Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
|
|
| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
|
|
Monday, April 21, 2003 The Pitch: It's like Planes, Trains & Automobiles meets Orange County! Very much a "didn't, did, didn't" morning. I woke up three minutes before my alarm, still totally tired, performed some calculations in my head, set the alarm to go off in another twenty-five minutes, rolled over to go back to sleep. But, a minute later, a strong wind came up, shaking the house for just a second, and then a strong rain began to fall, and I got up, simply because of the beauty of that sound. But I still ran a little late, didn't bother with possible arch-enemy the 6:21 bus, and instead grabbed a Mission Express sometime around 6:40.The Mission Express bus turns almost immediately off Mission and then gets on the highway and I love it because it allows me to do what I can never do when I'm driving--look at the scenery. If you love dewy morning landscapes populated by junkyards, sandbags and old tires, this is the bus to catch. I know I was worrying all the people sitting because I kept leaning toward them so I could see out the window: fresh grass split grafitti tags at their base; junked muni buses crouch like scarred prowling toms, pale green waterways lying amphoteric and still. It made me think, fortunately enough, of Grand Theft Auto 3 and Grand Theft Auto Vice City, where aesthetics is as powerful a reward as money, and missions frequently get abandoned so one can see what the view is like at the edge of the harbor. As much as I wanted to drive out, right then, to the very edge of China Basin and see the sunrise, I knew I wouldn't--time, effort and institutionalized racism being what they are ("What if my car broke down?" I found myself thinking. "What would I do then?"). But it was far more likely I would at some point, throw the GTA3 in the console and zip around again, watching a sunrise at the water's edge until I got bored, then setting my own car on fire to watch it explode. Which in its way (GTA3, I'm talking here) is some satisfying surreal re-creation of childhood (I use surreal in that specific sense of re-creation: a wheel is a surreal leg, etc.), where I remember standing by the side of the creek, watching only how the light played on the water, and trying to figure if the music of the creek changed as a result, and then turning my mind to the complete opposite of such peace--ripping off huge patches of bark, tossing them noisily into the water and then trying to sink them with stones before they could float away. At the moment, video games are most satisfying to me when they link discreetly with childhood in this way. What's Splinter Cell or Tenchu but extended versions of Hide and Seek or Red Devil that we used to play in our backyard? What's GTA3 but childhood itself, the struggle between doing chores and keeping oneself amused with psychopathic acts? Shigeru Miyamoto has mentioned how his childhood exploration of woods and caves are the major influence on the Mario games (and probably the Zelda games as well, I would imagine). What I'm wondering about these days is how video games might be too successful. At one point, Hayao Miyazaki, the animator, announced his retirement from making movies because he felt children were watching his movies over and over again instead of being inspired by his movies to go outside and explore the world around them. I'm too old now to go out and play Red Devil in my neighborhood, but maybe I could be spending more time outdoors instead of sitting in the dark, virtually skulking. This is what I'm writing about, these days, to various degrees of (which is to say, little) success: young men and their boxes, in living rooms with curtains pinned shut, extending their childhoods artificially, and learning, maybe, the lengths to which their games and their dreams have anything to do with each other. posted by Jeff Lester | 9:43 AM | |
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
