tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18688144913783750542024-02-08T16:22:58.130+13:00Professional AestheteDavidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02597398273751804565noreply@blogger.comBlogger66125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1868814491378375054.post-3349638481885317882010-07-23T13:00:00.002+12:002010-07-23T13:05:17.972+12:00Prediction<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%">It’s an unfashionable thing to say, but the world is a fairly predictable place most of the time. In similar situations, similar things happen. There’s only so many ways people will behave. That said, there are times when that predictability takes own its own strange scope and mystery.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%"><span style="font-style: normal">In April, or June, a plane went down in Poland, </span>taking with it an extraordinary chunk of the country’s national leadership. The dignitaries, strangely enough, were on their way to a memorial service for the Katyn Massacre, in which almost 22,000 Polish politicians, doctors, lawyers and intelligensia were killed by the Soviet internal security services. I don’t have to spell the parallels out, do I? But the most extraordinary thing, the thing about Poland that always caused some part of my brain grind to an astonished halt, was that this was a country presided over by twins. One was current president, the other Poland’s previous prime minister. It was a mythic set-up made real, perhaps by Poland’s inimitable history.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%">The plane crash, which mirrored so perfectly the very memorial they were on their way to attend, felt like fate. This is not a word I like, but what others do we have? How do we talk about this kind of thing? It is the sort of news that leaves me feeling supersititious. It was as though, for an instant, some arcane universal machinery had creaked into action. Its purpose – to redress circumstances too ridiculous, or too extraordinary to be allowed to last. Only an event of equal absurdity could reset the balance.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%">Later, a completely unrelated thing happened in the mediterranean. Isreali security forces stormed a group of aid vessels attempting to defy the Gaza Blockade. Whereas the Polish aircrash has something of the ineffable about it, this event had a logical ugliness to it – nine people were killed in the latest piece of violence to erupt in an area proverbial for it.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%">I think my point is that two very different kinds of predictability were at work. One, the aircrash, has a sort of mythic fatalism about it. The other, Israel’s most recent piece of criminal activity, seemed simply inevitable. I found myself enjoying both guiltily – the former because it suggested the world may yet act in ways too strange to fully explain; the latter because it seems to push us ever closer to a watershed moment in the Middle East, when Israel’s claim to self-defense would finally fall flat.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%">I don’t know how to finish this, because the process is unfinished itself. I am waiting, I suppose, for something to happen. Something bigger that, once and for all, exposes things for what they are. Heidegger would talk about lanterns in the darkness, someone like Swedenborg would speak of veils moving briefly aside. I don't know.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%">I really don't.</p>ofcourseicarehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03186408864195596534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1868814491378375054.post-73759251554081740012010-06-16T10:37:00.000+12:002010-06-16T10:37:43.448+12:00Wilkommen bei uns<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">Ladies and gentlemen, please redirect your attention to <a href="http://www.professionalaesthete.com/">Professional Aesthete dot com</a>. </span></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">Danke.</span></span></div>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02597398273751804565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1868814491378375054.post-61431507276295286182010-06-14T10:32:00.011+12:002010-06-15T19:30:15.530+12:00Gordon, my friend<div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>[O/T]</b></div><div><br /></div>I don't claim to know Gordon Brown personally. I've never been to his house. I've certainly never sat down and eaten a meal with the man. I don't know what Gordon Brown's hair smells like, or how he holds a fork. At no time was I on holiday with Gordon Brown, or his family. Neither of us were in Tuscany at the time ... or any other time.<div><br /></div><div>I have never met Gordon Brown.</div></div><div><br /></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1BlW0lklI3Wz36KnfEvd1EDPr-hP_rLSWzRmP3l2pf7p1tddGkuvQ3c3uGUZuUo7JOpUYeuySeM6xJAp1Q9Ee5diRIynNMkxKnGLYHfpxrTh0eUg7k1oSrZWx1mFHmvQ-wpV9K0srSPM/s1600/Gordon-Brown-france-met.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 230px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1BlW0lklI3Wz36KnfEvd1EDPr-hP_rLSWzRmP3l2pf7p1tddGkuvQ3c3uGUZuUo7JOpUYeuySeM6xJAp1Q9Ee5diRIynNMkxKnGLYHfpxrTh0eUg7k1oSrZWx1mFHmvQ-wpV9K0srSPM/s320/Gordon-Brown-france-met.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5482465248634934194" /></a><div>That said, I would be lying if I claimed not to know his ruff of hair, his ruddy, slightly slacken face. I have a vague grasp on his political pedigree: Gordon Brown, rough diamond, a kind of Obama for the Home Counties, beaming up the left wing. There was a lot of excitement around him, as there was Tony Blair. Though I never heard anyone call Blair a 'saviour'.</div><div><br /></div><div>Gordon has goen now. I know we were supposed to trust his terrierish ruffle of hair, his calm face. The solid will. But I never could. That is my confession. At a distance, he seemed paper thin. A lost cause. Not so much insincere, as impossibly transparent. To me it was a miracle that he held himself together at all and did not explode under the compression of constant scrutiny.*</div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">["the thing I am now imagining is like a human airship, inflated, aloft from the pressure of the atmosphere around it - a social Jupiter"]</span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><br /></span></i></span></i></div><div>I hope he's happier now.</div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><b>[E/O/T]</b></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;">*<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">this is </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">a defensive take on Borges's poem 'Music Box', in which 'shyness of melancholy ' is invoked as a</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"> successful containment of desperation at the arrival and passing of time. </span></div>ofcourseicarehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03186408864195596534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1868814491378375054.post-90918289664365483602010-05-18T23:01:00.008+12:002010-06-14T15:18:31.375+12:00Imaginary blogJorges Luis Borges believed nothing said in 500 pages could not be expressed in 5. In this spirit, nothing written in a blog could not be expressed as a comment underneath.<br /><br />It prompts a worrying thought. If <i>this</i> entry is in, its form, a comment, then what was written to inspire it is not yet written. We must presume a future webpage. It may contain a digression on the narratology of knitwear, or a diagrammatic how-to guide for provoking pandas into writing minimalist haiku. We cannot be sure. There may be no working backwards, or an infinite profusion of possible future pasts.<div><div><br />What I know is this: if the above is funny, or truly annoyed you, or you thought of Kurt Godel at any point, or you know what the word <i>neoplatonic </i>means, you are exactly the right person to be reading this blog.</div></div>ofcourseicarehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03186408864195596534noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1868814491378375054.post-53153473271036523512010-05-31T11:03:00.001+12:002010-06-07T13:56:15.938+12:00Borges at night<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJPKI6hex5V6NV3PjIbgdb3x8wJZasEGEKdcAnhi7mFDQlTxfkRTtynZaNd9qQTga_Dwf3oYCEXmTTCTsasD8W2fVy1YwNqlX_YsuKOGESTHQ0Lntoze64kMPP36dIsj7StgGzAc3Ibfdr/s1600/Poems+of+the+Night.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJPKI6hex5V6NV3PjIbgdb3x8wJZasEGEKdcAnhi7mFDQlTxfkRTtynZaNd9qQTga_Dwf3oYCEXmTTCTsasD8W2fVy1YwNqlX_YsuKOGESTHQ0Lntoze64kMPP36dIsj7StgGzAc3Ibfdr/s320/Poems+of+the+Night.jpeg" /></a> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdLTp3uiRguA7-jvnvORgBIUNxmiC7srwdJNnDD2ur7JAsGfm552JPw-71kv1uK01jo0pYOq9XYYJGR5CKQyj3ZoKYtmf1Pg9rbToFvov4Cp7zGdotV3LOQI8KnjTux9ePUlj_RGk9-qJW/s1600/The+Sonnets.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdLTp3uiRguA7-jvnvORgBIUNxmiC7srwdJNnDD2ur7JAsGfm552JPw-71kv1uK01jo0pYOq9XYYJGR5CKQyj3ZoKYtmf1Pg9rbToFvov4Cp7zGdotV3LOQI8KnjTux9ePUlj_RGk9-qJW/s320/The+Sonnets.jpeg" /></a> </div><br />
Penguin is publishing five (!) new Borges books this year. While three promise great things at a later date, collecting classic and unpublished essays on Argentina, Writing and Mysticism, the first two are already out, collecting his sonnets and his poems about night and darkness. For Borges, growing up with the knowledge that, like his father, he would eventually go blind, darkness is both threatening and perversely comforting – eventually the day will become the night, and all things will end.<br />
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Harpers published "Sonnet for a tango in the twilight" <a href="http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/04/0082883">here</a> (subscribers only, unless your eyesight can overcome low-res thumbnails), but the publishers released another sonnet, "Music Box", as a teaser.<br />
<blockquote>Music of Japan. Drops of slow honey <br />
Or of invisible gold are dispersed <br />
In a miserly way from a water clock, <br />
And repeat in time a weaving that is <br />
Eternal, fragile, mysterious, and clear. <br />
I fear that each one may be the last. <br />
It's a past coming back. From what temple, <br />
From what fresh garden in the mountain,<br />
From what vigil before an unknown sea,<br />
From what shyness of melancholy, <br />
From what lost and ransomed afternoon<br />
Does its remote future come to me?<br />
I cannot know. No matter. I am<br />
In that music. I want to be. I bleed.</blockquote>No such teasers are available for <i>Poems of the Night</i>, but the book's pitch informs me that the translators<i> </i>include W.S. Merwin, Alan Trueblood, Christopher Maurer, and my personal favourite, Alastair Reid. Both poetry books are dual-language, with parallel text – helpful if <i>someone</i> gives you "horrifying" for "<i>atroz</i>", and you just know that "atrocious" would scan better. Having different translators offers mixed blessings – the reader is exposed to a range of quality English-to-Spanish scholarship, but the potential to compare poems translated by a range of individuals is limited. <i>Atroz</i>.<br />
<br />
I picked up on the theme of night and day – or specifically, dawn and twilight – in last year's thesis, though in favour of proving a point, I focussed primarily on his earlier poems. I'm very interested in the contents of <i>Poems of the Night</i>, but in the meantime, here's something of an extract from the thesis, examining the tension between night and day, as mediated by the streets of Buenos Aires. The image of Borges the flâneur, writing the streets he would soon no longer be able to see, percolates through the early poems, particularly those in the collection <i>Fervor de Buenos Aires</i>:<br />
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[...]<br />
<br />
<i>Fervor</i>, for example, opens by moving beyond the names and dates engraved on tombstones in “Recoleta Cemetery”, to Beatriz Sarlo a site of belonging and remembrance that represents Borges’ sense of the liminality of the past and present worlds, and which necessitates his creation of a frontier between Europe and America. Sarlo places much emphasis on Borges’ position on the literary space of the <i>orillas</i>, which “possess the qualities of an imaginary territory, an indeterminate space” between the past and present, the plains and the first houses of the city. The <i>orillas</i> represent a final chance of an unmediated view of the horizon and, importantly, of the sunsets, which threaten to disturb both the city’s landscape and its aesthetic appeal to the flâneur. In “Sunset over Villa Ortuzar”, a street’s end at sunset “opens like a wound on the sky”; in “Campos Atardecidos” the sun refuses to heal the scarred sky by setting.<br />
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The transformative power of the naturally changing light enables Borges’ thematic transitions from the mundane to the eternal image gestured towards in “The Streets” and depicted in full force in “The South”. While the fleeting glimpse of a pure image would be developed and Borges’ focus on the image strengthened in the metaphysical fictions, the early poems hinge on the uneasy potential for transition from object to image and real to ideal. These poems emphasise Borges’ self-determined position on a border not just between Buenos Aires and the <i>pampas</i> [plains] or his family’s past on the one hand, and invented literary present on the other, but between a literal lived experience and the poetic or aesthetic response to it.<br />
<br />
In “The Streets”, images of the day and night frame the transition from the real “neighbourhood streets where nothing is happening / almost invisible by force of habit” to the ideal image of the streets “rendered eternal in the dim light of sunset”. In this case, however, the sunset does not threaten the poet’s experience: the act of writing the poem makes the streets eternal, but it is the sunset that mediates their transition to this state. Conversely, “Benares” places the poet’s imagined city (“False and impenetrable / like a garden traced on a mirror”) as a vision at dawn, as the “sudden sun / shatters the complex obscurity” of a “city which a foliage of stars oppressed”. The scarcely believable existence of the real Northern Indian city of Benares “with its precise topography / peopled like a dream” is described in more banal terms in the parenthetical statement that ends the poem:<br />
<blockquote>with hospitals and barracks<br />
and slow avenues of poplars<br />
and men with rotten lips<br />
who feel the cold in their teeth.</blockquote>This persisting city is nonetheless less real to the poet than the lyrical image of “the imagined city / which my eyes have never seen”.<br />
<br />
In this early collection, Borges toys with the opposing realities of the imagination and the real: the Benares of his imagination is more believable and is thus set in dawn or daylight and described in more concrete terms. The ‘reality’ of the city’s existence – notwithstanding the inevitable precision of its topography – is mitigated by being “peopled as a dream”, in which we see banal existence of the “men with rotten lips”. […] Reality is ghastly, slow and reduced to a parenthetical statement; the transitory dawn vision of the imaginary takes precedence. The qualifying statement of reality, though, undercuts the poet’s optimistic image of the city at dawn and invests the poem with a sense of resignation towards reality, even as it forms the poet’s closing image.<br />
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“Benares” is an early indication in Borges’ work of the unwelcome incursion of reality on a perceived state, but even the imagined city of the poem is prefaced by a warning to the reader. Borges had forewarned readers against the “illusion of verisimilitude” in the opening couplet of the poem, describing the city as “False and impenetrable / like a garden traced on a mirror”. The imaginary city is thus presented as a second-degree object from the beginning, with its existence dependent on comparison with a correlate.<br />
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Framing the impenetrable city in terms of its relationship with the ‘original’ sets up a binary relationship between the real and imagined in Fervor, even as the collection reflects on a transition between the two; Borges would later conclude the essay “Crossroads of Berkeley” with the observation that reality itself is no more than a reflection in a mirror, contingent upon the existence of observers, and is subject to non-existence when the mirror or the observer is absent. This is, of course, a simpler re-statement of Berkeley’s dictum that to be is to be perceived, but it serves as Borges’ early introduction of the mirror as a primary method of intuiting the difference between phenomena and noumena. An imperfect or incomplete duplication offers a glimpse into the profound: the concept would recur in Borges’ work throughout his life, from the various and divergent editions of the fictional book in “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim” to Pierre Menard’s fragmentary <i>Quixote</i>, and onward to the rise of Tlön. That Borges debunks his own literary contrivance in part refutes the egoisms of the poem; that he counteracts his ideal image with the inevitable intercession of reality refutes the assumed egoisms of the poet. Despite the intensity of the poet’s emotion, it is held in check by an equally pragmatic reserve, a balancing act that restrains a poetic climax.<br />
<br />
If the inevitable appeal of idealism is halted in “Benares”, the poet is still searching for an equivalent epiphany, as tentatively expressed in “The South”. The poet’s fervour in this first poetry collection is for his internalised and idealised city of Buenos Aires, as its title proclaims, but it is also the search for the epiphanic moments worthy of being retold: the unwelcome intervention of reality into the unreality of literature. “The South” recounts the essential elements in a list of separate images that are concatenated into one:<br />
<blockquote>To have watched from one of your patios<br />
the ancient stars,<br />
…<br />
to have heard the note of water<br />
in the cistern,<br />
known the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle,<br />
the silence of the sleeping bird,<br />
the arch of the entrance, the damp<br />
– these things perhaps are the poem.</blockquote>The still night envelops the images, its quietude precluding the transition to daylight that would threaten to introduce reality. Despite the poem’s restrained pace, the list of images still allows the formation of a single ideal artefact: the essence of a Platonic poem. This ideal poem-within-a-poem, suggested by concatenated images, anticipates the ideal artefacts of Tlön. The mere suggestion of aesthetic epiphany in “The South”, however, lacks what might be called a conclusive element – is there existence or meaning beyond the poem? For Borges at this early stage in his career, the poem is both means and end: a serpent content, for the moment, to eat its own tail.<br />
<br />
Similarly, “Unknown Street” sees the bridging effects of twilight amplify an otherwise mundane experience in the poet’s mind, where the street’s<br />
<blockquote>walls and cornices<br />
took on the pastel colour of the sky<br />
that nudged the horizon<br />
…<br />
<br />
Perhaps that moment of the silver evening<br />
suffused the street with a tenderness,<br />
making it as vivid as a verse<br />
forgotten and now remembered.</blockquote>The street becomes all streets as it assumes Platonic form, lending it a quality as intense as that of a poetic fragment. Once more, a partial image of a poem – albeit one that is more effective for being lost and subsequently recollected – assumes a curious primacy within Borges’ verse. “The South” brings to the reader a reflection on death and cyclical time, themes to which Borges would return throughout his life. The immediacy of the poem is threatened, however, within its closing lines:<br />
<blockquote>Only later did I come to think<br />
that the street of that afternoon was not mine,<br />
that every house is a branching candlestick<br />
where the lives of men burn<br />
like single candles,<br />
that each haphazard step we take<br />
treads on Golgothas. </blockquote>The poem’s earlier images of completeness become fragmented, as the poet recognises an underlying tension in the once-familiar street. Where twilight allowed the street to assume an idealised form, the poet’s memory of twilight inverts the image of the once-familiar street, now containing houses lit like candelabra, in which “the lives of men burn” like isolated candles. Kate Jenckes sees the evening characterised as a hopeful beginning: “The end of the day does not signify an end, but a beginning, a ‘venida’ of something at once hoped for (‘esperada’) and ancient”. This twilight-prompted beginning, she continues, “destroys the structures of interiorization that the poet constructs in a moment of dreamy nostalgia”, and invokes a new relationship between the poet and both past and future. Once more, the aesthetic appeal of nostalgia or ideal objects is not enough to overcome the inevitable fragmentation that results from prolonged introspection.<br />
<br />
In “Remorse for Any Death” and “Inscription on Any Tomb”, Borges continues his contemplation on what he sees as the transitive states of life and death. The former poem, meditating on the universality of death (“unlimited, abstract, almost future”), concludes that: “We have divided among us, like thieves, / the treasure of nights and days.” Time, he suggests, will slip away; the “dead person … is nothing but the loss and absence of the world”, robbed of both potential and experience. The individual is reduced to an absolute: “the dead body is not somebody: It is death”. The latter poem, however, concludes of the aftermath of death: “as you yourself are the mirror and image / of those who did not live as long as you / and others will be (and are) your immortality on earth”. Borges here depicts the self as both the instrument and the result of duplication, reaching through time to influence the lives of others. Others are made in the image of the self, he writes, that they might remake the world, the optimistic result being that the potential for one’s immortality lies in the actions of others. Mirror and image are fused in the self, and the key moments and emotions of the dead man’s life will “abide forever”; Borges exhorts the reader: “Let not the rash marble risk / garrulous breaches of oblivion’s omnipotence…. Let not the marble say what men do not.”<br />
<br />
In the poem, “Break of Day”, Borges grapples with the consequences of philosophical idealism, where reality is threatened by the absence of perception during the “horrible dawn that / prowls the ruined suburbs of the world”. Borges recalls<br />
<blockquote>… the dreadful conjecture<br />
of Schopenhauer and Berkeley<br />
which declares that the world<br />
is a mental activity …</blockquote>He sees Buenos Aires threatened with non-existence at<br />
<blockquote>… the shuddering instant of daybreak,<br />
when those who are dreaming the world are few<br />
and only the ones who have been up all night retain,<br />
ashen and barely outlined,<br />
the image of the streets<br />
that later others will define.</blockquote>This is the hour in which the “tenacious dream of life / runs the risk of being smashed to pieces”. Borges refers to the “common act of magic” that keeps the city of Buenos Aires in existence, before tightening his focus to close the poem: “with a certain remorse / for my complicity in the day’s rebirth / I ask my house to exist”. Here, the night encompasses and allows the idealised or imagined image, and only with the break of day does the real image intrude as “again the world has been spared. / Light roams the streets inventing dirty colours”.<br />
<br />
By the same token, however, the dawn that in other poems had mediated the transition between reality and imagination here confirms the “dreadful conjecture” – that the city had been close to becoming unravelled without the perceptions of wakened people to reinforce its reality. This poem, which begins with the poet recalling a philosophical detail, concludes in the imagined space of a city threatened by that same conjecture. Borges steps inside his supposition to offer the vision, anticipating the way he would frame “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”; in casting himself as the narrator retelling the recent history of a world in flux, he both allows conjecture on the results of philosophical idealism and assumes a position from which to offer a more personal commentary and his own aesthetic response.<br />
<br />
Knowing that he would eventually face the same congenital and progressive blindness as his father, Borges acknowledges the difficulty of relative perception as “Break of Day” closes: “The spent night”, he writes, “stays on in the eyes of the blind”. The liminal stages of dawn and twilight herald a transition from the ideal to the real for some, but not in the same manner for all: the imagined city exists in a different sense for those who do not experience it through sight alone. If to be is to be perceived, then an alternative mode of perception results in an alternative existence. The poet’s perception and recreation of Buenos Aires lends that city the same sense of unreality as the unvisited and therefore imagined city of “Benares” – itself “false and impenetrable” because of its genesis in the imagination. For readers – as for Borges with the city of Benares – the poetic recreation of Buenos Aires serves to ‘open’ the city, creating in one’s mind an idealised version of an otherwise very real place.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02597398273751804565noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1868814491378375054.post-22035543698357201352010-05-19T11:38:00.005+12:002010-05-31T12:55:06.443+12:00Needs no further commentAside from the all-too-obvious note that he's a singular Elvis. <br />
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I'd pay to see Elvi (and his stage show) at any one of Balmain's iconic local pubs, should the aging Melburnian Jemaine-alike take this thing on the road. There's one around every corner, according to the real estate shills, and there are certainly enough skintight bike suits and dayglo tape repositories to sustain a nightly show. Amaaazing. Can we get some more blacklight up in here?Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02597398273751804565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1868814491378375054.post-44451815111893955542010-05-24T09:26:00.004+12:002010-05-31T12:54:40.170+12:00CompressionI watched this without really knowing what I was getting into.<br />
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The first question that occurred to me was: 'Did they actually hire a stadium for this?' Then I wondered exactly who Wayne Rooney was. Then I just let go, and sat, utterly speechless, at the scale of this advertisement's ambition. Seriously, how much narrative can be compressed into 3 minutes? Someone is going to laugh at me, but it reminds me of Fellini, the way he will scarcely show you something, trusting that even a glimpse of the right image at the right moment will do the work it needs to. There's something hypnagogic here, something mythic maybe.<br />
<br />
I am a huge fan of the art form known as the preview, which is closely related to the music video. This ad has all the best elements of both, honed down to a glinting, razor edge. I suspect should be more horrified by this piece of cinema, but I'm not. I love the economy of it (a funny word to use, but it is perversely a very parsimonious piece of work), the efficiency, the direct-to-your-cerebral-cortex potency of it. It was directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, of <i>Amorres Perros</i> and <i>Babel</i> fame, but it's almost impossible to find out how much it cost. This would be my only real complaint right now.ofcourseicarehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03186408864195596534noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1868814491378375054.post-29870199508310499182009-09-16T10:34:00.002+12:002010-05-31T10:59:13.847+12:00the eXileI'm borrowing my supervisor's office for a few weeks, while he's away on leave. Several benefits accrue on that account – not least of all that I'm writing and revising my thesis in the same room in which my undergrad work has received so much criticism and assistance, which lets me channel my indolence into a constant stream of improvements to grammar and expression – but the best part of it all is the immediate presence of all the books an old-school Modernist could ever want, with particular emphasis on Lowry, Beckett and Joyce. And sidelines on Nabokov, Flannery O'Connor, Dante, John Fowles, Graham Greene, et cetera, ad infinitum.<br />
<br />
My casual reading list has been much richer for all of this, of course – last week it was Lowry's Selected Poems and the Conrad Aiken-inspired Ultramarine. (Lowry named the novel after Aitken's Blue Voyage; Aiken suggested the more fitting title of Purple Passage.) Then I moved on to a book of essays on Joyce's "The Dead"; the hard-to-find (at a reasonable price) Faber edition of Eliot's manuscript for "The Waste Land", with plenty of annotations and strikethroughs by Ezra Pound; Brian Boyd's take on Nabokov's Pale Fire (and then Pale Fire itself); Borges' Inquisiciones and Other Inquisitions; and yesterday, to a book I didn't think I'd find here – The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia, by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi.<br />
<br />
There was a flurry of interest in the eXile around these parts in 2003, when Critic landed an interview with Dr. John Dolan, who'd left the University and the woes of what was then English 124 (now ENGL126) behind him in a cloud of dust, and headed off to co-edit the newspaper. Critic's then-news editor (later editor for real) Hamish McKenzie wrote this feature on Dolan and the eXile, complete with gratuitously long quotes with so much gold that there was nowhere to cut or paraphrase:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>"Listen, I taught the first-year med students at Otago for EIGHT YEARS!!! You think I'm scared of death? Death is nothing! Those terrible lectures in ENGL 124 on Monday afternoons - those were the test for me. I remember that nightmarish first year - I came so close to bolting from Castle 2 one time. The valium prescription had run out on me about halfway through the lecture and I saw in full intensity the serried ranks of those mean, med-student faces sneering lazily down at me from the nearly-vertical rows of seats. People at Otago don't know how strange the atmosphere there really is by comparison with most real universities. I had been teaching at [University of California] Berkeley, where students of 18 are grown-ups and pleasant, witty, trusting grown-ups at that. To be faced by eight or nine hundred vicious, provincial adolescents staring down at you on a sleety Monday evening ... you think that after surviving that I'm going to be scared in Moscow? Death is easy; the med students are scary. Those were the most vile, evil, worthless excuses for human beings I've encountered in a long and checkered life. It's a pity they can't all be put to work shovelling the water out of the Leith with colanders."</blockquote><blockquote>...</blockquote><blockquote>That's Dolan for you - give him an inch and he'll write a column lambasting everything that's wrong about the society you live in.</blockquote><br />
The book (Grove Press, 2000) has a foreword by Edward Liminov in almost-broken English that sets the tone:<br />
<blockquote>[The] female condition in eXile is worst than in poorest Bedouin family wandering in the deserts of Israel.... The eXile's crew is also arrogant, and making fun of authorities. They have questioned Russian men: How much money would you have to be paid before you'd fuck Madeleine Albright? Russian men declined proposition.</blockquote>What are political beliefs of Ames and Taibbi? they are totally politically incorrect. they are extremists of a new brand: leftists and right-wingers in same time, they are racist red communist agitators worst than three-key people, bloodthirsty as Chikatilo, about women you know.<br />
<br />
But damn it's a great read. Ames and Taibbi clip in dozens of articles from the newspaper as sidebars, slander their workmates and each other, come up with new and curious ways to get some serious libel happening, and slam idealistic expatriat Americans to the ground. Wonderful stuff – if related by potentially unreliable narrators – it's depressing and scary, all the more so because it's exactly like the alternative press should be anywhere in the world, strugging for funding to stay afloat, jumping from scandal to libel to the horrors of everyday politics, and it's nothing I'd have to guts to write myself, regardless of where I lived.<br />
<br />
The eXile is gone now, shut down over a year ago after an "unplanned audit" of its editorial content; scared investors promptly pulled their funding. “The government does not need to jail or shoot people,” Mark Ames told Carl Schreck. “All they have to do to keep people under control is say ‘Boo!’" Here's Owen Matthews, writing for the Moscow Times:<br />
<blockquote>Is the paper guilty? Hell yes - at least by the puritanical standards of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The eXile was a biweekly dish of political gossip (often surprisingly incisive), grim reports from the country’s underbelly and amphetamine-fueled vitriol against Middle America. It was also heavily laced with pornography, satirical graphics and outrageous club reviews penned by a series of fictional correspondents. This was the paper that created the “Death Porn” column, a compendium of the week’s most gruesome crimes illustrated with police photos. Its most recent issue hailed the early arrival of “snapper season,” complete with photos of naked provincial girls taken from the “Dyevscovery Channel.”</blockquote>The original website's <a href="http://www.exile.ru/">still up</a>, apparently still shilling for donations to stay afloat, while new content has shifted to <a href="http://exiledonline.com/">http://exiledonline.com/</a>. Gems from the eXile's new home include Tal Sutsa's article "Memphis: where Steve Jobs goes to eat his fellow Americans" (<a href="http://exiledonline.com/memphis-where-the-oligarchs-eat-their-fellow-americans/">link</a>) and Mark Ames' new radio show (<a href="http://exiledonline.com/cat/exiled-radio/">link</a>). The eXile is a model for controversy, fun, an incidentally increased readership and doing absolutely everything you can't do if you get that internship at Fairfax.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02597398273751804565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1868814491378375054.post-37843395445525959562010-05-30T10:45:00.004+12:002010-05-30T12:21:48.977+12:00Hair, over thereMy daughter is one, and currently involved in an undergraduate psychology experiment run by the University of Otago's Psychology Department. Ignoring the implication of the department's location inside the gaping, embarrassingly puddle-ridden Commerce Building, we trundle up the 7th floor, where she sits in front of screens and is shown faces of various races. The experiment, I was told by a young, slightly orange-faced young woman whose perfume reminded me of a cheap bar, was designed to investigate the details children used to differentiate between people of different races. My daughter was good at distinguishing people of roughly Nordic heritage. She struggled a little with Pacific Islanders, and, to cement a cliche as old as rice paper itself, was utterly lost when confronted with a range of Asian and Middle-eastern faces. Thankfully, it only took a few visits to get considerably better at discerning less familiar face types. My brazenly Aryan daughter had redeemed herself.<br /><br />It turns out that the pattern recognition systems employed by our brains kick in early, lurching about, searching for a reliable range of details to distinguish one person from another. European children go for hair, noses, mouths. Asian kids are much better at eyes. And so on. The process is generic - it's not as though Korean kids are hardwired to recognise eyes - they're hardwired to find something to define one face from another, and it turns out, eyes are the thing. Hair in Asia, broadly speaking, just isn't varied enough to cut the mustard identity-wise. As a result, Asians' distinctions, when based on hair, are made in fairly broad strokes. Which solves, for me, an enduring mystery.<br /><br />Consider the following:<br /><br /><object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/XRvtahIOVtk&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/XRvtahIOVtk&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br />I have no idea what these guys won, or who won, or even who they are, but there's some pretty funked-out, ka-ni, architectural hair going on right there - as there often is when young Japanese guys appear in front of a camera. <br /><br />And now we know why - conditioned from birth to largely ignore hair as a definitive personal characteristic, these guys have to try about 3 or 4 times harder than you or me, to make a mark with their 'do. They're pushing against a crushing weight of cognitive selection, just to be noticed. Hence, what seems like a touching homage to My Little Pony (viz, the dude to the right of the MC) is really a restrained and debonair quiff that practically pays for itself after only two-and-a-half hours in make-up, and enough hairspray to fossilize a small penguin colony.<br /><br />Or am I just being crazy, and the guys on <b>American Idol</b> look just as frou-frou?ofcourseicarehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03186408864195596534noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1868814491378375054.post-63797320337717210232010-05-28T16:50:00.000+12:002010-05-28T16:50:42.129+12:00ene-be-aI grew up with a father ensconced, to varying degrees according to the whims of the Otago Law Society, in the legal profession. Lawyers, I take great pleasure in noting, charge not by the hour, but <i>determinedly</i> by the six-minute unit, meaning that a dozen short phone calls from a drunk fifteen-year-old in the police cells asking for advice over a 30-minute period could equal roughly an hour and a quarter of billable hours. (Few professions can bend time like this, or altogether deny its existence right up until the moment they sent the bill.)<br />
<br />
Basketball, then, was a pretty sweet deal. Forty-eight minutes, no injury time, limited time-outs: it kept to the family schedule, didn't run over time (the 1993 NBA Finals Game Three was a notable and extremely tense exception), didn't ever finish before the final whistle, and legitimised baggy clothing with readily apparent logos and brands. Important, in 1993.<br />
<br />
It's probably unfair to assume that it was solely a unit-driven upbringing that predisposed me to enjoy basketball – the spectatorship of which lives and dies based on a delightful formula whose end-product is a 24-second possession – and the appeal of that knock-off Chicago Bulls Starter singlet wore off pretty quickly. That formula, though. Try reverse-engineering the thing, imagining Commish David Stern's 1954 equivalent in your ear: "Fans want a hundred points per game from their team, and we've only got 48 minutes to give it to them. Twenty-five points in 360 seconds per team per quarter, divided by the average points per team possession (crunch the FG, FT and 3PT percentages, carry the one)…" It's a thing of beauty; it's finding a capital-'P' Proof based on first principles.<br />
<br />
I'm now in a country where NBA games are free-to-air and live, and while Eastern Conference games can't be found for love or money, the battle for the West continues every two or three days. Or it would, if live coverage of the Socceroos' gripping press conferences wouldn't keep obscuring TNT's pre-game comment-off. Not that I'm missing much from Charles Barkley, whose co-hosts have to help him along every misstep of the way. Kobe gets in on the act, too – where players without shoes named after them have the humility to ask the Round Mound how to get the step on defensive boards, Bryant just offers a shit-eating grin and asks how many donuts CB34 got through in his career. Former Indiana Pacers swingman Reggie Miller can't quite make up for it, commenting just as he used to play, by keeping his head down and sniping in from left-of-screen when everyone else is tired.<br />
<br />
The Mound is all kinds of interesting, but I want to hear Toni Kukoc telling us just why Goran Dragic thinks he can drive to the hoop <i>again</i>. I want to hear Clyde Drexler analyse Steve Nash's scoop layups, hear Spud Webb explain why Shannon Brown didn't <i>quite</i> manage to jump over Jason Richardson in Game One, hear John Starks belittle Derek Fisher. I want to hear Karl Malone laugh.<br />
<br />
Though, maybe he could look at Pau Gasol's gameface.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7iRYi7ErqQxJCYfsKYKvjsFAP2zC8TF0U5tyLTtp2aIGJ9I5V2xarVvJ-BldSbuoUSSsx_AAnz_Ljd-A57rEAYQ-9Puo4-sQ0uWsAp8mE5FNAsO_YNqsTKI3I-H1ATTHKqkvj1nubwiis/s1600/ept_sports_nba_experts-903305176-1274208300.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7iRYi7ErqQxJCYfsKYKvjsFAP2zC8TF0U5tyLTtp2aIGJ9I5V2xarVvJ-BldSbuoUSSsx_AAnz_Ljd-A57rEAYQ-9Puo4-sQ0uWsAp8mE5FNAsO_YNqsTKI3I-H1ATTHKqkvj1nubwiis/s320/ept_sports_nba_experts-903305176-1274208300.jpeg" /></a></div><br />
With the series tied up 2-2, today's game was always going to be a barometer, a test to see whether Bryant and Gasol could push back against the Suns and their scarily efficient bench. Whether I'd be able to discuss the Finals with Wilburforce the Fucking Pro Wrestler without knowing – <i>knowing</i> – that my Eastern Conference underdogs, whoever they turn out to be, would effectively be swept by the guys in imperial purple and gold. Whether Los Suns could pull off an emphatic triple construction.<br />
<br />
After losing two straight, Kobe was angry – in the pre-game interview, he almost threw his microphone out of the pram. The first scoring play saw Steve Nash milk an all-too-cheeky foul from Derek Fisher and hit two free throws. Robin Lopez's afro was ridiculously buoyant throughout, but it failed as a measure of the Suns' success. At the worst, the Lakers led by 18, and even a late run and an eventual 3 to tie everything up at 101 apiece couldn't do more than give Kobe another chance to take a game-winning shot in the final 3.5 seconds. Or, as the case may be, airball it straight into the hands of Ron Artest, who only had to appear to take the shot or be fouled. Back to Phoenix for Game Six.<br />
<div><br />
</div>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02597398273751804565noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1868814491378375054.post-51346727497027325802010-05-28T12:49:00.001+12:002010-05-28T13:18:18.096+12:00Welcome to the Space JamOh God. I can't get enough of <a href="http://studentorgs.utexas.edu/salsa/proceedings/2001/papers/brody.pdf">this</a> (pdf), Michal Brody's paper on the startling similarities between the 1996 MJ-and-Bugs vehicle <i>Space Jam</i> and the Mayan creation myth <i>Popul Vuh</i>.<br />
<blockquote>Consciously or unconsciously, the film's writers have developed a narrative in which a pair of heroes (Bugs Bunny and Michael Jordan) 1) are summoned to play a high-stakes underworld ball-game against a variety of frightening villains, 2) manage to defeat those villains through the heroes' summoning of extra-human ability, and 3) ascend from the underworld with a glowing orb, all of which occur in the <i>Popol Vuh</i>. While the details vary (in the <i>Popol Vuh</i>, the heroes intend to retrieve the head of their father, Hunahpu; whereas in <i>Space Jam</i>, the villains have stolen the talent of NBA stars such as Charles Barkley and Patrick Ewing), the congruence is remarkable. Brody also shows that the well-known phonetic irregularities of, e.g., Daffy Duck and Sylvester are quite analogous to those of ancestral characters in a variety of native cosmologies.</blockquote><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGAZQekOMOjDz-k_cLGZusBnAhTqGYrLh7HQPHrtiR9dpRlJ1H8ztWG4inhNLFlMcveT5ZBjp-pAqAMwNweZnhyOgOmAHRWxJ0bEyW0lRj3_PbjwoeoAylkzL2qOd96OqQ_2sqmDgq7t3u/s1600/Space+Jam.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGAZQekOMOjDz-k_cLGZusBnAhTqGYrLh7HQPHrtiR9dpRlJ1H8ztWG4inhNLFlMcveT5ZBjp-pAqAMwNweZnhyOgOmAHRWxJ0bEyW0lRj3_PbjwoeoAylkzL2qOd96OqQ_2sqmDgq7t3u/s320/Space+Jam.jpeg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b>Hero twins. Also, Bill Murray.</b></span></div></blockquote><blockquote>In addition, the Looney Tunes are not bound by the physical laws of the known world and are capable of recovering almost instantly from injuries that would more than kill any one of us. Those characteristics are shared as well by the Hero Twins of the <i>Popol Vuh</i>. Like the Tune Squad, their adventure in defeating the lords of the under-world is filled with treachery, faith, and the symbolic power of the sphere. Thus, we’ve seen that a venerated and classic story with grand- scale cultural importance has significant thematic parallels with a trifling and inconsequential Hollywood bauble intended principally for viewing by children. </blockquote>There's a digital version of the <i>Popul Vuh</i> (<i>Wuj</i>?) <a href="http://library.osu.edu/sites/popolwuj/">here</a>, if anyone would like to take this further, compare-and-contrast styles. Alternative option: compare <i>Who Framed Roger Rabbit</i> with the inevitable apotheosis of the monomyth's Universal Hero.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02597398273751804565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1868814491378375054.post-50114501128853870232008-09-15T12:18:00.010+12:002010-05-19T12:28:16.578+12:00Review: Uncommon Arrangements<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjoFHJ1ZqA2juKirLCYToRKGeoUIEZ3PRDObMgc474Ku8D-buEyJcHAzoUIY_Vk7x3wQQdMA2SaLltG2OscURwVv9tpHDs0qh6U_C7boHxg56XAXX4n2fiEY06xDnn-fRITsw5CZKCD0U_/s1600/uncommon+arrangements.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjoFHJ1ZqA2juKirLCYToRKGeoUIEZ3PRDObMgc474Ku8D-buEyJcHAzoUIY_Vk7x3wQQdMA2SaLltG2OscURwVv9tpHDs0qh6U_C7boHxg56XAXX4n2fiEY06xDnn-fRITsw5CZKCD0U_/s320/uncommon+arrangements.jpeg" /></a></div><br />
<br />
Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939<br />
Katie Roiphe<br />
Virago<br />
<br />
Katie Roiphe, daughter of first-generation feminist Anne Roiphe, vaulted her way to a semi-permanent spot on the list of America’s intellectuals with her first book, <i>The Morning After: Fear, Sex and Feminism On Campus</i>, which was simultaneously hailed and reviled for its unapologetic and polarising subject matter – sexual politics among young adults. Heralded initially as the “first intellectual of her generation,” later relegated to simply being a part of the post-Reagan young Conservative movement, and then grudgingly accepted back into the ranks of post-feminist writers who felt they owed little to their antecedents, Roiphe the younger has made a successful career out of toeing the line between her mother’s more overt feminism and a peculiar kind of logical individualism.<br />
<br />
<i>Uncommon Arrangements</i>, too, is a boundary book, and delves into the grey area between popular literature, historical biography and academic criticism, giving Roiphe the chance to revel in the ‘soft’ genre of literary biography. The book focuses on the marriages, long-term affairs and friendships that linked a group of writers active between 1910 and the beginning of the second world war, featuring well-known (and often-referenced) pairs such as Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, but also stretches to cover couples such as H.G. and Jane Wells, as well as H.G.’s mistress, Rebecca West.<br />
<br />
In analysing these lives, Roiphe seems completely at home, safe with the hard-copy evidence of piles of literary detritus, and a comfortable prose style possible only when writing about deceased subjects. With such material, then, Roiphe recovers from the jarringly callow observations to which she was prone in her earlier work, although the few that still slip through likely say more about the author than she would like readers to take from the book. She approves wholeheartedly, for example, of the understanding letter Jane Wells wrote to her husband after he walked out on her and their young son, in which the long-suffering Jane blames herself for being too possessive, and not understanding her husband’s needs. Roiphe is harsher on H.G.’s mistress, Rebecca West, who simply “wanted someone to fuss over her.”<br />
<br />
There’s an odd double standard throughout Roiphe’s editorialising – in the narrative she constructs, her subjects manage to defend the traditions of marriage at the same time as they infer the social benefits of extramarital affairs. Reconciling this is no easy matter. The book keeps coming back to the idea that strong (and fiercely intellectual) feminists can still find an appeal in brutish masculinity, just as Roiphe comes back to her favourite themes – accountability and personal responsibility, sometimes in the face of all logic. In her steadfast refusal to cast women as victims, it seems that Roiphe has internalised the male gaze in her writing, while simultaneously professing to agree with the logic of feminism. And all of this bleeds through the literary value of <i>Uncommon Arrangements</i>.<br />
<br />
New Zealand audiences familiar with the cottage industry C.K. Stead has built up around Katherine Mansfield will find little new information, although Roiphe contextualises extremely well, and <i>Uncommon Arrangements</i> provides a grounding in the complex public and private relationships of writers around the same period as Mansfield. Roiphe gradually builds up a picture of what she sees as the (tempting and attractive) flaws and (safe) inhibitions of the Victorian age. Marriage, she says, was a socially acceptable convenience that enables a queer sort of freedom in the newlyweds, the freedom that can come only after they have accepted the constraints of society. The tie that binds can also loosen, it seems.<br />
<br />
It may appear so, but <i>Uncommon Arrangements</i> isn’t a dry history of married life – rather, it’s a very involved account of several intertwining relationships, as seen through the eyes of an equally involved writer. The power dynamics between couples clearly fascinate this author, and investing her time into scholarship rather than polemic allows for a much more balanced book than her previous efforts, if one that is still an introduction to the literary letters scene.<br />
<br />
To revert to a more Victorian parlance, <i>Uncommon Arrangements</i> acts as A Young Academic’s Primer: a point of departure for further study, rather than a destination in itself. Those following the overarching Roiphe story – how the author revises and reiterates her idiosyncratic mindset over the course of writing her different books – will, however, read much of interest into the book.<br />
<br />
This article was first published in <a href="http://www.critic.co.nz/">Critic</a>.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02597398273751804565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1868814491378375054.post-27208929982274554672010-05-19T10:48:00.006+12:002010-05-19T11:18:43.535+12:00SoapIt is the curse of media culture that the brutal, banal or tedious must often stand in as emblems of larger issues. One thing stands for another. Many events are similar in shape, ultimately. I’m thinking of McCarthy barking across the floor in the hearings that bore his name, and the echo that rang out over America. I’m thinking of the fungal silhouette that loomed over the lives of anyone born before 1991. I’m thinking of Britney Spears’ garish divorce playing out like the murmur of a hotwater heater in the bathrooms of our souls. She has less currency than she once did, and there are dozens vying to replace her, but she remains a byword for that breed of hapless, tasteless ambition that thrives in the afterglow of America’s time in the sun. No less than a mushroom cloud.ofcourseicarehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03186408864195596534noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1868814491378375054.post-85033757602206071972010-05-03T12:41:00.000+12:002010-05-03T12:41:38.612+12:00On books and other books<blockquote><i>The ugly fact is that books are made out of other books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written. </i></blockquote><div style="text-align: right;">Cormac McCarthy, 1992 </div><div style="text-align: right;"><br />
</div>Last week, like a garden-variety postgrad junkie, I attended a William Faulkner masterclass at UNSW with Professor Noel Polk, who edited Faulkner's novels (1930-35) for the Library of America, and who probably has a better handle on Faulkner's manuscripts than anyone else in the field. (Received knowledge, this, but after the masterclass I don't have cause to argue it.) I followed the crowds from the 891 to the middle of the campus – modern, sporadically weeded and no less confusing than any university campus – wandered around until by some stroke of luck I found the right building, and despite feeling like I was walking into a high-school gymnasium, eventually ended up in the correct seminar room. <br />
<br />
Once there, we heard a paper from Noel about "The Leg" and "Mistral", two minor short stories with the common thread of never quite knowing what's going on, and I left with the distinct impression that despite not having read enough Faulkner in undergrad courses to get a handle on the guy, my thesis topic means that almost anything to do with literary conversation and dialogism in the Modernist field is worth hearing. I left the burbs with the title of a book to track down, Richard Gray's <i>A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature</i>, and a recurrence of that uneasy feeling that shoehorning both Jorges Luis Borges and Malcolm Lowry into a discussion of literature's Platonic Library may be verging on the optimistic. Tending towards pessimism in any case, T.S. Eliot's seminal "Tradition and the Individual Talent" provides a leg-up, and I'm working towards a thesis that Borges' sense of the Universal Library equates to an individual fascination and horror at the near-infinite (but decidedly finite) sources, whereas Lowry, the congenital copier with a "pelagarist pen", relies exceedingly heavily on outside sources for his own creative process. Despite our lack of time to adjust all the frame-widths for resolution-agnostic viewing, the last iteration of <a href="http://www.otago.ac.nz/english/lowry">The Malcolm Lowry Project</a> shows this reasonably ably, even 1994-era hypertext being a natural medium for annotation.<br />
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The synecdochic extension of undergraduate classes and, to a lesser degree, even the necessarily blinkered research for a Master's, tend to leave rather a lot of elephants in any given room, and the process of determining them Indian, African or otherwise is rather overwhelming. The spectre of Tradition, of drawing together all possible and probable sources, looms large, and even then managing to avoid (re)stating the obvious – well <i>of course</i> books are made out of other books – remains a concern. Lucky these things are supposed to take a few years.<br />
<br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />The Australian Association of Literature is holding its 2010 conference on Literature and Science at UNSW in July. I've (optimistically) submitted an abstract promising to examine the guiding principles of sf hybridity in Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos – framed by discussion of the triune Keats persona as mediated by an unknowable Logos – but at the very least there's a lot going on here, conference-wise. (I had a back-up abstract ready to go on Philip K. Dick's <i>DADOES</i>, our two cats and the production of kipple, that physical manifestation of entropy, but the less said about that, the better.)Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02597398273751804565noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1868814491378375054.post-81987403772772714102010-04-13T20:29:00.007+12:002010-04-19T21:12:09.551+12:00SexIn order to understand my own brand of confusion, and interpret the following, you may want to read the whole article I'm pulling the lines from (<a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n21/jenny-diski/diary">http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n21/jenny-diski/diary</a>). It's about Roman Polanski, but Jenny Diski also writes about being raped at age 14. She says:<br /><blockquote>"My overall reaction solidified into contempt rather than shame. I didn’t think that it was the most terrible thing that had ever happened to me. It was a very unpleasant experience, it hurt and I was trapped. But I had no sense that I was especially violated by the rape itself, not more than I would have been by any attack on my person and freedom. In 1961 it didn’t go without saying that to be penetrated against one’s will was a kind of spiritual murder. I was more disgusted by him than I was shamed or diminished. A different zeitgeist, luckily for me."</blockquote><div>I was thrown by that. By someone whose writing I really respected and enjoyed saying, effectively, that the cultural pathos of rape had deepened its horror. I'm not sure exactly what I thought before that. Maybe not a lot. Diski's passage slowly connected to my memories of Africa, where marriage, sex, and breeding are more or less economic relationships. That is the social set-up round sex in those parts. No-one talks about love - which seems, to me, to be the word my culture uses to sanctify sex. What happens, say, on Taranaki St, or on a larger scale in Cambodian sex tourism, is sex for money. Sex for money. That's what it is, isn't it? It's not rape. It's not love. As soon as you demote sex to 'another thing that happens' (which it could be, and I suspect, should be) the horror becomes merely the lack of choice. Now, I'm NOT going to get as deterministic as I sometimes do and say, shit, even this blog is (<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I believe to a very advanced degree</span>) pre-determined, because I feel in very shaky territory. What I can say is that any number of events less horrific than rape are equally forced and choiceless. Marriage still operates in some cases as a protracted form of rape. But that's speaking metaphorically, which is disingenuous perhaps. I don't know. I'm a bit lost now. Sex isn't sacred. Sex is sex. Rape is what happens either side of that, perhaps.</div>ofcourseicarehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03186408864195596534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1868814491378375054.post-24729356214668959542010-04-17T12:14:00.003+12:002010-04-17T13:17:26.063+12:00Not The Sharpest ToolAdapting foreign television games shows for a New Zealand audience proved fertile soil for producers here in the 80s and 90s, with <i>Krypton Factor</i>, <i>Sale Of The Century</i> and <i>Wheel Of Fortune</i> all serving as family favourites; the latter two were also developed into board games, amounting to little more than poorly made tart-ups of Trivial <i>Pursuit: Genus Edition</i> and Hangman, in exchange for coupons for consumer goods. Both sat neglected, alongside local anomalies <i>Kiwi SportsMania</i> and <i>Poleconomy</i> in the games cupboard. So it followed that the reality television boom of the past decade would be given a zero-budget local refit and sold to the lowest denominator. High production values are out of the question, so you lose <i>Real World</i>, <i>Big Brother</i> and <i>Amazing Race</i> straight out of the gate. Incidentally, <i>The Amazing Race</i> has been hosted since it’s inception by ex-pat NZer Phil Keoghan who, in 1990, was working as a presenter on after school TV escapade 3.45 Live, the same year Nick Tansley hosted the only televised season of Treasure Hunt, featuring couples negotiating the country in a helicopter solving clues. Coincidence? But cheap Polynesian versions on a Survivor/Treasure Island theme can be knocked out relatively easily and there are more than enough C-List media whores (to populate dancing contests) and bored housewives (with inept DIY husbands). And that about sums up New Zealand’s weight class.<br /><br />Occasionally you think they get the downsizing ratio just right, like <i>New Zealand’s Hottest Home Baker</i> as a small town / small time franchise of Master Chef, and I still have high hopes for Savage’s (sub)urban “fish-out-of-water” saga <i>Hip Hop High</i>. But I love watching the trainwreck when ambition wins out over reality, and we get treated to generous helpings of televisual pudding like <i>New Zealand Idol</i>, <i>New Zealand’s Next Top Model</i> and <i>The Apprentice: New Zealand</i>. Pretending there is a market for manufactured pop stars and high-end catwalk models in this country is endearing its own way, but the façade of penthouse-suite corporate power suits – in Wellington – is easily the masterstroke. Right now, a sausage sizzle is firing up outside 721 Fifth Avenue, New York. Surely. I'm not suggesting producers be put off developing other people's concepts in lieu of a genuine brainwave themselves, not at all, but that someone really, really make a local version of ...<br /><br /><object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/XpGWjN0Tf2k&hl=en_GB&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/XpGWjN0Tf2k&hl=en_GB&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="385" width="480"></embed></object><br /><br /><i>Tool Academy</i>.<br /><br />In the many and varied world of race-to-the-bottom reality programming, this show reigns supreme right now. It's not the most entertaining, or the most cringeworthy, or the most lucrative, but there is also a lack of guilt associated with the indulgence of watching it, because all the contestants are <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPB908xhGT0&feature=related">fucking</a> <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M96SB979vhg&feature=related">retarded</a>. Three seasons have run in the U.S, and in each twelve 'Tools' are duped into thinking they're going to be party kings, but instead are being taking into televised couples counselling. This ruse somehow continues to be effective <i>beyond the first season</i>. Incredible. Credit to the show, though, they go beyond the classic archetypes on repeat model of casting of <i>The Real World</i>, and get quite creative with their pigeonholing, evidenced by the line-ups in Seasons <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_Academy_%28season_1%29#Contestants">One</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_Academy_%28season_2%29#Contestants">Two</a>. Overheads are low. There are no big prizes or elaborate challenges, just the Tools, their partners, and the soothing voice of the counsellor/judge/jury/executioner, who for authoritative reasons in the U.S is played by stern Briton Trina Dolenz. Here in New Zealand, they should probably just use Mary Lambie. She was fantastic in <i>The Weakest Link</i>. As for local villainy, many of the originals are Universal, but it would be remiss to exlude Bogan Tools, Black Power Tools and Sexually Repressed Through Colonial Overhang Tools.<br /><br />The novelty of seeing New Zealand's Bad Bad Boyfriends scrapping it out for airtime and public humilation/redemption pales is dwarfed, however, by the potential of <i>Tool Academy</i> to branch out into the Celebrity Edition. The cult of celebrity, and the sense of ownership the tabloid buying public seems to claim, has ben on the up and up for a while, demanding exemplary behaviour of these perceived immortals who live in the Public Domain. If I sat outside your window and took photos of you getting undressed, I would most likely be arrested. If you make films or music for a living, I would be considered a <a href="http://www.tmz.com">valid news source</a>. And when the celebrity falls, oh how the opinions fly, the fame-whores emerge, and the public demands their pound of flesh. So why not do it in the most public, most heavily edited, most controlled, most ridiculous forum possible: Celebrity Tool Academy, with Tiger Woods (Texting Tool), Silvio Berlusconi (Prime Ministerial Tool) and Jesse James (Grand Wizard Tool) all making solid contemporary candidates. Public humiliation is the only satisfying catharsis for the modern media zeitgeist, and the sooner they realise this the better.Aaron Hawkinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01117693251442539292noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1868814491378375054.post-75962268823320282712010-04-12T16:11:00.009+12:002010-04-16T20:31:43.222+12:00We are lost hereThe Hurt Locker is a film about a three-man bomb disposal team working in Iraq. TIME critic Richard Corliss called it ‘a near perfect movie’; The Los Angeles Times pronounced it ‘the film about the war in Iraq that we’ve been waiting for’; and it took the highest average national box office returns for its opening weekend. Then it won the 2009 Oscar for Best Picture. And at first I could see why. The cinematography was well considered, gelling neatly with the editor’s urge to cut faster than I could blink, and the actors seemed convincingly disoriented by the resulting effect. But as the movie drew on, I came to think that what The Wall Street Journal called ‘austere technique’ was really the most recent perfection of an utterly familiar sequence of pull focuses, tense high angles, and jerky claustrophobia. The dialogue was as jarring as the camerawork, and the characters felt as if they were assembled from soldiers killed in previous films. They included a tense, neurotic coward who gets shot (but does manage to kill someone first); a stolid African American resistant to the idea of children; and the new commander (replacing Guy Pierce, who explodes in the first scene), whose cowboy antics endanger the team, yet never quite reveal the disturbed rag doll beneath. I felt myself watching something ghostly and familiar, a noontime apparition that could never quite shake its shadow.<br />
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The Hurt Locker was very well received, which makes it the latest example of that most revealing of American misonceptions: that an explosion is an event. An explosion is an instant, which the surrounding material illuminates and gives impact to. In other words, it really depends what’s being blown up, and in The Hurt Locker the surrounding material slowly revealed itself to be little more than the wadding from other, better films: the cowboy is lodged in a profound emotional rut; he at first jeopardizes then unifies the squad; the psychiatrist, focusing mistakenly on the coward’s rationality, is blown-up when he decides to join them on a mission, and son. These plot-by-number details are disguised by the care Kathryn Bigelow, the director, takes to isolate her characters from the larger picture of war – a picture in which her characters’ arthriticsm would be more crippling. It reminds me that there is a certain beauty that turns men’s heads, which makes for a profound banality when admired for longer than it takes a woman pass in the street. Bigelow assembles the fragments of her film with a student’s sympathy, but if it lives up to its claimed ‘perfection’, it must be that perfection lies in her merging of details – perfection as an act of obscurantism.<br />
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And this is the essence of my complaint with the Hurt Locker – not in the ongoing fatalism of the military myth; nor the insidiousness of its representation of Blackness (as something with a cellular fealty to values upon which America has an implicit monopoly); nor even the killing of Guy Pierce and then Ralph Fiennes within five minutes of meeting these fine character actors. The hard core of my gripe is: It told me nothing. Characters are bootstrapped to events and the result is a handful of angry humuculi backlit by a series of aborted explosions. About the most we learn is that Iraq is hot, dusty, and very confusing – but so what? I know war is confusing. Every piece of decent writing since Frost has told me this. Joseph Heller told me this. Norman Mailer told me this. Francis Ford Coppola told me this. I even found myself enjoying Sam Mendes when he was telling me this. I get the point. War fucks you up. How often must I hear this before the reality takes the course of all good fiction, and changes? The options are: a) an end to war, or b) make a different kind of modern war film. Though neither seems particularly likely, the latter is at least conceivable. However, it was never something in Bigelow’s ambit. She was once married to James Cameron, and her control of spectacle is no less impressive. Spectacle, after all, must first and foremost be managed, presented, packaged, but this does not make Bigelow a talented director, it makes her a seamstress. One who is very adept at disguising her stitches.<br />
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I distrust an audience that can regard this species of pastiche as ‘incisive’, let alone critics who term it ‘a penetrating study’. We know that power can be drawn from repackaging the old as new, but the critical response to the film seems oblivous – almost obeisant – to this part-way honesty, the semi-sufficiency of the half-truths it wallows in. Like the war itself, in which a partial lie first mobilised an invasion, then was castigated by a similarly incomplete revelation, America’s reluctance to investigate its own mythology has predictably turned into flagellating the mythology itself. The film’s aim is to challenge the viewer, one senses this in its air of doubt and discontent, but only an audience deeply inured to or sheltered from modern film could find it confronting. It’s challenging in the way that everyday life must be arduous to someone missing an arm. What it is not, is interesting. The question, then, is this: was The Hurt Locker's vibrant reception based in the mainstream audience’s lack of acquaintance with cinema, or their numbness to it?<br />
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The circuitous answer, I suspect, is that materialism focuses on circumstances over psychology. It is an almost unforgiveably general statement, but modern life is largely concerned with material conditions. Always outwards, pointing in, behaviourism has become a sort of default social stance, in which the individual’s situation is assessed in terms of access to infrastructure, income, known history and any other details we can glean. Only literary biographers and post-Colonial theorists bother with the inner states of groups. Educated to look to events and objects as measures of well-being, audiences respond to characters informed by those same forces, while writers, directors, artists and poets treat realism as a kind of fastidious documentary process: an explosion is the latest sign that the stolid, black character is unhappy. He does want children now? see conflagrations 3 through 7. Realism, under either of these conditions, is no longer realism. It is a collage of approximations, a subalternation of the truth.<br />
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I cannot say when precisely we past the crest of this realist wave, probably in the seventies or late sixties when a brand of surrealism the likes of which informed Catch 22 or Apocalypse Now was turned to realist ends. These films reached at the truth through overstatement, exaggeration, the vile twisting of some unconcious recognition. Unfortunately – as the surrealists discovered in the mid-fifties – after this movement, there is nothing. The terrain through which you were moving at last swallows up your point of origin, leaving you lost, directionless and perhaps unreachable. After that, films that sought to deal with war could only tell us this one thing: We are lost here.<br />
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In the space between form and formulaism lies all of art. Confronted with an accustation of cliché or triteness, the writer’s response is frequently to point to Joseph Campbell and mutter something about the monomyth. This is the narrative equivalent of a three-year-old standing beside a broken window and pointing to the dog, as if to say, he did it. Wittgenstein struggled to find the atomic elements he felt constituted all of language, but I do not think it’s seriously in doubt that there are fundamental features of fiction. In fact, I would go further and say that ‘story’ can be reduced to a basic, finite componentry and remain both meaningful and useful (if a little blurry). This is not the same thing as seeing, tucked into the tailends of testaments to The Hurt Locker's brilliance, adjectives such as ‘sturdy’ or ‘efficient’. This suggests something more mechanical, with joints and pivots we can reveal, if we just pull back a little of the film’s skin. When this is done, what is on display is not a shining, oiled cinematic skeleton, but a fairly typical oblivousness of the inter-workings of the classical mythologic structures.<br />
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True to Ecclesiasties, there is nothing new under the sun. It is the essence of this misleadingly nuanced declaration that Campbell takes his bearing from, and unless one is directing a French new-wave film from 1972, there will always be a Change of Circumstances in a story, there will always be a Girl, there will usually be a Coward. These are the ideas that any apprentice should be inculcated with. But still it can be taken too far. We had seen the characters in The Hurt Locker before, but this was literally true in the case of the coward – the actor Brian Geraghty played an identical character in Jarhead, a far more potent film on a more or less identical subject. I hadn’t seen Jarhead recently, so had to check the Wikipedia page to quite believe it. Bigelow co-opted the character in toto. Near the film’s end, he is shot by the cowboy, who is trying to save his life (the coward doesn’t die, he is only injured), and afterwards is evacuated from Iraq, whining and swearing. Over 120 minutes, the character had not altered in the slightest. The stunning arc of the black character, by comparison, moves through five or six near-death set pieces until he realises that having children may be the only way to save himself from a job that will almost certainly kill him. It might have been touching, but there was no movement toward this point. We simply arrived there, making the moment seem like a pirhoutte. Having ticked the ‘revelation’ box, that was the last we saw of him. The cowboy’s disregard culminates in him stepping into the shower in full battle kit, and collapsing. I would have thought that this scene was terminally shop-soiled, but apparently most of America has never seen Macbeth (though surely they must have seen Casino Royale, or The Abyss, or even Moon 44 ...). The cowboy’s anxiety is not investigated, merely inserted. A character in need of an epigram, he finally falls victim to a quote seen at the outset: to the effect that war is a drug. We see him return home after his year in Iraq, play ironically with his son, try to buy some cereal and become utterly lost in the comforting, price-check-isle-three contentment of middleclass America. Cut to the cowboy, back in Iraq, suited up for another round of hurt.<br />
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The film’s ending, too, is Jarhead’s. In each a soldier cannot relinquish the warrior, though at least Jake Glynhaal makes it home. The impression in The Hurt Locker is that the tension of wartime Baghdad induces a homeostasis that supports the cowboy – the denoument shows him suited up, walking into a bomb disposal job. The music is jaunty. We are offered in these last few seconds a romantic view of the antihero, condemned to his post, this Sisyphus of conflagrations. It is not much of a message and might as well describe the debauched, bored fashions that produce such films. Though this was not the opinion of Peter Howell in the Toronto Star: ‘Just when you thought the battle for Iraqi war dramas has been fought and lost,’ he wrote, ‘along comes one that demands to be seen ... The Hurt Locker strips the Iraqi conflict of politics and brings it right down to the garbage-strewn pavement, where lives are saved through skill and nerve but lost through bad luck and malevolence.’ The erasure is noticed and applauded, as though the whole conflict were just too complicated and thank god someone focused on real people. Anti-heroism is a natural pose for current American mythology, and this tightened, individualist focus is useful to it – this is no war, just something that’s happening.<br />
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Beyond being a painfully ironic phrase, the idea that ‘the battle for Iraqi war dramas’ could have been over before the conflict itself finished is a prominent spike on the graph of oblivion drawn by war films in the last 40 years. The real people on show are, of course, American. Iraqis are kept to the roles of rude mechanicals, and not even Howell seems to have noticed that the ‘battle’ has yet to actually feature an Iraqi perspective. Snipers are silhouttes rather than people. Admitedly, this is how soldiers see the locals. The problem is the presentation – that this is okay, this is bravery, rathery than institutionalised stupidity. We are offered these soldiers as heros, rather than accomplices. Anything else might interfere with the carefully controlled descent of the mythology into ambivalent territory. Thankfully, Bigelow lands squarely in the Green Zone.<br />
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As an acknowledgedly tendentious piece of synechdoche, take the title – exactly what a ‘Hurt Locker’ is, or who coined the phrase is never made clear, though by the end of the film one gathers what it must mean, this unascribed colloquialism. It is a neat trick to convey that sense without spelling it in brazen dialogue, but this sort of trick is repeated throughout the film, a camoflauging of lineage: allusion after allusion is drawn together, coiled into a piece of visual rhetoric so tight that it obscures its own origins. The effect, if not the purpose, of this erasure is, predictably, to isolate a situation from its causes. In Bigelow’s case, this is her art – the seamstress, tucking away the edges of stories she has transfused. The Iraq war, in all it’s flamboyant, dull horror, is no longer an extension of an ambiguous American will. We are presented only with confusion; any opportunity we had for unravelling this or moving away from such inertia has been artfully precluded.<br />
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If The Hurt Locker never leaves its moral Green Zone, this is perhaps the most realistic thing about it. Edward Said believed that such refusals of context were the essence of occidentalist power playing, and the film’s form certainly speaks to that idea. Critical response focused broadly on its verisimilitude, implicit being the notion that a sufficient description is also a causal one, as it lays clear a variety of relations. But Bigelow is not so thorough. Hers is an incorrigibly partial view, through the eyes of characters whose flimsy derivation leaves them with only one foot in the film. The point is not to seriously investigate the effect of an unvalourous war on its combatants, but to descend far enough to give the antihero somewhere to rise up from. In this sense, one begins to suspect that the film is successful exactly because America is so hungry for myths of redemption right now. A narrative that offered to rehabilitate a nation’s view of itself, while seeming to deal honestly with the conditions that required it, was always going to find a place in the pantheon.<br />
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The Hurt Locker's predictablility is anchored to a single fact: God is still American. It is a Hollywod movie that strives to deny its Hollywood pedigree, but like the rest of its ilk, must abide by certain covenants made long ago. This is the rule set the film cleaves to – not traditional myth structure, but the American myth. There is no room for a true anti-hero, someone genuinely unlikeable, or whose downfall we hope for. On the cowboy’s shoulders rests America’s image of itself – brazen, conflicted, but ultimately just. Notions of fate – that most Islamic of forces – are quietly conscripted into the service of a story that has been told and retold since the first wagons rolled West. Something, though it would be extraordinarily difficult to say precisely what, has come full circle. Some story even older than California. God has returned to his old stomping ground, but he has clearly found a new chosen people. For in the final analysis, this is Babylon, familiar and vile. Virtue will always be an intruder here.ofcourseicarehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03186408864195596534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1868814491378375054.post-1812123240188363332010-04-01T11:03:00.002+13:002010-04-16T20:23:27.384+12:00Prior to which the best of intentions were beset from all sides<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Upon arrival in Sydney, we were warned of the brazen motorcycle gangs and the accompanying perils of roadside steakhouses, pickpockets to rival Oliver Twist’s most kleptomaniacal fantasies, the dangers of walking on grass with bare feet (funnelwebs abound!), vicious teen muggers, eleven-year-olds carrying knives, ATM skimmers, ‘self-pruning’ gumtrees endangering passersby, violent hailstorms, termites, snakes, cockroaches and the apparently furious bidding wars for desirable rental properties. The worst thing I’ve found so far is the number of Robert Lowell books in the second-hand bookstores. (Lowell’s often the last book on the LOW-- shelf, so I’ve been blaming him for the lack of Lowry). Still, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Sursum corda</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, and be glad I’m not stuck with a Lois Lowry collection.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">We got here on Feb 13th, and I don’t think I’ve found Australia yet*. Not that I’ve been looking terribly hard; most of our time has so far been caught up the the rush to find a house before our savings ran out, or our welcome ran out with the extended family. With that done (living just outside of Balmain in the Year of the Tiger has its own appeals for anyone passively schooled in late-nineties NRL fandom), we may now have a little more time to start casting our eyes sideways. There is a very loud amusement park right beside our present lodgings. It seems that way, anyway – in all honesty, it’s mostly just the recurrent problem of Antipodean girls.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I’m wary of judging a country by its free-to-air programming – where, on that scale, would NZ fall? – but it’s difficult to avoid it. Case in point: I’m now living in a city that is big enough to warrant its own news hour, and this is not entirely a bad thing. How provincial, to think it would be! When the wind blows from the mainland TVNZ is almost aware of its Auckland-centric coverage, but I’ve never watched enough TV in Auckland to appreciate just how reassuring it can be to hear about nothing further away than the outer ‘burbs. It’s distressingly insular, but comfortingly so. When we stabilise enough to secure an internet connection, I do intend to catch up on current affairs from the rest of the world; 13,000 RSS items and counting await that luminous moment.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">We wandered around the CBD earlier this week, turning when we thought that the iPhone was pointing in the right direction, and found – by chance – two small public sculptures, each comprised of three small square blocks. The first set we found had one block labelled ‘HELL’, I think, and two blank; the next again had two blank, but the middle block was engraved with the word ‘PURGATORY’. I suppose they have something to do with Pyrmont’s imaginatively named sandstone quarries, but we’d already found limbo; even after filling out too many customs forms, we have to wait six to eight more weeks before our personal effects (read: my books, Jen’s clothes) arrive, and as of this evening our freshly assembled flatpack shelves don’t hold much more than a television and various pieces of paper that may or may not prove useful sometime in the next 36 months. Thirty-six months (42 in the laziest case) is now the yardstick against which any major future plans are measured.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">We didn’t find ‘PARADISE’ engraved anywhere, although Gould’s Book Arcade, panacea for a house filled with empty shelves, is probably a reasonable fascimile. Gould’s poetry shelves don’t show any kind of organising principle, though, so instead of blaming Lowell I just find my hopes flaring up briefly whenever I see his Collected Works.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">*Australian media still seems to be trying to sort this out, incidentally. Not in any sensible kind of way, but in true PSA fashion, where the good ship HMS Federal Racism Statistics is broadsided with advertising dollars in the hope of bringing her down.</span></i>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02597398273751804565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1868814491378375054.post-18328290144691671842010-04-14T14:55:00.000+12:002010-04-14T14:55:56.415+12:00A Pile of 20c PiecesI don’t know that anyone would care to sift through these ... gems? gewgaws? ... but here they are: a collection of Conversations about Games, on Air, between Gentlemen, ca 2009. There were more, but in my rush to leave NZ for a funded (but non-dedicated) office chair I left them nestled among my newsy detritus on Mandroid’s computer. Files are courtesy of Radio One, as are all soundbites in the Commonwealth. Tally-ho.<br />
<br />
<b>Revolution X</b><br />
(Midway, 1994)<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQP72wH2AiUezE7IC4IePI5soMC_hTLbvkGMMaizoZOsQJ2t5ad2fsWbHSzxKE2A8y2b7GJtwpKwK3fH7RUFfDcz4NKjZkQdW-ASx0v_ZprahE_PY6sCUaM1c50oEGMmdrZB4gXRLa2BTM/s1600/revx.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="277" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQP72wH2AiUezE7IC4IePI5soMC_hTLbvkGMMaizoZOsQJ2t5ad2fsWbHSzxKE2A8y2b7GJtwpKwK3fH7RUFfDcz4NKjZkQdW-ASx0v_ZprahE_PY6sCUaM1c50oEGMmdrZB4gXRLa2BTM/s400/revx.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><img border="0" height="0" src="http://counters.gigya.com/wildfire/IMP/CXNID=2000002.11NXC/bT*xJmx*PTEyNzEyMTI*ODA4NjAmcHQ9MTI3MTIxMjQ4MzA3NiZwPTE4MDMxJmQ9Jmc9MQ==.gif" style="height: 0px; visibility: hidden; width: 0px;" width="0" /><br />
<center><br />
<div style="visibility: visible;"><object data="http://assets.mixpod.com/swf/mp3/mff-stick.swf" height="35" style="height: 35px; width: 219px;" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="219"><param name="movie" value="http://assets.mixpod.com/swf/mp3/mff-stick.swf" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="scale" value="noscale" /><param name="salign" value="TL" /><param name="wmode" value="transparent"/><param name="flashvars" value="myid=50772201&path=2010/04/13&mycolor=222222&mycolor2=77ADD1&mycolor3=FFFFFF&autoplay=false&rand=0&f=4&vol=100&pat=0&grad=false"/></object></div></center><br />
Our hero saves latter-day rock gods Aerosmith from a fate worse than death – Headmistress Helga and rollerblading street thugs! I’m sure that twenty-seven percent of all one-dollar coins that passed through my hands between 1998 and 2001 went to a good cause. The continuing presence of the <i>Rev X</i> arcade machine is, incidentally, one of the reasons I always insist on getting to Dunedin Airport earlier than is strictly necessary to complete the check-in formalities.<br />
<br />
<b>Outrun</b><br />
(Sega, 1986)<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA3Exm8IE4tNId5bkMlsJEj-olkLcWb7PR1a6V4tr0GxjxmZNvKSPnvGq2pSeb2v_oVAChWmXMKWctLzsLOpWdVqzkFS0Js-vAR4tiZuGrdAqigsSjCPTgkmLHNGwyReVhDCQ7Kiwk1U7a/s1600/outrun.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA3Exm8IE4tNId5bkMlsJEj-olkLcWb7PR1a6V4tr0GxjxmZNvKSPnvGq2pSeb2v_oVAChWmXMKWctLzsLOpWdVqzkFS0Js-vAR4tiZuGrdAqigsSjCPTgkmLHNGwyReVhDCQ7Kiwk1U7a/s400/outrun.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><img border="0" height="0" src="http://counters.gigya.com/wildfire/IMP/CXNID=2000002.11NXC/bT*xJmx*PTEyNzEyMTIzOTM2OTgmcHQ9MTI3MTIxMjM5Njc*OSZwPTE4MDMxJmQ9Jmc9MQ==.gif" style="height: 0px; visibility: hidden; width: 0px;" width="0" /><br />
<center><br />
<div style="visibility: visible;"><object data="http://assets.mixpod.com/swf/mp3/mff-stick.swf" height="35" style="height: 35px; width: 219px;" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="219"><param name="movie" value="http://assets.mixpod.com/swf/mp3/mff-stick.swf" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="scale" value="noscale" /><param name="salign" value="TL" /><param name="wmode" value="transparent"/><param name="flashvars" value="myid=50772103&path=2010/04/13&mycolor=222222&mycolor2=77ADD1&mycolor3=FFFFFF&autoplay=false&rand=0&f=4&vol=100&pat=0&grad=false"/></object></div></center><br />
A spritely racer, complete with a hen-pecking trophy girlfriend. Somehow Yu Suzuki had tapped into that consensual hallucination about grown-up life.<br />
<br />
<b>Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time</b><br />
(Konami, 1991)<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiTZaLvMhHzlHY1u3Mo5x6cWNGEiN4vVzYPcf5PPrmVBE0nR4pe_TQu_Iws3dcPdHnEOgdHwo-izoRKNSriyMgAvH0JJEUGFhSYwO-0VenDbb15m7QzRNx86gS7OpGwgZ84A2_3KShiBQ_/s1600/turtles-in-time-gameplay1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiTZaLvMhHzlHY1u3Mo5x6cWNGEiN4vVzYPcf5PPrmVBE0nR4pe_TQu_Iws3dcPdHnEOgdHwo-izoRKNSriyMgAvH0JJEUGFhSYwO-0VenDbb15m7QzRNx86gS7OpGwgZ84A2_3KShiBQ_/s400/turtles-in-time-gameplay1.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><img border="0" height="0" src="http://counters.gigya.com/wildfire/IMP/CXNID=2000002.11NXC/bT*xJmx*PTEyNzEyMTI2NjU4MjUmcHQ9MTI3MTIxMjY2ODMyMiZwPTE4MDMxJmQ9Jmc9MQ==.gif" style="height: 0px; visibility: hidden; width: 0px;" width="0" /><br />
<center><br />
<div style="visibility: visible;"><object data="http://assets.mixpod.com/swf/mp3/mff-stick.swf" height="35" style="height: 35px; width: 219px;" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="219"><param name="movie" value="http://assets.mixpod.com/swf/mp3/mff-stick.swf" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="scale" value="noscale" /><param name="salign" value="TL" /><param name="wmode" value="transparent"/><param name="flashvars" value="myid=50772414&path=2010/04/13&mycolor=222222&mycolor2=77ADD1&mycolor3=FFFFFF&autoplay=false&rand=0&f=4&vol=100&pat=0&grad=false"/></object></div></center><br />
Bodacious! Tubular! Generic Affirmatives! My childhood was great fun, but I didn’t discover segues until I got to high school. Had I discovered nonsensical time travel and odd scale issues, however, I would have been fine.<br />
<br />
<b>Barkley, Shut Up And Jam: Gaiden, Chapter One of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa</b><br />
(Independent [Tales of Game’s], 2008)<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQar6eJAK4rxGsyiXQDK-h5bariOlwFDR6ShcXs8wbjy9viuVB-sJrQijYdvxbALAxsmJThOepSsVHDnwS5OZMhSQ8ysEWd-CVAAWjPiZatmWoW3m-Bhup8v-AeNJkeWhr-Qvj9PDw3jlA/s1600/barkley1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="297" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQar6eJAK4rxGsyiXQDK-h5bariOlwFDR6ShcXs8wbjy9viuVB-sJrQijYdvxbALAxsmJThOepSsVHDnwS5OZMhSQ8ysEWd-CVAAWjPiZatmWoW3m-Bhup8v-AeNJkeWhr-Qvj9PDw3jlA/s400/barkley1.png" width="400" /></a></div><img border="0" height="0" src="http://counters.gigya.com/wildfire/IMP/CXNID=2000002.11NXC/bT*xJmx*PTEyNzEyMTI1NzQzMzAmcHQ9MTI3MTIxMjU3NTkzMSZwPTE4MDMxJmQ9Jmc9MQ==.gif" style="height: 0px; visibility: hidden; width: 0px;" width="0" /><br />
<center><br />
<div style="visibility: visible;"><object data="http://assets.mixpod.com/swf/mp3/mff-stick.swf" height="35" style="height: 35px; width: 219px;" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="219"><param name="movie" value="http://assets.mixpod.com/swf/mp3/mff-stick.swf" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="scale" value="noscale" /><param name="salign" value="TL" /><param name="wmode" value="transparent"/><param name="flashvars" value="myid=50772304&path=2010/04/13&mycolor=222222&mycolor2=77ADD1&mycolor3=FFFFFF&autoplay=false&rand=0&f=4&vol=100&pat=0&grad=false"/></object></div></center><br />
It’s oddly disconcerting just how closely this game maps to the one semi-original plot I came up with between 1992 and 1994. Except in my version the Round Mound of Rebound was an actual hill that MJ and his apprentice had to climb so they could see the destruction that David Stern had caused. I wish I’d worked Ghost Dad or Juwanna Ball in there somehow.<br />
<br />
<b>Mario Teaches Typing</b><br />
(Interplay, 1991)<br />
<b>QWERTY Warriors</b><br />
(Flash game, ???)<br />
<b>The Typing of the Dead</b><br />
(Sega, 1999)<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzVSvTVx5a6CQqfdxFL19FX1MTU5C_93t3P__j0UkN7pD5CKsWjYAm10MoamQ9jpJPVi-1l66kjoAg_SMXAmo6p5r8hW2y_xnZy5e6yb54lfcvwZ9yGW9ZsGsxsy3v8JmqDii99tqqOrCl/s1600/typing.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzVSvTVx5a6CQqfdxFL19FX1MTU5C_93t3P__j0UkN7pD5CKsWjYAm10MoamQ9jpJPVi-1l66kjoAg_SMXAmo6p5r8hW2y_xnZy5e6yb54lfcvwZ9yGW9ZsGsxsy3v8JmqDii99tqqOrCl/s400/typing.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><img border="0" height="0" src="http://counters.gigya.com/wildfire/IMP/CXNID=2000002.11NXC/bT*xJmx*PTEyNzEyMTI3NzkyODEmcHQ9MTI3MTIxMjc4MDg3NyZwPTE4MDMxJmQ9Jmc9MQ==.gif" style="height: 0px; visibility: hidden; width: 0px;" width="0" /><br />
<center><br />
<div style="visibility: visible;"><object data="http://assets.mixpod.com/swf/mp3/mff-stick.swf" height="35" style="height: 35px; width: 219px;" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="219"><param name="movie" value="http://assets.mixpod.com/swf/mp3/mff-stick.swf" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="scale" value="noscale" /><param name="salign" value="TL" /><param name="wmode" value="transparent"/><param name="flashvars" value="myid=50772537&path=2010/04/13&mycolor=222222&mycolor2=77ADD1&mycolor3=FFFFFF&autoplay=false&rand=0&f=4&vol=100&pat=0&grad=false"/></object></div></center><br />
Mario talked way too much about George Washington’s wooden teeth for my liking, and DVORAK Warriors would have scanned a little better. Bringing up these two games on air were a circuitous excuse on my part to talk about The Typing of the Dead, itself probably an excuse to get gamers to type ‘purple monkey snot’ in order to defeat assorted cadres of undead.<br />
<br />
<b>The Secret of Monkey Island</b><br />
(Lucasfilm Games, 1990)<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiea7s6ANC1zsV7jWKzLOH3gQpsr3SuQcltnSbCwd306Y-TqNM16dXkDSMM4rEAqM_fTJI0v5k0Wn5ui5iz6A_hiks-diBxAOMUMjXKtR0-CmItRFr4AZsIHP6GvixHrtIbS7ARSAm1xAW8/s1600/monkey-island.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiea7s6ANC1zsV7jWKzLOH3gQpsr3SuQcltnSbCwd306Y-TqNM16dXkDSMM4rEAqM_fTJI0v5k0Wn5ui5iz6A_hiks-diBxAOMUMjXKtR0-CmItRFr4AZsIHP6GvixHrtIbS7ARSAm1xAW8/s400/monkey-island.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><img border="0" height="0" src="http://counters.gigya.com/wildfire/IMP/CXNID=2000002.11NXC/bT*xJmx*PTEyNzEyMTIyOTY*MDAmcHQ9MTI3MTIxMjI5ODI3NyZwPTE4MDMxJmQ9Jmc9MQ==.gif" style="height: 0px; visibility: hidden; width: 0px;" width="0" /><br />
<center><br />
<div style="visibility: visible;"><object data="http://assets.mixpod.com/swf/mp3/mff-stick.swf" height="35" style="height: 35px; width: 219px;" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="219"><param name="movie" value="http://assets.mixpod.com/swf/mp3/mff-stick.swf" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="scale" value="noscale" /><param name="salign" value="TL" /><param name="wmode" value="transparent"/><param name="flashvars" value="myid=50772003&path=2010/04/13&mycolor=222222&mycolor2=77ADD1&mycolor3=FFFFFF&autoplay=false&rand=0&f=4&vol=100&pat=0&grad=false"/></object></div></center><br />
Digging up t-shirts and swapping mugs of corrosive grog has never been this much fun. Monkey Island has more people writing accolades for it at this very moment than people playing it, which is an imbalance I feel like redressing this afternoon. Don’t ask me about <i>Loom</i>.<br />
<br />
<b>Brutal Mario</b><br />
(ROM hack, ???)<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhan5gJQl3cSbg5uREYahQrYG2lmGuUqB6npHaiKDIbTQM4D5iUBgEabEnJg7jjZ2uIv0af6PoA7GMJ8A8igOBcI43p5iaXt4720JidqYdVTe_gen9NEA1GWyW7y7-sqrw7l4UjxUaEP1O8/s1600/brutalmario.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="301" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhan5gJQl3cSbg5uREYahQrYG2lmGuUqB6npHaiKDIbTQM4D5iUBgEabEnJg7jjZ2uIv0af6PoA7GMJ8A8igOBcI43p5iaXt4720JidqYdVTe_gen9NEA1GWyW7y7-sqrw7l4UjxUaEP1O8/s400/brutalmario.png" width="400" /></a></div><img border="0" height="0" src="http://counters.gigya.com/wildfire/IMP/CXNID=2000002.11NXC/bT*xJmx*PTEyNzEyMTE4MDIwMjgmcHQ9MTI3MTIxMTgwODQ4MCZwPTE4MDMxJmQ9Jmc9MQ==.gif" style="height: 0px; visibility: hidden; width: 0px;" width="0" /><br />
<center><br />
<div style="visibility: visible;"><object data="http://assets.mixpod.com/swf/mp3/mff-stick.swf" height="35" style="height: 35px; width: 219px;" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="219"><param name="movie" value="http://assets.mixpod.com/swf/mp3/mff-stick.swf" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="scale" value="noscale" /><param name="salign" value="TL" /><param name="wmode" value="transparent"/><param name="flashvars" value="myid=50771429&path=2010/04/13&mycolor=222222&mycolor2=77ADD1&mycolor3=FFFFFF&autoplay=false&rand=0&f=4&vol=100&pat=0&grad=false"/></object></div></center><br />
It’s still easier than <i>I Wanna Be The Guy</i>.<br />
<br />
<b>Dirty Challenger Muscle Men</b><b> / </b><b>Kinnikuman: Dirty Challenger</b><b> </b><br />
(Yutaka, 1992)<br />
<b>Gourmet Sentai Bara Yarou!</b><b> </b><br />
(Winds / Virgin, 1995)<br />
<b>Cho Aniki</b><b> [</b><b>Super Big Brothers</b><b>] </b><br />
(Masaya / NCS Corp, 1992)<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiP5err9uBkDvfG8bCH_TnaCUDjuC0g9meGsWX5YlWVsopJ3UfmQyUTi3HKAkLIFwCPs8whY9D_pF5RQTqfXPQa0J4__fMczLuRLvObm-LR0wAHq9m4RXI9WWOw8d3Bx6lqbrEG9ECQSLQa/s1600/choaniki.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="302" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiP5err9uBkDvfG8bCH_TnaCUDjuC0g9meGsWX5YlWVsopJ3UfmQyUTi3HKAkLIFwCPs8whY9D_pF5RQTqfXPQa0J4__fMczLuRLvObm-LR0wAHq9m4RXI9WWOw8d3Bx6lqbrEG9ECQSLQa/s400/choaniki.gif" width="400" /></a></div><img border="0" height="0" src="http://counters.gigya.com/wildfire/IMP/CXNID=2000002.11NXC/bT*xJmx*PTEyNzEyMTIxODUyNTImcHQ9MTI3MTIxMjE4ODE3NiZwPTE4MDMxJmQ9Jmc9MQ==.gif" style="height: 0px; visibility: hidden; width: 0px;" width="0" /><br />
<center><br />
<div style="visibility: visible;"><object data="http://assets.mixpod.com/swf/mp3/mff-stick.swf" height="35" style="height: 35px; width: 219px;" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="219"><param name="movie" value="http://assets.mixpod.com/swf/mp3/mff-stick.swf" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="scale" value="noscale" /><param name="salign" value="TL" /><param name="wmode" value="transparent"/><param name="flashvars" value="myid=50771872&path=2010/04/13&mycolor=222222&mycolor2=77ADD1&mycolor3=FFFFFF&autoplay=false&rand=0&f=4&vol=100&pat=0&grad=false"/></object></div></center><br />
As soon as I realised that the bottom of the Shit Games barrel concealed a false bottom where the Idiot Games congealed, I was in on the ground floor with 900 Nintendo points. Also, having the presence of the Other be entirely tongue-(among other things)-in-cheek works pretty well.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02597398273751804565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1868814491378375054.post-91510007742476329442009-06-24T13:08:00.000+12:002009-06-24T13:43:41.761+12:00À droiteHaving exhaled (exhumed?) the lowbrow products of procrastination (below; backdated), a few things are jumping around for attention. <a href="http://professionalaesthete.blogspot.com/2009/03/fear-and-loathing-in-dc-wasteland.html">This article</a> is still remarkably fresh in my mind, for example, if only because it's so delightfully derivative of Borges' "Benares" (1923, <span style="font-style: italic;">Fervor de Buenos Aires</span>):<br /><blockquote>False and impenetrable<br />like a garden traced on a mirror,<br />the imagined city<br />which my eyes have never seen<br />interweaves distances<br />and repeats its unreachable houses.<br />The sudden sun<br />shatters the complex obscurity<br />of temples, dunghills, prisons, patios<br />and will scale walls<br />and blaze on to a sacred river.<br />Panting<br />the city which a foliage of stars oppressed<br />pours over the horizon<br />and in a morning<br />full of steps and of sleep<br />light is opening the streets like branches.<br />At the same time dawn breaks<br />on all shutters looking east<br />and the voice of a muezzin<br />from its high tower<br />saddens the air of day<br />and announces to the city of many gods<br />the solitude of God.<br />(And to think that while I play with doubtful images<br />the city I sing persists<br />in a predestined place of the world,<br />with its precise topography<br />peopled like a dream,<br />with hospitals and barracks<br />and slow avenues of poplars<br />and men with rotten lips<br />who feel the cold in their teeth.)</blockquote>Or, at least, derivative of the paraphrasing I was doing around the poem in my thesis. I'm still riffing on parallel structures, though, and this morning chewed through <span style="font-style: italic;">Urn Burial</span>'s fifth chapter again, where Browne turns from cataloguing the virtues and idiosyncrasies of funerary customs to melancholy: "'Tis too late to be ambitious," he sighs. "The great Mutations of the world are acted, our time may be too short for our designes." But the point is, really, that it has always been too late to be ambitious, and it always will. Which leaves unspoken the problem of Art; the significant absence, perhaps, as obvious as "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"'s footnotes about Tlön's "scandalous" materialism leaving the problem of <span style="font-style: italic;">material</span>.<br /><br />All of which is, effectively, the Borges-narrator resigned to the rise of Tlön and hiding in his uncertain translation of <span style="font-style: italic;">Urn Burial</span>. In what will be a fusion of Quevedo's satire and Browne's reflections on mortality, the narrator of "Tlön, Uqbar" is writing the equivalent to the story in which he exists. Circularity rocks. And, one assumes, rolls.<br /><br />Browne, for all his subtle gloom, managed to find something positive, although it's mildly undercut:<br /><blockquote>Darknesse and light divide the course of our time, and oblivion shares with memory a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest stroaks of affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremeties, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables.</blockquote>Oh, and despite Borges' avowed love for <span style="font-style: italic;">Urn Burial</span> – he name-checked it in 1925's <span style="font-style: italic;">Inquisiciones</span>, wrote "Tlön, Uqbar" around it, and translated Chapter V for Victoria Ocampo's <span style="font-style: italic;">Sur</span> in 1944 – I still haven't found any articles linking Browne's style to Borges'. There's plenty of thematic junk, and I'm sure adding to the pile, but nothing yet on the way the semi-colons balance the omissions, distortions and contradictions, and, mostly, assist the underlying pragmatism. Although it may be too obvious to mention without being a little gauche.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggjqX8MFFmCN0cLyBy2KLW2H29U6YEa_3g28fKyfELQiYDJTU89OzbbRDdy1UDDR-X8QLjypnW19daz65TEP_FHf33higUnKTDPMlqj7JFOKapsKiUu8U_5kkC7IBbIraymp3UajZM5ATc/s1600-h/picture-110.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 279px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggjqX8MFFmCN0cLyBy2KLW2H29U6YEa_3g28fKyfELQiYDJTU89OzbbRDdy1UDDR-X8QLjypnW19daz65TEP_FHf33higUnKTDPMlqj7JFOKapsKiUu8U_5kkC7IBbIraymp3UajZM5ATc/s400/picture-110.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5350699076103251762" border="0" /></a><br />Apropos of nothing, or perhaps of the trend towards the gauche, I just flicked past Choire Sicha's <a href="http://www.theawl.com/2009/06/flicked-off-transformers2-the-revenge-of-megan-foxs-rack">review</a> – and fitting proposed subtitle – of the new Transformers film, Michael Bay's very male gaze and Megan Fox:<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggjqX8MFFmCN0cLyBy2KLW2H29U6YEa_3g28fKyfELQiYDJTU89OzbbRDdy1UDDR-X8QLjypnW19daz65TEP_FHf33higUnKTDPMlqj7JFOKapsKiUu8U_5kkC7IBbIraymp3UajZM5ATc/s1600-h/picture-110.png"><br /></a><blockquote>All on her own, she is reeling back twenty years of gender and film studies textbooks. While we may have thought the male gaze was wilting or troublesome, Megan Fox proves that (for her and a select few others, at least) the male gaze is just some flimsy and pitiful little ray to rub her flesh up against so as to keep warm her nearly-exposed rump. She is hard to believe, with the soft kitty-cat stripper ways of a Gina Gershon melded with the hard machineness of a Linda Fiorentino.</blockquote>Snap.<br /><br />And finally, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neda_%28Iranian_protester%29">this whole thing</a> jumped out at me in my daily headline filtering this morning. I'd heard all about Neda Agha-Soltan's death, I thought, and by now everyone has, but I'd like to know why it hit a little harder than the other deaths of protesters in Iran, or anywhere. That a video camera was right there? Her wide eyes when she lay on the street? Or the Persian meaning of her name – "voice", "calling" or "divine message"? I'm going to leave it there, because trying to answer that brings me right back to the gauche. And, to make the stupid pun I promised myself I wouldn't, I'd rather aim for the adroit.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02597398273751804565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1868814491378375054.post-45066397367618914862009-03-03T17:41:00.000+13:002009-06-22T15:49:11.410+12:00Fear and Loathing in the D.C. Wasteland<div style="text-align: left; font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8ko86zrNOcQV4cHNhI9sR_hYaPXCPD0R2MxIHqBkOHotab772FukecQUPdworpC47IKe_2K4lVeyQ5silRRvgeupw_A7-26Dw4C_w9yZE1inLcGHY0hC7Ie42Bp-0xkcGlL6Abrddmd2f/s1600-h/fallout3wasteland.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 254px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8ko86zrNOcQV4cHNhI9sR_hYaPXCPD0R2MxIHqBkOHotab772FukecQUPdworpC47IKe_2K4lVeyQ5silRRvgeupw_A7-26Dw4C_w9yZE1inLcGHY0hC7Ie42Bp-0xkcGlL6Abrddmd2f/s400/fallout3wasteland.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5349992847035258882" border="0" /></a></span> <span style="font-family: georgia;font-size:100%;" >A curious duplicity comes into focus with the release of <i>Fallout 3</i>; the game’s timing was imprecise but close enough to real events. As the world's eyes were turned towards the concept of a new America freed from the ills of the Bush era, so were those of gamers fixated on Bethesda's microcosmic version of the same. Well-known subway stations, memorials to long-dead presidents – all are present and accounted for in both iterations of D.C., all shelter the mistakes of the past, and offer the vague hope of a society free from oppression.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />For reasons both too numerous and too readily apparent to mention here, I wasn't able to attend the inauguration of the new U.S. President, Barack Obama. Instead, I attended an altogether different ceremony, in a landscape of a lower resolution – albeit a more idealised one – and thus better suited to recall.<sup>*</sup> Touring the D.C. Wasteland of <i>Fallout 3</i>, one can avoid the pitfalls of reality, the discomfort of crowds, while still cashing in on the ‘I-was-there-when’ <i>veritas</i> of the magical moment. </span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />In the real world, crowds of adoring democrats, republicrats and assorted hangers-on cried and proclaimed their love for fictive political constructs, tiny paper flags and standing outside in the cold; in the wasteland, crowds of ghouls, Glowing Ones and the inevitable supermutants appeared rather annoyed that I had disrupted their unending search for human flesh, and promptly triggered an instanced attack. Despite the skirmishes and constant search for stimpacks, I decided I had the better deal than those who made the journey to the real Washington – warmth, maps, and haptic feedback being infinitely preferable to biting winds, jingoism and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Shepard Fairey, a man whose idea of creativity is to watch three scenes from John Carpenter’s <i>They Live</i>. (The PS3’s loading times being what they are, however, the idea of a four-year wait to reset a bad situation may not be inconceivable.)</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />Exiting at Foggy Bottom station in my ideal version of D.C., there was a wasteland wanderer begging for purified water or bottlecaps (the local equivalent of money). The <i>U.S. News</i>’ Robert Schlesinger would later write of running into a homeless man outside Foggy Bottom on inauguration day, a man with the audacity to ask for change. “Even the homeless have talking points,” Schlesinger quips, before fighting against the tide of humanity to watch the inauguration from the safety (and warmth) of his office. </span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />Parallel structures abounded that day. Was the version of the inauguration I ‘attended’ any less real than that version Schlesinger avoided? Certainly we both saw the same television coverage, but the version of Washington D.C. I've spent so much time in is simply more real than the <i>other</i> place. I know the tripwires around Arlington Cemetery, the difficulties in navigating the trenches in front of the Capitol building, the inadequacies of defending the Lincoln Memorial. Why, then, would I really need to go to Washington, if not to destroy my memories of the city as I know it?</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />* When John Key stepped up to become our own nation’s new Prime Minister last year, however, I didn’t feel the need to find some next-gen version of the ceremony I could pretend to attend. A bootleg copy of <i>Dig Dug</i> and a damp towel perfectly emulated both the self-congratulatory Parnell house-party and Key’s speaking ability, respectively. </span></div><div style="margin: 1ex; font-family: georgia;"><div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><p style="text-align: left;"> </p> </div> </div>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02597398273751804565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1868814491378375054.post-83499107082564945122009-06-14T14:00:00.000+12:002009-06-15T11:48:35.361+12:00ShiftSpace: Wikifying the Web<div style="text-align: left; font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;font-size:100%;" >Annotation is the red-headed stepchild of research, it sometimes seems, and yet so much relies on it. Without level-headed (or contrarian) commentary on a text, too much can be taken for granted as true; some of the most reliable books I’ve borrowed from lecturers and students have been annotated so much that there’s more pencil than ink on any given page. Of course, annotations can be as suspect as the printed word – if only there were some way to toggle annotations on or off, depending on who wrote them…</span> </div><p style="font-family: georgia; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Enter ShiftSpace. A simple plug-in to the Firefox web browser, ShiftSpace (currently at v0.14) has been annotating the web for a few years now, and has morphed into a pretty stable wee script, containing multiple ‘Spaces’ for users to ‘Shift’ webpages. Users can annotate pages using the ‘minor’ Spaces by highlighting certain words or terms, and adding sticky notes to certain sites – both useful for group work and note sharing – or go the extra step and work with two major Spaces – SourceShift and ImageSwap. </span></p><p style="font-family: georgia; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKcDdgI2zhdsLqhx1GVer1yarImr_UWZuXGZQjyRYJCTj4EEGn-ZNPx8nZDIOK77NGaZSsz77nXp7xi0Qk1GID_l0NOeqou5m3bD1szE3ptNQ4hbMVKuqE38akHrQiJw43_UFPwNCKvB1H/s1600-h/shiftspace.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 232px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKcDdgI2zhdsLqhx1GVer1yarImr_UWZuXGZQjyRYJCTj4EEGn-ZNPx8nZDIOK77NGaZSsz77nXp7xi0Qk1GID_l0NOeqou5m3bD1szE3ptNQ4hbMVKuqE38akHrQiJw43_UFPwNCKvB1H/s400/shiftspace.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5347333745876168882" border="0" /></a></span></p><div style="font-family: georgia; text-align: left;"> </div><p style="font-family: georgia; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:100%;">ImageSwap lets users switch out certain images or logos and replace them with others – you can, for instance, Shift <a href="http://www.otago.ac.nz/" target="_blank">otago.ac.nz</a> by replacing the pictures of happy graduates with a picture of a burning sofa, as seen above. (Or a kitten, if that’s still your thing.)<br /></span></p><div style="font-family: georgia; text-align: left;"> </div><p style="font-family: georgia; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:100%;">SourceShift, alternately, is a blessing for anyone with rudimentary html skills, and enables users to freely alter the source code of a given website, adding annotations like videos (copy and paste the embed code from YouTube), pictures, or additional text. Once you’ve made a Shift, you can save it – anyone coming to the site in future will have the option to view your Shift, create their own, or view the page it its original format.<br /></span></p><div style="font-family: georgia; text-align: left;"> </div><p style="font-family: georgia; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:100%;">While there’s scope for abuse, ShiftSpace isn’t all about hacking or parody. For example, searching for “falun gong” on <a href="http://google.com/" target="_blank">google.com</a> will give a different result than <a href="http://google.cn/" target="_blank">google.cn</a>, as Falun Dafa is censored in China. ShiftSpace includes a note on the Chinese results acknowledging that they have been censored, and offers the uncensored top search results of <a href="http://falundafa.org/" target="_blank">falundafa.org</a>. ShiftSpace lets viewers stake a layer of freedom over the web, even over proscribed content.<br /></span></p><div style="font-family: georgia; text-align: left;"> </div><p style="font-family: georgia; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Public annotation can, I think, be an art form in itself – assuming one draws a similar distinction to that between vandalism and street art. The already-vocal commentariat can be let loose from the bottom-of-page confines of comment threads, and respond directly to the page’s content, <i>on</i> the content. We can, with the simple addition of a layer in a browser window, return to the panoply of views that the internet purports to represent.<br /></span></p><div style="font-family: georgia; text-align: left;"> <span style="font-family: georgia;font-size:100%;" >It’s locative art turned mainstream, framed in a browser, and from an aesthetic standpoint, ShiftSpace recreates the consensual hallucination of the web – Gibson’s proto-matrix be damned; ShiftSpace is a layer of textual awareness that can be toggled on or off, can be altered to suit any viewpoint, twisted to support protests or reinforced to back up arguments with insufficient evidence. It certainly results in a confusion of annotations and pranks, but it reclaims the web as public space, and making an already democratic medium slightly more fluid and open to re-creation is never a bad thing. </span> <span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: georgia;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />A How-to Guide</span> <span style="font-family: georgia;font-size:100%;" ><br /></span><span style="font-family: georgia;font-size:100%;" >(Instructions and all links are also on <a href="http://www.shiftspace.org/install" target="_blank">shiftspace.org/install</a>)</span> </div><ol style="font-family: georgia; text-align: left;" type="1"><li><span style="font-size:100%;">Download and install the Firefox browser.</span></li><li><span style="font-size:100%;">Install the Greasemonkey plug-in for Firefox. This lets you run small Javascript programs to modify websites, from annotations like Shiftspace to user scripts and tweaks of Google’s email/calendar/docs ecosystem. </span></li><li><span style="font-size:100%;">Head to <a href="http://www.shiftspace.org/install" target="_blank">shiftspace.org/install</a> and click on the link to install ShiftSpace, then refresh your page, update to the latest version, and you’re good to go! </span></li><li><span style="font-size:100%;">While browsing, you can call up the ShiftSpace console and view all public Shifts made by other users, then toggle them on or off. </span></li></ol><div style="font-family: georgia; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:100%;">[This article first appeared in <a href="http://www.critic.co.nz/">Critic</a> magazine.]</span> </div>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02597398273751804565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1868814491378375054.post-72522524702259131552009-03-31T14:17:00.000+13:002009-06-15T11:44:48.115+12:00Distributed gamingThe Games Development Conference has been raging for the past week, and amongst the exaggeration, misrepresentations and flat-out lies of the PR blitz, one company is offering something that could (gasp) change the industry as we know it – after seven years in ‘stealth mode’, OnLive is promising gamers with amazing broadband connections the chance to play console and PC titles, all without the need for an expensive disc-based console. Yeah, they get all the luck.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUdJSBZo5xemu_n1jnM0OoCr3wW0kugRL6OZ51SluTrEOHNViEW_cNkzEIBm4zgIv9K5Y1sW2qrA081tikaoX8blvUakBdEzLawu3knERz6uG62KhMnkBfntKxOL772t09iYjC-Xd4DlI1/s1600-h/onlive1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 309px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUdJSBZo5xemu_n1jnM0OoCr3wW0kugRL6OZ51SluTrEOHNViEW_cNkzEIBm4zgIv9K5Y1sW2qrA081tikaoX8blvUakBdEzLawu3knERz6uG62KhMnkBfntKxOL772t09iYjC-Xd4DlI1/s400/onlive1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5347332607474727026" border="0" /></a>With high-end computers running at the server-side, and video feed being pumped through the ether to your television or computer screen, it’s the equivalent of cloud computing. The bandwidth issue might hold back the service from these shores for a while, though – a 1.5Mbps connection is required for standard-definition content, while a whopping 5Mbps connection is necessary for HD-quality footage. There are two main hardware options as well – running the service through a PC or intel-based Mac will be cheapest as OnLive can be run through any browser window, but if you’re playing on a television, you can buy a cheap “microconsole” (pictured, with the ugly controller) to relay the signals from the cloud to your television. Controller issues have also been addressed, and OnLive is promising 1-millisecond ping times and a magically minimal signal latency. Demos at the show looked promising, but there’s no proof that the problems of streaming high-res video and managing controller feedback have been solved.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc7JhQenz61Zw_pYa9GpqgYTzDK6CLhEtPyCTrGhF4zOMSwYjJKVwUtTW-d0m1-_XlBzbBQp4wZ1ntQiJUDo27DGbFeA1cAvM5XpVNGgARst94-DTAPcQaVEOdiJJpLcgqzh8u1kkQACx8/s1600-h/onlive2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 309px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc7JhQenz61Zw_pYa9GpqgYTzDK6CLhEtPyCTrGhF4zOMSwYjJKVwUtTW-d0m1-_XlBzbBQp4wZ1ntQiJUDo27DGbFeA1cAvM5XpVNGgARst94-DTAPcQaVEOdiJJpLcgqzh8u1kkQACx8/s400/onlive2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5347332608212162530" border="0" /></a>The company is also promising a raft of community features, including spectator support for all users, brag clips from any game you’ve played and friends lists with video-based avatars. OnLive’s promises may sound suspiciously like those of the Phantom console (R.I.P.), but the new service already has the support of nine publishers, including Atari, Codemasters, Eidos, EA, Epic, Take Two, THQ, Ubisoft and Warners. With little chance of software piracy, there’s no reason why they wouldn’t sign up and try to tap that mythical untapped market of gamers with spare money but no consoles.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg501jqTEp8z27o3IvJjo5HqDd4GmSGCxO7xwo1uxUEAkVPfBcTgOsOuHtLpiO8NGB0tyY7FuemxlF6_hTrBweY9-6VnciYKSRLqMi8V2F1jrkVvmD2H39g7619K2bRpLyiNlogBxPZn9V8/s1600-h/onlive3.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg501jqTEp8z27o3IvJjo5HqDd4GmSGCxO7xwo1uxUEAkVPfBcTgOsOuHtLpiO8NGB0tyY7FuemxlF6_hTrBweY9-6VnciYKSRLqMi8V2F1jrkVvmD2H39g7619K2bRpLyiNlogBxPZn9V8/s400/onlive3.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5347332609290147106" border="0" /></a>Best of all for the new company, OnLive doesn’t really have any competitors. If it takes off, this distributed gaming thing could be huge. That said, pricing tiers for games haven’t yet been rolled out, and subscription fees to the service could be prohibitive – and without competition, there’d be little incentive to decrease their prices or offer non-restrictive terms and conditions to consumers. And we’re not even beginning to address the question of ownership of non-corporeal digital games. Still; it’s exciting times, the future is now, but where’s my flying car, et cetera. <p><b>Edit:</b> Eurogamer smashes the OnLive dream <a href="http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gdc-why-onlive-cant-possibly-work-article">here</a>.<br /></p><p>[This article first appeared in <a href="http://www.critic.co.nz/">Critic</a> magazine.]<br /></p>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02597398273751804565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1868814491378375054.post-37288551327174212012009-06-14T13:49:00.000+12:002009-06-15T11:43:42.705+12:00Review: Resistance: Retribution<span style="font-size:100%;">SCEA Bend Studio</span> <p style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;">PSP</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;">For the first handheld outing in the <i> Resistance</i> series, <i>Retribution</i> doesn’t do such a bad job. Despite the natural controller shortcomings of the PSP – most notably the single control nub instead of two analogue sticks – the game overcomes the potential miss-step with a competent aim-assist mode and an automatic cover system that rarely misreads your intentions. This faint praise aside, even being helped out this much doesn’t make the game too easy, as the steady stream of angry enemies, often requiring a quick switch in weapons or attack tactics, keep you busy. </span></p><p style="font-family: georgia;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmsrS5PS8B8wkUddaG6gOEYgDrgZf1Gv273cseNfK6vor1HezjoyCH9EL4lq1_zcrPcoeQqZk-4Y90v09ksJezGkDU_ULACeclVQ6AKwdwkl8rhUBaXqm8oM2p9ufTKlTTGtLA0dWl306k/s1600-h/rr1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmsrS5PS8B8wkUddaG6gOEYgDrgZf1Gv273cseNfK6vor1HezjoyCH9EL4lq1_zcrPcoeQqZk-4Y90v09ksJezGkDU_ULACeclVQ6AKwdwkl8rhUBaXqm8oM2p9ufTKlTTGtLA0dWl306k/s400/rr1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5347332415182325970" border="0" /></a></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Controlling cockney soldier Lt. James Grayson, you’re after revenge (what else?) following the death of Grayson’s brother in a Chimera conversion centre, which adds a certain frisson to the action. Sure, Grayson may look like biker who failed his gang initiation, and he tosses out lame cockney one-liners without pause (or reflection), but at least he’s a skerrick more interesting than the original <i>Resistance</i>’s Nathan Hale, who pales in comparison to this new loutish protagonist.</span></p><p style="font-family: georgia;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr1BiojnzdW7ywrB64PfTIV760KH6lzqbDxy2oNielbR4YgGxuVDbly_gOXF-DCtQlyjyWTkzhgQfUGYqnyKNhEuunIkehTFkr5GB5mooRuGpC-27dsbMUUL8xaMJgLzP2NM5ScW_9Qa9r/s1600-h/rr3.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 226px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr1BiojnzdW7ywrB64PfTIV760KH6lzqbDxy2oNielbR4YgGxuVDbly_gOXF-DCtQlyjyWTkzhgQfUGYqnyKNhEuunIkehTFkr5GB5mooRuGpC-27dsbMUUL8xaMJgLzP2NM5ScW_9Qa9r/s400/rr3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5347332425825290002" border="0" /></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx5U7Wwe2Fc0z_fdmy2Drz3fvvYzwHTl_I4axohdF-G_dc5vC7BZLWnI_RauU8C2pXU9yGB-beXmxVpUiAa0bN-Z40ucgelLAVyMhoFxywbywrP_oMQJrBoHkYaR5eQ9k4uK977HGaNUQ1/s1600-h/rr2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 224px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx5U7Wwe2Fc0z_fdmy2Drz3fvvYzwHTl_I4axohdF-G_dc5vC7BZLWnI_RauU8C2pXU9yGB-beXmxVpUiAa0bN-Z40ucgelLAVyMhoFxywbywrP_oMQJrBoHkYaR5eQ9k4uK977HGaNUQ1/s400/rr2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5347332422663898834" border="0" /></a></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;font-size:100%;" >If you’re enough of a fan of shiny black plastic to own both a PS3 and a copy of Resistance 2, you’re able to hook up both systems, enabling an ‘Infected’ mode, where you’re given regenerative Chimera powers and new weapons for the campaign. While it’s hooked up, you can also play through the campaign with your PS3 controller, assuming you keep both machines connected while you’re playing. Using the more precise controller, the aim assist mode is turned off, but the novelty enables a more natural mode of play mode. </span></p><p style="font-family: georgia;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghAzWe1RNeolS2GFZjrWOHKVBb9AcPgBIU8tSBIr2zuRnN1ajihV70svvbyLwI5ProhbotHnr1WaG40E5wCYwblcgBaPMc1szJpubxvD6mQwkn2oLbCXlhwCPLrVUudXF7D4XKECKZUGGa/s1600-h/rr4.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 227px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghAzWe1RNeolS2GFZjrWOHKVBb9AcPgBIU8tSBIr2zuRnN1ajihV70svvbyLwI5ProhbotHnr1WaG40E5wCYwblcgBaPMc1szJpubxvD6mQwkn2oLbCXlhwCPLrVUudXF7D4XKECKZUGGa/s400/rr4.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5347332430904043938" border="0" /></a></p> <p style="text-align: left; font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;font-size:100%;" >Multiplayer content in <i>Retribution</i> is very well supported – using either ad-hoc or infrastructure network modes, you can easily set up eight-player games. There’s even support for clans and headset chat, and of course, you get bonus geekery points if you can convince seven other people with PSPs to play the game at the same time as you. Good luck with that.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family: georgia;font-size:100%;" >[This review first appeared in <a href="http://www.critic.co.nz/">Critic</a> magazine.]</span><br /></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;font-size:100%;" ><br /></span>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02597398273751804565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1868814491378375054.post-35727953166345036472009-06-14T14:09:00.000+12:002009-06-15T11:34:27.523+12:00Review: Afro Samurai<span style=";font-size:100%;" >Namco Bandai Games</span> <p style="font-family: georgia;"><span style=";font-size:100%;" >PS3, Xbox 360</span><br /></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;"><span style=";font-size:100%;" >If part of the review process involved adding subtitles to games, I’d probably settle on something like <i> Afro Samurai: Lost in Adaptation</i>. (Unfortunately I was beaten to the punch by the slightly more entertaining <i>Afro Samurai: I've Had It With These [expletive deleted] Samurais On My [expletive deleted] ‘Fro!</i>) Year-old memes aside, it’s pretty clear that the transition from anime series to video game hasn’t been terribly kind to <i>Afro Samurai</i>. It’s uncommon for a slavish reproduction of any form of media to pay off, but this game could have benefited from slightly more cribbing from – and less free interpretation of – the original series. Not to say that the charm of the manga and the anime isn’t present in spades in the IP’s third major outing, but for all of the effort put into reincarnating the storyline, the beat-em-up game suffers from minor misteps. </span></p><p style="font-family: georgia;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuaD2neh10v7bnmiq0MhK8LgPU7FgK30nz2FdyD-HdUP8yHuhoGm04egH-GeCaLssF0gRm7Pe2HTpm3tCRJGUWfa-bkDboKBG1Cj40j7XzLiij8RfqP6cKzk5ZTj8IdhZARF2gJHv1aXo9/s1600-h/afro4.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuaD2neh10v7bnmiq0MhK8LgPU7FgK30nz2FdyD-HdUP8yHuhoGm04egH-GeCaLssF0gRm7Pe2HTpm3tCRJGUWfa-bkDboKBG1Cj40j7XzLiij8RfqP6cKzk5ZTj8IdhZARF2gJHv1aXo9/s400/afro4.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5347326170605732738" border="0" /></a></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;"><span style=";font-size:100%;" >Cell-shaded and coloured with the same muted tones of the anime series, the game plays like an extended episode – although at roughly six hours, it clocks in at three times the total length of the series. And for all of that time to expound on just what the hell is going on, <i>Afro Samurai</i> still doesn’t get the story across. Moreover, while it has polish in spades <i>and</i> Samuel L. Jackson returning to the fold, portraying both the kick-ass Afro and his constantly swearing sidekick Ninja Ninja, the game soon wears thin. Now, I’m not saying I wouldn’t pay through the nose just to listen to Sam Jackson talk to himself for six hours, but there’s a limit to how much of the same hack, slash, rinse and repeat I can put up with. </span><br /></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;"><span style=";font-size:100%;" >While you gain experience throughout the game and learn new moves, you don’t need them. There isn’t a boss that cannot be beaten with repeated taps on the heavy attack button, occasionally interrupted with a judicious block-and-evade combo. Killing enough of the cookie-cutter enemies (among them assassins, bulky guys with clubs and half-naked stripper-ninjas) gains focus, which can be spent in chunks to slow down time, or blown all at once to engage in a one-hit-kill spree to clear large crowds of enemies. The game plan is set in the first battle scene, and in contrast to the poorly explained and ever-changing plot, it stays constant throughout. </span><br /></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;"><span style=";font-size:100%;" >RZA’s influence, so vital to the anime series, is back in force on the beats, even if he couldn’t be personally involved in the process. Too busy to score the game himself, RZA offered up his notes and samples to composer and producer Howard Drossin. </span></p><p style="font-family: georgia;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXUSWvcecP7-yuiFrwjL07D4mZeyn2RZXXtZv-wzTSdh7qDJHM7BWBjIF-Ha3WPnRF9EFE1ydMBLs9mmCiwFCv2JnsSsFOzcLKzwMiJq0x4q5_MkaM0X52rc7PwyMlMjVaATSd8KT2s0pY/s1600-h/afro3.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXUSWvcecP7-yuiFrwjL07D4mZeyn2RZXXtZv-wzTSdh7qDJHM7BWBjIF-Ha3WPnRF9EFE1ydMBLs9mmCiwFCv2JnsSsFOzcLKzwMiJq0x4q5_MkaM0X52rc7PwyMlMjVaATSd8KT2s0pY/s400/afro3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5347326168905106306" border="0" /></a></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;"><span style=";font-size:100%;" >The battles are highly stylised, and it sure is fun to slice and dice in time with the music, dismembering waves of enemies in new and interesting ways. And for a while, the combat is utterly brilliant – RZA’s melding of C-movie samples, soul tracks, Wu-era beats and laconic raps is the most complementary music possible for the game. Until the point where, through my own ineptitude and unwillingness to spam the heavy attack button, the battle lasts just a little longer than anyone had planned, and there’s a pause. Silence. And the same track starts up again, and momentarily jolted from your violent reverie, you continue. </span></p><p style="font-family: georgia;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxIJP-npawCuWsN4zvQpPaII9Vo1elGNdnnbb8ZqlKCHPKTb8FSIQwQYra183vovN51aLv6est3bBZ1AvcFE80IH22CdEb2X48Rs8-Milx5nQ1KhyphenhyphenUQfQNBtpRmR0-J4z8l1TO3YBec4VP/s1600-h/afro1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxIJP-npawCuWsN4zvQpPaII9Vo1elGNdnnbb8ZqlKCHPKTb8FSIQwQYra183vovN51aLv6est3bBZ1AvcFE80IH22CdEb2X48Rs8-Milx5nQ1KhyphenhyphenUQfQNBtpRmR0-J4z8l1TO3YBec4VP/s400/afro1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5347326159017165714" border="0" /></a></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;"><span style=";font-size:100%;" >So here’s the kicker: players can’t draw out the intensely enjoyable combat, aiming for enemies’ heads and thrilling in the cinematic qualities of the slow-mo finishing moves, without experiencing a little hiccup that says two things; first, an inference on your lack of skill, that you are remiss for not having killed everything on screen; and second, that the <i>durée</i> of combat is shattered, and is no longer the graceful, rhythmic and interactive moment-as-continuum that it should have been. All of which is to say that lacking the simple addition of a bridge or looping track, enjoyment can go downhill very quickly.</span></p><p style="font-family: georgia;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc4-5QulJltbVjkVdd2HLeSLsIuHlAdgm3WleTNj27lWlxkbauEI2QG089TKi3qLks74pp0L7IP3brWOx1kZwyiqdI_kNuv9l-ZMa-Es5X4S0xQlkM8MevqnCkO-Iuc-iK8-shu9LoZ-TF/s1600-h/afro2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc4-5QulJltbVjkVdd2HLeSLsIuHlAdgm3WleTNj27lWlxkbauEI2QG089TKi3qLks74pp0L7IP3brWOx1kZwyiqdI_kNuv9l-ZMa-Es5X4S0xQlkM8MevqnCkO-Iuc-iK8-shu9LoZ-TF/s400/afro2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5347326163649770834" border="0" /></a></p> <div style="text-align: left; font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-family: georgia;font-size:100%;" >All in all, <i>Afro Samurai</i> is a collection of opposing statements, a rebuttal of its own marketing bulletpoints. The game apes the cinematic sense of the anime, but the camera can be poorly integrated at times; it uses RZA’s music to great effect in battles, until the end of each track; and while the epic story is present, it’s shifted almost beyond recognition. There’s little explanation as to whether you’re in the game’s present, or playing through a flashback scene, which adds to its disconnect. This one’s strictly for fans of RZA, afro-toting and cigarette-chomping martial artists, Samuel L. Jackson saying motherfucker, and the inevitable Venn diagram intersection of the three. </span> <span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">[This review first appeared in </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><a href="http://www.critic.co.nz/">Critic</a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> magazine.]</span></div>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02597398273751804565noreply@blogger.com0