Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

So I read the somewhat snarky NYT story on senator and presidential candidate Chris Dodd this morning, and it was pretty consumed by the narrative of the experienced pol who can’t match the fresh new pop star appeal of his better-polling competitors. It didn’t get into the issues or his positions – not that anyone cares about that stuff yet. Mainly the writer talks about Dodd’s old school charm – his perfect handshake, his jokes, his anecdotes – which is all stuff I’ve heard about.

Then I read something new: that in his extended D.C. bachelorhood – the same period where he was Ted Kennedy’s drinking buddy – Dodd dated a lot of women, including, um, Carrie Fisher and Bianca Jagger. WTF? Why haven’t I heard about this before?

It made me think. Not (just) that Dodd should run on having dated Bianca Jagger. But that this narrative of Dodd as the old-fashioned pol is way, way, way undervalued.

During the debate Thursday, Brian Williams asked some question about whether Dodd’s years of experience were a detriment. The obvious answer is “Um, no, Brian. What’s wrong with you?” The central failure of our current administration is competence. Its inexperience is the one tragic flaw that both parties agree on.

But I’m not saying that Dodd should run on experience, ’cause again, nobody cares about that. It’s that he has retro appeal. He has charm. Yes, Obama, Clinton et al. offer a new kind of leadership, but let’s face it, Dodd can’t touch them on identity politics. But what he can offer is that nostalgic appeal, of guys who understand how the town is run, who know these people and have these stories and know where the bodies are buried.

People LIKE that. Not everybody, but a lot of people took their first high school dates to the stodgiest, most formal grown-up restaurant they could find. A lot of people apply to Harvard. Or buy their first interview suit at Brooks Brothers. And a lot of people wish we knew who the goddamn enemy was, and had a government that could tackle it. Maybe it’s because my dad was a Boston lawyer, but I’ve always had warm memories of that kind of classy formality, of believing the world has rules that are knowable and navigable. (And that your cronies should at least come from the Ivies – not from Texas.) Maybe I’ve read too many George V. Higgins novels. But ever see “Anatomy of a Murder”? It’ll make you wish you went to law school. Cary Grant knew how to get things done – how to make it on his wits but also on his pre-post-modern total clarity about the system. He was funny and appealing and likably musty.

Dodd should run as Cary Grant.

He should run on the D.C. bachelor thing. The experience thing. The knowing charm. He’s got that, and he’s not selling it. We should know he dated Bianca Jagger. We should know about his handshake. That his friends have been famous for more than fifteen minutes. And that spending decades in D.C. means having a hell of a lot of great stories to tell. Yeah, I’m talking about “old white man” stuff. But it’s a hook, and at a time of national crisis, it could work.

(Pictured: Chris Dodd’s debate war room, via streaming video)

Caught the first Democratic Presidential Debate tonight, and what a difference this is from ‘04: instead of the nine dwarves, we get six all-stars plus two goofballs who actually brought something useful.

Barack Obama was rough around the edges for most of the debate. Lately he’s seemed like the political version of “Stairway To Heaven”: yes, it’s the best song ever and it still gives you goosebumps, but do you want to listen to it every day? But Obama got some hits in the last five minutes, when his back-and-forth with Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel showed that he’s a fighter. “I’m not planning to nuke anybody” was one of the best lines of the night.

Points for most comfortable go to Joe Biden, the only one on stage who looked like he was really enjoying himself and hadn’t been cramming for the past week. Hillary Clinton was solid as a battleship, Bill Richardson talked a little too long, and did John Edwards really have to pause that long to decide that his moral role model is the Lord? (I was sitting at home shouting “Jesus! It’s Jesus dude! Say Jesus and let’s get this show on the road.”)

I had my eye on Chris Dodd. My friend Matthew Weiner works on his campaign, and the more I hear about him, the more I like: he has the experience, perspective, and ideals that we need for a president. On paper, he’s the guy you would vote for. He’s the guy you’d get a beer with. But he has none of the pop star charisma of the top tier candidates, and while his answers tonight were solid, I don’t remember a moment where he really “popped out.” Then again, he had quite a clown show to elbow through.

If tonight had a winner, it had to be Mike Gravel, the cantankerous peacenik former Senator from Alaska who wagged his finger at the other men and women on stage and all but shouted at them to get off his goddamn lawn. Check out his website: as of this moment it’s down because of excessive traffic. C’mon man, real candidates don’t use open source databases! It’s time to step up, because with Sharpton out of the race this time, we really need you.

I write about tech, and since I’m as prone to falling for scoops as the next freelancer, I often cover companies that are just starting out or just announcing their bright new idea that will change the face of digital music/the media/the Internet/sex/life as we know it forever. These are ideas that may pan out and may not. They could be good ideas that fail in execution, or ideas that, once you see them in practice, turn out to be sort of stupid. Should people who call themselves journalists jump on these bandwagons?

In the ’90s, I had my token free subscription to Industry Standard and Business 2.0, and nowadays you can still go to Wired for interesting but not necessarily grounded coverage of the hot next thing. (Clive Thompson’s cover feature on “radical transparency” is a good example: he makes a good case for something negative – that companies can’t get away with lying to their customers anymore – but has to spin it into a case that a “CEO 2.0″ who spends all day giving away all the company secrets and arguing with people on blogs is going to have a leg up in the market.) In all these cases it’s the same: why say something safe when you can say something exciting? And anyway, you can’t fact-check something that hasn’t happened. I mean, do fashion magazines get guff about this? What if purple isn’t the new black?

I had the chance to discuss this with the New Yorker’s John Seabrook, who regularly covers tech for the magazine – dig his fantastic feature on Will Wright, which deftly gets by the fact that Wright’s next game, Spore, is highly, highly anticipated – but totally untested. (Imagine if Spore moves fewer copies than, say, Puzzle Quest. Will the sky cave in?) Seabrook was the one who pointed out to me that being a futurist is not the job of a journalist, and falling for these high-tech pitches is a trap. He’s right. But … you know … it is fun. And there is that scoop.

I can think of a few times that I got ahead of myself with a company. For example, talking up Echo Nest in my music recommenders feature last year, even though it’s been a year and I still haven’t seen a single meaningful piece of software from them. But here’s a better case study: ClearChannel’s Instant Live, or “the souvenir live CD.”

Here’s how Instant Live works: a band plays a concert. Someone at the mixing board records the show. When the show’s over, the engineer immediately copies the digital file – unedited and unmastered – to a bank of CD recorders, which press CD-Rs of the concert that are ready 15 minutes after the last encore. People filing out of the hall can pick one up for $15 and take home a souvenir of their show. It’s relatively inexpensive – you just need a few thousand dollars’ worth of gear that fits in an SUV. And Instant Live weren’t the only people trying it, although ClearChannel did patent the idea.

It was fun to write this up, but after I filed it I stopped following the story – because for the most part, the idea has gone nowhere. Bands with record contracts had trouble signing up because their labels didn’t want to flood the market with competing product. Acts like moe. and Kay Hanley took advantage of it, but overall, not many albums got made (see ‘em all here). So it didn’t exactly revolutionize the live music experience.

On the other hand, the idea still interests me because of what it says about recording live music. There’s something about a crystal-clear minute-by-minute record of the show you just saw that really sucks all the life out of the experience. Pop in the disc after you get out of the concert hall, and every bad joke and long delay for retuning comes right back. The great parts are predictable and the bad parts go on way too long. If you get a “live album” months later, it has a chance to become a whole separate experience; if you make a bootleg, it has other associations because you grabbed it, and it sounds like crap. But Instant Live seems more like a tape of your wedding: it’s not as good as the real thing, and you really just want to keep it around so you can make your friends hear the highlights.

Still – even if it doesn’t have legs, there are useful ideas and implications here that are worth discussing. (See also the cat piano.)

For the record, I still dig John McCain. Among the guys at It’s Not Complicated, I’m a big McCain apologist, and this new “flap” about his joke – singing “Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran” to the tune of a Beach Boys song – is overblown. It was a good joke. He was defusing a crowd of crotchety seniors who seriously want to start sending some bombs to Tehran, as if they’re sending a message to kids skateboarding by their senior center. He could have thrown red meat to the crowd, but instead he cracked a joke and took some of the edge off the mob. And it was a funny joke.

Anyway, that’s how I read it.

Fun fact: two of my buddies at It’s Not Complicated are on the Moveon mailing list, and they both got hit up for money to pay for their new anti-McCain ad. But one of them was asked for $75, and the other got hit up for $250. I guess even radical lefties have tiers …

One of the best things about Second Life is the ability to play live concerts in-game – you set up a stream from your basement studio, stream into an in-game club while your avatar plays guitar or whatever, and people sit and watch you. It works better than you’d think, and bigger-name artists like Suzanne Vega have given it a try, as well as hundreds of open-micers.

So check this: Lord of the Rings Online lets you equip an instrument and play – actually play, using the 1-8 keys plus shift and control to hit 24 different notes. Any player can do it, not just the minstrels. It feels like the old harpsichord in Ultima V – you can play simple tunes but it’s not much more than a toy. Still, it’s a toy you can play in social areas alongside other musicians, and there may be midi support in the future. Everyone’s going to be out there trying to pluck out “Greensleeves” or “Smoke on the Water” but hey, it’s the Internet – someone’ll make something cool out of it, right?

People are talking about it here.

Geeks are everywhere nowadays. … Or are they?

SIGNS THAT GEEK STUFF IS BLOWING UP

- Everyone knows what a Wii is; Nintendo suddenly mainstream again
- Niche, arch humor now huge thanks to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report
- The Office is everywhere, shy, geek-ideal Jenna Fischer taking off clothes in all possible venues
- Sci-fi and comic book movies some of the only blockbusters left now that serious adult dramas are pfft
- Actually, even comic books are sort of tolerated, and not just Chris Ware’s
- “Geek” used affectionately to describe anything people obsess over, like knitting, meaning that the act of obsessing over something is validated and Star Trek fans can come out of the closet
- There’s even a Geek Magazine, informally described as “Maxim for geeks”

SIGNS THAT EH, MAYBE NOT

- Gaming still a little embarrassing for “non-gamers”; widely-acclaimed Gears of War not exactly on an artistic plane with The Godfather
- The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are huge – for Comedy Central, and among people who know who Neil Cavudo is (did I spell that right?)
- NBC’s Thursday night slot, which is full of those “smart” comedies that you can’t believe made it onto Thursday night, is bringing the lowest ratings for that night in decades; maybe Rainn Wilson should start taking it off too
- Movies suck
- Comic books still just a step above pornography (to paraphrase Chris Ware)
- “Geek” still a term for unnatural obsessions that need to be excused in mixed company, like knitting
- Maxim already was for geeks.

When NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Streets ended after seven seasons and too few viewers, it chose an amazing way to end: it took arguably the show’s central character, Bayliss (Kyle Secor), and gave him an arc. The arc began in the pilot, when Tim Bayliss shows up on his first day as a fresh-faced murder police who’s quickly overwhelmed by the emotional and moral demands of the job. Throughout the show’s life, we see Bayliss get hardened, get indecisive, and get pummeled by his job, mostly because of a failure of imagination: he has trouble getting into the mind of a killer, and as his longtime partner Frank Pembleton tells him, if he can’t do that, he can’t solve a murder. Then, at the very end of the show, he finally takes the next step. A (very cheesy) killer has gotten off on a technicality. Bayliss can’t stand it – so he kills the guy himself. He covers his tracks. He gets away with it. And he quits his job, picking up the crap off his desk and walking out the same way he walked in seven years earlier.

See? It’s a perfect story arc. At least for that character. And it raises your opinion of the whole series. But if you were, say, a TV critic, you wouldn’t know until that final episode that the show was that great. Maybe you’d be impressed by everything else about it along the way, but the fact that it adds up to a complete story doesn’t reveal itself until the end.

Serial narratives don’t always wrap up neatly. Characters in comics, TV shows or increasingly, video games are supposed to wander around and keep themselves busy in case something comes along that’ll nudge them along their arc, if they have an arc. And if you treat one of these things as a complete work, you can’t review it – because it’s still unfolding. Many people have complained that there are no great game critics. But how about TV? It’s decades older but I can’t name a single must-read TV critic. Even the TV reviews in The New Yorker are the weak link in the chain – weaker sometimes than the poetry. The people who do it best are the folks at Television Without Pity – but they review a show episode by episode, and they’re as much in suspense about whether a show is going uphill or down as the rest of us.

At the same time, we can agree that TV is in its true golden age, and nothing – not music, not games, and definitely not movies – can touch the best television on the air right now. Everyone has their own top 10 list of amazing shows, and they don’t always overlap very much! But not many critics are keeping up – they talk about how great these shows are, but not in a way that you’d really care to read. I’ll read an interview with The Wire’s (and Homicide’s) David Simon, but I can’t remember many reviews really slapping me in the face.

So there’s that. But let’s also bring up gaming. This topic’s on my mind because I’m filing my review of Lord of the Rings Online next week, and of course that’s a moving target – it could change in three months, it could get much better, it could make some mistakes, the community could be really good, the community could vanish. Sure, I can deliver 400 words with a lot of caveats, but those’ll be big caveats – levels are capped at 15 (out of 50), and even this new “monster play” feature isn’t running at full steam right now.

So here’s my question: I know that we don’t have a “Lester Bangs of video game crit.” But it seems like we really need a Television Without Pity of game crit, or at least mmog crit. There are tons of World of Warcraft podcasts, but they seem about as dull as swapping golf tips. Aside from Somethingawful, who’s blogging about an online game in a serious, engaging way that I, a busy adult with a gnat-like attention span, would actually want to read?

I thought I was pushing it when I reviewed The Shivah in the Onion this week – not because it doesn’t deserve it, but because it came out last fall and I didn’t move on it then. Only after seeing Dave Gilbert’s panel at the GDC did I really get around to trying it out and pitching it. But I was also worried about covering a retro-looking indie game. I cover indie titles fairly often, either because they’re great (DEFCON, Eets), or because they’re not (Big Oil, Prison Tycoon 2). Personally, I like a mix between games everyone’s heard of and games that get no press, especially if the unknown games have a broader hook – whether it’s a mystery steeped in Jewish culture, or a pseudofascist game about privatized prisons.

But I didn’t know if anyone else liked it until today, when most of the commenters seemed to like reading about a nontraditional, budget-priced and ancient-looking game that also happened to be really good. That was a real boon. My instincts are often wrong about what’ll sell and what won’t. But I’m worried about next week – my review of Bus Driver is really going to push it …

Also new today: my interview with Ronald D. Moore is up. Props to the Onion reader who said, “Oh dude! You interviewed Eddie Rabbit!”

So I write a column about games in Paste Magazine, and while it’s not often online, you can catch the latest one, Failure is an Option, on the website. It’s a short take on games that have no goals and no strict “failure,” and I got to end with one of my favorite quotes – from MIT’s Eric Klopfer at the Education Arcade, where they believe that failing is a crucial part of learning: “If you’re always a straight-A student, maybe you’re not being challenged enough. If you fail half the time and succeed half the time, maybe that should be an A.”

I’ve been thinking about failure a lot lately, as I watch the news about – well, name any of disasters of the past three years, from Iraq to Katrina to Afghanistan. Bear with me if you disagree on how I’m characterizing this, but we here in America have witnessed some major screwups lately. And we’ve gotten in some (arguably?) unwinnable situations. I don’t know how anyone could argue that things in Iraq will “just work out,” at least in the next few years. And yet, there’s still some assumption – if only in Bush press conferences – that we’ll find an answer. Because we’re Americans, and we still have that can-do attitude, we must assume there’s an answer somewhere, or a cavalry that’s just waiting to show up, or a eureka moment waiting to happen.

This is what I love about games, and particularly the few strategy games I’ve played: when you lose, you lose. Sure, sometimes you can pull out a victory at the last moment. But sometimes, you just can’t. Playing DEFCON last year with some of my friends, I was impressed by how total your disaster could be, when your bases and fleets had been obliterated, your population turned to ash and all of your defenses were helpless – and the missles just kept coming. You reach a state where you realize that no, this situation cannot be salvaged.

What lesson can you take from that? I dunno – maybe that you should always have a few nukes stashed away for a parting “screw you”?

Pulitzer Prize winner Ornette Coleman has a MySpace page.

Sound weird? Well, so does the late Eric Dolphy. Apparently he lives in Zimbabwe.