[Insert "So Dark the Con of Man" variant here], A Review of The Da Vinci Code
The Da Vinci Code is getting ciritcally panned, and has aroused a Christian furor equaled in stupidity only by the fear that Harry Potter would cause the youth of the world to take up devil worship. All this aside, it's quite a fun movie, capably directed and acted, visually pleasant, and not boring despite its considerable length. Tom Hanks is charming as always, Audrey Tatou is not annoying, and Jean Reno (who many of you may remember from his famous role in Genma Onimusha III: Demon Siege, although I hear he has also been in some French films) is delightful and intense. Paul Bettany shines as the lunatic albino monk Silas. His performance was so powerful and nuanced that it has caused me to develop an indelible prejudice against albinos, who I now believe are all murderous ascetics. I didn't even find the movie's plot particularly confusing - it was much less complex than some of the more baroque storylines in Angel, and the characters naturally had to explain what was going on to one another, so the exposition never bogged down. Delightful summer fluff.
Special Bonus: HegsethWatch 2K6
Again Mr. Rafil Bonerston-Smith has favored us with a delightful news item, a report on Guantanamo Bay which features quotes from Princeton war hawk/lesbian icon Pete Hegseth. It is available here if Mr. Bonerston-Smith has not already emailed it to you (this page will attempt to print when you navigate to it, I believe because of the "Hegseth Code"). I once had the pleasure of watching Mr. Hegseth shoot the leader of the campus Democrats with a paintball; Mr. Hegseth moved like some kind of white tiger robot, designed to protect Lex Luthor's gardens.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
All Your Face are Belong to Us
So I had my fieldwork proposal defense yesterday. This is a charming academic tradition in which the PhD candidate stands on a stool in his underwear and the faculty circle with permanent marker all the parts of his body that they feel are too fat. They then take a polaroid which is placed in a "Burn Book" and kept in the thesis room, on file, for posterity. My project was judged somewhat more harshly than others, so they also compelled me to carry a tiny Dora the Explorer backpack around for the rest of the day. All in all, not an entirely pleasant experience.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Please Go Away, Ramesh Ponnuru
I don’t know how many of you saw Ramesh Ponnuru on the Daily Show yesterday. He was hawking his new book, The Party of Death, one of the endless recent parade of popular nonfiction books on politics. This particular book takes the stance that the Democratic Party is the titular Party of Death, encouraging murder and disrespect for life on a worldwide scale. The fact that Mr. Ponnuru is a senior editor at the National Review should let you know what to expect before even reading his book (and I will freely admit that I have not nor will I ever). Jon Stewart took a pretty hard line with Mr. Ponnuru and was gentleman enough not to point out that Ponnuru is a squeaky-voiced little wiener who has never touched a boobie.
Whether or not Mr. Ponnuru is a wiener has little to do with the argument of his book (though it may have quite a lot to do with the fact that he chooses to make this argument). Basically, abortion is the main issue: Ponnuru sees abortion as being wholly and indelibly defined as a lust for death, a state sanctioned murder, and an erosion of “our fundamental right to life.” Ponnuru claimed on the Daily Show that he advances a principled, ethical, rational argument against abortion that does not rely on Biblical interpretation (what this could possibly be I don’t know, and he didn’t say). He also claimed that he could make the same kind of scientific argument about stem cell research (one wonders if he also opposes blood tests, or surgery). Jon Stewart asked him how the President could justify shedding innocent blood in Iraq to defend us from the (imaginary) weapons of mass destruction while at the same time steadfastly opposing abortion and potentially revolutionary research on stem cells because it represents a sacrifice of innocent life to save other lives. Good question, Mr. Stewart.
Basically, this all boils down to Benveniste and Agamben’s Culture of Life. Mr. Ponnuru calls the democratic party a culture of death and champions a conservative valuing of life as an inalienable, sacred right. Yet when we make life sacred and inalienable, at the same time we absolve the state of any responsibility for its quality. No wonder we do not have national health care yet we enjoy unprecedented tax cuts for the immensely wealthy. No wonder the Bush administration and its conservative and evangelical allies assault sex and science education. This insistence on the sacredness of life cannot emerge from a scientific ethics; my opinion is that the current pusillanimous championing of the rights of the blastula comes from a bottomless hatred and fear of women, and a neurotic, consuming desire to control their reproductive organs. I’m really so, so sick of this. See my previous post for a better explanation of the culture of life idea.
Classic Review Corner
A Review of Krazy Kat the novel
Jay Cantor, 1987
Jay Cantor wrote Krazy Kat in 1987, before Michael Chabon wrote The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and before Jonathan Lethem wrote Fortress of Solitude. Krazy Kat contains no superheroes, since Cantor has borrowed most of his characters from Coconino County, home to the titular Kat and setting of the celebrated comic strip Krazy Kat. Drawn by George Herriman, the strip ran in the Hearst newspapers from 1913 to 1944. It little resembled our contemporary comics. The action in Coconino County took place on a full page, and the characters had room to do and say more than, say, Garfield or Beetle Bailey. The core cast was small: Krazy Kat, a natural philosopher and great mispronouncer of words (before Family Circus made the practice nauseating), Ignatz Mouse, who paid no attention to the law or to Krazy, and Offisa Bull Pupp, a bulldog cop who kept the peace in Coconino. Krazy, it so happens, loved Ignatz, and Offisa Bull Pupp loved Krazy; Ignatz, however, did not reciprocate the love of the Kat. He preferred to hurl bricks at Krazy’s head. Krazy took this as a token of affection and Bull Pupp took it as a crime. Many strips ended with Ignatz locked in Coconino’s jailhouse.
Cantor uses Kat & co. as a cast, letting them loose in five vignettes. The technique is academic. We see Cantor’s various themes through the opinions of the Kat, the mouse, and the bulldog: character steps in for theory. His themes too have an academic resonance, and Cantor aims high: he begins with Krazy reacting to the development of the atomic bomb (which coincided with the end of the strip’s press run), passes through Freudian psychoanalysis and revolutionary theory, skewers the culture industy and ends up in an intense consideration of the link between violence and sex. Cantor doesn’t just decorate his novel with these themes: his characters literally live through them, like performance artists. In the section on psychoanalysis, for instance, Ignatz gives a virtuoso reading of Freud by treating Krazy’s neurosis – it’s edutainment and I love it.
Krazy’s neurosis, which she picks up in the first chapter, drives the plot (which scarcely matters because the characters and images are so dazzling). Krazy and Ignatz have been out of work, and Ignatz, always meddling, takes her to see the atomic bomb tests at Alamagordo – after seeing the horror of the bomb Krazy changes; a piece of fallout burns a patch of her perfect black fur white. After this, Ignatz’s bricks begin to hurt, raising stars of pain rather than hearts of foolish love. Coconino County is a plastic place, and Cantor paints its shifting landscape, mesas blurring into clouds and clouds precipitating into cactuses; cartoon Krazy stands still against the backdrop, but after the tests she has to change, she cannot repeat her triangular drama with Ignatz and Bull Pup. No wonder Ignatz reaches for Freud.
So the rest of the book details Krazy’s efforts to become a person, what she calls “round”, as opposed to flat, like a cartoon or movie. Ignatz suggests that sex might be the best route to this, though he has only a hazy idea of what sex is – “I think they pee in each other”, he writes in a letter to Bull Pup. Since Krazy starts out as a full-fledged, interesting character her change works as a classic psychological narrative – she may think of her transformation as change into a new person, the fallout “giving her an inside,” but really she is becoming more herself, emerging rather than transforming.
Despite all its melting landscapes and intense theoretical involvement, Cantor really devotes his novel to character – Kat and mouse both grow and change throughout the narrative, but because they are cartoons Cantor can let them act these internal changes out in arrestingly direct ways. Krazy, for instance, goes rigid after some traumas (Ignatz compares her to “a Danish Modern coffee table”), and Ignatz has a chance to try his crackpot theories, playing psychiatrist, producer, and revolutionary in turn.
Cantor does eventually shift away from the cartoon in the final chapter, “Venus in Furs” (a reference to the classic Velvet Underground paean to S&M), which he originally published on its own in Playboy. Krazy appears here as Catherine Higgs Bosun, patient of Doctor Ignatz and daughter of a prominent physicist – a woman, not a Kat. Ignatz and Kate (The Kat’s new-minted name) waste no time in transgressing the doctor/patient relationship and plunge into a sexually inventive affair. In this final chapter the Kat is no longer strictly speaking a cat, Ignatz no longer a mouse, and Coconino resigns into Boston. We’re definitely still in a cartoon, one that stings and saddens the reader but in places lets the candy colors and startling lines of Herriman’s original vision shine through. Kate and Dr. Ignatz are cartoonish in the manner that most people I know are cartoonish – they fight, mock, and joke ferociously but not in the least unrealistically. When Kate, drunk in some horrible bar and separated from her mouse, leaves Ignatz messages on his answering machine we smile and cringe at the same time, but we never doubt that Kate the Kat would taunt him so: “‘I’m in Paris and I miss you terribly, darling, I wish you were here with me. Why couldn’t you have turned a new leaf over, so your baby could be your slave? Oh Ignatz,’ she snuffled, ‘Why couldn’t you behave?” Ignatz, still a lover of technology, replays the message to search for “French-sounding static.”
Jay Cantor, 1987
Jay Cantor wrote Krazy Kat in 1987, before Michael Chabon wrote The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and before Jonathan Lethem wrote Fortress of Solitude. Krazy Kat contains no superheroes, since Cantor has borrowed most of his characters from Coconino County, home to the titular Kat and setting of the celebrated comic strip Krazy Kat. Drawn by George Herriman, the strip ran in the Hearst newspapers from 1913 to 1944. It little resembled our contemporary comics. The action in Coconino County took place on a full page, and the characters had room to do and say more than, say, Garfield or Beetle Bailey. The core cast was small: Krazy Kat, a natural philosopher and great mispronouncer of words (before Family Circus made the practice nauseating), Ignatz Mouse, who paid no attention to the law or to Krazy, and Offisa Bull Pupp, a bulldog cop who kept the peace in Coconino. Krazy, it so happens, loved Ignatz, and Offisa Bull Pupp loved Krazy; Ignatz, however, did not reciprocate the love of the Kat. He preferred to hurl bricks at Krazy’s head. Krazy took this as a token of affection and Bull Pupp took it as a crime. Many strips ended with Ignatz locked in Coconino’s jailhouse.
Cantor uses Kat & co. as a cast, letting them loose in five vignettes. The technique is academic. We see Cantor’s various themes through the opinions of the Kat, the mouse, and the bulldog: character steps in for theory. His themes too have an academic resonance, and Cantor aims high: he begins with Krazy reacting to the development of the atomic bomb (which coincided with the end of the strip’s press run), passes through Freudian psychoanalysis and revolutionary theory, skewers the culture industy and ends up in an intense consideration of the link between violence and sex. Cantor doesn’t just decorate his novel with these themes: his characters literally live through them, like performance artists. In the section on psychoanalysis, for instance, Ignatz gives a virtuoso reading of Freud by treating Krazy’s neurosis – it’s edutainment and I love it.
Krazy’s neurosis, which she picks up in the first chapter, drives the plot (which scarcely matters because the characters and images are so dazzling). Krazy and Ignatz have been out of work, and Ignatz, always meddling, takes her to see the atomic bomb tests at Alamagordo – after seeing the horror of the bomb Krazy changes; a piece of fallout burns a patch of her perfect black fur white. After this, Ignatz’s bricks begin to hurt, raising stars of pain rather than hearts of foolish love. Coconino County is a plastic place, and Cantor paints its shifting landscape, mesas blurring into clouds and clouds precipitating into cactuses; cartoon Krazy stands still against the backdrop, but after the tests she has to change, she cannot repeat her triangular drama with Ignatz and Bull Pup. No wonder Ignatz reaches for Freud.
So the rest of the book details Krazy’s efforts to become a person, what she calls “round”, as opposed to flat, like a cartoon or movie. Ignatz suggests that sex might be the best route to this, though he has only a hazy idea of what sex is – “I think they pee in each other”, he writes in a letter to Bull Pup. Since Krazy starts out as a full-fledged, interesting character her change works as a classic psychological narrative – she may think of her transformation as change into a new person, the fallout “giving her an inside,” but really she is becoming more herself, emerging rather than transforming.
Despite all its melting landscapes and intense theoretical involvement, Cantor really devotes his novel to character – Kat and mouse both grow and change throughout the narrative, but because they are cartoons Cantor can let them act these internal changes out in arrestingly direct ways. Krazy, for instance, goes rigid after some traumas (Ignatz compares her to “a Danish Modern coffee table”), and Ignatz has a chance to try his crackpot theories, playing psychiatrist, producer, and revolutionary in turn.
Cantor does eventually shift away from the cartoon in the final chapter, “Venus in Furs” (a reference to the classic Velvet Underground paean to S&M), which he originally published on its own in Playboy. Krazy appears here as Catherine Higgs Bosun, patient of Doctor Ignatz and daughter of a prominent physicist – a woman, not a Kat. Ignatz and Kate (The Kat’s new-minted name) waste no time in transgressing the doctor/patient relationship and plunge into a sexually inventive affair. In this final chapter the Kat is no longer strictly speaking a cat, Ignatz no longer a mouse, and Coconino resigns into Boston. We’re definitely still in a cartoon, one that stings and saddens the reader but in places lets the candy colors and startling lines of Herriman’s original vision shine through. Kate and Dr. Ignatz are cartoonish in the manner that most people I know are cartoonish – they fight, mock, and joke ferociously but not in the least unrealistically. When Kate, drunk in some horrible bar and separated from her mouse, leaves Ignatz messages on his answering machine we smile and cringe at the same time, but we never doubt that Kate the Kat would taunt him so: “‘I’m in Paris and I miss you terribly, darling, I wish you were here with me. Why couldn’t you have turned a new leaf over, so your baby could be your slave? Oh Ignatz,’ she snuffled, ‘Why couldn’t you behave?” Ignatz, still a lover of technology, replays the message to search for “French-sounding static.”
Monday, May 15, 2006
I Wish this Game were Bad, so I could call it God of Bore
A Review of God of War
Like most people, I bought this game thinking it was the playstation version of the 1998 Brendan Fraser/Sir Ian McKellen vehicle Gods and Monsters. I was looking forward to a robust pool-cleaning sim interspersed with awkward intergenerational gay sex. This turned out to be something of a misconception. God of War is actually about a pale, extremely violent man named Kratos. Kratos sports a gothy pallor, an extreme sports goatee, and a livid red tribal surfer tattoo, yet he clearly could strangle with his muscular legs all of the subcultures which these affectations represent. He would not put up with any come-ons from Sir Ian McKellen either.
Kratos is living out a healthily bastardized version of the Hercules myth, but much like Hercules he is not enjoying most of it. It seems Ares, as Greco-Roman gods do, has made Kratos go nuts and kill his family. Kratos is out for revenge, big-style, and he will stab any number of people or mythological creatures to get it. The plot, a ridiculous pastiche of Greek myth, commits to being grim and nasty and thereby avoids the pitfalls of the singularly boneheaded Japanese video game style of allusion. You don’t have to collect the three Sacred Stones of HyperOlympus, and if some doe-eyed bobblehead suggested to Kratos that by working together and trying their best they could save the environment, Kratos would probably push her off a cliff. Shion from Xenosaga would last about one minute around Kratos. He would not appreciate it if she brought him curry.
Crossover fanfiction aside, this is a very good game. Kratos is a huge bad-ass, as mean and violent and singleminded as a character in a Cormac McCarthy novel, but he also fights his way through the game with a sinuous grace. Once you master the combat system, Kratos’ leaps and dodges become as important as the wide balletic arcs of his blades, and though Kratos may be a contender against Ian McKellan or a tiny, futuristic Japanese robotics engineer, he’s a little outclassed by most of the enemies in God of War. The game has one of the best balancing jobs I have ever seen: you never face a fight that’s impossible or unfair, but you never face an easy opponent either. Most of the monsters Kratos fights are Greek mythological figures given a sinister update: slavering, mad-eyed minotaurs and skull-faced Satyrs both make an appearance, as well as a colossal hydra and a fair number of centaurs who look as if they have wandered off a particularly savage chest-tattoo. Most of these enemies are bigger and stronger than Kratos, and they come at him in swarms, so be prepared for a challenge that may make you yell so loud at the TV that your frighten the dogs. The monsters are not Kratos’ only enemy: one particular challenge in which Kratos climbs giant, rotating bladed cylinders was so difficult that I developed carpal tunnel syndrome so severe that I now have to keep BOTH hands in leather gloves filled with Vaseline.
These hiccups aside, God of War delivers a much better experience than almost any other recent game (Resident Evil 4 rivals it, but suffers from some annoying Japanese video game clichés). The combat is always fun and rewards deep, ethnographic knowledge of the fighting controls (and the blocks and evasions are not simply ornaments!), there are some interesting puzzles, including a violent, ancient Greek version of Tetris, and Kratos manages to take the typical mindless rage of the video game protagonist and turn it into a satisfying character. At one point in the game, Kratos has just completed a ridiculous, enervating, grueling trial in order to obtain Pandora’s Box, which turns out to be the size and weight of a Toyota Scion Xb. He needs to bring the box back to Athens, and he is out in a giant temple in the desert, a temple that took three days climbing up sheer cliffs to reach. Kratos doesn’t even pause before he begins to push the box inch by tortuous inch back to the city. Perhaps the designers realized that actions sometimes can show character much more effectively than dialogue (and certainly better than the RPG stock phrase “…”), and that video games really ought to be relying on action. Eighteen thumbs up – it’s a Player’s Choice or something now too, so it’s only $20.
Sunday, May 14, 2006
AMDB, yeah you know me
A Site Plug, plus a review of Destroy All Humans
Recently, I have been spending a very great deal of time at somethingawful.com (having navigated there from x-entertainment). This site is probably beyond old news to everyone, but they seem to be consistently pretty funny, in a nerdy way, and they also relatively recently added a feature called the Awful Movie Database, a pitch-perfect parody of the IMDB. The idea is not that innovative: they copy the format of IMDB, then fill out the template with fictional movies like Hard Eagle (1993, Steven Segal) and Cannibal Barbarian (1982, Dir. Alan Smithee). The execution is perfect down to the smallest ethnographic details (Cyborg Warp's IMDB message board consists of six or seven posts by "CyborgKnight", all variations on "DVD??????"), but the actual substance of the parodies bears all the hoofmarks of a group of rather clever friends cracking eachother up, and furthermore is just very funny instead of impenetrable and in-joky. Take this triva from Hard Eagle:
Destroy All Humans
If you want an Xbox game under $20, you actually have many, many options, most of which are better than Destroy All Humans. The premise seems like it can't miss: you play a wise-cracking alien in the style of 1950s schlock science fiction, bent on destroying the earth with your death rays and evil plots. The problem is, the developers go for humor with this. The reason that bad sci-fi is funny (much of the time) is that it's NOT played for laughs. But this game is definitely straining the sinews of its digital limbs trying to be wacky. The results brims with all the freshness and verve of Shrek II.
Maybe this would have worked if the jokes were actually funny: hearing an alien (for some reason doing a z-grade Jack Nicholson impression) crowing "It's probin' time!" before painfully electrocuting a kidnapped government agent is not really all that funny, and coupled with the game's extreme violence it embarasses rather than amuses the player. I don't know if they hired a professional writer for the jokes (my money's on "no"), but they are all of the same obvious and dim level. Your alien can (and unfortunately must) scan the minds of the unwitting humans around him, and they are all thinking something stupid that might perhaps seem screamingly funny to a group of foul-smelling men who have developed elaborate tics around their mousing technique. The male citizens of the game make searing assaults on 1950s conformity ("I have to keep up with the Jones! If only I could remember who the Jones were!") and the women think about nothing but sex and their own sex organs ("There's that not-so-fresh feeling again!"). The parentheses contain actual quotes from the game, in case you were wondering. Embarassing.
This would all be OK if the game were good, but it isn't. It's like Grand Theft Auto if your in-game character were a quadraplegic. It gives you very few things to do, and veers maddeningly between soporific ease and unbeatable difficulty. Save your money: only six thumbs up.
Recently, I have been spending a very great deal of time at somethingawful.com (having navigated there from x-entertainment). This site is probably beyond old news to everyone, but they seem to be consistently pretty funny, in a nerdy way, and they also relatively recently added a feature called the Awful Movie Database, a pitch-perfect parody of the IMDB. The idea is not that innovative: they copy the format of IMDB, then fill out the template with fictional movies like Hard Eagle (1993, Steven Segal) and Cannibal Barbarian (1982, Dir. Alan Smithee). The execution is perfect down to the smallest ethnographic details (Cyborg Warp's IMDB message board consists of six or seven posts by "CyborgKnight", all variations on "DVD??????"), but the actual substance of the parodies bears all the hoofmarks of a group of rather clever friends cracking eachother up, and furthermore is just very funny instead of impenetrable and in-joky. Take this triva from Hard Eagle:
Steven Seagal was furious when he learned that over sixty bald eagles were killed during the making of the film. In the director’s commentary track on the 1998 DVD release, Harold Wells explains that “we didn’t tell Seagal we were using real eagles, he would have shit his self. But what the fuck, a real eagle and a permit to be cruel to it costs way less than a really good fake eagle. We must have shot fifty takes of the scene where Geoffrey Lewis beats up that eagle and tears it apart. He kept asking for more takes. He loved it, he loved the feeling of power, I think. Plus we needed to kill about a dozen more eagles for the feathers on all those Indian… you know, those hats. We got really good at killing eagles, between Geoffrey and I. About as good as anyone ever has been, maybe.”Worth a lengthy perusal. SomethingAwful's other sections are also pretty delightful, generally.
Destroy All Humans
If you want an Xbox game under $20, you actually have many, many options, most of which are better than Destroy All Humans. The premise seems like it can't miss: you play a wise-cracking alien in the style of 1950s schlock science fiction, bent on destroying the earth with your death rays and evil plots. The problem is, the developers go for humor with this. The reason that bad sci-fi is funny (much of the time) is that it's NOT played for laughs. But this game is definitely straining the sinews of its digital limbs trying to be wacky. The results brims with all the freshness and verve of Shrek II.
Maybe this would have worked if the jokes were actually funny: hearing an alien (for some reason doing a z-grade Jack Nicholson impression) crowing "It's probin' time!" before painfully electrocuting a kidnapped government agent is not really all that funny, and coupled with the game's extreme violence it embarasses rather than amuses the player. I don't know if they hired a professional writer for the jokes (my money's on "no"), but they are all of the same obvious and dim level. Your alien can (and unfortunately must) scan the minds of the unwitting humans around him, and they are all thinking something stupid that might perhaps seem screamingly funny to a group of foul-smelling men who have developed elaborate tics around their mousing technique. The male citizens of the game make searing assaults on 1950s conformity ("I have to keep up with the Jones! If only I could remember who the Jones were!") and the women think about nothing but sex and their own sex organs ("There's that not-so-fresh feeling again!"). The parentheses contain actual quotes from the game, in case you were wondering. Embarassing.
This would all be OK if the game were good, but it isn't. It's like Grand Theft Auto if your in-game character were a quadraplegic. It gives you very few things to do, and veers maddeningly between soporific ease and unbeatable difficulty. Save your money: only six thumbs up.
Friday, May 12, 2006
Just My Lack
A review of Just My Luck
Starring Lindsay Lohan, Chris Pine, Samaire Armstrong (from Entourage) and some indistinguishable British moppets.
Really, who doesn’t like Lindsay Lohan? From her adequate acting to her basically orange color, Lohan has something for everyone, from the film’s target audience of teenage girls to the balding lone pervert who made this particular cinema experience extra special. Watch it for up-and-coming British “indie” rock band McFly (you can hear their repertoire expand from one to three songs!), an even more twitchy than usual Samaire Armstrong, and a bunch of onscreen animal feces. I give it nine thumbs up. Also, at one point Lohan’s luck gets so bad that she demonstrates an Antigone-like perfect acceptance of the death drive; this places her in the space between life and death, the eerie realm of Das Ding and the Homo sacer, the zone of creation and annihilation populated by monsters and monstrosities. She uses this opportunity to wear bowling shirts and learn to repair fluorescent lighting fixtures.
Saturday, April 29, 2006
As in the Cylinder
Dear everyone,
To graduate does not take a direct object as a verb when used to describe an individual graduating from an institution. "Kimiko graduated college this spring" means one of the following things:
- Kimiko conferred a degree upon college this spring.
- Kimiko gradually changed college by degrees this spring.
- Kimiko arranged or divided college into steps or grades this spring.
I think people find that using graduate as a direct object verb in this way makes them sound smart or British or both (like Sir Ian McLellan), but in fact, to me, it simply sounds affected. Of course everyone will understand you perfectly, and I'm sure that in a few decades this usage will be standard and acceptable, but what is a blog for if not airing completely inconsequential grievances to a largely uninterested public? Here are some grammatically acceptable usages of to graduate.
- Hollywood Upstairs Medical School and Discount Electronics graduates a class of 200 this year.
- Elutherius Abednego Constington was graduated from Harvard in 1810.
- Barring further assault convictions, the university plans to graduate her this spring.
- I graduated from college.
Comments? Objections from Wobblies and Levellers?
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Colossal Review Roundup
Alright BLOGOSPHERE, get ready for a large number of very short reviews culled from this depressing month of April.
Scary Movie 4
If the writers had chosen to parody something other than War of the Worlds and The Grudge (which is a bizarre choice, given that the last Scary Movie parodied The Ring, which you need a scorecard to differentiate from The Grudge), this would have been a much better movie. Anna Faris is charming and very funny, and it would be nice if she had some sharper material to work with. Probably worth seeing on Stars, or if you are already at the mall waiting for a hairdressing appointment.
Silent Hill
Once I played Silent Hill 2 for about fifteen minutes and then got so scared that I literally couldn’t sleep for a week. This was in January of this year. This movie is not that scary, but it is extremely grimy and skin-crawlingly unpleasant. The movie fails to evoke the “oh shit, oh shit!” terror of the games, but does manage to weave together a pretty coherent, kind of interesting plot. Laurie Holden is compelling as freaked-out police officer Sybil Bennet, and Sean Bean is entirely misspent in a secondary role that looks like it was filmed as a response to focus-group viewing of an early draft of the movie. The monsters were somehow less terrifying because you can see them clearly; some of the mystery is eroded, so there’s less room to fill in the gaps with your personal psychosexual horrors.
Game Boy Review Roundup – Normal People Stop Reading
Many of you may know that I recently purchased a game boy advance, or as some like to call it a MicroNanoBoy. I did this so I could play games on the subway or train, and in fact it allows me to achieve this goal. The games, however, are not really all that good. Most people think that the game boy is a system for children, but most of these games would cause a carefree young child to convene a Stuffed Animal War Tribunal and sentence the game boy to being used as a very small skateboard ramp. The games are very, very difficult in the manner of classic Nintendo games like Kid Icarus, games that I mastered to such a low and spastic degree that I rarely made it past the opening credits.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
If you are autistic, you will really like this game. Very Japanese, very into punishing you down the road for decisions you make before you really know what you’re doing. I played it for many hours a day for about three weeks then got disgusted and quit. The graphics were charming but the whole experience felt somehow antiquated. The class-switching system is fun, the Laws system is definitely not fun. I liked the equipment management system. I did not like having some of my best soldiers look like deformed rabbits.
Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow
Very good. Too short, a little bit too difficult, but all in all a dreamboat.
Metroid Fusion
Made me want to throw the game boy into a storm drain. It seems like it consists of incredibly hard battles interspersed with fun use of your swell cyber-powers, but it’s actually just the typically annoying video game progression where by the time you get your awesome powers, they are not all that awesome. Why would I want to pay to have my alter-ego repeatedly killed by something that looks like a retarded bat wearing an airport metal detector?
Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
This made me want to throw the game boy into some kind of special storm drain that is twice as deep as a normal storm drain. Coupling graphics and inventory management straight out of Ultima Three with a delightful mechanic in which if a character dies, he or she is dead forever, this game was absorbing for about ten hours, then the scales fell from my eyes and I realized that I was replaying the same mission for the ninth time and that I secretly wished that all the characters were dead.
Advance Wars II
Shit sandwich.
Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga
Since E. Hastings endorsed Paper Mario, I thought this Mario RPG thing might work. Again, this game looks like it might be for children but is in fact better suited to mutant superchildren or baby robots or something. Puzzle minigames: way too hard and annoying. Princess Peach escort mission: abominable. Also, grow some fucking balls, Mario and Luigi! You’re like 40 years old!
Scary Movie 4
If the writers had chosen to parody something other than War of the Worlds and The Grudge (which is a bizarre choice, given that the last Scary Movie parodied The Ring, which you need a scorecard to differentiate from The Grudge), this would have been a much better movie. Anna Faris is charming and very funny, and it would be nice if she had some sharper material to work with. Probably worth seeing on Stars, or if you are already at the mall waiting for a hairdressing appointment.
Silent Hill
Once I played Silent Hill 2 for about fifteen minutes and then got so scared that I literally couldn’t sleep for a week. This was in January of this year. This movie is not that scary, but it is extremely grimy and skin-crawlingly unpleasant. The movie fails to evoke the “oh shit, oh shit!” terror of the games, but does manage to weave together a pretty coherent, kind of interesting plot. Laurie Holden is compelling as freaked-out police officer Sybil Bennet, and Sean Bean is entirely misspent in a secondary role that looks like it was filmed as a response to focus-group viewing of an early draft of the movie. The monsters were somehow less terrifying because you can see them clearly; some of the mystery is eroded, so there’s less room to fill in the gaps with your personal psychosexual horrors.
Game Boy Review Roundup – Normal People Stop Reading
Many of you may know that I recently purchased a game boy advance, or as some like to call it a MicroNanoBoy. I did this so I could play games on the subway or train, and in fact it allows me to achieve this goal. The games, however, are not really all that good. Most people think that the game boy is a system for children, but most of these games would cause a carefree young child to convene a Stuffed Animal War Tribunal and sentence the game boy to being used as a very small skateboard ramp. The games are very, very difficult in the manner of classic Nintendo games like Kid Icarus, games that I mastered to such a low and spastic degree that I rarely made it past the opening credits.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
If you are autistic, you will really like this game. Very Japanese, very into punishing you down the road for decisions you make before you really know what you’re doing. I played it for many hours a day for about three weeks then got disgusted and quit. The graphics were charming but the whole experience felt somehow antiquated. The class-switching system is fun, the Laws system is definitely not fun. I liked the equipment management system. I did not like having some of my best soldiers look like deformed rabbits.
Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow
Very good. Too short, a little bit too difficult, but all in all a dreamboat.
Metroid Fusion
Made me want to throw the game boy into a storm drain. It seems like it consists of incredibly hard battles interspersed with fun use of your swell cyber-powers, but it’s actually just the typically annoying video game progression where by the time you get your awesome powers, they are not all that awesome. Why would I want to pay to have my alter-ego repeatedly killed by something that looks like a retarded bat wearing an airport metal detector?
Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
This made me want to throw the game boy into some kind of special storm drain that is twice as deep as a normal storm drain. Coupling graphics and inventory management straight out of Ultima Three with a delightful mechanic in which if a character dies, he or she is dead forever, this game was absorbing for about ten hours, then the scales fell from my eyes and I realized that I was replaying the same mission for the ninth time and that I secretly wished that all the characters were dead.
Advance Wars II
Shit sandwich.
Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga
Since E. Hastings endorsed Paper Mario, I thought this Mario RPG thing might work. Again, this game looks like it might be for children but is in fact better suited to mutant superchildren or baby robots or something. Puzzle minigames: way too hard and annoying. Princess Peach escort mission: abominable. Also, grow some fucking balls, Mario and Luigi! You’re like 40 years old!
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Heads You Live, Tails you HOLLYWOOD MAGIC!
A Review of Domino
At one point in Domino Tom Waits shows up in the middle of the desert, driving a classic convertible, bandages on his hands and stubble on his long and wolfish face. He tells Keira Knightley, her boss, her violent, sociopathic Latin lover, and their Afghan terrorist RV driver that they must sacrifice their lives to pay for a $300,000 operation for the grand-daughter of a 28 year-old DMV clerk/ Jerry Springer guest named Lateesha. During this scene 90210 alumnus Ian Ziering (playing himself) dances in his underwear, socks covering his hands, babbling hysterically after having drunk coffee larded up with mescaline instead of non-dairy creamer. This is indeed the weirdest scene in the movie, but not by too long a stretch. How could I not love it? I give it nine thumbs up. A. O. Scott recently wrote an article about how there were no great artistic flops produced anymore, that movies were focus-grouped and noted into safe mediocrity. This movie may be neither great nor artistic, but it is definitely not mediocre.
At one point in Domino Tom Waits shows up in the middle of the desert, driving a classic convertible, bandages on his hands and stubble on his long and wolfish face. He tells Keira Knightley, her boss, her violent, sociopathic Latin lover, and their Afghan terrorist RV driver that they must sacrifice their lives to pay for a $300,000 operation for the grand-daughter of a 28 year-old DMV clerk/ Jerry Springer guest named Lateesha. During this scene 90210 alumnus Ian Ziering (playing himself) dances in his underwear, socks covering his hands, babbling hysterically after having drunk coffee larded up with mescaline instead of non-dairy creamer. This is indeed the weirdest scene in the movie, but not by too long a stretch. How could I not love it? I give it nine thumbs up. A. O. Scott recently wrote an article about how there were no great artistic flops produced anymore, that movies were focus-grouped and noted into safe mediocrity. This movie may be neither great nor artistic, but it is definitely not mediocre.
Monday, April 10, 2006
She Blinded me with Very Poorly Conceived Science
Take this delightful test from the Harvard psychology department. Come back when you finish - I'll be waiting right here, in the BLOGOSPHERE!
Ok, basically, this test is supposed to measure your association of certain racial groups with negative ideas, in this case black people with weapons. The researchers claim that this is designed to detect the unconcious roots of racial profiling in almost everyone. In the debriefing page for the test they lament the fact that people who take the test most often associate harmless objects with white people and weapons with black people.
The test works in the following way: you can sort an object or person into one of two categories. it starts off with black on the right and white on the left; then it goes to weapons on the right and harmless objects on the left, then to black OR weapons on the right and white OR harmless on the left. Then it switches categories so that blacks are paired with harmless objects and whites with weapons. My test came back that I had a slight tendency to associate blacks with weapons and whites with harmless objects (cellphones were one of the representative examples, although I don't really think of them as harmless).
Here's the thing: the test measures how many mistakes you made and how swiftly you selected categories. I made many more mistakes in the final category (black and harmless objects versus whites and weapons). Is this because watching American History X in high school turned me into a big ol' racist? NO, it's because I got used to where the categories were on the test! It would be like suddenly having the turn signals on your car reversed: what you associate with them (left and right turns) has no intellectual or decision-making content. You simply know to push the stick down for left and up for right, and if these directions suddenly reverse you're going to make many mistakes. I cannot believe that this actually passes for statistically robust research even in a field as decayed and idiotic as psychology. Even in the dim and badly organized sociology and statistics class I took sophomore year they specifically told us not to design surveys like this, since they cause an egregious bias. The study is so flawed and so unimportant to almost every human being that only the blogosphere can pass judgement on it. The sentence? Death by drowning.
Ok, basically, this test is supposed to measure your association of certain racial groups with negative ideas, in this case black people with weapons. The researchers claim that this is designed to detect the unconcious roots of racial profiling in almost everyone. In the debriefing page for the test they lament the fact that people who take the test most often associate harmless objects with white people and weapons with black people.
The test works in the following way: you can sort an object or person into one of two categories. it starts off with black on the right and white on the left; then it goes to weapons on the right and harmless objects on the left, then to black OR weapons on the right and white OR harmless on the left. Then it switches categories so that blacks are paired with harmless objects and whites with weapons. My test came back that I had a slight tendency to associate blacks with weapons and whites with harmless objects (cellphones were one of the representative examples, although I don't really think of them as harmless).
Here's the thing: the test measures how many mistakes you made and how swiftly you selected categories. I made many more mistakes in the final category (black and harmless objects versus whites and weapons). Is this because watching American History X in high school turned me into a big ol' racist? NO, it's because I got used to where the categories were on the test! It would be like suddenly having the turn signals on your car reversed: what you associate with them (left and right turns) has no intellectual or decision-making content. You simply know to push the stick down for left and up for right, and if these directions suddenly reverse you're going to make many mistakes. I cannot believe that this actually passes for statistically robust research even in a field as decayed and idiotic as psychology. Even in the dim and badly organized sociology and statistics class I took sophomore year they specifically told us not to design surveys like this, since they cause an egregious bias. The study is so flawed and so unimportant to almost every human being that only the blogosphere can pass judgement on it. The sentence? Death by drowning.
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Our Stupid Country
Oh holy fucking motherfuck sonofabitch, I am SO SICK of the insane and idiotic religious obsession abroad in our rapidly-getting-less-great nation. Fundamentalist Christians: you won. You control the government of the country. Please stop whining and focus your energy on stripping our civil rights and lobbying against women’s’ right to drive. I really, honestly love America but these people are SEVERELY trying my patience and they seem to be here to stay.
CASE ONE
Tresa Waggoner, a Colorado music teacher (and devout Christian!), basically lost her job because she had the Satanic pride and daring to actually teach music. She showed a video of Faust in her middle school music class. Parents objected in quite strenuous terms, because they thought the opera might cause their children to worship the Devil. The school suspended Waggoner. The mayor of the town resigned. No one bothered to mention Faust’s central role in the Western canon or its deeply Christian underpinnings. Hysteria and superstition triumphed.
Link
Link
Link
CASE TWO
See this week’s New Yorker for an article about how the Bush administration is prepared to oppose a vaccine for the Human Papillomavirus, the leading cause of cervical cancer. They are concerned that vaccinating against one of the many horrifying possible results of sexual intercourse might lead to young women (who, surprise! are the only ones who suffer from cervical cancer) having premarital sex, and, God forbid, possibly enjoying it. They would prefer that young women across America ACTUALLY SUFFER FROM A DEBILITATING CANCER AND DIE RATHER THAN HAVING SEX BEFORE MARRIAGE. Giorgio Agamben, you’re our only hope! The new model for the world really IS the death camp!
COMING SOON – A review of Galactic Civilizations II!
EDIT MARCH 9 - CASE THREE
I somehow forgot this one: South Dakota banned abortion, even in the case of rape or incest. Guess who the only people who can have abortions are - if you guessed women, you're right! Of course according to Fox News, 90% of rape victims were totally asking for it and in fact enticed their rapists over Myspace. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Deadeye Dick, "You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages - they haven't ended yet."
Link
CASE ONE
Tresa Waggoner, a Colorado music teacher (and devout Christian!), basically lost her job because she had the Satanic pride and daring to actually teach music. She showed a video of Faust in her middle school music class. Parents objected in quite strenuous terms, because they thought the opera might cause their children to worship the Devil. The school suspended Waggoner. The mayor of the town resigned. No one bothered to mention Faust’s central role in the Western canon or its deeply Christian underpinnings. Hysteria and superstition triumphed.
Link
Link
Link
CASE TWO
See this week’s New Yorker for an article about how the Bush administration is prepared to oppose a vaccine for the Human Papillomavirus, the leading cause of cervical cancer. They are concerned that vaccinating against one of the many horrifying possible results of sexual intercourse might lead to young women (who, surprise! are the only ones who suffer from cervical cancer) having premarital sex, and, God forbid, possibly enjoying it. They would prefer that young women across America ACTUALLY SUFFER FROM A DEBILITATING CANCER AND DIE RATHER THAN HAVING SEX BEFORE MARRIAGE. Giorgio Agamben, you’re our only hope! The new model for the world really IS the death camp!
COMING SOON – A review of Galactic Civilizations II!
EDIT MARCH 9 - CASE THREE
I somehow forgot this one: South Dakota banned abortion, even in the case of rape or incest. Guess who the only people who can have abortions are - if you guessed women, you're right! Of course according to Fox News, 90% of rape victims were totally asking for it and in fact enticed their rapists over Myspace. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Deadeye Dick, "You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages - they haven't ended yet."
Link
Saturday, March 04, 2006
Apparently 40 Years was not Long Enough
A Review of The 40 Year Old Virgin
Wow. Steve Carrell is charming. He looks like a charming, ironic weasel and is appealing in his many dorky polo shirts. This movie is not charming. Perhaps the writers were in a bit of a rush and just stuck with the first draft of the script. Or perhaps they actually thought that lines like “If he starts waxing his pubes, I’m outta here!” were funny. Maybe, deep beneath the thick, trollish skin of this movie there are some good ideas. But they lie beneath an agonizing rubble of infantile, tired, dull-edged jokes. Sorry to all the (many) people who recommended this movie to me, and a big f-word you to all the newspapers and websites that gave this movie rave reviews. A sour, unfunny, unwatchable mess.
Wow. Steve Carrell is charming. He looks like a charming, ironic weasel and is appealing in his many dorky polo shirts. This movie is not charming. Perhaps the writers were in a bit of a rush and just stuck with the first draft of the script. Or perhaps they actually thought that lines like “If he starts waxing his pubes, I’m outta here!” were funny. Maybe, deep beneath the thick, trollish skin of this movie there are some good ideas. But they lie beneath an agonizing rubble of infantile, tired, dull-edged jokes. Sorry to all the (many) people who recommended this movie to me, and a big f-word you to all the newspapers and websites that gave this movie rave reviews. A sour, unfunny, unwatchable mess.
Monday, February 27, 2006
DestiNations 2K6
First in the series of Rafil Bonerston-Smith Travel HotSpots, Ave Maria Florida:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2058771,00.html
Bring the kids, and the obedience!
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2058771,00.html
Bring the kids, and the obedience!
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Resident Weevil
A Review of Resident Evil 4
We live in an era in which our desires are identified and answered before we even become aware of them (thanks, marketers!). For instance, I had no idea that I had an intense desire to be terrified and to shoot virtual Spaniards until I played Resident Evil 4. This latest entrée in the series (and the only one I’ve ever played) leaves the Engrish shores of Raccoon City for a vile and nameless Spanish village. The story starts out idiotic and then takes a back seat to the amazing, absorbing gameplay; basically, the President’s suspiciously Japanese-looking daughter has been kidnapped by some manner of Spanish cult (perhaps on her semester abroad in Seville?), and the task of her rescue falls to superagent Leon Kennedy.
Poor Leon! Over the course of this game his fate dooms him to being shot with arrows, burned, caught in bear traps, vomited on by gigantic insects, pummeled by gigantic oafs, shot at with catapults, attacked with chainsaws, and condescended to by a guy named Luis. This is only in about the first two hours, too. As in all Resident Evil games, Leon’s primary duty if to fight zombies, although in this case he is fighting uniquely Spanish zombies (only at this late date in the Playstation 2’s career have we possessed the technology to convincingly animate the Spanish zombie). These zombies initially seem a little off, since they are not dead nor do they wish to eat Leon’s brain; eventually, you figure out that they have been infested by a parasite called the Plaga. These creatures occasionally emerge to wave their hideously deformed and barbed limbs when Leon shoots the villagers heads off.
The game is unremittingly gritty and unpleasant looking (without the white-hot intensity of the Silent Hill series, which is a good thing since it can be played without a double fistful of Xanax). Plenty of surprises keep the tension up, but the game actually manages to instill dread, the acme of a horror series. It’s just as scary to turn a corner and see a flock of parasite-riddled degenerate Spanish monks lurching slowly towards you as it is to hear the plaintive shriek of a Novistador, the game’s resident giant homicidal insects. Resident Evil inaugurated the survival horror genre, and the staples are still here: restricted supplies, save point, and stiff controls. However, someone at Capcom bucked the trend of Japanese software design and decided to emphasize fun. Thus, ammunition and weapons are scarce but sufficient (you never have to ask yourself, “do I really have enough ammunition to shoot this blind, insane gladiator?”), and the controls are slow enough to instill a little bit of anxiety, but responsive and tight nonetheless. You will rarely find yourself blaming Leon’s truck-like turning speed when you get killed, but you will get killed, and frequently, until you get the hang of things. The game has a forgiving continue system, and is generally so fun that replaying most sections is actually pleasant.
The plot and voice acting are pretty weak, and the writers keep doubling up on articles when they use Spanish phrases (“The Los Illuminados” for instance), but the most interesting parts of the story spring from the action itself – all the desperate gun battles and insane booby traps tell a much more interesting tale than Leon’s conversations with his controller or the Castellan, a perverted and diminutive holdover from Spain’s feudal days. I give it nine thumbs up and a hearty recommendation to anyone (I played it on the PS2, although a graphically superior version was released first for the Gamecube, as if anyone who read all the way through the review didn’t know that).
We live in an era in which our desires are identified and answered before we even become aware of them (thanks, marketers!). For instance, I had no idea that I had an intense desire to be terrified and to shoot virtual Spaniards until I played Resident Evil 4. This latest entrée in the series (and the only one I’ve ever played) leaves the Engrish shores of Raccoon City for a vile and nameless Spanish village. The story starts out idiotic and then takes a back seat to the amazing, absorbing gameplay; basically, the President’s suspiciously Japanese-looking daughter has been kidnapped by some manner of Spanish cult (perhaps on her semester abroad in Seville?), and the task of her rescue falls to superagent Leon Kennedy.
Poor Leon! Over the course of this game his fate dooms him to being shot with arrows, burned, caught in bear traps, vomited on by gigantic insects, pummeled by gigantic oafs, shot at with catapults, attacked with chainsaws, and condescended to by a guy named Luis. This is only in about the first two hours, too. As in all Resident Evil games, Leon’s primary duty if to fight zombies, although in this case he is fighting uniquely Spanish zombies (only at this late date in the Playstation 2’s career have we possessed the technology to convincingly animate the Spanish zombie). These zombies initially seem a little off, since they are not dead nor do they wish to eat Leon’s brain; eventually, you figure out that they have been infested by a parasite called the Plaga. These creatures occasionally emerge to wave their hideously deformed and barbed limbs when Leon shoots the villagers heads off.
The game is unremittingly gritty and unpleasant looking (without the white-hot intensity of the Silent Hill series, which is a good thing since it can be played without a double fistful of Xanax). Plenty of surprises keep the tension up, but the game actually manages to instill dread, the acme of a horror series. It’s just as scary to turn a corner and see a flock of parasite-riddled degenerate Spanish monks lurching slowly towards you as it is to hear the plaintive shriek of a Novistador, the game’s resident giant homicidal insects. Resident Evil inaugurated the survival horror genre, and the staples are still here: restricted supplies, save point, and stiff controls. However, someone at Capcom bucked the trend of Japanese software design and decided to emphasize fun. Thus, ammunition and weapons are scarce but sufficient (you never have to ask yourself, “do I really have enough ammunition to shoot this blind, insane gladiator?”), and the controls are slow enough to instill a little bit of anxiety, but responsive and tight nonetheless. You will rarely find yourself blaming Leon’s truck-like turning speed when you get killed, but you will get killed, and frequently, until you get the hang of things. The game has a forgiving continue system, and is generally so fun that replaying most sections is actually pleasant.
The plot and voice acting are pretty weak, and the writers keep doubling up on articles when they use Spanish phrases (“The Los Illuminados” for instance), but the most interesting parts of the story spring from the action itself – all the desperate gun battles and insane booby traps tell a much more interesting tale than Leon’s conversations with his controller or the Castellan, a perverted and diminutive holdover from Spain’s feudal days. I give it nine thumbs up and a hearty recommendation to anyone (I played it on the PS2, although a graphically superior version was released first for the Gamecube, as if anyone who read all the way through the review didn’t know that).
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