American fantasy, not only generic fantasy but the mass-mediated fantasies that lull us to sleep (and rouse us to fight - each other, if no one else). D&D is far and away the most popular pen-and-paper roleplaying game - that doesn't matter as much in the post-EverQuest, post-World of Warcraft era, but it still matters. The new books are bestsellers, and D&D still gives popular fantasy - books, movies, and games - much of its basic structural and stylistic vocabulary (y'know, the bits that don't come from Tolkien and Star Wars and such).

Plus, what can I say? Lately I spend my weekends rolling dice. I wanna know what's going on, and why.

I'm not an authority on this stuff - this is my attempt to put down the 35-year history of one game that's had tremendous influence. I'd like to try to talk about the nature of that influence later, as I think about it more. And so we're clear: I wasn't there, and this isn't about What A Swell Time It All Was Before The Suits/Millennials Ruined It. Nor is it cultural history. This is one attempt to summarize the history of a design as I see it. Probably I'm all wrong - I'm sure I've overestimated the irritations of actually playing AD&D, which I'm limited to reading rather than playing. This is all Big Angry Declaratives because I get that way sometimes, but really the whole thing has a giant question mark on top of it.]

OD&D

In the beginning you had miniatures wargaming - Napoleonics, Ancients, and so forth. Gary Gygax wrote a fantasy-wargaming ruleset, Chainmail. In 1974 he took a bunch of Dave Arneson's ideas (in particular the central conceit of roleplaying games, 'You are your character'), mixed them in with his own fantasy-gaming preoccupations, and produced Dungeons & Dragons, a tabletop game that was much closer to individual-scale wargaming than 'storytelling with dice.' Indeed, original D&D was more a Chainmail expansion than a full-blown game in its own right; while the three 'little brown books' presented an alternative combat/measurement system, D&D players were expected to own Chainmail, and to be familiar with the conventions of miniatures wargaming. The game's setting was straight-up midcentury pulp fantasy, with no small amount of Tolkien (and a few spoonfuls of Lovecraft) thrown in to sweeten its heavy Leiber/Howard men-of-mixed-morals flavour.

Food.

Of course I find food obsessives ridiculous. Never moreso than when they're borrowing affective postures from their literary betters:

So, clearly, decent food can be had at more than reasonable prices [at the Cheesecake Factory], but it takes some careful choosing on a menu with more than 200 offerings. The biggest drawback is the mall-like atmosphere, a sense of faux everything that is perhaps inevitable in any large chain. The fact that any of the 146 CFs around the country can put out this astonishing variety of food is an impressive work of corporate organization and efficiency. But I left feeling sad, and not sure why. I think, on reflection it was because of the sense that what we'd just experienced was simply a company responding to the demands of America, and the demands of America were helping us to take our food one step backward rather than one step forward, and I don't think we have time for backward steps.

Well, no, but if you're worrying about how no one makes 'slow food' anymore and don't give a shit that doctors are all about hair-trigger optional C-sections - or you were as interested in the importance of Twitter during the recent Iranian uprising as you were in a democratic goddamn uprising in a nearly-nuclear theocracy run by imbeciles and lunatics - then your worry about 'backward steps' comes off as a little goddamn precious. Does 'faux everything' make our world worse? Yes it does. Is the availability of cheap tasty food at the shopping mall really the worst possible case? Nope. Does your Overwhelming Sadness at the availability of an unbelievable variety of (mass-produced freeze-dried sensually-denuded) cheap food in the suburbs seem like a gross luxury, given that the suburbs themselves are so complexly mind-warping that the Cheesecake Factory doesn't even crack the list of the Top 50 Things Worthy of Scrutiny About This Fucked Living Arrangement? Yes it does.

And you know what? The Cheesecake Factory sucks, just like lamely recreating the first scene from the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to promote your basic-cable TV guest appearance sucks. Just like Hollywood sucks generally, and massive income inequality sucks, and mosquitoes and designer clothes suck, and the bourgeois food-tourism that passes for 'adventure' TV sucks. Plus it sucks extra that David Foster Wallace is dead, John Coltrane is dead, Robert Altman is dead, and we have to go on pretending that weeping into your tastefully-arrayed miniscule portion of honey-glazed whatever counts as having an existential crisis.

Keep writing, Mr Ruhlman. You take it seriously and ask new things of yourself and I admire that (a great deal) (but only that).

Keep preening, foodies everywhere.

The fallout is bad but it's bomb I'm afraid of.

This is how you review the written word!!

Dig it.

My life just got much worse in a hurry.

I just spent eight minutes reading the blog of a gossip-blogger with the stage name 'Perez Hilton.'

Everyone who supports this imbecile: go fuck yourself, hard, now.

Music → Markup.

[This turned out to be something, but it's still just about Phish, so if you're at all skeptical about this sort of thing, skip to the bottom paragraph and be done with it. Seriously! You have been warned.]

For many Phish fans, the segue is the true measure of a set's fluidity and complexity. In Phish-fan parlance there are two kinds of segues - the bracket and the arrow. Take this setlist, from 4/5/98 in Providence:

Oh Kee Pa > YEM, Theme > McGrupp, Gin → Cities > Sparkle, Melt

The crucial element in there is the Gin → Cities marking, which denotes an improvisatory bridge between the songs, a passage that's neither the clattering midtempo rock of 'Bathtub Gin' nor the thumb-on-the-turntable sludge-funk of Phish's Talking Heads cover. Not only does the music not stop, it changes form to get from one tune to the other. If the tunes aren't in the same key, the band might start the second song wherever they already are, tonally, and drop into the right key after a few seconds or minutes - or the may walk the circle-of-fourths for a while before alighting on a suggestive key, which might prompt a new musical direction. The point is, when you see an arrow on a setlist, it means something is going on, risks are being taken, truly new music is coalescing in the gutters between tunes. The word 'composition' is being stretched and joyously repurposed onstage. For Phish fans (as for Deadheads) there's nothing better than a clean-but-crazy segue, one that in retrospect makes perfect sense but could never have been predicted at the outset of a jam. For many fans, those are the holy moments.

The bracket segues, on the other hand, can denote anything from the stop/start of OKP > YEM to the band fading out 'Theme' while Anastasio tosses out the opening licks of 'McGrupp.' Old Phish setlists tended to be heavy on the brackets and light on arrows - though once in a while you'd stumble across some absurdity like this, from 2/20/93 in Hotlanta:

Wilson > Reba, Tweezer → Walk Away → Tweezer > Glide > Mike's → My Mind → Mike's > Hydrogen → Kung → Hydrogen > Weekapaug → Have Mercy → Weekapaug → Rock and Roll All Nite Jam → Weekapaug, Fast Enough for You > Big Ball Jam > HYHU > Terrapin > HYHU → Harry Hood, Tweezer Reprise

Yes, the show is as ridiculous as its setlist. (And a fine copy is available in the Live in Atlanta box set.) The Glide > Mike's Song suite feels like a single performance; the frenzied quote-heavy performance of 'Glide' carries over as Anastasio starts whipping up the 'Mike's Song' guitar line, and when the band slingshots into the tune it's like the resolution of the previous song's tension. The spirit is improvisatory though the setlist was at least partly written in advance, and if the set wasn't full of onstage composition, it did feature wild onstage rearrangement - songs popping up within other songs, lengthy quotes piling atop one another, an anarchic party-hearty spirit that might've seemed strange from a bunch of 20something nerds. 'My Mind's Got a Mind of Its Own' evolves organically out of a cooled-out 'Mike's' jam; 'Kung' starts up where 'I Am Hydrogen' should be; 'Have Mercy' slips into a 'Weekapaug' longueur before a brief KISS tribute, and the whole scene feels like a single suite. Segues got more meaningful later on in the band's career, as average song length stretched far beyond the old standards:

Halley's Comet → Tweezer → Black-Eyed Katy > Piper, Antelope

That's 11/22/97 II, one of the canonical Phish sets from the band's greatest tour by far, Fall 1997. In this case the setlist hides more information than it reveals: 'Halley's Comet' skips right past the usual outro chords and into a greasy funk groove that mutates, after fifteen minutes or so, into a terrifyingly intense 'space jam' - roaring noise and feedback, celestial synth textures, and a pounding lost-in-a-cave beat from Fishman on drums. The whole thing lasts 25 minutes, and if it's the most interesting and uplifting jam of the set, its appeal is matched (in other ways) by the devastatingly sexy Tweezer → BEK middle portion. The set wanders all over the goddamn map musically, and there's nothing in 'Halley's' or 'Tweezer' that would explain what transpired between the two songs.

In the future we'll make improv-rock setlists as we now make 'tag clouds' on blogs - the heaviest tracks will simply be noted in a bigger font, and big breakaway jams will get their own 'Jam' notation in 48pt blinking Comic Sans, and the world will be light. Or shit - by then I suppose the world will be shit. I wonder whether they'll look back and say this post sped up the process of beshittening, or stemmed the tide for a moment - or perhaps they'll say nothing at all, as I've just done.

Well. To sum up: Improv-rock fans use straightforward markup for their setlists, which in combination with fan expectations and collective knowledge enables complex evaluation and info-exchange - despite the data's lossy compression scheme. This notation is unique to improvisatory rock; most jazz fans rarely need to note segues in this way. What's important to me isn't important to you, probably, though the fact that it's important (to me) might be an entryway by which you access the hidden heart of Just Another Human Being. And so how will I find my way into yours?

Easy pieces.

the day.

that day i will tend to things.
you will not take the sheet rolling over in bed.
that day i will skip breakfast i think.
i will walk only away.
that day i will eat an unhealthy dinner.
i will try to read a book and fail.
i will lose my place.
that day i will hate sunshine.
i will not want to be touched.
i will watch children sit.
you will not be singing along as you walk in from work.
that day i will be tired.
i will fear to sleep.
you will not make up funny words over dinner.
i will have my way on the issue of the television.
that day i will not know what sentences should look like.
you will not turn from the unwashed laundry rolling your eyes.
that day i will forget obvious things.
i will catch myself not breathing.
you will not again gather into a human shape
what remains of me
that day.

L,
W.

Holy guacamole - Palin resigns.

From her statement to the press today:

If I have learned one thing: LIFE is about choices!

And one chooses how to react to circumstances. You can choose to engage in things that tear down, or build up. I choose to work very hard on a path for fruitfulness and productivity. I choose NOT to tear down and waste precious time; but to build UP this state and our country, and her industrious, generous, patriotic, free people!

Life is too short to compromise time and resources... it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: "Sit down and shut up", but that's the worthless, easy path; that's a quitter's way out. And a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic to just hunker down and "go with the flow".

Nah, only dead fish "go with the flow".

No. Productive, fulfilled people determine where to put their efforts, choosing to wisely utilize precious time... to BUILD UP.

And there is such a need to BUILD up and FIGHT for our state and our country. I choose to FIGHT for it! And I'll work hard for others who still believe in free enterprise and smaller government; strong national security for our country and support for our troops; energy independence; and for those who will protect freedom and equality and LIFE... I'll work for and campaign for those PROUD to be American, and those who are INSPIRED by our ideals and won't deride them.

I WILL support others who seek to serve, in or out of office, for the RIGHT reasons, and I don't care what party they're in or no party at all. Inside Alaska - or Outside Alaska.

But I won't do it from the Governor's desk.

I've never believed that I, nor anyone else, needs a title to do this - to make a difference... to HELP people. So I choose, for my State and my family, more "freedom" to progress, all the way around... so that Alaska may progress... I will not seek re-election as Governor.

And so as I thought about this announcement that I wouldn't run for re-election and what it means for Alaska, I thought about how much fun some governors have as lame ducks... travel around the state, to the Lower 48 (maybe), overseas on international trade - as so many politicians do. And then I thought - that's what's wrong - many just accept that lame duck status, hit the road, draw the paycheck, and "milk it". I'm not putting Alaska through that - I promised efficiencies and effectiveness! ? That's not how I am wired. I am not wired to operate under the same old "politics as usual." I promised that four years ago - and I meant it.

"...so I better run!"

Y'know what? All in all I think it's kind of a great little speech. Political suicide, presumably, and given her history I'd bet you ten bucks (following Josh Marshall here) that this is about cutting her reputation losses and getting out of the public spotlight before additional ethics investigations snow her under. (Plus that MacArthur quote is craaaaaazy.) But today I finally began to understand how people could go for this woman. She just doesn't sound anything like a politician.

Which is to say on one hand her aggressive willful parochialism and grotesque bigotry ensure that she's not actually qualified to run anything bigger than Wasilla, by the looks of it, and I wish those poor bastards something better than Sarah Palin's stewardship.

But on the other hand: well, she's one of a kind, huh? Weird to get so far and be so wholly without shame. Admirable, kind of.

(I'm being sarcastic, but not just that. I really do think it's all kinda neat! Scary but neat! Like an episode of Buffy but with much less coherent dialogue.)

The financial crisis described slightly differently.

The financial crisis is the one thing that could have turned Obama's election - which was about young people's energy, new ideas, the blurring of standard GOP/Dem party lines - into nothing more than a middle chapter in a litany of grownup problems. It's the one situation in which Obama is no longer the bold (comparatively) young reformer but just another guy trying to fill the Big Political Moment.

I wrote this back in the day:

What are Dems getting out of Obama? How is the party establishment hoping to play his election, and what happens to his candidacy now that he's (sort of) the presumptive nominee? And what is it like to be a Young Voter in this extremely consequential election, voting for someone who seems to be as Outsider-y as you can get, yet who would never ever have gotten this far without the intrinsically creepy mechanisms of modern-media politics, to which he's rhetorically opposed? And, and: What kind of political generation is arising from the very, very questionable feelings of agency and 'ownership' that Internet/distributed political financing and the constant blather of blogs seem to promise? There's reason to believe that Young Voters are more apathetic than they've ever been, across the board; what does it mean that they're rousing themselves to vote for this guy?

What do these assholes think this is, a game?

Back then I really thought the election was about a sea change in American governance. I was excited about the election as such, the symbolism of it, the pragmatic power-sharing and -shifting of it. (Yes we did! and so forth.) The financial crisis - and the hyper-partisan mudslinging that's followed, much of it nonsensically 'socialism'-themed - hasn't suddenly turned Obama mortal and fallible. It's shown that as far as our nation's ruling class of venal middle-aged assholes was concerned, the election was never going to be allowed to change anything.

And that, ladies and germzzz, is my cup of fresh-brewed morning cynicism for today!