Tag Archives: The Nod

Omnibus (week of March 25, 2018)

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If you’re one of my six regular readers, you will likely already know that I got a job recently. This has resulted in a general sense of stability, clear headedness, and purposefulness that I haven’t had for a while. So, what does one do with one’s suddenly guilt-free spare time on an occasion such as this? One plays computer games.

I’ve been avoiding games for a while because they stretch out to fill the time. And when there’s too much time for them to stretch out into, they can take a toll on your self-worth. But I have plenty of that at the moment, so I played no fewer than three games this week. They’re all very short, to be fair. But it feels good to be back to this medium for at least a while, because all three of them were extremely interesting, and it was hard to pick just one to recommend. Read on to find out if I managed — and to find out which of the gaming podcasts I tried out was the best. When I get in a mood, I commit. 

Also, I had three pieces on the radio this weekend. Readers here will likely be most interested in this one. 

17 reviews.

Games

Kentucky Route Zero: “Un Pueblo De Nada” (and assorted miscellany) — Kentucky Route Zero’s final intermission minisode is an elegiac trip behind the scenes of a declining small-town public access station. I could have identified that as a KRZ premise even if you hadn’t told me it’s a video game. The minisode itself has less to offer than its two immediate predecessors: “The Entertainment,” which opens up the possibility that the entire game is a stage play being written by one of its supporting characters, and “Here and There Along the Echo,” which makes trawling through a touch-tone telephone menu fun. But when you take into account the fact that “Un Pueblo De Nada” has a slew of online videos associated with it, all of which are live-action renderings of broadcasts from the public access station we explore in the minisode, it rises to the level of prime KRZ. I watched the videos first (save for a couple of hour-long, out-of-universe media art pieces that may be edifying but don’t seem crucial), then played the actual game. I think I recommend doing the opposite. Or at least save the final, longest video until after you’ve played the game. I’ll say no more, except that if you intend to play KRZ at any point, you can’t skip the intermission features, because in spite of their brevity they are as enthralling as the actual chapters of the game. (A final note for obsessives: it looks like the airstrip from the first chapter, which initially seemed like little more than a haunting non-sequitur, is actually going to take on more significance. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I really liked it as an inexplicable, beautiful moment that’s basically unmoored from the rest of the story. But then, if there’s any developer we can trust not to make anything too tidy, it’s Cardboard Computer. So I still feel like the ambiguity won’t be explained away to the point where the airstrip vignette becomes banal.)

Subsurface Circular — This is a miniature, dialogue-driven story game that takes place on a single, continuous train ride. It observes the Aristotelian unities more aggressively than maybe any other game I’ve played: it takes place in real time, as far as I can tell, and your character does not (and cannot) move from their seat in the subway carriage. It is written by Mike Bithell, of Thomas Was Alone fame, and like that game it is about artificial intelligences. However, in Thomas Was Alone, that fact was basically only relevant to the plot: the character drama proceeds as if the characters are odd humans. Subsurface Circular has a little bit more fun with the fact that its characters are robots, encumbering some of them with really strange traits, like having their mood entirely determined by the mood of a separate robot. The story is a straightforward mystery that you investigate the only way you can: by talking to people on the train. The dialogue is choice-based, in the vein of Telltale, except that your choices don’t seem to have a great deal of impact on the actual story — or even the relationships between the characters. That’s not a flaw. It still presents a compelling story and offers you the opportunity to role-play within it. Still, to progress through the story you must hit on certain crucial bits of dialogue. Getting to them is less a matter of cleverness and more a matter of simply exhausting all of your options. Given my own propensity to try and see as much of the text as I can in one sitting, this can get a bit tedious. And it’s partially my fault. But the writing and the story are really, really fun. I highly recommend this to people who loved the writing in Thomas Was Alone, and to people who like text-based games in general.  

Virginia — I love this game. I can imagine what the key critiques of it are, even without reading anything about it. I can hear people’s objections about the lack of even the illusion of player choice, and the way in which you are driven through its spaces on tracks without any real opportunity to explore. (In that way, it is fundamentally different to some of the games it will inevitably be compared to, i.e. Gone Home, Tacoma.) But the way that Virginia tells its story is completely ingenious and wouldn’t be possible in another medium. The story itself is fairly simple to describe, at least until near the end. You’re an FBI agent, assigned to investigate a missing person with another FBI agent — and while you’re at it, you’re expected to carry out an internal investigation of your partner. Virginia’s FBI is a paranoid body where duplicity is par-for-the-course. It even invokes J. Edgar Hoover: a figure whose time would have been up long before this game takes place, but who looms large in the FBI’s institutional memory. You experience the story from a first person perspective, in which you walk down corridors, search for things in rooms, and frequently find yourself jump cutting to another location altogether. Those cuts are the game’s masterstroke — they convey a sensation of the unreliability of memory, perception and reality. The cuts are simple at first: you’re walking down a corridor, only to find yourself walking down a different corridor. The message is simple: we’ve elided part of the story, because it’s not important. But soon, you find yourself cutting from the present-day to a memory, from a dream to reality, and maybe even into the perspective of another character altogether. All of these are bog-standard techniques in film editing, but they make you disoriented and paranoid in this context. Also notable: nobody speaks in Virginia. It proceeds with visual storytelling akin to a Méliès film or a Pingu short, minus the grunting. That only adds to the vagueness. In fact, Virginia avoids words almost entirely, only deigning to put them on screen when there are especially crucial plot details that you can’t afford to miss. (After an hour of wordless gameplay, a key revelation is delivered via microfiche.) The point is this: Virginia is deliberately obscure because of its central themes. Virginia is a game about transgressing the boundaries of what’s true. It is about the levels of artifice that exist in relationships between people, the disconnect between what we perceive as real and what is empirically real outside of us, and how truth can be deliberately distorted for one’s own means. It is strange, unique, powerful, probably unknowable, and it has an original score performed by an honest-to-god symphony orchestra. I love it. I can’t wait to play it again. Pick of the week.

Movies

Isle of Dogs — Hmm. Look, it would be an excellent movie if it weren’t so culturally insensitive. I want to like it, believe me. Wes Anderson is one of my favourite directors, with The Grand Budapest Hotel standing particularly tall among my all-time favourites. And there’s much to love in this film. It contains some of the most objectively gorgeous stop-motion animation I’ve ever seen. And all of the stuff involving the dogs themselves is gold. Bryan Cranston gives a fabulous performance as the hardened stray that the other dogs both look up to and resent. Jeff Goldblum is hilarious as the town gossip. And Harvey Keitel puts in a curiously heartbreaking turn as a dog for whom desperate times called for desperate measures. But much of the remainder of the movie takes place in a Western fantasy of Japan: a Japan with only its aesthetics intact. A key element of the film is that the audience is not supposed to understand the human dialogue throughout much of it. But… presumably those members of the audience who speak Japanese will not get the benefit of that choice. Like Pop Culture Happy Hour’s Linda Holmes pointed out, Japan isn’t Narnia. It’s a real place that exists in the world. Much of Isle of Dogs constitutes textbook cultural appropriation. Shame, too: if this had been made to take place in an actual fantasy world, I think it might be a near masterpiece. As it is, I spent much of the movie’s duration squirming uncomfortably.

Literature, etc.

Brian Vickers: “Too too solid: On the Norton Shakespeare and the New Oxford Shakespeare” — I have been meaning to buy a proper complete Shakespeare for a while now. Reading Moby-Dick in the Norton Critical Edition has opened my eyes to the advantages of a solid critical edition, even for recreational reading. This opinionated, not to say catty, review of the two most recent editions of Shakespeare from perpetual rivals Oxford and Norton highlights the latter as a pretty clear winner. Even if you’re not in the market for one of these, this is worth a read simply to watch Vickers excoriate the Oxford for its misbegotten attempts at trendiness: referencing Hamilton, referring to Shakespeare as “the ghost with the most,” and eschewing critical introductions to the plays (probably the whole point of a critical edition for most readers) in favour of something they call “Shakespeare tapas,” in which they sample one or two lines from essays and interviews with notable Shakespeareans out of context. Norton it is.  

Music

The New Pornographers: Mass Romantic — Somebody mentioned them in conversation recently and I was reminded that I’d never heard a full album. I’m not sure I’d even listened to a song with any real intention. I began where one begins: with “Letter From an Occupant.” That song is a miracle. Neko Case’s voice is a laser, and it contains the lines “I cried five rivers on the way here, which one will you skate away on?” That’s a Joni Mitchell riff that improves on the original. There’s something you don’t see every day. Nothing on the rest of the album quite compares, except maybe the title track. After one full listen, my sense is that I’ll be compelled to revisit the Neko Case songs (I’ve listened to “Letter” probably a couple dozen times this week) immediately, and the A.C. Newman songs may yet grow on me. Good album.

Jack White: Boarding House Reach — It’s not all excellent, but it is so crazily heterogenous and energetic that it doesn’t matter. This is the album where Jack White finally embraces the digital, and it turns out not to actually affect his aesthetic all that much. This is as messy, weird and disjointed as any White Stripes album and also toes the same line between knowing ludicrousness and total sincerity. It’s a succinct demonstration that an artist is not defined by their chosen tools, but by their approach to them. Highlights include “Corporation,” which injects an unexpected dose of P-Funk into the record, “Ice Station Zebra,” which contains the much-complained-about rapping (as if we’ve forgotten that he did it on “Lazaretto” too and nobody minded), “Over and Over and Over,” which is the closest we come to a classic garage rock track, and “Respect Commander,” which does some intensely fun stuff with tempo adjustment, and “Get In the Mind Shaft,” which is probably the closest Jack White will ever get to making a Daft Punk song. His best work since Icky Thump. Freaky good fun.

J.S. Bach/John Eliot Gardiner, English Baroque Soloists et al: St. John Passion — It’s Easter. On Easter we listen to Bach. I’ve always preferred the St. John Passion to the St. Matthew, which I can never get all the way through. Where Matthew is mutedly passionate, John is explosive. The opening chorus is a particular favourite — one of the most openly dramatic things in Bach’s entire oeuvre. There’s nothing quite like a big, awesome choir making their first entrance with “HERR!! HERR!! HERR!!” Speaking of, the Monteverdi Choir are the true stars of this fantastic recording with Gardiner. Neither he nor they are afraid of “letting it rip,” as the kids are saying. The English Baroque Soloists play with a sense of individuality that befits their name. And the vocal soloists put in lovely performances, particularly Anthony Rolfe-Johnson in the often thankless role of the Evangelist. Have a listen. At least check out the choruses.

Podcasts

Retronauts: “Zork,” “EarthBound” & “Broderbund” — In my recently rediscovered enthusiasm for video games, I felt compelled to check out a couple things from the doubtless well-populated gaming podcast space. True to its name, Retronauts is a roundtable chat podcast that focuses on retrogaming. In general, I am a modern gaming person, but I played just enough games in my childhood that I can occasionally conjure some nostalgia for eras of gaming gone by. How surprised was I, then, to find that the most recent episode of Retronauts focussed on Broderbund, a company whose edutainment titles made up a big chunk of my early exposure to computers. This episode reminded me of the existence of Living Books, which I’d forgotten entirely, as well as The Print Shop and the Carmen Sandiego games, of which Where in Time is permanently imprinted on my DNA. The Zork episode is a fun exploration of that game, which I’ve put many hours into and never even really come close to beating. I do feel that the panel may have a limited experience of post-Infocom parser-based interactive fiction, in light of which Zork’s puzzles look counterintuitive and inexpert. The EarthBound episode is the one with the most difficult task, namely to say interesting things about a game about which there is little left to say. It’s probably the Super Nintendo equivalent of Bowie’s Low. Alas, much of the discussion focuses on the game’s music, which is deeply beside the point. Still, I’ll listen to more of this. They’ve got a rich back-catalogue with at least one thing I care about for every dozen that I don’t.

No Cartridge: “Desert of the Real Fictions” — The second gaming podcast I checked out this week is this loose conversation show hosted by a professor. A conversation between that professor, Trevor Strunk, and the developer of Night in the Woods, Scott Benson, is bound to be fun. This particularly focuses on the question raised by gamers who demand better endings from game developers — as if a game is something other than a thing made by a person, but rather a thing that exists whole in some other universe and has been dragged imperfectly into this one by a flawed human vessel. It shines a light on the ways in which a large swathe of the gaming hordes are substantially lacking in critical facility. A fun listen if you’re into that sort of thing.

On the Media: “Big, if True” — One of the best things about OTM is that it’s always there on the stories you need it for. The Cambridge Analytica story was one of those. This is as good an exploration of that as you could hope for.

Song by Song: “Bride of Rain Dog” & “Anywhere I Lay My Head” — I’ve enormously enjoyed this podcast’s breakdown of Rain Dogs. These final two episodes are the general summation you’d hope for. It’s all well that they chose to do that, since I’m really not sure there’s much to say about “Anywhere I Lay My Head” that it doesn’t say for itself. It is one of Tom Waits’s most poignant creations. I’ll be returning to this show for Frank’s Wild Years — my idiosyncratic favourite Tom Waits album, an opinion I know the panel does not share.

Pop Culture Happy Hour catch-up — It came to pass that I agreed with Linda Holmes (and not Chris Klimek) on Isle of Dogs, a very problemsy movie. In other news, High Maintenance sounds not for me, Ready Player One sounds intensely not for me, and the SXSW wrap was sort of repetitive after hearing All Songs Considered’s coverage in its entirety.

Theory of Everything: “Utopia” parts iv and v — This hasn’t been my favourite mini-season in ToE’s history. But there’s much to enjoy here, in particular Andrew Calloway’s trip to a pagan utopia in part iv.

Imaginary Worlds: “Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin” & “Stuck in the Uncanny Valley” — The Le Guin episode is a good primer that I’ll look back to when I am in search of an SF novel to read. The uncanny valley is one of the better Imaginary Worlds episodes in a while, in no small part because it draws on Eric Molinsky’s expertise as a former animator.

The Memory Palace: “Outliers” & “A quick update and a bonus episode” — “Outliers” is a brief thing about the reasons why a person might decide to take part in a freak show in the 19th century. It is as compassionate and broad minded as you expect this show to be. Oddly, though, the bonus episode that follows it is almost better. It transitions seamlessly from being a bland housekeeping episode to being a really lovely tribute to Lavinia Dock, whose suffrage slogan, “the young are at the gates” is now being repurposed movingly as a slogan for the Never Again movement. This show is an ongoing miracle. Pick of the week.  

The Nod: “Peak Reality” & “Sister, Sister” — It’s been awhile since I listened to this. I heard a preview for “Sister, Sister” on another Gimlet show and figured I had to hear it. But first I listened to a completely different episode by mistake that turned out to be even better. “Peak Reality” finds Eric Eddings arguing to Brittany Luse that 2016 was the best year for reality television. There’s nothing like smart people talking about dumb things. As for “Sister, Sister,” it’s an interesting bit of family drama in which a producer finds out her sister doesn’t identify as black and is upset by this. Alas, the actual conversations with the sister in question make it plain immediately that this sister’s issue is simply that she is in college, with all of the attendant confusion. It’s less compelling than it might be.

Omnibus (week of July 24, 2017)

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This was one of those weeks where I watched a whole season of TV. It happens. But I still managed to get a bunch of podcasts in and some truly wonderful music. 25 reviews.

Movies

Blade Runner — The only other time I’ve watched Blade Runner was when I was probably 16. I’m not sure which cut I watched at the time, but it couldn’t have been the Final Cut, which I watched this time, because that didn’t come out until the next year. Regardless, I remembered liking it a lot, but that’s kind of all I remembered. This week, I watched the Final Cut with a friend, in a state of distraction and fatigue. Truthfully, a lot of the story and many of the themes slipped past me, given how little attention I was paying. But the result of this was a unique sort of viewing experience: I feel as though I watched Blade Runner as a painting. Without following the story or attempting to parse the characters’ motivations and identities, Blade Runner becomes a mystifying, entrancing procession of sensations and impressions. If it were possible to photoshop out all of the main characters from Blade Runner and mute all of the dialogue, I daresay it would still be a compelling art film. It would still be a fever dream of a future city: we would still see the magnificent towers occupied by the very privileged, the sweaty masses of pedestrians in the Tokyo-inspired lower quarters, the vast modernist step pyramids where authority lives, and the total dominance of advertising from the street level straight up to the rarified air of the police aircrafts. We would still have Vangelis’s abstract, improvisational score imparting a feel of creeping malaise. We would still see rooms filled with grotesque semi-sentient toys, and beams of golden light enrobing the figure of an owl with a curiously reflective iris. When my friend and I first tried to start the movie, we were disappointed to discover that her HDMI cable had reached the end of its lifespan. (“It’s too bad she won’t live. But then again, who does?”) We rushed to London Drugs for a replacement, and since the store was just about to close, one of the employees in the home electronics section was indulging himself by playing Philip Glass’s score to Koyaanisqatsi over the speakers. A small moment of serendipity, this was. Koyaanisqatsi is an experimental film by Godfrey Reggio that was released the same year Blade Runner was. Inevitably, the music conjured up the film’s narrative-free imagery of late 20th-century cities in my mind, and it remained lodged there throughout the duration of Blade Runner. Maybe that’s part of why I saw it the way I did. Contained within Blade Runner is both a science fiction thriller about human identity and a sort of speculative Koyaanisqatsi. Where Reggio’s film is a study of then-contemporary urban malaise, conveyed through images and evocative music, Ridley Scott’s is the same thing for an imagined near future. The two films never struck me as being of a piece with each other before, but I doubt the connection will ever leave me now. I might watch Blade Runner again next week. I love this movie and I still don’t really know what it’s about.

Television

Twin Peaks: The Return: Part 11 — Okay, so Shelly has abruptly become much less admirable in the show’s estimation. First, she jumps onto the windshield of a moving car, something no reasonably intelligent person would do, regardless of the circumstance. Then, she instantaneously forgets the moment of family crisis she’s trying to negotiate when her latest criminal boyfriend drops by. I mean, it’s not like she didn’t always have a thing for criminals, but that scene is super weird. One second she’s crying, embracing her off-the-rails daughter, and the next, she’s scampering away from that same daughter as fast as she can to go make out with Balthazar Getty. I am trying hard to maintain my view that Twin Peaks is intrinsically worthwhile by virtue of being unlike anything else on television, but it’s not making it easy. Mind you, if it were making it easy, it wouldn’t be unlike anything else on television.

Game of Thrones: “Stormborn” — Wow, this must be blazingly good for me to not hate it. I always hate the beginnings of GoT seasons. Now I’m actually looking forward to this show’s next episode. I don’t think that’s happened for about three seasons. That’s my highest possible praise for this show, so I’ll just leave it at that.

Downton Abbey: Season 5 — Once you start a season of Downton it is impossible not to finish it that week. I defy anybody to try. Here is the season where everybody’s moral clarity, however misbegotten, gets shot to hell. The situation with Edith’s illegitimate daughter is an absolute minefield. While the constant scenes of her getting turned away by the unknowing foster mother of her illegitimate child get trying, the denouement of that plotline makes everybody a victim. Edith herself is the victim of the social strictures of her time that would see her scandalized if her pregnancy had been revealed, and the foster mother is deprived of the child that she raised because of her inferior class. When Cora finds out, even she is unable to maintain her usual consistency of ethics: she’s deeply offended that Violet and Rosamund kept the secret from her, but once she knows she claims it’s “not their secret to tell,’ even to Robert who by rights has an equal claim to the knowledge as Cora. But of course she’s right to feel he can’t know. Because he’s an ass-backwards jerk. That ought to be the reasoning Cora offers. And he is awfully insufferable this season. One of Downton’s perverse delights is watching as Robert’s way of life is eroded gradually in ways he finds unacceptable and unjust. His misplaced anxiety about his wife’s fidelity is a clever way for the show to demonstrate the extent to which his grip is slipping. But it’s also a clear indication of how much he takes Cora for granted. Elizabeth McGovern walks a fine line in scenes with her would-be illicit lover Simon Bricker: never once implying that she actually wants to have an affair, but happy to be appreciated for once. Meanwhile, Mary maintains her steadfast code of self-interest and remains basically sympathetic due to the extent to which her being that way flies in the face of convention. I’m quite the fan of how this season makes it even clearer that she’s the second coming of her grandmother, with all of the wit and imperiousness that entails. As for her suitor Lord Gillingham, holy smokes what a dolt. I never tire of scenes in which he steadfastly refuses to acknowledge that he is no longer involved with Mary. I have no particular wishes for how the relationships on this show are to turn out, but I’m very happy to see that guy get thrown over. And on the note of Mary’s similarity to Violet: Maggie Smith continues to be the best part of this show, if only because her total insincerity offers a comment on the proceedings that’s in line with those of us who find ourselves watching Downton half in spite of ourselves. Her storyline with Cousin Isabel, and their mutually unexpected reinvigorated romantic prospects is probably the most consistently amusing thing in this season. As for historical context, the first Labour government gives rise to hopes and fears alike among the servants. For Carson, whose identity and what prestige he has is based entirely on the continuing prosperity of the aristocracy, it seems catastrophic. But for Daisy, who still has her life ahead of her, it seems like an opportunity to do something more with her life. It’s an interesting exploration of the double bind that the serving staff are in: reliant upon the class structure for their livelihoods, but held back by it in larger measure. Also, now that we’re well into the inter-war period, I suppose there need to be some anti-Semites in the show. Clever of Fellowes to have Rose fall for Atticus before she knows of his Jewish heritage. That prevents the unpleasant sense that she’s fetishizing his otherness the way she did with her previous suitor, who was black. Altogether, I think this is one of the stronger seasons of the show, if only because it focusses in on its characters and their lives more than contriving schemes and implausible happenstances to elicit drama. But I honestly would have been pretty much satisfied even if it were just nine hours of Lord Grantham getting called “Donk” by a small child.

Music

Buffy Sainte-Marie: Illuminations — One of the great underrecognized classics of the era. This is the album where Buffy Sainte-Marie leaves folkiedom behind in favour of a very idiosyncratic and not-to-be-pigeonholed rendition of psychedelia. She’s cited Morton Subotnick as an influence in the past, probably the only songwriter I’ve ever seen that remark from. And the electronic filigree that links this album’s songs together has Silver Apples of the Moon’s influence all over it. Except it never outstays its welcome. One of the best things about the rock music of the late 60s and early 70s is the fact that all of these musicians were listening to avant-garde classical music, but had the impulse to fold its aesthetic into their music rather than its spirit, which didn’t necessarily always prioritize sounding good. I have no problem with that, but it’s nice to hear the legacy of Subotnick colliding with something I actually love. And the songs themselves are outstanding. “God is Alive, Magic is Afoot” is fun because it’s not a Leonard Cohen cover, but rather a setting of a poem that he himself did not set to music. How lovely it is that we have in the world a song that can be credited to Cohen/Sainte-Marie. The music is pleasingly simplistic: Sainte-Marie has cottoned onto the chant-like character of the text and made that the central inspiration for her music. Among the originals, my favourites are “Better to Find Out for Yourself,” “The Dream Tree,” “Keeper of the Fire” and “Poppies.” The first and third of these feature some of Sainte-Marie’s most aggressive singing. One reason I love her early records so much is because she offers such a compelling alternative to more conventionally pretty folk voices of the time, like Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. She has that sweet, lyrical character in her voice as well, and it comes out gorgeously on “The Dream Tree.” but that’s only one facet of the voice. “Better to Find Out for Yourself” finds her folding wolf calls into the ends of her phrases and “Keeper of the Fire” is a flat-out hard rock vocal performance with an imitation guitar solo in the voice as well. This is a classic, visionary, haunting album and I am constantly appalled by its overlookedness.

Pink Floyd: The Early Years 1965-72 — Oh man, the audio portion of this box set is on Apple Music now! (Except for the last volume, because they still have to entice me to buy the set somehow. As if the hours of video footage weren’t enough.) This is astonishingly entertaining for a vast set of outtakes and rarities. I’ve gotten through the first two volumes, and I am having a Grand Old Time. Let us go into detail, shall we? Volume one, focussing on the period from 1965 through 67, is the only one in the bunch to entirely predate Syd Barrett’s replacement with David Gilmour. It runs the gamut from bracing to boring, but there’s less of the latter than you might think. It’s in four sections. The first is a set of recordings from 1965, while the band was still calling itself the Tea Set, and had a second guitarist. The sound is excellent, but the same can’t be said of the songs, which find Syd Barrett in the throes of a rhythm and blues obsession that will have long abated by the time Pink Floyd actually releases a record. The performances are surprisingly good, though. Already, this is a band that’s more concerned with how they play than what they play. The second part is a collection of the band’s singles, B-sides, and a few unreleased tracks. Of these, the singles and B-sides are familiar but welcome here as part of the broader picture of this band at this time. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn proves to be a very narrow window through which to view these artists. The unreleased tracks include a few new mixes of familiar tracks, including a “Matilda Mother” with different, funnier lyrics. “There was a boy whose name was Jim / His friends they were very good to him / They gave him tea and cakes and jam / And slices of delicious ham.” God, I love that. But probably the highlight of the volume is the new stereo mixes of the famous unreleased tracks “In the Beechwoods” and especially “Vegetable Man” and “Scream Thy Last Scream.” These last two are in fact among Syd Barrett’s finest songs and in a just world would have become two sides of a single, or maybe showed up on A Saucerful of Secrets in place of, I dunno, “Corporal Clegg” and “See-Saw.” It seems they’ve been regarded as unfortunate symptoms of Barrett’s decline over the years. But with these new mixes, they stand revealed as two of the best early Pink Floyd songs. The second disc of volume one, consisting of the other two parts, is a less triumphant affair. It does feature the archeological diamond of a full live set with Syd Barrett, though the vocals are missing from the mix and only audible through distant mics. Still, it sounds like Syd was having a bad night vocally, so maybe that’s not such a bad thing. It’s weird to hear him sing “Set the Controls” to begin with — let alone so out of tune. And the instrumentals like “Interstellar Overdrive” and the unrecorded “Reaction in G” are as compelling as the band’s early fans would have you think. Volume one finishes with an unused free improvisational film score made for the experimental filmmaker John Latham. This is not great. It’s one of those things that it’s nice to have, just because we’ve all known that it exists for so long. I imagine it’s kind of like finally getting to see the pyramids in person. Except, if the pyramids were shitty. Because this is Pink Floyd doing a sort of free improvisation that they were a bit out of their depth to attempt. Their best semi-improvisational pieces, “Interstellar Overdrive” and especially the sublime “A Saucerful of Secrets” are based around concrete structures, as opposed to just noodling. AMM could make noodling sound good. So could King Crimson. Not Pink Floyd. Still, it’s a pleasure to experience. Volume two is simultaneously worse than volume one and more narratively compelling. It focusses on 1968, a rough year for the band in many ways, though it did see the release of one of my idiosyncratic faves in their catalogue, A Saucerful of Secrets. But for all of their success as an albums band that year, the first section of this disc proves they were creatively spent as a singles band. If Barrett’s “Apples and Oranges” had proven a disappointing follow-up to “See Emily Play,” then Wright’s “It Would Be So Nice” and especially Waters’ “Point Me At The Sky” prove completely unworthy. Their engine of ingenious psychedelic pop was irreparably broken. It now seems obvious that the only feasible direction was towards the very avant-garde. The BBC sessions that close out volume two (one of which delightfully comes with John Peel’s intros and extros intact) finds the band seemingly in denial of this, as they focus on performing their singles. We do, mercifully, get a rather good live “Saucerful of Secrets,” though it is inexplicably retitled “The Massed Gadgets of Hercules.” I say “inexplicably” because the album had already come out when the session was recorded — it can’t have been an early title. Am I wrong? In any case, volume two of this box is endlessly fascinating from an anthropological perspective, in large part because of how bad it is. Can’t wait to hear the rest.

Tom Waits: Frank’s Wild Years — My favourite Tom Waits album. To me, it strikes a perfect balance between the freaky cabaret music on Rain Dogs just before it and the crunchy aggro of Bone Machine shortly after. “Innocent When You Dream” is one of the most heartbreaking songs ever, made moreso by its comedic drunken ugliness. This is a man who hit bottom and smashed through into a dark, parody underworld where nothing seems real but everybody’s still behaving like nothing’s wrong. The same goes for the demented Kander and Ebb pastiche “I’ll Take New York,” which finds Waits at his most openly parodic and nightmarish. The best thing about it is that there’s nothing dark in the lyric. It’s a pitch perfect impression of Kander and Ebb’s civic boosterism. But it’s refracted through the lens of the demented calliope music that is one of Waits’ most profitable standbys. And even when Waits is working on a slightly less heightened level, like on “Temptation” or “Cold Cold Ground,” both among his best songs, he still sounds like he’s living in a pocket universe where the rules of reality are a bit different from our own. This is one of those rare albums that suspends reality. I love it.

Tom Waits: Small Change — I am generally more of a fan of Tom Waits’s post-Swordfishtrombones albums than his 70s material. I like the complex irony of those later albums. It’s like there’s a dark mirror planted somewhere near the year 1980, and Waits stepped through and became a gurning, grotesque reflection of what he was before. But there’s a time and a place for Waits’s more sincere early music. The time is 2:00am and the place is staggering home drunk. Or, in the absence of these conditions, you can simply imagine yourself in that state and it still kind of works. I had previously only known Waits’s earlier music through my longtime favourite Heartattack and Vine and a scattering of tracks from before it. This is my first listen to Small Change, and it is a heck of a lot better than Heartattack. There’s not a single song on this that I didn’t love immediately. While Waits is lacking his later derangement here, he still has the unique wit of a self-romanticizing drunk hobo. “Step Right Up” is a distillation of all of the most familiar slogans in cheap advertising and straightforward swindling into a song. It is substantially virtuosic, and it helps to clarify the difference between Waits’s early novelty songs and his later ones like “Cemetery Polka.” In “Step Right Up” (and also “The Piano Has Been Drinking”) Waits is letting the audience in on a joke he’s come up with. He’s performing a routine. In “Cemetery Polka,” there’s a joke somewhere, but it’s hard to parse and we feel alienated because of it. It’s entirely possible that we’re the brunt of the joke. But most of the album is made up of the sad, lovelorn ballads that Waits is so good at during this period. “Tom Traubert’s Blues” is the clear highlight, with its ripped-off chorus (from “Waltzing Matilda”) taking on more heft in this context than in its original one. It is one of Waits’ great pictures of modern despair and displacement, and one of his very best songs. The same goes for “Bad Liver and a Broken Heart” and “Invitation to the Blues.” This immediately struck me as a brilliant album. I expect to be back to it as frequently as its ultra-specific mood will permit. Pick of the week.

Literature, etc.

Chris Onstad: Achewood — I have read up to April of 2002 in this wonderful, absurd, very funny and often poignant web comic. Evidently I am still a long way off from the good stuff, but I am already very into this world. Ray and Roast Beef are yet to become the central characters (I know enough to know that they eventually will) and Philippe is the current highlight. He is so adorable that it can only be hilarious to see him subjected to the capricious whims of the Achewood universe. Great stuff.

John Errington: Centuries of Sound — I’m trying to catch up with this blog, which includes mixes for every year of recorded sound. It’s a great premise, and the very early years are super interesting, though the mixes are understandably short and abstract. The first of them features a few reconstructed recordings of Édouard-Léon Scott, who made a machine that could record indications of sound in soot. They were never meant to be played back, because Scott couldn’t conceive of such a thing, but of course we’ve found a way. Errington’s mix includes a documentary by Studio 360 about how that came to be. It’s actually crazy to hear, however scrappily, the sound of a voice from 1860 — the voice of a person who might not have thought that such a thing was possible.

Podcasts

The Nod: “Greetings, My Brothas” — Okay, now this is good. There’s something about hearing people laugh at a funny thing that makes it funnier, and these two laughing at a YouTube conspiracy theory about the Jay-Z/Solange elevator incident is start-to-finish hysterical.

Mogul: “How Heavy It Was,” “August 30, 2012” & Uncle Murda cameo — Mogul is a beautiful thing. These last two episodes (I’m not going to deal too much with the cameo, fun though it is) just clinch the whole thing. What I love about this is that the show subtly frames its narrative as a low-key true crime story that culminates in a contested suicide ruling. But the narrative proceeds inexorably to the conclusion that Chris Lighty’s death probably was what it seemed like. The chief contribution of Mogul to the story of Chris Lighty is bringing the mental illness he suffered to light. That’s part of what makes it so vital: it addresses a death that’s regarded as a mystery by framing it in terms of the evidence that nobody wants to talk about. This is so good, and I have become very fond of Reggie Ossé. I don’t know how an Ivy League educated lawyer can be so warm and likeable. The Combat Jack Show has a new subscriber.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Dunkirk,” “Girls Trip” & “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” — I’m liking the new format. Of these episodes, the only one that convinced me to see something was the Dunkirk one, because I was genuinely on the fence prior to this. The other two amount to a “not for me” and a “this sounds awful.”

The Turnaround: “Anna Sale” & “Reggie Ossé (Combat Jack)” — I really admire Jesse Thorn for not cutting the moments in these interviews when his guests don’t know what his question means. Because I can absolutely relate to that. Anna Sale’s interview is a bit rough, since it was the first for this show, but it’s still edifying enough. The Combat Jack episode is a series highlight, though. I’m happy Thorn included him, since there aren’t likely to be any other specialists in a subject area on this show. (Unless you count Brooke Gladstone, but “media” isn’t really a niche.) Since Mogul’s been coming out, I’ve been amazed at how easy it seems for Combat to talk with huge hip hop stars. Turns out, there’s value in being a bit of an insider. He’s a known enough quantity that these artists are comfortable talking to him. But that’s not to say that craftsmanship and intent don’t enter into what Reggie Ossé does. He’s always thinking in broader terms to what just about any generalist interviewing a rapper would be thinking. He’s interested in hearing their take on life in general, rather than just about their art. That’s valuable. Have I done a complete about-face on my opinion of interviewing artists since I started listening to this show? Yes? I dunno. I’m very confused about my own value system. But I know I enjoyed these shows.

Code Switch: “What’s So Wrong With African Americans Wearing African Clothing?” & “What’s Good? Talking Hip-Hop and Race With Stretch and Bobbito” — A pair of preview for shows I’m not super interested in. The Stoop covers interesting territory, but I’m not sold on the hosts. And I’m suspicious of the extent to which NPR is getting in on the personality-driven podcast bandwagon with the Stretch and Bobbito show. Probably I’m wrong.

Theory of Everything: “Private Ear” — I can’t help but feel like the guy this story is about — an aural reconstructor of secret spaces who uses the memories of prisoners as his guide — is a bit dodgy. But it’s very much like this show to introduce me to an artist (because this is what he is, mostly) who works so far outside of the expected arenas.

99% Invisible: “The Trials of Dan and Dave” — ESPN is getting into podcasting, and they’ve already got the Roman Mars bump. Imagine. This is a fun story that’s not really all about the sports, which as far as I know is the 30 For 30 trademark. Nice stuff.

This American Life: “Break-Up” — It’s pretty rare for me to listen to anything from a show’s back catalogue these days. But this is the episode that made Starlee Kine’s career. As a steadfast mourner of Mystery Show, I felt it was necessary to finally hear the famous story where Kine works through her bad breakup with the assistance of one Phil Collins. As a Genesis fan, it’s doubly interesting to hear Collins tell the story of how his first divorce precipitated his transition from being a jazz fusion drummer in his non-Genesis career to an international pop star on the back of several heartrending ballads. This all strikes a personal chord for me, because I went through a shit breakup that was scored by the music of Phil Collins’s one-time bandmate, Peter Gabriel. There was a while there where I obsessed over Gabriel’s Us album for very similar reasons to the ones Kine cites for her love for “Against All Odds.” I am Starlee Kine in the Upside-Down. T’was ever thus.

99% Invisible: “El Gordo” — Ah yes, a story in which only one person in a town does not win the lottery. The world is quite marvellous, you know that?

The Memory Palace: “Elmer McCurdy Rides Again and Again” — It was only a matter time before our greatest author of historical prose poems attempted a rhyming couplet story. It is a mixed affair. Mostly I like it, but I halfway feel that the gimmick gets in the way of a genuinely marvellous story, in which an embalmed human body is mistaken for a wax sculpture and ends up on the set of The Six Million Dollar Man. Still good.

Criminal: “A Bump In The Night” — A terrifying story of a woman who hears sounds in the night that turn out to be something. It ends unsatisfyingly, but so do most things in life.

What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law: “The Emoluments Clauses” — The most interesting thing about this is the fact that the emoluments clauses of the constitution have been considered so obscure that they’re not even in textbooks, and Trump is the first president so unconventional that he requires them to be taken into consideration. Everything is bad.

The Daily: July 24-28 — My first full week of listening to The Daily reveals it to be a genuinely excellent way to keep on top of the biggest stories, at least as they pertain to American federal politics. I have generally preferred this show when it contains at least one segment that takes place outside of the U.S.A. But there are some genuinely confusing and terrifying things happening in the White House on a week by week basis, so what are they to do? Regardless, this is one of the best shows to launch in recent years, and a genuine innovation.

Reply All: “Long Distance” — The best episode of Reply All for some time. And it’s not like it’s been in a slump. Some schlub who didn’t know what he was getting into tried to scam Alex Goldman and ended up the subject of a piece of playful yet ruthless investigative journalism. Goldman’s imperiousness is hysterical here, and the fact that he doesn’t reveal the consequence of the story at the start is much appreciated. I feel compelled to be coy about this and not spoil it. Listen to it. It is magnificent. Pick of the week.

Song by Song: “Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen), Small Change, Tom Waits” — I came across this Tom Waits song randomly at work, having never listened to Small Change. (You’ll note from above that I have since listened to the full album and had quite the response.) It is a beautiful thing, and I figured I’d take the opportunity to sample this podcast that’s going through his songs in order, one by one. It could do to be longer, honestly. It feels a bit slim. Fun that they’ve got Jeffrey Cranor, though. Not sure I’ll be back to this.

Omnibus (week of July 16, 2017)

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Three picks of the week, this week. It was that kind of week. Also, here’s the latest NXNW segment. It’s a really good one, this week. I talked about three things from very recent weeks that I’ve especially loved. I’m at 2:09:42.

19 reviews.

Movies

Baby Driver — I have a friend who tells a story about how Brian Eno saved his life. “I suffer from tinnitus,” he wrote. “These days I’m mostly able to ignore it, but when I first noticed it, it was terrifying. I couldn’t sleep through the night without having this track (“Music for Airports 1/1”) on repeat in the background, just loud enough to distract me from the buzzing in my own head, just quiet enough to allow me to sleep.” He went on to coin a phrase I like: “societal tinnitus”: the terrifying sensation that the world is inescapably noisy. I know for a fact that he’s not the only person to have found Music for Airports necessary for drowning out one metaphorical tinnitus or another. But music’s function as a tonic runs deeper than a mere physiological response to calming ambient music. Music can offer a near-complete respite from the obligation to be present in the world. When you put in earbuds, you are doing two things in equal measure: connecting yourself to an imaginary reality that exists in a recording, and disconnecting yourself from the auditory portion of the empirical reality around you. It’s wrong to view the latter phenomenon as a byproduct of the former. Your inability to hear while in this state — and increasingly the willingness of others to simply accept that you cannot hear them while wearing earbuds and thus not try to engage you — is a feature, not a bug. “The world is so loud.” To escape, simply superimpose a louder one. Disengage. A pair of shades to avoid unsought after eye contact completes the coping mechanism. Making compulsive use of this function of music is surely unhealthy. But for all that it may cost you, it repays you with moments of unmatched vibrancy in your inner life. Everybody else is walking to work, lining up for a sandwich, waiting for the bus. And you may be doing one of those things too, but you are wholly within yourself: a bespoke intelligence expending the minimum amount of mental energy on the world that begins where you end. This is when you are most yourself. These moments are a joy and a necessity. And the music itself is almost incidental to the appeal. Baby Driver is the first movie I’ve seen that captures, or even attempts to capture, this feeling. When Baby dances down the sidewalk in the long take that makes up the movie’s title sequence, he is allowing “Harlem Shuffle” to subsume his reality. (Ansel Elgort’s essential charmlessness helps to sell Baby’s total disengagement.) When he makes his immaculately choreographed getaways to the strains of various energetic scores, he is imposing his own reality on the world around him. Baby Driver’s relationship with music is different from that of lesser films like Garden State or even High Fidelity, both of which are about how a person’s relationship with specific genres, songs and artists help to inform that person’s identity. Baby Driver isn’t really about any music in particular, but rather about the act of listening itself, and the functions of that act. Baby’s musical taste has little bearing on his character. For Baby, music is neither indulgence nor signifier, but a basic necessity. He requires it to drown out his tinnitus — which he possesses in both literal and metaphorical forms. In a bit of boilerplate but not entirely unrelatable backstory, we see that Baby’s tinnitus and his psychological trauma were caused by the same event. We see that even prior to this event, Baby was using the noise-cancelling properties of Apple earbuds to drown out a noisy household. (“So this is what the volume knob’s for…”) For Baby, music will always first and foremost serve a practical purpose. Baby’s not a music nerd. His taste in music doesn’t serve as personal branding or narrative shorthand. (And what would we be meant to learn about him from the fact that he blasts “Tequila,” anyway?) He simply does not have the freedom to exist without music. He cannot do his job in its absence, and he cannot avoid his literal and metaphorical tinnitusses without it. This is what Buddy misunderstands when he deafens Baby: he’s not taking away something Baby loves, he’s permanently curing the disease that the music was only ever a treatment for. Without tinnitus, Baby is free to continue living his rich inner life unencumbered by the noise of the world and the noise in his head. He is free to be the most himself, always. Deafness is a permanent and equal alternative to the superimposed reality of his iPod. He even already knows sign language. Baby Driver is not a music nerd movie. It is not a movie about listening to music. It’s a movie about not having to listen to the rest of the world, which is loud and confusing and stressful. That is an effect that listening to music has. It is a feature, not a bug. This may turn out to be one of those movies with which I develop an inappropriately intense relationship. Pick of the week.

Television, etc.

Twin Peaks: The Return: Part 10 — Is it foolish to criticize the amount of violence towards women in a show that started off about the brutal murder of a homecoming queen? Because, 26 years later, Twin Peaks still submits its female characters to an awful lot. This, more than any other episode of the season, is where these dubious instincts come out a bit too much. There are three separate instances of physical violence towards women in this, two of which are in the first ten minutes. Also in the first ten minutes is a somewhat troubling sequence in which a woman is too stupid to realize that if she swats a fly that’s sitting on a person’s head, she swats the person as well. Subsequently, she cries for the whole day and asks the swatted man “how can you love me after what I did?” This in spite of the two other women this man keeps around the house wearing the same fetishistic outfit. I mean, she could be up to something, but this is one of very few shows where it’s possible she might just actually be that way. Hmm. Pity too, because it would be a good Lynchian joke if this show were a little bit less dudeish these days. (Where the hell is Audrey??? I’d understand if she’s reluctant to show her face because her son’s a shitsack, but I need her in this show for the same reason I need Cooper back, i.e. I need somebody to start figuring shit out.) I’m also starting to seriously question what the point was of casting Naomi Watts as such a dunce. This hasn’t really stuck out to me over the past nine episodes, but I’m now starting to wonder whether this show’s attitude towards women is actually worse than it was in the early 90s. On the other hand, I’d really like to see more of Harry Dean Stanton singing folk tunes. And I was OVERJOYED to see Rebekah Del Rio, whose performance in Mulholland Dr. is my favourite moment in all of cinema. So, with those notable exceptions, this was my least favourite episode of the season so far. I hope the next few episodes follow through on Part 9’s promise to start allowing plot threads to converge. That, or just do more awesome freakouts like Part 8. If you’re going to be obtuse, GO ALL THE DAMN WAY.

Game of Thrones: “Dragonstone” — Well, this is off to an abruptly better start than the last couple of seasons. I have a lot of trouble getting excited for GoT the way that the rest of the world seems to. But when I actually sit down and watch it, I inevitably remember that I like it. Highlights here include Arya brutally slaughtering dozens of people and shortly thereafter trying to fit in non-awkwardly with a bunch of normal-seeming soldier dudes. Maisie Williams’ forced laughter in this scene is a thing to behold. It’s entirely possible that her performance is my favourite in this show. Also, Sam is attending Gross University. The Hound is gonna find religion. And Jorah is dying slowly. Those are my key takeaways. Mostly I’m just happy that there are no plotlines in this show right now that I’m barely tolerating. Should be a good season.

Deep Cuts: “A Guide to BRIAN ENO” — Oh no, I have a British doppelganger and he’s better and more prolific than me. This is an impressively thorough trip through the Eno catalogue, dealing with his solo albums and collaborations. Oliver J (a cursory Google did not yield a full surname) has some nice bits of analysis in here, like when he points to Eno’s habit of giving descriptive names to his own instrumental credits (e.g. “Snake guitar”) as an indicator of how good he is at communicating about music — and therefore why he’s such a good collaborator. I hadn’t thought of that, and I think about Brian Eno more than just about any artistic figure. It’s a marathon, but it’s worth a watch if you’re trying to parse Eno’s catalogue for stuff you might want to check out.

Porkin’ Across America — This is a very dark story, courtesy of the Onion, about what happens when a man neglects his family in favour of travel, fame, and pork. It starts to get dark immediately, but you have no idea how dark it will get by the last episode. You have no idea.

Games

The Dream Machine: Chapter 5 — Chapter five is the strangest, most discursive and in some ways most ingenious chapter of The Dream Machine. As I said in my review of chapter four, Victor has essentially completed his character arc at this point, and all that remains for him is to save the day with his newfound maturity and empathy. (I’m assuming that’s what chapter six will entail, but I haven’t gotten there.) So, in this penultimate chapter, the devs just cut loose, envisioning two dreams that have little bearing on Victor’s psychology, but which are simply good fun to walk around in. Selma’s dream is probably the most significant accomplishment in the game in terms of its (literal) construction (from clay, cardboard and found objects). The look of the place is a wonder: a hazy fairytale forest in a state of perpetual gloaming. Its crowning glory is the inside of a squirrel’s hidey hole, bark and wood walls all covered in lichen and mushrooms. The detail in these interactive dioramas is like nothing we’ve seen so far. And though its characters are not dealing with struggles that resonate with Victor (the only familial relationship here is Selma and her grandfather, and that relationship is only sketched in broad strokes), they are probably the most memorable group of characters in The Dream Machine. (One of them is, alas, basically the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but with the delightful twist of being actually dead, and still unwilling to acknowledge it.) If I follow my usual theme of this game being the story of a young man learning empathy, then I suppose this chapter’s role is to expose him to subconsciousnesses that are drastically different from his own. The people he meets here are new types of people for him: a persecuted vampire, for instance. Or the mysterious presence that calls itself (themselves?) “Legion”: a seeming manifestation of Mr. Willard’s doubts and anxieties, lurking at the bottom of an abyss. Is it too personal to reveal that Mr. Willard’s dream is the one in this game that most resembles my dreams? Mine tend not to try and kill me quite so often. But when I remember my dreams, which is infrequently these days, they tend to take place in indeterminate, abstract spaces like this. For all that Selma’s dream is the most impressive construction in this chapter, it’s the aggressive simplicity of Mr. Willard’s monochrome stress vision (with Victor appearing in black and white, to boot) that I really love. Both dreams have some of the game’s best (and hardest) puzzles. But this chapter’s real masterstroke is the reveal that its two dreams are connected by a dividing wall, just as Selma’s and Willard’s apartments are, and that it is possible and necessary to transgress this boundary. That central conceit, that you can leverage the logic of one dream world against another to solve its puzzles, is The Dream Machine’s most ingenious idea from a gameplay perspective. The narrative apex of chapter four is ultimately more satisfying than anything in this chapter’s story, but chapter five is more ostentatious, more dazzling, and therefore occasionally more fun. Chapter six will have to be extraordinary to measure up to the standards of its two predecessors. Thank god I don’t have to wait for it this time.

The Dream Machine: Chapter 6 — Wow, this did not end anything like I expected it to. That’s not to say that the ending wasn’t essentially in keeping with my concept of the game’s themes, because it was. But I didn’t expect the ending to be so perverse. The Dream Machine is a game about a man who learns the value of other selves, and by extension he learns how to put himself second. He started the game wishing he could retire to an island and fish for the rest of his life. In this episode, we learn the significance of this image: Victor regards the first time he killed a fish for no good reason as the end of his childhood. It’s also the point where he stopped fishing. So, his island fantasy is a straightforward reversion to childhood. We always knew this, but now we can fill in the blanks. I expected Victor to end the game in a dramatically different place from where he started it, and of course he does. But only emotionally. Physically, he’s trapped in the exact state he’d initially fantasized about, wishing he’d been careful what he wished for. It’s the dark culmination of an unexpectedly dark final chapter. The previous moments find Victor walking back inside his mother’s womb (it’s as literal as that) and performing a coat hanger abortion. That’s ground I never expected this game to tread. I confess to being of two minds about the ending. I see how it makes poetic sense, but I also can’t help but feel it’s a betrayal of Victor’s character arc. Because even if he does end the story with a selfless act that he wouldn’t have been capable of previously, he also does not get to be the father he’s learned to be from his travels through other people’s subconsciousnesses. But focussing on the ending alone isn’t fair, because there’s a whole chapter that leads up to it, and it’s a very good one. It benefits from having (slightly reduced) versions of all of the previous dreams available to explore and manipulate, but it also has its own entirely new area which is one of the game’s best. The centre of the dreamscape is a blacklight fantasy that is effectively one big puzzle. Like the cruise ship of Alicia’s dream in chapter three, it is populated by multiple Victors. But unlike chapter three’s Victors, these Victors are (or were) on the same mission that our Victor is. And so, the game eventually takes the form of Victor having an extended conversation with himself about how to solve the puzzle. The greatest pleasure of chapter six is tapping the other Victors, who are drastically different in their attitudes, for information — and cross referencing that information with what you managed to get out of all of the other Victors. They’ve all tried and failed to solve the same puzzle you’re trying to solve. They’re playing the same video game. So basically, I really liked this chapter, and I’d probably put it above the first three in my ranking. But the ending rankles. And it’s making me see my initial theory, the one I was so proud of, that the whole game is just an enactment of Brian Eno’s song “On Some Faraway Beach” in a very new light. Gradually, throughout this game, Victor came to see that faraway beach as a more lonely and sinister place, and no longer wanted to “die like a baby there,” as Eno sings. (I’ve explained this more thoroughly in previous reviews.) Now it appears he’ll live there forever. And of course, the theme has to be driven home even more perversely with a quote from an entirely different song: “Where I End And You Begin” by Radiohead: a song about a failure of empathy. The devs are to be congratulated for being so wonderfully unpredictable. I need another playthrough to sort out my feelings on this, but altogether, The Dream Machine is a masterful creation, and something that any fan of adventure games should hasten to play.

Music

GZA: Liquid Swords — This is an album I listened to once or twice a couple years back, liked a lot, and am only now revisiting. I find it hard to decide between this and 36 Chambers, honestly. The proper Wu-Tang debut benefits from the presence of nine unique MCs, but Liquid Swords benefits from GZA’s primacy for the exact opposite reasons. The parade of disparate personalities on 36 Chambers keeps it entertaining from front to back, but Liquid Swords is more consistent by virtue of putting Wu-Tang’s most skilled MC up front. (Anybody who doubts this assignation is advised to closely consider GZAs verse on “Duel of the Iron Mic.”) RZA is honestly not one of my favourite beatmakers — his key contribution to Wu-Tang in my view is as the “ideas guy,” curating the Clan’s constellation of recurring cultural touchstones and self-imposed mythologies. But there’s an atmospheric quality of the beats on this that matches GZA’s more contemplative moments pretty well. The only downside to this is that the preponderance of features from other Wu-Tang members come from MCs who aren’t really my favourites. Barring welcome appearances by Method Man on “Shadowboxin,” RZA on “4th Chamber” and a vanishingly small snippet of ODB on “Duel of the Iron Mic,” I don’t really care for any of the feature verses. Still, this is a genuine classic.

Literature, etc.

George Saunders: Lincoln in the Bardo (audiobook) — This is a beautiful, beautiful book. If you’ve read any of the hype about it, you could be forgiven for thinking that it is primarily a book concerned with history, or with America, or with a president. It is not. The Civil War, and the person of Abraham Lincoln are just a generous seasoning sprinkled overtop of a story that is first and foremost about the universal experiences of grief and regret. Naturally, given that this is a story that takes place in the immediate aftermath of the death of Willie Lincoln, a certain amount of the grief and regret in the story are the grief and regret of President Lincoln. And the brief passages in the book where we get to see inside of his head feature some of Saunders’ most powerful writing. One passage, where Lincoln imagines himself and his wife as two puffs of smoke who became mutually fond and mistook each other for permanences (I’m paraphrasing as nearly as I can since I don’t have the text in front of me; it’s an audiobook) has been particularly haunting me. But the most significant characters in the book are essentially unaware of the war, having died and become trapped in a middle-ground between the world we know (referred to by them as “that previous place”) and the next one, long before any such war ever began. The reason to read this book is not Lincoln; it’s the double act of Hans Vollman and Roger Bevins III, two deceased people who are deeply in denial of this fact and consumed by regret for what they did and did not do during their time in that previous place. They, and their fellow death deniers are so defined by their regret that they take on physical characteristics that reflect the specific nature of those regrets. (Vollman, who never consummated his marriage, is blighted by a comically large erection. Saunders has him describe it with skillful and hilarious euphemism, e.g. “my enormous disability.” And Bevins, who believes himself to have missed out on appreciating the world’s simple pleasures, is afflicted with an overabundance of sensory organs: far too many eyes and noses, for instance.) The purpose of Lincoln and his son in the narrative is not as a focal point, but rather as a catalyst for Vollman, Bevins and the other denizens of the bardo (that is what this middle-ground is called in Tibetan Buddhism) to understand their condition differently and to see their particular experiences of self-grief and regret in a new light. It could only be the Lincolns who catalyze such a thing, because they are people in a particularly extraordinary situation, dealing with an entirely specific experience of grief. But, their identity as historical figures in a familiar narrative is ultimately secondary to the coincidence of their intersection with the historical nonentities that populate Saunders’ bardo. So, don’t come to this expecting a work of historical fiction or a rumination on a divided America. Come to it expecting a beautiful fantasy, rendered in gorgeous prose, about the saddest moments in human experience. (And do listen to the audiobook. Nick Offerman and David Sedaris’s central performances will make you cry on the bus.) Pick of the week.

Jorge Luis Borges: “Death and the Compass” — Without meaning to, I seem to have read the entire Garden of Forking Paths collection, so I figure I may as well make a concerted effort (though an out-of-sequence one) to read Artifices as well, thus completing the two-part Fictions collection. This strikes me as a superior detective story to Borges’s better-known “The Garden of Forking Paths” and an obvious precursor to some of the most prevalent detective narratives of our era. It might be the times talking, but I see a particular resonance with Twin Peaks. Detective Lönrott’s willingness to explore mystical, kabbalistic elements of the murders taking place could be a direct inspiration for Agent Cooper’s fascination with Zen Buddhism. The twist, which I am about to spoil, is a lovely one in which it is revealed that the detective in this detective story is not simply a plot element trying to figure out what transpired, but also a motivating factor in the crimes themselves. I’d watch a television series about Lönrott. And considering the story’s willingness to entertain the notion of reincarnation, this story could be either the first or the last episode. Get on it, Bryan Fuller.

Podcasts

Mogul: “Gucci Boots” — Here’s where the story starts to get dark. Reggie Ossé and his team discovered a police report that reveals Chris Lighty’s domestic violence record. I think they went about covering this in a really responsible way. In spite of the high regard that Ossé holds Lighty in, he doesn’t make any attempt to mitigate the horror of this side of him. Moreover, he calls the chief communications officer for the National Domestic Violence Hotline for advice on how to proceed, and actually puts that conversation on the show. This is the point where Mogul becomes more than just a compelling story and starts to coalesce into a whole biographical portrait.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Twin Peaks: The Return” — I think I’m going to like this show’s new format, but I might start waiting until Friday to listen to both weekly episodes in succession, because I like gulping it down in big chunks. Still, the bit of news at the end of the Tuesday show could serve as a nice way to mark things as they happen rather than once everybody’s forgotten about them. As for the Twin Peaks discussion, it is as contentious a conversation as that show deserves. It speaks to the complexity of Twin Peaks that you can read and hear every opinion on the internet about this show and still not come across your own.

The Turnaround: “Errol Morris” & “Jerry Springer” — The Errol Morris interview is some kind of extended break with reality. Jesse Thorn tries as hard as he can to use Morris’s own tactic of just not saying anything to the interview subject against him, but Morris just meanders nonsensically. Which is not to say that it isn’t entertaining, it’s just… something. There’s a wonderful moment when Morris reaches his most discursive moment only to circle back immediately and unprompted to the question “what even is an interview??” The Jerry Springer interview is most revealing for the fact that Springer also thinks his show is garbage. But he’s also really good at rationalizing why it’s worthwhile regardless. Two episodes that seem out to prove that The Turnaround isn’t trying to be journalism school — it’s way weirder than that.

WTF with Marc Maron: “Keb’ Mo’ & Taj Mahal,” “David Remnick,” “Edie Falco” — After my big doubtful tirade against interviews with artists, all I want to do is listen to interviews with artists. Weird. Let nobody ever hold me to my convictions. The Keb’ Mo’/Taj Mahal double is great mostly because of how temperamentally different they are. Keb’ is thoughtful and considered in his speaking, and Taj is a raconteur par excellence. But they both seem to really enjoy talking to Maron, and that’s the deciding factor on this show. David Remnick is an interesting fellow who has as much range in his conversation as you’d expect from the editor of the New Yorker. But the Edie Falco interview is the best of them, mostly because it’s the sound of Maron’s preconceptions shattering. Like Jesse Thorn said on The Turnaround, Maron’s key move is bringing his preoccupations all with him to the interview and allowing the guest to confirm or deny. Great radio.

The Daily: July 20 & 21 — Two banner episodes of this podcast in as many days. The first features a debrief with the reporters who interviewed the president shortly before, along with (low-quality) audio from that interview. The striking moment is a bit where Trump’s granddaughter comes in the room and starts being adorable. This was one of those moments that happens ever more frequently where I don’t know what’s real and what’s fake. Obviously, it could have been a planned stunt. But there’s no actual reason for me to think that, except that this president constantly tries to reshape reality as he speaks. Regardless, it’s Friday’s episode that stands out. It’s a desperately sad story about women who were taken prisoner and raped repeatedly by ISIS militants. Don’t listen to it unless you want to feel terrible. But it’s important work, undertaken with the utmost discretion. This may well be the defining podcast of this era in the medium. Pick of the week.

Mogul: Cameos: Joan Morgan & N.O.R.E. — Two great bits of tape that were excised from the main story. The N.O.R.E. episode is particularly amusing because everybody involved, including the host, is drunk.

On the Media: “Not Repealed, Not Replaced” & “Doubt It” — Two essential episodes of a show whose essentiality continues unabated into the Trump campaign. First off, Brooke Gladstone calls up her key source for her incredibly effective poverty myths series from last year to give some long-view context to the recent failure of the GOP to repeal and replace the ACA. And in the main episode, she and Bob Garfield revisit their dust-up the morning after the election, which remains the most disquieting and memorable podcast episode of last year. Turns out, Bob Garfield has had a change of heart. I was never quite sure whose side I was on to begin with, so I’m not sure how to react. I will say this: Brooke Gladstone’s constant interrogation of the way we process information and the reasons why we process it that way is unique among current affairs journalists, and it’s been as useful as anybody’s work these past few months. So, Garfield is probably right to swallow his doubts and start taking the long-view.

Radiolab: “The Ceremony” — This is a fun story, but it has a seemingly big twist in it that they make a big deal of but that turns out to be nothing. I’d go into more detail if it had delivered on its promise, but it didn’t, so it’s just another episode, really.

The Nod: “Hunter Green Thong” — This is a great addition to the Gimlet stable. It’s a funny and thoughtful show about blackness. Not something I see myself listening to religiously, but definitely something I’ll check in on from time to time.