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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Friday, September 24, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Aventurera meets Resident Evil: Apocalypse! Things have taken a turn for the interesting in my little world of blogs. In screwing with some power cables, infinitely cute Ben Hibbs managed to screw up the computer of his papa, infinitely crabby Brian Hibbs. So Hibbs won't be updating the Savage Critic blog for at least three weeks. As he put it, "Jeff may or may not update." Which on the one hand gives me maximum freedom to do whta I want. Now I just have to figure it out: what do I want? Currently, I'm planning on updating the Savage Critic on a fairly regular basis, but by evening I may abandon this idea entirely.I didn't talk much about Resident Evil: Apocalypse, did I? Apart from maybe mentioning I ponied up money and went and saw it in the movie threaters (if I did even that)? There may not be much to talk about: I went and saw it, and while appalled at its utter, relentless stupidity (stuck in a whole city of zombies, our band of heroes seek temporary refuge in a graveyard), I have to admit to enjoying a lot of it. Oh, crap! I totally forgot I have to watch this videotape before I leave for work. More on this later.... posted by Jeff | 9:15 AM | Monday, September 20, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Light Sleeper meets National Lampoon's Vacation! I'm back, I think. I'm still feeling under the weather with whatever I got while Edi was away, and I'm at work hoping I can be awake and alert enough for the next ten hours to...crap, I dunno. To do it again tomorrow, I guess.I haven't updated because of said under-the-weather feeling, also because of video games, video games, video games. [Warning: overly long post about video games follows.] Edi snagged Way of the Samurai 2 from Hollywood Video last week (and this is how you know it's true love, everyone--not only does she put up with the video games, she actually went and got me them while I was sick) and, when returning that yesterday, Burnout3 was just going back on the shelves so I rented that: a very pleasant surprise considering the average time a game goes up on the shelves at Hollywood Video to the time I'm able to rent is, on average, about two months. WotS2 is a, what, samurai simulator? It's more of a samurai RPG, with a branching dramatic structure. (a.k.a., "choose your own adventure" gameplay) that's just generally lovely to look at, and very keen. Unlike cutesy Culdcept with its squeaky mouse-fart noises and Nintendo style graphics, Edi actually would watch me play WotS2 and comment on bits of the animation, or the clothing, or the colors: your samurai wanders through different areas of the town, doing chores (it's really Way of the Ronin 2) during different hours of the day and night and the locations are beautiful. There's a certain Groundhog Day element to it as you play in a town location over a period of days and there's only a number of days until the town festival where all bloody hell breaks loose. By the end of it, I had learned enough by playing, dying, starting over, lathering, rinsing, repeating, that the festival wasn't trauma-inducing and a whole new storyline (that didn't involve me being cut to ribbons by both yakuza and magistrates) opened up to me. And by that time, it was time to return the game. Lovely to look at, kind of a chore to play, Way of the Samurai 2 was a pleasant enough experience I don't feel particularly driven to complete: as sometimes is the case with Japanese games, perusal of the write-ups at Gamefaqs revealed tons of things to "master" I had no interest in mastering: pouring all your money into refining your blade continuously until it becomes "Mizzuini, the Master-Killer Demon Blade" is probably worth it for some people, but not for a lazy short-attention span feller like me. No sir. Teach me how to kill somebody with a single sword-stroke or move on! Burnout3 understands such short attention spans and rewards them gloriously: a racing game where the key to winning is making other cars crash, Burnout3 rewards you with new cars and areas for doing little more than turning on the Playstation 2. If Way of the Samurai 2 played like Burnout3, you'd get the Master-Killer Demon Blade in the first five minutes, and move right up the hyperbole scale from there. Edi also spent a certain amount of time watching this one, impressed with the beauty and the speed of sparks flying in slow motion off a wrecked Honda hurtling off the side of a cliff (I'm sure a certain amount of Honda-intolerance plays into it) and the game does its best to jam the game full of spectacle with lanes jammed so full with crashing cars, it's like looking at the single twitching backbone of a violent chitinous beast. It's the sort of video game you hope someone is savvy enough to show to J.G. Ballard because all you need is some sort of periphereal that vibrates your errogenous zone to climax with every collision and you've got one of his novels as mass-market video game. There is both a race mode and crash mode, and Burnout3 is a smart enough game that both modes have elements of the other, so that even when you're racing, you're slamming other vehicles off course and into explosive crashes, and even while you're in crash mode, you're racing to get to the right place and touch the right modifiers in time so that your hundred thousand dollars of property damage doubles or triples in value. Burnout3 does suffer from a few flaws; EA, in releasing the game (I think it was with another publisher that folded), has jammed it with a completely horrid soundtrack--post Blink 182 poser punk blaring from song to song. Even worse, EA revisits its EA Radio technique from SS3, so you've got a Carson Daly sound-a-like with a porn star name (Stryker, I think) yammering excitedly about the perfect condition for "Burners" to "deal up some damage." "I've got some buddies with the Department of Transportation who are wondering when you guys are really going to show us what you've got," Stryker exhorts before a Crash scenario, "so let's break out the wicked property damage, all right?" There's something about the EA radio approach I find a little chilling and, if I had a kid, I would be leery about them playing the game. It's one thing to make a game where people can do things that everyone knows are wrong--the GTA and Manhunt games come to mind, of course--but it's another thing to disguise causing the deaths of countless innocents as just another extreme sport complete with meathead soundtrack and product placement. There is no sense that there is anything "wrong" with what you're doing and that bothers me a lot. Or maybe, like those Blink-182 fuckers, the use of something subversive to so bald-facedly fill the corporate coffers bothers the shit out of me. If I want greed-induced ghastliness, I'll just watch those Sarah Jessica Parker/Lenny Kravitz Gap ads, thank you. Ugh. posted by Jeff | 8:50 AM | Wednesday, September 08, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Everybody Comes to Rick's meets Mindless Pleasures! The title of my blog, High Concept, makes me happy. I stole the format from Nancy's blog, of course, but tried to come up with a different spin.But sometimes, I think a more appropriate title for my blog would be The Double Bill for at least three reasons; one, I could just throw two movie titles even more surreptitiously than I already do; two, I think my blog entries tend to start in one place, and end up somewhere entirely different, the way a crazed double feature might; and three, for the pun, "double-billing," since it seems I do a lot of the blogging at my down moments here at work. (Although I miss the crazed "just throw open a composer window and start writing" insouciance of the Hereafter, there's no way I could written half as many entries if I hadn't been able to post remotely.) By the way, I've got something knocking around inside me about the oblique connection between Napoleon Dynamite and Donnie Darko, but if I managed to get to it before leaving work tonight, I'd be really, really surprised. posted by Jeff | 9:30 PM | The Pitch: It's like Wait Until Dark meets Glengarry Glen Ross! (One of the biggest surprises to me, by the way, is that I can actually spell Glengarry Glen Ross correctly? Two 'n's? Two 'r's? It's always a mystery to me, which makes it all the more shocking that I get right more or less every time.)I'm doing the overtime thing tonight and it's been very, very crazy so far. To paraphrase Willie the Shake, "for the want of a scanner, the gut was lost"--I've had to run up and down three flights of stairs three times so far, and I've only been at work for less than ninety minutes. I thought working overtime at night would be something cool to try--I've seen the night shift and know that there are times when they're insanely busy, and times when everything is deathly quiet. I gambled I'd show up when things were quiet, collect my time and half, and run. As long as I don't have to go up and down the stairs many more times, that might still be the case. But the real problem with this gig, whether it gets busy or not, is how I squandered my day waiting to go to work. I had planned to leave for work roughly around 3:15 or so, which meant I shouldn't try to undertake something engrossing or productive after, I dunno, 2:00? Somehow that became more like noon, leaving me reluctant to do anything other than play Culdcept. I had a little bit of a breakthrough the other day with Culdcept, I'm happy to say. After losing seven consecutive games, I finally won. And all the hard schooling I received allowed me to win the next match the first time out this morning. So it was a far less anguished me that sat down to play Culdcept today, one which took being beaten cross-eyed by a koala bear wearing a book necklace with a certain relaxed indifference. And yet, after kissing the wonderful girlfriend goodbye and walking down the open-air oven that is currently Mission Street, I found myself wondering: to what end? So I won the matches I wanted to win, and am that much closer to beating the game, and even won several medals (there are approximately fifty medals you can win, usually by doing things like rolling a high number eight consecutive times, or being the shittiest player for three consecutive games), and yet, I would have to say the only thing I really gained from it is a certain nearness toward my own death. About, I dunno, five or six years ago, I played a certain amount of computer solitaire, a little bit of freecell, a little bit of minesweeper--all those PC games. Somebody, sometime, told me these games had all been loaded onto Windows to get secretaries, word processors and other people who'd done all their work using just keyboards, comfortable with using a mouse. It's a pretty brilliant idea if true, and I can generally attest to its power--a lot of my co-workers are incredibly mouse-dependent on doing tasks in Word, I think because they never wanted to rewrite their brain's knowledge of keyboard commands in Wordperfect 5.1 (and Word seems to be unbelievably fucking stingy with information regarding its keyboard commands, maybe as a way to sell more user guides and training courses). I wonder to what extent minesweeper, freecell and solitaire became the computer equivalent of kudzu--an elegant solution that overshot its mark and became a horrible problem--at least as far as worker productivity is concerned. Why'd I bring all that up, particularly when I'm not sure I even believe in worker productivity (or at least as far as those studies are concerned)? Oh, right. Freecell, minesweeper, solitaire. They actually served a purpose at one point, which makes them "better" than most videogames in a pragmatic sense. But I had continued to play them long after that--and there was a feeling I had one day playing one of the three, a desperate lonely feeling, and an awareness that I was doing nothing but literally wasting time. That Modest Mouse line I quoted the other day is still half-haunting me: "You wasted life, why wouldn't you waste the afterlife?" It reminds me of a William S. Burroughs anecdote: someone at a reading asked Burroughs if he believed in an afterlife, and he replied, "How do you know this isn't it?" On the one hand, I actually think it's kind of nice I can, at the age of 38, take a mid-morning nap and play some videogames. On the other hand: wow. 38? Don't I have some literature I should be getting to? The writing conundrum is probably an entry for another time, since my byzantine rationale for not currently writing might add even more to this seemingly unending entry. As is, actually, some thoughts on whether you can actually waste your life, what with the lack of an actual objective standard and all. But more to the point is a feeling that regardless of a definition of worth, there may be activities one can do in life that are more efficient than others. And I think I mean "efficient" in a fuel-burning sense: things that burn cleanly and leave you feeling less befouled than other things might, or even improve you in some measurable way. posted by Jeff | 5:14 PM | Tuesday, September 07, 2004 The Pitch: It's like From Beyond meets Broadcast News! Oh, the headaches we will have! The lunches we will toss!Today, after a kinda horrible evening last night, work has been about as much fun (as my dear father would say) as a hammer blow to the nuts. Despite such piquant imagery, it hasn't been overtly horrible--it's just been an extended run on an out-of-control hamster wheel after I already arrived pre-exhausted. Of course, this being the workplace that it is, the firm stocks no aspirin or advil (supposedly for fear of lawsuit, an all-too-cheap bit of poetic justice). The carrot I dangled to get myself through this day was that this was my Friday and I'd have two days off if I got through it. And yet, I'm coming in to work tomorrow night (from 5:00 p.m. to 11:00) on overtime so that particular carrot shouldn't have worked. That it did says a lot about the power of habit. Wow. Time to go find a friendly attorney--they've always got advil socked away and I honestly don't think I can wait until I get home. More later, barring frontal lobe explosion. posted by Jeff | 6:31 PM | Monday, September 06, 2004 The Pitch: It's like The Core meets Napoleon Dynamite! Dying over here. The heat according to the thermometer built into my old Navy clock-cube reads 85.0(F). We've got the curtains down, we've got the windows open, we're sitting around in our underwear, and my wonderful girlfriend is walking about with an ice pack on her head and a beer in her hand.Culdcept is this impressively annoying game--after losing twice on this one scenario, I've backtracked to replay some earlier boards to accumulate new cards and get a better idea of what I'm doing. And I've spent the last day and a half losing repeatedly to some bastard I beat single-handedly three matches ago. I believe this betrays a serious lack of understanding about the game--which is always a comforting feeling to have while playing...particularly during a heat wave. Edi and I caught Napoleon Dynamite yesterday with our friend Dan, and I liked the movie, despite some reservations: the film is basically Wes Anderson filming an extended Kids in the Hall sketch, and I think that illustrates exactly the charms and shortcomings right there. At its core is a dazzlingly assured performance by Jon Heder as Napoleon Dynamite--so much so you kind of can't imagine the movie even being written without him already bein cast beforehand. Although I thought there should be some sort of warning that the movie will feature music by Jamiroquai(!), I don't have any major complaints. It was a comedy that made me laugh in a way that makes you analyze why you're laughing, and there lots of things loose in the world worse than that. Like Culdcept, for example. Fucking, fucking Culdcept. Work will be fucking hideous tomorrow--the first day after a long weekend usually is--but I'm so glad not to be working today I don't mind, even with the sun deciding to burn San Francisco off the face of the Earth and everything. posted by Jeff | 2:50 PM | Saturday, September 04, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Dirty Dancing meets The Plague Dogs! There's a warm breeze blowing in through the open window. I'm listening to Modest Mouse's latest album, Good News for People Who Love Bad News, and I like it. It's growing on me, to the point where I tried to listen to it at home a few times this week only realize I had left it at the comic store. I was saddened, despite it being a deeply annoying album. The lead singer is growly, yowly, hollery, and there's a sort of sing-along quality to the albums that can either seem anthemic or annoying (or both). Parts of the album try to make up for that by sounding like songs were built around a recording of skittles being spilled on a floor (parts of it are a very Talking Heads type album, I just realized). But, thanks to the wonder of the Miracle Meme-Melding Machine (known by some people as the radio), I liked 'Float On' enough to buy the album and still like it enough to put this album on and play it over and over. I think that's the best part of albums, listening to them over and over until meaning starts to rise from them. Or listening to them until you start to really hear what you've been listening to. I've listened to this album at the comic store maybe half-a-dozen times, and I never caught the line at the end of a song where the singer yelps, "You wasted life, why wouldn't you waste the afterlife?" Yikes. That re-ups the album for another half-dozen listens, at least.I'm trying in my half-assed way to do research for this year's Nanowrimo, which sounds like an accomplishment maybe, but is really just a cheat. I want to pick up the Nanovel I wrote but didn't finish two years ago and finish it this time around. So I've been reading books about syphilis and fanzines devoted to pulp writers (the fanzines themselves threatening to become a topic) and I guess I need to figure some things out about, you know, Greyhound riding and plots and stuff. Timelines. If I wasn't a lazy type, it'd be terribly exciting, like one of those big class projects where they give you an island, and make you research what kind of animals and vegetation you'd put on the island, and craft the tools your imaginary tribe would have, and the best part is trying to figure out where you're gonna put the dinosaurs. I'm not sure I ever finished that class project. In fact, looking back on my big class projects from elementary school, I'm not sure I ever completed any of them. Which may not bode well for this particular imaginary island but we'll see. I find I stick with things a little bit longer now that I'm grown up. However, I can only read non-fiction for so long. And so, just as I returned to the old sin of video games, I returned to another vice this week: old Don Delillo novels. I'm about fifty pages in Americana, and the flaws in it, his first novel, are very, very noticeable. And yet there's also that wonderful Delillo ability to sum up: We went back to the office. In the early afternoon it was always quiet, the whole place tossing slowly in tropical repose, as if the building itself swung on a miraculous hammock, and then the dimming effects of food and drink would begin to wear off and we would remember why we were there, to buzz and chime, and all would bend to the respective machines. But there would be something wonderful about that time, the hour or so before we remembered. It was the time to sit on your sofa instead of behind the desk, and to call your secretary into the office and talk in soft voices about nothing in particular--films, books, water sports, travel, nothing at all. There was a certain kind of love between you then, like the love in a family that has shared so many familiar moments that not to love would be inhuman. And the office itself seemed a special place, even in its pale yellow desperate light, so much the color of old newspapers; there was the belief that you were secure here, in some emotional way, that you lived in known terrain. If you had a soul, and it had the need to be rubbed by roots and seasons, to be comforted by familiar things, then you could not walk among those desks for two thousand mornings, nor hear those volleying typewriters, without coming to believe that this was where you were safe. You knew where the legal department was, and how to get a package through the mailroom without delay, and whom to see about tax deductions, and what to do when your water carafe sprung a leak. You knew all the things you wouldn't have known if you had suddenly been placed in any other office in any other building anywhere in the world; and compared to this, how much did you know, and how safe did you feel, about, for instance, your wife? And it was at that time, before we remembered why we were there, that the office surrendered a sense of belonging, and we sat in the early afternoon, pitching gently, knowing we had just returned to the mother ship.(pg. 20) That's this guy's first novel, twenty-three years ago, and he nails so much of what I find striking about working in an office, and have been trying to figure out how to sum up for so long. And it's right there. Things have changed of course (the gender lines between executives and their secretaries have blurred considerably) and there's some unfocused preciousness--I bet Delillo can't look now at this paragraph without the phrase "to buzz and chime" making his stomach hurt--but yeah. That addictive ephemeral feeling of love one can have on those down periods at work: that's it, damn him. An attorney came up and gave me a tape while I was writing this, and I should go transcribe it now. While she filled out the form, I surreptitiously eyed the crosshatching her mesh sweatpants had left across her pudgy tan belly. How can I not be grateful, at least sometimes, to be paid for this? posted by Jeff | 4:31 PM | The Pitch: It's like Donnie Darko meets New York Minute! Fate has conspired to keep me from this blog. And by fate, I mainly mean video games. With a bit of wonky wireless connectivity thrown in.If the wireless hadn't mysterously conked out on me, like it tends to do every so often, I would have posted on Thursday about how I'd missed posting on Wednesday thanks to the black-tarrish qualities of Culdcept, that odd Monopoly-meets-Magic-The-Gathering-but-on-a-PS2 video game I bought online (used from EB games for twelve bucks), and the incredible nightmare of re-registering my car which seemed to me an awful lot like taking several hundred dollars and throwing it out into the middle of the street. Later, if I can, I'll resuscitate my earlier post (I managed to copy and save it into Word). It deals with an issue that came out of me playing Culdcept so much on Wednesday and Thursday that Edi pointed out--if I'm playing the game to relax, why am I cursing and swearing so much? But for now, just wanted to say: am still alive; will post more soon. posted by Jeff | 10:24 AM | |
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