Isoceleria

3-Sentence Reviews: Scandinavian Indie Folk Special Edition

2012-02-13T16:10:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while, perhaps as rarely as a few times per indie-music-listening career, you may encounter the chance to like something really big before it was popular, and I believe Of Monsters and Men might be the best chance I've ever gotten at that. They're the sort of ensemble you couldn't make up if you tried: six Icelandic dudes (actually five dudes, one of whom is actually named Kristján Kristjánsson, and a woman) on a stage playing guitars and horns and whatever percussion they can drum up. Called Iceland's Mumford and Sons and the new Arcade Fire, Of Monsters and Men are probably better than either band, featuring a bright, energetic indie folk and probably the coolest music video I've ever seen; they're so indie that you can't actually buy their full-length My Head is an Animal in the US yet, but expect big things once you can.

I'm ~~a little~~ incredibly late to the party with Fleet Foxes' Helplessness Blues, but I was entirely apathetic to the isolated monotone of their first album and expected more of the same with their second. It's a much better--and much more interesting--album, featuring their trademark harmonized "ooh"s over acoustic folk ("Sim Sala Bim"), 60s-style pop ("Bedouin Dress"), and even Appalachian-flavored pentatonics ("The Shrine"). Like on the first album, all these songs are the same in tempo and instrumentation, but unlike on the first, they differentiate themselves into an entire album of things worth listening to.

I first heard of First Aid Kit via Ben Gibbard's Twitter, and if you can't take indie music advice from the guy behind the most successful indie band ever, who can you take it from? Like so many bands with promise, the (surprisingly country-sounding) Swedish folk-singing sisters aren't as good as their best song ("The Lion's Roar"), offering impressive and impeccable harmonies on all their music but enough hooks to make it compelling on only about half. Their 2010 debut The Big Black and the Blue is a tiny bit better than its follow-up, 2012's The Lion's Roar, but both contain enough to promise that First Aid Kit can eventually release a truly brilliant album.

On the advice of my girlfriend Stephanie, and on the strength of a standout eventual first single "1957", I went to see Milo Greene in concert last weekend. It's potentially the indiest show I will ever see: Milo Greene hasn't even released an album yet, and their own website lists only four songs. Thanks to a fall 2011 tour opening for the Civil Wars, they'll be forever linked with and compared to that band; the Civil Wars' Barton Hollow had flashes of brilliance amidst a field of decent songs that didn't really go anywhere, so hopefully Milo Greene's eventual debut album takes after "20 Years" or the title track instead of the rest of Barton Hollow.

Opening for Milo Greene was the slightly more established band Family of the Year, who apparently already has three EP's and a full-length album in its three-year musical career, with another full-length coming this year. Like Milo Greene, their sound is vaguely indie-folk with guy singer/girl singer harmonies; FotY is a little less down-to-earth, including more experimentation with 70s post-psychedelic and rock influences, a few passages of borderline spoken-word, and song titles that might be steeped in a little too much irony for their own good ("Putting Money and Stuff", "I Played Drums on This"). Their willingness to draw off so much inspiration might leave the band without a unique sound if they're biting off more than they can chew, but songs like "Summer Girl" prove these guys are still worth watching to see if this family can grow up a little bit.

Currently listening: "Toccata," from Orfeo, Monteverdi

Probably the best spam comment I've ever gotten

2012-01-31T15:16:00.000-08:00

I use comment moderation on this blog because every once in a while, I got a lot of spam in the comments. Usually, these comments are the boring type or the gibberish type, but sometimes I come across a true gem. Not wanting to post it as a comment, I've decided to legitimize the spammer on my own terms:

The Discount Cigarettes With Virginia Stamp is, if you exactly after "evening banquet" thought that the time is "the unforgettable time", you are the choice pull out Double Coronas or Giant Double Coronas? Or is both pulls out together?If business is arduous, meets the company share circuit breaker or Kenneth lai such faces likely goes out of business safely lets the human is badly battered, is sure not to light the cigar, because smokes the cigar is enjoys the leisure time whiling away the time. The cool evening, is burning the prill on the lawn, on the frame calmly is lying down the fresh and tender pink beefsteak, is assisting the very good red Newport Cigarettes.
The food finishes, lights a vandyck brown big cigar, attracts one, puts out freshly, moist, sends the blue color slightly the smog, no matter these blue smokes are for the time being flutter from a 400 Yuan David Du in husband (Davidoff), flutters from 300 Yuan Mcknew Du (MacanuDc), or is 90 Yuan P G C Hajenius, you

Now I know what's been missing all those cool evenings when I was burning the prill on the lawn.

Currently listening: "Annie Waits," Ben Folds

My take on SOPA

2012-01-18T13:24:00.000-08:00

If you so much as used the internet today, you might have gotten the distinct impression that the internet is literally going to end because of SOPA. Its opponents would say that's only a mild exaggeration. It's easy to read the anti-SOPA offerings on Wikipedia and Google and be swayed into opposing SOPA. They are persuasive arguments. And at first pass, it's easy to conclude that SOPA represents a grave threat to the internet as we know it.

But there's an intellectual problem with supporting or opposing any measure before hearing every argument for or against it. There are two sides--often many more--to any story. As its critics accuse SOPA of being distinctly anti-internet, it's easy to go on the internet and find the ways in which SOPA is or might be bad. What the internet has done a less good job of doing is exploring the ways in which SOPA is or might be good. "That's because it's not," an opponent might argue; "everything about SOPA is bad." But somebody thinks it's good. It has sponsorship in both houses of US Congress (under the name PIPA, and with slightly differently wording, in the Senate), enjoys bipartisan support, and has extensive lobbyist funding.

As the internet becomes more riled up about what the bill might be, or might become, it's more important for supporters of SOPA to deliver their arguments clearly and rationally. Often, SOPA is accused of being pushed by "old-media people" who "don't understand how the internet works." It would be enlightening--and, by this point, essential--for a "new-media person" who does understand how the internet works but nevertheless supports SOPA to offer a rebuttal. Such a person may or may not exist. At the very least, authors and supporters of the bill need to respond quickly and specifically to the concerns raised in various parts of the internet.

Here's a paraphrase of a common example used to illustrate the perils of SOPA. Say a Google search turned up a site that hosted pirated copyrighted content. Under SOPA, its opponents claim, the holder of that copyright would be able to sue and get an injunction against Google. In turn, the attorney general would be able to enact that injunction to temporarily shut Google down. Google would then be faced with the prospects of frequent outages--clearly denying its customers the chance to use its services--or actively policing all its indexed search content, a time- and money-intensive process.

This seems bad, if it is true. Without hearing any arguments to the contrary, I'm forced to conclude that it's both true and bad. What this debate needs desperately is for SOPA supporters to explain whether or not that's a fair characterization of SOPA and if it is, why it is not bad. The longer they fail to do so, the more ground their position will lose.

In the vacuum of counter-evidence that is the internet, SOPA does indeed appear threatening and dangerous. It's possible--even likely--that all the pro-SOPA argument in the world wouldn't change that appearance. But to snap to conclusions about what the bill might become without even having heard the argument is irresponsible.

Currently listening: "1957," Milo Greene

3-Sentence Reviews: Movies I Saw Over Christmas

2012-01-10T22:46:00.000-08:00

I'm surprised I liked The Help as much as I did. It's the closest thing I've seen to a chick flick in a long, long time (there are approximately two male characters with lines), but it won points for not being too relationship-y or sappy, instead focusing on a solid script and a well-told story. It also won points for starring Emma Stone, whom I may have a bit of a celebrity crush on.

Following in the welcome trend of Slumdog Millionaire and The Hurt Locker, The King's Speech was a Best Picture winner that was entertaining, well-made, and wholly deserving. It's a World War II movie that's about so much more than the war; it reminds us that for all their royal trappings, the Kings and Queens of England are people too. Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush are brilliant, and Helena Bonham Carter delivers the best performance of her career.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo may have pulled off the rarest feat in book-to-film adaptation: being more entertaining than its novel counterpart. Minutiae of 1970s Swedish politics are part of what gives the Millennium trilogy its unique "charm," but they make for a much better reading than viewing experience. Instead, we get all the action and intrigue (and yes, disturbing graphicness) of the book, distilled into about two and a half hours of movie that don't seem nearly that long.

Considering all the possible stakes for losing a particular bet, forcibly watching Ghostbusters is far from the worst thing that could have happened. It suffers a bit from Lethal Weapon syndrome, in that it's a product of the '80s, and boy, can you tell. But the comedic talents of Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd (not to forget perennial third-man Harold Ramis!) keep it afloat, and if the the aesthetic trappings seem egregiously dated, the "just this side of absurd" humor is oddly timeless.

I often describe myself as more of an Atlanta Braves fan than a baseball fan, but I think you have to have at least a little baseball fan in you to appreciate Moneyball. The human element to the story is fine--and if Jonah Hill doesn't win a Supporting Actor Oscar based on this movie, then the system is totally invalidated--but in the end it takes a back seat to a fascinating look at a transformation of America's pastime. For anyone who's ever wondered why we suddenly care about OPS and WAR in baseball, Moneyball explains it and tells a compelling story at the same time.

The James Bond franchise was "rebooted" after Die Another Day, and it's easy to see why. By the mid 2000s, Pierce Brosnan's 007 had become so smug and over-the-top that the franchise was in danger of becoming a vehicle for one-liners and CGI explosions. To its credit, Die Another Day has some downright spectacular CGI explosions, and there are far worse Bond films out there (I'm looking at you, anything starring Timothy Dalton), but there are far better ones too.

Currently listening: "Simple Song," the Shins

Pyongyang Pikas Postgame: Season Recap

2012-01-06T12:59:00.001-08:00

The most hilarious thing about a four-team fantasy football league is that every team makes the playoffs. The regular season matters for about nothing. Sure, there's an attempt at seeding, such that the nominally best team in the league plays the nominally worst. But any team can pull a 2008 Detroit Lions, losing literally every game, then get hot at the right time and win it all.

Nothing quite so dramatic happened in the Pikas' fantasy league, but Zach's Beat Tom was close. Long occupying the number four spot on the ladder, Beat Tom had a late-season surge to make things interesting. BT beat the Pikas in Week 13, the last game of the regular season, to drop the Pikas to a losing record overall. But--in another amusing side effect of a four-man league--their 6-7 mark was enough to earn the #2 seed for the playoffs. (In retrospect, looking the the records going into the playoffs, it should have been immediately obvious what would happen. Only Tom's 2MuchJohnson4U had a winning record, an impressive 9-3-1.)

That was a double-edged sword for Pyongyang, though, as the surging Beat Tom claimed the #3 seed. In a couple of mid-December games that the Pikas would just as soon forget, Beat Tom blew out the Pikas 235-182. But the Pikas' season wasn't over yet: Christmas and New Years' weekends held the third-place consolation match against Josh's North Dakota Narwhals. On Christmas Eve, Aaron Rodgers (as usual) and Brandon Marshall had huge games, putting up 32 and 21 points. Cam Newton had 30 of his own, but the Pikas eked out an 8-point lead.

But playoff games last two weeks in fantasy-land, and third place wouldn't come so easily. The Pikas made their last stand on the first day of 2012. Their early games were marked by inconsistency, with 49ers running back Frank Gore scoring exactly zero points (a mere 9 yards on 7 carries) but Michael Turner having his best game of the season, putting together 172 yards and 2 touchdowns for a fantastic 29 points. It all came down to the last game of the season, a Giants-Cowboys contest that, in true fantasy fashion, I wouldn't have cared about at all but for fantasy.

The game started with the Pikas down 99-79, with one Pika (backup quarterback Eli Manning) and one Narwhal (tight end Jason Witten) to play. Eli, playing because the Packers were resting Aaron Rodgers, needed to outscore Witten by more than 12.

He scored 26 in a veritable Aaron Rodgers-esque clinic. Witten scored 6, and the Pikas claimed the third-place "honors" in the league.

Pikas final record: 6-7, 3rd place in playoffs

Pikas MVP: Aaron Rodgers, Green Bay Packers QB. No question here. Rodgers was the league's highest-scoring player despite sitting out the last week. The one week he scored under 20, it was shocking, and his best game was a mind-blowing 45 points.

It's been sometimes fun, sometimes stressful, and always enlightening running a fantasy team. It's also an excuse to drink bad beer and trash-talk your friends, which I've grown to appreciate is the real point of fantasy.

Currently listening: "Calamity Song," the Decemberists

Pyongyang Pikas Postgame: November Recap

2011-12-02T14:07:00.001-08:00

It's been a month of ups and downs for the Pikas, who won two out of their last four to go to 6-6 with one game left in the regular season.

Week 9 saw some strong efforts by a few Pikas, including quarterback Aaron Rodgers (30 points) and newly-healthy tight end Antonio Gates (15) to bring the score against Tom's 2MuchJohnson4U to 96-83 at the end of Sunday. Both teams had one player left to play: Pikas star running back Matt Forte needed to get no worse than 12 points fewer than 2MuchJohnson4U star running back LeSean McCoy to give the Pikas their first win over Tom's team. McCoy made it interesting, scoring an impressive 17 during the Monday night game, and even though Forte scored only 10, it was enough.

Final score: Pikas 106, 2MuchJohnson4U 100

Another close game followed in Week 10, but sadly it didn't go the Pikas' way. Many of the Pikas simply didn't show up in Week 10, with the wide receiver duo of Wes Welker and Mike Wallace only scoring a total of 12 points, and the usually stalwart Ravens defense scoring a miserable 1. The Pikas were down 87-64 heading into Monday night, where the Pikas played Aaron Rodgers at quarterback and Zach's Beat Tom team played Greg Jennings at wide receiver. Rodgers had a typically stellar night, racking up 4 touchdowns and a total of 28 points; sadly for the Pikas, one of those touchdowns was to Greg Jennings, and that made the difference in the game.

Final score: Beat Tom 96, Pikas 92

The Pikas were completely demolished in Week 11, scoring by far their lowest point total of the season. New recruit Brandon Marshall was supposed to bolster the receiving corps but scored no points at all. Worse for the Pikas, running back Fred Jackson, a key early-season acquisition, was injured during the game and his season finished. Once that was combined with three Narwhals players scoring more than 20 points each, the Pikas suffered a good old-fashioned blowout.

Final score: North Dakota Narwhals 128, Pikas 76

Fortunately, the Pikas righted the ship in Week 12 starting with an auspicious Thanksgiving Day. Quarterback Aaron Rodgers had his toughest matchup of the season but still score 20 points. The Ravens defense put on a clinic against the 49ers, piling up nine sacks and scoring 18; the only points the 49ers scored came off the foot of new Pikas kicker David Akers, who netted 9. Things fell into place even more nicely on Sunday, with Wes Welker bouncing back from two miserable weeks to get 22 points and Roddy White adding 18 of his own. 2MuchJohnson4U's last hope on Monday night was Jimmy Graham, the New Orleans tight end who is arguably the best in the league. Graham scored 20, as much as an owner could ever expect a tight end to score, but it wasn't quite enough.

Final score: Pikas 112, 2MuchJohnson4U 98. Pikas record: 6-6 (3-1 in division)

Only one final matchup with divisional rival Beat Tom remains before the playoffs!

Currently listening: "The Angels Hung Around," Rilo Kiley

3-Sentence Reviews: November Sweeps 2011

2011-11-23T13:47:00.001-08:00

Rather than reviewing television shows at the beginning of the season, this year I've waited until the November sweeps to see what survived, both in terms of my interest and the ratings.

The promise of "Steven Spielberg does dinosaurs on TV" was enough to draw me into Terra Nova, and a month or two in, there's not much keeping me there. Shows have tried very hard to claim the "spiritual successor to Lost" title and largely failed because they never learned the lesson that Lost was more about the characters than the setting or mythology. Dinosaurs, time travel, and mysterious antagonists are fine and good, but this show is going to need interesting characters besides Commander Taylor if it wants to survive.

It's been clear to me for some time that eventually, at some point, I would stop being able to bring myself to care about the psychological insecurities of doctors on House, and that point is now. Park and Adams are okay--and this season is much better than that disaster of a seventh season we just had to endure--but the show has been in decline since the end of the third season. With any luck, this eighth season will be the last, and the announcement of an end date will spark a return to form for the rest of the year.

Zooey Deschanel vehicle New Girl knows it's a Zooey Deschanel vehicle, and at least it's been true to its mission. While none of the characters are as interesting as Deschanel's Jess, the show has enough laugh-out-loud moments per episode that I'm still watching. Its biggest trap is going to be becoming too relationship-y; The Big Bang Theory went from excellent to awful when it became "geek Friends," and New Girl desperately needs to avoid becoming "quirk Friends".

That The Office has managed to keep itself afloat without Michael Scott says a lot for the quality of the writing and the rest of the ensemble. The old tone and character is still there, and the brilliant Ed Helms portrays boss-Andy just as engagingly as he did worker-Andy. My only reservation is new big-boss Robert California; instead of the comedic ineptitude that we're used to from the show, he gives us unsettling corporatism.

Points for my new favorite show of the year go to Person of Interest, a very CBS procedural starring ~~Jesus and Ben Linus~~ Jim Caviezel and Michael Emerson. It's disorienting but refreshing to hear Michael Emerson not lie whenever he talks, and if nobody has managed to become to spiritual successor to Lost yet, Caviezel's Mr. Reese may well have become the spiritual successor to Jack Bauer. I'm not sure I need the Detective Carter storyline, and we'll wait to judge the overarching Elias plot until the end of the season; for now, I'm just enjoying the weekly antics of Finch and Reese.

I'm a little angry at The Mentalist for (apparently) breaking the Megatron Rule; in keeping antagonist Red John alive, they've completely negated the impact of the show's best episode, last year's season finale. Maybe the show will finally move past Red John at some point. But even if it doesn't, it remains one of TV's best procedurals, with trademark deadpan, snarky tone, and one of the most memorable and likeable leading characters on TV.

Currently listening: "Congratulations," the Juliana Theory

Mylo Xyloto (and a Coldplay retrospective)

2011-11-04T15:29:00.000-07:00

I suppose I consider myself a Coldplay fan, though my road to Coldplay fandom is definitely the one less traveled by.

There are two sorts of Coldplay fans. The first one listened to Parachutes on repeat back in 2000, proclaiming it brilliant, and A Rush of Blood to the Head on repeat back in 2002, proclaiming it slightly less inspired but still wonderful. 2005 brought X&Y, and with it, a disliked new direction and a hated mainstream popularity. Fans of early Coldplay became Not Fans of later Coldplay, and even though Viva la Vida is inarguably the band's greatest achievement musically, critically, and commercially, they were long finished with the band by 2008.

Fortunately for Coldplay, the second sort of fan decided to show up circa Viva la Vida. This fan probably heard "Speed of Sound" a couple dozen times on the radio between May and October 2005--with maybe the occasional "Talk" or "Fix You" thrown in for good measure--and forgot about Coldplay, only be be inundated again three years later. "Viva la Vida" pervaded every aspect of media and pop culture for a summer, and it attracted an entirely new cohort of Coldplay devotees. For this second sort of fan, "Violet Hill" is more quintessentially Coldplay than "Clocks," and "Yellow" is a color, not a song.

Where was I in all of this? I was a bit young to know what Parachutes was when it was released, but by Rush of Blood, I'd caught on to the band's existence. The difference between me and the cool-kid early adopters was that I didn't actually like Rush of Blood, and I liked Parachutes even less when I went back and listened to it. It's not that I actively disliked it; early Coldplay simply occupies the "inoffensive but uninteresting" musical domain alongside electronica and classic rock.

It's a little odd, then, how eager I was to grab X&Y in 2005, and even more odd how much I liked it. I might be the only person on the planet who liked X&Y; everyone else had either abandoned Coldplay or not caught on to them yet. But even it lost its charm after a few years, and I was decidedly less interested in keeping up with the band immediately prior to Viva la Vida. I didn't know there was a new Coldplay album, and I didn't know that this "Viva la Vida" song I'd been bombarded with was theirs. But my mom vouched for the album, and I picked it up and enjoyed just about every thing about it."Viva la Vida" is a fine song, and its success in bringing new fans to Coldplay is a testament to its quality, but Viva la Vida succeeds on so many levels beyond just its title track that it's clearly the greatest thing the band has ever done.

But now it's 2011, and Coldplay has painted itself into a bit of a corner. They've released four albums, each consistently--even exponentially--better than the last. Is it fair to expect the fifth album to outdo Viva la Vida by the same margin that Viva la Vida outdid X&Y? Is it even possible? Viva la Vida is a legitimate magnum opus, the sort of album that's a ceiling on achievement for virtually any band out there. Realistically, the best that Coldplay fans could expect was that they would move laterally along that ceiling for their fifth album, giving us an album that's equally good but that explores different musical territory.

And for a brief, shining moment, it looked like we might get it. The second single from the still-mysterious Mylo Xyloto was a song called "Paradise," and we knew Coldplay had it in them. Forget "Viva la Vida"--forget Viva la Vida, for that matter; this was clearly the the greatest thing the band has ever done. "Paradise" is not only the best song in Coldplay's discography, it's the greatest thing to have come out of the pop/rock mainstream this decade, and it's an example to the rest of the genre what contemporary mainstream pop/rock can and ought to be. There's lavish orchestration, but not for a second does it sound overproduced; the secret is that the production leaves Chris Martin's voice alone and lets him just sing, displaying both his trademark falsetto and his increasingly competent tenor. There are interesting melodic devices: major/minor inversions, octave jumps, modal and pentatonic themes. And the hook draws you in, and despite being played a few too many times, never actually overstays its welcome.

Unfortunately--perhaps predictably--the rest of Mylo Xyloto can't quite live up to "Paradise". Little of it is actually bad, instead creating a confused jumble of strange decisions. Two of the strangest are the concept and the ventures into some decidedly 2011 genres.

Apparently Mylo Xyloto is in fact a concept album, an urban-dystopian love story. While songs like "Us Against the World" and especially "Major Minus" make the 1984 influence all too clear, that the album is supposed to tell a coherent story can really only be deduced once you know the concept is supposed to be there. There are clues here and there, and points to Coldplay for giving the story a happy ending, but like Halloween costumes, the best concept albums are the ones that require the least explanation.

Aside from the (supposed) concept, Mylo Xyloto is at its weirdest (but not necessarily its worst) when it tries to stray too far from Coldplay and too much into "things you would hear on the radio in 2011". "Every Teardrop is a Waterfall" sounds like it wants to be a collaboration with either Lady Gaga (judging from its first thirty seconds of dance-poppiness) or Rebecca Black ("I turn the music up, I got my records on/ I shut the world outside until the lights come on") but is a pretty decent song once you forgive it that. "Princess of China" ~~sounds like it should be~~ is a collaboration with Rihanna, which is one of the most perplexing musical crossovers of the century, but again not exactly bad if you're into that sort of thing.

The worst moments of the album have to be its interspersed ballads, which hit more like musical roadblocks than emotional weights. "Us Against the World" in particular is an unfortunate flirtation of Martin with the dregs of his vocal register, and "Up With the Birds" is as blandly generic a way to end the album as could probably be conceived.

It's not all bad outside "Paradise": both "Hurts Like Heaven" and "Charlie Brown" are fine songs. Incidentally, they're the songs that come immediately before and immediately after "Paradise," which brings up an interesting point. Does "Paradise" polarize the rest of the album; does it make the mediocre songs seem relatively better and the tepid to bad songs seem relatively worse? The best way to answer this question is to make your very own Mylo Xyloto remix:

Make a playlist that contains all of the songs on Mylo Xyloto.
Delete "Paradise".
Listen to the playlist.

How does it sound? There's little you don't want to listen to, but more importantly, there's little to nothing that gets you excited about it.

Mylo Xyloto proves that Coldplay has come a long way in the last decade. They're making sounds, exploring styles, and covering entirely different musical spectra than they would have dared to in the early 2000s. However, in some sort of ironic way, Mylo Xyloto is the most Parachutes-y album since Parachutes. It has more definitely good tracks and more definitely bad tracks, but the bulk of the album is back to "inoffensive but uninteresting," familiar ground indeed for Coldplay.

Currently listening: "New Frame of Mind," Kathryn Calder

Pyongyang Pikas Postgame: Week 8 and Midseason Analysis

2011-11-01T12:11:00.000-07:00

The Pikas were destined to lose their Week 8 game from before the season even started, when the Pyongyang front office noticed "there sure are a lot of players on bye in Week 8." With Aaron Rodgers, Michael Turner, and Matt Forte not playing, an average of 58 points evaporated from the Pikas scorecard, and it proved impossible to fill the holes.

With backup quarterback Philip Rivers not producing this entire season, the Pikas turned to the free agent market to replace Rodgers, and the best option available was Eli Manning. Eli, to his credit, threw together 21 fantasy points, suggesting that he has a future as Rodgers' backup on the Pyongyang bench. The resurgent Frank Gore had a nearly Matt Forte-esque game, earning 19 points, but Chris Johnson once again derailed the Pikas at running back, scoring only 3. (Fortunately for the Pikas, Chris Johnson should never have to start again.)

At wide receiver, neither Mike Wallace nor Wes Welker seemed interested in playing against each other's team, with the Steelers/Patriots game only netting the Pikas 10 points between the two. One bright spot was Antonio Gates at tight end; despite having to come back from injury and a lackluster Phillip Rivers throwing to him, Gates looked good and scored respectably.

But against Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson scoring 27 points each, the Pikas' replacement-filled roster really couldn't compete, and they suffered their fourth loss of the year.

Final score: North Dakota Narwhals 129, Pikas 95 Pikas record: 4-4 (3-0 in division)

With any luck, and maybe some help from a Calvin Johnson bye, the Pikas will break the "Tom's Team" curse next week and finally defeat 2MuchJohnson4U.

Now that it's the middle of the season, what's working and what's not on the Pikas roster is finally taking shape.

Quarterback: Aaron Rodgers has been the Pikas' most consistent and most prolific scorer, never slipping below 20 and averaging 26. He's the league's highest-scoring player in terms of points per game; because he's already had a bye, barring a disastrous injury, there won't be a reason to start a quarterback besides Rodgers for the rest of the season. It's a good thing, because backup Philip Rivers hasn't impressed at all this season. At other positions, or for other teams, it makes sense to have a backup in case of bad matchups. Rodgers has shown that there is no bad matchup against him.

Running back: RB has turned into a strength for the Pikas, though the depth chart looks a little different than it did in the preseason. At the beginning of the season, the Pikas started Chris Johnson, Frank Gore, and Michael Turner, with Matt Forte as a nice bench option in case of an injury, bye, or bad matchup. But when Johnson proved totally ineffective, and Gore sustained an injury, the Pikas were forced to look elsewhere. Simultaneously, though, Matt Forte decided to have a breakout season, and the Pikas were able to make a key acquisition of Fred Jackson. Now, the Pikas start Jackson (the league's #2 scorer in terms of points per game), Forte (#5), and Turner (#6), with Gore as the bench option now that he's healthy and playing like he's supposed to.

Wide receiver: Falcons star Roddy White was supposed to be the Pikas standout at WR with Mike Wallace backing him up. They're a fine combination, with White disappointing a little but Wallace scoring in the league's top five wide receivers. But the Pikas got an unexpected boon early in the season when Tom's team released Wes Welker, who has had a solid season interspersed with a couple of monstrous games to become the league's #2 wide receiver. The Pikas plan going forward is to start wide receiver by committee: choose the two most promising of those three in any given week.

Tight end: TE has been one of the few real disappointments for the Pikas so far. Starter Antonio Gates missed most of the first half of the season due to injury; backup Jermichael Finley, taking away one colossal 26-point performance, has been a little flat. The good news is that Gates is healthy and playing like the athlete he is, but if any doubt lingers, it's that Philip Rivers' season has been considerably less than impressive. Gates is a playmaker catching the football, but he needs a playmaker throwing the football to be effective.

Kicker: This is a tough position to analyze in fantasy because there's so much variance, but Patriots kicker Stephen Gostkowski has been fine so far. An offense that gets a lot of yards needs a lot of placekicks, either from field goals or PATs, and Gostkowski has done his job well.

Defense/Special Teams: The Ravens defense can do it all: prevent a team from scoring, force fumbles, get a half-dozen sacks per game. It's a fun defense to watch, with (alleged) murderer Ray Lewis leading the way and getting fired up about all sorts of things.

Outlook: The Pikas have a roster built to win football games. As long as everyone does their part, shows up each week, and doesn't get hurt, Pyongyang is a legitimate title contender.

Currently listening: "Younger Than We've Ever Been," Kathryn Calder

Pyongyang Pikas Postgame: Weeks 6 and 7

2011-10-25T13:34:00.000-07:00

After a frustrating loss to Tom's 2MuchJohnson4U in Week 6, the Pikas rebounded to reclaim a winning record with a victory over Zach's Beat Tom in Week 7.

The Pikas are now 0-2 against Calvin Johnson and company, losing to Tom's team in Week 3 by 4 points and in Week 6 by 5 points. In Week 3, the loss came down to a bad decision to bench Aaron Rodgers; in Week 6, the Pikas could have started Frank Gore over Matt Forte, or Mike Wallace over Roddy White, or the Bears D/ST over the Ravens, and they would have pulled out the victory. The Pikas front office never seriously considered any of those moves, though, and the Pikas actually had the lead going into the Monday night game.

Monday night turned into the most amusing construct of fantasy football yet. Say the fantasy team you're playing against starts a certain defense; we'll call it the Jets defense. And say the Jets are playing a certain offense; we'll call it the Dolphins. Naturally, you want the Dolphins to score a lot of points, so that the Jets defense loses fantasy points, and you win. But at some point, if the Jets defense is good enough (and oh, is it), the 10 points for a shutout start looking a whole lot better than the flood of points they could score if they yield a couple of field goals but rack up some sacks and turnovers along the way.

That's the situation the Pikas faced on Monday night of Week 6. A comfortable 15-point lead quickly turned into a point short of a tie as the Jets defense picked up a quick fumble return for a touchdown--but that would have been okay, assuming the Dolphins offense scored any touchdowns at all. Frankly, that would have been even have been okay assuming the Dolphins did literally nothing else on offense. It would have been better for the Pikas had the Dolphins just swum away from the game and taken knees on every play.

But they didn't. They tried--and failed--to score more points, and the Jets defense was all too happy to scoop up the football three more times on those failed attempts. The Jets D/ST turned into 2MuchJohnson4U's biggest scorer, and the Pikas fell to .500 on the season.

Final score: 2MuchJohnson4U 115, Pikas 110

Fortunately, in Week 7, the Pikas found their way to their favorite patch of fresh grass: Zach's Beat Tom team. Beat Tom has been kind to the Pikas so far, and Week 7 was no exception. Aaron Rodgers led the effort with 25 fantasy points, but it wasn't a single-player effort: of the Pikas' nine players, six scored 11 points or more, and Jermichael Finley at tight end had a respectable 7. A backup kicker (with New England's Stephen Gostkowski on bye) managed only 3, but kickers in this league are notoriously swingy.

The sole disappointment was early-season goat Chris Johnson, who was forced to start because new favorite Fred Jackson was on bye. He hasn't picked his game up at all, cobbling together a mere 3 points. Fortunately, it didn't hurt the Pikas in Week 7--but it could pose a problem in Week 8.

Beat Tom tried to make things interesting in the late games, with New Orleans wide receiver Marques Colston coming back from injury to score 21 points, but it was too little, too late. And although the Ravens suffered a pretty humiliating defeat at the hands of the Jacksonville Jaguars, their defense was still good for 11 points to end the week's action.

Final score: Pikas 112, Beat Tom 87 Current record: 4-3 (3-0 in division)

The Pikas are not looking forward to Week 8. Five of their players have byes, including the league's best quarterback (Aaron Rodgers) and best running back (Matt Forte). Fortunately, the league's second-best wide receiver (Wes Welker) and second-best running back (Fred Jackson) have gathered enough fresh grass for the time being and are back in action this week. Hopefully that will be enough to go up two games to one in the season series against the North Dakota Narwhals.

Currently listening: "Santa Fe," Beirut

Conference Chronicle: 2011 AIChE Annual Meeting

2011-10-21T14:43:00.000-07:00

One of the most ridiculous parts of grad school--or any job that involves research, I suppose--is the conference, where you shuttle yourself and your flash drive around the country and pretend like you've broken some academic ground. It's sort of like vacation, in that you get to go to new and exotic locations, except that your employer is paying for it, so you feel a little guilty about having too good a time. Also, it's usually colder than real vacation.

That was certainly the case in Minneapolis last week, where I found myself for less than 48 hours in the name of promoting plasma medicine. And I was determined to make those 48 hours count.

October 15, 2011
9:30 pm (PDT), Berkeley CA: BART doesn't run on Sunday before 8 am. This is a Big Problem. My flight to Los Angeles (a natural layover for a flight to Minneapolis) leaves Oakland at 9:30, so I need to be at Oakland by 8:30 am at the earliest. I scour Google Maps for about half an hour and finally concede that my best option is to take the 6:45 am 1 bus.

October 16, 2011
7:30 am, Oakland CA: International Boulevard in Oakland lives up to its name.

8:30 am: I am stuck behind six Chilean guys in the TSA line at the Oakland airport. There are plenty of TSA personnel, but instead of opening up more lines, TSA decides they need to be rolling three deep at every check point.

11:30 am, Los Angeles CA: LAX doesn't make any sense. This airport is completely incomprehensible. Say what you will about ATL, but at least it's possible to navigate. I land in Terminal 5 and apparently have to go to Terminal 6. The catch? Terminal 5 does not connect to Terminal 6. I get on a shuttle bus that drives around a few tarmacs and really hope the driver knows what he's doing.

11:33 am: Terminal 6 looks like a postmodern art installation. There are exposed rafters, insulation hanging from the ceiling, and approximately two signs to direct me to my gate.

6:53 pm (CDT), Minneapolis MN: Minneapolis has pleasantly surprised me. Its light rail is a sensible, straightforward, and cheap way to get from its airport to its downtown. The only other cities I know of that can claim that are San Francisco (which charges an arbitrary $4 for the privilege of going to the airport), Washington (which gives you the extra added adventure of decoding this), and Atlanta (which takes you through a stretch of the city you might call "the hood").

7:48 pm: I arrive at the Minneapolis Convention Center, all ready to print my badge. The "thank you for registering email" told me "The registration area will be open beginning at 7:30 AM on Sunday, October 16." Anything in there about it closing? Nope. So imagine my surprise to find that the registration is closed for the evening and won't reopen until the next day at 7 am.

8:23 pm: For the amount of money ~~I'm~~ my department is paying for me to stay at this Radisson, it damn well better have free internet. It does, but its bandwidth is straight out of 1998. I manage to cobble together about an hour's worth of Skype with my girlfriend, and it's sort of lucky that she has to leave, because I'm not sure how much more that poor connection could have handled.

October 17, 2011
6:01 am: I'm awake this early for only the second time this year.

7:20 am: It's 41 degrees outside. It's October. What's wrong with this picture? Luckily, I unearthed a Starbucks gift card from the depths of my desk drawer before I left. It hasn't run out yet, which is fortunate, because "cold and early" is a combination that pretty much begs for coffee.

8:30 am: My session at the conference starts. There are twelve people here, including two session chairs and seven speakers. Frankly, that's about three more than I expected to show up.

8:55 am: I chat about plasma for a while.

12:47 pm: Back in my hotel room, eating a Cuban sandwich, watching some trashy daytime TV. Not necessarily wearing pants. Living the dream. But it is pretty cool that the view from my lucky-thirteenth floor room looks like this:

2:23 pm: Okay, I think. Gave a talk, sat through the rest of my session, went to a plenary... sounds like enough conference to me. I decide to check out the Mall of America. It's as ridiculous as I could have hoped.

Yes, there really is a roller coaster in the middle of this mall.

This turf war has to be intentional.

Approximately fifteen years ago, it would have been literally impossible to remove me from here.

7:01 pm: I head down to the waterfront to see if I can get an Obligatory River Shot of the Mississippi. I notice a strange phenomenon: there's an abundance of people wearing Packers jerseys in this city. It's not as intense a rivalry as, say, Packers/Bears, but the Packers and Vikings are not exactly best friends either. Would you expect to walk around Philadelphia on game day and see more Giants than Eagles jerseys?

7:03 pm: Perplexed though I am, I do manage to see the Mighty Mississippi at sunset.

October 18, 2011
8:39 am: In my first serious attempt to navigate the Minneapolis Skyway, I get completely lost. Turns out "Macy's" is not nearly as descriptive a landmark as "the intersection of 8th Street and 1st Avenue".

11:06 am: I've managed to get un-lost and ride back to the airport. I get the opportunity to gate check my bag, which is a little like opening a cereal box and getting two prizes, or pressing the "up" button on an elevator and having the doors immediately open. You reduce your hassle by about 50% and save $20 at the same time!

12:56 pm (PDT), Phoenix AZ: Phoenix is probably the second-most logical connection city for my route, after Los Angeles. This airport sucks a lot less, but I manage to spend seven dollars on this:

Notice 1) the halfhearted-at-best attempt at slicing and 2) the crust tumor growing from the pizza's bottom-left. What you can't notice is the two minutes of under-cooking.

3:30 pm, Oakland CA: I arrive back in Oakland, exactly on time, which is a feat previously unaccomplished by US Airways.

Currently listening: "Fletcher," Blitzen Trapper

Pyongyang Pikas Pastgame: Week 5

2011-10-14T13:53:00.000-07:00

Week 5 delivered a thrilling matchup between the Pikas and Josh's team, the newly christened North Dakota Narwhals. With the league-leading Ravens defense on a bye this week, the Pikas drafted the New York Giants defense based solely on an ESPN projection, but other than that, the Pikas roster featured all of its starters.

After an astounding Week 4, the Pikas were virtually guaranteed to regress a little. Aaron Rodgers' 45 points in Week 4 were clearly unsustainable, but a Sunday night effort of 23 points was nothing to complain about. In the same Sunday night game, Roddy White (11), Michael Turner (11), and Jermichael Finley (6) all underperformed a little but not enough to doom the Pikas. Wes Welker's 12 landed him in the same "not a disappointment but not a breakout" spot. And the draftee Giants defense was mediocre at best, piling up 6 sacks but allowing 36 points to claim a total of 6 fantasy points.

Only a couple of Pikas had breakout weeks: Stephen Gostkowski turned in a whopping 13 at the kicker position, and early-season acquisition Fred Jackson continued to deliver at running back with 25 points.

While the Pikas played consistent (if not outstanding) football throughout their roster, the Narwhals had some players falter--and one truly memorable performance to balance them out. In three wide receiver slots, the Narwhals combined for a mere 22 points, and running back Darren Sproles was a mild disappointment at 9. But Adrian Peterson once again had his day, raking in 30 points, 22 of them coming in the first quarter alone.

Peterson's performance was so strong that the Narwhals actually led the Pikas entering the Monday night game, but the Pikas had one more weapon: running back Matt Forte, coming off a career day last week. The stakes were high, and the math was straightforward: if Forte could run for at least 100 yards, the Pikas could carry the day. It was demanding but not impossible, and if Forte could reach the end zone at least once, the numbers became a lot more relaxed.

Forte never scored his touchdown, but he did rush for 116 yards (and threw in 35 receiving yards for good measure) to secure the victory for the Pikas.

Final score: Pikas 121, Narwhals 116 Pikas record: 3-2 (2-0 in division)

In Week 6, the Pikas play the ever-formidable 2MuchJohnson4U, the newest moniker of Tom's team, highlighting the remarkable ability of Calvin Johnson to catch footballs. The ESPN projection has the Pikas ahead, but Johnson--along with Tom Brady and LeSean McCoy--are sure to keep things interesting.

Currently listening: "Solid," the Dandy Warhols

Pyongyang Pikas Postgame: Week 4

2011-10-05T09:20:00.000-07:00

This is what the Pikas are capable of.

Weeks 2 and 3 saw consecutive losses for the Pikas, and they desperately needed a win in Week 4 to get the season back on track. They got it.

Last Sunday's early afternoon games gave the Pikas a quick start, with Matt Forte and new acquisition Fred Jackson combining for 43 points at running back. Mike Wallace was less impressive--but still not a complete disappointment--at 7. Going into the late afternoon games, the Pikas had a slim lead, one that could be erased if Darren McFadden or Ryan Mathews had a breakout game.

They could have had two breakout games each, and it wouldn't have mattered. Jermichael Finley didn't repeat his stunning Week 3 performance, netting the Pikas only 2 points, but everything else clicked at every position. Wes Welker continued to dominate at wide receiver, the Seahawks defense contributed to the effort by giving Michael Turner a few easy touchdowns, and Patriots kicker Steven Gostkowski was solid too.

But this week's game was so lopsided that all of the above players could have sat on the bench, and the Pikas still would not have lost. Aaron Rodgers did it all: 400 passing yards including 4 touchdowns, 2 rushing touchdowns, and a colossal 45 fantasy points (I promise never to bench you again!). And the Ravens defense, fully recovered from its Week 2 stumble, racked up 3 defensive touchdowns coming off an interception, 3 fumble recoveries and 2 sacks. It led the grossly overrated Mark Sanchez to dominate the Bad Quarterbacks League standings in Week 4, and it cemented the Ravens defense as football's--or at least fantasy's--best defense.

Final score: Pikas 178, Beat Tom 77. Pikas record: 2-2 (2-0 in division; perhaps I should play Beat Tom every week)

Sadly for me, the Ravens defense gets a bye this week, so the Pikas will have to combat Josh's Team entirely on the strength of their offense. The projection is for a healthy Pikas win; the past history with Josh's Team suggests otherwise. We'll see what happens in Sunday's rematch.

Currently listening: "Don't Carry It All," the Decemberists

Pyongyang Pikas Postgame: Weeks 2 and 3

2011-09-29T12:04:00.000-07:00

It's been a tough couple of weeks for the Pikas. After a strong start in Week 1, the Pikas have lost back-to-back matchups.

Week 2 saw the Pikas matched against Josh's Team, and it was a disaster from the outset. Josh's Team showed up much stronger than they had in Week 1--and the Pikas were apparently busy gathering fresh grass to dry. It was one of those blowouts so disastrous that literally no combination of players among my starters and bench would have given me the win. Aaron Rodgers held up his end, and Michael Turner turned in a nice rushing performance against the Eagles, but it wasn't enough. Chris Johnson was weak enough at running back for a second straight week that he earned a ticket to the bench for Week 3. Antonio Gates earned literally zero points at tight end, and somehow the vaunted Ravens defense pulled off a negative score.

Final score: Josh's Team 138, Pikas 97

Week 3 was closer, and things could have turned the Pikas' way at any time, but Tom's Breesus Christ edged out the win. This one was entirely on my bench management; one better choice at any of a few positions would have given me the game. Aaron Rodgers, who had reliably scored 20+ points in both of the first two games, was "projected" to earn fewer points than my backup quarterback, Phillip Rivers--and that made sense; Rodgers was facing the competent Bears defense, while Rivers had the much more favorable matchup against the Chiefs.

It didn't matter--Rivers scored a mere 6 fantasy points owing to a skewed stat line of 2 interceptions and no touchdown passes. Rodgers scored a consistent 21 points that I wasn't around to collect. Wes Welker raked in a monstrous 34, but I never strongly considered starting him over Roddy White (14) and Mike Wallace (20) at wide receiver. And based on another ESPN projection, the Pikas played entirely the wrong kicker--Josh Brown scored 1, while Steven Gostkowski hammered out 7 on the bench.

Week 3 wasn't as bleak as week 2, with several Pikas starters turning in solid performances. Mike Wallace's brilliance was outdone only by Jermichael Finley's 26-point fluke at tight end. And the Ravens defense was back in form, piling up five sacks, two turnovers, and once defensive touchdown, scoring 20 fantasy points.

Final score: Breesus Christ 103, Pikas 99 Pikas record: 1-2 (1-0 in division)

Week 4 features a slightly revamped Pikas offense, benching both Johnson and Frank Gore at running back in favor of new acquisition Fred Jackson, and starting Welker at receiver in place of Roddy White to take some eggs out of the Atlanta basket. I'm projected to lose by 14, but my projected victories in Weeks 2 and 3 didn't actually project much of anything, so there remains hope.

Currently listening: "The Authority Song," Jimmy Eat World

Pyongyang Pikas Postgame: Week 1

2011-09-13T18:11:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago, my friends decided to start a fantasy football league. Not knowing the first thing about the NFL, I of course decided to join, joking that I was going to make a team entirely composed of former Georgia Tech and current Falcons players. The draft came, and luckily ESPN's projections were around to let me know how bad an idea that would have been (though I did pick up both Roddy White and Michael Turner). If you're interested, you can check out my full roster.

The most critical part, of course, was what to name the team. After some consultation with friends, I decided I liked the irony of picking a location where American football was incredibly unlikely to be played combined with a mascot that was about as unassuming as UC Santa Cruz's. Thus were born the Pyongyang Pikas (the alliteration is a nice bonus).

My first matchup was against my roommate Zach, at the helm of the imaginatively named "Beat Tom". (His stated goal is, regardless of final record, to beat our friend Tom's score every week.) The Thursday night season kickoff proved to be a fantastic start to the Pikas' season, with Green Bay quarterback (and Cal alumnus) Aaron Rodgers scoring 19 points before halftime. Rodgers was so solid that at one point, my projected total for the weekend was an improbable 155 points, but on the shoulders of some poor running performances, that was not meant to be.

In the draft, my first pick was a fellow named Chris Johnson, running back for the Tennessee Titans. I picked him first not because I'd ever heard of him (much less knew him to be good), but because ESPN.com told me to.

Thanks, guys.

Mr. Johnson, "projected" to have something crazy like 19 points, got me a whopping 4. You know something is wrong when your kicker (nothing against the St. Louis Rams' Mr. Brown) outscores your first-round draft pick. Frank Gore didn't do much better at 6.

I played the Bears defense/special teams, which between Brian Urlacher and an amazing kick return unit, seemed like a solid bet. The odd part was that I started my two Falcons offensive players against them, setting up a weird hedge that actually ended up scoring me 35 points. The Bears D/ST, oddly enough, ended up as my second-highest scoring player behind Rodgers.

So, after a stellar performance at quarterback and on defense, some passable scores at wide receiver and tight end (#unintentionalsportspun), and not much at all out of my running backs, Sunday ended with me having gotten all the points I was going to get and holding a 17-point lead over Beat Tom. The match was far from over, as Zach still had a trump card in the form of the Raiders' Darren McFadden, a star running back on a not-so-terrific team. (Zach's logic is that he likes playing good players on awful teams because all the offense is likely to come from that guy, and that reasoning is making more and more sense from a fantasy perspective.)

I watched the Monday Night Football game between the Broncos and the Raiders, not because I care at all about either of those teams, but merely because I wanted to see McFadden not score any points. When the Broncos had the ball, I didn't care if they scored or not--I just needed them to take as much time as they could doing whatever they were doing. And when Oakland had the ball, I didn't care if they scored or not either--I just wanted the plays to involve anyone but McFadden. It's an odd way to watch a football game, but it made me realize exactly how golden fantasy football is to the NFL because it makes you glued to the television for games that you otherwise wouldn't know existed.

McFadden had a fine first half and was on pace to score just under the 18 points he needed to turn Beat Tom into Beat Matt for a week. That was fine. Then came a mammoth run in the third quarter, with McFadden stepping out of bounds literally at the 1-yard line. One more yard, and his touchdown windfall would have sunk my team. But fortunately for the Pikas, the Raiders did the remainder of their scoring--and most of the rest of their offense--without McFadden, and I scraped by with a 2-point win.

Final score: Pikas 95, Beat Tom 93. Pikas record: 1-0 (1-0 in division).

Check back next week to hear about my first match with Josh's Team (apparently he hasn't gotten around to naming it yet). I'm "projected" to win by 17 points, but as they say (and as I very nearly learned the hard way this week), there's a reason they play all the games.

Currently listening: "Might Find it Cheap," Blitzen Trapper

3-Sentence Reviews: Good New-ish Music

2011-08-29T20:02:00.001-07:00

Pickin' Up the Pieces by Fitz and the Tantrums, which comes recommended courtesy of my dad, is much less indie than most things I listen to--not that there's anything wrong with that! It's '70s R&B meets Broken Bells by way of Cee Lo Green and refreshingly well produced compared with many of the mainstays of the 2011 indie circuit. Timelessly angry lyrics and creative, unconventional instrumentation combine to create an album that fans of a dozen different genres can agree on.

We've waited quite a long time for the follow-up to Among the Oak and Ash's self-titled album, and Devil Ship finally sailed this month. On a whole, it's a little weaker than the self-titled debut, suffering from shaky production in a few spots and sorely missing Garrison Starr's harmonies. But it still has its standout tracks ("Billy and the Good Girl," "Devil Ship"), and it's good to know that Josh Joplin's mission of preserving the Appalachian music tradition continues.

The rebirth of Paste Magazine as an electronic publication has been an unprecedented success, and one of many things it's done well has been to preserve its "Best of What's Next" issue. Invoking comparisons to both Stars and Eisley, it made Kopecky Family Band seem like a can't-miss--and the music did not disappoint. Strangely, The Disaster is at its worst when Kelsey Kopecky channels her inner Amy Millan ("Birds" halts the middle of the album like a speed bump), but the ambitious arrangements and excellent vocal performances on "God and Me" and "Red Devil" make Kopecky Family Band one of my favorite discoveries of 2011 so far.

I have Stephanie to thank for introducing me to Vespers, whose Tell Your Mama contains some darn fine indie folk. A family-ish outfit reminiscent of Eisley, Vespers aren't as deep vocally or experienced musically, but that should improve over time for the young band. Vespers are at their best when they make the most of their myriad guitar alternatives (banjo, ukelele, and mandolin at the very least) and when they're unabashedly bluegrassy about their indie folk with a Nashville flavor.

Another offering from Paste's "Best of What's Next," and one I was much more surprised that I liked, was The Bright Light Social Hour's self-titled album. Paste promised me their music was for fans of Franz Ferdinand and the Killers (which I am, if a little distantly), and the comparison is apt if a little misleading. Most of the album sounds like it could comprise the soundtrack to a sports video game or a slightly-more-musically-savvy-than-average fraternity, and it's a little unclear why half the songs are interspersed with Spanish non sequiturs, but it's at least a nice change of pace--and potentially much better than that.

Currently listening: "Love the Way You Walk Away," Blitzen Trapper

Awesome things my new phone can do

2011-08-13T19:43:00.000-07:00

For almost two and a half years, my G1 was my favorite toy. It came with some serious history: the G1 was the first-ever Android phone, when the thought of Google's first OS was so novel that it earned the nickname "the Google phone". But as the years wore on, my phone grew increasingly geriatric. I'm pretty sure it actually spied on me, because the more intent I became on replacing it, the clunkier it got. About a month ago, I broke down and bought what has quickly become my new favorite toy, the HTC Sensation. I'm convinced this phone runs on equal parts Taiwanese engineering brilliance and magic. This phone:

Runs the Urbanspoon app. I've actually been waiting for almost three years for a phone that does this. I'm notoriously bad at picking restaurants, so Urbanspoon might have been the first thing I installed when I got the phone working.

Allows me to beat you at Words With Friends. When the Android market told me that devices running Android 1.6 could run Words With Friends, it was lying. I think what it was trying to say was "grab your chisel and a handful of pebbles and make your own lettery tiles." Wordfeud is a much better pseudo-Scrabble; its interface is cleaner and less gimmicky, it incorporates native Android features better, and it won't steal your soul because it's not made by Zynga. But in Wordfeud, I can only beat you if you're running Android too. Words With Friends is indiscriminate! (Yep, this is a challenge: I'm Pavalavavalavich on there if you're up for it.)

Can stream all of my music from anywhere in the world. This is mind-blowing. Via Google Music, I can upload all of the music that I own to Google's big hard drive in the sky, then listen to it, on demand, whenever and wherever I want to. This has completely obsoleted my iPod. (If anyone wants one--and you do--I have three invites left.)

Streams all my podcasts too. Podcasts are just RSS feeds anyway, so all it's taken to make phone-USB syncing a thing of the past is an RSS reader with an audio playback codec written into it.

Automatically adjusts its screen brightness. Such an obvious, but entirely novel, functionality. If it's bright outside, the screen gets brighter so you can actually read it. If it's dark, the screen dims to save battery. Phones have had front-facing cameras since before the Motorola Razr was cool, so why not put them to use?

Connects to Wi-Fi without destroying its battery. 4G is really, really solid--but it's incredibly satisfying to download an application update in a matter of seconds.

It's true that I lost a little hipster cred in upgrading from the vintage, truly open-source option to the new and shiny one. It was worth it.

Currently listening: "20 Years," the Civil Wars

A Dance With Dragons, Finally

2011-07-20T22:44:00.000-07:00

Have you ever waited six years for anything?

A college freshman waits less time to earn a degree. A defeated presidential hopeful, for his next run at the White House. An underdog Olympic medalist, for a chance to show the world that her triumph was no fluke. But six years is exactly what fans of George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire epic have had to endure since the release of the fourth book in the series, A Feast for Crows. Worse, due to the narrative choices that Mr. Martin made (not necessarily bad ones), this is the first we've seen of some of the series' most compelling characters since the third book, 2000's A Storm of Swords.

ASoIaF is the best fantasy fiction currently being written (though some of Brandon Sanderson's stuff comes close). That said, the series has lagged a little in its more recent volumes: A Feast for Crows is the slowest and least interesting book in the series, and Dance is only slightly better. (Its proximity to the first season of the excellent HBO adaptation only served to contrast it to the fast-paced, at-times shocking first book.) But, as many a fan has pointed out, mediocre George RR Martin is better than nearly everything else out there.

More than half of Dance is devoted to just three characters: Jon Snow, Tyrion, and Daenerys. Jon has always been among my favorite characters, so it was a welcome sight to see him commanding about a fifth of Dance. And of the book's three "main characters," Jon's chapters are definitely the best. There's a sense of progress throughout, from when Jon beheads his old rival Janos Slynt, through his gradual peacemaking with the wildlings and re-establishment of the garrisons along the Wall, to his climactic scene in Castle Black rallying the wildling chiefs to march against Winterfell.

Speaking of Winterfell, why not make a battle at Winterfell the climactic scene in the book? It would have touched the stories of plenty of POV characters--not only Jon but also Asha, Davos, Theon, and Melisandre--and a massive, pitched battle would have been exactly what the book needed to cram some excitement into its last quarter. Also, even though the Bastard of the Dreadfort claims it, I doubt very much that Stannis is dead.

The big cliffhanger to Jon's story is that he maybe, possibly, could be dead. He's not. His story isn't finished yet, his destiny not fulfilled. And without Jon, we would have no narrator to describe the events at the Wall and the looming battle with the Others. Plus, you can't set up a march against the Boltons at the head of three thousand wildlings and Tormund Giantsbane by your side and not deliver on it. (Also, Tormund Giantsbane for best minor character? I vote yes.)

Unfortunately, the rest of the "main character" chapters aren't as good as Jon's. Daenerys has admittedly never been my favorite character--which is increasingly a bad way of looking at the series--but at least her chapters in previous books have constituted a sort of travelogue, a way of getting some insight into the rest of the world beyond Westeros.

Even that grinds to a halt in Dance. After relatively brisk stays in Pentos, the Dothraki Sea, and Astapor, we find Daenerys settling herself into Meereenese politics. It would be a fine story if it were told by itself. But as a handful of chapters in the overarching plot, it doesn't work. Dany is smitten with a mercenary captain (whom we don't care about because he was just introduced in this book), betrothed to a local noble (whom we don't care about because he was just introduced in this book), attended on by a different local noble (whom we don't care about because he was just introduced in this book), and the list goes on.

All of this is mighty far away from Westeros, which makes it really difficult to become invested in. One of the many reasons that ASoIaF is so compelling is that Westeros is so very nearly like our own world that there's a sense of proximity to it. The cultures, customs, and names of the Westerosi are vaguely familiar in a way that makes them seem more human than most other fantasy authors' characters.

But Ghis, Slaver's Bay, and Valyria are distant and bizarre. Mr. Martin succeeds in creating a foreign, almost alien, culture that's intriguing--but at the price of removing our attachment to it. Virtually every Daenerys chapter in Dance feels like a speed bump in the book, distracting our attention from the characters and places we've thought so much about over the last fifteen years. If those speed bumps meant that Daenerys were about to get back on the highway of the main plot, that would be fine. But what does she have to show for her months in Meereen and her chapters in Dance? A trio of feral dragons and a marriage to a man who is probably out to kill her.

With Daenerys planted firmly on the throne of Meereen, it falls to Tyrion to be our tour guide through Essos, but our beloved dwarf would rather brood on his past than point out landmarks. Yes, you shot your father Tywin with a crossbow while he was on the toilet. We read all about it in A Storm of Swords. We understand that your feelings about it are mixed and that it's constantly on your mind. That does not mean we need to read about it in every one of your many, many chapters in Dance.

Nor do we need to read about you choking Shae with her jewelry or your obsession with finding Tysha or how much wine you've had to drink or if you were winning or losing at cyvasse. Every Tyrion chapter can be reduced to some combination of those thoughts, and after three or four iterations of it, it ceases to be interesting. Tyrion's personality and occasional encounters with other branches of the plot and POV characters save his story from becoming a complete trainwreck--but barely.

Even his great cliffhanger falls flat: he's going to convince a turncloak group of mercenaries to... turn their cloaks again? At the end of the book, I realized I didn't even remember how Tyrion's chapters had ended because the "climax" seemed like such a non-event at the time.

Fortunately, not all of Dance is as dreary and inconsequential as the adventures in Essos. Ironically, the characters with the fewest viewpoint chapters have the most interesting things to say. Melisandre's lonely chapter shed some important if oblique insights on her relationship with the Red God and even more on the destiny of Jon Snow. (Hint: if you ask to see Azor Ahai reborn in your fires, and all you see is Jon Snow, maybe it's time to rethink the whole Stannis bit.)

My favorite character in the series remains Jaime, and his one chapter was excellent. It mattered to the story, it told an interesting detail about the world, it showcased how his character has developed, and it reunited him with Brienne, another POV character (not to mention confirming that Sandor Clegane is alive). Cersei's lesson in humility was deeply fulfilling to watch and kept its pace nicely.

There's a certain morbid thrill in watching Arya develop into an assassin, and it's going to be a very bad day for her hit list when she returns to Westeros. And Dance definitely needed more Bran. His scant few chapters were chock full of mythology and magic, and I look forward to the day when he becomes a flying tree.

Even Jon Connington's handful of chapters are interesting. By my own logic, I shouldn't care about him because he was introduced so late in the game... but given that he's already involving himself in Westeros instead of huddling in some corner across the Narrow Sea, he hasn't made himself an unwelcome addition. The news that Prince Aegon is still alive was a nice twist, and we finally got an answer to the age-old question of "whose side is Varys on, anyway?"

(Maybe that's the secret to bringing back the intensity and excitement of the first three books: limit George RR Martin to no more than five chapters for any one POV character!)

In the end, if fans are disappointed by Dance, it's not because they disliked the book--after all, this is A Song of Ice and Fire, and we would gladly read seven hundred pages of Rickon Stark playing with his direwolf if that's what Mr. Martin gave us. Instead, the disappointment comes from the dread of what comes next: do I really have to wait another World Cup and a half to get book six?

Currently listening: "The Police and the Private," Metric

Deathly Hallows Part 2

2011-07-17T15:04:00.000-07:00

A few days before the premiere of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, my roommate Zach asked me if the Harry Potter movies were any good. He'd asked a much tougher question than he thought he had.

When you're adapting a book to a movie or TV show, you're necessarily dealing with a story, characters, a setting, and sometimes even dialog that aren't your own. So whether you've made a "good" movie or not often rests less on your cinematic skills than on the quality of your source material. For instance, say you're a film studio that's charged with adapting a certain book into a movie. It's not a very good book--it has a cast of unrelatable characters and a plot pockmarked with holes--but you do your best. You direct it artistically, produce it professionally, and depict it faithfully to the book. Have you made a great film? By independent artistic standards, probably not, even though you've done your job well, and fans of the book will probably like the movie very much.

On the other hand, say your film studio somehow lands the job of adapting the hypothetical Greatest Story Ever Told, one with a cast of delightfully complex characters and an intricate, powerful plot. Again, you do your job, doing justice to the book and turning out a well-made film. Have you made a great movie this time? Possibly--but how much credit can you take for it? And in either case, you're going to have the purists who cry foul if you so much as change one character's hair color arguing against the interpretive artists who lament an adaptation that's too faithful, lacking an original spin put on by the filmmaker.

I thought about Zach's question for a few seconds, and I told him, "they do a good job visually representing the books," knowing full well I hadn't answered his question. Whether the Harry Potter movies are good disproportionately depends on whether you think the Harry Potter setting is any good, characters are any good, story is any good.

For example, Minerva McGonagall (played by Maggie Smith, both the most underrated character and actress in the entire series) marshaling the defenses of Hogwarts is an impactful, triumphant scene. It looks great on film thanks to director David Yates, but without JK Rowling having written it four years earlier, it never would have been part of the movie. Similarly, the epilogue is among the worst scenes in the movie. (I'm in the "epilogue is more corny than cathartic" camp, though I recognize that not everyone shares that opinion.) But short of excising it completely, what was Mr. Yates supposed to do about it?

Instead, where the film adapter can succeed is in illustration of the books and its themes, in using cinematic devices to emphasize the most important ideas and events in the novels. As much as Part 1 of the Deathly Hallows story is about diving deeper and deeper into despair, Part 2 is about reconciling all the emotional highs and lows of the story into a coherent (and ultimately happy) ending.

(For all the awkwardness caused by calling a movie Harry Potter Part 7 Part 2, it's clear from both the first installment of Deathly Hallows and this one that splitting the movie in half was exactly the right decision. The two movies together run a total of 276 minutes, and they really do need at least four hours of that to tell the story completely.)

Both narratively and cinematically, one of the artistic successes of Deathly Hallows is how sharply it contrasts with the earlier volumes in the series. Innocence, childhood concerns, and a world that's firmly steered in the right direction by its adults give way to tragedy, adult emotions, and moral compasses that don't function any longer. Mr. Yates does a fantastic job of illustrating this, however briefly, in the landscape shots of Hogwarts after its destruction and in the Snape's-memories-in-the-Pensieve scene that shows footage from the first movie.

Speaking of Snape, Severus Snape is by far the most interesting character in the Harry Potter story. You could call him the only truly three-dimensional character, and while you might be overly critical, you wouldn't be wrong necessarily. So it's fitting that the character is the recipient of the best acting performance in the series. Alan Rickman's Snape is egotistical, sardonic, and antagonistic--but vulnerable in the right time. It's an iconic performance, one that will be sorely missed now that the metaphorical train has moved "on" from King's Cross Station.

But we're going to miss a lot more than that. One of the reasons that Harry Potter resonated so strongly with this generation was that the story was timed just right to coincide with our lives. Sure, I was twenty when Harry was seventeen in the last book, but I'd been a teenager right alongside him. And Harry Potter and I were both eleven-year-olds slightly enchanted by fantasy and magic back in 1998. A twenty-year-old reading through all seven books would likely find the story derivative, even juvenile; an eleven-year-old would find the entire experience far too intense and wouldn't be able to appreciate the gradual maturation of both the characters and the series.

That's why we think Harry Potter is good. A skeptic might argue that Harry Potter is a story that's been told a thousand times and populated by stock characters, and all JK Rowling did was change the narrative perspective. But maybe that's all she needed to do. To bring the logic around fully circular, the people who are going to be attending a midnight showing of a Harry Potter movie, camping for four hours on Kittredge Avenue next to the Berkeley Public Library, are going to be people who think the Harry Potter story is at least good--most of them going much further than that. So maybe the real test of whether an adapted movie is good is whether it pleases the fans, and by that standard, Deathly Hallows Part 2 succeeds unequivocally.

Currently listening: "Come Clean," Eisley

An iTunes-created top 15 artists

2011-06-22T18:18:00.000-07:00

It's facebook viral survey time again!

Directions: open iTunes and sort your songs by number of plays. List the top 15 distinct artists that appear in terms of plays and the most-played track by each (along with the number of plays). Eminem and Eminem feat. xyz and variants thereof are not distinct artists, as much as iTunes may think they are. Write something about each of them. Tag me in your note.

1. "Greater Than," Vedera, from Stages (38). Okay, this one is going to take a little explanation. Two and a half years ago, Last.fm suggested that I listen to a little EP called Stages from a band called Vedera. It was awesome. It's three songs of brilliance; if you want them to, they can tell a cohesive story, and if not, they're perfectly amazing in isolation. But the best part was that Vedera hyped the EP as a preview of things to come with their second full-length album, also called Stages. The full-length didn't quite live up to the EP, but I still listened to it far, far too many times back in fall 2009. "Greater Than" is both the first and best track on the album, explaining its gratuitous number of plays.

2. "Sing Me Spanish Techno," The New Pornographers, from Twin Cinema (30). In a year that also saw the release of The Everglow, Plans, Illinois, and Picaresque, Twin Cinema still managed to be a standout album. This was the first song I heard by the New Pornographers--tragically, not until 2010!--and it made me an instant fan. Energy, imagery, and creative lyrics make this song a worthy addition to the list. Go listen to it.

3. "Careful," Paramore, from Brand New Eyes (20). Yep, guilty as charged, I'm into Paramore. The only surprise here was that my most-played Paramore track wasn't from Riot!, because that album is seriously good, and I will defend it with every ounce of critical credibility that I have. "Careful" is a fine track too, with enough energy to have been on Riot! and slightly more sophisticated lyrics.

4. "Australia," The Shins, from Wincing the Night Away (17). Love this song, love this album, love the Shins. It's so happy--how could you not love it? Some highlights are grin-inducing lyrics like "faced with the dodo's conundrum," a vague theme of breaking out of the mold and doing what makes you happy, and an absolutely delightful music video.

5. "The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid," The Decemberists, from The Hazards of Love (15). The Decemberists have a lot of material that's tough to explain to a non-fan, and Hazards takes the cake for furthest out there. It's also irrationally my favorite Decemberists album--I think the theater/folk/prog experiment paid off. This song is essentially the end of "Act I" of the implied musical; it's about the shape-shifting protagonist William trying to escape the clutches of his jealous forest-queen mother. And in the context of Hazards, that not only all makes sense, but is really entertaining, both narratively and musically.

6. "Jewel to Sparkle," The Juliana Theory, from Love (14). A little surprised this showed up until I remembered how often I listen to the Juliana Theory at the gym. They might be the most under-appreciated rock band of the 2000s, and if they're known at all, it's for Emotion is Dead. It's a fine album, but Love is probably better and certainly under-rated. It contains a lot of harmonic and instrumental explorations not normally associated with circa-2003 emo rock, which it what makes it such good music.

7. "Daniel," Bat for Lashes, from Two Suns (13). My friend Andrew and I have a fine tradition of listening to the Pitchfork "top ten albums of the year" every January. 2009's was particularly terrible (some trash from Animal Collective was apparently the "best"), but the one bright spot we came across was Bat for Lashes. And by bright spot, we meant this song and maybe two or three more on Two Suns. "Daniel" is an out-of-place techno-inspired track on an album that feels like an opiate-induced day-long dream; it's Bat for Lashes at its most accessible and musically sound.

8. "Someone Else's Arms," Mae, from The Everglow (12). Absolutely a travesty that this track is so far down on the list, it's possibly my favorite song from possibly my favorite album of all time. My love for The Everglow defies explanation, but it involves some combination of personal significance and musical brilliance. Of all the songs on it, "Someone Else's Arms" rocks the hardest and leaves the strongest impression.

9. "Desecration Smile," Red Hot Chili Peppers, from Stadium Arcadium (12). Not being a huge Chili Peppers fan in general, I was pleasantly blown away by Stadium Arcadium. It has a few weak tracks on it; "Desecration Smile" is not one of them. It might be about a relationship, or drugs, or nothing at all, but it hardly needs lyrics considering its modal, brooding melodies are so intriguing.

10. "Shady Grove," as performed by Among the Oak and Ash, from Among the Oak and Ash (11). Very cool. I've never been shy about admitting that I like a little folk and bluegrass garnish to go along with my steady diet of indie pop, which explains why I took to AtOAA so readily after hearing them on Paste Magazine's podcast a couple of years ago. "Shady Grove" is an old American folk song, with thousands of renditions out there, and Garrison Starr's simple banjo-accompanied version is as good as any of them.

11. "Bohemian Like You," The Dandy Warhols, from Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia (11). I claim to be a Dandy Warhols fan on the strength of this album alone; in fact, I've never even heard any of the other albums, I just assume they're a fraction as good. My friend Nicholas shared this album with me back in 2005, and this track was an instant favorite: "Bohemian Like You" made fun of the hipster culture before it was cool to make fun of hipsters.

12. "Help I'm Alive," Metric, from Fantasies (11). In the wasteland of music that was 2009, Metric somewhat quietly released by far their best album, managing to incorporate their dance-y unconventionality from previous albums without being nearly as aggressively in our faces about it. "Help I'm Alive" is far more interesting than it deserves to be for how much it repeats, but Emily Haines and company make me want to hear the insistent, driving chorus each of the dozen or so times it shows up.

13. "We Are What You Say," Sufjan Stevens, from A Sun Came! (10). Hardly a shock that a Sufjan Stevens song shows up on this list, the only surprise being that it's from A Sun Came! instead of the more recent The Age of Adz or the more brilliant Illinois. Along with "A Winner Needs A Wand," "We Are What You Say" opens Stevens' debut album with a surprisingly hard-rock take on Middle Eastern folk. Complete with slightly unconventional instrumentation and structure and vaguely-religious-but-draw-your-own-conclusions lyrics, "We Are What You Say" laid the foundation for more than a decade's worth of experimentation by Sufjan Stevens in the realm of indie folk.

14. "Barrowland Ballroom," Amy MacDonald, from This Is The Life (10). Every season, Starbucks releases a "Have You Heard" compilation that has historically done a pretty impressive job of picking out the next big thing in indie-land. I first heard Amy MacDonald on the Fall 08 edition, which also included current indie darling Bon Iver. I wasn't as impressed with his music as I was apparently supposed to be, but "This Is The Life" convinced me to buy Amy MacDonald's album. Most of it isn't as good as the title track; "Barrowland Ballroom" is one of the few songs that's probably better. Once styled as "the UK's answer to Katy Perry, except she can actually sing," MacDonald pilots her spirited contralto through a stride piano-driven track about doing awesome things with people you love.

15. "Close Call," Rilo Kiley, from Under the Blacklight (10). Even though they're the two most different-sounding Rilo Kiley albums, Blacklight and Take-Offs and Landings go back and forth for the honor of "Matt's favorite Rilo Kiley album". Blacklight must have won out, at least over the two-year span that this iTunes library has been racking up plays. Like every good Rilo Kiley song, it's a Jenny Lewis vocal showcase with just a hint of country

Currently listening: "My Lovely," Eisley, from Room Noises (only 3 plays? what?)

Game of Thrones, Season 1 (Part 2 of 2)

2011-06-21T17:09:00.000-07:00

If you missed yesterday's post where I mention my surprise that Game of Thrones has an audience and talk about my dislike of some of the more egregiously "HBO" scenes, read it first.

One of the reasons it's been such a pleasure watching Game of Thrones (the TV show) is how well it's followed A Game of Thrones (the first book in A Song of Ice and Fire--won't it be nice and confusing next season when we're watching Game of Thrones based on A Clash of Kings?). I haven't read the first book in a long time (maybe a decade?) so I don't remember its fine details well, but nothing seems jarringly out of place.

While the Unburnt scene is the proper denouement for the first book/season, and probably the one that's going to have the most important consequences for the series as a whole, my favorite scene in A Game of Thrones has to be the King in the North scene. And it turned out awesome--if the Greatjon taking out his sword and saying "there sits the only king I mean to bend my knee to" doesn't give you chills, you're watching it wrong. It could have used some broad shots of various castles in the north raising the Direwolf (one part of the book that I definitely do remember, and vividly). But otherwise, that scene--and virtually all of the first season--is both good television and a good match to the books.

Where the TV show has really excelled, though, has been in the characters. Sean Bean expectedly nails Ned Stark, and the rest of the Stark family is pretty spot-on too. The Lannisters are comparably well done: Cersei and Jaime are great, Tywin is better, and no discussion of the first season would be complete without praising Peter Dinklage's Emmy-worthy Tyrion Lannister. Because I read the first few Song of Ice and Fire books at around the same time that the Lord of the Rings movies came out, I couldn't deconvolute the two series' "dwarves," and I've had this ridiculous mental image of Tyrion as looking like Gimli for the past decade. Credit to Mr. Dinklage for showing me exactly how Tyrion is supposed to look, act, and behave.

That's been the best part of the television adaptation: getting reasonable depictions of all of the characters. Some characters are relatively important to the plot, yet if you asked me based on the books to describe them, I'd be at a loss. In particular, Syrio Forel and Littlefinger are shown much more vividly in the TV show than I could have envisioned them.

Only a few characters were portrayed significantly differently than in the books. The biggest misstep was probably Renly Baratheon; where the Renly of the books is a charismatic, influential adviser to the king, the Renly of the TV series is reduced to Loras Tyrell's gay lover. Robert Baratheon's drunkenness and misogyny are emphasized at the expense of his former diplomatic ability and skills as a warrior, which is not as much a mis-portrayal as a difference of opinion. And both Cersei (in emphasizing Robert's lechery) and Tywin (in showing that he has a sense of honor, albeit a self-serving one) are portrayed much more sympathetically than in the books, an interesting and not unwelcome take.

Next season, I'm looking forward to seeing Stannis, Mance Rayder, Jaqen H'ghar, and Roose Bolton. But I'm most interested in seeing Melisandre; a good decision in casting her could lead to the most evocative TV villain since the smoke monster from Lost.

Currently listening: "Is Patience Still Waiting?", the Juliana Theory

Game of Thrones, Season 1 (Part 1 of 2)

2011-06-20T18:26:00.000-07:00

There's something I can't figure out about Game of Thrones. It's not what the relationship between Houses A, B, and C is. It has nothing to do with whether Character X's motivation to betray Character Y had something to do with Character Z. And it's not even the true parentage of that bastard, or the true allegiance of that eunuch.

It's why the show has any mainstream appeal at all.

I say that as a huge fan of George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, the epic fantasy book series that Game of Thrones is based on. It is awesome. It's probably the best fantasy fiction being written today. But it also has plenty going against it, especially from the standpoint of being a successful TV show.

First, it's complicated. Martin has described his books as having a "cast of thousands". You don't have to keep close tabs on all those thousands to understand the story, and not all of them are around in the first book (i.e., the first season of the TV series). But A Game of Thrones does have a dozen or so characters who could rightly be considered "main characters" and another dozen or so supporting characters with complex personalities and enough relevance to the story that you do need to keep track of them.

Similarly, while you don't need to have the membership of all eight or nine Great Houses committed to memory, you do need to understand the interrelationships among four of them to follow A Game of Thrones, and the series only becomes more demanding as it progresses. And you don't need to be a scholar of all seven millennia of Westeros's history, but knowing the last fifty years or so provides some very necessary background.

Second, it's a "genre show" if ever there was one. Find two people who are familiar with Battlestar Galactica. Ask one of them "is BSG a drama?" and the answer will most likely be "yes." Ask the other "what sort of show is BSG?" and the answer will most likely be "sci-fi." If a TV show (or book series, movie, etc.) can be classified as fantasy (or sci-fi, or Western, etc.), it's overwhelmingly likely that it will be.

TV series like this are often referred to as "genre shows"; despite really only being dramas dressed up slightly differently, there's a propensity among critics to over-classify. And it can be to the series' detriment. Some people aren't "sci-fi people" or "don't do Westerns," but they're actually closing themselves off to good entertainment just because of the setting. If anything, the stigma is worst with fantasy.

Finally, the story isn't told yet. After a six-year wait following A Feast for Crows, we're finally getting the fifth book next month. Nobody (save George RR Martin) has any idea how this is going to shake out, and at the current rate, we probably won't know this decade. But even for fans of the TV show who haven't read the books, there are still plenty of stories untold.

Remember that time when Ned Stark told Beric Dondarrion to take a hundred dudes and track down Gregor Clegane? How about when Barristan Selmy stormed out of the Red Keep after Cersei forced him into an early retirement? Is Walder Frey serious about his demand for Robb to marry a Frey daughter, and will Robb keep the promise? And who's this Stannis Baratheon character everyone keeps talking about?

Having read the books, I know the answers to all of those questions, and most of them turn out to be relatively important points. But to someone who doesn't already know the answers, they seem like gaping plot holes.

Yet, despite all of those reasons why it shouldn't, Game of Thrones has succeeded, commercially, critically, and artistically. The one area where it's been less than stellar is its over-"HBO-ification". Yes, Martin's world is a gritty one, with sex, violence, death, and vulgarity in every corner. And no, I'm not the sort of prudish viewer who immediately dismisses a show with the first sex scene. But there are scenes that advance the plot and/or the characters, and then there are HBO scenes. One particular scene (with two random girls in Littlefinger's room) was actually hard to watch--I had to plug in earphones lest my roommates start asking questions.

Aside from the one scene per episode where you can't help but wonder "did we really need to see that?", Game of Thrones is a rousing success, following at least the first book perfectly. In the next post, I'll talk more specifics about the series and the books: what matched, what didn't, and where either the books or the show were better.

Currently listening: "So What," Miles Davis

Resurrection of a Laptop's Audio

2011-06-14T19:36:00.000-07:00

Spring has not, in recent years, been the kindest season to my electronics. About a month ago, I had several simultaneous maladies visit my computers. First, my desktop, barely two years old, decided it no longer needed to turn on for no apparent reason. A new motherboard ordered and RMA'ed later, whatever was ailing it was still utterly undiagnosable, so I bode my time until I could pounce on a stellar deal at Woot!.

The second problem was that my laptop decided it no longer needed to play audio out of the right channel. It only refused to work with headphones or external speakers plugged in, of course. I was reduced to the choice between one channel of audio and three: my laptop's internal speakers feature the conventional "left" and "right" plus the extra added bonus of "static".

Obviously, it was a much less disastrous problem than what befell my desktop, but man, it was irritating. And if my laptop was to become (at least temporarily) my actual computer, it was a problem that I wanted to get fixed. (How else was I supposed to enjoy Indie Pop Bonanza during my lunch hour-and-a-half?) I tried all the usual steps: disable and re-enable the device, uninstall and re-install the device, update the driver, roll back the driver... all to no avail.

Skeptically, I give Sony tech support a call to see if they had any ideas, fixes, or straight-up magic to cure my machine, but I was pretty much resigned to it being a hardware issue. I speak with "Hugo," and of course I can't get the idea out of my mind that I'm getting tech support from Hurley. (I console myself by remembering that his name probably is not really Hugo.) He leads me down the exact same path I've already trodden, and eventually he concludes that it's a hardware issue. Thanks, Hugo.

Hugo gives me a link to the Sony service site, where I'm sure I can send in my laptop (currently my only computer) and probably pay $89 for the privilege of having someone pop out my old card and put a new one in. Or, I can take the grad-student approach and fix it myself for $9. Doing an Amazon search for "sound card," I discover a product I never knew existed: the external sound card.

This is a brilliant inch-and-a-half piece of plastic that plugs into a free USB slot and makes your computer play sound again. I didn't notice a significant drop in quality, though it's possible that a serious audiophile comparing it with a dedicated sound card would. If you can stand the slight inconvenience of another part to keep track of and a permanently occupied USB port, this thing really is straight-up magic to cure your machine.

Currently listening: "Tell Your Mama," Vespers

Death Cab: Codes and Keys

2011-06-09T14:49:00.000-07:00

Back in 2001, when all the cool kids were listening to The Photo Album, there are plenty of ways you could have described Death Cab. "Overproduced" would not have been one of them; frankly, it would have been laughable. Something About Airplanes (1998) and We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes (2000) seriously sound like they were recorded in Chris Walla's linen closet, and The Photo Album isn't much cleaner. Even Transatlanticism (2003), an album that I adore, has its less-than-crystal-clear moments.

It wasn't until Plans in 2005 that Death Cab produced an album that sounded fully put-together (not coincidentally, Plans was their major-label debut). Narrow Stairs (2008) definitely represented a leap forward in production value, but (after some getting used to) it still sounded like Death Cab.

That's why so much of Codes and Keys is so surprising. It's not that it doesn't sound like Death Cab--it does, even though you might have to take a careful look to find it, especially with the conspicuous absence of Mr. Walla's guitar. Instead, it's surprising because there's production at every turn, sometimes to the album's detriment. At times, Ben Gibbard's voice sounds muffled ("Home is a Fire"), scratchy ("Some Boys"), underwater ("Doors Unlocked and Open"), or echo-y ("Unobstructed Views," "Portable Television," and about half of the album).

The natural question is why? Ben Gibbard has a fine voice--and that doesn't do him justice; he has an excellent voice--so just let him sing! You mix a questionable whiskey with coke to make it drinkable; mixing a 21-year single-malt with anything is a disastrous waste. Maybe the argument is "we've had the same single-malt for the last fifteen years, and we wanted a new flavor this time around." And Death Cab is at the point in their musical career where experimentation for the sake of experimentation is totally acceptable. But they're also sufficiently accomplished musicians that they ought to know when an experiment has failed. Intentionally obscuring Ben Gibbard's voice fails more often than not, and for that matter, so does removing virtually all of the guitar hooks.

But the change in musical style is only one of two tonal shifts that differentiate Codes and Keys from Death Cab's earlier work. The other, equally important one is a change in subject matter. For the first time, the driving emotion behind Death Cab's music is "happy". Back when Ben Gibbard was still making music with The Postal Service, he once described "Such Great Heights" as the only positive song about love he'd ever written. If he didn't change his tune after the if-not-joyous-then-at-least-longingly-hopeful Transatlanticism and Plans, then he sure has some explaining to do now.

Even the song titles reflect the album's sunnier mood: half the songs on here suggest removed obstacles ("Doors Unlocked And Open," "Unobstructed Views") or unbridled enthusiasm ("Stay Young, Go Dancing"). These sentiments would have been jarringly out of place on Death Cab's earlier albums, and they're not without their detractors here. One particularly skeptical commenter on NPR's review of the album said it was like "a Death Cab album with the soul sucked out."

In reality, Codes and Keys plays out more like a Death Cab album with an extra piece of soul added in, one that Ben Gibbard didn't know he had until he married Zooey Deschanel. While Death Cab had has success with happy-sounding sad songs ("The Sound of Settling"), it's played out by now. They had their flirtation with angry-sounding angry songs ("I Will Possess Your Heart"), and that worked fine for a while. Now that Ben Gibbard finally has a reason to expand his emotional spectrum to include happy songs, we as fans should be equally happy for him.

Currently listening: "Dawn of Time," Christie DuPree

The Oregon Trail, Day 4: May 30, 2011

2011-06-03T21:56:00.000-07:00

New to this? Start with the prologue, Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3!

10:30 am, OR 126, between Redmond OR and Sisters OR: Having long since departed the Super 8 for the last time, we pass a farm featuring something called "Operation Santa Claus live reindeer". It occurs to me that I've never actually seen a reindeer until now.

10:52 am, Sisters OR: This town was either part of the Oregon Trail, or it really wants unsuspecting passersby on Highways 20 and 126 to think it was. We're disappointed not to witness a buffalo stampede.

12:02 pm, OR 126 west of Sisters OR: We stop at the McKenzie River to see some nature.

Look how clear this water is!

1:37 pm, Eugene OR: Eugene seems to be closed. The whole town. Granted, it's a college town on a federal holiday during the summer, but you'd think there would be something more interesting than a Wendy's open for lunch.

4:21 pm, Coos Bay OR: These "sour nightcrawlers" I bought in that Eugene drugstore aren't sour at all.

5:46 pm, US 101 south of Port Orford OR: The Pacific Northwest's version of the West Coast is gloomy, almost like you're living a black-and-white photograph. Artsy people with tricked-out cameras, take note.

7:32 pm, Redwoods National Park: Thanks to Josh, I've learned something about redwoods. Since they're so massive, redwoods are really bad at using their vasculature to transport water to their extremities. That's why coastal redwoods only grow in foggy regions: they need to be in saturated moist air and absorb water through their limbs.

8:08 pm, US 101 south of Redwoods NP: Elk! Aside from in burger form at lunch yesterday, I'm not sure if I've ever seen one of these. Add that to my list of new animals for this trip.

9:00 pm, Eureka OR: We stumble upon Lost Coast Brewery, almost by accident. Driving through Eureka, we're all getting pretty hungry, when Josh notices a Lost Coast sign on a building to our right. It's our third brewpub experience in as many days, and we're not complaining. Their Downtown Brown is one of my favorite beers in the world; the Raspberry Brown somehow manages to surpass it.

11:17 pm, somewhere down US 101: In an effort to stay awake, the evening's entertainment has become another over/under game. We're guessing the population of various Northern California towns, which is fun because none of us has any idea what to guess. I offer the over/under of 3800 on McKinleyville; Josh takes the under and is clearly defeated. While I don't remember what the bet on Garberville was, whoever took the under was probably the winner.

1:06 am, further down US 101: I realize I've failed at my passengerly duties, having been asleep for about the last half hour.

2:42 am, Berkeley CA: Back home at last. Through detours, pit stops, and side trips, we've managed to more than double the length of time it took to get to Oregon on Friday, but it was totally worth it. I return to Berkeley a few hundred dollars poorer but don't much care because this has been the most fun I've had in months.

The Oregon Trail, Day 3: May 29, 2011

2011-06-02T23:53:00.000-07:00

New to this? Start with the prologue, Day 1, and Day 2!

10:20 am, Redmond OR: Slow start today. After Sonia and I fail to find a Catholic church in central Oregon with an 11 am Mass, we're forced to abandon Plan Go To Church. We enact Plan Investigate the Check Engine Light instead.

10:32 am, US 97 between Redmond OR and Bend OR: Josh's iPod, as is customary for it, plays some Tupac. Mr. Shakur raps the lyric "crack cocaine rocked us," which is probably the cleverest rap lyric I've heard in quite a while.

11:01 am, Bend OR: There is nothing wrong with Josh's car.

11:38 am: Driving aimlessly through downtown Bend, we come to an outdoor market selling items by local artists. A man who calls himself the "Nutmaster" is selling various delicious nuts; I order some cinnamon pecans with the accent on the first syllable.

12:05 pm: Beer tasting at Deschutes Brewery. It's slightly pretentious in a winery sort of way, where the beers are described with flavor notes. They're pretty tasty, and the Twilight Ale is a fine drink, but I still can't stand IPAs.

12:30 pm: Time for the brewery tour. There's chemical engineering here!

1-2 pm: Bend is no Portland, but it holds its own in terms of local Oregon flavor.

The Cyclepub

Bend Haiku Weekend--one week too early!

Vintage and local.

1:34 pm: "Thaiphoon" might be the best restaurant name ever.

1:43 pm: Ranch Records. Oh yes. These guys have Dr. Dre's The Chronic on vinyl. They also have a poster for tonight's Decemberists show in the window. I ask the grungy guy behind the counter if they have any more. "No, the promoters come and put that stuff up, so that's all we have. If you come back later, when we're closing, we can probably let them go." (He looks at his phone.) "I mean... if you just want to take it off the wall now, I don't care. I can just look the other way." I do, and he does.

2:46 pm: Linner at Deschutes Brewery's brewpub affords us a chance to taste yet more beer.

4:48 pm: While in line for the Decemberists concert, there's some concern about the blanket we just bought. We got it from Wal-Mart, which is the single least hipster place we might have bought it. If we were locals, we obviously would have taken a trip to the Goodwill. Josh turns the bag around so nobody can see the Wal-Mart logo.

5:35 pm: The pre-show music is decidedly twangier here than it was at the Death Cab show. It's true that The King is Dead has a lot of folk inspiration, but people expecting a straight-up bluegrass concert will end up sorely disappointed.

5:37 pm: The age distribution here is a lot wider than at Friday's concert. More forty-year-olds, and strangely, more four-year-olds.

5:38 pm: Parenting of the Year Award: baby in one hand, cup of beer in the other.

5:55 pm: Of all the foods the hipsters to our right could have sneaked in, they have chosen raw carrots.

6:09 pm: The first opener, Dan Mangan, totally obeys the Canadian Indie Band Rule by bringing six people to the stage.

7:04 pm: Gabriela Quintero of Rodrigo y Gabriela is pretty crazy, in the way that she's jumping up and down while playing acoustic guitar for a bunch of indie kids. In the context of metal, she's beyond tame; here, she's rocking hard.

8:07 pm: The hipster couple to my left is discussing their favorite things to buy at Trader Joe's.

8:23 pm: The Decemberists open with "The Infanta"! It's one of my favorite Decemberists songs, and the very first one of theirs that I heard. They hadn't played it at either of the other two concerts I'd seen them at, so it was a really nice surprise to hear it here.

It's followed by three tracks from the new album, "Down By the Water," "Calamity Song," and "Rise to Me". Given that Decemberists albums are usually two-thirds hit and one-third miss, it's pretty much on par. "Water" and "Calamity" are both excellent; "Rise" is okay but doesn't do much for me.

8:42 pm: Yes, that is Jenny Conlee on the accordion/keyboard/auxiliary percussion! She's undergoing treatment for cancer, and she was scheduled to miss all of the Decemberists' summer tour dates, but she's made a surprise appearance here. It's awesome to see her, and I've never heard so much heartfelt applause for an accordion player.

Like Death Cab, the Decemberists have done a really good job of sampling music from all over their discography. Older material (from Castaways and Cutouts and Her Majesty, two albums that I can never keep straight) includes "Leslie Anne Levine" and "Billy Liar," the latter with some fun audience participation. Picaresque has a nice showing after "The Infanta" with "The Bagman's Gambit" and "16 Military Wives," the latter also featuring some audience input.

The only song from The Crane Wife turns out to be "The Crane Wife Part 3," but that's as good a choice as any from that album. I'm still irrationally attached to The Hazards of Love, though explaining the album makes me realize how inscrutable it can be on a first (or fifth) listen. I got to jam to "Won't Want for Love's" prog rock-y intro for half a minute before I realized I should probably explain what in the world was going on to Josh, who isn't nearly as into the Decemberists as I am.

"Okay, this song is from the Decemberists' prog-rock opera The Hazards of Love. It's sung by the female protagonist, Margaret. She's commanding forest plants to do various things. She can do that because she's pregnant with the male protagonist William's child, and William and the forest are tight. Well, at least until the Forest Queen gets involved, but that hasn't happened yet. Oh, and William shapechanges into a fawn sometimes."

Later: "This one is called 'The Rake's Song'." "As in the cut the house takes in gambling?" (Josh plays a lot of poker.) "No, as in the immoral pleasure seeker. He's the antagonist in the rock opera. This song is about him killing his children in especially brutal ways."

And The King is Dead gets some more love (four and a half months out, this is still the King is Dead tour, after all) in "Rox in the Box" and "This is Why We Fight," "Rox" still being my favorite track on the album. The main set ends with "This is Why We Fight," but I've seen the Decemberists enough to know that their set isn't close to finished. On the Crane Wife tour, these guys played a seven-song encore, so I'd be surprised if we didn't see at least fifteen minutes more music.

The encore starts with "January Hymn," also from the new album. I like "January Hymn." It's quiet and simple, yet evocative; and it gets in, does what it needs to, and gets out. Afterward, Colin Meloy starts talking like it's actually the end of the show. They'd better play something big if my "fifteen more minutes" prediction is going to hold up. He tells us the next song will "fall apart" without our help. When Chris Funk (hearty round of applause) gives the signal, we're all to scream as if we're being eaten by a whale! It's "The Mariner's Revenge Song".

I have a schizophrenic love-hate relationship with this song. On one hand, it's totally awesome. It's not the sort of song I choose to listen to frequently, because it requires such a big time and emotional commitment. But as a creative piece of music that's well-performed and tells as engaging story, it's one of the Decemberists' most interesting songs.

On the other hand, I'm puzzled and a little dismayed that the song is so intimately connected to the Decemberists, particularly by non-fans. Upon mentioning that I like the Decemberists, I've had multiple people independently ask me "aren't the band that does that belly of the whale song?" Yes, they're the band that does "that belly of the whale song". And if all you're expecting to find from the Decemberists is nine-minute-long sea shanties, that's all you're going to find. But I promise, this band does a lot more than that.

Regardless of my conflicted emotions toward the song, "The Mariner's Revenge Song" was a lot of fun live, and it seemed the perfect note to end the show on. After a few minutes' absence, though, the band retakes the stage yet again for the rare double-encore. They play "June Hymn," another selection from The King is Dead that I like a lot, but it seems sort of a strange follow-up to the intensity of "Mariner". This time, the Decemberists leave the stage for real, having played sixteen songs--not as many as the twenty-four-song behemoth of a set that Death Cab gave us, but a healthy bit of music nonetheless.

The Decemberists are the only band that I've seen in concert three times, and it's a testament to how great their live shows are that I haven't gotten tired of them yet. Sure, they're playing new music every time, but Colin Meloy engages the audience so well, and the entire band is so accomplished at showmanship that I would gladly see them three more times.

11:06 pm, Redmond OR: Back to the Super 8 for our last night in the great state of Oregon.

The Oregon Trail, Day 2: May 28, 2011

2011-06-01T17:48:00.000-07:00

New to this? Start with the prologue and Day 1!

Roughly 10 am, Redmond OR: On the road again. After a break to grab some Livewire, of course.

11:24 am, US 26 north of Madras OR: I'm not sure I'd stay at something called "Bear Springs Campground".

11:41 am, US 26 near Mount Hood: It's snowing. I know we're up some elevation and some latitude, but it's May 28, and there's snow.

1:52 pm, Portland OR: In a region of the country renowned for fresh fish, sushi seems an obvious choice for lunch. Josh has his first sushi experience, and Sonia doesn't miss the opportunity to act the Asian tourist.

2:34 pm: Walking near the Wilammette River, we run into our buddy Tony Ferrese! It's an unexpected stop-and-chat with one of our colleagues from Berkeley.

Also, this guy is blowing bubbles.

3:30-5:00 pm: Portland doesn't disappoint.

4:17 pm: Somehow, we get on the topic of what "beer house" translates to in German. Josh took a lot of German back in high school, and he tells us it's just "bierhaus," pronounced the exact same way. Sonia thinks it may have been "bierhosen," and we agree that pretty much all hosen are bierhosen.

4:29 pm: Sonia wants to go into a Sanrio store in a downtown mall. Josh offers a side bet to the day's "spot that hipster" main action: clearly the Sanrio is going to be full of Asians, but will they be hipster Asians or fobby Asians? In any other city in America, the choice is an easy one; in Portland, I still opt for "fobby". Josh is perfectly happy to take "hipster". The rules: every Asian in the store must be assigned to exactly one of the two categories. Some discussion and/or observation time is permitted, but we must come to a consensus.

4:35 pm: There are no Asians in the Sanrio store! Instant death rules: the next Asian to walk in the store settles it.

4:38 pm: Green flannel shirt and thick-rimmed black glasses. I admit defeat.

5:15 pm: Dinner is at Rock Bottom, a brewpub in downtown Portland. In what will become a theme over the next two days, we sample some of the Pacific Northwest's various beer offerings. The red ale is not quite as good as Jupiter's Red Spot but tasty nonetheless.

7:22 pm: In our effort to find the Most Hipster Coffeehouse in Portland, Stumptown Coffee Roasters has lived up to our expectations. Note 1) the wall of pretentious magazines and 2) the actual hipster. What you don't see is 3) the girl on her Macbook writing poetry, 4) printed on the cup: "These cups are 100% compostable because we care," and 5) the incredibly vulgar rap, presumably played ironically, that all the baristas danced to.

7:52 pm: I didn't know there was such a thing as a hipster donut shop, but man, Voodoo Doughnut gets there. We get the "Voodoo Dozen," which is slightly cheaper than ordering a dozen doughnuts of your choosing, but (in an especially hipster twist) you get no say in what you order. The line is out the door and halfway around the building, but these are doughnuts we're talking about.

8:55 pm, I-84 east of Portland, OR: There are a whole, whole lot of Subarus at this part in the country.

9:30 pm, US 26 east of Portland, OR: Absolutely amazing sunset in the rear view mirror.

11:41 pm, Redmond OR: These doughnuts are incredible.

The Oregon Trail, Day 1: May 27, 2011

2011-05-31T23:32:00.000-07:00

New to this? Start with the prologue!

6:01 am, Berkeley CA: My alarm goes off. This is literally the earliest I have woken up all year.

7:15 am, Hercules CA: The Burger King Croissanwich might be the best $4 I've spent in recent memory.

10:24 am, I-5 north of Sacramento CA: "London Bridge" be Fergie comes on Josh's iPod. He claims it's not his fault it was on there.

11:36 am, Weed CA: The men's restroom at Weed's Chevron station smells like gasoline; all things considered, there are worse things for a men's restroom to smell like.

12:05 pm, US 97 north of Weed CA:

Mount Shasta

2:17 pm, US 97 north of Klamath Falls, OR: T-Mobile does not have my back. I'm on something called "UNICEL," which is presumably part of a United Nations plan to bring cell phone service to central Oregon because the coverage here is so poor.

5:20 pm, Bend OR: After a delicious linner of Red Robin, we've made our way inside the venue. "Daniel" by Bat for Lashes is playing, and I have total indie cred for knowing the song.

5:53 pm: Jenny and Johnny start their set not on time, but early!

6:12 pm: Jenny and Johnny needs more Jenny, but other than that, it's pretty good music.

6:45 pm: Bright Eyes starts their set, and it starts to rain. I'm not making this up as some sort of emo joke. As soon as Conor Oberst gets halfway through his first song, the rain starts falling.

7:22 pm: Bright Eyes finishes their set, and it stops raining. I'm not making this up either--right before the last song, the weather clears, and it's sunny for the rest of the evening.

8:15 pm: Death Cab finally takes the stage! They open with "I Will Possess Your Heart," and not the watered-down radio version either.

The set continues with "The New Year," which is off Transatlanticism and therefore good, and "We Laugh Indoors" and "A Movie Script Ending" from The Photo Album, which is an album I don't know nearly as well as I should. "Some Boys" is the first track they play from Codes and Keys, and it's probably my least favorite track on the album, though it sounds blessedly less over-produced live.

Death Cab winds their way through an impressive array of music, hitting twenty-one (!) songs in in the main set and ranging from their earliest material (1998) to their most recent. Three or four songs come from the "old" albums, Something About Airplanes and We Have The Facts And We're Voting Yes, which are fine music live but way too lo-fi for me when they were recorded in ~~Ben Gibbard's kitchen~~ the studio. Most of Death Cab's albums have three or four songs each make an appearance: the Plans contingent is "Soul Meets Body," "I Will Follow You Into the Dark," "Crooked Teeth," and "What Sarah Said".

Both "Grapevine Fires" and "Cath..." show up, and we discuss a bit which is the better song. I like "Cath..." for the musical structure, and Josh prefers "Grapevine Fires" for the imagery, but both tell awesome stories, and both together are far and away the two best tracks on Narrow Stairs. The great part about a concert is you get to hear them both!

With the album releasing literally two days later, it's hardly a surprise that Codes and Keys is so well represented. "You Are a Tourist," the title track, "Underneath the Sycamore," and a couple of songs I don't recognize by name yet all show up after "Some Boys". I liken the new Death Cab album to a Decemberists album (review coming soon!) in that half of it is awesome, a quarter of it is forgettable, and a quarter of it is just sort of bad. The song where Ben Gibbard sounds like he's singing underwater about "California" and "isolation" is in the "bad" pile, but luckily it's balanced with "You Are a Tourist" and "Underneath the Sycamore," which are both fine songs.

9:25 pm: The set is winding down, and our old friend Transatlanticism has been sorely under-represented since "The New Year". After my bold prediction of "Soul Meets Body" for the encore was shot down about half an hour ago, I switch to "Title and Registration" and wonder if we could be so lucky as to get "Transatlanticism" on top of it. "The Sound of Settling" is played, which makes me really happy. I don't know of a more upbeat song about failed relationships!

9:50 pm: After finishing "Title and Registration," Death Cab finishes their set with "Transatlanticism," and I am thrilled.

10:50 pm, Redmond OR: We arrive at the Super 8, our home-away-from-home for the next few days. Reflecting on the concert, we're all really happy with the variety and length of the set. Our consensus Song We Wish Were Played is "Marching Bands of Manhattan" from Plans; "Styrofoam Plates" and "I Was a Kaleidoscope" from The Photo Album and "The 405" from We Have The Facts are honorable mentions.

Midnight: I fall asleep, visions of Portland dancing in my head.

The Oregon Trail, Prologue

2011-05-31T22:14:00.000-07:00

March 26, 2011, 10 am: Tickets for Death Cab for Cutie's San Francisco concert go on sale.

March 26, 2011, 8 pm: I log on to Ticketmaster and am surprised to find that I can't buy a ticket to the concert. "This is odd," I think. "Surely this concert hasn't sold out in less than a day."

Late March-Early April 2011: I stalk Ticketmaster (and Stubhub and Craigslist) several times a day... and no luck. I come to find out that the concert had sold out not only in less than a day, but in less than an hour. Ticketmaster isn't doing it for me because there are literally no tickets left, and the resale markets are essentially useless because the tickets are will-call, photo-ID only.

But I'm not about to give up on this concert. I've been a fan of Death Cab for six or seven years, having never seen them live, and they've easily worked their way to the top of my Bands I Need To See In Concert list. On a whim, I look at the rest of their tour dates, curious if they'd be playing a show elsewhere in northern California. They're not... but they are playing at this sweet-looking venue called the Les Schwab Amphitheater in some town called Bend, Oregon. That's "only" eight to nine hours away... and The Decemberists are playing the exact same venue only two days later. Better yet, all of this happens over Memorial Day weekend, so I could easily make a weekend of it: drive up Friday, stay through Sunday, and come home Monday, only missing one day of work.

Late April 2011: I convince my friend Josh and his girlfriend (now fiancee!) Sonia to come along. The Oregon Trail is going to happen.

3-Sentence Reviews: End of the 2010-2011 Television Season

2011-05-24T21:53:00.000-07:00

To bookend the season properly...

I can’t give a proper three-sentence review to The Event because I stopped watching it mid-season. What began as a promising political thriller a la 24 with a touch of Lost-like supernatural intrigue turned into a bland mess of aliens over the course of about three episodes. The acting performance turned in by Zeljko Ivanek was a much-needed bright spot, but sadly the writing was so uninspired that I can’t even remember his character’s name.

Against all odds, Michael Scott leaving The Office just might have breathed new life into the show. The last few episodes of this season, beginning with a surprisingly touching farewell to Michael, were the strongest the show has been in years, and the B plots (like Angela marrying a gay state senator) are firing on all cylinders. As long as new boss (and I’m thrilled that it’s not going to be Will Ferrell’s DeAngelo) creates the same inane dynamic that Michael carried through seven seasons, The Office has at least a few more years of life in it.

The number of people who wrote off Outsourced without giving it a chance (“oh, it’s set in India, so it must be racially offensive”) continues to astound me. After performing reasonably well in the fall despite that negativity, NBC shipped the show off to the death slot of 10:30 pm, where it had expectedly miserable ratings leading to its cancellation. That’s a pity, because Outsourced’s Vaudevillian-meets-absurdist comedy was like very little on television, but at least fans got the relative satisfaction of a reasonable season-turned-series finale.

This season of Survivor only went to prove the point that a cast filled with less-interesting-than-average people leads to a season that’s less interesting than average. I didn’t hate the redemption island mechanic as much as a vocal contingent of fans apparently did, though I agree that its impact was lost when it crammed in four people (erroneously calling it a duel) and having everyone but the guy who came in dead last “win”. And CBS, if you subject me to the Rob Mariano or Russell Hantz season one more time, there’s a good chance I stop watching your show; the novelty of bringing back old players has long worn off, and I’m already skeptical of next season because of it.

After a mostly solid season, The Mentalist shocked with a season finale that might have been the best-ever episode of the show. The constant one-upmanship between Jane and Red John took some seriously inspired writing and acting, but everyone pulled it off. The only question now is where does the series go from here?

House burdened us with some real clunkers (see the horrible attempt at a Pulp Fiction tribute episode where House decides to spend a few days hanging out at an elementary school), and storylines like Taub’s ongoing marital issues aren’t nearly as interesting as the show thinks they are. Worse, we had to endure an entire season of “Huddy” detracting from the snarky medical drama just to hear a restatement of the show’s main theme that everybody lies and nobody changes. Now that the show has it out of its system, and especially with Lisa Edelstein’s much-publicized departure, maybe House will hearken back to its brilliant first three seasons as inspiration for its last.

I laugh, on average, about three times per episode of The Big Bang Theory. It's become oddly romantic comedy-y, with even Sheldon, the caricature of social ineptitude, settling into his approximation of a relationship. Bernadette and Priya add basically nothing to the show, there's been virtually zero character development over the course of the show's sixty-plus episodes... yet each of those three jokes is genuinely hilarious enough for me to keep watching the show.

Currently listening: "Underneath the Sycamore," Death Cab for Cutie

Kathryn Calder: Album and Concert

2011-05-17T21:36:00.000-07:00

The great thing about being a fan of a band that's billed as a "supergroup" is that you instantly get five or six more bands and solo acts to delve into. Neko Case, of course, has an amazing voice (she and Jenny Lewis are almost certainly the best female vocalists in the business today), but her disregard for the "song" when she's singing by herself makes it a little tough to get excited about her solo work. A.C. Newman's own solo work has enough of the energy and creativity of his contributions to the New Pornographers that I'd pretty much just rather listen to the New Pornographers. And Dan Bejar is a talented guy too, but his slightly off-kilter vocals on his slightly self-satisfied tracks usually end up as my least favorite on any given New Pornographers album.

Now Kathryn Calder is launching a solo career of her own, which I sort of knew about but didn't pay a lot of attention to until Stephanie (of "whitest day of my life" fame) touted her album as "really really good". Calder seems determined to show the world that she's a whole lot more than "that other girl singer that the New Pornographers have who's not Neko Case". Because she was originally part of the band as a touring replacement for Neko Case, and now sings a lot of harmony with her, it can be tough to disentangle what vocal parts are Neko Case's or Kathryn Calder's (or, for that matter, A. C. Newman's falsetto's).

That's why it's such a pleasant surprise to listen to her 2010 album Are You My Mother? and hear that Calder has a lovely mezzo-soprano that weaves effortlessly among Pornographers-style power pop, "conventional" acoustic singer-songwriter, stripped-down piano ballads, and jangly indie folk. The entirely "ooh"ed chorus of the first track, "Slip Away," is a statement of Calder's vocal register, and "Low" is a fine song if you're a connoisseur of the deliberately lo-fi keyboard-driven, but it's with the energy of "Castor and Pollux" that the album really hits its stride, and it doesn't let up until somewhere around track eight or nine.

The standout track (if I really have to pick just one from the outstanding middle chunk of this album) is "If You Only Knew," and since I'm such a sucker for both indie folk and unabashedly happy music (not to mention songs that mention places I've lived), that's probably not a huge surprise. But "Follow Me Into the Hills" is pretty excellent too, and so is "Day Long Past Its Prime," and so is just about everything on the album. Only one criticism lingers for more than a few seconds, and that's how slightly underproduced many of the tracks feel. There's actually a really touching story behind that, so maybe we can cut Kathryn Calder some slack here.

The silver lining to wanting a better production value from her album tracks is that when you see Kathryn Calder live, you get it! In true Canadian indie musician fashion, "Kathryn Calder live" is actually Kathryn Calder plus four or five people playing various instruments and harmonizing all the "ooh"s and "la"s that make her music so delightful. She proves to be an remarkably talented musician, delivering an outstanding vocal performance on top of deftly switching between guitar and keyboard.

After better fidelity (coupled with convincing live musicianship), the second-best reason that Kathryn Calder in concert is actually better than Kathryn Calder on your iPod is that there's more to listen to. Three songs showed up that aren't part of Are You My Mother ("One Two Three," something to the effect of "Turn the Light On," and another that I don't think she named), and they were all really really good. Given that these were described as "new," it seems likely that Calder has a follow-up album in the works, which is nothing but good news.

As can be expected from an artist embarking on the first tour of her solo career, Calder's vocals wavered a bit for the first song or two. And the band members aren't talented enough stage artists yet that they're comfortable vamping or chatting with the audience for the minute it took Calder to get some tuning issues worked out--or maybe they're awkward indie kids, just like their audience. But they made up for it by being entertainingly Canadian (confirmed: people from Vancouver actually do say "aboat" instead of "about"!) and having genuine fun on stage.

Going to the show was genuine fun. Buying a ticket was a genuine deal--not since I was convinced to see Zao and Throwdown back in 2006 have I paid twelve dollars to see a live show. And between the album, the concert, and the promise of more good solo material, I am now a genuine Kathryn Calder fan.

Currently listening: "Blindness," Metric

No Other Show Like It Round Here: The New Pornographers in Concert

2011-04-19T18:59:00.000-07:00

I haven’t been a fan of the New Pornographers for nearly as long as I should have been, or nearly as long as you might guess based on what I feed into Pandora and Last.fm on a daily basis. One play of “Sing Me Spanish Techno” last September on my “Indie Pop Bonanza” Pandora station, though, and I was A Fan. Call them whatever adjective of indie you like, or invoke the “supergroup” label if you must, but it doesn't matter. These guys make the exact brand of music I like: happy, poppy music with conventional tonality and familiar structure but themes and vocabulary that are anything but ordinary.

The only complaints I can make about this show pertain to things that happened before the New Pornographers themselves started playing. One of the biggest issues with the show was the merch stand, of all things—and when the merch stand is among your biggest complaints, you’re attending a fine concert indeed. (Bands, do your male fans a favor and make your shirts available in men’s sizes other than small.) Dejected (but twenty bucks less poor), I sat through forty-five minutes of opener and half an hour of set change before Neko, A.C., and company finally took the stage.

It's my policy not to comment on openers unless they're any good, so I'll skip to my Concert Gripe of the Day: unnecessarily long set changes. Clear some guitars out of the way, put some new ones out. Drag a drum kit twenty feet. Arrange stools, microphones, bottles of water. Then let the band play. It really shouldn't take more than ten or fifteen minutes, and it rarely does, but for reasons that can only be related to the venue wanting to drum up drink sales, we're forced to gaze at the empty stage for fifteen more minutes.

But after the wait always comes good music, so it's something the concertgoer must be willing to endure... and if nothing else, the New Pornographers make good music. The opening number, "Moves," played out almost like an extended sound-check (something that theoretically could have been done during that fifteen minutes of nothing). Neko Case in particular took charge of the stage like a general on her battlefield, giving cryptic hand signs to offstage sound guys and sprinting to bark a few seconds of orders in between most of the first six or seven songs.

It was good to see Neko finally start rocking a few songs into the set--"tentative" is not exactly the word you'd usually associate with the woman responsible for the vocals on "Letter From An Occupant," but for the first ten minutes, she seemed strangely out of her element. It seems utterly ludicrous to associate stage fright with someone who's been at this for at least ten years, but whether it was nerves, an overriding concern for the sound balance, or second-guessing where she'd told the Second Cavalry to make its charge, she settled down soon enough. By the time they started jamming about "The Slow Descent into Alcoholism," the entire band was brimming with an energy that lasted another entire hour.

Along the way, the New Pornographers completely nailed "Mass Romantic," "It's Only Divine Right," "Crash Years," "Jackie, Dressed In Cobras," and probably a dozen more songs I'm forgetting. "Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk" still has never failed to make me smile. "The Bleeding Heart Show" was exactly the right way to end the show (though the band missed a golden opportunity for audience participation in the "hey-la" out-tro), "Challengers" was the encore song I never knew I always wanted to hear, and "Sing Me Spanish Techno" made a triumphant actual end to the show.

Three more things made this show awesome. First, even people who weren't too familiar with the band had a great time, which is a sure sign the band is doing something right. Second, blessedly few concert fouls were committed--even the weed cloud kept itself at bay until nearly the end of the show. And third, like any "hey, let's get together and tour for fun and profit" shows, it wasn't tied to an album, and there was a legitimate chance the band will play any given song in their discography; if I'd made a wish list of, say, ten songs I would have wanted the New Pornographers to play, they would have hit at least eight of them.

Currently listening: "Home Is A Fire," from the soon-to-be-released Death Cab album

Ke$ha Week 2011: Day 7, or The Conclusion

2011-04-03T14:06:00.000-07:00

It's been a fun week, Ke-dollar sign-ha, but it's back to the land of indie rock and pre-baroque polyphany for me. Today, I'll look back at the hits and misses of the week plus talk about some things I wish had shows up but didn't.

Ke$ha Week, Day 7: April 2, 2011

Ke$ha "hit" that never showed up (much to my dismay): "Dinosaur". How can you not love a song that starts with "D I/ N O/ S A/ you are a dinosaur" and is basically about Ke$ha's distaste for older men hitting on her? I feel like I got every Ke$ha song out there except for this one... and next to "Blow," it's easily my second-favorite Ke$ha song.

Saving graces that never showed up (even though I thought they had a pretty good chance): anything at all by either Metric or Paramore. Metric is sort of, kind of, almost dance pop (though there's probably a veritable army of Canadian indie kids who would berate me for applying that label); both Avril Lavigne (who Pandora associates very closely with Paramore... ask me how I know) and Haley Williams herself (though B.o.B.) showed up on the station. Both bands have female vocalists. And both bands are responsible for songs that I thumbed-up or seeded on other stations. Now, I haven't been able to confirm this, but I swear that Pandora does this thing where it looks at your stations and subtly pulls in music from them to other stations. I had my fingers crossed that would happen here. But apparently Pandora was in on the wager, because it was having none of that.

Pandora trend that I'm just now picking up on: its distribution of well-known songs versus deeper cuts. If you seed a station with a single artist (as I've done here), the station will play anything and everything by that artist. Then, it'll try to find artists that are similar to your seeded artist... but it only plays their better-known tracks. For example, I came across "Sleazy" by Ke$ha (which certainly lives up to its name), which is track 3 off of Cannibal, a song I'd never heard before and would never expect to hear on the radio. But for all the Jason Derulo the station figured I needed to hear, I only got "Whatcha Say," "In My Head," and "Ridin' Solo," Derulo's three massive hits, but about six times apiece.

Did "Like A G6" show up? No... for the first time this week. I was shocked too.

Last song of Ke$ha Week 2011: "Tik Tok," Ke$ha. Couldn't have asked for a more appropriate note to exit on.

Ke$ha Week 2011: Day 6, or: Actually, This Station is Pretty Good

2011-04-02T15:59:00.000-07:00

You know, after six straight days of listening to Ke$ha and similarly dance-poppy music, it's really starting to grow on me. I've already bought Lady Gaga's The Fame and pre-ordered Born This Way, and I think I'm headed to the club tonight in hopes of hearing a little Taio Cruz or Iyaz. And I was really pumped when I got to hear Jason Derulo on the radio yesterday!

Ke$ha Week, Day 6: April 1, 2011

Ke$ha hit of the day: Your Love Is My Drug (remix). This song paints a very real and intimate picture of Ke$ha's psyche. She shows vulnerability when she talks about her "sick obsession," and she crafts a subtle and evocative metaphor throughout the song, equating her feelings to a physiological addiction. By far, the most touching lyric is "my esteem is gonna get affected/ if I keep it up like a lovesick crackhead," where she demonstrates her inability to function separately from her emotions.

Most heartfelt, relatable themes: "Waking Up in Vegas," Katy Perry. Who among can't relate to slightly awkward circumstances like these: "why are these lights so bright/ did we get hitched last night?" Repetitive, catchy choruses bring us all back to the times we've had to shake off the glitter in our clothes after waking up somewhere we didn't plan on.

Best example of pop music as art: "Bad Romance," Lady Gaga. If you haven't seen the video, you're really missing out--it's a stunning artistic vision, combining abstract symbolism with dance pop hooks and dark, minor modalities.

Most inspired chorus: "Iyaz," Replay. "got me singin' like/ na na na na everyday/ it's like my iPod stuck on replay." Too few artists pay tribute to the physical medium of music anymore. Iyaz offers the insight that he's deeply connected to how his fans listen to his music--and with a clever double meaning, succeeds in getting his own song stuck in our heads like all of our respective iPods are stuck on replay.

Did "Like A G6" show up? Yes, but I had to wait over an hour for it! The undisputed party anthem of 2010 dares to imagine a universe in which there's something "flyer than a G4" and revels in its electrosynth glory.

Happy April Fool's, everyone. Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion of Ke$ha Week 2011.

Ke$ha Week 2011: Day 5, In Which My Patience For Rihanna Wears Thin

2011-04-02T02:19:00.000-07:00

Prior to the beginning of this ordeal, one of the artists likely to show up on the Ke$ha station that I would have said I didn't so much mind was Rihanna. Not that I liked Rihanna necessarily--although I'll readily admit to thinking "Disturbia" is a fine song--but that compared to the likes of 3OH!3, a little Rihanna isn't so bad.

I have changed my mind.

Ke$ha Week, Day 5: March 31, 2011

Ke$ha "hit" of the day: "We R Who We R". Again, this isn't one of her more outrageous songs, but it does contain the requisite amount of sleaze: "stockings ripped all up the side/ looking sick and sexy-fied."

Song I would actually be okay with never hearing again because I've had to endure so much of it: "Love the Way You Lie," Rihanna. Over the last five days, it has shown up at least half a dozen times in its various incarnations--I didn't know this before I started my endeavor, but there are actually two "parts" to this song; the one you heard every day on the radio in 2010 is the first. Honorable mentions for outstanding contribution to my Rihanna saturation go to "Only Girl (In the World)" and "S&M".

Peak ridiculousness: "My First Kiss," 3OH!3 feat. Ke$ha. In retrospect, I shouldn't have expected anything but peak ridiculousness from a song by 3OH!3 that feats Ke$ha. My favorite lyric has to be "your kiss is like whiskey; it gets me drunk," because it's so amusingly straightforward. The dance poppy chorus is actually not that bad, but Ke$ha making kissing noises is just weird.

Song that I skipped: "Starrstrukk", 3OH!3. If Day 5 was responsible for wearing down my Rihanna buffer, it also made me realize that I had absolutely no 3OH!3 buffer. Besides, if I wanted to hear douchebag white guys yell at me and pretend they're good rappers, I could just listen to Eminem's part of "Love the Way You Lie."

Is David Guetta is still bad? Yes, if you believe "Who's That Chick". Aside from being irritatingly overproduced--I don't think there's a single audio element of this song that's not electronic in some form--includes such inspired lyrics as "urrbody's gettin' low."

Ke$ha Week 2011: Day 4, or: "This Place About to Blow"

2011-04-01T00:54:00.000-07:00

The halfway point in the Ke$ha marathon marked both the first time that Ke$ha herself didn't start the day (usually, when you start a station based on a single artist, Pandora makes some effort to play a song by that artist first) and the first time I've heard a Ke$ha song and its remix in the same day.

Ke$ha Week 2011, Day 4: March 30, 2011

Ke$ha "hit" of the day: "Blow" (plus its remix). The best lyric is "Throw some glitter, make it rain," but the lyrics aren't the best part of "Blow"--it's the video. Please watch this video. It's simultaneously terrifying and the greatest music video I've seen this year.

Today's overexposed artist: Katy Perry. Pulling a Lady Gaga move, Ms. Perry hasn't been featured this week nearly as much as I thought she would have--until today. My first song of today was "Teenage Dream," which would almost not be a terrible song, but for lyrics like "get your heart racing in my skin-tight jeans." In the span of less than an hour, I also got hit with "California Gurls," and "I Kissed A Girl". Later, because I apparently hadn't had enough Katy Perry, Pandora decided I need a "Teenage Dream" encore.

Most hilarious reimagining of an 80's hit: "Right Round," Flo Rida. Of course, this song appears on the station because it's more correctly "Flo Rida feat. Ke$ha." Only us true fans know that this song is how she got her big break.

Song that inspired the best Hanukkah-themed parody: "Dynamite," Taio Cruz. If you missed "Candlelight" last Hanukkah, now would be a great time to catch up--particularly because the Maccabeats have a new song for Purim!

First time that the ATL has gotten some props on this station: "Break Your Heart," Taio Cruz feat. Ludacris. It's not a great song (nor is it a bad song by the standards of this station), but I can't help but cut Luda some slack. After all, this is the genius responsible for "What's Your Fantasy," "Pimpin' All Over the World," and of course "Welcome to Atlanta"... and he never misses an opportunity to rep the Dirty South.

Ke$ha Week 2011: Day 3, or: Lady Gaga's Revenge

2011-03-30T18:31:00.000-07:00

My journey through the soundscape of trashy dance-pop has been surprisingly Lady Gaga-free for the past couple of days. A couple of songs over a couple of hours yesterday, and exactly zero on Day 1.

That all changed today, when Lady G made her presence known four times in just over an hour.

Ke$ha Week 2011, Day 3: March 29, 2011

Ke$ha "hit" of the day: "Animal". This song is really tame by Ms. Sebert's standards. It's more nonsensical than unintentionally hilarious... no mention of "little bitches" or "keeping it in your pants" here. Lyric: "our world is spinning at the speed of light" (which I sincerely hope that it is not).

Songs until I had to hear Lady Gaga: 3. "Poker Face" was the first time she showed up, and not the (vastly superior) Eric Cartman version. I also got "Telephone" around half an hour in. I never realized about this, but somehow Lady Gaga managed to make a single (peaking at #3 on Billboard!) out of complaining that too many people call her, and that she would rather dance than talk on the phone. "Alejandro" decided to roll after about 45 minutes, and I just missed the tail end of "Just Dance" because I had a meeting.

Does Jason Derulo announce his name at the beginning of all of his songs? Yes, see also either "Whatcha Say" or "In My Head," both of which I got to hear today.

Peak ridiculousness: "Sexy Bitch," David Guetta feat. Akon. "Sexy Bitch" contains both of these lyrics: "I'm trying to find the words to describe this girl without being disrespectful" and "damn you's a sexy bitch." Now, I was (and remain) willing to consider the notion that this song is tongue-in-cheek, an ironic commentary on the limited vocabularies of other hip-hop artists, meant to offer a deliberate juxtaposition of vulgarity and respect. But I'm skeptical: this song is so far out of the realm of good taste that if it is in fact a joke, it's an ill-conceived one.

Actually not that bad: "Everytime We Touch," Cascada. It's pretty standard dance-pop, derivative and relatively uninspired, but at least it's energetic, and there's nothing offensive about it. After "Sexy Bitch," Cascada suddenly starts sounding really good.

Ke$ha Week 2011: Day 2, or: "Club Can't Handle Me"

2011-03-29T23:32:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's selection featured much more of a dance club-ish vibe, rather than the shotgun spread of whatever was on the radio circa 2010 that surfaced on Sunday. (Miss what all this is about?)

Ke$ha Week, Day 2: March 28, 2011

Ke$ha "hit" of the day: "Kiss n Tell". I hadn't come across this masterpiece until around 11 am yesterday. It's full of lyrical brilliance, but its standout lyric is without a doubt "you really should have kept it in your pants; I'm hearing dirty stories from your friends."

Worst song: "Cooler Than Me," Mike Posner. This song has exactly twelve words, six of which are "you think you're cooler than me." I know I'm cooler than whoever wrote the drum part on this song, because he only knows two rhythms.

Saving grace: "Airplanes," B.o.B. Dearest Hayley Williams, I've never been so happy to hear your voice. I could really use a wish right now, too. It involves not hearing any more Mike Posner for the rest of the week.

Should Britney Spears sings dubstep? No, as we hear in "Hold it Against Me". (Actually, it's doubtful that anyone should ever sing dubstep.) Here's a sample lyric: "you feel like paradise, and I need a vacation tonight, so if I said I want your body, would you hold it against me?" Get it? You're so clever, ~~Britney Spears~~ Britney Spears' songwriter.

Songs until I had to hear Lady Gaga: 3 ("Born This Way"). "Lovegame" also made an appearance. (Lady Gaga wants to take a ride on my disco stick.)

Song I skipped: "Bass Down Low" by someone who calls herself "Dev". She sounds like a second-rate Ke$ha, and this song pulls off the unlikely feat of making me wish "Kiss n Tell" would show up again.

Ke$ha Week 2011: Day 1

2011-03-28T19:09:00.000-07:00

I lost a bet recently.

The details aren't as important as the wager. If I lost (and I narrowly but decisively did), I would have to listen to Kesha Radio on Pandora for a week. Whenever I sat at my computer and otherwise would have been inclined to listen to iTunes or Last.fm or one of my own Pandora stations, I got nailed with Ke$ha instead.

And I couldn't count on exploiting any loopholes: Two skips per hour. (No skipping if our dollar-signed friend herself showed up.) And no manipulating the playlist with thumbs-upping/downing.

It's a tall order, but I'm honor-bound to go through with it. Ever wondered what a Ke$ha Pandora station is like, but a little too scared (or proud) to investigate it for yourself? You can live vicariously through me!

Ke$ha Week, Day 1: March 27, 2011

Ke$ha "hit" of the day: "Blah Blah Blah". This song is so inspired that it's hard to pick out the best lyric, so here are two: "don't be a little bitch with your chitchat," "I wanna be naked, and you're wasted."

Worst song of the day: "3", Britney Spears. Lyric: "1, 2, 3/ Not only you and me,/ Got one eighty degrees,/ And I'm caught in between." This song is about having a threesome. It is so overproduced that Britney actually sings autotuned harmony with her autotuned self.

Did "Like a G6" show up? Yes, around the sixth song. It might have been a remix, because the album was listed as Far East Movement Remixes, but nobody announced "remix!" at the beginning, so I wasn't sure.

Peak ridiculousness: "I Like It," Enrique Iglesias feat. Pitbull. When a song's selling point is that it was included on the Jersey Shore soundtrack, you can guess about how good it is.

Song that I skipped: "Bottoms Up," Trey Songz. I shouldn't have been surprised that this song was so bad given how Mr. Songz chooses to spell his name.

"Currently listening" is on hiatus for the next week. Mourn for it.

Lisbeth Salander and My New Kindle Addiction

2011-03-26T23:21:00.000-07:00

It's rare the books create social phenomena. (Insert your own social commentary here.) Over the last decade, it's happened only three-ish times. One started in 2001 or so with Harry Potter, which became incredibly popular when phrases started getting thrown around like "my kids actually want to read now!". Another happened in 2003 with The DaVinci Code--and, while it was a fun story and a well-done thriller, the only reason that Dan Brown's books became known to the mainstream at all was an overblown religious controversy.

And in the last few years of the 2000s, Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander books somehow accelerated themselves into the public consciousness. It's surprising. Harry Potter had the tween vote going for him, Robert Langdon was the darling of every media outlet in the world for a few months... and Salander? The books about her are just good. Yet they're all over the place--people not usually known for being voracious readers have read all three of the books in the series and love them. Larsson has acquired piles of accolades in countries all over the globe. And as recently as fall 2010--two full years after its US release--there were nearly one hundred people waiting for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo at the Berkeley Public Library.

By last August, I'd been told so adamantly by so many people to read these books that in a Netflix-esque move, I broke down and put the first one, Dragon Tattoo, on hold. Four months later, I finally got my hands on it and read it over Christmas. It didn't disappoint. Larsson has a real talent for putting together intriguing, complex plots that are perpetually one step ahead of you as you read--so you can't help but keep reading more. His books aren't page-turners in the classic thriller (Dan Brown) sense of spewing plot at a breakneck pace and organizing it into two-page chapters.

Instead, Larsson is so adept at bringing multiple characters and plots together that you keep reading just to see how it all shakes out. Sometimes it's political conspiracy, sometimes it's cold-case forensics, sometimes it's gritty journalism... and Larsson's knack is putting it all together gracefully and (mostly) believably.

Dragon Tattoo turned out to be such a great read that I wanted to read the following books (The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest) as immediately as possible. The prospect of another four-month penalty lap courtesy of the BPL wasn't looking so good, but fortunately I had a new friend in the Amazon Kindle. This thing is magical and deadly. It makes reading so damn convenient that you will want to take it everywhere and read. Whether that's a good thing will depend entirely on how much free time you have and how many five-to-ten-dollar checks you're willing to offer in tribute to your new Amazon overlords.

Needless to say, I bought both Fire and Hornet's Nest immediately, but it took an embarrassingly long time to get through them both because things like "doing my job" reared their ugly head come January. Now that I'm finally finished, I can say for sure that the entire trilogy is absolutely worth reading, though it does come with a couple of caveats. A major theme in the trilogy is violence against women and society's role in preventing it (or at times condoning it), and to drive home his point, Larsson isn't afraid of including some graphic scenes of abuse and rape. But we're all adults here, and given that those scenes actually serve a point (rather than being merely pornographic, like similar scenes included in many movies), they're easy enough to look past.

The other popular criticism of the series, and of Dragon Tattoo in particular, is that it's too fundamentally Swedish for an international audience to be able to enjoy it. Characters make plenty of references to decades-old Swedish politicians, shop at Ikea and drive Volvos, and live on streets that have the character "å" in their names. It's confusing and even a little off-putting at first, but the overwhelming Swedishness gives the books character. And either Larsson or his editor had the grace to start adding footnotes to elucidate the more obscure references to those of us that live outside of Scandanavia.

Are these books "classics," Lisbeth Salander destined to become this generation's Tom Sawyer or Sherlock Holmes? I've long ago given up the "classic" discussion, but one thing's for sure: the best chance that these books have of being read decades from now is Salander herself. She's an incredibly complex character: reliable even though few people understand her at first, moving past "self-sufficient" into just "selfish," intensely good at what she does but downright poor at what almost everyone else can do. Salander's competence to function as a normal adult is raised as an issue throughout the series. The reason she's such a fascinating protagonist is that although most of the skepticism (and of course all of the abuse) directed towards her is downright wrong, Salander can't help but call her own competence into question.

Read Stieg Larsson's books for Lisbeth Salander; read them to feed a Kindle addiction of your own; read them just to get your friends off your back. You won't be disappointed.

Currently listening: "Go Places," the New Pornographers

Lost: The Complete Collection

2011-03-08T23:05:00.000-08:00

I just bought myself a belated birthday present: Lost: The Complete Collection on Blu-Ray. It goes without saying that I'm such a Lost fan that I'd have been completely happy with it even if it just contained every episode of the series... but this is Lost, so we should expect nothing so mundane. Instead, we get a superbly crafted mini-pyramid of mysteries that manages both to contain the series and encapsulate it.

In addition to thirty-five Blu-Ray discs, this thing includes (in increasing order of esotericness) a guide to all the episodes, a map of the Island, a (slightly secret) copy of the Blast Door map, a sheet from the Black Rock ledger, a Dharma Initiative blacklight keychain, a senet board complete with black and white rocks, and an ankh with a "secret message from Jacob". This all sounds absurdly made up to anyone with a life, but trust me, it's geekily glorious to us fans.

The blacklight lets you search for hidden messages within the collection. That's the surest sign that whoever was responsible for this package really hit it out of the park, because that's exactly the sort of thing that someone willing to throw down $170 on a bunch of discs of Lost would be excited about doing. Through careful exploration, you can decode the "secret message," find the hidden thirty-sixth disc (requiring you to, cleverly enough, "move the Island"), and learn to play senet. You can also explore the hidden messages on the Blast Door map and find some hidden illustrations in the disc sleeves.

Of course, you also get the entirety of Lost, which is pretty cool too. I popped in a season 6 disc just to make sure they worked, and 44 minutes of "Dr. Linus" later, I'm reminded how incredible this show really is. If you're a fan, do yourself a favor and buy this set. The brilliance of Lost was that you got out of it as much as you put into it--and you could put an astonishing amount in. Somehow, Lost: The Complete Collection manages to pull that off too.

Currently listening: "Mutiny, I Promise You", The New Pornographers

Eisley: The Valley

2011-03-01T18:00:00.000-08:00

I've liked Eisley for a long time, and although I recently got to see them in concert, it's been until now that I've had the fanboy pleasure of hearing one of their albums on its release date. (Protip: living on the west coast means you can technically download the album at 9 pm the day before it releases.)

Where Eisley's earlier albums were built on happy sentimentality and surreal fantasy, The Valley has a much darker tone. Eisley has collectively grown up a lot, producing an album that's more despondently mature than anything they've ever released. And it's not yet clear if that's a good thing.

It's clear that the songs on The Valley are coming from an entirely different place than those on Room Noises or Combinations. Bad things have happened to the lovely ladies of Eisley over the past four years, including a broken engagement and a divorce, and that provides most of the somber creativity on this album. It's a surprisingly visceral set for a band that built its freshman and sophomore albums on songs about mermaid-entwined shrubbery and alien body-snatchers. There's something to be said for how raw and personal a lot of the material is.

But on the other hand, it's not the Eisley that we know and love. We like Eisley because they're the band that plays at our local coffeehouse, singing songs about being lost at sea with people they love, wearing floral-print dresses and carrying a refreshing air of non-pretentiousness. Hearing them sing about their very real tribulations seems somehow wrong. Maybe it's not a bad wrong. Maybe it's just a wrong that's going to take some getting used to.

To help ease the transition, Eisley includes plenty of songs that sounds stylistically (if not thematically) at home on the earlier albums. "Watch it Die" and "Oxygen Mask" both evoke Combinations' more ethereal songs ("I Could Be There For You," "Come Clean") with falsetto-Stacy vocals and string/piano backing. And "Kind" and "Mr. Moon" owe a lot to the aesthetic of Room Noises, with guitar syncopation and major/minor interplay just toeing the line of whimsical.

There are a lot of strong tracks on The Valley, but this is a sort of album where no two listeners are going to prefer the same set of songs. Early standouts include "Sad," a Sherri vocal tour de force (every Eisley album has to have at least one, see also "Marvelous Things" and "Invasion") and "Ambulance," a strongly piano-driven reflection on, yes, a broken relationship that's better heard as a single track than as a closer to an album filled with yet more reflections on broken relationships.

The Valley represents an intriguing new stylistic direction for Eisley, but what's really going to be interesting is the direction that their future albums take, once these wounds have had a few years to heal. If Eisley can retain some of the darkly emotional energy of The Valley and integrate it with some of the playful fantasy of their earlier albums, then there are very bright things in Eisley's future.

Currently listening: "Miracle," Paramore

Mass Effect 2: Less Than A Year Late

2011-02-28T22:04:00.000-08:00

If Dragon Age: Origins was the game that got me to re-think my stance on Bioware, and the original Mass Effect was the game that finally tipped me over the edge to being a full-fledged Bioware fanboy, then Mass Effect 2 is the game that makes me glad to be there. It picked up where its predecessor left off, did a bunch more things right (and ME did plenty right on its own), and resulted in perhaps the best hybrid RPG ever.

Fans of the original, and of RPGs in general, will immediately notice that ME2 is less RPG-y than the original and than most of Bioware's earlier RPGs. The inventory system was one of the few weaknesses in the original; at times, it felt more like we were playing Spreadsheet: The RPG. Of course, whether to use Incendiary Ammo VII or Cryogenic Ammo VI would probably make such a slight sliver of difference to the gameplay that you'd really have to be looking for it to notice it, but let's face it: I spent far too long optimizing everyone's ammo upgrades on their tertiary weapons, and you did too.

ME2 doesn't waste time with those details. Every character has a handful of weapons, of which they'll ever use two at the most. Shepard's armor is customizable, but in a "hey, that's a cool bonus" sort of way as opposed to "I must squeeze every possible point of defense out of this." And gone are the multitude of skills that you may or may not ever use; each character has three plus a bonus that's unlockable over the course of the game. The result is something that doesn't feel exactly like an RPG, certainly less so than the first game did, but then again doesn't really sell itself as one or claim to be one.

All of those simplifications are things that could make the RPG purist whine, and fair enough to that. (We still have the RPG-tastic Elder Scrolls series--and Bioware's own Dragon Age--to console us.) But look at the other side of the coin: think of the pain that shooter purists must be feeling! There's no barrel-aim acceleration, no "realistic" obstacles to hitting your target like your character's breathing or footsteps, and no fancy scopes or aiming reticules. But as much as each of those is a sine qua non to a shooter person, they just represent inaccessibility to the rest of us.

So Mass Effect 2 manages to do something that's very rare indeed in the realm of game design: it hybridizes two genres to the satisfactions of all parties. It strips down both genres and figures out what's fundamentally fun about each with little regard for attaching either side's sacred-cow strictures. Then it combines all that fun into a game that turns out to be... fun.

The other thing that Mass Effect 2 does remarkably well is stray from the Bioware Path. The in media res prologue is still there, and so is the climactic final "dungeon", but gone is the almost amusingly tried-and-true "here are four parallel tasks that you must accomplish and which take place in different corners of the world" formula that literally every other Bioware game has followed. ME2 is stronger for pursuing its own identity. There's no artificial unfolding of the plot and very little railroading; instead, the endgame is laid out plainly after only a few hours of gameplay, and you can choose whichever path you see fit to get there.

It's a trend in modern video gaming to make games a reflection of a story that you want to tell rather than what the developers want to tell, and no game out there accomplishes this better than ME2. Although every playthrough of the game ends up in the same place, it's entirely up to you to get there, and your version of the game is the result of dozens of decisions that you make. It's an engaging and ultimately more rewarding experience than playing through someone else's version of the game.

And it's that immersive storytelling that really sets Bioware apart from other game studios. Bethesda builds worlds and lore better. Nintendo is more prolific and has a virtual monopoly on classic franchises. But if Bioware can make their trilogy's middle volume one of the best games in years, then consider me a fan.

Currently listening: The Valley, Eisley (review to follow!)

Birthday Cake

2011-02-17T16:01:00.000-08:00

My old friends the Decemberists decided they'd play a show in Oakland for my birthday, which was really nice of them, except that 1) it's impossible to get my friends excited about the Decemberists, and 2) while I'm perfectly comfortable going to concerts alone, doing that on my birthday just seemed sort of depressing. So, I decided on the next-best thing: go to see Cake (which I could motivate some friends to go to see) the day after my birthday.

Cake is one of those bands, like, say, Guster or the Juliana Theory, that I rarely think "yes, awesome, I need to listen to this band immediately." But when I do listen to them, I always scold myself for not being more into them, because they are awesome. Cake has been at this a long time--they're pushing two decades--and none of their albums represent much of a departure from any of their other albums, but there's something to be said for their consistency.

So Cake has never been at the top of my List Of Bands I Must See In Concert (it exists, and Death Cab for Cutie, Rilo Kiley, and the New Pornographers are all somewhere towards the front)... but now that I've seen them, I'm scolding myself for not putting them up there. In a reflection of their albums, their show isn't one that blows you away and leaves you, slack-jawed, gazing at the stage at the Fillmore and unable to move. Instead, it's a show full of really solid material that comes with just enough wry humor and audience participation to make you appreciate the hell out of the band.

(Another thing that makes me, at least, appreciate them is their extensive use of the trumpet. Trumpeter Vince DiFiore doesn't play a lot of difficult parts, though he plays them really well. It's when he launches into improv, something you don't get to hear a lot of on the albums, that's when you really start to understand how good he is--and how you're benefiting from seeing Cake live instead of just listening to them in your room.)

The band described their own show as playing two sets, but it felt more like a long set and a half, or like Cake was opening for themselves. The first half of the show featured some reasonably well-known older material ("Frank Sinatra") and some tracks from their new album, but it wasn't until the second half of the post-intermission set that they launched into iconic Cake, including "Love You Madly," "Sheep Go to Heaven," and "Short Skirt Long Jacket," finally ending the encore with "The Distance".

It's always a nice touch when bands make the audience sing, and it's even better when the audience plays along. The Cake-going crowd was game enough to provide background vocals on a few tracks, which was fun. Cake took their audience participation a step further, giving away cool stuff in exchange for knowing the answers to obscure trivia questions, including the date that Gutenberg was credited for inventing the printing press (1440; the prize was a printed page, signed by the band, from a book that Cake put together) and the identity of a mysterious tree on the stage (lemon; the prize was the tree itself).

One thing that made Cake stand out even more: throughout that trivia contest, and throughout the entirety of the show, Cake worked hard to maintain an air of civility, humility, and courteousness. It's a lesson that a lot of rock bands would benefit from taking to heart, and coupled with some excellent music, it made for a great (if slightly belated) birthday dessert.

Currently listening: "The Only Living Boy in New York," Simon and Garfunkel

Black Swan: Not the Best Movie of 2010

2011-02-01T21:14:00.000-08:00

Granted, I'm a bad choice of person to ask what the best movie of the year is. (After all, I'm one of like six people in my demographic who still hasn't seen Inception.) But I'm pretty sure that best movie is not Black Swan.

There's not much to be said for the plot of the movie. As a character study of a slowly developing insanity, it's fine, but "protagonist seeks impossible goal and goes insane" has been done to death over the last five centuries. Shakespeare did it with Hamlet, Cervantes with Don Quixote, Dostoevsky with Crime and Punishment, and Joseph Conrad with Heart of Darkness (probably the best "descent into madness" thriller out there). Black Swan draws from this fertile ground of storytelling but doesn't leave much of its own impact.

And let's be honest: from the moment that Natalie Portman's character Nina explains the plot of Swan Lake for the first time, we all know what's going to happen in the end. Portman's Nina--whose "White Swan" allegory couldn't be made more obvious if she wrote "white swan" on her forehead (naturally, with white marker)--is obviously destined to die by her own hand. (Black Swan did do legions of theatergoers the service of informing them how stupid the plot of Swan Lake is: girl is transformed into a swan and ends up killing herself because the guy she's after falls in love with the wrong girl? Whatever you say, Pyotr Ilyich.)

Thematically, amateur critics could have a field day throwing out allegations of "symbolism" with Swan's black-and-white drenched mise en scene. But in order to be symbolic, the supposed symbol must actually symbolize something. Any viewer could make the argument that any given black or white item had some deeper significance behind it. For a handful of costume pieces and important props, that's of course the intention, but it would be possible to seek your own impossible goal and reach your own madness trying to assign a symbolic interpretation to everything that is white or black. Sorry, but the black doorframes do not represent unrestrained passion. They're just part of the black/white motif--and that's totally fine--but let them be doorframes and don't make them more than they need to be.

Finally, that Natalie Portman should be lauded as heavily as she has been for her performance is baffling. She carries the role of Nina just fine, and her dancing skills are certainly legitimate and praise-worthy, but the problem is that her character is just not interesting. That's not Natalie Portman's fault, of course, but it feels counter-intuitive to heap awards on acting out a character based on deer-in-the-headlights stares and a frailty that comes across less as fragile vulnerability and more as bland weakness.

Black Swan isn't terrible. Vincent Cassel plays the manipulative, twisted-artist role to perfection (and pulling off a straight French ballet director should be award-worthy in its own right), and it's entertaining enough to sort through Nina's psyche to figure out which parts of the movie are real and which ones all in her head. Where the movie succeeds most is in giving an unflinching look at dancer culture; with its pressures and infighting, it's easy to believe that this is the kind of thing that could drive Nina mad.

It's entertaining and probably worth seeing if you're up to the challenge of putting together a few pieces yourself, but Black Swan just doesn't pave enough new ground or come together in the right places to legitimately be the best movie of its year.

Currently listening: "Pretend You're Alive," Lovedrug

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Game Informer For Free

2011-01-28T20:40:00.000-08:00

That we're still more than nine months away from the release of Skyrim is excruciating, but at least the good folks over at Game Informer have dedicated more or less the entire month of January to the cause. They've posted about a dozen fascinating articles about the game, ranging from insights into its development process to previews of its mechanics--but naturally, with them being a business and all, there's plenty more content in the physical magazine, in its February 2011 issue.

I'm nowhere near as big a video gamer as I was ten years ago, and my days of subscribing to video game magazines are long over... but this is Skyrim we're talking about. I decided I needed to own a copy of this issue. There were disappointingly few places I could have bought it on the internet, with the exception of eBay, and after shipping, it would end up costing me more money to buy a used copy than just to find my own.

"Easy," you might say. "Go to a bookstore." That would be a fine idea but for living in Berkeley. There's not exactly a Barnes and Noble down the street, and it's not like the hippies at the local independent bookstore carry a vast selection of video-gaming magazines. BART is always an option--but then I'd be spending more on my trip than on the magazine--and I have friends with cars, but I like to save my begged-for rides for things that really count, like trips that involve forty pounds of dirt from Home Depot.

But, upon entering my apartment yesterday, I noticed something: the February 2011 issue of Game Informer sitting on the shelf below my building's mailboxes. That shelf has come to be used for abandoning pieces of mail that belong to people no longer living in your apartment--and living in a student-heavy area, that happens quite a lot. I checked the name on the label against the name on Apartment 2's mailbox, and it was way off. Still, there's the vague thought of the phrase "federal crime" when you steal someone else's mail, and maybe there was a perfectly good explanation for why the magazine was outside its mailbox?

I didn't have to debate postal ethics for long, though. I opened my own mailbox to find the exact same issue of Game Informer had magically shown up in my mailbox. There is surely no Phillip Van Sant living in Apartment 12, and between shelving the magazine next to its twin or adopting it, the choice became easy.

Here's the thing, though: my apartment has never received an issue of Game Informer prior to January 27, 2011, and I've been leaving there for nearly a year and a half. I assume Mr. Van Sant is a prior tenant, but I've never gotten any of his mail before now. It seems downright bizarre that the first and only one that shows up happens to be the exact magazine I'm interested in.

I must have cashed in some seriously good karma for something. And, to keep the cycle going, Mr. Van Sant, the magazine is yours if you want it.

Currently listening: Tartini, Concerto in D, as performed by Maurice Andre

The Decemberists: The King is Dead

2011-01-18T19:59:00.000-08:00

Now that they've been making albums for ten years, it doesn't look like a completely consistent Decemberists album, one that's just plain good from start to finish, is ever going to be in the cards. Look at literally any of their six full-length albums (and many of their EPs and other assorted releases), and you'll see that half to two thirds of it is amazing, bordering on brilliant, and the remainder is... not. Sometimes it tries too hard and becomes the indie cliche that the Decemberists are often accused of being. Sometimes it doesn't try hard enough, and what would otherwise be a halfway decent track is lost to much better material to either side of it. And sometimes it's just boring.

The weird thing about the Decemberists is that however they dress their music up, it turns out this same way. Whether they're set in medieval Japan or Arthurian England, every Decemberists album follows the pattern. So forget the "blah blah blah REM" hype, and lay the "hey look, this album was recorded in a barn, so it is rustic" to rest. It's still a Decemberists record. It's still indie pop with strong folk influences and a pinch of hard rock to make it interesting. It still features Colin Meloy using words that you didn't know existed. And it still features six or seven outstanding tracks and a handful of entirely forgettable ones.

That's not to say that The King Is Dead is the same album as any of the Decemberists' past releases--least of all The Hazards of Love. Where Hazards was high-concept rock opera (and really cool, though not everyone's cup of tea), King is toned down a bit. The only major "theme" on this album, if one exists at all, is the passage of time: seasons turn, calamities happen, we reminisce, we fight in wars... and everything goes on. But the Decemberists are rarely ones to make a statement ("16 Military Wives" being possibly the sole exception). They're content to sing songs, and that's what's great about them.

What works on King? For starters, everything involving that "turn of the seasons" motif: "Don't Carry It All" is an upbeat way to start the album, a sincere paean to lending a helping hand. "January Hymn" has an austere beauty that executes Fleet Foxes' concept better than Fleet Foxes can, and "June Hymn" is as unpretentious an indie-pop tune you'll ever find, reveling in some simplicity that evokes some almost-real Springville Hill.

My favorite track, strangely, is "Rox in the Box." It has an irritating title, and the first two lines of it sound like they should be from a Charles Barkley commercial for Taco Bell, but it evolves into a complex tune with layers of bluegrass and old-style American folk that very few bands could pull off. "All Arise!" is another stylistic experiment, mixing in zydeco harmonica, accordion, and fiddle--and like "Rox," it borrows heavily from the aesthetic of the Decemberists' so-called side project, Black Prairie. And "Down By the Water" is a fine first single; what it lacks in usual Decemberists flamboyance, it makes up for with Gillian Welch's vocal performance. (Welch is featured on around half of the album's tracks, but her talents are used most effectively in "Water".)

King's biggest problem is that its pacing is just a bit askew. It's not a long album, weighing in at under 40 minutes, and every time it finishes, I want there to be more--which speaks highly for the album. Still, it drags in parts: both "Rise to Me" and "Dear Avery" are nearly five minutes long, and neither is interesting enough to warrant that much length. "Dear Avery" in particular is a curious, unexpectedly low-key end to the album. It's not quite as dull as "Of Angels and Angles," the mind-numbingly emo finale to 2005's Picaresque, but it doesn't build to any sort of climax that gets me excited about the last eight minutes of the album.

But it's the Decemberists, after all, and we can't expect every single track to be a winner. Six or seven brilliant out of ten is nothing to sneeze at.

Currently listening: "Apologies", Christie DuPree

The Case Against a College Football Playoff

2011-01-06T10:52:00.000-08:00

It's that time of the college football season again. Time to watch the best teams play each other, to celebrate the achievements of the student athletes--and to argue about how we could do it all better. It's awfully trendy these days to argue in favor of a college football playoff, but in reality, a playoff solves few of the problems it's ostensibly designed to fix, and introduces plenty of its own.

1. Someone still gets left out

One circumstance that sparks a particularly impassioned rallying cry among the football playoff's supporters is when a team gets left out. Maybe there are three undefeated teams, only two of which can play for the national title. Maybe there is only one undefeated team but three teams with one loss. Supporters of the playoff argue that a playoff is inherently more fair simply because there are more slots, giving more teams a chance to contend for the title.

Admittedly, even expansion to a modest four-team playoff does allow every undefeated team to contend for the title in most years. Expansion to a more ambitious eight-team playoff virtually guarantees that all the undefeateds will be in, barring the vanishingly rare case of enormous imparity in every football conference. However, unless there are exactly four, or exactly eight, undefeated teams, some team with the next-best record is still going to get left out. I'll use the 2010-2011 season as an example, referencing rankings and records as of the final BCS standings, but you can perform the same analysis on any college football season and come up with pretty much the same conclusions.

This year was an unfortunate example of the "three undefeated teams" version of the "someone gets left out" argument. Auburn (13-0) and Oregon (12-0) are outstanding football teams and the natural choices to contend for the title. But in letting them play in the title game, you're keeping out TCU (12-0), who essentially had no chance at ever making it to the title game unless Auburn or Oregon lost, and who showed in the Rose Bowl that they're every bit tough enough to "play with the big boys."

A four-team playoff would have allowed TCU to play for the national title. It also would have allowed Stanford (11-1) that same chance while denying it to Wisconsin (11-1) and Ohio State (11-1). While Stanford is also without question very good, you could make the argument that Wisconsin and Ohio State deserve the chance more because Stanford already lost to Oregon.

Want to expand to eight teams? Okay, but now you're letting in Oklahoma (11-2) but not Michigan State (11-1) or Virginia Tech (11-2). You're letting in Arkansas (10-2) but not LSU (10-2) or Missouri (10-2). And you're entirely neglecting Boise State (11-1) and the only team that figured out how to beat them, 12-1 Nevada.

In summary, although a playoff is a step in the right direction toward ensuring that no undefeated team gets left without a shot at the title, it still involves drawing an arbitrary line through a cluster of teams with similar records--and the teams on the wrong side of that line get left out.

2. Bowl coexistence

The bowls are an integral part of college football history, tradition, and culture. Fortunately, not even the most strident playoff supporters advocate getting rid of the bowls, so it's obvious that a hypothetical playoff would have to coexist with them. There are a number of ways to do this, but none of them are particularly satisfactory.

The BCS has tried two methods of reconciling itself with the classic "major bowls". Until 2006, the national championship rotated among the Sugar, Fiesta, Orange, and Rose Bowls. It's easy to envision a scenario where one year, the Rose Bowl is the national championship game, and the Orange and Sugar are national semifinal games; then the next year, the Orange is the national championship, and the Sugar and Fiesta are national semifinals, etc.

But it didn't really work when the BCS tried it, and there's no reason to think it would work any better under a playoff system. It's confusing--and it takes power out of the hands of the bowls and gives it to the playoff bracket. These "major" bowls are classics for a reason. The Rose Bowl is supposed to feature the best West Coast team against the best Midwest team. The Sugar Bowl is supposed to give the SEC a chance to defend its reputation on a national stage. College football is better off if it preserves as many of these traditions as possible.

A second option might be sending all the best teams to bowls at the end of the season... except for the really good teams, who get to enter the championship bracket. Now, the Fiesta Bowl features the best team in the Big XII... except for those two teams that were better and got to play in the playoff. You're watering down the bowls--they become the less exciting and less meaningful cousin to the playoff, which is fair neither to the student athletes that play in them nor to the culture of the sport.

Finally, it's conceivable to separate the bowls from the playoffs entirely; to play the bowls as they're traditionally done, then re-rank, then seed the top four or eight teams into a playoff. That idea has the advantage of preserving the sanctity of the bowl system, but it introduces yet another wrinkle: season creep.

3. Season creep

The college football season is already pushing the limit of how long it can reasonably be. For a long time, the climactic high point of the season was New Year's Day and the Rose Bowl. In the BCS era, we've tolerated some early January bowls. And now that the national championship game is its own entity, we've allowed it to take the place of honor as the very last bowl game--but it's pushing middle January.

Middle January is when virtually every college starts its spring semester--some, including my proud alma mater Georgia Tech, will have already started its semester by the time the national championship game is played. If a hypothetical playoff added any time at all to the season, then the season will extend at least a week or two into virtually every college's spring semester. That's okay for us fans, but it's not okay for the student athletes involved. Commitment over an entire semester is enough; there's no justification for stretching it into another one.

In conclusion, there exists no practical approach to a college football playoff that results in both the bowl season maintaining its tradition and excitement and the playoff not encroaching into middle to late January. And even if there were, it would rarely if ever solve the "fairness" problem that the current system presents. We can argue all day long that the BCS is broken, but a tacked-on four- or eight-team playoff is not the way to fix it.

Currently listening: Foo Fighters, self-titled album

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, First Impressions

2010-12-17T20:29:00.000-08:00

We've only been waiting four and a half years for it, but we finally got it, and it is phenomenal. And even though we know hardly anything about it yet, speculation about and anticipation of the new Elder Scrolls game, Skyrim, is going to occupy an unhealthy portion of the next eleven months of my life.

What do we know? The story sounds epic--and very Morrowind. The prophesied hero, incarnation of an ancient great power, comes to a remote province of the empire to save the day from a newly-reawakened evil. Call it Nerevarine or call it Dovahkiin, it's a classic plot within the Elder Scrolls universe, and it's consistently fun to play through. It's set to involve dragons, and while we know from the lore that dragons are a part of the history of Tamriel and especially Skyrim ("...and then came the northern men to help Kagrenac and they brought Ysmir again," 36 Lessons of Vivec, Sermon 36) we've never seen them in-game.

Much has been made of some comments from the developers, but in reality it's far too early to say anything about what they mean. In particular, Skyrim has been construed as a "direct sequel" to Oblivion, leading to a lot of speculation about how closely related the two titles will be. But as a longtime fan of the series, it's intuitive that Skyrim and will be about as closely related to Oblivion as Oblivion was related to Morrowind. All the games take place in the same setting, and the setting being as lore-intensive as it is, the events in the previous game are naturally going to have some impact on the next game. But a "direct sequel" to Oblivion would necessarily be set in the Imperial Province, involve the Oblivion gates crisis, and have Mehrunes Dagon as its antagonist. It's clear already that Skyrim will do none of that.

That said, because this is the Elder Scrolls universe, it is prudent to wonder just how much the events of the previous game are going to change the setting. A lot of crap went down in Oblivion. The Imperial City got sacked, a Daedric Prince was defeated, and the Septim line of emperors ended. At the very least, Tamriel is going to have a new ruling dynasty--and it's entirely possible that the Empire will have collapsed completely. Is Mehrunes Dagon permanently destroyed, or merely rebuffed from the mortal world? All this remains to be seen.

Finally, the announcement of Skyrim has re-ignited the senseless debate among Elder Scrolls fans about whether Morrowind or Oblivion was a better game. I don't know why we can't all agree that Morrowind had a more immersive experience and a better story, Oblivion had a more polished structure and prettier landscapes, and they were both incredibly enjoyable games. There are people who will insist that Morrowind is better because it has medium armor, the short blade/long blade distinction, and more attractive faces. On the other side of the coin, Oblivion's diehards protest that Morrowind was too hard and lacked horses.

Micromanagers and effort-averse aside, most Elder Scrolls fans do agree that both Morrowind and Oblivion were excellent. Even though we don't know much about Skyrim yet, if it builds on their successes, my social life is going to collapse next November.

A few assorted points:

--In the chorus at the end of the trailer video, a figure named "Hrothgar" is mentioned. I thought that Hrothgar sounded familiar, so I checked him out on the Elder Scrolls Wiki. Turns out the only mention they have of Mr. Hrothgar is that his name lives on as a mountain in Skyrim. But! Hrothgar is an actual mythic figure from Anglo-Saxon myth, most notable as the king in Beowulf. It wouldn't be the first time that an Elder Scrolls myth has drawn name inspiration from a real-world myth.

--It's probably a hope in vain because level scaling is pretty much de rigeur in RPG design these days, but I really, really hope that Skyrim either eliminates or overhauls Oblivion's approach to level scaling. Roadside bandits instantly getting tougher the second you do destroys the realism that the Elder Scrolls series tries very hard (and mostly succeeds) to create.

--Bethesda trademarked the name "Skyrim" way back in 2007, suggesting they've been planning this for a very long time indeed. Of course, suspicion that Skyrim would be the setting for the next Elder Scrolls game started back then, which is why it isn't really a surprise that this game has that setting. Looking at Tamriel, we've had games set in Hammerfell, High Rock, Morrowind, Cyrodiil, and now Skyrim. Unless we really want to set a game in Argonian-land or Khajit-land, that leaves Valenwood (Bosmer) and the Summerset Isles (Altmer) as the logical choices for the next Elder Scrolls game.

--So I got to thinking: wouldn't it be totally awesome if there were an Elder Scrolls game set in Summerset, where you could go to Artaeum, visit the Crystal Tower, and join the Psijic Order? Yes, it would. You heard it here first: Elder Scrolls VI: Artaeum, summer 2016.

Currently listening: "Letter from an Occupant", the New Pornographers

The Wheel of Time: Towers of Midnight

2010-12-08T23:37:00.000-08:00

Holy crap, Wheel of Time fans.

We're actually looking at the penultimate book of this series. It is going to be finished in the next volume. Twenty years later, and we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. It took fourteen books, not the putative twelve; it took struggling through some real quagmires around book 10; it took two of the most accomplished fantasy authors of our generation. But the Last Battle is really, truly about to happen.

Towers of Midnight is the second of Brandon Sanderson's three contributions to the series. The first, The Gathering Storm, was the best Wheel of Time book probably since The Dragon Reborn, and it represented a clear return to the brilliant form of the first few books in the series. Towers lags a little compared to Storm, but it still probably ranks among the better books in the series--and besides, it's the middle volume of a trilogy, so it's allowed to lag a little.

After having read three of Sanderson's books (his two Wheel of Time books and The Way of Kings), a few clear patterns have emerged. Sanderson likes to spend about four hundred pages developing a few protagonists and setting up their respective conflicts, then resolving those conflicts in the three to five hundred pages that remain. The result is that each protagonist's story--while well-developed, entertaining, and following a clear beginning/middle/end arc--is about twenty to thirty percent longer than it needs to be.

For instance, in Towers, Perrin's decisive battle with Slayer and the destruction of the Tar Valon dreamspike is necessary and entertaining; his earlier string of stalemates with Slayer are not. Mat's decisive battle with the gholam where he sends it through the gateway to nowhere is necessary and entertaining; his earlier string of stalemates with the gholam are not. Aviendha's vision at Rhuidean is necessary and entertaining; her introspection along the road there is not. Elayne's accession to the throne of Andor is (presumably) necessary and (marginally) entertaining; her oh-so-subtle political maneuvering to get there iscertainly not.

Speaking of Elayne, will some Wheel of Time fan please convince me that her story is either necessary or entertaining? She's not a terribly interesting character--at best, she's a slight variation on the "spoiled princess" archetype, and her most intriguing trait is her ability to assay and create ter'angreal, which has nothing to do with Andor at all. And her story lacks an exciting quality that most of the rest of the characters' stories have at least sometime--even Perrin's! We want Elayne to do something awesome; this is epic fantasy, not Machiavelli.

Elayne being about as interesting as the attendant who brushes her hair is more Robert Jordan's fault than Brandon Sanderson's. But Sanderson makes one apparent gaffe that's all his own. In bringing Graendal back from apparently being dead, he breaks the Megatron rule: if a villain appears to be defeated at the end of one installment, it is almost always wrong to retcon that villain into the next installment. Sanderson has latched on to Graendal as the primary villain for his trilogy, and that's fine, but she had better play a critically important role in the last book to merit being brought back in this one.

Sanderson still does a lot right in this book. The Tower of Ghenjei adventure is a nice antidote to the Elayne mess; it feels like a campaign in a heroic roleplaying game, and it's a fulfillment of one of the series' long-standing promises. Exactly what point Moiraine is destined to play in the final battle remains to be seen, but a little like Graendal, she had better be important to have invested so much of the series into this rescue. It's nice to see that Perrin, Mat, and Lan have finally decided to be real leaders, and the very last scene where Lan assumes the (figurative) throne of Malkier, raises the Golden Crane, and charges the Trolloc army at Tarwin's Gap is incredibly fulfilling.

Aside from telling a fine story, Sanderson continues to organize his narrative well. In the latter half of his part of the Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan more or less dispensed with traditional novel structure, instead releasing collections of chapters with little holding them together as books. While to some extent every volume in a serial is just a continuation of the story, each volume also needs to have enough internal structure to make them satisfying by themselves. (The best episodes of Lost both contributed to the overall plot and were compelling stories in their own right.) Fortunately, Brandon Sanderson is very good at this; reading Towers of Midnight felt like both reading a novel and continuing a series.

It's increasingly obvious that Brandon Sanderson is exactly the right person to continue the series to its conclusion. The Gathering Storm was excellent. Towers of Midnight was a little down but still great. If Towers of Midnight ends up being Sanderson's Two Towers, then we're in great shape for A Memory of Light.

Currently listening: Several Arrows Later, Matt Pond PA

Midnight Harry Potter, Two Weeks Late

2010-12-08T00:24:00.000-08:00

First thought: "This movie is going to end way past my bedtime."
Second thought: "Ah, what do I care. When else besides grad school am I going to have the means and opportunity to watch movies at midnight?"
Third thought: "Good Lord, what have I gotten myself into?"

Now, I like Harry Potter. I've read all seven books. I've seen the first seven movies, and I'll undoubtedly see the eighth. I'll even give the series credit for forming and strengthening some friendships. I would call myself a Harry Potter fan.

There aren't many of us.

Harry Potter tends to attract not just fans, but fanatics. Every hobby, every form of entertainment has them: people who own special clothing, who can recite lists of minor information, who spend time in the meta-community talking about the activity rather than doing it, who can engage in a half-hour conversation and not be abashed by its utter nerdiness but just be left wanting more. (Think me with Lost.) Whether it's gardening or Batman or Ke$ha or the New York Mets, somebody is going to go all out. But for whatever reason, a lot more people go all out with Harry Potter than with any other hobby or activity or entertainment that I know of.

Combine me being a mere Harry Potter fan with me being Not A Movie Person, and it was strange indeed to find myself in a midnight screening of Deathly Hallows Part 1. But I'm glad I went--because seriously, why not--because it turned out be one of the better Harry Potter movies so far. Only a few scenes fell short.

The only truly weak part of the film is the middle-to-late "Ron has left us; what are we to do?" section. It lasts too long with not enough happening. I don't remember the "Harry and Hermione dance" scene from the book at all, but man was it boring and inconsequential in the movie. One of the biggest differences in reading the book and watching the movie is that in the book, you don't know if or when Ron will come back--and it leads to an emotionally devastating few chapters. After you've read the book, you know that Ron does come back, and that the plot really doesn't advance until he does. With that in mind, the scenes in between go from powerful to filler pretty quickly.

Quibbles with other parts of the movie are even more minor. As in the book, I wish that more had been made of Hedwig's death scene. I'm probably alone among Harry Potter fans in saying this, but forget Dobby--I think Hedwig's death is the real tragedy. It's more than just a character dying; it's a symbol that Harry really isn't going back to Hogwarts anytime soon, and it's a clear sign that the Bad Guys are Not Messing Around, when they're totally okay with killing defenseless creatures.

And speaking of our friend Dobby, the funeral scene seemed a little odd, with Harry and company carrying around a white-sheeted bundle meant to contain Dobby's corpse. It's the only time in the movie where my suspension of disbelief utterly failed, and I started thinking in terms of actors and filmography rather than the story being told.

Finally, the intensity could have been turned way up in the Malfoy Manor scene. Once again, this scene serves some important literary purposes: it's more evidence for Bellatrix's complete insanity and hatred for non-pureblooded wizards, and it's probably the first strong piece of evidence for Lucius Malfoy's wavering loyalty. Sure, he's a bad guy, but the manor scene demonstrates that maybe he isn't okay with Voldemort using his place as a de facto base camp, and maybe he follows him more out of necessity than fervor.

The more potent the Malfoy Manor scene, the stronger the development of these character traits becomes. On top of all that, we need to feel like Hermione is really in danger of dying. This might be yet another function of having read the book and knowing what happens next, but the whole ordeal at the manor seemed started then finished in the matter of a few minutes. Obviously there are limits to how far you can push a PG-13 rating (and clearly it makes economic sense to avoid the R rating), but it's scenes like this one that I like to point to when Harry Potter skeptics accuse the series of being "children's literature".

As usual, though, when a review comes down to criticizing a few specific scenes, that means the rest of the movie worked reasonably well. I absolutely love Luna's character--in fact, her character is much better in the movies than in the books--and her humor (where you're never quite sure if she's being flaky or unexpectedly insightful) is one of the few instances of comic relief that is genuinely funny. The movie is quite faithful to the book--not that it's difficult to be, with two and a half hours to cover less than 400 pages of the novel, there would be no excuse for any drastic departures. And most importantly of all, the lovely Miss Emma Watson turns in clearly her best performance so far.

Bottom line: if you're out of the Harry Potter loop, there's no way you're going to see this movie, because it simply will not make any sense to you. And if you're in the Harry Potter loop, even if the movie were truly horrible, it probably wouldn't cross your mind not to see it. But here's the thing: this movie is good. It is both a worthy followup to the first six movies and a faithful translation of the seventh book (or at least the first chunk of it). So even all those fanatics that Harry Potter inexplicably attracts won't be disappointed.

Currently listening: Broken Bells, self-titled album

Eisley: Over the River and Through the Wood Tour

2010-11-22T16:26:00.000-08:00

My first experience with the musical side of Web 2.0 was in fall 2007, when I discovered both Last.fm and Pandora. Frustratingly, I found that I needed both of them: Last.fm was more diligent in giving me useful recommendations, but its "type an artist and we'll play more music that sounds like that artist" mode was (and remains) nowhere near as strong as Pandora's. One shared victory of both sites was Eisley: throw in a generous helping of Rilo Kiley along with a pinch of random indie pop and a dash of female-vocalist rock, and the good folks running both systems decided Eisley was a can't miss.

They were totally right. Fall 2007 saw me listen to entirely too much Eisley, so much so that my Last.fm charts never recovered from my binge. "Invasion," from Eisley's second album Combinations, will forever be the song I associate with fall 2007, in the same way that Mae's "The Ocean" is summer 2005, or The New Pornographers' "Sing Me Spanish Techno" is fall 2010. And in the height of that infatuated season, I had the opportunity to see Eisley in concert, though I never ended up going--in part because I couldn't convince any friends that they, too, wanted to go see Eisley in concert.

Part of that is because Eisley's music is awfully tough to categorize. The right place to start is probably "pop/rock," which is sufficiently broad as to be useless. There's a dose of acoustic rock, flirting with but never actually touching folk. A number of their songs have a dreamy, surreal feel to them, but "psychedelic" is not even close to the right word. Other influences might include "singer/songwriter," which I've only recently accepted as a genre, and "alternative," which I still stubbornly do not. Finally, there's a strong indie pop element throughout most of Eisley's work.

That raises the question of that now-cliche label, "indie". To a musical literalist, Eisley is an indie band now, because they're not signed to a major label. (This is a recent change; up until early 2010, Eisley was signed to a division of Warner Brothers.) But plenty of music critics will argue that "indie" has evolved from a label of a band's signing status into a genre of its own. I suspect that whether Eisley is an "indie band" is largely a matter of perspective: if you're someone who memorized every track on Mass Romantic in 2001 but gave up on The New Pornographers by 2005 because Twin Cinema was too popular, then the notion of Eisley as indie is frankly laughable. But if you're someone to whom "2010 in music" suggests a steady diet of Drake and Ke$ha, then Eisley is probably just another band that you don't hear on the radio.

All this genre-bending and label-defying can be a good thing--if there's one thing that Eisley is not, it's generic--but it can make their music nearly impossible to describe:
"Sure, I might go to that concert with you. What sort of music do they play?"
"Uh, well, I guess it's mostly rock, but there's a lot of indie pop in it too, not that they're necessarily an 'indie band'... you really just have to hear it."
"Okay... what are their songs like?"
"I mean, they sing a lot of songs about love and happy people, but then there's this surrealist element that shows up when they start singing about animals growing out of the garden or aliens taking over your body."
I'm pretty sure I've given this actual pitch to try to convince a friend to see Eisley with me. It wasn't any more convincing then.

Thanks in part to a greater sense of independence in concert-going (but mostly to living in a city that has more abundant public transportation in the part of the city where the concert venues are), I decided it was totally okay for me to go to this Eisley concert on my own. I'm very glad that I did go, because the combination of venue, opener, and set list is something I doubt I'd ever be able to experience again.

As Eisley is a band of four DuPree siblings and one cousin, it's fitting that another DuPree, younger sister Christie, opened for them. (Christie was backed up by yet another DuPree sibling, younger brother Colin.) Christie DuPree's six or seven songs' worth of opening set were probably the loveliest and lowest-key experience of my concertgoing career. Both Christie and her music are impressive in how genuine and sincere they are. The natural comparison, of course, is to her older sisters: her singing voice is a natural contralto, lower than either Stacy's or Sherri's voice. But her vocal resemblance to Stacy in particular is striking, especially in the soprano register or through sustained notes.

The only knock on Christie DuPree that I've heard is that she hasn't developed as a songwriter enough yet to distinguish herself from the army of acoustic-guitar-wielding female singer/songwriters that patrol the nation's coffeehouses. I disagree, but to the extent that these critics are correct at all, give her time. She's young--only twenty--and she's only been at this for a couple of years. Christie DuPree already has the raw vocal talent, and she comes from a family where "writing good music" comes in the genetics, so I'm already expecting some big things.

On top of that, she's a fantastically nice person, something far too often overlooked in the development of young independent artists. (Career-development-wise, I suppose it doesn't matter how friendly Jason Derulo is when he's on the radio every time you turn it on.) After she finished her set, I had the chance to chat with her for a few seconds (sorry, Haley Williams, but your tenure as my biggest girl singer crush is ended) and buy her EP (possibly the indiest thing I've ever purchased: this was a CD-R in a plastic sleeve with the words "Christie DuPree EP" handwritten in black pen), and that alone would have made the evening totally worth it.

But then I wouldn't have gotten to hear Eisley, and that would have been a real shame. Eisley wasn't touring in support of a new album, instead doing a good old-fashioned romp across the US to play some music. That, along with Eisley's rather limited catalog, really puts them in a sweet spot for touring: they easily have enough content to put on a satisfying show, but they're more likely than not to play any given song. (Lesson learned: if you're the sort of person who goes to a concert and figures to be heartbroken if you don't hear one specific song, go see that concert immediately prior to the release of the band's third album.)

Eisley's set list was weighted toward music off their full-length albums, but that was about the only bias in their music selections. They played half to two-thirds of both Room Noises and Combinations, which took up the majority of the show. It was fun to see Eisley delve into tracks from old EPs, but as a fan, the most encouraging thing about the show was their new material. Three of the songs Eisley played were new, slated to appear on their third album (which should release in the spring), and if these songs are any indication, that new album is going to be very, very good. "Ambulance" in particular is easily one of the strongest things that Eisley has ever written.

But the most distinguishing thing about this concert wasn't the inclusion of new music, it was that the show was entirely acoustic. (Fans of the band probably noticed a surprising lack of Garron and Weston, the bassist and drummer, in that picture.) When polled, two-thirds to three-quarters of the audience (including myself) admitted to never having seen Eisley in concert before. The expressions of the DuPree sisters changed from delight to surprise, then to embarrassment, when they started counting those raised hands. Sherri even apologized to the fans, saying this probably wasn't the best circumstance to see Eisley for the first time, and Stacy lamented that they weren't "very badass" that evening.

Badass Eisley is great, no question about it. But toned-down, intimate Eisley is in some ways better. The show was so relaxed that both Stacy and Sherri took some liberties with their vocals, trying a little improvisation and playing with the rhythms a little. Stacy tended to overdo it a little, but then again, if I wanted to listen to the album cut of each of their songs, I could just as easily sit in my room and do it. If it's going to give me a unique concert experience, I'll tolerate some mixed-results experimentation.

One more thing that deserves mention in that "unique concert experience" category was the venue, Swedish American Hall. I love this venue. It's easily the least pretentious and most charming venue I've seen in the Bay area. It's a century old and features some beautiful architecture. There wasn't any alcohol for sale, which might have been a deterrent for some concertgoers but suited me just fine. Best of all, their were chairs, so I could enjoy my live music in comfort rather than stand in an awkward semicircular clump around the state and be subject to the whims of six-foot-three guy.

In fact, thinking back on it, none of the nine unforgivable concert fouls were committed at this show. I'll conclude by leaving you in jealous contemplation of a concert full of good music but sullied by neither weed cloud nor totem-pole couple.

Currently listening: "Sun's Light and Willow's Shade", Christie DuPree

Mae: (E)vening

2010-11-14T22:11:00.000-08:00

This may well be the last collection of music that Mae ever records.

Think about that, Mae fans. Here is a band that's been part of your life for years, and this EP might be the last thing they ever say to you. As sobering a thought as that is, it's the right mindset to listen to (E)vening. This EP is certainly a departure from the first two "seasonal" EPs, and in just a year and a half, we've come a long way from the ebullient exaltation that the beginning of the day offered.

Instead, (E)vening plays out like a giant catharsis, the emotional capstone to Mae's oeuvre. The mood is reflective and serene throughout, consistently recalling the past, asking us to remember--or not giving us words at all, just making us think. Even the most ostensibly upbeat and energetic track on the EP, "I Just Needed You to Know," is filled with questions of "do you remember?", and the only other two tracks on (E)vening that have words are even more nostalgic.

The EP has either 7 or 9 tracks, depending on how you look at it; three tracks are movements of one larger piano piece, the appropriately named "Seasons," that forms the focus of the EP. Counting "Seasons," over half of the album is instrumental, and nearly all of that is piano. It's like a victory lap for Rob Sweitzer, newly reunited to Mae for this EP and the Goodbye, Goodnight tour; it's obvious that Mae is glad to have him back, and the longtime fans certainly are too.

And in the end, Mae's longtime fans are exactly the audience for (E)vening. It's not a collection of music that's going to get much if any play outside of the most dedicated fans of the band. Nor is it a collection of music that's really going to get you excited about Mae if you heard it in isolation; it's certainly not the rock-out Mae of "Someone Else's Arms". But it is gorgeous and introspective and in many respects exactly the right album for Mae to leave us with.

Currently listening: "Golly Sandra," Eisley

Mae: Goodbye, Goodnight Tour

2010-11-14T17:43:00.000-08:00

This was a concert five and a half years in the making.

(That's longer than Isoceleria has been around!)

Ever since March 2005, The Everglow has been at or very near the top of my list of favorite albums. It's nearly impossible to describe why--I've tried in the past and failed miserably every time. But it probably has something to do with it being a really, really good album. The musicianship is outstanding, the scale and execution of the concept are impressive, and the emotion that drives the album (avoiding both traps of being either hipster-ironic-tongue-in-cheek or over-produced-insincere) is genuine. It definitely has something to do with some personal factors that are even more difficult to express.

Yet, despite my five-year love affair with The Everglow, I never managed to see Mae in concert until last Wednesday. Mae has been back and forth with their releases since then, but nothing could erase the brilliance of The Everglow, and their enthusiasm and sincerity always seemed like they would produce an excellent live show. And somehow, I've managed to miss them in concert despite adoring their music since I've known what a concert was--not for lack of trying.

When I found out that Mae was coming to Bottom of the Hill, which has recently become my very favorite place in the Bay area to see a concert, there was no question that I'd be at that concert. And when Mae started throwing around phrases like "Goodbye, Goodnight," suggesting that this might be their last tour as a band, I jump in it.

Opening were Windsor Drive and Terrible Things, both of which turned out to be reasonable openers for Mae. Windsor Drive was a fine complement to Mae's gentler, acoustic side, while Terrible Things more closely matched rocker-Mae (or closer still, Anberlin). I hadn't heard of either band prior to the concert, but seeing both bands turned out to be worth my time, something that can't necessarily be said of every opener out there.

Mae themselves turned out to be everything I've been waiting five and a half years for them to be. Despite some fluctuation and unfortunate drama with their personnel over the last year or two, Goodbye, Goodnight Mae is Everglow Mae--and that's the only way we fans would have had it. They were enthusiastic, energetic, and obviously grateful to their fans (to the point of taking pictures of the audience after the concert), and they sounded remarkably cohesive for having not really toured together as a band for years.

While halfway a tour in support of the (E)vening EP, Mae's set list featured songs from every album and every era of their music. The concert was unsurprisingly Everglow-heavy--apparently there are many, many Mae fans out there who feel the same way I do about that album--with about half to two thirds of the album getting played. We also got to hear a little over half of Destination: Beautiful, the band's first album, from all the way back in 2003. The rest of the concert was a smattering of Singularity, the seasonal EP's, and a couple of B-sides/rarities.

Prior to the concert, I made a list of ten songs, saying if Mae was going to play just ten songs for me, I'd want it to be these ten. I hit seven out of ten: "Embers and Envelopes" and "Sun" from Destination: Beautiful and "Suspension," "Someone Else's Arms," "The Ocean," "Breakdown," and "Mistakes We Knew We Were Making" from The Everglow. They left off "All Deliberate Speed" from D:B (which surprised me a little, because I think it's a well-known song, and it features a sing-along-ready chorus) and "The Fisherman Song" and "Boomerang/Two Birds" from (M)orning (which surprised me less, since they're both sort of niche songs that undoubtedly took center stage at the Morning tour last year).

Hands down, the best chunk of the concert was the encore. The main body of the concert had somehow gone by without either "Sun" or "Someone Else's Arms," so during the "let's clap for five minutes even though we all know the show isn't really over" session, I turned to a friend and asked "There's no way Mae play a concert and doesn't play 'Sun,' right?" A minute later, I got my wish, as Dave Elkins climbed back on stage with an electric-acoustic guitar, smiled, and said "Here's an old one."

As I stood there thinking the concert couldn't get any better, the entire band rejoined Elkins on the stage and launched into the piano-heavy "We're So Far Away". It's a nice track, and I'm not about to turn down anything from The Everglow, but it seems an odd track to include by itself in a time-constrained encore situation. But just as it does on the album, the concert "We're So Far Away" was really just a buildup to the sheer exuberance of "Someone Else's Arms," and there was no better way that Mae could have ended the show.

Mae gave its fans more than an hour and a half of music that night, and it was an excellent capstone to the five and a half years of music they've given me already. If Mae decides to keep on making music after this tour is finished, I'll of course eagerly await it. But if not, it was a fitting way to say goodbye and goodnight.

Currently listening: "Mass Romantic," the New Pornographers

The Way of Kings

2010-11-11T17:22:00.000-08:00

Epic fantasy authors probably hate comparisons to the Wheel of Time--and Brandon Sanderson is probably more sensitive to those comparisons than any of them as the author who had the monumental task of finishing out the Wheel of Time. But let's face it: the Wheel of Time is our generation's defining fantasy epic, and it's a testament to that series' longevity and influence that every fantasy series from 1990 through 2010 (and probably beyond) is going to be compared to it. Sanderson's new epic series, the Stormlight Archive, is no exception.

The most striking difference when comparing the Stormlight Archive (or at least The Way of Kings) to the Wheel of Time is that the central conflicts of the two settings are designed very differently. From halfway through the first Wheel book, we know exactly what the central conflict is: the forces of the Dragon Reborn (the good guys) against the forces of the Dark One (the bad guys). There are a lot of characters who can rightly be considered protagonists, but it's obvious from the first chapter of the first book that the central one, the most important character to the story, is Rand al'Thor, the Dragon Reborn. And there are a lot of characters who can rightly be considered antagonists, but it's obvious from the flavor text to the prologue (not to mention his big-bad-guy name) that the big bad guy is the Dark One.

In contrast, after a book of Stormlight, we don't know who or what fills the role of central conflict, primary protagonist, or primary antagonist. In that regard, Stormlight is closer to emulating George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, which deliberately avoids the distinction of "main character"/"big bad guy" (or really even of protagonist/antagonist at all), and whose central conflict is basically a tapestry of a bunch of smaller conflicts that all happen to influence each other.

But that's not necessarily an apt comparison either. Stormlight, at least after one book, seems to have a central conflict--we just can't necessarily comprehend what it is yet. It has definite protagonists in the forms of Kaladin, Shallan, and Dalinar, though we don't know which (if any) of them is the "most important". And a conflict as climactic and apocalyptic as what's been hinted at has to have an antagonist behind it, but after the first book, we have literally no idea who that is, much less what its motives and intentions are.

It's not immediately clear whether that ambiguity is a good or bad thing, but in truth it's likely a little of both. It's nice that we don't know exactly where the book is headed, so we have to remain invested in every character and every story arc. But it's also a little disconcerting that there's no apparent structure or destination in mind. Worse, even high-concept epics that do have clear destinations don't exactly have great track records of completion.

To what extent does Brandon Sanderson actually intend to finish the Stormlight Archive? It's a cynical thing to wonder, but that cynicism is unfortunately justified in comparison to other contemporary epic fantasy series. George RR Martin hasn't made any apparent progress on A Song of Ice and Fire in the last five years. Terry Goodkind did finish the Sword of Truth series, but only after many more books than were probably necessary and enough shifts in setting, supporting characters, antagonist, and motivating conflict to make it seem like three or four series half strung together. And Robert Jordan actually died before he could finish the Wheel of Time. Obviously it's a tragedy, but it serves as a reminder that even the best laid plans of fantasy authors don't always come to fruition.

That said, the Stormlight Archive has a better-than-average change of reaching its ending. Brandon Sanderson is relatively young (middle 30s) and seems to be in good health. The series is slated to be comprised of ten books, and ten is such an important number in the setting that I honestly believe Sanderson will end the series at ten books. That's not to say there won't be bloat in the later books as Sanderson (inevitably) realizes he isn't telling the story as quickly as he needs to, but the promise of a logical stopping point in the series makes its finish seem more likely.

Even more convincingly, Sanderson has progressed incredibly well in his pursuit to wrap up the Wheel of Time. The first of Sanderson's contributions to the Wheel of Time books was scheduled to release in 2009, and we got it in November 2009. The second was supposed to release before the end of 2010, and we got it in November 2010. The Wheel of Time books are not small undertakings--neither in terms of pages nor the expectations of demanding fans--but Sanderson's demonstrated ability to deliver a large volume of high quality work while still maintaining a schedule is the best evidence that Stormlight will eventually reach a proper and timely conclusion.

The bigger question, of course, is do we want to read the Stormlight Archive all the way to its conclusion? At least after The Way of Kings, the answer is mostly yes. It's obvious that Sanderson has sunk an incredible amount of time and effort into world-building, and his effort has paid off. I'm already invested in the setting, and I definitely want to know what's going on. The characters are mostly good too, though at this point I think I'm more invested in the mythology than the characters. It's a dangerous road to walk--remember how many Lost fans were disappointed when they didn't realize until too late that Lost was about the characters, not the mythology--but I don't doubt the characters will grow even more interesting as the series progresses and we've spent some time with them.

The Way of Kings has only three centrally important characters, and they're all intriguing enough to keep me reading about them. The Kaladin chapters are generally the best, as the character development in them is both believable and interesting, but Kaladin's backstory is far too lengthy compared to the insight it gives to his character.

In fact, the biggest criticism I can give The Way of Kings is that it's too long. The one-thousand page mark in books is sort of like the three-hour mark in movies: you better have something truly extraordinary going on, or you're not holding my attention anymore. Way probably could have cut down to two-thirds or three-quarters its size and still been all right. And granted, it necessarily has its share of expository elements that won't need to burden future books, important if pedantic details like explaining how the monetary system works, or noting the cultural significance of a certain style of clothing.

To come full circle and close with another Wheel of Time comparison, many readers have already wondered if Sanderson will develop "Jordanitis"--with some complaining that he already has--that is, devoting so much of the book to description and detail that very little ends up happening. Honestly, he very well may. But part of the reason that the readers of the Wheel of Time grew so frustrated with Robert Jordan was that we had to wait indefinitely for each book, never knowing how long it was going to take to hear more of the story. So when a new volume was released that didn't actually tell any of the story, it was more than a little disheartening.

Where Sanderson seems to have surpassed Jordan, at least so far, is in his discipline. As long as Brandon Sanderson remains vigilant about consistently telling his story, we will read it, even if it takes ten thousand pages over fifteen years.

Currently listening: (E)vening, Mae (review to follow)

The Age of Adz: Album and Concert

2010-10-27T15:48:00.000-07:00

Sufjan Stevens' proclamation of "electronica influence" for his newest album didn't exactly instill much confidence in many fans. We want the solemn resilience of Michigan, the understated reverence of Seven Swans, the sincere exuberance of Illinois. The very mention of "electronic" from an artist who'd build an indie empire out of acoustic, folk, and orchestral modalities just screams "now it is time for my seventh album and I am going to do some crazy experiments with it!" And experiments go oft awry.

But hey, in 2003, if you'd asked me what I thought of a Ben Gibbard-"electronica" collaboration, I would have said that would be a bad idea too. And I would have been very, very wrong. So, bring on Age of Adz and all its electronic glory.

You can tell just by looking the cover that we're not getting the joyous proclamation of America that the Fifty States Project gave us. Instead, it's raw emotion, something that Stevens dreamed up under some combination of influences including his disenchantment with his earlier, lyrical approach to songwriting; his battle with some mysterious disease over the last year or two; and the post-apocalyptic, schizophrenic art of Royal Robertson. It's Robertson's treatment of the End of Days that colors a lot of the aesthetic on the album, including some downright "spacey" sound effects that would have seemed miserably out of place on any of Stevens' earlier records (even when the songs were about UFO's.)

At first, I was admittedly Not A Fan of Age of Adz. I was such a massive fan of Stevens' earlier work--Illinois in particular is easily one of my top ten favorite albums--that any drastic departure from his earlier aesthetic was a change I just did not want to deal with. Besides, when that change is to intentionally introduce dissonances and elements that make the music sound less good, I'm immediately biased against it. (When Mae tried it, it didn't work out too well for them either.)

Then again, I was admittedly Not A Fan of All Delighted People, Stevens' ambush of an EP earlier this year... but I warmed up to it after only two or three listens. In much the same way, I'm warming up to Age of Adz slowly but surely. The thing to realize here is that Stevens' music is and always has been excellent because he's a master at arranging sound. Whether that's the banjos and guitars of Michigan, the orchestral explosion of Illinois, or even the blips and buzzes of Age of Adz, Stevens is incredibly good at taking several different sorts of sound at once and putting them all together in a way that makes sense.

Age does have some standout tracks. "Vesuvius," especially, has quickly become one of my favorite Sufjan Stevens songs ever. Daring to use volcano imagery, the song begins slowly and quietly before erupting into an incredibly powerful message of following your heart and doing what you feel is right even in the face of dire consequences. The title track "The Age of Adz," "I Walked," and "Too Much," are all quite good as well. I'm less a fan of "Get Real Get Right" and "I Want to Be Well," which strike me as experiment for the sake of experimentation rather than for the sake of making interesting and innovative music. But all in all, Age of Adz has good stuff on it if you know where to look.

So when I had the opportunity to see Sufjan Stevens live, even though I knew most of his material would be from Age, I figured I liked enough of the album that I'd be able to appreciate the live show. And I'm glad I went. Stevens doesn't exactly have the reputation for being conventional, and that showed as soon as he took stage--with a dozen people. Among his retinue were two drummers, two trombone players, a handful of multi-instrumentalists, and two women who serves as both backup vocalists and streamer-waving dancers. On top of all of that, a video screen behind the stage showed various cosmic and apocalyptic scenes taken from or inspired by Royal Robertson's work roughly synced to the music. Spectacle is an important reason to see a live show, and Stevens absolutely nails it.

It's true that I'm feeling better about both All Delighted People and The Age of Adz than when I first heard either--and seeing songs from both live certainly helped me appreciate both better. But it was still a little disappointing when all of Stevens' material save two songs came from either the EP or the recent album. Of course, Sufjan played "Chicago"--even though this is the single most recognizable artifact of an era that he's clearly trying to distance himself from, there's no way Sufjan Stevens plays a concert and the fans let him get away with not playing "Chicago". Stevens' encore started with the opening track from Illinois, which contains "UFO" and (in true circa-2005 Sufjan Stevens style) about ten other words, and it's a nice piano piece, but I would have liked even more Illinois throughout the show.

Though seeing most of the songs live helped me appreciate them better, I'm still not convinced that "Impossible Soul" is any good at all. It's an oblique, 25-minute sprawl that closes the album, which Stevens referred (potentially tongue-in-cheek) to as his "magnum opus". It's the potential tongue-in-cheek nature of this entire song that bothers me. For a few miserable minutes in the middle of it, Stevens decides it's cool to use auto-tune. This could be for one of two reasons: either he thinks this effect actually sounds good or he's going for a supremely hipster irony in smugly referencing a pop music phenomenon. The first reason is simply incorrect; the second is actually more dangerous because it represents a departure from the deeply emotional sincerity we've come to expect from Sufjan Stevens.

Much like a metaphor for the entire album, "Impossible Soul" has its good parts, its parts I could do without, and its parts I can't really stand to listen to. The Age of Adz is something I can get used to--but that means it's strictly worse than Illinois, which was utterly brilliant the first time I listened to it and has remained equally as utterly brilliant the dozens of times I've listened to it since. As I've said before, Sufjan Stevens will not and should not be an artist who re-releases Illinois six times, puts his feet up on his desk, and sips cognac. But we wouldn't mind it if he decided to release, say, Arkansas instead of Some Galaxy Following a Supernova.

Currently listening: "Adlai Stevenson", Sufjan Stevens

Videogame Best Hits List

2010-10-15T17:35:00.000-07:00

This is probably the best viral facebook survey I've seen in years.

The rules: Don't take too long to think about it. List fifteen video games that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag fifteen friends, including me, because I'm interested in seeing what games my friends choose. (To do this, go to your Notes tab on your profile page, paste rules in a new note, cast your fifteen picks, and tag people in the note.)

1. Earthbound is and will always be my favorite video game of all time. It's not the first game I played or the first one I enjoyed, and I won't even make the claim that it's the best video game ever made, but it's the first one I "discovered" (this sort of thing is important to a quasi-hipster), and it's the only one that's ever made a real impact on my life. From 1995 until 2001, Earthbound transcended being a video game for me, and it became a way of life. Where today, most of my creative output happens in my blog, during those years, it happened through Earthbound: making websites, writing fan fiction, discussing the game on various fansites like Starmen.net. Earthbound has a particular culture about it--its quirky, almost trippy, aesthetic; its hilarious understated humor; its brilliant leitmotifs on its John Lennon-inspired soundtrack--all of these things make Earthbound an absolute masterpiece of a video game.

2. The defining feature of Chrono Trigger is that it tells a linear story through a nonlinear timeline--sometimes you need to go forward in time to learn more; sometimes you need to go backwards. And the true genius of the game doesn't reveal itself until you've already played through it once, when you can play through a second time and skip to the ending at any point to see how it changes. It's one the few RPGs with legitimate replay value, and its reasonable approach time travel was well ahead of its time.

3. Final Fantasy X is one of the only games that I characterize more by the number of things I didn't do (exactly two) than the number of things I did. It is the crowning achievement in the Final Fantasy series. VI was fantastic (and on this list), VII was truly revolutionary (and on this list), but there is no (and may never be a) better Final Fantasy game than X. Sure, it introduced voice acting, had some innovative mechanics, and looked absolutely beautiful for its time... but the reason that X was so good was because its setting was impeccable. It's the best example I've ever seen of a game where every detail--the game mechanics, the plot, the locations, and even the clothes the characters wear--reinforce the setting and make playing in it incredibly rewarding.

4. Morrowind/Oblivion (/Tribunal/Bloodmoon/Knights of the Nine/Shivering Isles) are all grouped together on my list. I know that they're technically at least two games, but they're similar in that they're set in the same universe, they're incredibly open-ended, they have a collective soundtrack that is one of the best of any video game ever, their style and tone are similar... and I sunk at least 120 hours into both of them. They succeeded on different accounts--Oblivion was more balanced, more polished ("better produced" to use a music analogy), and better looking; Morrowind had slightly more to do and had a better story. They're both among the greatest PC games ever, and well worth playing if you don't mind being antisocial for an entire month.

5. The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time was the definitive game for the Nintendo 64. I'll argue that Twilight Princess was actually the superior Zelda game, but Ocarina of Time did so much for the series and for 3D gaming in general that it's tough to pass up.

6. Final Fantasy VI was the first Final Fantasy game I played, and it got me hooked, not only on the series, but also on JRPGs as a subgenre. It's easily the most nonlinear of the Final Fantasy games, which makes it a lot of fun, and it probably features the best soundtrack in the series as well.

7. I expect some resistance on this one, but I think Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is the best Grand Theft Auto game. (Full disclosure: I haven't finished IV yet, but a few hours in, it's quite good.) It was the first to feature voice acting from the player character and the first to include real-world music from well-known bands. It was entirely better than GTA III, because it took everything good about it and improved it, but it avoided the trap of overextending like San Andreas.

8. I'm not by and large a strategy fan, but I'd be remiss not to include Rise of Nations on this list. I first played it in spring 2003, after I'd taken World History in high school (pretty much my favorite class ever), so I was on a real history kick around that time. It implemented lots of innovative features like permanent cities and territory, it had enormous success in merging conventional RTS battles and world-domination grand strategy, and the expansion added some both fun and detailed re-interpretations of historical campaigns.

9. Super Metroid is an absolutely classic platformer, most notable to me for being part of my friend Nicholas's self-proclaimed "best day ever". My best friend through elementary and middle school, Nicholas's best day ever included seeing Good Burger in the theater and getting a Tamagotchi. (Hello 1997.) And it was the first time either of us completed Super Metroid in under the three hours necessary to see the "best ending". (It was a team effort--I planned a course, and Nick executed it.) Prior to that day, the goal had seemed nearly insurmountable to our ten-year-old selves.

10. Super Mario World was the very first video game I ever played and was therefore responsible for spawning one of my biggest hobbies over the past fifteen-plus years. It helped to forge my friendship with Nicholas, and a decade later I remember playing through it as being one of the most fun things I did with my high school girlfriend Jenny (except for maybe discovering Curb Your Enthusiasm).

11. Even though none of us had ever touched a skateboard in our lives, my friends and I spend an irrational amount of time playing Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 circa 2001. (The game did spawn a short skateboard career for Nicholas, which was sadly cut short by injury.) The soundtrack is atrocious (except in a hipster-ironic sense) and the skate culture is probably the furthest thing imaginable from my personal aesthetic, but how could you not love spelling inappropriate things in "horse" mode and pulling off the 900?

12. GoldenEye 007 was basically the de facto go-to party game in the late 1990s. It (along with its spiritual successor, Perfect Dark) was probably the only shooter I've ever truly enjoyed... and man, was it fun karate chopping, Moonraker lasering, and throwing-knifing all your friends.

13. There is at least a plurality consensus among JRPG fans that Final Fantasy VII is the best in the series, and despite my mentions of X's beautiful story and setting (or VI's free-wheeling self-determination), I haven't won too many people over. They have a point--VII pioneered 3D for console RPGs, plus it has some iconic characters and settings, the single best piece of music on any video game soundtrack ("One Winged Angel," of course), and enough secrets and side quests to occupy you for quite a while. To add a personal note, this game is what convinced me to but a Playstation.

14. Donkey Kong Country might not have made to this list had I not watched my friend Tom play about a quarter of it a few months ago. I realized that, fifteen years after I'd played the game for the first time, I still instinctively know the first twelve or so stages backwards and forwards: optimal paths, locations of extra lives, how to get to secret areas. That brought a flood of nostalgia, and I remembered just how much I'd enjoyed it back in the day.

15. Admit it: you played Pokemon. You only started playing because it was a fad, and you stopped playing when it became passe, but for the year or two when it was socially encouraged to play Pokemon, you had a hell of a good time. To this day, I can't name a game that has taken such a creative spin on the RPG idea, nor one that has combined single-player and multiplayer modes so effectively. In fact, looking back on it, you'd be hard-pressed to convince me that Pokemon was not one of the great achievements in video game design history--it was a social gaming experience five years before we knew what social media was.

Currently listening: "Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk", the New Pornographers

Letter in response to Blum Center protests

2010-10-13T14:13:00.000-07:00

One of the sources of funding for my research is the Blum Center, an organization devoted to helping the quality of life in some of the world's poorest places. Blum Hall, where the Center is based on campus, had its grand opening last week, and the point was to show the rest of campus all the good things that research funded by the Blum Center is doing. But a bunch of asshats showed up to protest, because apparently that's what you do for an organization that's trying to bring cooking stoves to Darfur and clean water to the slums of Mumbai. Here's my letter to the editor of the Daily Cal that expresses that same sentiment but much more professionally.

This letter is in response to the protests that occurred during the grand opening of Richard C. Blum Hall, the campus home of the Blum Center for Developing Economies. The grand opening, last Friday, October 8, showcased some of the research that is supported by the Blum Center and featured remarks from Chancellor Birgenau, Richard Blum, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and former Secretary of State George Shultz. It took place amidst several protests that bore messages such as "Blum, don't privatize UC" and "end poverty here first." These protests were factually inaccurate on some grounds and logically misguided on others.

First, accepting research grants from private entities (whether corporations, individuals, or charitable organizations) in no way constitutes "privatization" of the University. In 2008, the University accepted $120 million in research funding from private-sector or non-profit sources. That funding has allowed the University to investigate topics as diverse as stem cells, robotics, and economic policy. And it has enabled the University to become a world leader in biofuels and other renewable energy research. Yet, Cal has remained a public institution and has consistently been recognized as the best public university in the country.

Second, the Blum Center's mission is to fight poverty in the developing world; construing this mission as a lack of concern for domestic poverty is a straw man fallacy. Roughly 40 million Americans live in poverty, and their situation is a serious one. But this poverty is a fundamentally different challenge from the one that the Blum Center aims to address. For example, among the eight million people living in the slums of Mumbai, many have no access to sanitary water; the Blum Center is funding research to develop viable and efficient solutions for ensuring a clean water supply. As problems that require both scientific excellence and a commitment to global engagement, these are problems that the University of California is uniquely poised to solve.

Unfortunately, as Mr. Blum explained the goals of the Center to its researchers, staff, and students, he was interrupted by a loud protest. To paraphrase Mr. Blum, apparently those involved with the protest would rather us not work toward improving the quality of life in the developing world.

In addition to interrupting Mr. Blum's speech, the protests closed an afternoon poster session to the public. The poster session was originally intended to be an open house. Ironically, the actions of the protesters did more to "privatize" the University's mission than did any donation from Mr. Blum. By preventing UC students, faculty, and staff from attending this event, the protesters denied the entire UC community a chance to engage the Blum Center-supported researchers and support their creativity and social consciousness.

Berkeley has a strong tradition of free speech, often including protests, and that tradition ought to be maintained. Protest injustices, protest unethical behavior, protest barriers that stand in the way of the University's goals. Do not protest those of us who are trying to use our talents and our resources to make a positive change in the world.

Currently listening: "Your Hands (Together)", the New Pornographers

3-Sentence Reviews: September 2010 Television (part 2)

2010-10-05T20:37:00.000-07:00

Continued from part 1...

The Big Bang Theory is the only conventional laugh-track sitcom I've liked since Seinfeld, and it's one that anybody who went to a tech-oriented school or had a lot of science-major friends will be able to appreciate. Its fourth season is as strong as ever, and the show is on a definite upswing now that it's gotten the Leonard/Penny romance out of its system. We're still ever closer to getting "The Sheldon Show," where everyone else is basically a supporting character, but that almost doesn't matter given how good Jim Parsons is.

I have a strange criticism of $#*! My Dad Says (pronounced "bleep my dad says"), and it has nothing to do with its unorthodox inspiration. Instead, I don't like this show because it's nowhere near offensive enough. The entire entertainment from the Twitter feed was the titular dad's vulgarity, bigotry, self-righteousness, and iconoclasm; at 8:30 pm on broadcast television (instead of a later timeslot or a cable channel), it can't feel anything but watered down.

While it really should have ended a year or two ago, The Office really better end after this season when Steve Carell departs. The seventh season so far isn't as strong as the first three or four, but at least it has avoided the miserable drama of the most recent couple. BJ Novak is still frustratingly underused, and the "Michael irrationally despises Toby" story/joke is not nearly as funny as the writers think it is, but new guy Gabe fits in perfectly, and the Dwight/Pam "we are stuck" moment was classic, hilarious, brilliant Office.

I probably would never have watched Outsourced had I not stumbled upon (and generally liked) the film of the same name (and inspiration for the television show). This show illustrates how difficult the movie to television conversion is: the movie had about 100 interesting minutes, and when it had used them up, it ended; even though we're only on episode 2 of presumably 20-25, we've already seen 43 minutes of content from the show, and I honestly have no idea where the show might go after its fourth or fifth episode. Still, I appreciate the change from love story to workplace comedy, and I like that the show isn't trying to make some grand statement on US/India relations, just pointing out that things one culture takes for granted are laughably bizarre to another.

In its last three seasons, The Mentalist has quietly emerged as the best procedural on television. There's just enough House-esque snarkiness--but less abstract pontificating on the nature of lying and a whole lot less unnecessary drama with the eponymous character dating his by-the-book female boss. Better yet, the series has finally hit its stride, including just enough Red John episodes to keep the overall arc moving forward but not so many that we get tired of it.

Alone among reality shows, The Amazing Race has redeeming value: the chance to be educated about all sorts of awesome things and places all over the world. It's almost enough to make me want to do The Amazing Race... then I look at the ridiculous things the contestants are made to do, and I realize I really do not want to do The Amazing Race. So far, I don't have a team I'm strongly rooting for--but then again I don't really hate many of the teams, so this season seems like it should be especially watchable.

Currently listening: "High Art, Local News", The New Pornographers

3-Sentence Reviews: September 2010 Television (part 1)

2010-09-30T20:21:00.000-07:00

It's that time again: television premiere season!

The ultimate irony of House is that as it's become more ostensibly character-driven, the characters have become less interesting; Thirteen's "I have Huntington's; should I stay or should I go?" two-dimensionality is a good example. But the nail in the coffin for character-driven House, the premiere episode of season 7, and potentially for the series as a whole is "Huddy": watch that miserable excuse for a scene where House opens the champagne bottle, and ask yourself if it is ever okay for House to smile with genuine affection and happiness. On a more positive note, the season's second episode was very strong, giving me hope that the writers have figured out how to balance "Huddy" with the House that we actually want to watch.

When you brand your show as "24 meets Lost," as The Event has done, you're not only marketing your show directly to me, you're setting some impossibly high standards as you compare yourself to my two favorite shows of the last decade. I'm enjoying it so far: I actually like the copious nonlinearity, though I appreciate that it won't be everyone's cup of tea, and I'm not sure I needed the explicit confirmation of aliens as early as episode 2, but I'm optimistic that I'll warm up to it. The biggest stumbling block I foresee for this show is that it could forget the Lost paradigm of characters first, mythology second.

I've never been particularly excited about theme-tribe seasons of Survivor, because they mostly end up as gimmicks. In that one season where they divided tribes by race, it's not like we actually learned anything about racial dynamics or differential ability; in Fans vs. Favorites, we never did get a conclusive answer about whether Survivor novices or veterans are better at the game; so in this edition, I don't expect any grand revelations about old people or young people being better at Survivor. But there are enough big personalities and potentials for explosive conflicts that I think it'll be a great season anyway.

Some seasons of Hell's Kitchen are good because the contestants are legitimately good chefs. Others are good because they're terrible chefs. This one looks to be good because all the contestants are complete morons, and there's no telling how much crap they're about to take from Ramsay because of it.

Criminal Minds continues to be criminally underrated by my demographic. It's one of the best procedurals on television today. In its sixth season, it's still excellent, and the psychological chess matches are only getting more intense.

Check back soon for shows from the rest of the week!

Currently listening: "The Bleeding Heart Show," The New Pornographers

Extra Lives

2010-09-28T20:22:00.000-07:00

Paste Magazine, which to my dismay recently suspended its print run, isn't just an indie music rag--it's an indie book/game/movie rag too! In their June/July issue, they reviewed an interesting-sounding book called Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. I figured it had a colon in the title, so it had to be good, and in an overwhelming display of whiteness, I decided to check it out from the library.

In it, Tom Bissell recounts his experiences playing ten or so video games, giving his reaction to each and interspersing interviews with game designers, critics, and other video-game luminaries. Finally, he tries to relate his experience with each game to some sort of social convention or human emotion, explaining why the game succeeds or fails as art.

Bissell's tales of playing through each game are by far the best parts of the book, especially if you're a gamer, and even more so if you've played the game he's discussing. These anecdotes are hilarious, accurate, and instantly relatable to anyone who's sunk triple-digit hours into Oblivion or suffered the misfortune of listening to its dialog.

The book is weaker when it's trying to make connections or prove a point. Bissell can't quite decide if he wants to apologize for his love of video games, defend it, or just revel in its geeky glory. In truth, he takes each of those three positions depending on his audience--the same game he praises for being innovative and absorbing, he starts criticizing as soon as his girlfriend does too--and he loses some credibility to that constant change of mood.

About the only other flaw in the book is its style. Bissell apparently has not learned the writer's lesson never to use a million-dollar word when a ten-dollar one will do (or however Strunk and White phrase it). He has a propensity for inserting Latin phrases just to prove that he knows them, and his sometimes-creative, sometimes-baffling bending of the conventional usage of words makes me wonder if he's writing for gamers or for other writers.

Although Bissell at times tries too hard to suck up to the smugness of the art crowd, it's clear from reading his stories that he's a gamer at heart. If you are too, you will certainly appreciate how Bissell memorializes your favorite games and sheds some light on their conception and production.

Currently listening: "Jackie, Dressed in Cobras", The New Pornographers

Three Dudes at a Paramore Concert

2010-09-20T16:43:00.000-07:00

Admit it: however rational, respectable, and artistic the rest of your musical taste is, you have that one musical guilty pleasure hanging out on your iPod. Disco? Kylie Minogue? 50 Cent? I won't judge--I can't--because I too have a musical guilty pleasure. It's pop-punk, in all its shapes and sizes, but in particular the angsty, high-school, half-assed-rebellious glory that is Paramore.

And I'll be the first to admit it: Paramore's music is not really that special. Their biggest hit, "Misery Business," is about as lyrically creative as an emo fifteen-year-old's Xanga account circa 2003. Their electrically driven brand of pop-punk hasn't been original since Green Day gave us Dookie in 1994 (back when they were still good and hadn't started whining about politics). And they only know how to write a handful of musical tempos and dynamics: loud and fast, loud and sort of fast, quieter and really slow.

Paramore transcends that heap of mediocrity to become just plain good in a way that's difficult to express or even make sense of. They're credible musicians, if not necessarily virtuosos. Their songs are infectiously catchy in a way that makes you want to listen to them over and over again, even though you know you're not going to get anything more out of them the second (or seventh... consecutive) time. And Hayley Williams, the group's feisty and fire-haired girl singer is legitimately talented.

In fact, it's Hayley (yes, apparently she and I are on a first-name basis) that gives the band any distinction at all. Without her, they'd be a competent but forgettable addition to the middle-2000s slate of pop-punk bands and entirely overshadowed by the likes of Fall Out Boy, Motion City Soundtrack, Sum 41... and just about everyone else who was making music last decade. It's no secret that I like rock music with girl singers--in fact, I have a Pandora station called Awesome Girl Singer Stuff that prominently features Paramore (also Eisley, Vedera, Rilo Kiley, and a handful of Scottish female singer/songwriters). It's a nice aesthetic, and it gives me an instant celebrity crush, so what's not to like?

And it was mainly the promise of seeing what sort of antics that Hayley would come up with live that got me excited about going to see Paramore in concert. One day in May, I stumbled upon a television commercial advertising their coming tour (try finding a television commercial proclaiming the Decemberists coming to town) and I knew I'd be going to that show. I half-jokingly floated the idea to a few friends... and four months later, there we were in downtown San Jose, three twentysomething dudes going to see Paramore in concert. Better yet, although I was genuinely excited about seeing the band, I could still play it off as hipster irony if anyone really pressed me on it.

Nothing about the concert disappointed. From before we even parked, we knew that our anticipation of the demographic was hilariously accurate: teenagers abounded, with about one in three concertgoers looking to be a seventeen-year-old girl or her barely-fighting-the-scowl boyfriend (who was probably secretly into the music anyway). In true signs of the times, the massive screen above the stage showed closeups of the band during the show (which is incredibly helpful in such a massive venue as the HP Pavilion), and during the set changes, it was filled with "<3"-laden texts from high schoolers. (Our plan, fueled by a handful of beers, to start trolling the text board with messages touting the superiority of Berkeley to their high school, never quite came to pass.) And once Paramore actually started playing, an alarmingly piercing shriek resounded from the audience, many members of which knew every single word of everything Paramore played.

The first surprise at the concert, a pleasant one, was the sheer amount of music we got to experience. The tickets said 6:30, but we weren't sure if that was the door time or the show time, so we arrived fashionably late at 7:30... only to find ourselves in the middle of the second of three opening bands. Usually, "second of three opening bands" spells certain obscure doom, but in Paramore's case, they'd managed to bring along New Found Glory, a band that everyone has at least heard of. The third opener, in a slight breach of concert protocol was the lesser-known Tegan and Sara.

I've heard about three songs each by both New Found Glory and Tegan and Sara, and I find concerts a miserable venue to learn new music, but both bands put on the sort of performance that if I were a fan, I would have enjoyed immensely. (The best thing that Tegan and Sara did was be dryly hilarious in a way that the teenage audience didn't necessarily pick up on. The best example was when they proclaimed that Paramore would "rock the shit out of this place," an amusingly inappropriate sentiment to deliver to a bunch of fifteen-year-olds.)

Paramore themselves came on at roughly 10:00 and played at least a solid hour of music. Minus set changes, that meant I got three and a half hours of music, and I would have gotten another hour or so if I'd bothered to show up on time. Unsurprisingly, the set list was weighted toward more recent material--they played nearly all of their 2009 album Brand New Eyes, a handful of the better-known tracks from 2007's Riot, and a song or two from their freshman All We Know is Falling, released in 2005. I have a new-found appreciation for both "Emergency" and "Pressure" (from Falling)--it's amazing what six years of touring and maturation do for your sound. The album cuts of both songs almost sounded like lo-fi garage rock in comparison to their live performances. Unfortunately, I couldn't gain the same respect for tracks like "Misguided Ghosts" and "Playing God" (from Brand New Eyes), which are still boring even live in concert... and "The Only Exception" (also from Eyes) is still boring and infuriatingly angsty.

Paramore played a few acoustic versions of some of their songs, which I could take or leave--though I understand the necessity for slowing the tempo and lowering the volume in the middle of a high-intensity show. They only played one cover, and it was Hayley singing a country song. Normally, I like covers, especially if they're of super-obscure songs that I happen to know. Not being the world's biggest country fan, I couldn't tell you if the one Hayley sang is well-known or not--but it turns out she's a pretty darn good country vocalist. I said so to one of the guys I was with during the show, and he admitted that "she's a pretty darn good vocalist in general."

Yet another part of the concert that didn't disappoint was the appearance of several of the top concert don'ts. Six-foot-three guy, totem pole couple, and spilling your beer all happened. Elbowing your way to the front and "you mind if I squeeze in here?" probably did too, but in our advanced age, it wasn't like we were rocking out on the floor next to all the really enthusiastic fans. The good thing about going to a concert populated with a bunch of only-mildly-rebellious high schoolers? No weed cloud or getting in fights. It seems there are worse people to sit down and listen to some generic pop-punk with.

One striking part of the show for me was its unabashed corporatism. It wasn't a Paramore tour, even, it was the "Honda Civic Tour with Paramore and Tegan and Sara". It was certainly the first concert I've been to that was headlined by a car. During set changes, we had to watch commercials for the Honda Civic--I'm not even making this up--prompting one of my friends to lament that we were "paying to watch a commercial." "Yeah, we are," I responded. "I'd love to see them try to get away with this in the East Bay."

For a lot of reasons, the unabashed corporatism being one, and the immense scale of the venue and the performers being another, this was not a concert that could have happened in the East Bay. On the other hand, it was one that I was perfectly happy having to travel to the South Bay to be able to go to. It might not be bleeding-edge indie cool to be a fan of Paramore... but it's also impossible to deny that they put on a fine show.

Currently listening: "Viola", This is Ivy League

The Salsa Connoisseur: Primavera Organic Roasted Tomato Chipotle Salsa

2010-09-15T23:27:00.000-07:00

One of the (many) oddities of living in California is the apparent easier availability of organic over "regular" products. Often, I have to double- and triple-check that the bunch of bananas I'm holding is a normal bunch of bananas, not a "have fun paying twice as much as you should with no real benefit" bunch of bananas. But sometimes, it slips under the radar, and I end up purchasing something organic in spite of myself.

Oh, California.

Texture: a little watery. It's true that I like my salsa fluid rather than chunky, but that comes mostly from the fineness of the vegetables. This salsa has roughly the consistency of soup, but it holds on a chip surprisingly well. Much better a little watery than "thick and chunky."

Heat: a solid "medium" to "hot". There's no description of this salsa's heat anywhere on the package, which is a little odd in a market dominated by cartoons of chilis and bright colors loudly proclaiming how much heat is supposed to be packed into the salsa. Ironically, a disproportionate number of salsas that advertise their heat think they are "medium-hot"; this salsa hits the nearest to "medium hot" of any that I've tried lately.

Flavor: definite smoky taste at the beginning, which comes from both the chipotle peppers and roasted tomatoes. That flavor fades to generic--but good!--salsa pretty quickly. It's slanted away from tangy yin of vinegar and tomato and toward the yang of salt and garlic, but it's certainly not overwhelming. The ingredient list for this salsa is pretty simple: tomatoes, onions, jalapenos (which, once they are smoked, magically become chipotle peppers), garlic, oil, vinegar, and sea salt. That's right: if it weren't hipster enough already to be eating an organic salsa made in Sonoma bought at the local independent supermarket, now you're eating one made with sea salt. Overly complicated saline aside, the simplicity and conventionality of the ingredient list is what makes the salsa work.

Available at Berkeley Bowl; 10.5 oz for $3.29 (31 cents per ounce). This is a fine fresh salsa that has a smoky, roasted flavor as its exactly one distinguishing characteristic. But that's enough to make me enjoy it and want to buy it again.

Currently listening: Hurley, Weezer (with review probably to follow soon)

Metroid: Other M

2010-09-14T00:24:00.000-07:00

The Metroid series may have shot itself in the foot by insisting that all its titles conform to the same unified chronology. For a comparison, look at Nintendo's two other massive flagship franchises, and let's start by talking about Mario.

Does anyone ever debate whether Super Mario 64 or Super Mario Sunshine comes later in the timeline? Is there any intrigue over the degree to which the universes of Galaxy and Galaxy 2 overlap? No, because it does not matter. We don't even know if any Mario game is a sequel, a remake, or a reboot of the game preceding it--all we know is that Bowser has done something dastardly again (often involving the Princess), and it is up to Mario to stop him. In Mario games, we're not looking for a great deal of character development or series interconnectivity; we're looking to jump on platforms, throw Koopa shells at Goombas, and kick Bowser's ass.

Zelda functions in basically the same way. There actually is a prescribed Zelda timeline, but nobody outside of a few dozen Zelda geeks and a handful of Nintendo employees knows it, because again, it does not matter. The vast majority of fans are content to treat every Zelda game as a reboot of the series, accepting that it's a new retelling of the hero Link fighting the great enemy Ganon with the power of the Triforce. In Zelda games, all we're looking to do is solve some tricky dungeon puzzles, bust out some fancy swordplay, and kick Ganon's ass.

Why can't Metroid do the same thing? Metroid fans are looking to explore every nook and cranny of an alien planet, establish a massive arsenal by finding weapon pickups, and kick Ridley's ass. It sounds awfully similar to Mario and Zelda... but for whatever reason, unlike those two, Metroid can't leave good enough alone. The first three games (Metroid, Metroid II, and Super Metroid) form a logical trilogy--though Super Metroid played enough like the original Metroid that nobody would have cried foul if it had simply been presented as a remake.

The Prime games clearly formed another logical trilogy, but these games' story and style were so distinct from the original trilogy that they seemed more like a reboot than a prequel trilogy. They didn't need to be prequels to make them fun, and them being prequels didn't enhance the series' earlier games. In fact, they set the precedent that seemingly unrelated Metroid games need to exist in the same continuum, which rather than establishing a universal and coherent story, has led to a frustrating amount of shoehorning in every other Metroid game.

It's most apparent in Other M, which tries incredibly (at times desperately) hard to be both a sequel to Super Metroid and a prequel to Metroid Fusion. Combine that with the Wii's fervor to be one giant logroll of a console for everything good that Nintendo has ever done. The result is a game chock-full of references to the earliest parts of the series, with Metroid II remake bosses taking center stage, and Super Metroid enduring an almost amusing number of namedrops, from the ubiquitous Mother Brain and Zebes to the lowly Tourian, just to provide longtime fans of the series with a wink and a nudge.

The ultimate irony of Other M, then, is the vast amount of criticism leveled at it that it is "not a Metroid game". Here's a game that's practically built on fanservice to the most beloved title in the series, and the fans are turning on it? But speaking as a fifteen-year veteran of the series, it's easy to understand the complaint. It has nothing to do with the combat, the graphics, the story, or even the (miserably bad) characterization. Instead, Other M institutes a handful of gameplay mechanics that unfortunately rob Other M of seeming like a classic Metroid title.

The most egregious (and most universally lambasted) of these is the "item authorization" mechanic. In earlier Metroid titles, one of the highlights of the game was finding new and awesome things on the alien planet or spaceship that made your character, Samus, better. Sometimes they made you tougher, sometimes they enabled you to explore new places, and sometimes they augmented your weaponry. So much of the joy of playing Super Metroid came from figuring out exactly what your new item let you do and where you could go that you couldn't before because you had it.

All that is out the window in Other M. In an attempt to reconcile the need for progressive improvements to your character with the inconvenient reality that Samus is pretty damn formidable after she's been through Super Metroid, the game arrives on what was undoubtedly seen as quite the clever solution: Samus already has all the items she'll ever need (minus a few that are mostly conveniences anyway), but she can only use them after certain pre-determined points in the plot, when she is authorized to do so by a superior officer.

It's given a great deal of plot justification, with some back story about how Samus is doing this out of respect to her father figure and to prove to her squadmates that she can follow orders. But Adam Malkovich's voice saying "huh, looks like you need some deus ex machina to complete this puzzle" is just nowhere near as satisfying as thinking "grapple beam? Does that mean I can go back to that one room and get across it now?". Worse, much of it doesn't even make sense. Adam is worried about authorizing Samus to use too much firepower, which I can almost halfway buy. Explain how that translates into barring the use of the totally non-threatening Varia Suit (which serves the sole purpose of making you not die in a hot environment).

Other infringements on the free-exploration extravaganza that ought to be Metroid include a baffling preponderance of locked doors. It's always been standard Metroid fare to lock doors until you've met a certain condition, like killing all the monsters in a room. Other M takes this miles further and locks doors simply because it doesn't want you going that way yet. A third frustration in this vein is the restriction on free movement that some rooms unnecessarily impose. If I'm in a massive cavern-style room, and I see a far-off ledge, I should be able to jump to it. Getting halfway there and slamming into an unseen wall is incredibly disheartening. Finally, there's the third-person over-the-shoulder style rooms, which serve no apparent purpose other than to make you handle like Bowser from the original Mario Kart. In an oil slick.

Other M's other great failure is in its characters. Ordinarily, it would be patently unfair to a Metroid game to judge it on its characters with the same intensity as its gameplay, but Other M makes no bones about putting its characters at its forefront. Look no further than the menu screen: right next to the map and the list of awesome things you've found are "story" and "characters". In the past, Samus has had very little definition to her character, so any contribution that Other M could make would be an improvement, right? Not when it's to make Samus fraught with both mommy and daddy issues. On top of that, she's clearly regressed in the feminist department--she's gone from a strong and capable fighter who happens to be a woman to a whiny, insecure girl.

The only characters who have any shred of humanity are Malkovich, the scientist Madeline Bergman, and (ironically) the android virtual intelligence MB. Even they are flat: two-dimensional and static. Anthony Higgs, who could have been far more interesting, exists only to provide Samus with a hint of sexual tension. His squadmates, though, perform a remarkable feat in character-building: if Anthony is one-dimensional, these other characters are actually zero-dimensional, possessing no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever.

Earlier Metroid games have made use of voice acting, but Other M uses by far the most of any title in the series--and it's by far the worst. Samus's lines in particular are horrid, scripted by someone who seems to have no idea how people actually talk, in the style of a somewhat-precocious fifteen-year-old who is intelligent enough to have a reasonable vocabulary but not wise enough to use it responsibly. They're melodramatic, cringeworthy--and delivered in a detached style so wooden it makes the Trojan horse animated in comparison.

Does that mean Other M is a big pile of failure? Thankfully, no. The story, which seems overbearing and forced at first, actually unfolds into something decent, and it becomes worth caring about more as the game progresses. The game splits up its difficulty oddly: in other Metroid games, boss fights were the only parts of the game where you were in real danger of dying, and the difficulty came in the often grueling treks between save points. If you did die, you were in big trouble.

Now, you can expect to die on every boss, and you're in mortal danger from almost every mini-boss and some normal fights as well. But you can continue much more easily. Apparently this is a very Ninja Gaiden mechanic--fight the same impossibly hard fight half a dozen times before you finally figure out how the heck to beat it, and move on to the next one--and that makes sense, given that "Team Ninja" developed Other M. But this redistribution of difficulty isn't necessarily bad, it's just different.

Rest assured that there are plenty of things about Other M that are legitimately good. I'll be the first to speak in favor of the more combat-oriented Metroid. Tough battles in the original trilogy pretty much followed the script of "fire missiles at it until it dies." In the Prime trilogy, this became "fire a whole lot of missiles at it until it takes on its next form and throws some more hideous attacks at you." But in Other M, there's a bit more strategy--and a whole lot more style--involved in a lot of the fights. And it's much less satisfying to "fire three missiles at it" than to "fire two missiles at it, run toward it, grab its neck, and slam it into the ground."

(Overblast and Lethal Strike, the two cinematic combat elements that Other M introduces, are a bit tough to use at first, especially to Metroid veterans. "Let me get this straight, I'm supposed to tap buttons to dodge rather than run the hell away, and then run toward it and jump on it rather than blast it from a distance?" Yep. Once you're over it, it becomes doable... then it becomes a whole lot of fun.)

The switch between first- and third-person control works much better than it has any right to, though like most of the control scheme, it can be a little awkward at first. Other simplifications to the controls work very well, like making wall jumping actually possible and eliminating the need to ever do needlessly complex Morph Ball bomb jumping puzzles.

And it would be a shame to overlook the greatest strength that Other M has: it looks really pretty. It's obviously the best-looking Metroid game to date, and it probably has some of the best graphics of any Wii game. Samus finally looks like she should have twenty-five years ago (now that shoulder pads have been firmly out of style for ten or fifteen of those years), and Ridley looks downright scary... in a way that makes you completely respect him and the rest of the game.

Other M is not an instant classic in the same way that Super Metroid was. It's probably not even as good as the Metroid Prime trilogy; in fact, it may even be among the worst of the Metroid games. However, that's as much a praise of the rest of the series as it is an indictment of Other M. It's not a long game--roughly 8 to 12 hours, depending on how good you are at it and how much effort you want to put into being a completionist (but remember that Super Metroid's ultimate goal is to finish in 3 hours). The questionable voice acting and shallow characterization are not going to win any awards or even much praise. If you're a Metroid purist, you will balk at parts of the game.

But the game is fun, and that's what counts. As long as you can get over "this isn't a Metroid game," you will enjoy playing Other M.

Currently listening: "Knights", Minus the Bear

Mass Effect: A Discussion of the Mako Tank

2010-09-04T18:06:00.000-07:00

My last post was a review and discussion of Mass Effect, and my conclusion is that I like virtually every part of the game.

Except for one:

I am convinced that I am the worst Mako driver in the world. A blindfolded three-year-old could easily drive this piece of trash better than I could. If you've played the game, you know how difficult it is to flip the tank over. I've managed to do it. Multiple times.

My relationship with the Mako didn't exactly start out smoothly: even though almost every single button and control was explained to me perfectly reasonably, the one that never made its way into the tutorial was "how to leave the damn tank."

On an early assignment, I needed to go to some God-forsaken planet and look for some escape pod. Before I found the pod, I had to engage something monstrous called a "thresher maw," which translates to "Mako tank-sized mouth that, oh yeah, spits acid at you, on top of one hundred feet of neck." Come to find out, it has the ability to burrow under the ground and instantly kill you by resurfacing directly under you. As if the acid spitting weren't enough.

But finally, I outwitted the thresher maw and found the escape pod... then couldn't do anything with it. I quit and reloaded the game twice to make sure that it wasn't a bug or glitch. Still, nothing happened. I resorted to an online walkthrough--the first and only time--and it told me to "leave the tank" then investigate the pod. After scouring the list of controls for a few minutes, I finally found it: you press the "q" button.

Fast-forward to Feros, one of the main-plot worlds. There's a part of Feros called the "Prothean Skyway". Sounds cool, right? Sure, except until you realize that "Skyway" is actually a euphemism for "highway suspended hundreds of feet in the sky." I died more times driving my tank off the side of the Skyway than I did on all the rest of Feros combined.

A little while later, on some other planet, I drove into an ambush and saw my tank take a ton of damage. A more reasonable player would have driven away and tried to repair the vehicle, right? With as little faith as I had in the Mako, my plan was abandon the tank and sacrifice the admittedly greater firepower just to be rid of the thing. (It worked.)

Finally, even after playing the game, there are some controls on it that I simply do not understand. The first is the spacebar, which engages some mysterious thrusters on its underside that seem to be good for ejecting me from the slope of a hill and little else. The second is left click, which fires the machine gun. Here's a scenario: robot armed with rocket launcher is walking toward you. Do you spray it with your dollar-store Super Soaker knockoff, or do you obliterate it with Right Click of Exploding Doom?

I really hope all these mechanics are fixed in Mass Effect 2. Except for Right Click of Exploding Doom. I'll keep that one.

Currently listening: "Black Magic Woman," Santana

Mass Effect: Debrief

2010-09-04T11:27:00.000-07:00

It's true: it's taken me until now to play through Mass Effect. Yes, it's been around for more than two years--in fact, I think I got some sort of second anniversary discount when I bought it back in May. Yes, a veritable legion of my friends has tried to convince me to play it for those last two years--and friends whose video game opinions I generally respect. Yes, I pretty much adore Dragon Age: Origins--and in the grand Bioware tradition, Dragon Age is basically just Mass Effect dressed up as fantasy.

I don't know why it's taken me so long. Part of it was probably my lack of time over the last two years; part of it was that I anticipated the game having too much shooter influence for my tastes--even though shooters are de rigueur in video gaming these days, I haven't played one I really got into since Perfect Dark back in 2000. Of course, my friends were completely right on this one. Mass Effect is a very good video game.

I've argued before that every Bioware game plays the same, and Mass Effect is no exception. It follows the now-familiar structure: a short in media res prologue that gets the action going; Act 1, which takes place in some beacon of civilization, establishes the central conflict of the game, and builds your party; a massive Act 2 that occupies the majority of the game and features four parallel main quests in the far reaches of the setting; a climactic Act 3, which features some major plot revelations and sets up the final battle; and a short Act 4, which is basically the final battle with a short lead-up. There are lots of side assignments you can do, many of which involve your characters and getting to know their stories better--including some that lead to romance subplots.

At around 35 hours, Mass Effect is a little shorter than I expected it to be. Maybe that shows the background that I game from--I grew up on JRPGs like Chrono Trigger and the Final Fantasy series that, even back in 1995, routinely lasted for 50-60 hours. I sunk 110 hours into Final Fantasy X, 120 into Oblivion, and I don't even want to know how many (but probably at least 150) into Morrowind. I didn't explore every nook of every isolated planet to find every side quest in the game, but I did put reasonable effort into finishing all the ones I bumped into. You could probably stretch Mass Effect to 40-45 hours if you dragged a fine-toothed comb over it, or you could probably speed through it in as few as 20-25.

But that would be a mistake. Bioware might come across as the poor man's Bethesda when it comes to crafting open, dynamic, and explorable worlds, but they're still far and away better at it than virtually everyone else in the business. There's a lot going on in Mass Effect, between history, setting, and characters, and it's worth it to explore as much of it as is feasible.

Mass Effect doesn't suffer from nearly as many difficulty issues as would plague Dragon Age: Origins just a year later. Both games scale their difficulty, so that your enemies get tougher as you do--except that the only thing that happens to your enemies is that the numbers go up. As you become more powerful, it's not strictly about the numbers, it's also about the additional things you can do. My mage character in Dragon Age was very much tilted toward "things" rather than "numbers," so the beginning of the game was unreasonably difficult (I would routinely die to a wolf ambush), while the end was almost trivially easy (because of all the resources at my disposal, I never felt seriously threatened by the final boss).

It might be a different approach to the character that I took in Mass Effect that made the difficulty more even throughout, or it might be that Mass Effect is just balanced better. Either way, the difficulty is appropriate at virtually every stage of the game, and I definitely felt seriously threatened by the final boss here.

Aesthetically, the game is decent to good. The music is passable, but it's no Jeremy Soule soundtrack (a la the Elder Scrolls games). As for the graphics, I turned the resolution up to 1280x1024 and all the other settings squarely to "medium," and I think it struck a nice balance of looks and performance, at least on my system. (My computer is only about a year old, and relatively powerful--but by no means a gaming rig. If you have a machine legitimately built for gaming, you'll be able to crank all the settings up with no problem.)

The controls are reasonably intuitive and mostly explained over the course of the "prologue" act, with a the exceptions of a handful of the minigames and a couple vagaries of the Mako tank. (In fact, there are plenty of vagaries of the Mako tank.)

But what you're really playing this game for is the story, which is executed brilliantly. It unfolds entirely sensically from the prologue to the final act, and even though you're clearly dealing with some world- (or galaxy-) changing stuff, you never really feel overwhelmed or in over your head. The plot toes the line between a self-contained story with an exciting climax and satisfying resolution and a first installment of a trilogy that's obviously part of something much bigger than itself. It works on both levels, and the best sign of its success is how excited I am about playing Mass Effect 2.

Currently listening: "Somebody Told Me", the Killers

All Delighted People EP

2010-08-31T21:31:00.000-07:00

There's a note of irony in Sufjan Stevens' career that any hipster among his fans is sure to appreciate. His greatest success by any measure--commercial, critical, or artistic--came from the same subset of his music that spurred a career-jeopardizing existential crisis.

Michigan (2003) wasn't Stevens' first album--it was his third--but it was the first one that anyone paid attention to. The Avalanche (2006) was the most listenable B-sides/rarities/outtakes album since the mid-1990s' Beatles Anthology series, plus it was Stevens' only album to date to crack the mainstream Billboard charts. And Illinois, released in 2005, has already taken its place among the greatest indie albums of the last decade, possibly of all time.

Together, these three form the beginning--or what ought to have been the beginning--of Stevens' supremely ambitious "Fifty States Project." Now, tragically, these three appear like they're forming the entirety of the project. The grand plan was to write albums inspired by each of the fifty states, of which Michigan and Illinois were the first two, and The Avalanche carried the momentum of Illinois to become its partner or sequel album.

Sufjan Stevens hasn't necessarily been forthcoming about his intentions for the future of the project. 2006 gave us "yes, of course I'm serious about finishing it." In 2008, we got the sea change of an opinion to "no, I'm not going to finish it, and I was pretty much joking the whole time." And by 2010, these prognostications more or less moderated to "I probably won't finish it, but I won't rule out working on it more in the future."

It would be a shame if he didn't put more work into it. While 2004's Seven Swans remains popular, and undoubtedly A Sun Came!, Enjoy Your Rabbit/Run Rabbit Run, and even The BQE enjoy their own followings, it's the Fifty States Project that put Sufjan Stevens on the map and has produced his best work. But it's possible that like many artists' magna opera, Stevens poured just a little too much of himself into it.

The self-destruction that threatened to follow saw Stevens giving quotes like "I've lost faith in the album" and of the song as units of musical expression. Nowhere did the breakdown appear more evident than in 2009's The BQE a mess of an orchestral tribute to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which was somewhere between horror and genius--but even fans have nowhere where to place it. We had no idea whether or not Stevens would release a conventional album with words ever again.

Therefore, the ambush of a release of All Delighted People was even more of a shock to fans. (And if that weren't enough, a full-length is planned for October.) Conventional it is not--apparently Stevens wasn't kidding when he hinted at abandoning the traditional song/album structure--but it does have words, it has a few remnants of convention about it, and it has a whole lot of content. The EP weighs in at 8 songs that last a total of more than 57 minutes (which many artists would be content to market as a full-length album). Do the math, and you'll find that the average song length is more than seven minutes--which isn't to say that Stevens has mundanely released an EP with eight seven-minute songs. Rather, the shortest is barely three minutes, the second-longest is eleven, and the longest is a hefty seventeen-minute jam session.

The middle of the album, tracks two through five, are where the album is at its most conventional and immediately accessible. "Enchanted Ghost" is the shortest track and seems the most like material that might have made it onto Seven Swans or Michigan. It's still my favorite track on the album, and while the following few tracks occasionally lose energy or direction, fans expecting Stevens' earlier work will be the most at home in this chunk of music.

"All Delighted People" makes its appearance as two tracks, which are not precisely the same song in terms of content and are drastically different songs in terms of style. Both, but particularly the first title track, feature some jarring dissonances and abrupt stylistic changes. It wasn't the sort of thing I was sure I liked at first; in fact, one of my first thoughts was "this will take some getting used to." But here's the thing: by the second time I played through the EP, I wasn't just used to it--I was into it.

Aside from more dissonance and sharper transitions than we're used to, a few stylistic departures from Stevens' earlier work pervade the EP. Electronic effects and wailing, meandering electric guitar solos show up more in "Djohariah", the seventeen-minute track that closes the album, than in Stevens' past seven studio albums combined, and they show up throughout the rest of the album as well. Stevens' falsetto, very much a part of all the music he has released, shows up in All Delighted People as a frailer yet more pronounced version of its old self, less agile and more obvious than it was in the past.

All Delighted People is not Illinois. Not that anyone really expected it to be--as The Avalanche showed, Stevens clearly could have made the rest of his career into re-releasing Illinois about five times, and he would have been plenty successful doing so. But there's always been a sense of boundary-pushing in Sufjan Stevens' music, and All Delighted People carries that tradition further than any of his previous albums.

Currently listening: "Magpie to the Morning", Neko Case

Matt Plays Food Blogger: Chicken Biryani

2010-08-23T21:34:00.000-07:00

I've never understood the national appeal of the New York Times. It's a regional newspaper--why would I want to read about what's happening in New York when I could just as easily read about what's happening in my own city? However, it has been an excellent source of delicious things to cook. Maybe I'm a Times fan after all.

Today's recipe was one I found describing how to make an Indian/Pakistani chicken and rice dish in a rice cooker. I don't have a rice cooker, but, hey, I just so happen to have an appliance that cooks things thoroughly and slowly! My slow-cooker version of chicken biryani is a lot simpler and takes fewer preparation steps, but I can't imagine it tastes much different from the original.

Ingredients

1-1.5 lb. chicken thighs. This week's Mega Ultra Chicken Thigh pack from Safeway had eleven thighs, and I used five of them in this. I think it came out to 1.2 lb. or so.
1 onion, chopped
2 inches of ginger, minced (I used a microplane)
3 cloves of garlic, minced (I microplaned this too)
3 small serrano chilis, stemmed and chopped (you could use just about any sort of chili)
1 1/2 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp chili powder
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cumin
1/4 tsp garam masala
6 cardamom pods
6 cloves
1 cinnamon stick
a pinch of saffron
3 cups of chicken broth
1 1/2 cups rice (I used Thai Jasmine, because that's what I had around. The original used basmati. I'm not sure how different those two are.)
1 cup of plain yogurt
3 tbsp chopped fresh mint
3 tbsp chopped fresh cilantro
juice from 1 lime
1-2 tbsp olive oil

This is a whole ton of ingredients. Half of them are spices, though, so you might already have them lying around. I think you could probably get away with using 3 tsp garam masala instead of the coriander/chili powder/cumin/garam masala combination to cut down ingredients. I already had all these spices except for cloves and saffron, and it was a good thing, because those two bundles of joy cost me about twenty-five dollars.

Saffron is not messing around. I'd heard of how expensive this business was, of course, but exactly how much it gouged my wallet astonished me. You have no idea how strongly I'm considering dropping out of grad school and moving to Spain to become a saffron farmer.

Preparation and Cooking

The original recipe suggests blending the onion, garlic, ginger, and chilis together to form a paste. Unfortunately, I don't have a food processor or blender, so I chopped and minced as above. Then slightly brown the paste (maybe "golden-brown the paste") by cooking in about 1 tbsp of olive oil. Take the paste out of the pan and set it aside. Brown the chicken in the same pan (first adding another tablespoon of olive oil if you need to) and put it on the bottom of a slow cooker. Layer the browned paste on top.

Throw in all the spices, powdered and whole, except for the saffron. (If you have a bit of cheesecloth or a dry, empty tea bag, you might want to throw the cardamom pods and cloves into a small bundle. You don't want to crunch down on one of these later.) Dump in the chicken broth and rice. Cook on low for 5 hours and 30 minutes. (Or longer, if you're worried about your slow cooker's ability to get the chicken cooked through.)

As the 5-hour mark approaches, chop the fresh herbs, juice the lime, and mix the saffron into the yogurt. Mine didn't mix so well--clearly my first time working with saffron. I probably should have tried harder to mix them. Add the chopped herbs, the lime juice, and the saffron yogurt at 5:30 or so, and stir everything together. Cook for another half hour, just enough to get everything to cook through.

Verdict

I liked this a whole lot. The turmeric turned the rice a fantastic yellow color, and all the fantastic south Asian spices melded together beautifully. This is one of the first dishes I've made where the sweet-savory-salty balance was dead-on.

The chicken was tender and not too dried out--I think cooking it for longer than 6 hours in my particular crockpot more or less kills it. The rice decomposed into a sticky mush, which I actually didn't mind at all, especially because the rice cooks in the chicken broth with all the spices dissolved in it. Plus, given the choice, I'd much rather have a casserole consistency than crunchy undercooked rice. That said, it makes for a fundamentally different dish. You could probably work some fancy timing for exactly when to add the rice, but that would involve more work than a slow-cooked dish is supposed to.

It's my belief that lamb is probably the most tragically underrated meat there is, and nowhere does it go better than in Indian-ish cooking. The reason I stuck with chicken here is that the dish uses chicken broth--I don't know if there's such a thing as lamb broth, lamb in chicken sauce just isn't as good as chicken in chicken sauce, and using beef broth in an Indian dish seems, well, sacrilegious.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm not sure if the vaunted saffron actually did anything at all. But I'm naturally unwilling to make compromises to my authenticity.

Currently listening: "Lightning Rod", Guster