Correlated Contents

As I sit here listening to the new Lordi album, it occurs to me that I had at one point planned to do a blog on grad school.  Not necessarily grad school as an institution, but what it means to me to go to graduate school, being the first person in my family to complete college, and the sort of crazy-ass anxieties I’m subject to when it comes to anything regarding higher education.  I’m normally not vocal about this, mostly because it doesn’t matter in a lot of situations.  It’s also really boring.

But I still feel the weird urge to write about grad school, or at least the application process, sometime — probably in the near future.  Until then I’m scrambling to get application materials together, take my GREs, etc.  This is by no means simple, since I have a pretty full schedule — lots of reading, mostly, like the theory stuff I mentioned last time, but also things for the class I TA, and my normal class reading, and also writing essays and things that are not essays for the creative writing workshop class I’m in.

You, being the bright little star-child you are, probably have figured out that this means shorter and/or infrequent blogs.  Good job!  Just keep an eye here and we’ll see what happens.

I have started my fourth year of postsecondary education, my senior year of college.  Since that is really about as interesting as my life gets, that’s about as much as I’ll blog about it.  This space is more for me ranting about pop culture and trying to sound intellectual, anyway.

What I am getting at is that, since this is my senior year, I have a senior seminar, which means I am going to be reading a shit-ton of Theory.  This will probably leak over into my habits here.  I’m not going to, like, give you a crash course in semiotics or anything (unless you really want me to I guess, just ask), but it’s just a warning that I may be doing a lot of rumination about the study of literature in and of itself.

Also I will share stupid links, as they intrigue me.  I’ve already talked about Satoshi Kon and his influence on me, and my feelings about his death, so I feel it is appropriate that I follow that up with his goodbye letter.  The final farewell really makes it for me — sorry to be leaving before you, indeed.  Heh.

It may or may not be apparent in reading my blog but there are very few things that have the power to make me genuinely happy to be alive.

That is not some confession of crippling depression on my part but a statement of fact — life, in general, is not something I have very strong feelings about.  Existence, as such, simply is.  DFW has that thing about the fish in the water — this is water, this is water, this is water — and he’s right when he says you have to make a concerted effort to realize, at every single moment of your life, that not only do you exist, but you are surrounded by other people that exist, and this in and of itself is pretty damn amazing.

Sometimes there are artists who help me realize this.  They are the ones who affect me the most strongly, the ones I feel the most affection for.  Shakespeare is one of them.  Satoshi Kon is another.

I am not saying Kon was Shakespeare’s equal or anything, but that for me, at least, he was a remarkably important storyteller.  When I heard he died today, I was upset — about as upset as you can be about the death of a person whom you’ve never met and can’t really make any sort of personal judgment on.  I didn’t cry or weep or anything, but I was disheartened in knowing that one of the few bright lights in the pantheon of pop culture I constantly ingest had gone out.

Kon liked fantasy.  He liked showing us how cool fantasy could be, but also how dangerous — how our fantasies can consume us.  When I was in high school, for various personal reasons, this became a very important idea to me.  For other reasons it still is, because I deal in fantasy.  I study fantasy for a living, in a sense, and my eventual desire is to teach it to others.  And our fantasies, the little stories we tell ourselves, can have incredibly important impacts on what constitutes real life.  Kon helped me realize this, and he helped me realize it without being some sort of materialist reactionary.

He knew, I think, that fantasies can be dangerous, but they are also humanizing.  His film Tokyo Godfathers is one of my favorites, and probably near the top on my list of “things that are important to me as a human being.”  I watch it every Christmas.  While it’s his least fantastical movie, I think it’s his best, because it’s the one where I think you see the painful beating heart of Kon’s humanism most clearly.  The fantasies of the characters are harmful, yes, but they’re also how they survive — and in the end the theme of the film seems to be an urge to be discriminating about our fantasies, to be critical of them, and to choose not the ones that simply make our pains and fears and jealousies go away, but the ones that tell us that everyone is subject to pains and fears and jealousies, and that it is only by reckoning our own existence and the existence of others with these inevitable disappointments that we can be healthy people.

We need fantasies that remind us, in DFW’s terms, that this is water.  We need fantasies that help us understand what it is to be alive.  We need fantasies that help us understand the connections we make with each other, and the kind of existence this fashions for us.  We need fantasies that help us understand the world, not hide from it.

There are very few things that make me genuinely happy to be alive.  Satoshi Kon’s films are one of those things.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll want to know is where I was born, and what deformities I had, and how my parents didn’t help when the townspeople burned me alive in our house after what I did to those two little girls, and where I got my mask, and all that Jason Vorhees kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.  In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my fans would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything that made my backstory even more complicated and nonsensical than it already is.  They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially the fat ones.  They’re nice and all — fans generally don’t run away when they see me, at least until it’s too late — but they’re also touchy as hell.  Besides, I’m not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything.  I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around that summer camp just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and lay low.   I mean that’s all I told J.C. about, and he’s my producer and all.  He’s in Hollywood.  That isn’t too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every weekend.  He’s going to drive me home when I go home next month maybe.  He just got a Hummer.  One of those retired army jobs that has chains and everything in the back for holding back bombs and junk, but I bet I could break them.  It cost him damn near an arm and a leg.  At least that’s what I would’ve paid.  He’s got a lot of dough, now.  He didn’t use to.  He used to be just a regular writer/director, he used to be small-time.  He made this terrific film, Dark Star, in case you never heard of him.  The best scene in it is with the alien.  It has this alien that looks like a beachball with feet and claws, it’s like a mascot, and the main character chases it around the spaceship and slaps it with a broom.  It killed me, which most things can’t really do, considering the number of sequels. Now he’s out in Hollywood, J.C., being a prostitute.  If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies.  Don’t even mention them to me.

1. I was on a sort of vacation last week and now I am moving back into the dorms this week so not much typing from me unfortunately.

2. I have friends who write blogs and a lot of the time the blogs they write are really really good.

3. Oedipiscopalianism.  This is the form of Christianity whose adherents want to kill God and have sex with the Virgin Mary.

First, we know by now I like literary mashups.  I also like Bret Easton Ellis.  I therefore direct your attention here.

Read it?  Good, good.  Now, switching tracks, play the music below while you read the rest of this post.

Let’s talk about Deadly Premonition.  It’s old news, yeah, but I’m always behind on games anyway.  This saves me the trouble of recapping a lot of stuff about it, since it’s been covered extensively elsewhere.  Basically what you need to know is that this game looks horrible, sounds horrible, and plays horribly.

It’s also probably the best game that will come out this year.  It’s my pick for GOTY, anyway.

Now of course there’s a lot of people going on about just HOW DAMN TERRIBLE this game is (I’m looking at you, Giant Bomb) and it’s pretty cool currently to play this game and be entirely ironic about it.  Hipster gaming, if you will.  And I’ll admit, when I bought the game I expected to be counted in this camp — the camp camp, if you will, the so-bad-it’s-good camp.  And I will also admit that this approach got me through the first hour or two of the game, with its clunky controls and awkward animation and basically excruciating gameplay.

Except at some point, some mysterious juncture, the game stopped being so-bad-it’s-good and became actually good.  I want to say that it’s due to the quality of the writing — which is odd, since the writing is usually pretty bizarre and awkward and the dialogue needs trimming.  But the characters are so vivid and, if you play long enough to get oriented, the storyline becomes unbelievably compelling.  The ridiculous elements of the game (the fact that the main character is talking constantly to an imaginary friend no one else can see, demonic dogs drop out of the sky at midnight, etc) together achieve some sort of weird gestalt where your disbelief is suspended almost indefinitely.  When the narrative actually picks up and that for all its peculiarities the game is internally logically consistent to a remarkable degree, you know you have something special on your hands.

It’s a mystery.  This is notable, because it’s hard to write good mysteries, and a lot of games that try to be mysteries (most things that try to be mysteries, even) tend to fall back on last-second details that basically tell you everything you need to know to solve a case.  DP is a good mystery; not only is it a good mystery, however, but it also gives you everything you need to solve it almost from the beginning.

And it’s not only a mystery, but a mystery populated with oddball yet recognizably human characters.  There’s a frustrated young aesthete stuck running a small-town diner, an old woman named Sigourney who is deathly afraid that the casserole dish she carries at all times will get cold, and a doctor named “Usha” who is obsessed with chess.  There’s no gruff space marine or evil dictator here; all of the stock-elements of modern gaming are pretty much completely absent.  One might think that the quirkiness of the characters might ring hollow, like Suda51′s takes often do, but it doesn’t.

You see, Deadly Premonition is probably the most sincere game to come out in a long, long time.  Irony is the completely wrong stance to take with it.  There’s more heart and feeling and humanity in this thing than the entirety of Gears of War 1 and 2; it is an example of what games can and should be, something not at all reproducible in another medium, and contains the sort of wild, nonsensical creativity that characterized games of another generation.  A plumber travels through giant green pipes to a subterranean kingdom of mushrooms and fights turtles to save a princess from a particularly nasty, fire-breathing turtle; an FBI agent with an imaginary friend travels to rural Washington to solve a murder case, but takes time out of his busy schedule to fish farm utensils out of a lake, predict the future with his coffee, check the Weather Channel 50 times a day, have tea with a crazy gas mask-wearing old man in a wheelchair and his manservant who speaks only in rhyme, peep through townspeople’s windows while they sleep, and discuss the Tremors movie franchise with the player/his imaginary friend.  And that’s only a fraction of the stuff that can happen.

Is the game fun to play?  Most of the time, no.  Does it look like ass?  Most of the time, yes.  But somehow it is more engrossing and compelling than any game I’ve played since Portal.  As gaming becomes more profitable and more homogeneous, more cinematic and more predictable, more focused on multiplayer capability and achievments than on storytelling, we need games like Deadly Premonition to remind us what we can do with the form.  It may not be the best it could, but it’s certainly better than nothing.  Hopefully its legacy is a rich one.

but still

For the past week or so I’ve been digging steadily deeper into the inimitable David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.  I know, I know, last summer was the so-called Infinite Summer, but I missed out on that because I was recovering from wisdom tooth extraction and therefore reading something much lighter on the brain.  Anyway, I’m a little over halfway through IJ and I’m liking it so far, it’s definitely good.  Prior to this I’d only read a handful of DFW’s short stories and essays, and in those it had seemed to me that if there is one writer that my generation needs to look to as a guide for humanizing our increasingly cynical and horrible art, it’s him.  Any serious writer of the coming generation will have to deal with DFW, I tell you that now.

However, despite all this, I can’t help but feel that IJ is a bit overrated.  And by a bit, I mean a lot.  Seriously.  It’s far from DFW’s masterpiece — that spot, I would wager, is reserved for his never-for-legal-reasons-officially-published piece of Harry Potter ‘slash’ fanfiction, “Brief Interludes with Invidious Muggles (Draco/Harry, mm, teen, rom, dub!con)”.  For those of you unaware, slash fiction refers to fanfiction written for the purposes of tossing male characters who are either enemies or serious bromantic partners into sexual relationships.  Yes, it sounds low-brow, it sounds tacky, it sounds terrible, I admit!  But in the meager 100,000 words and 85 footnotes of BIw/IM, DFW manages to say everything he had to say in Infinite Jest and more, in addition to shedding new light on the intricacies of one of the greatest fantasy series of all time.  To prove it to you, reader, I provide here an excerpt from a single sentence from this magnum opus.  Enjoy.

Desperately Draco pulls Harry to him, and their boyish lips and surprisingly rough tongues — like a group of old friends, like army buddies who haven’t seen each other in a while, presuming these old army buddies are covered in papillae and maybe suffer from a condition that causes them to sweat constantly, thus explaining the saliva, and maybe like maybe one of them wears spearmint aftershave or something — these theoretical guys, they embrace in the same way Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter’s mouths lock into a passionate and, once the gestalt of the whole thing sets in for the kids, emotional oral bear-hug, Harry’s gold-flecked green eyes widening in surprise, his pale hands, Harry P.’s pale hands, scrabbling for purchase outside the vicinity of his (Draco’s) shimmering silk Slytherin robes, which are honestly and awkwardly the closest things within reach at the moment, and if you think old D.M.’s not realized there’s nothing but his lonesome self within reach for H.P. to grasp then you certainly are not an astute judge of character, no sir.

Daniel Lau finished up Hellstar Remina a few weeks ago, and while the finished product does a mad tapdance between hysterically funny/cheesy and a lackluster execution of intriguing ideas, the volume’s bonus story is pretty damn cool.  You may remember that I have highfalutin ideas about Ito, and I think here we see him approaching something like Uzumaki‘s levels of subtle commentary after Remina‘s madcap frenzy of cultural pseudocriticism.  (An aside: it occurs to me that it might be more profitable to read Remina as Ito’s rebuttal to the sort of glamorous, humanistic futurism hypothesized by Osamu Tezuka, but that would require more research on my part.)

Anyway, “Army of One” is doing some interesting things with the idea of hikikomori and the competing individual/collective social demands currently playing out in postmodern Japan.  I don’t think the story is as good as Uzumaki but it strikes the right balance of creeping despair and ridiculous, almost comic grotesquery, the sort of metaphysical unease that I like the best about Ito’s work and about horror and/or art in general.

Hey speaking of metaphysical unease, my friend Ross wrote some words about Haruki Murakami, the most widely read Japanese novelist in the West since probably Mishima.  They are good words!  You should read them.  And if you haven’t read Murakami, you should read him too.

Back when I was a lowly scrub who knew he liked English but didn’t know what he wanted to do with himself, I considered going into Japanese and doing some comparative lit stuff, mostly on the strength of what Murakami I’d read.  This was foolish for a couple reasons, the most obvious one being that Murakami plays with Western writers a lot more (and a lot more openly) than other Japanese writers.  This was also before I decided that he somewhat infuriates me with his method — which is to say, that he makes it all up as he goes along.

This is something Stephen King recommends.  I don’t truck with it, personally, but it has the ability to turn out some good work.  However, you see the same sort of problems in both King and Murakami’s work, namely, that the motherfuckers can’t end a book in any reasonable fashion.  The difference is that King makes up monsters and spooks that dramatize or abstract certain American middle class malaises, the sort of things you’d get in John Updike; Murakami does this to some degree, but he also plays more subtly and loosely with his (technical literary term incoming) weird-ass shit, so you can read in a veneer of literary pretension (ie, magical realism) and often skew it as speaking more broadly about Japanese society in a very profound way.

So, right, it’s been a while.  Since I last blogged I’ve done a number of things, such as finish up that research project I’ve been blathering about, babysit 75 teenagers while also helping a dozen or so of them learn philosophy and write papers, and I turned 22.  Hooray!  I suppose much of that could be used as fodder for any number of blog entries, but no, I am going to do something else because I am tired.  You see, also since I last blogged, I played two videogames.  I am going to talk about videogames, okay.

The two games I played happened to be sequels.  They were Bioshock 2 and Mass Effect 2, and it should be noted that I loved the first installments in both of these franchises.  Currently, of course, there are a lot of people complaining about whether or not games are art or can they be or BLOO BLAH BLOO BLOO.  It’s beside the point.  Question: Can games be art?  Answer: Yes, I don’t see why not.  Second question: Are they art right now?  Second answer: No, ever so slightly, no.

I bring this up only because neither of the games I mentioned are art, but one of the predecessors — the original Bioshock — got so damn close to it that I was practically salivating.  Other people have outlined it better, but essentially Bioshock is a tightly woven comic book-philosophy story about what happens when Ayn Rand is a dude who actually has money and gets things done.  That’s standard videogame fare, but in its execution (and I abstain here from spoilers) Bioshock functions as an astounding deconstruction of its genre, the FPS, and of gaming pretty much as whole.  Then, after this marvelous apotheosis, it stumbles around for two more hours, negating everything it’s achieved, and then putters away into whatever ending you’ve earned.

This sometimes obscures exactly how smart Bioshock actually is on the level of the plot, however — it’s basically a Greek tragedy, but with an underwater city and crazy-ass X-men powers.  The weird thing is that, as a tragedy, you (which is to say, you the player) are not the main character.  You’re peripheral.  The tragic protagonist is someone else entirely, and once he’s off the stage, the game pretty much falls apart.  Imagine a production of Oedipus Rex where Oeddie blinds himself and then spends two more acts trying to run Thebes like nothing’s happened.

This is why Bioshock failed.  This is also why Bioshock 2 fails.  Which is not to say it is a bad game, because it isn’t really.  It’s just that the first game set such a lofty goal that, even though it failed to achieve it, there’s a lot for a follow-up to address; the difference is essentially that while the first game did indeed fail, it failed greatly.  The second game just flounders.

I am not against the concept of sequels per se; even Oedipus Rex has Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone, to stick to our models.  So by all rights, Bioshock 2 should be the Colonus — except it isn’t.  It’s hardly about the tragic ant/protagonist from Bioshock — hell, it’s not even about the actual literal no-kidding antagonist from Bioshock.  For a sequel, there’s actually very little in terms of overlap — you don’t revisit any old locations and you only meet one old character, who promptly disappears into a dangling plot thread, never to be heard from again.  The game’s mechanics are in place and certain currents in the story make me think that the new writers were at least a bit aware of what went on in the first game — specifically the themes of family, since almost all tragedies are about family — but in the end it just doesn’t work.

It’s like going to your old hometown, say, fifteen years after you moved away, and you meet a high school pal at the grocery store.  Only you don’t recognize him, he recognizes you, and he comes up to you and says “Hey buddy how ya doin’ how’s it been” and you’re all like “What, wait, excuse me, who are you” and he tells you and you’re all like “Oh” but when looking at this guy (maybe he’s gotten bald or skinny or fat or prominent scars or hell maybe he’s now a she) there’s some sort of cognitive dissonance at work, and no matter how much he insists he cannot bring you to believe that he is in any way related to the person you once knew.

Mass Effect 2 is a sequel to Mass Effect.  Duh.  Neither game is art or came close, but the first one remains one of my favorite gaming experiences (even in spite of its ham-handed exposition) due to the sheer wonder its fictional world inspired in me.  The second game is about as good, and overall a worthy successor.  Why does it succeed as a sequel?  Well, there are a handful of obvious reasons.  The first ME was intended to have sequels — two, in fact — to finish the plot arc, even though the first stands reasonably well on its own.  Bioshock, by contrast, is spectacularly self-contained and never really ‘needed’ a follow-up.  ME2 also allows you to keep certain things from the first game: your player character, for starters, and a handful of environments.

The end product is much more successful as a sequel than Bioshock 2.  Sure, it’s not art, it’s silly stupid pulpy sci-fi, but it’s fun and the story is solid without reaching for the stars.  It is entertainment; it is what videogames are currently best suited to do.  Does that mean we should make all games silly, pulpy fun?  Well, no, we should try for art sometimes, at least.  It’s what makes the first Bioshock so important, and in the future we’ll learn from the ways it and games like it stumble.