Golden Age, indeed.

You know this song. And if you're anything like me, your reaction to it is, "oh, excellent one-hit wonder there, Mr. Dolby." It's difficult to imagine anything like a steady, consistently good artistic output from the creator of "She Blinded Me With Science". And, apparently, you would be wrong. The Golden Age of Wireless (1982) is difficult to categorize - there's a lot of Bowie in there, some Elvis Costello, but what it reminds me of most is Donald Fagen's masterpiece of the same year, The Nightfly. I'm going to justify that comparison eventually.

The Golden Age of Wireless is an album with a bit of a complicated history - it's been through a couple of versions, and the one I have is actually the 1984 CD release (it's what was on iTunes). There's songs missing, songs rearranged, and, most notably, Thomas Dolby's big hit (which came out after the initial release of Wireless) shoehorned into the beginning to boost sales. The dysjunct is very apparent. "She Blinded Me With Science" is unrestrained, bouncy quirkiness - a far cry from the chilly Cold-War-era paranoia of "One of Our Submarines", for instance, or the subtle modulations and almost atonal arpeggios of "Radio Silence". Understand: "She Blinded Me With Science" isn't a radical departure - all the elements are still there: the syncopated synth-drums, the thin melodic lines, the lyrical sensibilities (the ones which aren't just putting more exclamation marks after "Science!") - but here in Wireless, everything's cooler, more anaesthetic, less...one-hit wonder.

Dolby doesn't really engage the viscera that much, targeting instead the intellectual half of the listener - even his hit is a sort of vulgar engaging of the vulgar intellect ("Science!!") - not to knock it or anything - and it is this which most reminds me of The Nightfly. (Well, that and the bass hooks and piano work in "Weightless".) Fagen's work was always cool, never stooped to engaging the viscera - was more groovy, certainly, but not in a grips-you "Feel Good Inc." sort of way. No doubt the retro-futuristic feel both albums have for a listener in 2011 (certainly intentional for Fagen - Dolby seems to have been going for just "futuristic", but time has slapped a "retro-" to the front of that) has something to do with the perceived similarity - it calls to mind Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and the whole pulp genre (thought to expand on later, possibly: "Pulp engages the viscera of the intellect").

Point is, Dolby's lyrics are lined with wires and technical details that enhance rather than distracting from the humanness he's primarily concerned with - most of these songs are poignant ("Europa and the Pirate Twins" is even heartbreaking, and the mention of a hoverport in the final verse does nothing to detract from that, though it does intersect oddly with the old-world-nationalistic refrains of "Oh My Country, Europa" and "Ta République, Europa"). Two further miscellaneous facts: "Commercial Breakup" is very Elvis Costello, and "Brooklyn is crawling/ With famous people" is a fantastic line (from "Airwaves").

In conclusion: The Golden Age of Wireless is an intellectually engaging work, full of both musical and lyrical subtlety. Dolby really does not deserve the one-hit wonder status that's become attached to him.

The Perfect Game

So crash course in RPG theory: the basic trichotomy that gets tossed around is the Gamist-Narrativist-Simulationist, which in its extreme cases works like this:

Gamist thought tends to treat RPGs as though they were games like Go or Chess - that is, there's a focus on making the game mechanically balanced, and the point of the game is for the players to win - to beat the DM. Games like old-school D&D and I think to some extent Paranoia tend toward a gamist perspective - and I have to say: that's fine, and that can certainly be fun, but it's not intuitive to me - which is interesting, as I am extremely competetive with regard to board games. RPGs just don't hit those same switches with me, I suppose. Scorpio has a heavily gamist bent, and that has led to some friction in the past. (Jack, near as I can tell, doesn't really have any particular bent, but tends in practice to fit somewhere between narrativist and gamist, probably weighted toward narrativist.)

Narrativist thought views the players as providing the protagonists for a story, the rest of which is written by the GM. Extremely narrativist games, like Polaris or Universalis, dispense with the GM entirely, instead relying on things like ritualistic interplayer negotiation (for Polaris) or an interplayer economy (for Universalis) to determine things about the game world and resolve conflicts. I'm much more in sympathy with the narrativist perspective, obviously, but even though I have no problem viewing my own life, human life in general, and indeed the life of humanity as a whole as a fiction - and in fact probably couldn't view it any other way if I tried - I am not entirely satisfied with narrativist gaming.

Simulationist thought tries to model the game world as accurately and realistically as possible. It tends toward the complex rules systems - Shadowrun, for instance, which can fill several books with mostly rules and tables of vehicle stats, or D&D 3.5, the Dungeon Master's guide for which is very possibly the most stultifyingly boring RPG book I have ever read - and the point is that a realistically modeled world is more immersive - which is a relatively difficult quality to achieve when what you're looking at is the people you're in college with, a bunch of funny-shaped dice, and a Word document with a lot of numbers on it. And here's a weird thing: perhaps because worldbuilding is one of my favorite aspects of fiction, I am at heart a zealous simulationist. I know that byzantinely complex rulesets are no fun to play with. I understand that there is relatively little difference between rolling to throw a grenade, rolling to determine scatter, rolling the target's dodge, and rolling the target's damage soak, and and the GM simply interpreting the results of one die roll, except that the first one is a bitch to do and will make combat unreasonably long. But, dammit, it feels different. And of course there's no way so far as I can tell to have quick, clean combat resolution and accurately modeled conflicts. The rules hack for Shadowrun I and my players are working on is supposed to contain various levels of granularity, to allow you to make that trade-off on a case-by-case basis, but that's a makeshift solution to an apparently insoluble problem.

But that's only a problem because we have a limited amount of processing power, yeah? Given the ability to easily remember a very large number of rules and the ability to perform complex calculations very quickly, simulationist games really come into their own. More than that - we can get more complex than that - truly three-dimensional space combat, computer hacking that involves actually finding holes in the programs and systems the game has constructed, magic duels with ebbing and flowing mana, attacks and counterattacks on your opponent's qi, fights won by wits and swordsmanship rather than by dice rolls (which, just between you and me, has always seemed like an unsatisfactory conflict resolution mechanic - though comparing static numbers is worse). And since we're operating theoretically - the things we could do with unlimited processing power! And so on until, like the map of Borges' cartographers, our simulation is precisely as complex and as intuitive as the universe itself. That, to my mind, is the perfect game.

Turns out, we can't do that. So near as I can figure, the difference between an actual simulationist and an actual gamist or narrativist is that the simulationist probably sighs and looks up at the stars, half-imagining what cannot be, before going and playing a gamist or narrativist game.

Addendum: that perspective on games certainly opens one up to accusations of escapism. That's valid insofar as games are actually used as an escape from the burden of actually doing something with one's life. And this runs into the problem of me being a very bad existentialist. See, I think that a person's life is inherently meaningless - that the meaning of one's life is self-determined. I then want to turn around and tell some people that the meaning they seem to be deriving from their life doesn't count - people who work their way up the company ladder and then retire to a country home and a yacht, people who work in a factory nine-to-five and drink beer with their friends on the weekends in front of the TV - in fact, my (totally unreasonable) instinct is to exclude politicians, lawyers, doctors, and teachers from the category of people who have meaningful lives, leaving only scientists, artists, and people like Joshua Abraham Norton I, Emperor of these United States and Lord Protector of Mexico, whose lives are in themselves such interesting narratives that it counts as production. Of course, this is only my own personal existential choice - these are the lives that I personally would find meaningful.

So, back to the point, which is: I don't think playing games is sufficient for a meaningful life - it certainly is not for me, and I want to say (but can't) that it isn't for anyone. However, I do think that it can be part of one - whether I end up doing the art thing or the life-as-narrative thing (scientist being, unfortunately, not really one of my options), that games can add to it. I learn a lot about storytelling, among other things, from playing these games, and that is valuable. It's just not valuable enough, on its own. (I should reread Nabokov's The Defense, which if I remember correctly is on more or less the same subject, but with chess instead of Shadowrun.)

Further addendum: it's pretty clear that many of my positions are philosophically incoherent. I'm okay with that - in fact, it's somewhat deliberate. The line of reasoning is this: I am never going to be right about everything. If I attempt to construct a coherent philosophical weltanshauung, any error in the initial premises is like to be amplified until I find myself believing unacceptable things once I get down to particulars. Besides, I have a certain amount of faith in human instinct - not in any mystical way, but simply that our ethics, our art, and our drive to know are all products of pretty nonrational impulses, which means we already have pretty okay heuristics for a lot of things. Not, obviously, unimprovable, and I'm certainly not rejecting reason - I can be logically convinced that some of my heuristics are bad and should be changed - but by and large, I think it's pretty reasonable to go with one's initial reactions on a lot of things.

A new thing

So I was reading this blog and watching the associated video series, both of which are a good deal of fun, and I thought to myself, hey, the people I play RPGs with are just as interesting and we have a good deal of fun and maybe I should write up some of that. In the past I've hesitated to do that because really, who wants to hear about people playing RPGs? But the answer appears on further reflection to be "precisely the people I'd want to talk to about people playing RPGs", so that works out well.

So the games I'm currently involved in:

I'm running Shadowrun 4e (urban fantasy + cyberpunk dystopia), set in Hong Kong, with a group of relatively small-fry PCs trying to make some sort of living in the midst of crime syndicates fighting it out. We all love the setting, we all hate the system, and we're trying to kick it to pieces and make a new one, which is apparently just the done thing with Shadowrun.

Apocalypse World is, as you might imagine, set in a post-apocalyptic world. (See Freakangels for a pretty good approximation. Also see Freakangels because it's good.) There's hard choices and constant vying for power in the ruins of a once-great civilization. So sometimes you agonize over what to do with the loyal lieutenant who's also murdering relatively innocent people with his mind, and sometimes you shoot him in the face with a ballista. Good fun.

There's a game of In A Wicked Age, which is more or less an episodic Arabian Nights-style game which over the course of a campaign sort of develops its own mythology based on your previous sessions, which is fun. Also fun: the fact that every session ends in a massive clusterfuck. In A Wicked Age has been on hiatus for four weeks, so in the interim, we've been playing one-shots of Universalis, Don't Rest Your Head, Dread, and Dread again.

And sometimes there's also Paranoia, which is roughly 1984 meets the Marx Brothers. Which is just as fun as that sounds.

Just as important as the games we play are the people we play them with (I think I will not use their real names, just as a formality):

Jack is the guy who runs Apocalypse World and In A Wicked Age. He's really good at winning arguments, game design theory, and GMing awkward moral choices. He's less good at playing characters, but realizes this, so he uses random personality generators and tends to play people who really like punching things - as he does in my Shadowrun game. And that works well.

Scorpio is the other guy who knows a lot about game design - mostly from hanging out with professional game designers on the internet and having played D&D more or less since he could walk. As a rule, he and Jack are pretty good about poking at my incoherent vague feelings about games and trying to render them intelligible so they can disagree vehemently. He's very concerned with game mechanics, and his medic character in Apocalypse World is currently making my character's group of machine cultists look sane by comparison.

Kali, in games as in life, is very often the one holding everything together. In Shadowrun, she plays a fairly normal decent ex-smuggler who has a couple of fantastically nuanced relationships in his backstory and is trying to hold together a team consisting of of himself, Jack's amoral face-puncher, Sam's currently soulless killing machine, and Bertrand's deeply inept mage. She's also been working on a Lovecraft game system that in its first incarnation was a horrifying frankenstein of four or five different systems. Her character in Apocalypse World is, again, the sane one - a dredlocked techie who serves as a go-between for Scorpio's psycho and power-hungry medic, and my crazy cult.

Sam is a deeply creepy child, but that's okay. Her character in Shadowrun already had an excellent backstory consisting entirely of pain and death and the most terrifyingly Machiavellian crimelord - and then he got his soul eaten by an eldritch being in-game and is now incapable of feeling emotion, and must kill hundreds of people before he dies of apathy.

Bertrand is a genius logician, and also manages to be extremely well-versed in Kafka, philosophy, and foreign film - from whence he derives truly excellent characters, such as the genial sociopathic gambler who shows his affection for Bertrand's Shadowrun character by trying to have him assassinated every year as a birthday present.

Moishe is a skinny ur-nebbish who runs a damn good game of Paranoia, and also of Dread. Only seen him as a player in In A Wicked Age, so I dunno much about his play style.

Ann is kickass, but I've only seen her play in IAWA and also my one-shot Don't Rest Your Head session, which was less successful than it could have been, so again, dunno much about her play style. She seems to be good at it, though.

Jill I played Dogs in the Vineyard with, back when Jack was running that. Now she plays In A Wicked Age. She's not bad, but she's not a person you'd expect to powergame - and IAWA is really not a system that you can powergame in - but that certainly doesn't stop her from trying.

And that's the group, more or less. So I'll go this direction with the blog for now, trying not to forget to also write about music and stuff. In other news - I like Duran Duran way too much.

In which I continue to have excellent taste in music.

Actually you know what: you want to read a review of Plastic Beach, go read the Midnight Insomniac's. I'll just say that, where Demon Days is an acoustic nighttime junkyard, Plastic Beach is a glitzy casino resort. Also that the music video for Stylo is awesome, and Superfast Jellyfish is a much, much better song than you think it is.

What I really should talk about is Steven Wilson's Insurgentes, which I've been putting off because, frankly, this is a daunting album to review. But here goes anyway:

Steven Wilson is of course the creative genius behind Porcupine Tree, a more-or-less contemporary prog rock band, whose musical trajectory is an interesting one: initially drugged-out psychedelia, it evolved into a more alt-metal sound, with I think mixed success. Check out On the Sunday of Life... for the early sound, Deadwing and In Absentia for the later sound. There's a lot in the middle there too, but I haven't really listened to it. But anyway, the point is that Insurgentes is a very different sound from any of that. It's a very introverted sound, a sort of musical omphaloskepsis, fading between beautiful melodic reveries and heavy dissonant pounding. It's an intensely beautiful industrial dreamscape. The first track, Harmony Korine - look, there's no way I can do it any kind of justice. Just go listen to it, now. Okay? Now listen to it again. I try to be frugal with superlatives, but that is the most beautiful song I have ever heard, Allegri's "Miserere", Gravenhurst's "Black Holes in the Sand", and everything Simon & Garfunkel wrote notwithstanding. (I've talked about Gravenhurst, yeah? Can't do it here, I already used up my superlatives for this post.) Abandoner is next, with a hollow drum loop overlaid with high wavering melodic lines, leading into immense monolithic guitar chords toward the end. Salvaging rides hard, with air support via guitar and synthesizer, which melts into a constantly modulating orchestral melody, before crashing back into what sounds something like hitting a piano with the sostenuto pedal down - intensely dissonant, and very enjoyable. Veneno Para Las Hadas starts with a monotone bassline under the same three distant chords, and Wilson's quiet vocals and a subtle, excellent use of piano - and though it builds a little from there, it's content to do basically that for the song. And that's excellent. No Twilight Within the Courts of the Sun is an eight-and-a-half-minute virtuosic display - a very complex piece reminiscent of King Crimson, with excellent performances on drums, guitar, and piano. And here I have to resist the impulse to go through every single track on the album, because all of them are worth discussion. So I will just say that Insurgentes is a complex, layered work which far surpasses in depth, consistency, and beauty, Steven Wilson's earlier work. And while the album, on first listen, may well seem monochromatic - quiet melodic piano alternating with heavy dissonant chords - repeated listens will reveal a meticulously crafted, intellectual, gorgeous piece of work.

What hath science wrought.

Opening shot: sand gusts through the streets of a long-deserted Mediterranean town. The camera pans past abandoned stucco buildings, overgrown with weeds.

Text: They Thought It Was Over

Camera continues to pan, as music begins to fade in. It is tinny, as though played through an old radio. A gust of sand completely obscures the camera’s view, and clears to reveal a shot centered on a small stucco building, door hanging off the hinges, part of the roof fallen in. The camera zooms.

Text: But Some Memories Never Fade

Music becomes recognizable: “As Time Goes By”, a oldies-style instrumental rendition. Camera zooms through doorway; a crackling radio stands on a table across the room, illuminated by light shining through the doorway.

Text: And Some Wounds

Zoom in on radio, music crescendoes accordingly. A silhouette of a man wearing a fedora falls across the radio.

Text: Never Heal

Silhouette raises gun, fires. Radio sparks. Cut to black as music ceases.

Fade in: timpani sounds once, extreme close up of a man’s mouth, chewing a toothpick.

Mouth: Play it, Sam.

Brief shot of Samuel L. Jackson cocking a shotgun, fade to black.

Another timpani; Bruce Willis and Robert Downey, Jr. walk slowly toward camera, putting sunglasses on.

Bruce Willis: Louis – [an enormous explosion in the background] – I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

The timpani begin to accelerate, heightening the excitement. Robert Downey, Jr. stands atop a ruined building, shouting to a courtyard full of dehumanized faceless soldiers.

Robert Downey, Jr.: [sneering] Round up the usual suspects!

Brief shots, now, one timpani per: Samuel L. Jackson, dual-wielding shotguns, in the smoking ruins of a building, turns to face the camera as it zooms; Robert Downey, Jr., face contorted with hatred, standing in the rain, turns to face the camera as it zooms; Angelina Jolie, wearing a kevlar corset and holding a katana, steps toward the camera and poses as it zooms; Bruce Willis, wearing a fedora and an overcoat, turns only his head toward the camera as it zooms down the length of the bar; Christopher Lee, above a machine torso and behind a mostly metal face, stands and glowers down at the camera. Silence.

Bruce Willis steps onscreen, looking down at the camera, pistol in hand. Points pistol at camera.

Bruce Willis: [sardonically] Here’s looking at you, kid. [Fires. Cut to black.]

Text: Return

Text: To

Text: Casablanca

Bruce Willis crouches behind the bar, reloading his pistol. Fragments of glass fall to the floor around him.

Bruce Willis: Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world – [slams clip into pistol] – she walks into mine.

He turns to fire over the bar. Cut to view across bar. He fires into the camera.

Text: In Theaters June 6

Is garbagepunk a word? Because it should be.

Gorillaz' Demon Days opens with a very noir oboe, punctuated by sirens, timpani, and an incomprehensible loop of some garbled rap lyric. The image of a dimly lit alley, graffiti scrawled on the brick walls, trash cans overflowing, is inescapable. And as a good intro should, it sets the tone for the underworld, counterculture feel of the album. Listening to the album is a lot like scrambling through an enormous junkyard. To be clear, that's a good thing. The album flows well, but that doesn't mean it's predictable. Every track is not quite what you expected, and though some are difficult to categorize as good songs on their own ("November Has Come", "All Alone", "White Light"), nothing is dead weight. If you're going to look at a junkyard with an eye for the aesthetic, you're going to have to use a very different metric than that you would use for a garden: everything here is interesting. Here the city's refuse has assumed the shape of a cathedral, the altar an overturned turntable ("O Green World") - there the contours of a Miami highrise ("Kids With Guns"). "Dirty Harry", one of the strongest songs on the album, is a good example of how this garbage approach to music works: it starts with a catchy synthesizer riff and a driving cowbell. The bass enters, a sort of off-beat jaunty staccato, and is joined by the drums and a children's choir:

I need a gun to keep myself from harm

The poor people are burning in the sun

They ain't got a chance, they ain't got a chance

I need a gun, cause all I do is dance

Cause all I do is dance.

The song then goes into a brief strings interlude before breaking it down into an anti-war rap (a pretty good one) and then resumes with the choir and bass. It then segues into the crazed laughter of "Feel Good, Inc." - and let me just say, if this song does not make you dance inside, you have no soul. Perhaps the catchiest, darkest bass groove ever devised, under a quiet guitar arpeggiation and the two-ton weight of a junkie's addiction:

You got a new horizon it's ephemeral style

A melancholy town where we never smile

And all I wanna hear is the message beep

My dreams they gotta kiss because I don't get sleep, no

Then it opens up into an ethereal acoustic guitar for the chorus before reverting to a surprisingly unsettling rap, given that it uses the lines, "It's my chocolate attack" and "Care bear bumping in the heart of this here". It goes ABABA, ending, as it began, with insane laughter. You have the drugged-out hazy dance groove of "DARE", the mostly-spoken folktale "Fire Coming Out of the Monkey's Head" - a rather heavy-handed but well done anti-imperialist polemic - and the gospel choir of "Demon Days" to finish off an always-interesting, often-excellent album. I'll get in Plastic Beach at a later date.

tinker tailor hipster nerd

The first thing you're going to notice when listening to Skeletal Lamping by Of Montreal (who are in fact of Athens, Georgia - the juxtaposition of the B-52s and Of Montreal in my head is doing interesting things.) is that there is a hell of a lot going on. (The first thing you're going to notice about this blogpost is that I have once again jammed a bloated parenthetical in between the subject and the predicate. Again. In the very first sentence. So much for that.) There are layers of production, multiple vocal lines chasing each other round, plenty of weird instruments, abrupt mid-song stylistic shifts - sometimes two or three per song. You will already have noticed - from the band name, album title, and songs called "An Eluardian Instance", "Beware Our Nubile Miscreants", and "Triphallus, to Punctuate!" - that you are in for some pretty hipster times, and nothing you will hear is going to contradict that. The lyrics are swollen masses of referentiality and are mostly incomprehensible. What might surprise you, however, is how much you will enjoy it.

The first song, "Nonpareil of Favor", opens with a harpsichord, followed quickly by an irresistibly upbeat rhythm section and a catchy pop tune which lasts all of a minute-and-a-quarter before slipping into something more comfortable: a slowed-down swinging verse which makes it maybe half another minute before they decide that what they really want to do with this song is hammer the same chord very loudly for a couple more minutes, accompanied by harpsichord. Then they decide that they're instead going to hammer the same chord more quietly under a hazy mix of vocalization and...celeste, I think? It's better than it sounds - the hammering in the middle is jarring at first, but they do good things with it.

Third song: "For Our Elegant Caste" opens with the immortal lines,

We can do it softcore if you want

But you should know I take it both ways

We can do it softcore if you want

But you know that I go both ways

The next iteration of these lines turns into a round, mostly in falsetto, and this brings up another characteristic of of Montreal: they are the single gayest-sounding band I have ever come across - quite apart from their lyrics, which admittedly don't contradict that impression. For me, this is utterly delightful, though the exuberant camp might grate on some people.

Another characteristic is their habit of inserting bits of - sometimes spoken - dialogue into their songs: from "An Eluardian Instance",

You sat me down, we had some drinks

And you told me all kinds of insanity

I asked your friend if you were available

She answered, "no, but yes, oh well oh well yes and no."

From "Women's Studies Victims",

Then threw me out into the snow, I waited for the bus

Up came some values voters screaming are you one of us?

I said, "Of course man can't you see I've got some text reconstruction?"

(What does that mean?) No clue. It must be illicit - pentagram.

(What are you talking about?) No clue.

And from "Triphallus, to Punctuate!",

"You should call me sometime.

I won't answer but at least I'll know you care."

"How will you know it was me?"

"What do you think, I've got caller ID."

Which is charming, is the point.

Also! These songs are incredibly obscene in the most delightful way imaginable. "Plastis Wafers", for instance:

I confess to being quite charmed

By your feminine affects

You're the only one with whom

I would roleplay Oedipus Rex

I want you to be my pleasure puss

I wanna know what it's like to be inside you

I want you to be my pleasure puss

I wanna know how it feels

There's really a hell of a lot to say about this album, and you should listen to it yourself, so I'll leave you some surprises, but just a quick overview: "For Our Elegant Caste" is two-and-a-half minutes of the most enjoyable ear-heroin I've ever come across; "Gallery Piece" is a wonderfully schizoid love song; "Women's Studies Victims" is the perfectly representative blend of pointless referentiality, interpolated dialogue, and really catchy upbeat tunes; "Plastis Wafers" is both incredibly catchy and so very obscene. In summary! Fifteen very catchy, layered, ADHD songs. Well worth listening to.

Last week I said I would deliver my opinion on the state of the world. Then I realized that this would be stupid as I just have half-educated guesses based on very limited and probably inaccurate readings of Marx, collateral knowledge of economics, and wild extrapolation. Thus I will not do that, instead sticking to subjects I know things about. Next week - let's see - how about Gorillaz' Demon Days and Plastic Beach? That sounds good. Should get some film in as well. Season 5 of Doctor Who, or maybe one of Clint Eastwood's westerns. Also literature assuming I have time to read. Eventually I'll finish Swann's Way. Been in the middle of it for over a year now goddamn.

Side note: somewhere back in the archives - way, way back - there's a cringingly embarrassing fanboyish rant about xkcd. I think for the sake of honesty, integrity, and justice, that I should say that the person who wrote that was young and foolish and that xkcd - and the nerd culture that has sprung up around it - is little more than festering shitegobs predicated on, among other things, a tribal mentality of "us" v. "them", a smug assumption of false superiority, a belief that a store of utterly trivial knowledge somehow makes one a better person, the utterly perplexing belief that having Asperger's Syndrome is a virtue, and a mindless conformity to all of the above.

To clarify: I understand where these self-described nerds are coming from. It's a lot like the worldview of me and my peers - we're all fairly elitist, we all like stereotypically nerdy things - roleplaying games, sci-fi television shows, superhero comics, video games - and there's more than one aspy in our ranks. But there are differences. We don't have the martyr complex of the high school nerd, we don't judge people by how much Batman trivia they know - and more importantly, we have knowledge - and discussions - of the non-trivial variety: about literature, physics, biology, chemistry, history, philosophy, history and philosophy of science, higher math, Talmud, Bible, music, art, psychology, sociology - you get the point. The point is, we're intellectuals, not nerds. We've all been - and many of us still are, to some extent - part of the nerd culture I've described. The thing is, we all grow out of it.

The fetishization of the nerd is a perplexing, fairly recent pop culture phenomenon. If you've seen the Scripps National Spelling Bee in the past few years, you've noticed it: the immense hype surrounding it, the movies and books that have been made about it, the media personalities condescending to the victorious middle-schooler who is orders of magnitude more literate than they. And, by and large, it's awful. Don't get me wrong, I love the spelling bee. But my god is it painful to watch the media milk adorable younger siblings of contestants, or interviewers asking some eighth-grader who was favored to win how it feels to be eliminated in the fifth round on some word only spellable if you've happened to have come across it before. Also, Akeelah and the Bee was an unholy abomination and should have been aborted in the first trimester.

Or perhaps you've watched a few episodes of The Big Bang Theory, which is about the lives of physicists as imagined by someone who's never actually hung out with any sort of intellectual. The laugh track is the least objectionable portion of the show. Or perhaps you've come across My Life Is Average, a website founded in response to the pathetic whinging of Fuck My Life, a website populated entirely by anecdotes of stupid people about their terrible lives. MLIA started out as a rather clever statement, where people would post completely mundane, uneventful stories about their lives. Then it became a circle-jerk for nerds to congratulate each other on how delightfully quirky their lives were and how they recognized that Harry Potter was superior to Twilight, apparently forgetting that one step above awful is still just mediocre. Or, again, maybe you've come across the creepy, bitchy, faux-intellectual, artless pile of shit that is xkcd. I used to call these people nerd posers. Then I decided that they were real nerds and I was not. And that's fine with me.

Probably I should justify this vitriol. In particular, I realize that my accusations of "a tribal mentality of 'us' and 'them'" and "a smug assumption of false superiority" may seem hypocritical, and that this whole thing may seem like mere wankery. So let me justify my statements a bit more: I have a friend, a third-year undergraduate, and young for that, who gives talks on mathematical logic at graduate conferences, and knows a great deal about literary theory, philosophy, foreign film, Kafka, and midrash. I have multiple friends who know so many languages it will make your head explode. I have a friend who reads Heidegger for fun. I have an undergraduate friend who is trying to get a Ph.D. in Classics so that he can become a practicing neurosurgeon. And yes, we are far too insular; and yes, we all, virtually without exception, fanboy or -girl hard over Doctor Who; and yes, many of us have inside jokes which stem from our Shadowrun campaigns; but we don't glory in being unable to interact with people outside our peer group; we accept people who think Zelda is the protagonist of Ocarina of Time; we don't consider non-intellectuals beneath us.

...except for nerds.

Not convinced there's a difference? Yeah, I get that. Not very convincing. I'm not quite communicating here. This is my emotional reaction, and I have yet to completely rationalize it (that might seem a bit ex post facto to you, but I think that's a big part of how our minds work. The reaction is prior, and if you can honestly justify it, then good, and if not, you need to fix your reaction.) So I'll keep working on that - I welcome any input - but I do sincerely think there is something severely wrong with nerd culture as it currently exists.

One last note, re: Asperger's - I hope my comments won't be misinterpreted as prejudice. I have a moderately high-functioning cousin with Asperger's, and a couple of close friends who are quite high-functioning - not that "some of my best friends are, etc.", but rather that I've had some experience with it. Obviously, it's nothing to be ashamed of, but it's something that makes your life more difficult in a lot of ways - something you have to struggle against. My cousin, for instance, can instantly detect spelling and grammatical errors in a document, but has a hard time grasping that not everyone is as interested in All in the Family or ALF as he is. One of my friends has had to reverse engineer a sense of humor and is knowledgeable about theories of humor, which is admirable, but he doesn't have the instinctive feel for it that most people do, and so he tends to say legitimately very witty things at inopportune moments. What I dislike - and I'm open to correction on this point - is people who feel that Asperger's excuses their antisocial, obsessive behaviors and that they therefore don't have to try to change, and everyone else should just put up with it.

Oh, and you should really check out the blog I linked above. It's amazing.

Haha, but seriously, what.

So apparently someone sometime decided that Sid Vicious and his ilk had a really good thing going with the whole 80s British punk rock thing, but what that sound really needed was to be run through a filter of 90s British girl-pop, and thus Shampoo came to be. Now, I realize that music is constantly shifting and evolving, and I listen to a lot of weird music, but that is probably the strangest concept for a band I have ever heard. It doesn't make any fucking sense. Who hears "I - WANT TO BE - ANARCHY" and thinks "that, but with Miley Cyrus"? More things in heaven and earth, etc., and the thing is, I actually kind of like it. We Are Shampoo (1994), their first album (and the only one anyone really cares about - most of the rest were Japan-only releases, because that makes as much sense as the rest of it) is certainly not the best album I've ever come across - no song ever rises above the level of "pretty good pop song" - but it's utterly fascinating.

It opens with their big single, "Trouble", which is a pretty typical pop song - a danceable drum loop and bass line, a catchy repetitive guitar hook, and a couple of teenage girls singing about how their parents will be angry with them for staying out all night. On the other hand, they're yelling the verses in true punk form, and this contrast drives the interesting bits of the album. Sometimes Shampoo wears the girlpop celebrity hat, such as in the completely over-the-top "Viva La Megababes", or "Shampoo You", both about just how fantastic and famous Shampoo is. Other times, they skewer the very pop culture they are embodying: "Dirty Old Love Song" talks about overproduced pop songs - "They're big and bland but they spent four hundred grand/ On the video." - and "Skinny White Thing" is not kind to its titular androgynous beautiful person. This is when they're not just singing veiled sexual lyrics ("Delicious", "Me Hostage"). Then there's the extremely out-of-place "war is bad and we should all get along" spiel of "House of Love", and "Glimmer Globe", which appears to be a post-apocalyptic song about a disco ball, because, again, none of this makes sense.

So, overall, a bit of a curate's egg. Overproduced, catchy songs at best, and several surprises in the lyrics and the attitude, but it's hard to believe, much as I would like to, that this is a completely self-aware parody of 90s culture rather than another couple of teenage girls trying and failing to make it big. Most likely, both things are going on here, but the album remains interesting and unique. For what I think is a purer take on the Shampoo quintessence, try "Bouffant Headbutt", an earlier single which includes the lines "The way you act is such a disgrace/ Now you'll feel a bouffant in your face" and "When we get you outside/ You're fucking dead." Never have I been so intimidated by a 60s haircut.

Also, an official Power Rangers music video was made for "Trouble". At this point, the only conclusion I can draw is that whatever shadowy cabal secretly controls the world has a really weird sense of humor.

Next week on Handful of Dust! The pretentious hipster bullshit of Skeletal Lamping by Of Montreal, and my extremely authoritative take on the world in general! Also maybe I will not separate the subjects and predicates of sentences with absurdly lengthy parentheticals!

The Dionysian Individual in his Natural Habitat

I've always found tweed vaguely erotic.

A grey tweed jacket on a woman implies intellectualism, and more importantly, an absurd gravity, a taking-oneself-too-seriously, reading Nabokov wide-eyed, gasping occasionally at particularly daring turns of phrase - the sort of cultured, ridiculous, sincere naïf who would use words like "naïf". Which for some reason really appeals to me. Romantics always do, I think because I tend to think of myself as a romantic wearing the skin of sardonic realism until I actually interact with a romantic, at which point I realize that the realism goes much deeper than the romanticism. I fundamentally do not take myself seriously - that's realism.

Don't believe in continuity of self except as a useful fiction, like free will, or (in my more cynical moments) love. I deny anything other than an accidental, superficial connection with who I was five years ago. I mutate in response to my environment, shifting to meet new matrices and situations.

If you've ever played Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, you may know what I mean when I speak of the Dionysian Hero. If you haven't played it (and you should - it's a beautiful game. Also there is a UFO abduction in a rural medieval-ish setting), all you really need to know is that the hero of the game, Link, must save a world he finds himself in entirely by accident, a world he has no connection to. He must do so by acquiring and using a variety of masks, some of which actually change his physical form entirely, allowing him to assume the roles of various specific individuals. Essentially, he is a blank slate which those around him overwrite to fit him into their individual stories. He's only the hero at all because the world needs a hero, and overwrites him to fit. And even his role as hero is taken away when the Big Bad of the story gets a chance to overwrite him - with another mask - as the ultimate villain.

Point is, I'm Dionysian. And that's weird, I think, because most people seem to think of themselves as Apollonian: they have themselves, and they attempt to shape the world around them in some small way to change it to what they want it to be. I do just the opposite: I have the world, and it shapes me. I don't think I'm all that different from other people, nor do I think that I am right about human nature and they are wrong: I think that both the Dionysian and Apollonian perspectives are legitimate lenses for viewing human nature. I just happen to use the Dionysian one where most seem to prefer the Apollonian. It works out well for me, I think. If I am whoever I am needed to be by those around me, it allows for smooth interactions, and closer friendships than I think I would have otherwise.

"What about personal integrity?" you might ask. "How can you switch between different social circles, particularly ones with conflicting views of reality without massive cognitive dissonance?" That's a remarkably apt question, actually. It's almost like you're a second-person interrogative projection of myself. The answer is that, yeah, it's weird when different circles of friends clash. Reality kind of goes all wavy. But I mean, this is obviously a very strong statement of what I feel like. In reality, of course, I do have some apparent invariants. I'm pretty consistently an atheist wannabe writer, for instance. But I feel like even these are (in theory and given extraordinary circumstances so don't hold your breath) negotiable.

And I was going to talk about Beck's The Information and Of Montreal's Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? because they're pretty good examples of people taking themselves too seriously or something but I don't feel like it now so I'll do that later.

The title of this blogpost is blogpost.

Eschewing juvenile styles and outgrown beliefs we move forward. Also I'm sick of looking at that last blogpost.

I feel like this is me actually starting this blog, so I'll introduce it and me. I am a second-year at the University of Chicago. I'm undeclared as yet, was going to be an English major, but then I decided to write a BA on Novalis which means I'm going to be a Comparative Lit major or something like that. Which means I need to teach myself German over the summer. Which is intense.

Grew up young-earth creationist in Arkansas. I don't recommend it. Kicked around charismatic evangelical Christianity for a long time, until I realized that none of it had ever made sense to me, and that I'd manufactured all the warm fuzzy Jesus feelings. So now I'm an atheist, and that, my friends, has simplified my life wonderfully. Guess I'll talk about that more later.

I am surrounded by exceptional people, to whom I talk about (lately) literature, ethics, and philosophy of science. I'm in charge of the fiction selections for one of the literature magazines on campus (it's called euphony and it's actually pretty legit. I think I've got a book review of Umberto Eco somewhere on that site.)

As for this blog, it's about music, literature, film, and so forth. Used to have theology instead of film, but you understand why that changed. My music tastes are omnivorous and ever-expanding, but I plan to review Of Montreal's Hissing Fauna Are You The Destroyer? and Demon Days by Gorillaz in future blogposts. Maybe Air's Moon Safari as well. Oh and Steven Wilson's Insurgentes. Lots of stuff, is my point. In terms of genres, classic rock, progressive rock, progressive metal, eighties synthpop, eighties punk, folk rock, and pretentious indie bullshit cover it pretty well.

As far as literature goes, I'm weirdly limited to mostly 20th-century novels, but a lot of those (GK Chesterton, Italo Calvino, Hemingway, James Joyce, Nabokov, Umberto Eco is a good list). Theoretically, I like sci-fi. In practice, usually not so much. I care less about fantasy, but therefore have lower standards for it and so probably enjoy most of it more? I tend to dislike most poetry not written by TS Eliot, and almost nothing before 1900.

Film is much more haphazard. Pretty sure Blade Runner is the greatest movie ever, with maybe Pan's Labyrinth in second place. Visuals are important - plots can be vague and still work, but a beautiful detailed world makes a lot of films great.

The rest is pretty much whatever I feel like. Perhaps this will include me talking about coming out to one's (fundamentalist evangelical Christian) family as an atheist. Perhaps it will include good conversations I have with exceptional people. Who knows? The possibilities are Literally Endless.