Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Thursday, July 29, 2004 The Pitch: It's Like Back to School meets Grease meets The Jackal! I finally, finally, finally went to the Naz Super 8 yesterday, after months and months of just telling everyone I was going to. Yes, I made it back to the strange and dusky land known as Fremont, where Chris and Nancy came from, and I was so happy to see the dry-dirt mountains I actually took pictures. I will probably subject you to them later becuase that's the sort of cruel bastard I am.As is the case when I hit the Naz 8, I saw two flicks, and the first one was a dud and the second one was a ton of fun: not surprising since I deliberately chose to go see Bollywood sexer Julie as my first flick. After the car crash that was Boom!, you'd think I'd learn the cardinal lesson of controversial adult Indian films: the women never get naked and the plot never gets interesting. Thank God the second film Main Hoon Na is a big old crack pipe of modern Bollywood cinema: it's three hours long, has no intermission, jams musical number on top of musical number, and gives you a muscial credit sequence where cast and crew cavort at a carnival. Alarmingly, this is the second Indian film I really, really enjoyed with Sharukh Khan. Unlike Kal Ho Naa Ho, it wasn't even "I enjoyed Sharukh Khan despite my better judgment, and part of it is because his character is going to die." I just liked the vain, mugging bastard, as he plays an all-business Army Sargeant posing as a college student to protect young Amrita Rao from villainous terrorist Sunil Shetty. There's a strong element of Kabhi Kushi Kabhi Gham in the flick too, as Khan poses as a stranger to his stepbrother and stepmother to reunite his family after the death of his father. So there's family crying; there's over-the-top action sequences; and there were enough musical numbers to sate the biggest Bollywood fetishist. The director, Farah Khan, came from choreographing musical numbers and it shows: one musical number starts with a breathtaking sequence where the camera doesn't cut from the singer until the arrival of the second singer--and then follows that singer in an unbroken sequence. The whole thing, from what I could tell, is two unedited shots and it's dazzling--The Touch of Evil of musical numbers. Really, the only thing I found wrong with Main Hoon Na was it didn't showing its Indian Film Certificate at the opening: I love the Indian Film Certificate and halfway through Julie I realized I could sneak out my digital camera and snap a picture of it at the opening of MHN for my own use. No luck, though. Now I gotta start getting ready to go to Humboldt County for the weekend. That I will see a good Bollywood flick and relax under the stars with Edi in a Finnish Hot Tub within 48 hours of each other seems almost too good to be true. (To say nothing of not working on Friday or Monday.) Now if I can just remember to pack everything... posted by Jeff | 5:31 PM | Tuesday, July 27, 2004 The Pitch: It's like After Hours meets Saturn Three! Warning: The f-word gets a good working out in this post. Yes, I use the word fucking a whole lot in this post. As in: my fucking Palm Pilot keeps fucking me over and I'm pretty fucking sick of it.It wasn't always this way. The laughs the two of us had! The incomplete novels! The sublime games of Dopewars! And to be fair: I share some of the blame. On Saturday, I turned on the Palm Pilot and got a message telling me to back up my information and switch out the batteries. Since I was at work and couldn't synch up the palm with the computer, I didn't do anything. And then when I got home that night, I forgot to synch it up. And forgot about the whole thing until today when I turned it on to get Hibbs' home phone number and got a dead Palm that wouldn't power up. Okay sure, that seems like I'm entirely to blame but that's not the case. I would've gladly swapped out batteries right then and there on Saturday if my Palm hadn't started playing a little game about a year ago called: "Let's lose all our info." The way this game is played is pretty easy (even a child could do it!): I change my battery, and the Palm loses all our info. Up until the time my Palm learned this exciting new game, I could yank out batteries cavalierly and never worry about the consequences. The material was always there. Always. Not a problem in over five years of owning Palm Pilots. Of course, most of them had another game they liked to play called "Your stylus is pressing constantly on this corner of the screen," but that was entirely my fault. I carried the Palms around in my pants pocket, for crying out loud. I deserved what I got. But I don't deserve the grief I'm getting for changing batteries. When I lose everything, all I need to do is hot-synch it with my PC and reload everything (and I think I haven't lost any writing or anything this time. I think) which is a chance to play my sputtering PC's favorite game, "every USB port works except the one with the Palm Pilot synching cable." This game makes me less likely to synch up my data on a regular basis (oh, the good old days when I used to synch up my Palm and PC every! single! day! I was pretty good for the first six months or so...) and makes it more likely for me to lose all this info. So I put new batteries into the Palm in the hopes that I can get home, synch it up tonight, and it'll be fine. Because as it is now, when I turn on the Palm I get a little screen that says: "Erase all data? Press up for YES, press any other button for NO." Then when I press any other button, my Palm has a flickering seizure and eventually turns off. (Or I freak out and turn it off.) I admit, this has thrown me off my writing game a little bit. I want to get back in the habit of writing every morning, but I don't want to play "every USB port works except the one with the Palm Pilot synching cable" every night, nor "Let's lose all our info" or even the merry diversion of "Erase all data? Press up for YES, press any other button for NO." And if it takes five to ten minutes for me to reload everything after it's been wiped... I'm very easily discouraged when it comes to writing. That's why I took up with the Palm Pilot and my beautiful Stowaway keyboard in the first place--I could write anywhere I went and it was very, very hard to lose, and very, very easy to save. But now? Maybe this whole thing with the Palm Pilot is signs that I should do something new: get one of the new glitzier Palms, the Treo or whatever the fuck, and a new wireless keyboard. Or maybe something different: I've always coveted an Alphasmart. I've just got to come up with something more reliable than this, because all these games are ones I just keep losing at. posted by Jeff | 4:47 PM | The Pitch: It's Like Requiem for a Dream meets Ghostbusters! Didn't post yesterday because I was struggling with the horrible miasmatic tendrils of addiction. But it's now been almost seventy-two hours without an apple fritter, and I think I'm going to be okay.After all, I managed to--not once, but twice--go to work and not give in to the fried and sugar glazed vulgarity that is....that is.....(Dear God, stay strong!) It's quite the achievement when you think of it. I pass one Chinese Food Doughnut shop on my walk to BART (on the smallish side, but fresh), and then on the way from BART to work, one dour looking Happy Doughnuts (fresh, skimpy on the apples, but big, sell out quick), three Starbucks (uniformly stale, but with a decent apple count, widely available), Lee's Deli (irregularly offered, highly variable in freshness and size) and the newly opened 7-Eleven (best I had discovered yet: crisp, large, fresh, maybe a bit low on the apples but who's complaining, available even after lunch). It was this last store, discovered at the tail end of my addiction that kept me from quitting for another week or two: how could I quit after I had found my Apple Fritter Mecca? After all those afternoons settling for a stale Starbucks hand-me-down? Yeah, I think the monkey's off my back. I only think of it once or twice each morning, and only after lunch...and when I just get off work...and during the quiet moments at work between 8:00 and noon, and maybe 4:00 to 6:00 if I didn't pick up a dessert after lunch. Sadly, my Proustian analysis of fritterian delectation will have to wait, as I am at work, and somebody who can't be arsed to listen to a voicemail and write down a phone number has forwarded me something to transcribe. But it's not because I'm leaving now to go to that 7-Eleven. No, no, no. I assure you I am not. No, no, no, no, no, no. No. I hope. posted by Jeff | 8:23 AM | Sunday, July 25, 2004  The view from the office as I was leaving Saturday night. I was sure there'd be no way I could catch one-tenth of those clouds' enormity but I'm really happy I was wrong.  posted by Jeff | 9:54 PM |  I had originally snapped the picture of this abandoned child's mattress on Army Street becuase it seemed poignant. Then, I looked closer and saw it depicted nothing but killer whales and great white sharks! What kind of inhuman monster makes their children sleep on a bed decorated with great whites and killer whales? Sadly, the asp and cobra comforter was nowhere to be seen.
posted by Jeff |
9:52 PM |
The Pitch: It's like Stand By Me meets The End of the Road! Ai-yi-yi, my stomach. Today, I ate 2 garlic sausage sandwiches, a piece of garlic salmon, stuffed garlic mushrooms, a sample of garlic ice cream, grilled corn in garlic butter, a garlic stuffed olive, half a grilled garlic balogna sandwich, a lime shave ice, two krispy kreme doughnuts, and an egg mcmuffin (no canadian bacon). God bless the Gilroy Garlic Festival.Edi and I had planned to make it down there early to beat the crowds and heat, and darned if it didn't work out perfectly. We were there about three and a half hours, twice as long as our first time last year, and Edi was actually pretty restrained about the whole thing while I pretty much tried to eat everything in sight. Consequently, we came home and Edi was able to do work, read and make actual conversation, while I collapsed on the couch with an ugsome headache and a talking butt. I think if we go to the GGF again, I'm going to have to check into a separate hotel room so E. doesn't have to put up with me and my emissions. Poor girl. She likes garlic and she likes me, but garlic and me? It's tough to say right at the moment. posted by Jeff | 9:31 PM | Saturday, July 24, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Toy Story 2 Meets Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone! The first Ratchet & Clank game was very big hit at Paris House. Dave had bought it on the recommendation of a sales clerk at the Metreon after describing the sort of games he and the household liked most: A cute fun game with high playability with an emphasis on exploration and puzzles. (Paris House was a Sonic and Super Mario household with a Metal Gear Solid and Madden Football console.) And that aptly described R&C which hooked all of us in, so much so that I looked online to Metacritic to see why it wasn't regarded as a top classic. Metacritic gave the game an 88, and loaded the score with lots of reviews in the low 80s, even though the blurbs of those reviews said things like: "A veritable masterpiece almost worthy of the stout Italian [Mario] himself," and "It is [...] head and shoulders above anything else currently available on the Playstation 2." (A review which Metacritic assigned the 70 rating.)It's not surprising: a lot of gamers and game reviewers eschew "cute" games. A lot of lip service is given to Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of the Mario games (and God help me, I actually knew how to spell Miyamoto's name on my own--I just went to Google to doublecheck the spelling) but the stuff is embarassing to a lot of American gamers. Playing GTA3 or Madden or a first person shooter is perfectly acceptable, but the Net is filled with dismissals of console RPGs as too cartoony or cutesy (no matter how complex the gameplay is), and you'll read a lot of embarrassed admissions of addiction to a game like Animal Crossing--embarrassed because of its childishness. Thank God, Paris House was filled with people in the early 30s and late 20s who had no qualms playing the awesome Super Puzzle Fighter Turbo until all hours of the night. And Ratchet & Clank, although a solo game, had a similar level of devotion. It was a shooter, it was a puzzle game, it had RPG elements, it had racing levels. I never finished the game thanks to an insanely frustrating final boss level but I had fun right up until then. Ratchet & Clank 2 came out while I was in the process of moving out of Paris House, and so I got the slightest taste of it until recently when Dave lent me his copy. I found myself sitting down to start playing it in earnest with a glow of anticipation. R&C2 had actually gotten better reviews from the gaming press--much more openly glowing--and everyone in the house had seriously loved it. So I was a bit baffled to find out I initially didn't like it much. I kind of had that feeling when I played it back in December, but chalked that up to the "all-packing! no-time!" final days of moving out. This time, however, I was overworked, exhausted and in serious need of that placidly active state video games put me in--a state where I recently found myself playing and enjoying less widely acclaimed video games (howdy, Red Dead Revolver! What's new, Hulk?) And yet...the camera control seemed worse than the first game. Clank was entirely absent from the action. The environments were pretty but repetitive and the weapons, while new, seemed to offer nothing new to them. There was also dogfights in space, exactly the sort of thing that had made me put Mace Griffin down, never to pick it up again. It seems almost impossible that a guy who grew up watching Star Wars wouldn't like playing video games with dogfights in space. It seemed impossible to me anyway, until the third time through the first dogfight in R&C2 where I found myself frustrated and bored. (I'm sure there's a good explanation for this, and I think it might involve my unwillingness to buy a joystick for my PC, but I can save it for another time.) But I kept playing because I really didn't have anything else in the household and I needed to decompress--God help me, when I get stressed out, I unwind by picking up a joystick and going "Zap! Zap! Zap! Zap! Zap! Zap! Zap!" And then at some point--I think about seven or eight hours into the game, R&C2 really began to grow on me, and now, right around hour 13, I'm really enjoying it. I've even had some more dogfights and liked them. And around the time of the giant robot battle on the visibly curved planetoid, it kind of sunk in why the game was good and why I had been frustrated with it (apart from the camera). The big concept in games these days is the "sandbox"--an open environment where one can go anywhere and do anything, a la GTA 3, usually working alongside a more conventional misson-based structure. Those and stealth games are my favorites, and the first Ratchet & Clank game had a lot of sandbox-like play without being truly open (in R&C you go back to the same environments again and again with new weapons and gadgets that open new areas, but it's all pretty contained--at best you have several different areas to pick from at a given time). The second R&C2 is less sandbox and more what I would call "activity book." It's not "go anywhere and do anything;" it's "keep playing and we'll give you new games to play." While this was somewhat true of the first game, it's hugely amplified for the second. I was initially frustrated by how tight a rein the game kept on information: I could never see more than one planet ahead; I didn't have a lot of different choices as to where to go next; and the plot was openly farcical and the objectives vague, much more so than the first game, leaving me with little idea why I was doing what I was doing or when it would be over. But last night when I had lost the plot and wasn't sure where to go to get the new gizmo that would open up the levels I needed, I ran around and rooted for crystals in the desert. When that was done, I mined raritanium out in the dunes. By the time I was done, I had figured out my next step. And if I had wanted, I could have gone back and done again any of a number of minigames initially completed. R&C2 also takes an idea to expand replayability from the first game--at the end of R&C, you can purchase upgrades to your weapons (with a currency hidden throughout the game) and then replay the game--and works it right into the heart of the gameplay: if you use a weapon long enough, it upgrades itself. So you find yourself using the weapons that you may not initially like, or may not be the best weapon for the challenge at hand, just to see what the cool upgrade might be: I didn't care much for the anti-gravity glove, but the mini-nuke it upgrades to? Very cool. So the longer you play the game, the more enjoyable it becomes. The traditional two-part carrot that comprise most video games (mindless twitchiness plus desire to see what's next) gains the third carrot modified from the RPG (how can I upgrade myself next?) and a potentially more powerful fourth: what game do I get to play next? What's the next page of the activity book? That Ratchet & Clank 2 caught me when I was at my most lackadaisical about video games, and after I was less than initially impressed, ranks it pretty high in the pantheon of good games for me, and may even point the way to another branching path for the quickly developing future of video games in general: it'll be interesting to see if or how other games (like, oddly, the new Mortal Kombat game) take and develop this concept. posted by Jeff | 5:48 PM | The Pitch: It's like Annabel Lee Meets Double Indemnity! On Monday, flailing around for a book to read at work, I grabbed from the work drawer an old tattered copy of Lolita, dragged it on break with me and started re-reading it. This has worked so well I have now set my defaults: the next time I can't think of a book to read, read Lolita.The last time I read it, five or six years ago, the beauty of the language and the comedy of the narrative voice lulled me as it usually did, and it wasn't until the later passages that I was struck by the monstrousness of Humbert Humbert. This time, I seemed hyper-aware of the cruelty from the start, and find myself disquietedly turning the pages. And you know me and the Gravity's Rainbow references: right at the end of Section 20, after H.H. has found himself unable to drown Charlotte, a neighbor pops up and talks about how she saw the two of them out in the water. The neighbor is a painter and often comes to the lake to work.
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