Wesley Fenlon | Not with a bang but a whimper.

I think there’s a piece of me missing.  I didn’t know I was missing it until about three months ago when I first saw An Education.  The film was up for three Academy Awards.  And not throwaway awards, like sound editing or hairstyling.  We’re talking real awards: Best Picture and Best Actress.

I spent a couple hours watching An Education, and afterward I started to think something wasn’t quite right with me.  And ever since, that same niggling uncertainty will pop back up and gnaw at my confidence.  But today I found out for sure.  I watched Fish Tank.

Apparently 2009 was the year for depressing British adolescent flicks.  Or maybe those are the only kinds of movies British people make outside of the Bond franchise, and the two I’ve been exposed to are but the tip of a horrifyingly vast iceberg of teenage angst.  I really don’t want to know, because An Education and Fish Tank were enough to prove something to me.  Despite critical acclaim, despite passionate writing and emotional acting, despite powerful cinematography, I just can’t seem to care about young British girls and their experiences with older men.

Whatever part of my brain dishes out sympathy, it’s missing the receptor for the plight of the British youth.  After watching both of those movies, devoting four hours of my life to them, trying to appreciate them as the movie buff I aspire to be…mostly, I was just bored.

Don’t get me wrong — there’s a lot in each film I can appreciate.  An Eduation captures its setting beautifully, applying this glossy sheen of wonder to the high society of 1960s Europe.  It’s like a perfectly-resored antique, and an absolute pleasure to look at.  I just couldn’t draw much of an emotional impact out of the story.  The problem sure wasn’t the acting; Carey Mulligan’s Oscar nomination was well-deserved, and Peter Sarsgaard exuded Child Fucker from the moment he showed up on screen (and seriously that Minnie/Bubbalub scene is one of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen).

Maybe that was the problem, actually.  When your movie is about a young girl falling for a dashing older guy who woos her with his charm and offers her the world, is there ever any doubt how things will turn out?  Watching An Education amounts to spending two hours waiting for something awful to happen, and then it does happen, and then people get over it and life goes on.  The story is told well, but it was destined to end the way it did from the very beginning, and didn’t bother to take any detours along the way.  It was a straight line from start to finish, and my sympathy didn’t make it far past the starting line.

Then there’s Fish Tank, which took an altogether different approach to the same coming of age dilemma.  An Education seemed to show us that life is pretty amazing, as long as you don’t get tricked by charming child predators.  Fish Tank’s motif is more along the lines of Life Is A Bit Shit, and nobody is really ever happy about anything.  The protagonist, Mia, and her ghastly mother try to out-horrible each other because they’re both pretty miserable.  The mother is the party type, still trying to have a good time and acting like she doesn’t have kids to be responsible for.  And Mia has so much rage and angst built up she just hates everbody, and has to tell them at every available opportunity.

The whole thing is recorded with handheld cameras, and the style works perfectly to capture the low-class urban social system at work, high-rise tenements and cramped spaces.  Mia spends most of her time wandering aimlessly or dancing.  And her dancing is complimented several times throughout the film, though it mostly seemed awful to me.  But if there’s anything I’m less fit to analyze than the emotional state of a 16 year old lower-class British girl, it’s probably dancing.

The worst thing about Fish Tank is that the only character who is remotely appealing is mom’s boyfriend Connor, who, of course, turns out to be a double-life leading sleaze.  The depiction of Mia’s life is raw and just terrible enough to feel authentic, but is also borderline uncomfortable to watch.

When I think back on coming of age stories, there are plenty that resonate with me.  Quite a few of my all-time favorites are coming of age tales, in fact.  But all of them are a little more nuanced, complicated, or masked than either An Education or Fish Tank.  Take FLCL, for example, which buries a very sweet growing up story underneath layers of Japanese pop-culture references, robot fights, and a level of weirdness only Japan can cram into a couple hours of television.  Or Ferris Bueller, which begins as a story about a lovable slacker and ends as a much more poignant story about Cameron, and what happens to love and friendship after high school.

Fish Tank and An Education simply didn’t resonate with me that way.  Much as I tried, I couldn’t generate the sympathy to feel much for the girls, as horrible as their situations were.  Maybe it’s because the prospect of having my life ruined by a charming-but-ultimately-evil 30 year old man is utterly foreign to me.  But I found Joyce Carol Oates’ novel You Must Remember This to be far more gripping and emotionally powerful than either film, even though it told much the same story.  The power of prose over film, I guess.  Or it could’ve just been the accents.

Did you know William Gibson is one of the most skilled authors of the 20th century?  It’s true!  “Sure,” you might say, “he did practically invent the cyberpunk genre.”  Yup, that’s pretty impressive.  He dirtied up technology, marrying the high-tech with the low-brow to create a whole world of fiction populated with cobbled-together Millenium Falcons instead of spit-shined Death Stars.  You might also note his ability to shrewdly predict the future path of technological development, resulting in almost eerie interpretations of the Internet and the dissemination of information decades before their time.  You could even harp on his fantastic sense of style — which at times reads like a sci-fi lucid dream — or how his fast-paced narratives often imply action without even having to show it.

Yeah, those would all be pretty good points.

But there’s another element of his writing, more overlooked, that deserves praise for so effectively bolstering up the stories Gibson has to tell.  I was suddenly struck by the intricacy and imagination of Gibson’s worldbuilding while reading his 1993 novel Virtual Light.  Having only read the short story “Johnny Mnemonic” and the Sprawl trilogy before Virtual Light, its slight departure from the tech-heavy cyberpunk of his earlier works was an interesting change.  Granted, Virtual Light still bears the markings of a cyberpunk dystopia, but lacks hacker heroes like Neuromancer’s Case and vivid depictions of cyberspace.  In all of his books, Gibson harnesses that knack for predicting technology’s path and uses it to build a unique world, unusually believable and more thoroughly thought-out than nearly anything else in sci-fi.

Virtual Light is no exception, only the results of Gibson’s worldbuilding are even more interesting than usual because he applies them to contemporary society.  The novel hits much closer to home, even if its near-future setting isn’t so far removed from his earlier works.  He creates a world where California has been ravaged by earthquakes and split into NoCal and SoCal (amusingly playing off the already-existing cultural differences between the two), while Japan has been similarly decimated by an Earthquake nicknamed Godzilla.  A cool setting, but hardly as amazing as the character J.D. Shapely who lurks in the shadows just outside Light’s corona.  Shapely is not a protagonist, an antagonist, a tag-along; he’s simply a memory.  But he was a man whose unique biology led to a cure for AIDS.  In 1993, AIDS was a hot-button issue, and Gibson took it upon himself to address the issue within the realm of science-fiction, creating a Martin Luther King-esque martyr for a cause that concerns every living person on the globe.

Gibson is obviously interested in exploring real social issues, extrapolating them into a future scenario and scrutinizing how they would eventually impact us all.  Shapely becomes a cult figure, worshiped by the poor, celebrated by the rich.  He weaves history, fake documentaries, and character observations of Shapely references throughout Virtual Light, none of which directly relate to the plot in the slightest.  They create such a real, powerful vision of the world that Virtual Light’s fictional society derives enormous complexity from such a tangential story element.

Like Shapely, another oft-referenced, never-seen character, Reverend Wayne Fallon, addresses a real social issue.  Fallon is an ironic extrapolation of the modern Joel Osteen, a character whose followers have advanced from worshiping on television to worshiping television.  It’s an amusing cyberpunk blend of religion and technology, but also a bit frightening; when people start looking for God in their television, you know the outside world is really going to suffer.

The scary thing is, Reverend Fallon’s flock aren’t all that unbelievable.  They hang out in the background as fuel for dystopian thought, while the majority of Virtual Light’s plot plays out in chase scenes and cop drama.  Interestingly, its conclusion steers much closer to the intriguing worldbuilding information Gibson packs into the novel, focusing more on class issues and social strife surrounding the future of San Francisco.  Reading the book days after leaving the city, I loved picking up on Gibson’s geographic references to real places, but ended up coming away with a new respect for his work thanks to the socially conscious blend of present-day class issues, future social problems and a dab of zesty science-fiction dystopia in a fictional 2005 that, even in 2010, edges a little too uncomfortably close to reality.

It’s funny how the little things can get to you.  In most of my favorite games, the moments that will forever claim a spot in my memory are generally epic in scope — that first exploration of Ocarina of Time’s vast and open overworld, the incomparably intense encounter with Andrew Ryan in BioShock, that perfect moment in that perfect game of  Halo.  Most games will never make such a measurable impact, never meld so perfectly with what I’m unconsciously looking to experience in a virtual world.

But sometimes that doesn’t matter.

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena updates 2004’s critically-acclaimed Butcher Bay and delivers an all-new standalone campaign of its own, mixing competent FPS gunplay with stealth and satisfyingly brutal first-person melee combat.  Fun, but ultimately forgettable — a few years from now, the gameplay will be more or less gone from my memory, leaving little to indicate I’d ever played it at all.

Maybe Starbreeze predicted that all the shooting and crawling around in the dark wouldn’t make Riddick’s new adventure all that memorable.  Maybe they’re slightly deranged.  Whatever the reason, they decided to populate one room within the claustrophobic confines of Dark Athena with prisoners who have something in common: they’re almost all totally insane.

Thanks to some incredibly sharp (and off-the-wall) writing and even better voice acting, the prisoners provide a wholly unexpected amount of absolutely hilarious throwaway dialogue.  The incongruous comedy room works because it’s so out of place in the Riddick universe, where the concept of comic relief makes precious few appearances.  What drives a man to switch gears from friendly gratification to unquantifiable, screaming rage in a sudden bipolar explosion?  Apparently, he really needed to tell Riddick what a pussy he was, which never seems like an especially wise thing to say to the galaxy’s number one badass.

But crazy man Jaylor’s pussy insults and ravings about murder and necrophilia (necrophilic gangbangs, in fact) pale in comparison to the antics going on in Exbob’s cell.  I don’t know how he got his name — maybe he was, at some point in time, a regular Bob, but clearly those days are long past.  Exbob gyrates constantly in nervous agitation, twitching from side to side and dancing back and forth like a crack-starved parody of Muhammad Ali.  But oh, the things he says.  If there are other games out there with deranged inmates smacking their asses while simultaneously giving you the finger, I need to experience them.

And the bitchjacks.  Ah, the bitchjacks.  Such a little thing — only seconds of the 10 or so hours Dark Athena lasts.  But when Exbob channels his nervous energy into a jumping jack routine, exclaiming “Bitch!” in a hi-pitched squeal at the crescendo of every repetition, I think I saw God.  Maybe I was just trying a little harder than normal to breath, doubled over in convulsions as I was.  Either way, it’s one of those things that sticks with you.  Forever.

(Note: above links are, obviously, profane).

It took me a solid five months, but I finally (finally) finished Atlas Shrugged at the end of May.  My enjoyment of the book definitely took a downwards turn in the second half; after Dagny left the valley, it was a slow crawl to an inexorable conclusion.  Ayn Rand came up briefly in my Editing and Design class earlier in the semester, and the professor joked that she was an author seriously in need of an editor.  And he was exactly right: Atlas Shrugged struggles under the weight of its own vision, a novel incapable of supporting Rand’s philosophy while simultaneously carrying an appealing narrative.

I’m curious how many people have actually dragged their brains through John Galt’s 80 page speech that endlessly extols the true virtues of man and condemns the mindless parasites of society.  I suppose, in a way, I’m almost proud to have read the entire thing, but by that point I was far past interest and moving forward on sheer stubborn determination.

Now that I’m finished with Ayn Rand, I’ve moved onto lighter, more fun things; I started reading the complete works of Dashiell Hammett, who’s probably most famous for The Maltese Falcon.  Not only is it great pulp fiction from the early years of the 20th century, it’s great fodder for Based on Books.  After Atlas Shrugged, Hammett’s tight, fast-paced narrative and sharp dialogue are a welcome, welcome change.

Gotta catch ‘em all. It seems so innocuous, doesn’t it? There are lots of these little Pokémon fellas, and your challenge is to grab each and every one. But no, it’s not quite that innocent. Nintendo’s catchphrase invokes a youthful enthusiasm by deliberately tapping into the psychology behind game design, a never-ending, insidious cycle of collection and reward that we wholly by into with no reservations. Practically every game on the market entices us with collectable coins that lead to secret unlockables, or trophies to chart our progress — something to tap into that unconscious addiction to collect ‘em all.

Read the rest of this entry on GameSpite »

Much has been written since the death of EGM last month. For most, the pain has subsided. Attentions have been shifted elsewhere. After all, it’s the internet, a capricious landscape of sweeping contradictions and short memories — the same group that most vocally grieved for EGM helped bring about its end. But that was January. It’s February, and by and large we’ve moved on.

But I’m always a little late to the party. It’s taken me a while to pick up on, and actually listen to, some of the post-1UP layoffs podcasts, namely the mammoth final episode of 1UP Yours and Robert Ashley’s A Life Well Wasted.  And as I listened to these podcasts, I kept feeling, again and again, that something truly special had been lost.  The tone of each podcast couldn’t vary much more radically: 1UP Yours is comprised of a rowdy group who joke, tease, laugh, drink, and find a way to squeeze interesting conversation into the mix.  A Life Well Wasted is absolutely surreal, blending short conversations with haunting music into something more powerful than the sum of its parts.  Where the two meet, where they reveal they have far more in common than their structures imply, is at their emotional core.  Every conversation held, every laugh shared, every memory revealed shows that something genuinely extraordinary has been lost.

Has any publication ever fostered the sort of love EGM did?  Over the course of its 20 year lifespan, how many people grew up reading this magazine cover to cover, absorbing every word, regardless of the game it pertained to?  And how many of them thought, “This is what I want.  This is what I want to do with my life.”  And how many of them actually did it?  It is, perhaps, the highest praise a publication could ever receive — its own fans were the very ones who grew up to give it new life and propel it forward for a new generation of readers.  And that new generation felt the exact same thing.  I should know; I’m one of them.  I can see the very stories recounted in A Life Well Wasted echoed in my own life — the worst games ever made list, featured in issue #150, attained a mythical status among my group of friends, and the mere mention of Custer’s Revenge even today would likely call forth a smirk.  I could probably still name most of the games on that list, and actually having played E.T. made it that much cooler.  It also led me to experience the horror that is Nigh Trap in all its hilarious, campy glory.

The crew of 1UP Yours discussed the fact that many fans felt as if they got to know each podcaster over the course of the show, but that really knowing them wouldn’t be possible given the nature of something like a podcast.  True, it’s not a reflection of real life.  It’s impossible to really know someone through such a detached medium.  But by so thoroughly communicating their own friendship on the show, they managed to pull in listeners, building a sense of powerful community and friendship, inviting us into their conversation, even if we couldn’t be there.  The entire institution was easy to take for granted, but now that it’s gone, I feel like there’s a gap — on the internet, on the newsstand, and in the daily lives of those who felt a special connection with people they’d never met but hoped to one day work beside.

We’re worse off for the loss.

Things haven’t quite gone as planned.  But that’s par for the course in the big golf game of life, and reading the life works of Cormac McCarthy at the pace of a book a week has left me little time to devote to Ayn Rand and her endless philosophizing.  But I’m halfway there, having reached page 552 a couple nights ago.  Over the hump, around the bend, et cetera.  And so far…well, it’s no Fountainhead.

Where The Fountainhead felt dense and unique thanks to Ayn Rand’s very mechanical writing style, Atlas Shrugged passes into the realm of tedium.  It’s often simply too repetitive, too long-winded to be as great as its predecessor.  The characters, too, feel like slightly less interesting versions of the main cast of The Fountainhead — only Howard Roark is a better protagonist than Hank Rearden and Dominique Francon is a more interesting lean, steely leading lady than Dagny Taggart.  Maybe it’s just the order I’ve read the books in.  But so far, Rand hasn’t deviated from The Fountainhead enough to grab my attention the way she did the first time.

The politicians and typical members of society are still as overbearingly disgusting and small-minded.  And while I haven’t expected certain plot points that have developed throughout the book, the general course of the narrative seems very predictable, which makes the hundreds of pages of blatant delaying action all the more frustrating.

We’ll see if it blows me away in the second half.

I started reading Atlas Shrugged last week, but have only seriously begun committing time to the novel in the past two days or so; I hope to plow through a decent chunk of it before classes begin demanding the majority of my time.  So far, it’s easy to see the similarities between Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, though so far I’d say that Rand’s earlier novel did a better job of espousing philosophy through the characters.  Atlas Shrugged is certainly more overt and heavy-handed, and no one really has the appeal of Howard Roark.

I wish I had the memory and the penchant for philosophy to really remember and totally understand everything Ayn Rand has to say.  She’s a hell of a writer, even if objectivism is…well, a little crazy.  Her portrayal of society in Atlas Shrugged is already contemptuous and fucking frightening — the endless obsession with the “common good” at the expense of individualism is presented perfectly, and even though I’m perfectly aware of what a caricature it is, it succeeds perfectly in making me loathe the weaklings of society.

And I’m barely 200 pages in.  Let’s see how deep this rabbit hole goes.

I have to admit: when it comes to music, I’m generally hopelessly behind the times.  With gaming, movies, or virtually any other form of media, I do my best to stick with what’s cutting edge, hitting up midnight releases for titans like Gears of War 2 or The Dark Knight.  But whether it’s due to some natural resistance to what’s hip in the music scene or a simple inability to keep up with all the bands out there, I’m often a decade or three late to the party.

Even so, I manage to find out about good bands eventually, and this year I was lucky enough to discover some really extraordinary music.  The list of bands I found out about is far too lengthy to expound upon, but the few albums that I became obsessed with that were actually released in 2008 are deserving of far more praise than I can heap upon them.  So here they are, more or less in order of their ability to change your life, rock your face, or soothe your soul.  In fact, they can probably do all that shit.

Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend

If there was an album more amazing than Vampire Weekend released in 2008, I didn’t hear it.  Instantly refreshing, endlessly catchy, and almost criminally upbeat, this album exudes originality and is everything an indie band could aspire to.  Plus, it was released on my birthday last January — how cool is that?

There’s a little bit of everything in here.  “Campus” is a love song for college days gone by (something that feels wonderfully current for this student), but even weightier songs like “Walcott” manage to retain a cheerful sensibility while dropping lines like “Fuck the women from Wellfleet.”
 

Vampire Weekend have established themselves as the most promising new band on the scene.  If they somehow manage to top their self-titled debut with a sophomore release, it’ll be history in the making.

The Raconteurs – Consolers of the Lonely

It’s like Jack White took the rock and blues bottled up in his soul, accumulated gradually over the years from his work in The White Stripes, and poured it out in Consolers of the Lonely.  The album absolutely blows away the group’s first effort, Broken Boy Soldiers, which was a decent enough rock album in its own right.  Consolers of the Lonely is a full-blown, unconstrained rock album with some wonderfully bluesy undertones.  It feels a bit chaotic at times, but the chaos is always wonderfully utilized, and with the exception of a few moments of overboard screaming guitars, it’s a powerhouse on all fronts–lyrically, instrumentally, and vocally.

It’s hard to pick a standout when every song is so good.  “Salute Your Solution,” “Consolers of the Lonely,” and “You Don’t Understand” me are all wonderful, but when the album rocks out on “Hold Up” or takes it back a notch on “Rich Kid Blues,” it’s just as effective.  Through all the wonderful tracks, though, the bizarre but absolutely amazing “Carolina Drama” always kept me coming back for more.  I can’t really tell you why.  Just ask the milkman.

Ra Ra Riot – The Rhumb Line

I listened to Ra Ra Riot’s self-titled EP earlier this year, about the same time I discovered Vampire Weekend.  Ra Ra Riot is definitely another fantastic up-and-coming indie band, but I didn’t realize until just a few weeks ago that they had released their first full-length album, The Rhumb Line, this August.  Needless to say, it’s fantastic.

While my favorite song is likely still “Each Year,” Ra Ra Riot did a great job of filling out their six song EP into a full release.  A few things draw me to the band more than anything else — lyrically and vocally, they’re an absolute powerhouse, thanks to singer Wes Miles, and the inclusion of strings in rock music gets me every time.  Throw a violin and a cello into a rock setup and put the instruments into the hands of talented people, and wonders will come out.

I had the opportunity to see Ra Ra Riot live at the 40 Watt in Athens just a few weeks ago, and it was an incredible show — probably one of the highlights of my year.  And the thought of my copy of The Rhumb Line on vinyl still makes me a little giddy.

The K-Macks – Welcome, Everybody

It’s time to give some serious props to a local group, whose presence in the Athens, Ga. music scene excites me for a couple reasons.  The first is that, well, they’re really good.  The second is that these guys went to high scool with me, and it’s exciting to see them create something so full of heart and soul.

Kevin and Max have been playing music for years, but Welcome, Everybody is the first time I’ve really heard their work in a concentrated, refined form.  At first, I liked it, but thought it could be better.  But it kept sucking me back in, and after every listen it got better and better.  The fact that they’re my most listened to artist of the last few months is a testament to the staying power of Welcome, Everybody, and to how deceptively great it is.  Far too often I find myself wrapped up in the poignant (or slightly depressing) lyrics, hardly paying any attention to the instrumentation beneath it all.  Kevin’s scratchy voice leads most of the songs, but when the pair trade out or combine their powers to form Captain Planet, it’s quality stuff.  Above all, the album just feels unusually real, and that sincerity is what truly raises it above the pack.

If you pick up a copy (and I heartily recommend it), make sure to stay tuned through the end for a hidden track.  You won’t want to miss it.

Yes, this blog has been neglected.  Yes, I have a good reason.  Yes, it’s teh schoolz.  Finals weren’t too bad this semester — on the scale from brutally straining to suicide-inducing, they were much closer to the former end of the scale.  In short, mad studying, sleep deprivation, and far, far too much writing about books and movies and folklore (eep!) kept me from laying hands on this blog for a good while.  And even before finals I was caught up in rather long essays and end of term projects.

But now that’s all done like Christmas turkey.  Or Christmas salmon, as i happened to experience this year.  Hrm.  But let’s backtrack a bit to the main point: the lack of updates, and how that dire and unfortunate situation will soon be remedied.  No sooner had I returned home from my last final than a friend showed up, ready to commence our delicately-planned and hotly-anticipated Christmas break gaming marathon.

Experiences with each entry in our marathon will be documented in turn, and those we didn’t get to shall, I suspect, be attacked shortly, as soon as designated family time comes to a close.  You can also look forward to a new music post highlighting a few albums of 2008 I felt were really exemplary.  It’s such a cliche it’s almost not even worth pointing out it’s a cliche, but I’ll refrain from making lots of best of lists and just say why a few albums are especially kickass.