VIDEO GAMES - Wii/SNES - Chrono Trigger

Score: 10.0

The score really sums it up. If you haven't played this game before, and you own a Wii, you must pay, download, and play this. Right the fuck now.

If you're one of those gamers who only plays Call of Duty and Halo. I don't give a shit. If you think Role Playing Games are for nerds and geeks exclusively. I don't give a fuck. If the thought of reading speech bubbles makes you gag. You make me gag. And I don't give a fucking shit. Download this game, right now, and set aside about ten hours. That's all it will take. At least for the first play through. The thirty or so next play throughs (about what it takes to get at least a few characters to Level 99) will entirely devour your life, but they're optional. The first one will expose you to everything you need to know to understand the justification for the perfect score.

After playing video games for the better part of my now twenty six years of existence, this game is still (having come out only ten years into that existence) the best gaming experience I have ever had. I've played games that might have slightly more visual and artistic merit (Shadow of Colossus comes to mind). I've played games that had more addictive game mechanics (can anything beat the simplicity and joy of a Starcraft or X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter?). I've played games with amazing storytelling and characters (GTA IV, Metal Gears, etc. etc.). But no game, not one, has combined all these elements as smoothly and effortlessly as this masterpiece from Squaresoft did in 1995.

I won't go into the history of the game or its design, because that's what the link in the title to Wikipedia is for. My single goal here is to instill in anyone dumb enough to be reading at this point, how absolutely life-inspiring this game is, and how magically it weaves its way into your memory.

The best way I can explain the overawing awesomeness of this game is through personal anecdote. Or rather, the sheer volume of them. Anyone I have ever talked to who has played this game, has loved it. People I didn't even know would ever pick up an RPG, have said that it's one of the most amazing games they've ever played. People who aren't even gamers. Parents. Little kids. Black. White. It doesn't matter. Humanity loves this game. I've seen a few forum posts in places like IGN and Gamespot from supposed haters, but these people are not real. They are being contrary for the sake of wanting to stand out in a sea of overwhelming support. The few people who appear to have something bordering on valid criticisms are often talking about the poorly done up Playstation version (which I also own) which butchered the experience with long loading times, poor music translation, and, well, horrible loading times. The original Super Nintendo version available now in the US, EU, and Japan Wii shop channels, is faultless.

I would attempt to pick out one part that stands above the rest (if I were forced to, it would be the story, which pulls you in from the start of the first playthrough, and does so again every time you click "New Game+"), but that would be useless. Every part of this game merges into the next. The music reflects the visual style on the screen. The graphics and animations flow as if your controller were connected directly to the characters. The combat system is simplistic, dynamic, complicated, easy and challenging all at once, as the difficulty of the battle before you (based on the story) dictates. The story is sweeping and epic, yet driven at moments by characters you will never forget. Each character has their own theme song that supremely sums up the entirety of that character. Talking about the game's virtues is cyclical and, ultimately, redundant. Words don't do this game justice. You have to play it.

So do it. Take the ten hours. It costs eight dollars. Really. Eight dollars. For ten hours of your life you'll want to relive again and again. I am supremely jealous of anyone I might ever convince to play this for the first time. It's been so long I can barely remember that addictive joy. Just do me a favour, drop me a line when you finish it, and tell me how much you loved it. I'll add it to my list of anecdotes.

BOOKS - Rivka Galchen - Atmospheric Disturbances

Score: 7.6

First, a bit of a prelude (because those are always fun, right?). I generally prefer to provide feedback on novelists who, you know, are still alive, directly. With the exceptions of bazillion-selling Oprah's book-club authors like Franzen or Morrison, it's surprisingly easy to get direct access to even fairly successful authors and academics. I've dropped lines to Luis Rodriguez for his excellent zeitgeist of latino LA short story collection The Republic of East LA, and more recently Charles Bock, for his even more excellent zeitgeist of modern Las Vegas, Beautiful Children, among a few others over the years (these two stand out for their quality). The market for literary fiction books is generally small enough that fan-author connections are still possible, unlike most other medias. Yet some authors, including Ms. Galchen here, for whatever reason (I imagine in her case, a few too many email addresses to keep track of) don't have a big flaming "Contact Me!" button on their websites.

The point of this maligned prologue? Simply that this review might be a little harsh. When I tend to contact these still-living authors, I essentially write to them an abbreviated version of the review that would otherwise appear here. Except it's nicer. Because, I mean, you're saying it right to their faces. The tone definitely moves from criticism of skill to criticism of work, which is probably fairer (at least less Ad Hominem) and in many cases more indicative of where fault actually lies (lays? Yes, I'm a critic who never took the time to learn that freaking rule. I'm going with lies). So if you bump into Ms. Galchen on the street somewhere and she complains to you about this one jackass of an internet critic who put down her book that's won numerous awards, let her know it's nothing personal. Just put a "Contact Me!" button on your site.

Now onto the book. Ms. Galchen has crafted quite an interesting collection of words. I purposely don't say "story", because, like many pieces of literary fiction, plot is not the primary concern in this novel. It's quite simplistic, and relatively little actually happens within the course of the book. Don't let that put you off however, the book is a fantastic read. While it may be read as part mystery or thriller (and it does contain elements of those genres), it's not a dedicated page turner a la Dan Brown. Twists and turns come suddenly and sparingly, and just often enough to keep you going. The short chapters (none longer than about seven pages or so, many coming in at just two pages) also aid in making the story manageable as well as an excellent bus-ride-home read.

The true strength of Atmospheric Disturbances though, is the unparalleled access the reader is given to the narrator and protagonist, Leo Liebenstein. Specifically to the world he gradually drapes over the reader, pulling them into his highly personalized, highly developed, and highly addictive psychosis. If you've ever wondered just how insanely logical and well reasoned a worldview separated from the consensus worldview (ie. a crazy person's take on the world) can be, read this book. It is a masterful dive into mental illness and serves as the source for those same mystery/thriller aspects of the novel, as the "mystery" is concocted entirely in Leo's mind. The strength of this immersion is also furthered by the nature of Leo's work. As a psychiatrist well-versed in the vocabulary of the mental health community, the narrator's imaginary search for truth is littered with transference, Oedipus complexes, psychiatrist vs. analyst bickering, and numerous other psycho-babble I probably didn't even pick up on. It's a ridiculously immersive ride from New York to Argentina, and most of that immersion stems from the strong writing that Galchen exhibits via her main character.


But it's not just the prose itself that showcase Galchen's obvious talents. Essentially a story of two characters, narrator Leo and his wife Rema, the dedication shown to Rema's character is almost as evident as with Leo. As an American immigrant, Rema's English is prone to certain playful rearrangements of idioms and common phrases, and Leo finds himself falling prey to the use of them the more time he spends with her. As a reader, too, you are gradually exposed, unannounced, to these slightly off phrases as they work their way into Leo's own writing. It's a beautiful and very delicate touch that's applied liberally and accurately throughout the book, as you slowly realize just how much Rema has infused herself into Leo's person - the strongest mark of a real relationship I can think of. All the other small details of her character, like the way she drinks her tea and her indifference towards canines, are dutifully brought out as appropriate, making her in every way except direct voice an equal in Leo's frantic journey. 


The crux of that journey lies in Galchen's combination of her own father's science, meteorology, with the telling of Leo and Rema's relationship. The relationship = weather metaphor infests every corner of the novel, as Leo continually seeks to understand the present and future states of his love life by relating them to the unpredictable nature of weather. If Leo's voice is the centre of the story and Rema the planet that orbits tightly, that central metaphor is the gravity pulling them together then swinging them apart. Mixed in liberally with a dose of Pynchon-esque postmodernity, weather constitutes both the driving force behind many of the plot twists, and the fixation of Leo's increasingly fractured mind.


Perhaps the most daring technique Ms. Galchen used in the course of the novel though, was the weaving of autobiography into the text. The meteorologist who provides Leo with his background information is none other than Tzvi Gal-Chen, the author's own father, who died in the mid 1990's. Tzvi becomes one of the many characters drawn into Leo's disturbed web of meaning, and his research into doppler effects and current state measurement drives Leo towards his many otherwise incoherent actions. While the purpose of including Tzvi as a central character is not immediately clear, there is a sense of autobiography in this. Ms. Galchen, on top of being one of the New Yorker's 20 best writers under 40, is also a Mount Sinai medical school graduate who, like her protagonist Leo, specialized in psychiatry (don't you just love over-achievers?). Though I couldn't determine an exact purpose for all these autobiographical clues being brought together, I did extract a sense that Leo, by diving into Tzvi's research, was in some respect standing in for Ms. Galchen, trying to grow closer to her father, gradually moving away from an ability to diagnose the mentally ill, and submersing into meteorology, which, in this novel, is really a stand-in for matters of the heart.


It is a ballsy maneuver, and one which, short of a complete re-read of the novel, would require much more analysis than I can provide here. Some, including the original New Yorker review, were especially taken with this aspect of the novel. I found it neither wasteful nor inspired. For me, it was simply there. Perhaps I read too little into it, or missed some of the clues that were out there, waiting to be read, but ultimately I didn't feel strongly about it.

Now usually, as I get near the end of a book and begin to think of what would go into a review of it, the one question I always pose is, "Who did the author write this book for?" In my opinion, knowing whether you are the designed reader can influence your understanding of any work. Usually the answer is fairly clear, but this time I had a difficult time. It is a little too small in scale and character to appeal to fans of pulp, too smart and apolitical to appeal to most modern literary fiction sensibilities, and not really autobiographical enough to appeal to fans of that genre. I was truly stumped. Eventually I found an answer on the back of the hardcover copy I'd taken out from my local library. All three sets of praise plastered on the back were from other writers. And truly as an aspiring (read: unpublished) writer myself, this book most appealed to that aspect of myself. The skill, techniques, and dedication to truly immerse oneself into a head that fucked up, to describe with such dedication and detail the intricacies of a relationship as fleshed out as Leo and Rema's, well, that's the kind of writing that other writers salivate over. But as a reader, it still left me unfulfilled.

As a reader I wanted the physical journey to matter a bit more. As interesting as the descent into a worldview disparate from that of the majority consensus was, a recovery from that view and back into the real would have been truly spellbinding. I wanted sanity to be laced somewhere in Leo's journey, because otherwise all it was was essentially one giant talk therapy session. Again, the intended ambiguity of Leo's insane voice means that maybe that was the whole point, that maybe, like the weather, setting an "end point" at which resolution is achieved, is an unrealistic expectation. If the central metaphor of relationships = meteorology is the whole point, then how is weather supposed to heal? When does weather ever really make sense? At what point does trying to extract meaning out of chaos become useless?

Even as I write it, I can't help but think that a journey out of psychosis sounds horribly Hollywood, horribly blase and predictable. But I still want it. I want Rema to pull Leo out of his mindset in a passionate display of the power of love. That would be the epitome of Hollywood, the epitome of Hemingway and his love for an affirmation of the positive spirit of man. I don't want to get into a whole discussion of the artistic merit of pulling a Hollywood and displaying the world (and in this case, one aspect - mental illness) as we want it to be, versus displaying it as it really is (I doubt a mental disorder as powerful as what affects Leo is likely something someone recovers from easily, if ever fully). This is not the place for such a discussion. All I know is that the minute after putting this book down, all I could think of was the potential it had for illuminating not just the depths of self-imposed mental loss, but the joys associated with overcoming that same loss. Even just pulling a quick Catcher in the Rye and having the novel itself be Leo's writing therapy for his psychoanalyst would have been a nice touch. And really, given the excess of mental health practitioners in this novel, the most unrealistic thing I can imagine is that Leo would fail to undergo treatment of some sort. 

And really, that was what upset me the most about this novel. The first twenty or so pages had me so deeply enthralled with the possibilities that Galchen's eventual path of postmodern lack of meaning out of the whole thing was more than a little disappointing. All the pieces were in place, the entire autobiographical aspect prepared for insertion into the midst of an emotional climax. Instead, it merely fizzles. Still, the writing is so strong, and Galchen's talent so obvious, I couldn't help but enjoy the book. Loving it, as the book makes clear, would have required just the right atmospheric confluences, and the weather just wasn't right.

GEAR - Kobo WiFi E-Reader

Score: 6.1 (UPDATED July 20, 2011 - See Below)

First, I have to say to the person who bought me this: it is still the single greatest gift I have ever received. No low score can take away from the heartfelt nature of this gift, or the countless hours I have already spent using its delightfully delightful services.

Yes, it was my wife who bought me this.

In all fairness, I did ask for it for basically six months before this most recent Christmas, when I, like a child, savagely ripping off layers of wrapping paper, feasted my eyes upon the one gift I'd wanted above everything else, and was at one with the world, the universe, and the little poverty stricken orphan Timothy Cratchit. It was the tickle-me-elmo beanie baby wrapped in some other slightly more obscure holiday madness gift with a quaint electric sheen. And it was mine. My heart did flips. I took all my Chapters gift cards I received that same day, and splurged on beginning my electronic book collection. Now, I kind of wish I'd waited.

Which is not to say that the Kobo e-reader is in any way bad. It's not, really. I mean, a little bit. Ok, it's kind of bad. When asked to do nothing but let you read and slowly turn from one page to the next, it performs fine. That was the original reason I asked for it: to read. I didn't want an iPad or any other tablet, I wanted an e-reader, with e-ink. This is because my eyes, which are already seared consistently enough by working at a desk all day, simply could not handle arriving home and having to deal with another glaring LCD screen when all they wanted was some simple, passive, black on white text. Is that too much to ask?

Prior to this Christmas season, the answer had always been "yes". Amazon's Kindle, which has revolutionized ebooks, was still at a price point that was simply too high to justify. Sure, ebooks are a bit cheaper, but I'd have to amass an entire library to make up the price difference (actually it was only about 50-75 books, but still), and the technology still had to prove itself. But along came Kobo, and just in time for Christmas, along came it's $139 price point. Just dear enough to justify a great Christmas present, or so I told my wife. Truth be told, Amazon had come very near to matching that price with their cheaper WiFi only Kindle, but two things directed me to direct my wife to getting the Kobo over the Kindle. #1: Amazon's proprietary DRM ebook format annoyed the hell out of both the library user and open-source geek in me (user only, don't worry), and #2: As weird as it sounds, I wanted to support Kobo, a Canadian company, because I just couldn't bear the sight of my big box book retailer getting shut down by, you know, that other big box American retailer. A flurry of ill-dispensed patriotism sold me on the Kobo.

Selling my wife was a bit harder. Let's just say she's a book purist. It's paper or nothing for her. She rejects ebooks with the veracity of a dog lover thrust into a nest of adorable, cheezeburger has'ing kittens. It's for this reason that I never expected she would actually get it for me, and the same reason I was so child-like upon opening said gift.

My first week of ownership was (to begin a metaphor whose final path I'm not sure I want to know) the honeymoon period. I downloaded and started reading Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, and was loving every bit of it. The readability is excellent, the weight and ergonomics of the device itself are great, the buttons respond well and are laid out nicely, the page-turning speed (the one spec I'd actually cared about deeply) was more than adequate, and not having to earmark my current page (the e-reader does bookmark whatever page you're currently on when you switch it off) was the best thing since sliced bread toasted with sliced cheese. I read that first novel in about a week and a half, and it was then that I noticed my e-readers fatal flaw.

That flaw is battery life. Now, my understanding of e-ink, and one of the great advantages it possesses over LCD screened devices, is that the display itself only uses power when the page is being turned, ie. when the pixels are actually doing some changing around. E-readers, then, are supposedly amazingly power efficient. So efficient, in fact, that they never have to turn off. One of the weirdest things I experienced when I first opened it was that it simply doesn't turn off. You hit the power button and the only change noticeable is that the cover of whatever book you're currently reading replaces whatever else was on the screen. And it stays there. Forever. Or, and this is much more likely, until the battery runs out.

UPDATE (July 20, 2011): I am stupid. This section is not entirely accurate. There are two modes for turning off the Kobo. The first is what I've described above, and is referred to as Sleep mode. The "Powered Off" mode is achieved by holding down the power button longer, and actually stops all power drain. The only difference in view is the wording itself at the top though. It is likely I was sometimes setting it to sleep mode, and sometimes powering it off, and was just too dumb to notice the difference. Because of this inconsistency, I am scoring the Kobo a full point higher. Not so much because I'm sure it will perform better, but because when you're this dumb, you've got to give out freebies as recompense.

See, the device evidently does continue to use power at all times. The engineers who designed the thing obviously figured that the extra power required to boot the OS up and down would be far more damaging to battery life than the steady draw it currently employees. That may be true in situations when people are turning it on and off every hour. But for anyone like me who reads in long intervals and then takes a week off, it's incredibly annoying, because every time I went to go read, the battery was dead.

When the honeymoon started to wrap up, I plugged it in for my first charge, figuring the battery would get better. It only got worse. A full charge lasts about four days of non-reading time. Not fourteen. Not even close. Mix in some reading, say an hour a day, and suddenly it's three days. My previous LG cell phone that I used and left on all day and night, lasted two weeks on a charge, and had an LCD screen. It probably even had the same wattage battery (this was a very slim LG phone). There is a possibility that the one I received was a lemon, and that most other Kobo owners don't have to deal with this problem. The simple reality is it doesn't matter - I'm not a professional reviewer who gets to run through samples until I find one that the company thinks is representative of its standard quality - I get what I get. And what I got is poor design at some stage, whether it's the actual electrical, the other hardware, the firmware, software, something, somewhere, is crap. There was no nice, slow descent into happy married life, it was instant fights about kids, money, and sex (the unholy triumvirate/trinity/triad of unhappy marriage) all at once.

Still, like a man desperate for kids, money, and sex, I stuck through it. I figured we could work it out. I reasoned with myself that yes, it wasn't perfect, but damnit, I was in this for the long haul. I bought more books. I dove into Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, which is not a short book, and told myself that I would have had to charge the hard cover version just as frequently as I did the ebook. In short, I began to lie to myself.

After the death knell that was the faked battery life, all the other issues, all the little blemishes and behavioural quirks that, in a normal marriage, you can deal with, started to come out of the wood-work; in this one they were just extra nails in the coffin that our relationship was born into. The menus are overly simplistic and don't allow for ease of picking through pages or hunting for a specific quote. The absence of a keyboard makes even basic activities involving, you know, words, hard. The lack of real page numbers means I can never retain an exact spot. Even the fake page numbers that are provided for each chapter (see my review of Steinbeck for examples) change as soon as you shift the size of the font. On top of everything, my e-reader was inconstant. The Kobo application that's required to buy books and sync them with the reader crashes and hangs occasionally, even mid-purchase. The application's bookstore, while pretty, isn't easy to navigate. The bookstore on the e-reader itself? Fuggadowbdit. Until the most recent firmware update, it was impossible to read while the reader was plugged in to charge, which, as I've mentioned, was every time I was in the mood to read. The USB cord that came with it is too damn short. The list goes on. Again, these are small travesties that get in the way of truly enjoying the device. Under normal circumstances, I could look the other way, but by this time, I'm pissed. I don't want to look the other way. I want to revel in my righteous indignation, and let loose a torrent of hellfire upon the object of my affection/affectation.

These issues I've pointed out thus far are all the reader's problems. They're things that Kobo could control. I have other issues, but these are really just mine.

The biggest is the lack of ebook support from libraries. This, I have to admit, should have been expected. Ebooks just achieved popularity. There's almost no way an industry as big as the publishing one would have a good idea of how to lease out ebooks to libraries, and still make money. The technology is still too young, and the economics of it are still being sorted out. I don't know why, but I expected to be able to log in to my local library and take out a dozen new releases all at once, keep them on my ereader until I'm done, and then return them somehow. It's not there. The groundwork is being laid, but at least where I live, the selection of ebooks are so limited as to be a joke.

My second self-inflicted problem is that Kobo is, I've heard, rather poor for supporting independent publishers and self-publishers. Amazon, meanwhile, has opened up the Kindle, and now anyone can write a book, publish it on Amazon for 99 cents (or more likely 9.99, for reasons of incentivization), and get it out to millions who have bought a Kindle, without ever killing a tree. No such luck with Kobo. I'm not sure if this will change in the future, but right now, it's not the greatest for the small voices who are struggling to be heard. You know, like this guy.

So how does this rather technocentric love story end? Not sure yet. I still have my Kobo, and I still use it for what I wanted it for: reading. But that's it. I find it hard to use as a replacement for a book - the tactile sensation, the ease of use, all the small things that go to make a reading experience pleasant. My Kobo has put everything back in perspective. Whereas before I was so happy to save two dollars when buying an ebook version over a paperback, or ten to fifteen for a hardcover like Freedom, I've since begun moving back to buying physical copies if the price is within a decent range of the ebook (usually about five dollars more). Sure, I've lost the portability, convenience, and good green feelings of owning my entire collection in one little device. But I don't have to charge my paperbacks, and I don't mind bending over the top corners so much anymore. In the long run though, I'm sold. The technology works, it just needs a bit of kneading to make it work well. Whether that's a Kobo in the future, or a Kindle, I'm not sure. But it will be something. I'm in it for the long haul.

NON-REVIEW - Blog Update

Just a quick note that I've made some small updates to the blog in terms of style and focus. More on books and other storytelling media, less on other mediums including music and automotive. They may pop up still from time to time, but yeah, just wanted to narrow the focus a bit. So... book background it is!

Also, I hope to keep the posts streaming a bit more regularly than they've been trickling in for say... the past three years. We'll see how that works though. In the meantime... books! Oh, and Louis CK. Cuz the guy is a genius.

BOOKS - John Steinbeck - Travels With Charley: In Search of America

Score: 6.9
Version: Kobo Provided Penguin E-Book Edition

This review will be relatively short, in large part because I honestly can't remember enough of the book to feel I can really dive into it.

I read Travels with Charley over about three months, during which I took numerous breaks, got fed up with it, and generally didn't pay it the kind of attention a really good review deserves. Still, after reaching the end of it, I couldn't help but think "This would make a great book to review!" The reason for that? Well, it's an interesting book, if nothing else.

Pegged as non-fiction, but probably fitting a bit more into one of the creative non-fiction veins of memoir or personal essay, it is the account of John Steinbeck (you know, of Grapes of Wrath fame) and his drive around the United States of America in the year of 1960, with a poodle named Charley in the passenger seat. Beginning in the northeast, where he lived, Steinbeck drove through the midwest, across the northern plains to Seattle, and then down the coast of California, and finally, across Texas and into the South. Along his way he met some interesting characters, had a few run-ins with law enforcement and racists, and generally connected with a large swath of America of that time period.

But ultimately it's not the people of America that he best documented in this book. While there are a few memorable characters (and I do mean characters - according to Wikipedia large portions of the book are not consistent with Steinbeck's actual movements that year), his true successes in building this book are two fold: weaving his own personal history with that of the people and landscapes he comes across, and providing a very accurate portrait of the nation of America in the time period in which he travelled.

Having never read any Steinbeck before (no, not even The Grapes of Wrath), I had no pre-existing knowledge of the author. No sense of what style to expect, or any knowledge of his personal life beforehand. With this book, I feel I knew the man better than authors who I've read six or seven times. He deftly mixes his previous experiences with a given locale with analyses of their (then) current situation. In bringing out previous stories and experiences about a place like Chicago, he makes the place come alive while simultaneously breathing a history into it as well. The best examples of this are his stories about Seattle, the Bay area of California, where he grew up, and Texas, where he has a number of in-laws and friends. He reviles, revisits, and reabsorbs each respectively, and by the end you get a sense of a writer and observer who very keenly understood the temporal nature of what he was describing. Steinbeck, by this time an older man with some health problems, gives the reader a glimpse (albeit a contrived, and if critics cited on Wikipedia are to be believed, a bit of a false one) into the life and times of a revered American writer.

The true strength of the book, however, is in building the rough outlines of the nation that was America in 1960. I use the term "nation" very specifically, because as Steinbeck admits, there is no way to try and grasp a representative of every walk of life in one book. Instead, what he leaves you with is an imagined sense of the lives the vast majority of people in America were living at that time. It's impossible to forget, for example, his description of trailer parks and mobile homes, before the powerful stigmas of trailer trash and extreme poverty were attached to those homes. To Steinbeck, in 1960, they're a fabulous new invention that's sprouting up all over the country and populated by hard working, resourceful people who don't want to live in crowded cities or the new stretches of suburbs. It's a jarring understanding of mobile homes given the way they are constantly portrayed in media in the here and now, and his interpretation of these new living devices sticks with you. Similarly his mentions of polluted air, growing suburbs, wide open but soulless interstates, and probably most thoroughly his description of Texas, gives the reader an overview of America. Nothing more, nothing less, just a solid, complete overview of the imagined community that he builds in his mind and expresses on the page.

To sum up this point, near the end of the book, Steinbeck himself says, "When I laid the ground plan of my journey, there were definite questions to which I wanted matching answers. It didn't seem to me that they were impossible questions. I suppose they could all be lumped into the single question: 'What are Americans like today?'" (34 of 107 of Part 4 - Ebook, no page numbers for me!) At first he considers his quest to discover a suitable answer a failure, until he reflects and says, "Americans as I saw them and talked to them were indeed individuals, each one different from the others, but gradually I began to feel that the Americans exist, that they really do have generalized characteristics regardless of their states, their social and financial status, their education, their religious and their political convictions." (36 of 107 of Part 4, emphasis mine) This sense of the American people though, was "increasingly paradoxical" (36 of 107), and really, the sentence I have just quoted is as close as he ever gets to describing what he finds. Yet that's not really a failing, because what he is counting on the reader to do is wretch their own sense of these things out of the previous pages, and come up with their own sense of Americans as a people, and hence, of the place as a modern nation. It's a neat little trick, and it works well enough - you feel that he's provided you with the information, all that's left is for you to pull out the meaning behind it.

Sadly though, the book has many failings as well. For all Steinbeck's accessible style and everyman wit, some large portions of the book read very dryly. The descriptions of landscapes are likely the worst, as are some of the earlier sections about his time in New York. Even the dialogue, which I understand was once one of his strengths, doesn't read all that great. Perhaps his greatest issue though, is that he doesn't devote time to the one part of his travels (the South) that would actually warrant a full, thorough investigation of the issues. What could have been a scathing indictment against racial segregation (a la his indictment against the rich in the Grapes of Wrath) falls flat and impotent, much like Steinbeck's own, lone confrontation with a racist southerner at the end of the book. Essentially he took what could have been the most interesting quarter of the book (roughly equal with its geographic weight in the nation), and turned it into a fifty page (e-pages, that is) footnote. Maybe he was trying to say that racial conflict isn't a problem that defines America, but considering that's really the only thing he talks about at all concerning the South, it's a shame he didn't go further. In fact, he seems to purposely ignore the chance to go into further detail. He claims at the end that he remembers with perfect clarity everything on his trip up to Virginia, but his only anecdotes set in the South stop somewhere in Louisiana. It's a shame too, because the conversations he does have (with a racist and an equalist white, and with a thoroughly race-shamed black person and a young, hopeful black), are easily the best in the book. They get to the core of the whole, "What are Americans today?" question better than any other portion of the book. Yet, tellingly, they are expressed after he's posed that same question to his readers. It's almost as if the South isn't what he would consider part of America. It's historically apropos then that the South he envisioned did largely disappear in the fifty years since he wrote this book. It turned out not to be a huge part of America after all.

Another huge problems facing Steinbeck in this book, and one all travel writers essentially deal with, is that it's near impossible to get a real good sense of characters aside from the narrator. There can be no deep interplay between multiple characters leading towards a climax, as in a novel or even short story. By its very nature, everything is eternally in passing, in for a few moments and then gone again. It's simply not conducive to building a character. Without characters, there is no real action. Without action there is no conflict. And without conflict there is little to pull a reader in.

In lieu of a pantheon of fleshed out, detailed characters, the reader really has to rely on the narrator's voice to walk them through everything that is going on, to pull meaning and emotion out of the transitory events and make something for the reader to hold on to. The points where Steinbeck does this well are those outlined above, and they do a great job of engrossing the reader. Everything else though, from the descriptions of the landscapes to the issues with Charley, don't hold up nearly as well. In the end you get a good sense of what this book could have been - an amazing memoir about a man who had his finger on the pulse of a nation for most of his life. But when the best thing a book gives you is the possibility for another book entirely, it's simply not that good.

BOOKS - Kim Echlin: The Disappeared

Score: 8.3

No time for a lengthy, detailed review (I don't even have the book on hand for quotation purposes), so this review will be a mere outline of one, which, given the book, I don't think will be too big of a problem. This is a novel which outlines many things in a tracing that seems small in comparison to the politics at work. And that sparseness contributes greatly to the book's success.

Shortlisted for the 2009 Giller Prize, the novel tells the story of a young Montreal woman who falls in love with a Cambodian immigrant while his country is mired in the disastrous rule of the Khmer Rouge. Upon the border to Cambodia being lifted, he returns to his home, and the two go through a period of separation. However the narrator remains fixed upon her love, and before long, heads off to follow him. It's there that the story truly begins.

Before it's over, lives are made and lost, and though only one character is ever developed to its fullest (the narrator), a small but strong cast of supporters helps to drive this tale of loss. The less said about the plot itself, the better - the novel is brief enough to risk spoiling almost everything in more than a paragraph of explanation.Yet without going into detail, I'd still like to discuss the qualities of the plot.

Overall, it's crafted well. The focus is always on the central character - her voice dominates the narrative, and it's truly only her story that's ever told in any detail. The other characters' lives, including her lover's, are more on the periphery. Which brings me to my major complaint. Though the writing takes the form of a story being told to the lover years after the events of the novel (it's full of "You did this, you did that, we fell in love" etc.), the narrator comes across as border-line narcissistic. She displays a patent disregard for her friends' lives and wellbeing at one point near the end, and all throughout, she never succeeds in producing (for the reader, mind you) any sort of empathy with her lover. Everything in the book is about her, how these things affect her, drive her to do as she does. Granted, it's her story, but it left me wanting more from these other characters, who are overwhelmingly possessing of more interesting stories. The few glimpses you get are merely those outlines I mentioned - defining moments in their lives, not the type of true depth you're hoping they will ultimately display. The lover comes close in some ways, but even some parts of him fade from perspective as the book moves on.

The end result is a story that feels as though it is but another white perspective into a world of the Other. The narrator's misguided ideas and hopes for an overwhelming human dignity (along the lines of a UN declaration of human rights, which, let's face it, is unenforceable, and much of the world does not actually agree with it any significant way) make her come off as just another white woman full of sorrow for the atrocities of the third world, without any true comprehension of the fundamental human and inhuman forces at work underneath. By the end I was left with but an impression, a border of the true human sacrifice that is at the heart of the political realm discussed. This isn't a bad thing, in fact I think given the book's brevity, dealing with the subject matter as she has (one voice, one rather strict, if sympathetic worldview), Kim Echlin did the subject matter proud. She did not write it to discuss the atrocities of the Cambodian genocides, she is merely taking on one woman's story and her own personal connection to those atrocities. It's not holistic, and it's not what I would call "fair", but it's real in its own way.

The writing itself is stellar. Echlin has a knack for simile and metaphor, pulling them out when least expected, and drawing your mind in places you weren't expecting, but are simply thrilled to go. There's nary a cliche in the book (ok, I might have read one, and I said "aha", only to realize the book was all but finished), and her use of short sentences, poetic measure in some passages, and the occasional use of Khmer keep the pace just right. There's never a bad or awkward moment linguistically, and the short, succinct chapters have the effect of mimicking a murder-mystery: you're always on the hook for something good around the corner. The writing is probably more deserving of something around a nine.

So overall, though I have a few complaints - they're mostly personal, not stylistic, and nothing I can fault her too badly for. The book is deserving of its praise.

BOOKS: The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman

Score: 8.6
Version: 3.0 (Published 2007 - Douglas & McIntyre here in Canada)

So I didn't really know crap about free trade, globalization, economics, or business entrepreneurship three years ago when I started this blog. I was an Arts grad who had no idea what I'd be doing for a living, and enjoyed giving his opinion on things. I was also fresh out of an education system that was gradually migrating away from a worldview still centered around the cold war. Since that point changes have been made. My wife, who is currently a student teacher, is instructing grade tens from a textbook called Perspectives on Globalization, and what was once (when I was growing up) a hazy and uncertain future for the globe that was no longer based on two competing super-powers but immaterial concepts like free trade and the interwebs, has been given grounding. Globalization is very real now, and ignorance of it is not really acceptable anymore.

Part of the credit for the mainstreaming of this reality is due to this very book. The World is Flat is Thomas Friedman's opus to the causes, shapes, and outcomes of a world that has migrated from cold wars to cola wars and format wars. In it he expands upon the central metaphor of a "flat" world. By this he is referring to the idea that the world of business, and consequently power, is "flattening out", from a vertically-driven world where decisions, supply-chains, and world trade rested in the power of a few at the top of the chain, and was then spoon-fed down and up the chain as those at the top decided. No more. Because of what he describes as the "ten forces that flattened the world" (each described in detail in a mini-chapter), the balance of power and decision making has fundamentally shifted, from patriarchal to collaborative and from vertical to horizontal - hence the "flat" world. While, like all great economic shifts, technology is the central enabler in this shift, much of the flattening process was made possible by free trade agreements and the opening of previously communist economies to capitalistic endeavour. The end result is a world where competition is no longer between nations or companies, but between billions of individuals competing against one another for work that is, with less and less frequency, limited by location to the extent it was in the vertical, closed off world.

I won't go into too much detail concerning Friedman's analysis - that's best left for the book itself. Instead, I will comment more on the quality of that analysis. In a short phrase, it's mostly good. You're not going to get amazingly in-depth, detailed data on any one topic, he keeps it open for a multitude of reasons, foremost that there's simply too many angles to approach with a topic this extensive without devoting a lengthy chapter to each. As it is, the third release I read was already 635 pages with what looks like a relatively meagre 1.2-ish line spacing setup. It's not a quick read.

It is however, an easy one. Friedman's style is well suited to the topic. Anecdote is interwoven with statistics, interviews with high-ups in companies laced between explanations of how their products or processes are changing things for the common worker or consumer. You might find yourself reading fourty pages on the invention, implementation and importance of the Netscape browser (a three-point narrative strategy he employs for all of the "ten flattening forces"), but it's never tedious, never dull. If acronyms like PHP, RAM, SQL and the like drive you to confusion, worry not, because he's not there to lecture you about them, just say that they're there, this is what they do, and this is why they're important. The focus throughout the entire work is held on business - how they utilize the technologies like the internet and technical standards, as well as the processes like offshoring and outsourcing, and how these businesses are thriving because of it. In that sense it takes on the tone expected in a business how-to book, but for those of you not interested in business, there's enough common-sense situations and sociological impact to make the reading process enjoyable. Friedman is a journalist and it shows in all the good ways. The language is simple, the writing clear, and the topics well connected. Ever get lost in a Friedman book? Go back to the first sentence of the paragraph, and you can pick up from there.

If you get lost on a grander scale, the chapters are clearly defined, if inter-related, and follow a very specific course. First there's the exposition, which consists of a description of each of the ten flatteners. These portions are clear, fairly even-handed, and informative. Then Friedman moves into the true analytical portions. The first details what impact the flattening process is having and will have on the United States of America, and given the flatness of the world (and hence the fact that location is no longer a major determinant to success), he is really analyzing globalization from the point of view of all developed countries. Following that, there's a section for developing nations, followed by businesses, and then individuals. Again, in each the focus is on economic activity, entrepreneurship, etc. It's not until the end that he branches out and touches on the cultural, political, and other social aspects of globalization.

Each chapter is well thought out, its limitations are made clear (his stark acceptance that Information Technology related positions account for only 0.4% of Indian jobs, after extolling the great wonders of shifting wealth the IT world has meant for Indian society, is particularly even-handed), and the central concept is unified, consistent, and remarkably well described. It is difficult to argue against the fact that globalization has in large part succeeded in bringing wealth and prosperity to parts of the world that just a few short decades ago, were bereft of it. Friedman is fair in his assessment of the negative aspects of globalization as well: that jobs are lost in developed nations as they move to cheaper developing ones, sometimes permanently; that corporations like Wal-Mart are able to exploit globalization in its drive for lower costs, again resulting in poor labor conditions for North Americans; that security is increasingly difficult to find (in any sense of the word) in a globally cohesive market. He doesn't shy away from these topics, even if he does treat them with a sort of topical wave of the hand, invoking counter-positives that don't really equal the gravity of the issues they are supposed to dispel. This book is an American book, above all else, with all the brash American enthusiasm for capitalism and wealth you expect, but you don't have to be American to understand it, or appreciate it. No matter your background, it is an easy-to-read assessment of the then-current (remember, this was released in 2007, prior to the stock market/financial market collapse of 2008/9) reality of the world marketplace. My wife could give it to her grade tens, and they'd get it. They'd see themselves in this book, as well as the headlines they read every day, and they'd be plugged in to the flat world. This book is their reality, and they've never known anything different. Friedman nailed that part, and it really is the key here.

However, there is one overall point that irks me. It's something small, perhaps, but there. It always surprises me in those who advocate for free markets and capitalism in general: the relative lack of understanding of Marxism and all its derivatives (socialism, state-communism, Leninism). Someone who supports the ingenuity of markets and the spreading of one very specific form of capitalism should not be "startled" (233) to learn that Karl Marx essentially "called it" (my scare quotes, nothing Friedman wrote) way back in 1848. "Called it" referring to the globalization of trade that is essentially the topic of Friedman's book. Indeed, the passage quoted by Friedman from The Communist Manifesto (234-5) describing capitalism's basic historical functions, grows more and more relevant with each passing year, not less. Though it's taken a bit longer than Marx and Engels might have imagined, capitalism is behaving exactly how they figured it would: endlessly searching for new markets, lowering prices, lowering wages, and toppling political and economic regimes in its travels. Given how cluttered, political, and historically laden any modern analysis of capitalism is, anyone who truly wishes to understand the soul of capitalism, the drive that lies behind its basic principles, would be well advised to consult the two documents that are entwined together in its birth: The Wealth of Nations and its oft-maligned sister work, Das Kapital. No two books ever complemented each other better, or relied on one another more to cover ying and yang, positive and negative, declarative and analytical. Friedman can perhaps be faulted for not going this deep, for not taking an unflinching look at the basic structure that is driving the globalization movement. And, perhaps more importantly, for not considering the Communist Manifesto once again in his closing.

This is a bit of an aside, but if Marx and Engels "called it" in their initial analysis by stating that capitalism will inevitably push beyond all other boundaries to cover the globe in its web of trade, then perhaps the entire "revolution of the proletariat" thing can't be entirely ignored either. Indeed, if there is one point in Friedman's analysis that smells faintly of naivety is the insistence that the process he describes will occur all over again in the future, to the joint benefit of all. Developing nations will progress smoothly to developed nations, followed by an out-pour of capital that will go to newly developing nations to repeat the process. An army of middle class individuals will grow in these developing nations, and everywhere around the world, always (assuming it remains flat), standards of living will improve for the great majority of people as the middle-class only continues to grow in wealth, numbers, and power. If there's anything globalization has made the average working stiff more aware of, it's not that new middle class jobs are just waiting to be filled (as Friedman insists), but rather that middle class jobs as a whole are disappearing. I have plenty of anecdotal evidence to point to this: the huge unemployment figures across the United States; that one of the newest "markets" Friedman likely would have pointed to as producing middle-class jobs (namely the financial sector) has turned out to not really be a market at all, but a bubble based purely on finance's abilities to manipulate itself to produce "profit" out of nothing tangible, real, or value-added; that profit margins for corporations continue to grow even as real wages have stalled or fallen in the developed world. The polarization of the classes between worker and owner is just as real a possibility in the flat world as it was in 1848, 1989, 2001 or 2010. Granted, if we're following Marx's timeline, the final, true, polarization will not occur until the entire world is enveloped in capitalism, without a single person living outside its boundary: Middle-East, Africa, South America, Antarctica, everything consumed and consuming in its chaotic interweave. Regardless, right now, it's easy to see a future where the very term "middle class" might be something relegated to the history books - an anachronism of a time period when rising standards of living were possible for all.

It's a uniquely American trait to ignore these kinds of economic fundamentals, to ignore dissenting viewpoints and instead focus one's outlook with a strong dose of, as Friedman puts it, the "American optimism" (616): the pull yourself up by the bootstraps, work hard, and make it rich American dream that so many in America believe should be the standard the world over. This bias is present again and again in the book, from his insistence that entrepreneurship is natural in all human beings, to his topical references to the greatness of America (page 298 of my version contains the most painful incident). It's not wholly unwelcome, and not completely unchecked by the author, but it can be a bit grating at times.

Another uniquely American trait in writing books like these, is to completely lose sense of people as people, in place of people as their occupations. The book is definitely guilty of that. Even Friedman's heart-touching finale featuring twenty children from India's untouchable class is predicated solely on their ability to suddenly become doctors, astronauts, and writers. Not to live happy lives. Its easy to say that more money equals more happiness, but it's simply not true. Given the bare minimums of food, shelter, and safety, people can be happy in all sorts of environments. Five hundred years ago, nobody had any of the things our modern market has made possible, but people lived full lives then, if their cultural artifacts are to believed. Yes, untouchables in India's caste system lead incredibly difficult lives, and their opportunities for happiness will be greatly enhanced by having economic opportunity thrust upon them, but what makes happy people is, first and foremost, good people. That is the one topic that is most notably absent from the book, and what prevents The World is Flat from becoming a true historical landmark, a fault also present in those other two analyses of political economy. You never get a sense from it of what the overall human impact is going to be from all this. I believe Friedman is aware of this, and to spare his poor reader from another 600 pages, he limited himself to analysis of business, economics, and to a small extent, culture. But humans are more than those things, and more even than the sum of all its topics, and as such, this book, while great, falls just a bit short of amazing.

VIDEO GAMES: Assassin's Creed II - Playstation 3

Score: 9.3

First, a short warning. I have not played the original Assassin's Creed, and don't intend to anytime soon. As such, certain comments may not vibe with those who have played the first game. No big issue there, just laying out in the open. Oh, and also, SPOILER ALERT!!!

As the score testifies, I was very happily surprised by the game. To begin with, the story was quite good, enjoyable (obvious sequel ending aside), and interesting in the mechanics of how it was laid out. The overlapping present-day story of Desmond and the modern Assassin fight against the Templars has the effect of a framing narrative, but one that is both tied to and in most ways dependent upon the body narrative of Ezio and the Renaissance Assassins. The interplay between the two is not in-depth, but the ending turns the entire thing on its head. It's unexpected, but incredibly effective. It's something I haven't seen played with since the end of Metal Gear Solid 2, which, while not dealing with similar technology or ideas, used the video game mechanic in a way that was new and invigorating. With a slightly different slant Ubisoft's done the same there here. As I said, quite nice.

The main story of Ezio is quite engaging on its own, as cliche as it might be. The characters are colourful and the high quality voice acting done with just the right level of bad and good Italian accents. The star of the Italian story though, is the Italian backdrop.

When I say Ubisoft went out of their way to make a fantastic world that was at once believable, playable, and historically accurate, I'm doing them a great disservice. Fantastic doesn't cut it. Scope, detail, and layout are all amazing. The polygon count for a city like Venice, is hard to imagine. Some serious work has gone into creating an engine that can craft the entire city as seamlessly as it does, all the while making it feel natural, while keeping the playability factor that's required for an open-world platformer like this. Even that phrase is somewhat astounding. An open-world platformer. Let's face it, most open world games have been knock-offs of Grand Theft Auto, where killing civilians is a major source of fun. This game moves the entire open-world concept into another realm, where the cliches are removed, and civilians are no longer targets, just objects getting in the way. I know I've missed out on a couple years of gaming lately, but except for Fable, I can't think of an RPG that's tried this approach (MMORPGs aside), even though it seems it would be perfectly suited to it. Whatever, I'm just proselytizing, the game structure works great. The buildings are all scalable, which means they often wind up resembling one another, but by the time Venice comes around you are used to it, and the beauty of the dissimilar buildings makes up for the mind-numbingly similar ones.

The rest of the renaissance setting is great too. Merchants hawk clothes and weapons. Doctors promote fresh cut leeches, and the prostitutes are something right out of a Shakespearean play. The attention to detail in the historically accurate buildings is great too. Infiltrating the Vatican is a great feeling, and speaking with Leonardo da Vinci is just plain awesome. Nothing brings out the inner geek like a little historical fiction. That Ubisoft did it so well is a testament to their homework, and attention to detail.

The other thing they did great was the gameplay. The movement mechanics have about an hour learning curve (if you've never played the first game at least), and then they feel second nature. Fighting, while not incredibly in depth, is good. The lack of depth however means that fights eventually degenerate into the exact same thing every time. The supremely patient AI (and its subsequent inability to stop you in the middle of a killing blow of their allies) makes for unrealistic sequences that belie the overwhelming pseudo-historical approach taken to the whole game. It's a weak point, but given the control scheme available, there might not be much room for improvement. Perhaps a trigger could switch combat modes, or perhaps you should be given a greater incentive to run from large numbers of enemies. Just an idea...

The platforming is super fluid, almost to a fault at times, like when a slight tilt of the left stick sends you running up an adjacent wall instead of jumping up on top of the box you were meaning to. Still, in the end, you feel as though you always have control of Ezio, and any errors your avatar makes, you know are yours.

One other small problem is the quick time action sequences. The first one as a child is cute, but the rest are not necessary, at least not in most cases. At least they're kept to a minimum.

Other than that, I believe the score really speaks for itself. This is a great, great game. And Ubisoft can count on me picking up a copy of the inevitable third title (assuming it doesn't get horrible, horrible reviews upon release). If nothing else, I want to see how Desmond's story winds up, and where the next area will be (French Revolution? Japan, 1930's? England 1700's? Or a jump back to China, say during the Three Kingdoms period?). Until then, I may have to go back and beat this one again.

FIGHTS - WEC 43: Cerrone vs. Henderson

Score: 8.8/4.2

The 8.8 is for the quality of the fight, which was exhilarating throughout, and featured a smorgasbord of styles that bled seamlessly from one to another. This fight is why I love watching the WEC. Cerrone is a great showman, and in my opinion, one of the better 155 lb-ers in North America in terms of natural ability and certain techniques. The fight, was a joy to watch.

The result (see 4.2), was unfair. Cerrone won the fight. I know, given the 10-point must system, that fights like these are difficult to score. But let's be honest, Henderson did not beat Cerrone. Ok, yes, in rounds 2 and 3, he took the fight to the ground, in a seemingly commanding way. But was he? What damage did he do with Cerrone on his back? He probably spent six of those ten minutes standing up, occasionally landing solid shots to the head, but more often struggling to get through Cerrone's legs. Yes, for those two rounds (and at various points through the fight), he out-wrestled Cerrone. But this was not George St. Pierre calibre of out-wrestling. Upon taking his opponent to the floor, Henderson was almost in more danger than Cerrone. If not for a freakish level of flexibility in his arms, he should have tapped at least once in the final round. Yes, Cerrone was on his back, for two rounds, but as evidenced by the many times he kicked Henderson off without much trouble, it was Cerrone who had control over where the fight went, and when.

The judges patently blew this one though. I don't know which round (out of the first and fourth), they gave to Henderson over Cerrone, and I suppose it doesn't matter, because in all reality, they just missed it. Not that this wasn't a close fight in many regards, but in looking at each round, and when considering the fight as a whole, Cerrone was the overall better fighter. Not all the time (again, this is not St. Pierre we're talking about, or Machida), but enough to win the judges scorecards. Or at least mine.

I may make another post about how the ten point system could be altered to make for both more engaging, and better-scored fights, but that can likely wait for another time.

MUSIC - Radiohead - Kid A

This is essentially a response to Pitchfork naming Kid A their album of the 2000-09 era.

Score: 8.8

I've had Kid A for a couple of years now - probably after reading about it on countless indie-rock oriented sites. I'd picked up OK Computer a few months previous, and didn't see what the hoopla about that particular album was, so you can imagine when I listened to Kid A once, said "meh", and moved on.

Allow any hipster passerbys to cry foul now and insert interjections full of hyperbole. It's a simple statement: Kid A is not that good.

It's good, don't get me wrong, but it's not that good.

Now I think everybody who'd ever read Pitchfork for any duration longer than a few months would have known that Kid A was a shoe-in for the top pick of the decade, so it's not as though I'm arguing that it shouldn't have been. Their editors, while overly verbose and usually spewing nonsense, are firm, predictable, and seem to believe deeply in the music they like. For the Pitchfork crowd (and, it appears, the Rolling Stone crowd), Kid A simply was the best album of the decade. My argument instead is that, while it has several good points to it, it does not possess the things which people go to music for.

Kid A can roughly be summed up thusly: electronica-infused dissonance. Radiohead obviously did not invent electronica, and were not the first to utilize dissonance as a musical tool (Shostakovich was using it as his overwhelming modus operandi fifty years earlier). So what then, explains the huge outpouring of critical acclaim? Was it the fact that they were one of the first to do the two things in one cohesive package? Perhaps, but I find most arguments for Kid A's importance seem to revolve around two things, one of which is valid (in my opinion), and one which is not: Radiohead itself, and the sociological construct of the western world in the year 2000.

Radiohead as a band started as (more or less, probably less actually) a brit-pop group in the vein of Oasis. At least, that's what their recorded output began as in the mid 90's. By the time of The Bends, they'd more or less perfected that sound and had begun to move on (something Oasis never really wanted to or tried to do). So when OK Computer spun around in 1997, it was radically different - barely rock, definitely not pop, and full of messages that had nothing to do with love or regret or anything like that. I mean, what pop group writes songs about paranoid androids?

Well, there was one pop group that had done something similar thirty years earlier. The 1960's equivalent, of course, was the Beatles, who were ripping the Tibetan Book of the Dead in their post-pop outings of Rubber Soul and Revolver, and doing things that pop musicians were not supposed to be doing, like reversing guitar solos (Rain), writing songs with only classical instruments (Eleanor Rigby), and introducing new, non-western instruments to the pop catalogue (Norweigan Wood). The decades and the topics were different, but the feeling of change was the same. Which is why, after OK Computer, the fans of Radiohead were getting it in their head that Radiohead was their generation's Beatles (and the previous generation's, who had missed out on something similar [Led Zeppelin or The Clash probably came closest]). Kid A was, subsequently, the generation's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a pinnacle of engineering, sound development, and pop songwriting.

The difference between the two however, was that whereas the Beatles retained all their fans through Rubber Soul and Revolver, OK Computer (and shortly thereafter, Kid A), had failed to keep up the radio notoriety that The Bends had managed through poppy singles like "Fake Plastic Trees" and "High and Dry". The Beatles had "Paperback Writer" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" leading up to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Radiohead had "No Surprises" (a song I wasn't even aware of until I'd listened to OK Computer probably the fourth time, after which I promptly fell in love with it). More telling, upon the release of Kid A, not a single was heard on the radio. Pop music, even in the year 2000 was still reliant heavily on the radio to determine was what was "pop" and thereby, what was "cool" in the eyes of the masses. Radiohead effectively buried themselves in the first corners of the internet music ward, apart from pop culture, and away from the prying eyes and demands of popular culture (though they would constantly flirt with it, due to their huge success in that internet ward). Whereas the Beatles had "All You Need is Love" and "Hello Goodbye" as the radio holdovers while Sgt. Pepper went on tour for the band, Radiohead had nothing.

Yet those fans who'd followed them through the haze of OK Computer were suddenly convinced that yes, here was the 2000's Beatles, and they were visionaries, pop music boundary-pushers, who were unquestioned geniuses. I have no idea if that's the impression others have got, and I have no clue whatsoever what Radiohead's impression of this was, but pop music was, I believe (and the lack of singles evidence this) no longer in their sights. To their fans they'd created a great album (again, I'm not arguing against the quality of the album, it's good!), and they had secured their place as the pinnacle of the 2000's, by October of 2000. Pitchfork was and remains, such a fan. Like the girl who fell in love with the bad boy once, and never looked at anyone that didn't have a chip on their shoulder, Radiohead fans have pretty much been enamoured with this album since it's release, and have always used it as a measuring stick against which all other music simply fails to match up.

The timing of the album is usually the other thing fans point to: Radiohead described all the tension of the year 2000 perfectly through their electronica, krautrock, and voice-distortion and through a generally dissonant sound and set of lyrics. The world in 2000 was a scary place full of this new technology (PCs, and the Internet, more generally) that was binding us all together (a la Thomas Friedman's book The World is Flat), while pushing us further away from one another, in this endless cycle of digitization and dehumanization. So when Thom Yorke's voice came through in the first track all garbled and disrupted, that was the perfect opening to a decade of personal and cognitive dissonance, where truth wasn't clear and people were no longer measured by their real attributes, but what their digital version would mean.

That's all true. But unfortunately, it doesn't help the music enough to make the album better than it is.

I find the "timing" argument for Kid A to be very interesting, and very accurate in a lot of ways. But unfortunately, that same argument means that the music is exactly what the times were - unengaged and impossible to fathom. Removing the human aspect of music means it isn't music that can reach humans in the ways other music can. It can dissuade, it can disconnect, and it can engage the thought processes, but it can't be felt. Kid A is guilty of, above all else, it's inability to be felt on any emotional level.

"That's the whole point!" Some hipster cries. "And," I would return, "that, is mine." I want music to speak to me, to sing for me, and to do things that I can't do myself, that thought and disaffection and transistors can't do for me - create beauty. Kid A is many things, but it is not beautiful ("Treefingers" being the possible exception).

And I suppose that's the crux of my admittedly rather weak argument. I can't say why I don't like Kid A so much as I can find fault in the arguments of those who do. It's cold, and I want my music to be hot. I want to feel something when I listen to it - not experience the absence of feeling. Kid A will be, for me, a lounge record. The most popular muzak you'll ever hear.

And I love Radiohead. They may be the closest thing to the Beatles we ever have. But the painful thing that made me feel the need to write this in the first place is that Pitchfork's #2 choice, the Arcade Fire's Funeral, is the better album, by almost all leaps and bounds. Pitchfork, which is rarely dogmatic, is fixated upon Radiohead like so many devoted fans. But Funeral signaled the changing landscape of indie music, and it was the antithesis to Kid A in every way - full of emotion, overflowing with it. Funeral was the realization that music, of all things that can be digitized, will remain always attached to human subjects. And it was hot, hotter than anyone was prepared for. For that, it was the decade's best album.

BOOKS: Toni Morrison - Jazz

Score: 8.5

The first reading of a Toni Morrison novel is like eating your favourite meal for the first time. To start all you have is the aroma, the cover, a blurb, maybe an image. It's enough to give a brief outline, teasing your senses, but nothing more. Then you crack it open and with the first bite you're completely overwhelmed. It's all there at the start - the texture, the contours, the flavour, the spice, the moisture, any sauces, any hints of a well-incorporated core. The first thirty or fourty pages can leave you breathless, confused, and unsure of much, beyond that your appetite has been whetted.

Then you continue reading, and each bite is more succulent than the last, each one of those initial qualities takes over one of the mouthfuls, and before you know it, you've devoured the plate. Every character, every temptation, history, human emotion and animal reason has been consumed, and at the end of it all, you love it. You can't imagine not knowing these characters, their flavours, the way they move and the people they love. It's your new favourite book and as good as it was, you can't imagine eating again for some time. It's quite an investment.

Jazz, her 1992 novel about black country folk moving into the big City in the heady 1920's is a Toni Morrison novel through and through. It won't let you forget it, from the overwhelming intro the final statement of purpose, expressed through the simple holding of hands, you can tell it'll be another favourite before you've put it down. All the elements of Morrison's trademark are present - deft weaving of past and present narratives, evocative writing that seems to build metaphor upon metaphor to the point of near-incredulity, and characters you will remember, whether you want to or not. Yet something is lacking. In the preamble, Morrison relates Jazz to her previous masterwork, Beloved, linking them thematically. Yet where Beloved succeeded because of it's seamless connection between style, subject matter and character development, Jazz is lacking.

Though I doubt I would ever review it here, Beloved is likely the only book I could ever give a perfect 10.0 to. It's still the absolute best at nearly all the things I hold dear in writing. It is about slavery, pure and simple. One word describes its whole topic. Somehow, Morrison managed to convey nearly every single problem, ramification and personal experience (I can only imagine this last point) related to slavery in a masterly whirlwind of poetic prose and postmodern narrative structure. It is as close to perfect as one can hope.

Jazz is a bit more convoluted. The title would have you believe one thing, but jazz itself doesn't really play a huge role, it is the narrative voice, and in that sense behaves in a way typical to jazz: it's a bit scattered, graceful, and most certainly oftputting if taken in in small pieces. However, that narrative roleplay, as good as it has the potential to be, never truly becomes effective in any way in Jazz. Similarly, the characters, as interesting as they may be, seem a little bit underdeveloped by the end, perhaps with a tad one too many. The central two are excellently done, but unevenly so, with one being far more interesting than the other, and the third central character not really being explained very well at all.

Similarly, the plot seems at best hard to follow, and at it's worst (I can't believe I'm about to write this) trite. The two lover characters are connected through a convoluted chain of knowledge, and they don't really need to be. Nothing is really achieved in the overall terms of the novel by having the two linked. It could be the scattershot way I read the novel, but it definitely lacked a compelling sense of drive within the plot; almost as though it was a collection of individual stories and characters Morrison tied together through a central incident. Reasonable, but not spellbinding by any measure.

The writing, as always with Morrison, is stupendous, and there were several times I was simply caught in the beauty of the phrasing, or even a simple response a character would make. "I didn't fall in love, I rose in it." Simply stellar. It's enough to lift up a sometimes dreary book into the realm of excellence. Just don't expect it to do much more than that.

[Addendum]
On the whole, Jazz never achieves the singularity of purpose that infused Beloved. It is not a pure depiction of black life in an historic urban reality, and it is not even an effective documentation of the transition from rural to urban that it seems to touch upon.

MOVIES - Kingdom of Heaven

Score: 6.2

After reading up on this movie, I feel a little jilted. Apparently there is a 49-minute longer director’s cut version, wherein Ridley Scott’s more ambitious film-making is given further time to flounder or flourish. However, having seen just the standard theatrical release, I have to state that this movie largely flounders.

Shoddy characterization, cringe-worthy dialogue, poor acting (Bloom is especially guilty, though Liam Neeson seems to be growing more limited the more I see of him), and historical inaccuracies are simply too much to beat back the great action shots, good cinematography and score, good acting (Edward Norton was in that movie? WTF?), and a decent attempt at trying to connect with (and possibly ease?) Islamic-Christian tensions in the present day by looking to the past.

Perhaps that is the easiest and most direct place to discuss the merits and weaknesses of the film. Through some rather blatant dialogue symbolism, Scott sets up Jerusalem as more or less what Western audiences perceive it to be to this day: a place of mystical powers and history, which, it is perceived, many millions are willing to kill to obtain in order to achieve their lofty (and completely misguided) sense of heaven. Scott’s own view of that heaven quickly comes out however, as a mystical place that exists only in our heads and the only purpose of which is to serve as a sounding board for the epitome of whatever ideology we are under the sway of. Balian, Orlando Bloom’s character, gives a speech near the end of the film that advocates a completely secular understanding of God, worship, and the Crusades as a whole. To many people I think this is a big bone of contention, and rightfully so. Could the horrors of war turn even the most devout of medieval believers into some form of atheists? Absolutely. Did it turn men like Balian into such atheists? No. Firmly insulated by nobility, political power, and a fierce investment in the power represented by the Catholic clergy, leaders like that of Orlando Bloom’s character would never have advocated a 21^st century view of equal-but-different faiths, and that is just the biggest of all the historical fuck-ups of the movie. If, as Scott seems to have advocated, the movie was designed as an examination of religious conflict, his examination is both topical and completely unilluminating. The “we can all get along if we just understand we’re all human” approach is true, but none of the people in this movie, historically (or if their characters are imposed on the leaders of today), are secular humanists, and as much as it pulls at my bleeding heart strings, an impassioned plea for us all to abandon religion is not going to solve the problem and bring about the typical Hollywood ending this movie concludes with. It wouldn’t have in the past, and it won’t now. It’s really superficial proselytizing, and as much as I love left-leaning Hollywood for presenting this stuff, there are better ways of doing it. Check out Brokeback Mountain.

Still, for all the historical mistakes, there is a degree that his analysis of the possible peace between faiths (actively at war then, undoubtedly at tension with one another on a number of topics now) is useful, if not tastefully done. The very idea of touching a Crusade movie in our current religious climate is ballsy, if nothing else, and it’s not like Scott placed machine guns or suicide bombers in the movie in some messed up form – he kept it firmly within the limitations of the time period, and he deserves credit for it.

Other criticisms quickly have to come up though. Another one at the forefront is the simple sensation one gets, in watching the movie, that Scott bit off more than he could chew. There are too many characters, too little exposition, and too few major plot events to make up for it. For an example – rather than leaving Saladin as an enemy without back-story or conflict (which might have actually worked better for the movie, leaving only the final meeting between Balian and Saladin to show the Muslim character’s compassion and willingness to compromise – a far stronger showing, and one the actor likely would have been up to), needless scenes depicting an apparent conflict between him and one of his advisors are shown, the totality of which lead to nothing. Perhaps in the extra 49 minutes more is fleshed out, but I don’t see how it would be enough. In reaching for the epic scope, writer and director both missed the fine balance between personable and expansive. You sort of get the one, but the other is just a mish-mash of overly simplistic and mildly conflicted motives.

Besides story and plot however, there are several positives to the film. Much like The Painted Veil most of them revolve around the more technical aspects. For recreating Jerusalem in the Moroccan desert, the crew should be applauded. The special effects are good, and the action scenes are both more believable, better filmed, and just plain cooler than the ones in say, King Arthur. As much as I may deride Orlando Bloom’s acting, he has the swagger to control action flicks like few other. It’s too bad this movie wasn’t trying to be one.

Unlike The Painted Veil though, the acting wasn’t uniformly good or bad, with strong and weak points throughout, and the shots weren’t as uniformly beautiful or intriguing either – never once did I think to myself, “Wow, that was pretty cool how they did that.” It’s pretty prototypical filming, and it works for some things, for most, it well, flounders.

MOVIES - The Painted Veil

Score: 7.3

This is a beautifully shot movie with a quite horrible script. And that about sums it up. From the opening few shots, through to the end, the camera and lighting work is exquisite - all the details are illuminated, the play between shadow and light is immaculate, the scenery is the character that constantly dominates every shot, and the landscapes are simply mesmerizing to a prototypical Western viewer who has never been to the Chinese countryside (myself included). Unfortunately, the landscape is too big a character in this novel-come-movie, which would have sufficed in far easier times as a parable play. As it stands it's merely a set of really great shots, with some decent acting but relatively little characterization.

Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh, but considering Edward Norton's character declares his love for Naomi Watts after dancing a single time with her (which the audience isn't even privy to), you can tell this isn't a story big on back-story or character development. It's merely taking cliches (the simple but beautiful woman and the intelligent but not so good with women scientist) and thrusting them onto a backdrop where they have yet to be fully played out - Colonial China in the 1920's, with Cholera to boot. The tale of love, betrayal and reconciliation is trite and predictable to the last (I predicted the final scene involving flowers after witnessing its counterpart in the beginning fifteen minutes), but serviceable. The dialogue is merely atrocious, without a hint of following the old adage "Show, don't tell." The word "love" comes up so often it makes me wince. Rather than showing the two characters fall in and out of love, the director and writer were satisfied to have the character's talk about falling in and out of love with each other. The few times it even achieves a decent parlance into this manner of story-telling, it is still the camera that is doing the work (Edward Norton's watching Naomi Watts undress was particularly telling). The topical dips into anti-colonialism are pretty weak as well, seemingly thrown in for the purpose of... well actually I can't tell the purpose, other than to provide some background to the time period for western viewers I suppose.

Still, in many respects it is a good film - the soundtrack delivers, the backdrop is adequately epic, and the acting is still heartfelt, even if the stars, or anyone else really, was given rather little to work with. For me though, it's just a little too light on the things that could have catapaulted it into a great film, and when you have all these other pieces in play (like an obviously talented director and cinematography team) it's really inexcusable.