Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

My big story this week was a “Better Late Than Never” feature for the Onion, on Bob Dylan. It’s one of the most ignorant things I’ve written all year – but it turned out pretty well.

The backstory: After six years at Pitchfork and even stranger, three years at Paste, I have never seriously listened to Dylan. I knew five songs off the radio but owned zero albums and had zero interest in digging in any deeper. And I mean, is there are bigger artist you could possibly sleep on? You could say you missed the Beatles, but I wouldn’t believe you – there are about five songs in the whole Beatles catalog that you could honestly claim you’ve never heard, and four of them are on the White Album and the fifth is “Flying.”

I finally started checking him out about a year ago, first with Blood on the Tracks, and then Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, which I decided to use as the focus for the piece. I spent a long time on this one. The first draft had a lot of ranting about the ’60s and the hippies, but by the time I finished, it was much more of a personal essay – which isn’t usually my forte.

I’ve resisted first-person writing for a while. I had trouble getting over the whole, “Why the hell do you care what I think?” thing. Certainly when I read other people’s “here’s a little 1,000 word peak into my mind” pieces, they usually bore me crapless. Sorry, Captain Park Slope – I don’t care why you cheated on your wife. But I also know that readers like a voice and a perspective to react to, and being shy about it doesn’t accomplish anything. All in all, I think it worked.

Also? It was fun to look stupid. It’s hard to shed the whole defense of, “I’m the expert here – look, I’m in print and everything.” But admitting that I had never heard Dylan, and that I was writing the whole piece on the strength of one documentary and Wikipedia, was a hoot.

Be sure to check out the YouTube clips – especially this one:

This week, my review of new indie WiiWare title LostWinds ran in the AV Club. My overall impression was that it was a sweet but thin game: the world wasn’t convincing, the setting and story weren’t original, and while I had fun solving puzzles and using the wind techniques, I didn’t get that sucked-in, eyes-opened sense of adventure that you can find in say, Knytt or Knytt Stories – two games that are often compared to this one, because they offer the feeling of a giant world crammed in a three-gallon tank. The thing that bugged me most in the review, though, was the difficulty.

While I found it fairly light and simple, it occurred to me that if I were five, I would probably really love this game. It’s short and easy to finish. The one boss battle is pretty nonthreatening: the giant guy you have to defeat turns out, in the end, to be a pretty nice monster, once you free him of evil spirits. Maybe the older kids will want to play the new Okami for the Wii, but the little brothers and sisters can have fun with this title.

But what makes a game a “kid’s” game? In my review I complain that we no longer differentiate between games for kids and games for adults. Grown-ups still love all the Nintendo properties they’ve been playing since they were kids. They even play those LEGO games. I’m reviewing LEGO Indiana Jones thing next week, and if LostWinds is for kids, LEGO Indiana Jones the Original Adventures is for kids who keep getting dropped on their heads. It’s cute and the co-op’s nice, but … really, adults play these things?

Naturally, there are some games for kids that actually do turn off adults – for example, games that are based on children’s television properties or movies that have no appeal to grown-ups. I don’t know if they ever made a Bratz game, but if I they did, it will not break out of the tweener set. And naturally, great games for kids can be great for all age groups. The first game my kid ever got a look at was Eets, which is fantastic (and challenging) for all ages. And his second game’ll probably be Rock Band – where the biggest problem is dirty words in the lyrics.

But we need a way to identify games that are fine, and cute, and well-designed, and original – but nevertheless, are really “young.” Games that aren’t going to challenge or stimulate the average adult. LostWinds may or may not fall in that category – I know some critics liked it better than I did. But I’m going to have to think about how to review games that are clearly meant for someone who can’t drink beer when they play.

About the only for-hire writing I do is for David Sylvian’s SamadhiSound label. If Sylvian likes it, you can’t go far wrong. This February I spent a lot of time listening to an album by the Swedish artist Thomas Feiner, a rerelease of his entrancing pop record The Opiates, so I could write this press release about it. It’s a real grower and recommend if you like Sylvian, or Mark Hollis, or Nick Cave, or smart, baritone-sung art music. You can hear the whole thing at his site or catch a few tracks on MySpace. (Though they left out one of my faves, “Postcard“.)

Too tired to post after staying out late catching Subtle at the Middle East last night, and there’s no way I can top the legendary giant headless ant post. So just wanted to wish y’all a good long weekend, and remember: drink all you want … but leave the art alone.

So last week, artist Nate Walker stuck a giant ant in downtown Portsmouth. Okay, it’s a sculpture of an ant, but it’s wicked cool, and my kid liked it. Except that some other kid, who’s older than my kid but less mature, got wasted and decided to wrestle the thing. The drunk kid ripped the ant’s head off, and while he got busted, the head is stuck in evidence – so the ant has no head.

(Actually, the drunk was not a kid: according to the paper, he’s 26-year-old Theodore Mottola. Wanna make a bet how many of his friends and family actually call him Theodore? And how many call him “Shithead”?)

Replacing the head will cost something like six hundred bucks. So to help cover the cost, the Flatbread Pizza Company is throwing a fundraiser Tuesday night from 5 – 9 PM. If you’re in Portsmouth, go get a pizza or a beer. Fund the ant. Do your part. Because this is what a community does: it sticks together, and helps buy a head for that giant fucking ant. After all, the kids dig it. Except when they’re wasted.

UPDATE: I had a morning-after update here, but I’ll let the comments speak for themselves.

UPDATE 2: He’s free! And he has to pay restitution to the artist. So he’s basically off the hook, aside from how he’ll spend the rest of his life as “that guy who pulled the head off that giant ant.” Which is the most appropriate penalty I can imagine.

I know life gets dull on the campaign trail. But seriously, let’s try not to let every insignificant moment become a telling detail, ‘kay?

From the New York Times’ Julie Bosman:

JUNCTION CITY, Ore. — On the day Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was endorsed by the governor of North Carolina, a supporter gave her a three-foot-long balloon replica of herself, complete with blond hair, black pantsuit and wide pink smile, which Mrs. Clinton promptly took on her plane and laughingly showed off to reporters.

On Thursday, little more than two weeks later, the doll lay on the sofa by her seat on the plane, shriveled and deflated.

From the reliably snarky Dana Milbank at the Washington Post:

On the way into town, she makes an unscheduled stop at an upscale farmers market … . She makes her way past rows of geraniums and marigolds.

But even among the blooms, Clinton is reminded of her troubles. She stops at Ellen’s Homemade Ice Cream and orders a scoop of espresso Oreo and a scoop of butter pecan. “Ooh, that looks good,” she says after taking the confection, then pauses. “Now, let’s see. Who’s got my money?” asks the woman who has lent her campaign $11 million to keep it afloat. She laughs. “Where — where’d they go, the people with my money?” Finally, two aides arrive to retire Clinton’s dessert debt.

And this – you couldn’t even get an exact quote, CNN Political Producer Alexander Marquardt?

Before her rally, Clinton toured the [Maker's Mark] distillery and tried her hand at sealing a bottle of Maker’s Mark, donning protective gear and dipping the bottle into a vat of the famous red wax. She remarked that she didn’t realize every bottle is sealed by hand.

Let’s hope Adam Nagourney doesn’t wind up in the campaign plane rest room with the last sheet of toilet paper.

I have a week’s worth of links to stick up here for y’all. First, this morning my review of Subtle’s new album, exitingARM, ran on Pitchfork. I reviewed 2006’s For Hero: For Fool, and just between us chickens, it was … challenging: I listened again and again, tried to make sense of it, loved some things about it, and struggled with others. I didn’t grok the story behind the album.

This time, frontman and lyricist Doseone has done a better job explaining the mythology around Hour Hero Yes, the Ungodz and the rest of the gang. The music’s great, but understanding the words makes it much better – so my review was basically tilted to trying to give people a way in and some tips for grappling with the headworld of Doseone.

Other links:

- Last week my interview with game design visionary and serial entrepreneur Jordan Weisman ran on Gamasutra. As we say in Boston, he’s a wicked smaht guy. We talked about world-building, toy-making, alternate reality games, and kids growing up too early. I hope to talk to him again some time and drill down on just one or two of these topics.

- I reviewed The World Ends With You and gave it my first A of the year.

And I’ll leave you with a couple of Doseone clips – I couldn’t find many live clips of Subtle that weren’t rough bootlegs, but this is a broadcast of his 13 & God (Notwist + Themselves) playing in Germany.

“Superman On Ice”

“Sure as Dept. Dust Collectors”

I don’t often write about comics here. But I had to bring up a couple skeins that caught my eye from the Marvel Universe. I’ve read all the issues of Runaways, out of a combination of following Brian Vaughn and following one-time guest stars Cloak & Dagger. One thing that struck me about it was how maturely it handled the sexuality of the teens. About a year or so into the series, one of the characters, Karolina Dean, turns out to be gay. She makes a pass at her teammate Nico Minoru, who seems to be straight but is fond of Karolina and also, lonely and confused. The pass doesn’t work out – but minutes later, a skrull crashlands on Earth and winds up sweeping Karolina off her feet. This skrull normally identifies as male, but for Karolina, he shapeshifts to be a girl, and … well, here I have to pull the old guy card and say comics never went this far when I was a kid.

I remember when Willow came out on Buffy: it was a bold move at the time, but Vaughn has definitely one-upped Whedon by introducing characters who are confused about their sexuality – and malleable in their gender.

Which takes me to Ultimate Spiderman. I picked up one of the issues of last year’s Clone Saga at Free Comic Book Day, and liked it enough to get the whole arc in trade paperback (collection #17). In that book, we find out that Peter Parker has been cloned. And one of his clones – the most successful one – is an exact replica of him, with the y chromosome taken out. That means you have a 16-year-old with the memories of Peter Parker, but she’s just been reborn (respawned?) as a girl, with the name Jessica Drew.

She’s also pretty hott, but that’s neither here nor there, or … anyway.

To be precise, we’re talking about the Spiderwoman in the Ultimate comics continuity, where Spiderman’s in high school again and Nick Fury’s black and the Fantastic Four say “like” in every single sentence. This Spiderwoman is fascinating, because she is the exact metaphor of a confused transgender youth. The media has picked up more and more stories about kids in high school or younger who basically just identify with the other gender, and start to live that way. In Spiderwoman’s case, she’s effectively a boy who was magically reborn as a girl. In the comics, we don’t see much of how she deals with it – the focus is on Peter Parker, and how he deals with it, while Jessica Drew mostly stays witty and collected. But she’d make a killer miniseries (or full series), along the vein of say, the ’80s Magik series.

If Fox News got wind of this, they’d scream to the rafters about introducing this stuff to kids. I’m not Fox News, so I think it’s pretty awesome. Who knew Marvel would tell stories this bold, in a clear, “no big deal” way?

Just checked the TV on this, the night of the West Virginia primary. Polls closed 45 minutes ago, yet none of the results have come in yet. Why? Because the election officials down there can only count to 21 – with their pants down – and so it’s gonna be a looonnnng night.

I’ve been to West Virginia. It’s a nice place. But you wouldn’t know it from the primary coverage over the past week. We’ve heard that West Virginians hate black people, which means they’ll never vote for Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton’s last chance in this race is to convince people that white people like her better, and the media has used Appalachian W. Virginia to prove the point for her. We hear about local yokels claiming that Obama is a Muslim, and not a full-blooded American.

I know most of West Virginia is better than that. But all in all, this has been a lousy primary for them. In fact, most states get the shaft when the roving press corps come to town. The race started gently enough in Iowa and in New Hampshire, though Jon Stewart once called us a “frozen hellscape.” But Florida was that dumbass state that – yet again – couldn’t figure out how to hold a legitimate election. Michigan came off as so down-trodden and job-free that Detroit started to look like the nice part. Pennsylvania got the “our white folks won’t switch sides” treatment, from no less than their own Governor Ed Rendell – except for Philadelphia, where we heard that Obama might underperform unless he gave out “walking around money” to the local (black) operatives.

So now the press is tired, and so is the populace, and the people of West Virginia are taking the brunt. West Virginia, where Deliverance is a love story. Where the signs at the border say, “If you can read this, you’re a tourist.” Where … ah, why bother cracking jokes? You probably already turned your last computer monitor into a fish tank.

So last night, I’m playing Grand Theft Auto IV and I get a call from Elizabeta. She’s in a screaming match with my buddy Little Jacob over some missing coke, and can’t understand his thick Rasta accent. (Neither can I – lucky I get subtitles.) She tells me to come over and straighten him out pronto.

So I do. But not right away. First, I finish driving down to Battery Park (or whatever the game calls it) to meet up with a new contact, who sends me on a mission on the Upper East Side. After that, I take my tenth run at a mission that calls for me to gun down three sleezeballs in a strip club – and yet again, I blow it and get shot in the head, sending me to the hospital, where hours later I step out again into the street, jack a new car, and finally get over to Elizabeta’s place, where she’s still standing there having it out with Little Jacob.

I’m sensitive about time. When I have to be somewhere, I’m rarely late. I get anxious about missing things. So I have a giant pet peeve with games that can’t consistently handle a perception of time – when they act like the clock’s ticking, but it ain’t.

This bugged me in the 24 game, where we’re supposed to think that we’re running out of time on every single mission – but in fact, you can spin around doing wheelies or running around at the back of the level for as long as you like, and the timer only started when you were in the final stretch of your objective and the game decided it was time to apply some pressure.

But it bothered me more in Baldur’s Gate II. Early on in that game, your half-sister Imoen is captured by the main villain in the game. You know she’s in prison, probably being tortured, maybe close to death; you feel like you should rush over to where she’s being held and rescue her. But in fact, this is the part of the game where you should be building up strength, gaining experience, chasing down every little side quest to get as buffed up as possible for the chapters to come. There is no ticking clock, and no sword hanging over Imoen’s head. You can lounge around and get old, and it doesn’t matter to her, or the villain, or anybody at all.

Usually, a game will explicitly tell you if you have a time limit. So much is going on in modern games that if a given mission needs a timer, you’ll see it flashing right there on the screen, usually with some helpful voiceover prompts (“You’re almost out of time! Step on it!”). But it bothers me that this doesn’t always jibe with the storytelling.

Every medium has to struggle with this – I’m still confused about the section of the recent Casino Royale, where James Bond seems to leave the Caribbean, fly to Miami, go to an art opening, and have a giant shoot out on on an airport runway during a night that by my back-of-the-napkin estimate must have lasted at least 20 hours. But with games, it matters a little more because you’re not dealing with the audience’s feeling that something’s wrong; you’re misrepresenting the pressure the player should be under. Because if I’d been too smart for my own good, let Elizabeta stew for a couple of days, and shown up only to find her and Little Jacob dead of mutual gunshots? Boy, would I feel stupid.