For you, a podcast

Noted friend of Yesterday’s Salad, JJ, has started a podcast about Jewish Philosophy.  While there is so far only one podcast up, the show seems to be pretty candid, and from the sounds of it, should have something for everyone (whether they are Jewish, have met a Jewish person, are interested in philosophy, or are one of those free-thinking atheist-types). Well, most everyone.

You should check it out:

http://justcommentary.libsyn.com/

(word has it that it will be available via iTunes soon)

Enough

The Bank Job is easily one of the best heist movies of recent vintage. With nary an electronic gizmo in sight, our would-be bank robbers have to get by on those most timeless of qualities; drills, British accents, and a wee bit of guff are all that’s needed to loot and plunder. The movie is funny, refreshing, and exciting, and Jason Statham shows that he can be a legitimate movie star, and not just an action wind-up-doll. Yet the movie falls into a rather unexpected trap. While it manages to deconstruct the modern heist movie, exposing the genre’s over-reliance on technology and precision timing, as well as its over glamourizing of the robbers, The Bank Job does manage to fall into one rather common cinematic pratfall: the torture scene.

Too many movies make use of torture scenes these days, to the point where moviegoers now have the (often) opposite impulses of wondering if a) the scene goes too far and b) if the scene was necessary at all. Movies have always utilized torture scenes, but recent years have seen them proliferate as a result of the Iraq war and the implied political statement that they entail. As a result, the once harrowing moments have become repetitive and obvious, or excessive and cruel without reason. In this regard, these moments resemble drug use/abuse; while not everyone personally knows what the problem is like, everyone knows what it looks like to play a junkie, and how that role is played. Now, everyone knows the emotional responses of torture. The scene has been cheapened, and the emotional impact of pointed torture scenes blunted. Moviemakers need to find a new visual language for addressing these problems rather than relying on the ease of familiar moments.

Presidents Then and Now

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Barack Obama minister controversy. There are multiple issues here that deserve consideration: 1) can a person belong to a religious community without agreeing with everything the spiritual leader says; 2) should we be held accountable for the views of our leaders; 3) do personal relationships transcend ideology? None of these will be treated here. In fact, the whole premise of the controversy is false; as we all know, Barack Obama is a crypto-muslim. Therefore the views of “his” Christian pastor are meaningless. It’s all an act.

But lost amidst the transformation of the presidential circus from a hootenanny to a hullabaloo is the release of a new The Presidents of the United States of America album. As in 1996, The Presidents decided to have their new album coincide with the US elections. That album, II is an excellent album with an incredible A-Side and brilliantly nonsensical lyrics. The greatest example of this is “Twig” by Chris Ballew and Beck, a perfect storm of lyrical daff (old English root, cf “daffy”). For example:

“You paint a monkey gold, let him loose downtown
You start him with a smile, he’ll come back with a frown”

While I’m not really sure what the lines are supposed to mean in a grand sense, they have an inner narrative logic that makes them work. Why should a monkey be satisfied in gold paint? This idea of inner-narrativity was later perfected by the President’s frontman Chris Ballew in his solo project “The Giraffes.” From, “Ghost of a Bad Friend”:

Check out that bunny with the sick fat tumor
Busy ducking punches and dodgin dirty rumors
Evening magazine shows up at his hole
And catches that bunny with the money that he stole
Can’t find an explanation for the way
He got rich as a rabbit in a day

Here Ballew exploits his inner-narrativity to collapse it. The verse begins in an animal world, a familiar motif in Ballew’s lyrics. As in a fable, the Bunny is endowed with certain human characteristics. It lives in a world where Evening Magazines will show up at his hole. But as soon as the world is constructed, Ballew destablizes it. The rabbit “can’t find an explanation for the way/He got rich as a rabbit in a day.” He’s still just a rabbit, no matter how personified he may be, and rabbits can’t get rich that fast. This, by the way, is similar to one of my favourite lyrical techniques: literalizing metaphors. As in this great Destroyer line, “Tried to summon up the spirits/live on Face the Nation/But the Port Authority’s just taxed incantations”

All this said, the new Presidents of the United States of America album, “These are the Good Times People,” is borderline terrible. I should have known from the over-emphatic nature of the title that these would not, in fact, be good times. I just never expected them to be so bad. Ballew’s still singing songs about animals, but now the songs are only about animals. No lyrical or musical complexity. The last album saw the Presidents successfully move in the direction of a standard, “non-gimmicky” rock group with even its most quirky song, “Some Postman,” being incredibly rational, only with a more interesting premise. The album also showed the band’s improving ability to craft narrative as in, “Shreds of Boa.” “These are the Good Times People” is a regression from the last album, the bands worst—worse than “Pure Frosting” which wasn’t even a real album—and, ironically, in their blatant disregard for the reality of the situation, their failures now mirror those of our current President. I only hope the band does some honest soul searching, rather than removing all dissidents from office and minimizing their voices.

Pull Up Those Britches, Whipper-Snapper, Or Pay The Consequences

Some of you may remember me. I am the eyebiter.

Some of you may remember my droopy pants-ed story.

Some of you, if you be Floridian readers sportin’ a reckless disregard for belts or suspenders, be in trouble.

Now I’m Very Big, I’m A Big Important Man

I had been planning on penning a piece about the new Presidents of the United States of America album before real-life interrupted. A friend of mine died tragically today. All deaths are tragedies, but this one was made all the worse for its randomness. An accident. A truck. He was one of the most welcoming people I’d ever met, and one of the smartest. Grad school is a place that encourages people to isolate themselves and to stay away from others. But that wasn’t my friend. We never talked about a lot of things even though we talked about a lot. I found out tonight that he used to write for The Forward but he never talked about it with me, nor did I ever talk to him about my various writings, no matter how insignificant they might have been, even though I always dreamed of inviting him to contribute to the Salad or to our as yet unprinted print companion, Fortnightly Salad. He was a man of diverse interests, and in tribute I’d like to mention two of them, two poets: Saul Tchernichovsky and They Might Be Giants.

Tchernichovsky was a man of the Hebrew renaissance. In my mind, Tchernichovsky, even more than Bialik, was the Hebrew renaissance. He translated the classics into Hebrew, be they from English (Longfellow) or from Greek (the Iliad). He made everything into Hebrew culture, and made world culture a part of the Hebrew rebirth. He even tried to turn the country around him into Hebrew culture, writing such “Canaanite poems” as “My Astarte.” My friend wrote his thesis about Tchernichovsky and his research cuts infinitely deeper than my curt introductory remarks. For me Tchernichovsky is a street more than a poet, an intersection with Bialik and Allenby, and a place of overpriced cafes. Somehow his words became history, became reality, an unbelievable feat.

For a different view on history, consider They Might Be Giant’s “Purple Toupee.” The song is a brilliant reworking of twentieth-century history, a comic inversion of the inversions in society. For me, the song is incapsulated by the brilliant line, “I shouted out, free the Expo 67!” One 60’s event so quickly turned into another. But for my friend the best line was, “Now I’m very big, I’m a big important man.” I never figured out why. Was it the double assertion? The posturing? Or just the great vocal inflections? I’ll never know, but I’ll always wonder.

Yesterday’s Salad Index 3/15/08

Previous installments of the Yesterday’s Salad Index: 0

Percentage of hits due to ibiteyoureyes’ posts about foot fetishists on Craigslist: %15

Average hits due to ibiteyoureyes’ “hottest cartoon redheads” post: 80

Average of these hits due to searches for “Jessica Rabbit”: 79

Comments asking for the return of L. P. Mandrake: 7

Typos featured in an average Yesterday’s Salad post: 4

Typos featured in an average L.P. Mandrake post: 0.2

Combined years of Yesterday’s Salad graduate school attendance: 6

Total letters contained in said graduate degrees: 11

Letters belonging to Rabbi Haverstam: 6

Barenaked Ladies albums listened to while composing last NWB post: 3

Years since listening to Barenaked Ladies was socially acceptable in the United States: 10

Diatribes written by the Ciceronian: 3

References to Cicero contained in the Ciceronian’s last posting: 67

Cumulative references to Catullus contained in the Ciceronian’s postings: 2

Unedited manuscripts written by Dash: 2

Total references to Portal in NWB postings thus far: 7

Letters of hate mail received after Yahtzee retrospective: 7

Letters of hate mail with correct punctuation, spelling, or coherence: 2

Can you count the Jewish celebrities?

The League of Extraordinary Weblinks

There’s a remarkably good primer on the work of Alan Moore over at the A.V. Club. While I’m not a particularly big fan of Moore’s work, I can respect the work he’s done to direct comics on a more complex (and occasionally introspective) path.  And if you’re not familiar with his work, there’s all the more reason to read up on him before the next disastrous movie adaptation of his work. Given my expectations for the upcoming Zach Snyder version of Watchmen (five dollars says that it somehow incorporates zombies), a work that Terry Gilliam reportedly called “unfilmable,” I might just spend my time watching the most faithful adaptation thus far.

1986: The Year in Pictures

Although literary critics will tell you that thematizing (to make thematic; to organize into themes) is often a bad idea, I’ve nonetheless been trying to thematize the Best Picture and Director nominees of 1986. It’s an odd-assortment of movies, to say the least. Two far-historical pictures (A Room with a View, The Mission), one set in the recent past (Platoon), two contemporary films (Children of a Lesser God, and Hannah and her Siters), and the most famous Lynch film, that (“the word I’m thinking of is”) Dickensian exploration of small-city U.S.A and its’ seedy underbelly. Undoubtedly one of my biggest problems is the 2-3 month break between seeing 5 of the movies and the last one this past weekend, but even without temporal considerations, 1986 remains a thematic challenge. Will one emerge as we evaluate the movies individually?

Wild Card:

Blue Velvet: I said most of what I wanted to say here in my post on Isabella Rosselini’s “Green Porno.” I’ll only add a few words about Dennis Hopper’s performance. Lynch and Hopper managed to create one of cinema’s greatest villains in this movie, on a par with Nicholson’s Joker or McDowell’s Alex DeLarge. But while those characters exist in worlds of pure imagination (to borrow Willy Wonka’s apt phrase), Hopper’s Frank is all the more terrifying because of its realistic tendencies. Though no-one would ever accuse Lynch of playing by the rules of verisimilitude or David Simon level realism, Frank very well could exist. He’s the perfect combination of the mundane and outlandish, vividly realized through Hopper’s divination of his own demons. Also one of cinema’s greatest explorations of the question, nay, theme of voyeurism. A-

Best Picture Nominees:

A Room with a View: I don’t know if I’d ever seen anything take itself so seriously as the beginning of this film, when all the characters discuss the need and meaning of the titular room. The comedy of manners is certainly all the funnier for it. It’s a shame that the movie can’t sustain the tone, succumbing to more pedestrian levity. Like Blue Velvet the movie can be seen as having a theme of exploration: the novelist played by Judi Dench disavows guide books and encourages real exploration, advice that many of the characters pick up. Daniel Day-Lewis’ Cecil is the antithesis of this principle, instead preferring to read books and experience the life of the mind with passive experiences of the real world. I wasn’t too impressed with this movie after the first 30 minutes when its tone reverted to a standard comedy of manners. B

Children of a Lesser God: The great run of William Hurt movies continues! Hurt plays a teacher drifter (an explorer!) who, after teaching speech therapy at all the top schools, has settled in what wikipedia tells me is New England (It was filmed in New Brunswick). I don’t believe that the movie is ever explicit on this point, and I prefer to think of it taking place in the Puget Sound. This movie suffers from the same problems as all 80’s William Hurt extravaganzas: sheer we-get-the-pointness (I apologize for my use of obscure academic jargon). Hurt’s 80’s movies are telegraphed from the get-go with nary a surprise. Still, Marlee Matlin is exceptional and deserving of her best actress award, and Hurt is William Hurt. And then there’s boomerang, what this website calls, “a more energetic gaudy pop tune” (we completely disagree on Children of a Lesser God and The Accidental Tourist, btw) and others have called the best movie musical scene ever. That would be “Singing in the Rain” in Singing in the Rain, but BA-BA-BA-Boomerang does inject some much needed energy into an often elegiac film. B-

Yesterday’s Salad Reviews Yahtzee

Now, for those intrepid enough to have made it past the headline, you may be wondering why you should read yet another Zero Punctuation-inspired bit of videogame journalism.  After all, there are already so many turgid fan-boy pieces on YouTube from which to choose, that it’s a wonder that Yahtzee hasn’t simply taken his own life out of disgust.  So, I offer you this distinction: as the title less-than-subtly implied, this is not simply a review of a Yahtzee game, this is a review of Yahtzee, the person.

While such reviews are, of course, generally under the purview of a select few, through his perennial efforts to make free games and reviews for us to ungratefully snap up like fat children groping at a platter of McVitie’s, Yahtzee has in a sense put a giant target on his back. To wit, it would be wrong not to do such a review.

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First, a short history lesson. Yahtzee hails from England, a quaint country in the North Eastern Atlantic, that in its more benevolent moments, managed to create a world-spanning empire for the sake of spreading received pronunciation.  Without delving too far back, Yahtzee first made his name developing games in Adventure Gaming Studio.  AGS is a free utility for making games in the style of the classic Sierra and LucasArts adventures, developed by Chris Jones, a 67 year-old bricklayer from Gloucester.

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Yahtzee was a pioneer of AGS, and through his early efforts, he helped to demonstrate engine’s potential, started a number of wacky traditions, and introduced a community to his somewhat idiosyncratic brand of humor.  Unfortunately, signs of Yahtzee’s future misanthropy were already afoot.  Flush with success and a dash of enfant terrible, Yahtzee struck off on his own, vowing that he would move on to bigger and better things, free of the insufferable goodwill of the AGS community.

Thankfully, for we of the cheese-it consuming public, Yahtzee was far from done with making adventure games.  And as corollary, here our review begins in earnest.

Yahtzee’s 5 Days a Stranger is one of the classic titles of AGS, featuring a gentleman thief named Trilby trying to break his way out of a haunted mansion and deal with the mildly paranoid reactions of the other people trapped inside the house.  As it turns out, said house became haunted when the owner, Mr. Defoe, locked his deformed child John in a dungeon beneath the stairs, mortally wounded him, and then was subsequently murdered along with his other son by John, who then expired.  Oh, and there’s a creepy little idol that may or may not have been causing all of this.

The puzzles might not have been anything to call home about, and the supporting characters were paper thin, but through his manipulation of classic horror movie leitmotifs, Yahtzee managed to do something tremendous in the offing: he managed to weave together a tight story such that playing a computer game with teensy pixilated characters became quite… scary.  The ending also managed to take a surprising emotional turn, as Trilby and the other survivors found out the terribly disturbing history behind the Defoe Mansion and exorcised John Defoe’s ghost.

Yahtzee followed this up with 7 Days a Skeptic, which takes the dread-laden experience of 5 Days a Stranger into outer space.  In the game, you play Doctor Jonathan Summerset, resident psychiatrist on the charmingly-monikered scout-ship Mephistopheles.  Things begin to go amiss when the ship picks up a derelict cargo container covered in a warning from Trilby, who we learn, has since become a member of a government agency devoted to combating paranormal threats.  Rather than following Trilby’s reasonable warning, someone on the ship finds it perfectly reasonable to hold onto the container, which contains both the slasher get-up from 5 Days a Stranger, and the creepy little idol responsible for the whole mess.  While the game lays on the homages to Event Horizon and the Ridley Scott Alien movie rather thickly, in all, the move to space a clever conceit, and the game demonstrates some admirable progress in the quality of the puzzles, and also, the interactions between the characters actually begin to take on some three-dimensionality.

Unfortunately, the game suffers from quite a bit of required backtracking.  Even though you might think that a scout-ship with only six crew members might be somewhat manageable to get around (this number is soon reduced considerably), the ship happens to be the size of a rather oversized football field.  While spelunking through the ship, being chased by a welding-mask clad specter of evil might sound kind of frightening and exciting, by the umpteenth time you’ve scuttled down the Jeffries tube, searching madly for that obscure inventory item that eludes you, you can’t help but feel a latent bit of Stockholm syndrome coming on for the eight foot-tall nightmare who must feel equally frustrated with trying to find you.

Similarly monotonous is the gore.  While the first sight of the red, red kroovy against the sterile grays of the spaceship is quite disturbing, in no time you’re picking out stray bits of your fellow redshirts from everywhere up to and including the food dispenser (aww… no… not torso for lunch again!), so every further bit of sanguinity feels like it ought to have the robots from Mystery Science Theater giving color commentary in the lower right hand corner of the screen.

Not to be outdone by himself, Yahtzee released Trilby’s Notes, which returned the series to the relative present, and promised to fill us in on Trilby’s curious transition from gentleman thief to well-dressed paranormal investigator.  Finding that the remaining survivors of the tragedy at the Defoe Mansion have, in fact, not survived after all, Trilby sets off to find the mysterious idol with the aid of a cumbersome text parser.

If this sounds like strong premise for a game, it’s because it is. Trilby is kind of the genius stroke of the franchise, and many players craved a chance to finally delve into the character’s psyche and background. In essence, it was a prime opportunity for Yahtzee to prove once and for all that he learned how to wind a good yarn of a story. Seeing as Trilby is in many ways a charming synecdoche of all things British, the idea that he was secretly haunted by a mystical artifact from the British Empire’s slightly less charming days of colonialism seemed like a poignant metaphor for the notion that empire haunts soul of the occupier more than the occupied.

Cleverly, Yahtzee chose to take this opportunity to ditch Trilby for much of the game. Instead, he provides the player an exhaustive history of a reject god from the Cthulu Pantheon named Ch’zo (pronounced Ch’zo, Ki-zo, or for all I care, Kazoo). In fact, given that there is no in game speech, and that Roland Barthes long ago declared the death of the author as an authority on their own work, I hereby declare Kazoo to be the official pronunciation.

So, it seems that many ages ago Kazoo, the dark elemental god of pain, suffering, and quicktime events, turned a druid who had displeased him into a demonic tree.  Subsequent attempts to chop down said tree, make a table out of said tree, a harpsichord, several Ikea bedroom sets, and a crudely hewn idol all resulted in the untimely and painful deaths of those around it, making it the nastiest haunting of a deciduous tree since that naughty tree at the beginning of Evil Dead.  Add in to the mix the fact that the Earthly servant of Kazoo is an evil eight foot tall mime, and you’ve got Trilby facing off against the scariest set of apparitions this side of Marcel Marceau.

This is not to say that the game is terrible by any means.  While the revealed backstory is meandering and disappointing, the way in which Yahtzee presents it demonstrates quite a bit of verve and cinematic flair.  While it might be hard to take some of the plot seriously, there is no question that the execution of many of the flashbacks is a major accomplishment for horror on the small screen. Similarly, Trilby’s haunting visions of death and destruction (which are in fact part of a public service campaign to warn gamers about the ills of caffeinated beverages) are genuinely frightening, though none are quite so frightening as the scene where you have to beat the living shit out of this pleasant girl who fancies Trilby because you’re worried that she will eat your soul (am I the only one disturbed by this?).

With a rapidly growing fan-base in thrall, Yahtzee released 6 Days a Sacrifice, the ultimate chapter in the now unfortunately titled “Kazoo mythos.”  At first glance, the game bears no resemblance or connection to the previous titles, as you play as Theo DeCabe, a chartered accountant, no, sorry, a weak-willed surveyor for the city council. Sent to investigate the headquarters of a local cult to make sure that their construction is up to code, Theo is tossed down an elevator shaft, causing him to suffer some traumatic, yet, surmountable injuries, and forcing him to miss his subsequent meeting at the bureau of information retrieval. Nursed back to health by a mysterious doctor, and a page-six celebrity journalist, Theo finds himself a prisoner in the cult’s underground lab, which is administered by a clone army of evil Trilby’s.

That’s right, you heard me correctly, a clone army of evil Trilby’s.  Yes, far more frightening than any demon unleashed by Kazoo is the thought of Yahtzee laughing maniacally behind his computer, taking a character who he spent years introducing to adventure gaming fans everywhere, and thinking of all of the myriad and exotic ways that he can kill him over and over again (“What was that flying weapon in Krull? Ah, let’s show Trilby getting eviscerated with a glaive…”). Well, that and the gag-inducing sex scene, which is made all the worse for it’s Lifetime-channel-grade hints of sensuality.  Of course, after Theo sleeps with the gossip columnist, she goes batshit, and as logic surely dictates, must be dispatched.

The rest of the story indulges in a tortuous bit of time travel, which admirably rewards players by tying up many of the loose ends from the other games.  Unfortunately, most of this exposition is accomplished by the actions of a mysterious man in red, who fails to give an explanation for his actions, or at least, one that is intelligible to mortals.  Of course, in the hopes of completely spoiling the plot, the man in red turns out to be the protagonist from the second game. This leads to a remarkable scene in which the man in red talks his younger self into becoming the man in red.  Oh, that and the milquetoast building inspector ends up becoming the ultimate personification of evil in the universe.  But you saw that coming from the outset, didn’t you, you clever devil, you.

Now, for all of this slogging on Yahtzee’s Kazoo games, the following disclaimer must be added: despite the fact that they are at times cryptic and at other times infuriating, all of them are quite a bit of fun to play, and for that matter, they remain totally and completely free. Not only that, but Yahtzee went ahead and listened to the cries of fan-boys everywhere, releasing The Art of Theft, a remarkably easy to play, hard to master, game that features some of the best pc platforming since Conrad Hart rotoscoped his way across the galaxy.  It even has a bonus game that is only available to the lion-eating elite of gameplayers, such to better separate the real men from the chaff. What’s more is that it’s chock full of the sweet, sweet Trilby that the fan-boys have demanded since 5 Days a Stranger.

Finally, Yahtzee’s Zero Punctuation reviews need no introduction, seeing as they’ve become so popular that YouTube is already chock full of imitators, kind of like the one you’re reading right now.  While some might be ready to label Yahtzee a mean bastard for his lack of political correctness, his alternating bouts of homophobia and homophilia, and his ready profanity, they’d be absolutely right.  But for all of the lexical abuse to which he’s subjected gamers and the games they play, the man’s got ready wit and a keen eye for his subject matter.  So in the final balance, when you’re faced with dropping your last fifty dollars on a game, and can no longer count on so-called “respectable” game journalists to give you the straight story (*cough* Gamespot *cough*), he’s exactly the asshole you need.

So, there you have it, Yahtzee’s official score as a human being. Oh, and if you were reading to the end in the hope of seeing a review of Adventures in the  Galaxy of Fantabulous Wonderment, I’m afraid you’re bound to be disappointed.