Reviews of everything

I have the best idea for a Halloween costume: steampunk robot Benjamin Disraeli, or Disraeli Gears. That said, my last Halloween costume idea went over like another bluesrock buzzword, so we’ll see.

So I’ve talked about Cream and Disraeli Gears. The album contains many great songs, but it’s too ADD – songs don’t even make it to three minutes before Clapton and co. are on to the next song, and the album is only 35 minutes long, so it’s not like they had too many ideas and not enough room. The album would be perfect if not for its inability to focus and overall short length.

These problems are more or less solved with Blind Faith – in fact, the whole album can be looked at as the simultaneous fleshing-out and perfection of many of the musical themes of Gears – a simultaneous incarnation and ascension, if you will. The album opens with “Had to Cry Today”, which is a piece centered around a downward guitar hook, much like “Sunshine of Your Love”. However, the Blind Faith song is over twice the length of its predecessor, leaving a lot of room for Clapton to just play the guitar, which he does. Everyone is happy. “Can’t Find My Way Home”, the shortest track on the album (and still longer than the average Gears track) contains more intricate guitarwork than just about anything on Gears, but has the high smooth vocals of tracks like “We’re Going Wrong” and “World of Pain”. At a certain point (which is now) the analogy breaks down because I am too lazy to actually continue providing evidence for it. “Well...All Right” has a lot of very good piano and is generally a pretty upbeat song. “Presence of the Lord”, like the Led Zeppelin song “In My Time of Dying”, invokes old stately Southern Gospel Religion in addition to a wonderful blues breakdown. One of my favorite bluesrock songs ever. “Sea of Joy”, despite its upbeat title, contains a barely restrained and unfulfilled longing, and also violins. “Do What You Like”, at over fifteen minutes, is everything a long jam should be. Overall, Blind Faith is even better than Disraeli Gears, and not nearly as well known for some reason. Get it.

On a completely different note, Metallica’s Master of Puppets is an album that I like a lot more than I would have expected. I believe that this is because it is much more melodic than I would expect from their other stuff. It’s still thrash, so there’s a lot of rhythm and noise, but it’s not too distorted that I can’t tell what notes are being played. The track lengths range from five minutes to eight-and-a-half minutes, in contrast to The Black Album, which ranges from 3:45 to 7:00, a small but telling difference. Metallica simply put more thought into each song back then, and it shows. Song structures are not monolithic, rhythms are more complex, everything is melodic and yet unapologetically thrash, in contrast again to The Black Album, where some songs are melodic and others are thrash and everything is short and digestible. Fully half of the tracks start with something that is not heavy distorted guitar, and there’s a lot of sonic experimentation, particularly towards the last half of the album. That said, it’s Metallica: it’s loud, it’s heavy, and “Disposable Heroes” is my favorite angry song (“You will do/ What I say/ When I say BACK TO THE FRONT/ You will die/ When I say/ You must die BACK TO THE FRONT”).

On to films: I saw Up. It was Pixar and therefore good. I wasn’t overwhelmed, to be honest, but I was charmed by the fairy tale of a house flying through the sky under the power of hundreds of helium balloons. I also really enjoyed the opening minutes in which the main character lives the vast majority of his life in a series of vignettes. An adventure movie in which the protagonist is a pottering old man is just delightfully unique, which is what we expect from Pixar. The movie isn’t Toy Story or The Incredibles or Ratatouille, but it’s certainly better than Cars (“hey remember the sixties? yeah, good times.”) or A Bug’s Life, which was anthropomorphized to death (sounds odd to say that was the problem. After all, Pixar’s whole schtick is anthropomorphizing things, right? Well, to a certain extent. The toys are still very much toys, the fish are still very much fish, and the rats are still very much rats, but the insects are really just people from the feudal era in insect costumes. Meh. Guys, anyone who makes an insect movie should take a page from Watership Down – make the characters believable as small, frightened beings in a world where they’re not the top of the food chain. Aaanyway.)

Pulp Fiction: here’s a game. It’s called “Quoting Tarantino Without Using Profanity”. You go first.

...

I win!

So having seen Kill Bill and Reservoir Dogs, I think I can safely join my voice to the majority and say that this is his best work. Really, the movie, despite its action flick pretense, is a slice-of-life about such engaging characters as Samuel Jackson, Bruce Willis, and John Travolta. No, really. Anyone who can get me to care about all three of those people in the course of one movie is a genius. The dialogue is of course witty, interesting, irrelevant, and obscene. You should probably just see it, because it’s good.

Spirited Away: So Miyazaki’s more or less the Pixar of Japan. He makes movies with strange premises, and he doesn’t usually miss. He’s a lot more fairy tale than Pixar is – fairy tale is a genre in which ordinary people are put in a deadly, treacherous world with a set of rules that are completely unclear, and which allow for unspeakable evil and otherwise impossible beauty. Fairy tales were originally magic realism, but the realism has aged to the point where it’s no longer realistic. Spirited Away is my favorite of the three-and-some-bits of his movies I’ve seen so far, and concern a young girl’s attempt to get a witch to turn her parents back from pigs into people. The plot is the least important part of the film. What is important are the incredible details of setting Miyazaki works in. Also good: Howl’s Moving Castle (a giant steampunk hut of Baba Yaga, a young handsome shapeshifting wizard, airship battles, and a young girl very suddenly aged into an old woman) and Porco Rosso (post-WWI fighter pilots. 40s-era class. The main character is inexplicably a pig.)

Blade Runner: another movie I should have seen a long time ago, but didn’t. Vangelis’ soundtrack is excellent (he was almost in Yes at one point. Also Jimmy Page had a couple of sessions with Alan White and Chris Squire. Listen to them.) It is increasingly clear that what I look for in works of either sci-fi or fantasy is not encyclopedically catalogued worlds, nor is it either your typical fantasy setting or “our world – but with robots!” Rather, what I like most is hints of a world that is very different. I don’t want to know everything about the robotic uprising of the late nineties, but I do want to know what trying to get a bowl of chow mein is like in 20XX, possibly as a result of the robotic uprising of the late nineties. This is why I like Cowboy Bebop – that’s pretty much the whole show. This is why I prefer Asimov’s robot stories to the Foundation books. If you want encyclopedic, Tolkien already won, so you’re just wasting your time. I’m looking at you, Frank Herbert.

But Blade Runner: not only do we see what getting a bow of chow mein is like in 20XX, we also see what being a lonely yet brilliant genetic engineer is like in 20XX, and so forth. Blade Runner has so much detail and backstory that is never explained (at least not in the director’s cut, without Harrison Ford’s I-am-given-to-understand-incessant voiceover) but which adds so much to the world. Ford’s kitchen is incredibly detailed. The slums are detailed. The office buildings are detailed. As if that weren’t enough, we also have the grand myth of the supermen, isolated, shunned by society, hunted down by bounty hunters, and exceedingly mortal. Now I really, really, really want to play Shadowrun. Someone needs to start a game. I shall play a VTA pilot, burnt out on cybernetic enhancements and stimulants, whose twin loves are flight and really good jazz. Ah, Shadowrun. Its genius in one concept: an elf who is the ruthless CEO of a company with environmentally irresponsible policies. Subvert racial stereotypes indeed.

In other RPG news, I’m running a campaign. Unknown Armies, a mechanically simple occult horror game. Set in modern-day Paris. Two sessions so far, both of which have gone well. The characters are investigating a murder in their apartment building. The woman was found dead in her bathtub, her throat slit. This is complicated by a small marble of obscure but presumably mystic function found at the scene, the pawprint and later silhouette of a very, very large cat, and the three warnings from three different sources against trusting the detectives and requesting the characters’ appearance at, coincidentally, the same time at, coincidentally, the same place. The PCs show up, are confused, as are the three sources who are not overfond of each other. Argument is cut short by the entry of men with guns, who are (eventually) cut short by the three sources, one of whom rips up half a pew and uses it as a baseball bat, another of whom causes a would-be hostage taker to explode in a cloud of blood and intestines, causing the pew-wielder to turn on him accusing him of witchcraft. The dust settles, and most of the PCs and the two non-witchcrafty NPCs are in the legendary sewers of Paris with a gutshot Pole. Further updates as situation warrants.

Books: I’m struggling to get through Proust, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and an ever-expanding list of theological works. You, however, don’t have to bother with that, because you can just go find books by Shaun Tan, an Australian sometime-children’s author. The Arrival, one of the best books I have ever read, has no words except the title and publication information, but tells the story of an immigrant to Ellis Island – or is it? No, but it’s the magical realist equivalent. Beautiful art, sometimes terrifying, made me cry at the end.

So I think I’m going to end up writing very good potboiler sci-fi for a living. I am okay with this. Possibly some webcomics or comicbooks will be involved if I can partner with someone who’s good at art. I have friends who are good at art. We shall see.

Speaking of webcomics – there are a lot of them! The internet is big! How are you supposed to know which ones are good? It is simple! I will tell you!

xkcd: used to be good. Randall Munroe no longer puts thought into the art or the jokes and is just generally self-righteous and whiny. The archives are worth a trip, though.

Art: 0 (3) of 5. Humor: 1 (4) of 5. Coherent story: N/A. Likeable characters: N/A. Charm: 0 (5) of 5. (Parenthetical numbers are “old” xkcd.)

Dinosaur Comics: Ryan North uses the same six clip-art panels of inaccurately colored dinosaurs stomping on anachronistic items almost every day for this comic. There are over a thousand strips. No, really.

Art: What? Humor: 4 of 5. Coherent story: N/A. Idiosyncratic use of language for purposes of awesome: 5 of 5.

Achewood: Anthropomorphic animals being variously adorable, contemptible, creepy, rich, angsty, ditzy.

Art: Serviceable. Humor: 3 of 5. Coherent story: surprisingly, yes. Likeable characters: Roast Beef. Idiosyncratic use of language for purposes of awesome: 5 of 5.

Questionable Content: Hipsters. Sometimes they are witty. More often they are melodramatic.

Art: Actually pretty good. Humor: on average, 2 of 5. Coherent story: mostly boring. Obscure music references: all of them.

The Adventures of Dr. McNinja: He is an Irish M.D. ninja. His secretary is a gorilla named Judy. His sidekick is a twelve-year-old mustache-having bandito gunslinger on a velociraptor. That’s the least ridiculous stuff.

Art: Very good. Humor: 5 of 5. Coherent story: Yes. Sum total of awesome: Yes.

Subnormality: Work is put into this one. Walls o’ text. Lots of art.

Art: Amazing! Humor: 4 of 5. Coherent story: not really. Obnoxious political rants: sometimes.

A Softer World: Joey Comeau takes three photographs. Each is accompanied by a probably irrelevant line of text, which is usually cynical.

Art: Good photography. Humor: 3 of 5. Coherent story: no. Gets old after a while: yes.

Cyanide and Happiness: there is a line between what is decent and what is not decent. C&H never crosses that line – it is permanently on the other side.

Art: 1 of 5. Humor: 3 of 5. Nauseating: 5 of 5.

Dresden Codak: Not really sure. Transhumanism is involved somehow. Also sometimes D&D with philosophers!

Art: 5 of 5. Humor: erm. Coherent story: it tries.

Lackadaisy: Prohibition-era St. Louis. With cats.

Art: 5 of 5. Humor: 4 of 5. Coherent story: 5 of 5. Likeable characters: 5 of 5.

Gunnerkrigg Court: It starts with magical realism – an enormous school, robots, sentient shadows, and one girl in the middle of it. Lately it’s been trying to be Harry Potter.

Art: 4 of 5. Humor: eh. Coherent story: too coherent. Likeable characters: no one likes Harry.

8-Bit Theater: Final Fantasy sprites. Game-based jokes.

Art: 1 of 5. Humor: 3 of 5. Coherent story: yes. Characters: one-dimensional.

Order of the Stick: stick figures, D&D-based jokes.

Art: 2 of 5. Humor: 4 of 5. Coherent story: one of the better ones. Characters: actually pretty likeable.

Girl Genius: alt-history steampunk/magical Europe. Hilarity ensues.

Art: 4 of 5. Humor: not the point. Coherent story: yes. Likeable characters: Jägermonsters, virtually invincible killing beasts which speak with a very heavy German-ish accent. Yes, they’re likeable – why do you ask?

Pictures for Sad Children: Simply drawn, magical realism, dark humor. Good times.

Art: 2 of 5. Humor: 3 of 5. Pavs: 5 of 5.

Now you ask, "Levi, what is pavs?" I shall define it: pavs [pävs] adj. the quality of being both adorable and tragic, in the manner of a three-legged puppy. Language of origin: a much longer Indian word I don't know which means something similar, through a particularly linguistically influential person in my dorm, who a) knows many, many languages; b) speaks in vague and truncated terms like, "so, basc [baysk], here's this thing, and it's totes like, whatevs..." and so forth. Thus, pavs. Those of us who have watched much Battlestar Galactica (the newer series) use "boomerpavs" for something that is even more pavs. If you have watched it (and, y'know, it's pretty good. Not as good as Cowboy Bebop or Firefly, but good.) you will know why.

And yes. I'm currently at home for a week. I'll write about that later. Currently I am exhausted from riding my bike forever.