First off, I really loved this episode — it was much slower and more ponderous than I expected, but it explained plenty. Obviously we now know who Adam and Eve were, but also the genesis of the donkey wheel, where the dagger that killed Jacob came from, who made the wells, how the Orchid well got filled up (in “This Place Is Death”), why Jacob and the Man in Black can’t hurt each other directly (thanks to Alison Janney’s Magic Touch™), etc. My favorite elements of the episode had little to do with these answers, however, and were much more about how a number of images/themes recurred from previous episodes (or, chronologically, how and why they show up after this episode’s events). Here’s a short list of some things I noticed:

• Claudia, pregnant, washing up on the beach = Rousseau and Claire showing up on the island pregnant
• Janney’s manipulating the kids as a replacement to protect the island = Kelvin manipulating Desmond as a replacement to man the hatch
• Jacob, the bratty, petulant, kind of dumb whiner with mommy issues = Jack, the bratty, petulant, kind of dumb whiner with daddy issues
• The Boy in Black’s specialness nurtured by a protector of the island (Janney) = Walt’s specialness nurtured by a protector of the island (Locke)
• The Boy in Black has a mystical conversation with his dead mother that drives him to the others = Ben Linus has a mystical conversation with his dead mother that drives him to the others.

So, there are patterns here… this works for me to glue together many of the disconnected events on the show. For instance, it now seems clear that Ben was manipulated by the Man in Black since he was very, very young, luring him to the others much in the same way that the Boy in Black himself was lured to a group of others two millenia earlier. Jack is an entitled, stupid brat who doesn’t want responsibility perhaps because everyone who gets this island-protecting job is someone who needs that arc of self-discovery, etc.

This, finally, gives the series the kind of synthesis I really wanted without being conscious of it — one of recurring images and themes, not of overt explanations. It’s not that we necessarily needed answers for “what the island is” in anything other than the metaphorical sense described in “Ab Aeterno,” it’s about having something tie together all of the events so that they make some kind of thematic sense. At least for me. I couldn’t care less if we ever get an explanation of exactly how the island turned the Man in Black into a pile of clickety-clackety smoke, nor do I understand why anyone really needs that level of explanation.

Yet, one big unanswered question for me with regards to the island’s mythology is the timing of when a “smoke monster” first appeared on the island. Claudia clearly washed up during Roman times (speaking Latin, her people had a Roman dagger that ended up with the Man in Black). But, many of the relics on the island that we see in the 19th century onward are apparently Egyptian — the Taweret statue, the vents for the smoke monster under the Temple’s wall and the underground wall that the Man in Black yanked a block out of this week. So, there must have been a previous smoke monster that predated Claudia’s arrival, right?

This implies, maybe, that there was a previous smoke monster that has since been dispatched somehow, or that the smoke monster itself is some other entity entirely and not simply a disembodied version of the Man in Black. Like all of the other bodies it’s appropriated over the show (from Christian to Yemi to Alex), the Man in Black might be just another one taken by whatever the smoke monster is. Fascinating development, if it’s true. This episode also continues to open up a whole world of narrative possibilities for spinoff materials — since it looks like we won’t get an explanation of Egyptian-era island, or who Jacob’s adoptive mom was (not to mention the 1800 years or so between the events of “Across the Sea” and “Ab Aeterno”), perhaps this creates new avenues for Lost to live on in some fashion past the end of May.

In graduate school the last several years, Lost was one of our only weekly “water cooler” shows — the days after airing were filled with questions about what had happened, theorizing about the show’s mysteries, and interpretation of the show’s meaning. Now, as a group of students studying and making games, this always struck me (and I presume my friends) as normal — there was something built into this show that seemed strongly about games. Incidentally, I found it odd that the media studies students I knew who studied television had, for the most part, long ago given up on the series, while nearly everyone that studied games still kept up with it, and wondered if this was more than just coincidence.

Since the beginning of the series, games have cropped up over and over again. Most prominent (and, it seems, prophetic) was John Locke’s first season explanation of backgammon to Walt, a game he described as featuring “two players, two sides — one is light, one is dark,” and one that was very, very old. As the series has come back to these themes in recent weeks, it’s drawn my attention back to how games have appeared during its six-year run.

Various things we put in the family of things called “games” have been scattered through the series, and in multiple forms — as abstract mind games (The Pearl station; most of Ben Linus’s storyline in seasons 2-5), sports (the Red Sox winning the world series; Desmond’s critical soccer game), computer games (Locke’s game of chess at The Flame), and board games (backgammon in The Swan; Risk played in the barracks). Games are a key motif that I’d initially missed, but seem to be one that the show’s returned to over and over again.

Games are, of course, more than just something the show’s writers are using as window dressing, and have been employed to useful thematic effect. Most notably, the metaphor of a game has been used repeatedly to show the struggle between two groups at a time competing on the island, hinting at complex strategizing that might underly an otherwise confusing set of events. As the series is wrapping up, these themes have come back stronger than ever, and we again see the “team conflict” that’s permeated the show since the first season. A “taking of sides” has cropped up over and over again, from the first season’s “man of science” (Jack) vs. “man of faith” (Locke) to the later conflict between the Oceanic survivors vs. “the Others” to the combined Oceanics and Others vs. the Freighter folk (Naomi and Keamy, primarily) — and now the currently brewing Team Jacob (Jack, Hurley, Ilana, Sun) vs. Team Smoke Monster/Man In Black/”Angry Man” (Fake Locke, Sayid, Claire, Sawyer) showdown.

At times, ludic elements of these conflicts have been alluded to, with constraints and rules being mentioned by the Man in Black vs. Jacob this season as well as Ben vs. Widmore in season four. Now, with this (potentially) final game between two god-like mysterious beings, “gaming” has gone from a subtext to being, quite possibly, the answer to the biggest mystery of the series — why is all of this happening in the first place? Games are moving from being purely subtextual to being oddly diegetic (if that terms works here) and is, I suspect, going to be a core aspect of the show’s narrative from here on out. That’s a fascinating twist to the series, if it comes to pass like they’ve been hinting.

Anyway, I’ve found myself reflecting on my watching of the show for the past few years, and considering that the appeal of the show all this time has had something to do with gaming — or at least, gaming-like practices as activities the viewer does (puzzle-solving, piecing together the narrative, trying to predict the next step of the story), something the characters are engaged in (increasingly overtly, as with Hurley’s recent vocalizing of fan theories), and something the show’s writers have most likely had to do just to draw all of the show’s strands to a satisfying conclusion.

It’s this last, behind-the-scenes bit that now interests me the most, perhaps because it’s all speculation: We can look at the writers’ task for the first three seasons as the creation of a set of “pieces” and a “board” for them to move around on, and the negotiation of the series’ end (during the show’s third season) meant the writers had to first solve the puzzle themselves. Or, to put it another way, the writers themselves were forced to do (at least somewhat) what fans have been doing — problem-solving, trying to take the narrative elements they’d set up in the beginning of the show and have it all make some kind of sense by the end — in order to choreograph the series’ final three seasons (an unprecedented task, as far as I know).

Though he hasn’t been directly involved with the series for a while, executive producer J. J. Abrams clearly loves games (note the t-shirt above). He discovered Michael Giacchino by playing games that Giacchino had scored, and managed to turn a print magazine (Wired) into an interesting game artifact for an issue last year. Alternate reality games (The Lost Experience and the Dharma game) have played a significant role in exploring corners of the story that couldn’t be explored easily in the show, and the otherwise execrable Lost: Via Domus (which I’ve purchased now an inexplicable four times — don’t ask) actually successfully foreshadowed events in the fifth season much more than I had ever expected a game tie-in to. Games are part of the set of paratexts around the show that make it work, but, I suspect, work because the show itself seems so fundamentally game-like. Or, at least, does the practice of watching it serially, in communities of friends who also care about and find themselves “gaming” the show (similar to my experiences reading the original Watchmen comics).

As tomorrow’s episode will show the backstory for Richard Alpert’s mysteriously long-lived character, I’m guessing we’ll see a revisiting of an earlier stage of the Jacob/Man In Black “game” and more uncovering of the show’s larger narrative. Games are as old as narrative itself, and while I’ve been teaching a course this term on the limits of understanding games as narratives, it’s the relationship in the other direction — games can help shape how we read and collectively make meaning of ongoing linear narratives — that I’m finding most compelling about Lost as it gathers steam and heads into the final few episodes.

Here’s a blurb from a recent Billboard article:

The Rock Band Network recently started a closed beta trial, which MTV expects to expand to a public beta test in August. The company hopes to open the Rock Band Network store before year’s end. Songs available through the new store, which will remain separate from the existing “Rock Band” store, will be initially available for download to users of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game console. MTV expects to eventually make the popular tracks available for use on the Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii game systems.

“We’ve figured out how to make it so anybody who owns and controls masters and publishing can put music into ["Rock Band"] at their own pace,” says MTV Games senior VP of electronic games and music Paul DeGooyer. “We’re talking about a set of serious professional tools to allow people on the front line of writing and recording songs to completely control their destiny with respect to interactive products and then giving them direct access to the download store.”

Rather than deal with Harmonix directly, artists and labels will submit songs to a community of Harmonix-trained freelance game developers and other interested programmers who will prepare the tracks for “Rock Band.” Additionally, labels can either hire trained developers or school their existing employees to do the work in-house.

Songs submitted through this process must then be reviewed by other developers to check for playability, inappropriate lyrics, copyright infringement and so on. Harmonix will post approved tracks to an in-game download store separate from its existing “Rock Band” store where creators can set their own price (50 cents to $3 per song) and receive 30% of any resulting sales. Gamers will also be able to demo 30-second samples of each track.

So, okay, I’m actually a little skeptical that this won’t turn into a flood of major-label songs — big companies have the resources to allocate staff to make playable tracks out of all sorts of stuff, while smaller indies and unsigned bands will have to do it themselves. The Billboard article goes on to say that this is a good thing, in that it allows much more content in general to be provided through RBN, regardless of who’s providing it.

But, I think what gets most people excited about this is that it’s a new venue for anyone to contribute (well, anyone in a band, or anyone who produces music which can be translated to a drum, guitar, bass, and vocal part). I’m dying to see how much good “unserious,” relatively uncommercial stuff will make it through the process. Will we see the next ridiculous “Chocolate Rain” come through here? Will we see countless versions of “Chocolate Rain” itself submitted through this?

Anyway, I’m excited for the possibilities. And, I might dig out my guitar and try my hand at recording something for this as well.

A few themes emerged over the different meetings, however, which I found heartening, given that they appear to sync up well with the directions that I want to take my work. First, at both G4C and GLS, Jim Gee gave impassioned keynotes on how the focus should shift from the game artifact to the productive “affinity spaces” around them, consisting of gamers enacting all sorts of sophisticated literacies and learning practices. I made essentially the same point in the G4C panel, trying to further some of Jim’s ideas by honing in on the idea of “design” as a way to better specify what it is that happens when players move from being simple consumers of games to being engaged in larger communities that can tie to specific social issues (the concern of many at G4C).

Even though I’ve been a graduate student working to help run the GLS conference the past three years, I’m still somewhat amazed at how well everything came off this year. There was a great variety of talks and voices at the conference, ranging from commercial game designers to high school administrators to theoretical linguists. The session I was in gelled in ways I don’t think anyone really expected — Ben Aslinger‘s talk on using Kongregate to introduce his college students to different forms of gaming was a great testament to the utility of Flash game sites to encourage discussions about games that are, frankly, harder for most people to have over, say, Far Cry 2 or Madworld. Similarly, Idit Caperton and Shannon Sullivan presented some fascinating work on their Globaloria program, geared toward helping rural West Virginia kids develop game design literacies, game design skills, and, specifically, Flash competencies. It’s one of the first sessions I’ve ever participated in where it was clear that the other people I’d been scheduled with would make great future collaborators, and I’d love to develop my work with online Flash communities such as Kongregate with both Ben and Idit/Shannon.

Finally, while I’ve found complex, 3D virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft to be terribly interesting and engaging (and clearly I’m not the only one), I’ve felt a bit out of place doing virtual worlds work. The work I’ve done with Constance in the past three years has been centered on World of Warcraft but, largely, in the communities that either emerge through play or are constructed around play. That’s really where my interests are at, and it was great to me to see that so many of the up-and-coming virtual worlds researchers are focusing on similar matters. In particular, it was especially great to meet Nathan Dutton (a PhD student at Ohio University, working with Mia Consalvo). His work on how Lord of the Rings Online players attempt to negotiate gender in the game (both through in-game actions, discussions in the community and with the game’s designers) is similar in spirit to the kinds of negotiations I’m looking at in World of Warcraft. While it’s different content, tackling how the designed nature of the game butts up against the fan activities and vice versa is, to my mind, one of the most productive areas of research for virtual worlds and I was happy to see the younger SoP attendees increasingly looking at this.

So, I saw several themes of how researchers of games are converging on trying to better grok the productive communities that arise around games, as well as looking at how these conflict with, operate in parallel to, or sometimes support the design of these games/virtual worlds. That is, the “affinity spaces” around games are impossible to dismiss as just simple fan activity (as if something like that even existed) — understanding how and why affinity spaces operate is key to creating games for change, for delving into the learning practices afforded by games, and better situating virtual worlds in larger, asynchronous communities of practice.

Maybe all this is just wishful thinking on my part or my perspective is clouded by being so deep into my dissertation right now, but sure feels good to see these fields increasingly focusing on those areas that I think need most focusing on.

As many of you know, I’ve had significant previous experiences at Miami, first as an undergrad in Miami’s (late) Interdisciplinary Studies program, then as a visiting faculty member there for several years, and subsequently as a staff member of Miami’s Project Dragonfly. When I heard about the position, I was initially reticent — would going back to Miami truly be the best fit for me? At the time, it felt a little early for me to be applying for jobs, but I gave it my best shot anyway, as I was very curious to find out how Miami was changing in recent years.

In the subsequent weeks and months, I learned a great deal about Miami’s new vision under President Hodge and Provost Herbst, and it began to sink in how exciting and innovative this position was for Miami (not to mention how amazingly good of a fit it was for what I wanted from a faculty position). I became more and more intrigued, and when I interviewed in February, I was completely blown away by the commitment that both the EHS (under Dean Carine Feyten) and AIMS (under Glenn Platt and Peg Faimon) had for novel staffing models and promoting productive interdisciplinary work. The Armstrong Professors (my position and one in the School of Fine Arts) do not sit within departments, the resources of both EHS and the AIMS program are top-notch (McGuffey Hall’s renovation was phenomenal!), and all of the faculty I met seemed committed to supporting my goal of figuring out how exactly new media and games should guide learning for future generations.

I just got back from a brief curricular retreat with the AIMS faculty and am looking forward to working with everyone. Sitting on the faculty with engaged researchers who do everything from investigating high-end virtual reality spaces through developing models of how the humanities might be reshaped for the digital era made it clear that Miami is exactly where I should be. I know from my earlier experiences that Miami’s undergrads are also superb, and I’m looking forward to building an undergraduate research group on new media, games, and learning once I get settled in Oxford. With all of this in mind, choosing Miami was just, well, a no-brainer, I guess?

In a year in which the academic job market has withered, I’m humbled that I was able to get a job that’s so perfect for the kinds of work I want to do. I have high hopes that this position will serve as a good model for how novel interdisciplinary research can be fostered at the University level, and it’s going to be incumbent upon me to now do good work in the spaces I think need most addressing in understanding learning — bridging traditional educational disciplines and the fantastic new stuff going on with interactive, digital media. It’s a big task, but right now I just feel like I’m a very, very lucky dude.

Anyway, I’m excited and happy! In the next few months, as I finish the dissertation, I’m sure I’ll have more to say about the position and my move to Miami. But, for now, expect a few tweaks to the site in the coming weeks, and even some more regular blog posting (I’ll need to do something else other than write my diss, right?).

Okay, I normally don’t make these kinds of posts to my blog, and I feel like I should preface this by form of apology. People (us nerds especially) tend to get very bent out of shape when someone decries or criticizes their favorite media franchises, and I’ll do that here — um, the criticizing, not the bending out of shape. I note that Andrew O’Hehir (and others, I’m sure), have recently referred to The Dark Knight as a “teenage boy’s idea of a serious film,” and have received plenty of ire (including creepy threats) from the rabid fanboy/fangirl contingent. So, sorry if this post offends, but I’ll be working through why the new film Watchmen — and its incessant hype — has been bugging me the last few days. (Oh, for the record, I liked Dark Knight just fine, but even as a long-time DC Comics fan, I have to admit that Iron Man was by far the better cinematic superhero experience in ’08).

Watchmen’s hype is, alas, long-standing; it is now regularly afforded the title of “best comic ever” in the same lazy way people give Citizen Kane the “best movie ever” crown. I read Watchmen for the first time back in 1985, when the comic was first released — I was a teenager, and bought each issue on the day it came out, devoured it, and waited (sometimes for months and months) for the next installment. I had been a fan of Alan Moore’s work on Swamp Thing and Marvelman, so I loved Watchmen; it was a genuinely revolutionary superhero book and one which, along with Frank Miller, Dave Mazzuchelli, and Lynn Varley’s The Dark Knight Returns marks a particularly innovative moment in mainstream comics history that’s undeniably significant.

Yet, it’s been the intervening years (and subsequent readings) which have given me pause in canonizing this particular book as the “best comic book ever.” During the early days of the comic’s inception, it was initially conceived as a way to re-use a number of characters that DC had acquired when it bought out the old Charlton Comics line, many of which have now been incorporated into the DC Universe.

But, since then-editor Dick Giordano was really enamored with some of these characters, Blue Bettle, Captain Atom, Nightshade, The Question, the Peacemaker and Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt were all morphed into similar analogs (Night Owl, Dr. Manhattan, Silk Spectre, Rorschach, the Question, the Comedian, and Ozymandias, respectively). Moore took the basics of these characters (down to making multiple Night Owls, etc.), tweaked them into darker versions of the characters, and ran with it, inventing an alternate 1980s America where Nixon was still president, where superheroes were creepy fetishists more than moral paragons, and where “heroism” was relative.

It’s a great comic, one of the best superhero comic books ever. Moore’s writing was perfectly complemented by Dave Gibbons’s gritty art, and the unique (at least at that time) mix of comic book storyline, comic-within-a-comic (Tales of the Black Freighter), and prose (the text appendices at the end of each issue, e.g. Hollis Mason’s Behind the Mask) all combine to make it a work unlike any other seen to that point. I personally think other comics hang together better than this or are generally more interesting (in Moore’s work alone, I enjoy his run on Supreme quite a bit, and think From Hell is the greatest long-form comic to date), but I acknowledge that Watchmen was certainly great for its time.

One thing which shaped my enjoyment was the specific activity of reading this comic. As each issue was published, I’d talk about it with my friends, trade issues, and when we had access to it, we’d hop on the nascent internet of the era — basically, USENET newsgroups, such as rec.arts.comics — where other fans picked it apart, trying to understand the symbolism Moore and Gibbons were dropping, as well as the larger configurations of this alternate world. On USENET, the collaborative work of smarter dudes than me figured out who Rorschach was two or three issues ahead of the big reveal, discovered significant foreshadowing in the backgrounds of various panels, and made the practice of reading a wholly different sort than reading a “graphic novel” version is typically like today.

It’s this sort of social, knowledge-building activity that, to me, is what made Watchmen really fantastic as a comic book reading experience. Making sense of all the different kinds of storytelling in the book was a lot of fun — looking at the inclusion of the Black Freighter comic was evocative and served as a great counterpoint (and sometimes foreshadowing for!) what was going on in the main story, the details presented in all the prose work (Behind the Mask) were integral for understanding the larger story of the Minutemen and their legacy, etc. Piecing together a serial storyline with a bunch of other people, reading and rereading each panel, going online and trying to suss out various theories (and their justifications) — this is similar to the kind of joy I get out of watching (and trying to understand) Lost these days.

But, back to the present. There’s no way the film can mimic this kind of reading experience, so what’s this movie actually going to be? While as a teenager I thought the comic’s ostensible storyline — “whoa, superheroes might be kinda fallible and sometimes mentally unstable!” — was mindblowing, that holds basically no resonance with me as an adult. I’m perplexed; who really cares about the superhero storyline in this any longer? Isn’t it much, much more interesting the way that Moore and Gibbons use comics to tell us a story and what it tells us about reading comics?

Rather than mimic the reading experience, it seems that Zack Snyder has tried to be quite faithful to the comic’s look and plot, essentially using the original work as a storyboard for making the film. I suppose I can understand this as a pragmatic means of making a movie that will be under this degree of scrutiny (visual accuracy certainly won’t upset the fanboys and fangirls), but is also a fundamental misapplication of the art of comics — Moore (as seen most pointedly in works like The Killing Joke and From Hell) is a master of interesting visual juxtapositions that work best in static, discrete media. Take this scene transition from The Killing Joke, for example:

It’s evocative of the Joker’s mindset, clearly sexually creepy (note the “coin slot” location), and all intended by Moore — though Brian Bolland was the artist, Moore’s scripts are always spelled out in excruciating detail. There’s something about the language of comics can get lost when translated to a film, and I think it’s completely reasonable for Moore to distance himself from any cinematic interpretation of his work. Will these kinds of subtleties be captured in the film? And, if so, how does the switch to a motion picture change the effect of this? I’m not decrying the idea of attempting to adapt his work, just skeptical that the so-called “visionary director of 300” will be creative enough to handle it.

It’s also not encouraging that, because of time considerations and studio pressure, Snyder’s been forced to cut out the Black Freighter comic (though he’s releasing it as a separate DVD), there’s really no way to include Behind the Mask as anything but exposition within the film, the ending is significantly different in content if not in theme, and, in the silliest change, Laurie Juspeczyk no longer smokes (because the studio head hates smoking). I don’t much care about how the movie deviates from the comic except insofar as this movie seems structurally incapable of conveying a rich, multimodal mix of comics and other text that the initial work featured. We’re left with a movie that, rather than reference other superhero movies is, from all accounts, rather slavishly re-enacting Watchmen’s uninteresting plot about how superheroes are fallible, etc. Well, okay, great, if you’ve somehow made it to the 21st century without ever thinking about how silly the concept of superheroes is, I wish you an enjoyable experience, but I’ve been there, done that.

What was valuable about Watchmen for me was its use of comics (and prose) form in support of these themes, plus the way its serialized nature encouraged us teenagers to engage with the text of the comic, talk to each other about it, and puzzle-solve. Basically, we “gamed” Watchmen — an activity that this movie is, frankly, not set up to afford. I’m not saying that comics cannot or should not be made into good films. Rather, I’m arguing that the very point of Watchmen is really about comics form and creating new activities of comics reading, not about superheroes. It’s just a bad fit unless liberties are taken with the source material and it is rejiggered to somehow be about film form and film viewership. Everything indicates that Snyder has done the opposite of what he should have done, and made a film which attempts to lift an innovative comic directly into a medium it was never meant to be in.

The new Watchmen film will be “dancing about architecture” at best, or just another dumb big budget shit-blows-up film at worst. Either way, it’s a rental.

I’ve been interested in this stuff for a few years, ever since my friend Dave gave me a copy of this 8-bit peoples comp:

That led me to a great short piece in Wired by Malcolm McLaren from way back in 2003 called “8-bit punk,” and I’ve since tried to track down the documentary Reformat the Planet, about a recent Blip Festival, but have yet to find a working streaming version. There used to be one up here at pitchfork.tv, but it doesn’t load for me. Regardless, here’s a trailer for the documentary:

I’m not sure if my attraction to this kind of music is because it’s repurposing old technologies or repuposing games specifically. I study games, but I’m too old to entertain the same degree of nostalgia for the NES/Famicom/Gameboy that these dudes clearly hold — these games systems were played by me sporadically during college, not obsessively during my childhood. Perhaps I’m interested in all of this because they’re unique and interesting sounds in a musical landscape which has been, for a long, long time now, full of very tired, boring music. It’s made me excited about electronic music again for the first time in years.

At any rate, the record I’ve lately been spinning (er, MP3s I’ve been streaming?) the most has been Adventure’s self-titled, which came out last summer:

Adventure, aka Benny Boeldt, crafts epic, almost orchestral tunes out of these 8-bit palettes (using MIDI instead of the actual old game systems). Here’s a video for the excellent tune “Poison Diamonds”:

It’s interesting to read interviews with the guy — he’s only 23-ish, it seems? — so, while I hear lots of similarities to old New Order, he labels them “cheesy.” Sure, I guess that’s somewhat accurate, but it’s amusing to me to hear kids reinventing the musical wheel in fun and interesting ways without fully understanding the debt they have to the music that came before them.

I downloaded his album from emusic (the best of the paid MP3 sites, in my opinion). Give it a shot.

We’ll be treating the entire series as the core text, as one might study the novels of Dostoevsky or drama of Shakespeare. Watching 5 episodes a week, we’ll be considering the show both as an aesthetic achievement and social argument, asking two key questions: what does The Wire teach us about the possibilities of television, and what does it teach us about contemporary urban America? I’ll try to post here regularly about the challenges and revelations about teaching a long-form television narrative in its entirety, something that I do not believe has been done before in this form (if anyone knows of similar models, let me know).

Mittell’s approach was, thus, to teach the entire television series, an episode at a time throughout the term. It’s a great idea, and he’s set up a blog for the course (check out the comments by who I presume are students in the course); I encourage interested folks to check it out. Also, he makes an excellent case for why a course on this particular show requires watching the entirety of the series right here in this short, three minute video put out by Middlebury:

Mittell and Middlebury seem quite aware that there’s a bit of audacious academic theater going on with a course like this (why else would the College release a PR video?), and that’s great. But, I’ll be honest: I haven’t watched much of The Wire. I own the first season on DVD, watched a few episodes and got thoroughly lost in simply keeping the characters straight. I’m aware that this is an egregious error on my part — it’s apparently really a great show, I know, I know. I just need to devote some attention and energy and time to it. Someday!

Regardless, what I’m most interested in here are the pedagogical implications of Mittell’s course for the kinds of media that I’m currently looking at — videogames. Games are, as most know, equally long-form kinds of media (e.g., something like Fallout 3 clocks in at around 50-60 hours of play minimum), albeit with much more variation as we’re talking about an interactive rather than filmic kind of experience. Would something like this work for studying games? And, if so, which games in particular would work? And for what ends?

The only course I’ve taken here which has done something similar is Constance Steinkuehler’s virtual worlds course. In it, we were required to purchase and play World of Warcraft throughout the semester, reflecting on our play as well as doing fieldwork within the space of the game. Now, this is quite different from what Mittell’s doing — Constance’s course was about developing critical skills to approach understanding a virtual space, while Mittell’s seems predominantly about conducting an analysis of a long-form text. The goals seem quite different for both courses.

Additionally, one gets into platform issues with something like this. For a television show, there are many, many ways to watch 5 hours per week (iPhone, laptop, streaming, or on a, gasp, TV), but with a videogame there are few platform-independent long-form works that have a large degree of narrative depth. I suppose something available on the 360, PS3, and PC, like Grand Theft Auto IV might be worth exploring. Or something free and available for a number of computer operating systems (e.g., Dwarf Fortress)? A critical issue would be how the few games widely available for multiple formats might constrain the educational goals of the course — Dwarf Fortress is a fascinating set of complex systems, but it’s not something with the narrative complexity of The Wire. GTA IV seems a better bet, and one that could induce some interesting reactions.

Anyway, just exploring ideas — my gut feeling is that I’d love to give something like this a shot, but I’d have to think very carefully about exactly what a detailed focus on a long-form game would buy me and the students. One thing that Mittell has captured with this is that the structure of University classes just doesn’t afford the in-depth, continued analysis of a media text very well (supplementing the course with a blog and out-of-class viewings). I’d be interested in further exploring how a class focusing heavily on a single game could challenge assumptions about more than what counts as worthy of study in a University course, but also the way one teaches the predominant forms of media in this day and age.

In the work I’ve been engrossed in these last few weeks, I’ve been writing about the weird and woolly world of internet discussion forums — how to best study them, how they may support “new literacy” practices, etc. — all in support of my PhD dissertation research. It’s probably old hat by now that online discussion forums feature some of the most complex (and, yes, sometimes the most distasteful) of discourse out there, but I’m currently most curious how much Internet media are really beginning to supplant traditional forms of media in the lives of everyday folks.

Dennis Jerz recently linked to an IFC/Zogby poll on the role of the internet in the world of news, especially during this last election cycle:

Results indicate that the Internet is the most trusted news source among all age groups, and overall, more trusted than newspapers and television news combined. FOX News is the most trusted news source on television and The New York Times is the most trusted national newspaper outlet. Three out of four people feel that news coverage is biased, and that media coverage influenced the outcome of the Presidential election.

(Here’s a link to a PDF of the poll’s press release).

Breaking this down further according to party affiliation, they stated that “94.2% of Republicans surveyed and 55.6% of Democrats surveyed believe media coverage influenced the Presidential election,” and, interestingly, “[m]ore than 90% of Republicans and 55.6% of Democrats do not feel the media is giving a true representation of what is going on in Iraq.”

This a Zogby poll, and there have certainly been issues with some of their polling choices and methods in the recent past. However, taking these results at face value, we see an enormous skepticism toward traditional media, yet it seems to be coming from an overwhelmingly politically conservative skepticism. Is this simply an entrenching of the same “conservative blog effect” that was so predominant in 2004, or something new? Is it too early to tell?

Obama’s made improving the US’s broadband adoption (we’re currently 15th in the world) a part of his jobs plan, and now that the iPhone is the best-selling mobile phone/internet device in the US, we’ll be faced with new questions of how and why people engage with these media in all sorts of contexts.

Spending my days and nights on the internet is such a part of my life that I have a hard time knowing how one “goes back.” I’m not really complaining — pulling out the iPhone at dinner to see what movies are playing down the street is certainly a convenient, useful means of looking up information for the particular kind of privileged, middle class lifestyle that I lead. But, what about more important issues — for instance, how is knowledge shaped by use of the internet? How are political positions going to be shaped by a President who uses YouTube for his addresses? How will the conservative movement change if it begins to take seriously the tools of the internet? How will I ever get my work done if I’m constantly drawn back to reading about this stuff on blogs, message boards, and the like?

So, yeah, this is more work procrastination couched in the form of a speculative blog post. It’s just all of this feels particularly salient to me lately, and I felt like I had to jot it down — any of us hoping to further careers studying internet culture in any capacity have to be both excited and perhaps a little unmoored by the rapid changes that the next few years might bring.

Anyway, fast forward a week to a rather quiet Friday evening, and based on last week’s discussion (and an offhand comment from Tom), I decided to track down Peter Adair‘s amazing 1967 documentary Holy Ghost People. I’d last seen this in college, around 1990 or so, and only remembered vague snippets — the interviews at the beginning, the singing, the snake-handling (and snake-biting). Documenting a meeting of a Pentecostal Church in rural West Virginia, the film paints a fascinating (and eerily distant) view of this kind of religious experience. Watching the film was extremely tough for me, as someone deeply skeptical of these sorts of experiences (especially in today’s political climate), but it’s worth checking out. It’s probably less entertaining than Religulous, but also you wouldn’t have to put up with all of Bill Maher’s irritating smirking.

Anyway, Holy Ghost People is worth seeing, up in its entirety on YouTube. I have no idea how long something like this will last before it’s taken down, but it’s there for now. Incidentally, the user who posted it (athephi) has a number of other interesting films/documentaries about religion and atheism on his or her feed, so I recommend checking them out.

Now, the movie (in six parts):

(By the way, does anyone have any advice on how to incorporate the Google shared stuff, including my comments into an existing blog template? There’s an RSS for those shared items, but not one which includes my comments that I can find. And, well, I think people should have to hear my amazing insights on other people’s posts about videogames to SNL to bathroom tiling. That’s what the Internet’s for, right?)

Anyway, one thing I stumbled across on Google Reader this morning was a recent post by Scott Westerfeld (author of the excellent So Yesterday that I posted about recently, as well as the Uglies/Pretties/Specials/Extras books that Liz is currently reading). A few months ago, people were going nuts over wordle.net (a Java app which does word counts for any block of text and visualizes them), and I missed it. Scott decided to take the list of artists from his entire iTunes library, and dump it into Wordle. Pretty cool and fun, and Scott’s experiment is documented here.

I followed his instructions, however, and it turns out that simply dumping all the info from iTunes can be terribly misleading if you have a ton of stuff in your iTunes library that you never, ever listen to. I was sort of shocked that “Nintendo” was the most frequent word in my iTunes library, probably because of Super Smash Bros. Brawl and other soundtracks I’ve got in there which I rarely play. I thought of an alternative, using the music I actually listen to, and decided to Wordle my Last.fm music — basically, all of the music I’ve played via iTunes, my iPods and iPhone for the past 3 years (or however long it’s been since I started audioscrobbling). In particular, I chose to dump in the list of tracks I’ve listened to rather than just the artists (so Wordle could actually build up counts of individual artists). Like Westerfeld, I had to trim out a few words (“play,” “track,” and “full” all showed up as very common, so I did selective searches and replaces). Here’s what it turned out as (apologies for the tiny thumbnail, but that’s what Wordle gave me):

I really like how it broke up the names of multi-word artists, and it highlights that I have listened to a hell of a lot of Ennio Morricone and Yo La Tengo over the years (not to mention the soundtrack to Shaun of the Dead). I have an old dude’s musical tastes, but whatever, I’m old.

Oh, and it makes a decent desktop wallpaper, no? I decided to make a plain black and white sans-serif version for my laptop:

[Click to enlarge]

Additionally, just for kicks, I decided to throw in all the text of the book chapter that Jim Gee and I wrote — which is about to be published any day now, just checked the proofs last week! The chapter is entitled “The Hero of Timelines: Argumentation and Epistemology in Zelda Chronology Debates” and it’s going to be in The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy (Ed., Luke Cuddy) sometime this Fall. Here’s a Wordle for our chapter:

Unsurprisingly, “Zelda” is the biggest word on the map, with “game” and “games” pretty close behind. “Evidence” interestingly shows up big, as does “legendary” — we make a big deal in the chapter about the ways fans of the Zelda games use bits of narrative from the games as evidence to develop theories about the games’ overarching timelines. In particular, we pull out an example of a debate over the meaning of the term “legendary,” so this all makes sense. (If you’re interested in the paper, by the way, I have put a PDF of it on the site for anyone’s perusal).

Anyway, enough Wordling for now!

It’s been a busy month, first with travel to LA (for Sandbox), and then Boston. I logged a fair number of flights (for me, at least), and to pass the time, I’ve been dipping back into young adult fiction. They’re easy enough to read and fun enough for a plane, plus I get a weird little kick out of when adults recognize what I’m reading (more people are reading these kinds of books than I thought) and when kids recognize what I’m reading — frankly, this hasn’t happened too often, so maybe I’m reading the kind of YA fiction that only adults actually read.

I’m not reading Where the Red Fern Grows, but have been reading some of the contemporary geek fiction written for young adults. In the past few weeks, that’s been So Yesterday by Scott Westerfield, and Little Brother by boingboing‘s own Cory Doctorow. Both are worth reading, both are good books, and both are recommended. Here are a couple of brief reviews:

So Yesterday

I’d bought this a year or two ago, but had always found reasons not to read it. It appeared to about teenage “cool hunters” — which seemed rather implausible to me at first glance — and their wacky adventures hunting cool stuff in New York City. This is, actually, what the book is about (sort of), but it’s much more fun, and much more subversive than I expected.

Basically, the story follows a cool hunter (someone who tips off corporations to hot new youth culture trends) and his budding trendsetting girlfriend as they try to track down what happened to the cool hunter’s contact in the biz (a Nike employee), who has mysteriously disappeared. What happens throughout the book is that the entire enterprise of cool hunting gets dealt with critically by the protagonists — questioning the point of helping corporations such as Nike with marketing trends back to kids, plus the role of “culture jamming.”

It was quite a fun, short read, and one that I’d definitely recommend to any kid who is dying to have the latest, greatest products. I mean that slightly snidely — as a wannabe hipster teenager, I was enamored by the latest gadgets, weird ways of tying one’s shoes, and clothing (though nowhere nearly as much as some kids today). Getting kids to understand the bigger picture (how kids are marketed to, why, and how trends propagate) seems a good idea.

Little Brother

I’d seen some of Doctorow’s blog posts on boingboing about this book within the past year, but only after reading Westerfield’s book did I decide to go out and but Little Brother. I’ll admit that I’m very conflicted about Doctorow’s books — he blatantly rips off (or “homages”?) better science fiction writers (e.g., John Varley in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, the title of Little Brother an obvious reference to Orwell), and his writing style always feels like it needs another two or three edits to tighten things up (did he need to use the phrase “stocking feet” so often in Little Brother?).

That said, I really grew to love Little Brother. Naming the protagonist “m1k3y” (a la “Mike,” the AI in Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress) pretty much indicates Doctorow’s goals here, and it seems like this is ultimately his contemporary manual for revolution masquerading as a fun scifi book (though, to be honest, it’s barely SF; the tech used in it is basically available now). He wants kids to pick up this book, look critically at the privacy and human rights violations of the past decade, and then go out and do something about it. A laudable goal, and one which really shines through the whole book — whether it’s on how to set up clandestine, encrypted network using hacked gaming consoles, or how to take LARPing and ARGs and turn them into political tools, the book illustrates plausible and interesting modes of resistance using staples of nerd culture.

And, rather than spoil, I’ll just politely dodge the content of the ending. I’ll say that I found “m1k3y”‘s predicament in the final chapters a bit shocking to read in a young adult novel, but strangely refreshing at the same time. Rarely have I seen a book (let alone a kids’ book) that deals with the contemporary issues of torture and government impropriety one would see in the real world during a war crimes tribunal. The book’s not without its flaws (Doctorow’s writing style really bugs me at times), but these criticisms are far outweighed by the importance of the book’s message. Young adults should be encouraged to look at the last decade of privacy and human rights violations, and empowered to do what they can to resist them using the tools they know best.

So, these were both a couple of fun, interesting teen novels to check out at the end of the summer, while providing more substance than most expect from young adult literature. Both novels take just a few hours to read, and both are worthwhile for adults, as well. (If you’re cheap, click here and you can read Little Brother in its entirety online).

It’s actually a pretty interesting watch for anyone currently into computer and/or videogames, just to see how little has changed in the past 23 years. Yes, little… though the technology has improved, so many of the same preconceptions, arguments, and tensions are still around.

In the post-Atari, pre-Nintendo industry cooldown, attention turned back to computer games, as well as speculation toward what the role of games would be in the industry. Taking a definite “they’re back to being complex toys for hobbyists” stance, the late Gary Kildall certainly didn’t have the long view for the eventual social and cultural significance of games (and, one could argue, he didn’t for operating systems, either).

Anyway, check out the episode in its entirety:

It starts off with demos of Sargon and Millionaire for the (then brand spanking new) Macintosh, then moves into a very awkward demo/interview segment with Lebling and David Crane, co-founder of Activision. I mean awkward in about three senses — Crane and Lebling seem uncomfortable around each other as wings of very different kinds of games (Activision leading the way with graphical games, Lebling’s Infocom still trying to compete with text-only games), Crane seems giddily happy with all the dumb, silly eye-candy around the Ghostbusters game, and, of course, it was Activision who would later buy Infocom about one year later. I don’t know how far Infocom’s talks with Activision had proceeded by the time this was filmed — or if they’d even started — but with hindsight, we can see the eventual end of Infocom right there on that table (with a bouncing ball highlighting Ray Parker, Jr. lyrics).

So, sort of depressing, I guess. Lebling argued that their games would eventually move beyond the short form to more “novel-like” games, and that clearly didn’t happen (at least in text games). Rather, it seems that the short form has exploded and flourished in the past 15 years, with the advent of Graham Nelson’s (and collaborators’) Inform, among other interactive fiction platforms.

Also be sure to check out the amusing commentary by Paul Schindler on why Candyland is superior to videogames (because, of course, videogames cause people to “lose human interaction”), not to mention the news summary at the end about the rise of 15-lb. “lap portable” computers, computerized shoe customization, and how “the end of QWERTY” was supposedly near.

So, okay, maybe a few things have changed in 23 years.

The forums present that gamers are “creating an surround in which epistolatory scientific thinking practices are state learned,” said Sean Dancer, a student intellect who worked on the “Humanity of Warcraft” informing with guide communicator Constance Steinkuehler. The stuff is set for publishing in the Leger of Science Teaching and Profession.

We are the only visitor in the domain that has been as flourishing in all the markets where we participate. We hump a spherical strain. Usually, [when fill say they screw a globose labor, they] honourable impart they deceive in Nippon. But we’ve got creation crosswise Accumulation. No separate complement has been competent to do that. We hold collective a orbicular expertise that none of our else competitors hit.

And, it continues. This has made Mr. Dancer’s day, week, and month. I’m considering starting a whole new section in my vita called “Incomprehensible Vietnamese WoW Gold-Seller Spam,” with this as the first, glorious entry.

I presented a paper called “Informal Scientific Reasoning in Online Game Forums” by Constance and myself, discussing our work studying informal science reasoning in the World of Warcraft forums. If you’re unfamiliar with this work, check out a pair of older blog posts on Constance’s research blog by Constance and by me on the topic.

Unfortunately, Constance couldn’t make the meeting, so she graciously sent me along to deliver the paper, which has received some media attention. Though the message of “Hey parents, games aren’t all bad!” is certainly not a new spin (nor a terribly interesting one anymore), it was nice to see the press jump on the APA’s press release. I’ve been having fun tracking where the AP wire piece (by Steve LeBlanc) has ended up, so here’s a partial list of site/media outlets that have picked up either the state wire report or the later revision, which went national yesterday.

• CNN
• MSNBC
• NPR
• USA Today
• Fox News
• The Guardian
• Kotaku
• SFGate
• WoWInsider [Hm, does it undercut our findings when the biggest WoW blog completely misreads the press release and combines our study with Gentile's?]
• Gamepolitics [Are those commenters named "Jack" just fakes or is the real Jack Thompson commenting on our symposium?]

… and a bunch of other newspapers, TV stations, etc., including at least one in Spain, and one in Hong Kong. Pretty nice!

Again, it was a worthwhile experience. I’m interested in further challenging the discourse among psychologists (a profession I once considered myself training for, sort of) that surface depictions of violence in media outweigh the learning practices that people get from playing with these kinds of interactive environments. It’s pretty much incontrovertible at this point, and it’s nice that the media are still finding it worthwhile to write about.

Of course, I’d still prefer a day (hopefully soon) in which the simple fact that “games involve learning” is common knowledge, and thus no longer newsworthy.

Also, over the last few days, it seems that Cryptic has finally unveiled a little about Star Trek Online, their new Trek MMO. Cryptic makes City of Villains and City of Heroes (neither of which I’ve played), and they’re shooting for releasing the Trek MMO within the “next 3 years,” which sounds unsurprising. But, of course, I’m gonna have to try this thing out… whenever it arrives.

They’re making a few odd design choices, which I’m curious about — each player starts off by commanding their own ship in the game (either Federation or Klingon, the initial first two factions, with Romulans and Dominion to come in expansions or patches, presumably). One’s bridge crew are then, basically, pets in the game. How this will work, I have no clue, but it’s certainly an inventive way to simplify the third-person MMO style of player development (you develop your own character through his or her command), while also allowing for ship battles. I’m not sold on the idea, but I’m at least a smidgen receptive to it.

Here’s an introduction of the game at the big Trekkie convention in Las Vegas this weekend:

I’ve already registered on the site (my username’s “scd” there), and will soon probably start recruiting a Klingon guild on their forums, just for kicks. (Yes, they really do have a guild/fleet recruitment forum already). I mean, if I’ve got three years before this thing comes out, I might as well try to get the best, smelliest, ugliest group of Klingons I can possibly get, right?

What should I name my fleet? Fleet “Targ Breath”? “Bumpy Heads”? “Sto’vo’kor”? “No Kill I”?

Oh, how I love the Internet.

If you saw my last post, you know that I recently had a few seconds of Internet fame that has stretched to approximately half a minute of fame by this point. The people behind the Food Network show Ace of Cakes — a show I’ve seen a few times, thought was sort of interesting, and then promptly forgot to continue watching — made a really great original series Star Trek cake. Being a Trekkie and one who thinks obsessive Trekkies are hilarious, I made a little joke in the vein of obsessive Trekkies which was promptly misread by a bunch of people, carried over to io9, and a few other places.

I’m still a bit flabbergasted by this — how in the world did “THIS IS A DISASTER I CAN’T BELIEVE THEY PUT SCOTTY IN THE NAVIGATOR’S POSITION I CAN’T BELIEVE THESE PEOPLE ARE SO CLUELESS ABOUT THE BASICS OF STAR TREK THIS IS A DISASTER” sound at all like a serious post to these people? For the majority of people on Trekmovie.com (where the comment was posted) — including the dude who runs the blog — it was an obvious joke. But, for others, they either have impaired senses of humor, or my fake-out was entirely too close to what many schmucks think Trekkies really talk like online.

Anyway, I’m having fun cataloging where else this little thing has ended up, and will share a few with y’alls:

First of all, Trekmovie felt the need to clarify that, yes, it was a joke, and graciously linked to my previous blog post.

Next, it seems Geekologie carried the story — though they attempted to get a dig in at me personally, they couldn’t spell my name correctly, oops!

Then, a bunch of others picked it up: Horrorthon repeated the Geekologie story, Joseph Dickerson (a very serious looking guy) linked to it, as did “Grinning Skull” (I kinda like the blog name, if not the blog itself), and Tweaks the Limbs. Tim posted an apology (being that he was one of the Trekmovie posters who replied to me in that thread), and Food Network Addict had a rather funny post about it (and the pic above), notable mainly because Mary Alice (one of the Ace of Cakes peeps) chimed in.

Then there’s the LA Times blog linking to it, and, of course, it got Dugg and promptly went nowhere. Oh, and I’ve seen it linked a few times on Livejournal, but Livejournal’s a cesspool, so I barely bother reading or commenting on those, I guess, other than this one, notable because of the awesome animated series LJ icon linked here:

Anyway, it’s amusing to see that, for a few people I don’t know out there, the phrase “THIS IS A DISASTER” became something of a mini-meme on Trekmovie for a day or so. And, I’m left with the conflicting emotions that a bunch of people eager to point fingers at nerds pointed them at me, when, uh, I was trying to do the same thing! Hoist with my own petard, I suppose.

One more comment from the io9 post made me laugh a ton:

OletheaEurystheus at 12:37 PM
@Box-of-Rain:
Actually it seems like half the internet didnt get the joke. Trekmovie has had to post a story specifically TELLING the rest of the people who picked it up it was a joke by a guy with a known sense of humor. This is the problem with the internet sometimes, blogs pick up on things that are in the know to only those people who post there and spread it around the internet like its fact… Its especially problematic of blogs that try to be “hip” by making fun of everyone else. IO9 (and Gawker blogs in general) is well known to be one of those types of blogs who try to manufacture hipness..

The bolded emphasis was mine and not the original poster’s, as I’m always going to emphasize when someone out there describes me as “a guy with a known sense of humor.” No one on Trekmovie knows me, and this OletheaEurystheus person is unknown to me, too. Yet, I have a “known sense of humor!” I’ve made it! I beat the Internet!

Finally, just to remind everyone the only proper and correct reaction to nerds, I leave you with the immortal words of John Goodman:

(… and Ogre).

But, hey, I just had to post about my 15 seconds of Trekkie nerddom fame. A few days ago, Trekmovie.com posted a few cute pictures from the upcoming season of Ace of Cakes, which features an original series Star Trek cake. Check it out:

Cute, huh? Of course, there’s a redshirted dude (Scotty? Leslie? I dunno) sitting where Chekov normally sits, so I posted a comment which, to my eyes, is about as tongue-in-cheek as you can get on the Internet:

6. sean – May 25, 2008

THIS IS A DISASTER I CAN’T BELIEVE THEY PUT SCOTTY IN THE NAVIGATOR’S POSITION I CAN’T BELIEVE THESE PEOPLE ARE SO CLUELESS ABOUT THE BASICS OF STAR TREK THIS IS A DISASTER

Har har, yeah, I poked fun at obsessive Trekkies. It’s easily apparent that I’m being absurd and ridiculous. All caps and “THIS IS A DISASTER” seemed to make that pretty obvious, no?

Well, no, as a number of Trekmovie responses indicated:

14. Tim – May 25, 2008

Ugh Sean you make us look all INSANE! It’s a cake…nothing more…it’s not meant to be canon. Just relax dude. Who gives a frak if the small little cake people are not sitting in the right chair. Lords of Kobol protect us all! If anyone saw the G4 Star Trek ads they ran then we all know that Spock doesn’t have a sanctuary where Scotty DJs

Secondly, Adam, I’d rather watch a show about baking unique cakes on the FOOD NETWORK than a show about 12 women who want to find a farmer for a husband.

18. Navigator NCC 2120 USS Entente – May 25, 2008

“12. Sean – May 25, 2008

lol #6 has a point. Scotty and Uhura are not in the right spots and Chekov is nowhere to be found. Even before Chekov came onto the show Scotty didn’t sit there.”

Actually Sean, Scotty DID sit at the Navigator’s Station on the bridge at the end of the second pilot “Where No Man Has Gone Before” because Navigator Gary Mitchel was dead. There is a picture of it at http://www.trekcore.com. I tried to post the link to the picture but it did not work.

Navigator NCC-2120 USS Entente
/\

38. Gary Seven of Nine – May 26, 2008

Sean:

“Have you ever kissed a girl??!?!?!?!?!”

It’s an F-in cake. Turn-off your caps lock and and stop making trekkers look like such OCD losers.

Et cetera, et cetera. Again, fairly amusing — some of the hardcore readers of the blog thought I was being serious, no big deal, right?

Now I start getting a few anonymous, confusing emails and find that this has been picked up by the Gawker sci-fi blog io9, with even more hilarious results. A few choice comments from that blog:

joemono at 10:22 AM

THIS IS A DISASTER I think everyone should bookend all comments on this thread with that phrase THIS IS A DISASTER

Zantor at 11:44 AM

We are talking in depth about a little “Star Trek” Cake?
I remember when Trekkies were cool and fun. What’s this shit?
Set phasers for Get me the hell out of here!

victheremin at 12:42 PM

THIS IS AN ABOMINATION!
DAMN THE ACE OF CAKES!

I’ll chase him ’round the moons of Nibia and ’round the Antares Maelstrom and ’round perdition’s flames before I give him up.

The bridge crew’s arrangement notwithstanding, I’m not that impressed by their cakes. Unless the cakes are really tasty or laced with heroin for that extra “oomph”, someone in that company must have some serious connections for them to be the premiere cake supplier in their area.

Oh, this is just too hilarious. With just one off-hand jokey blog comment post, I’ve managed to annoy both the hardcore Trekkies and the people who hate them at the same time! I never thought my first time making it into a Gawker blog would be over a Star Trek cake, but you know what they say about gift horses.

Well, hey, lookie here, I’m in the local paper!

Last week, Rob Thomas of the Capital Times called me up to talk to me about a paper I wrote for an educational psychology class last spring, on expertise in Guitar Hero. I’ve posted on this little blog about that paper before, but in case you missed it, here’s the original post I made about it over the summer. I’m pretty happy with how the article turned out, and it’s fun to see a little project like this end up getting some unexpected play in the local media.

Which brings up that I’ve been neglecting this poor little blog lately, and apologize for that. I’ve been too busy writing (two book chapters mostly done this semester, plus one journal article), taking classes, and, uh, playing videogames. Lately, that’s been more World of Warcraft than anything, but I have spent a fair amount of time on both Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band (imagine Guitar Hero plus drums and vocals), so I might as well post some initial impressions.

First of all, if you didn’t already know, there was a bit of an unhappy divorce between Harmonix and Red Octane (respectively, the game developer and hardware manufacturer behind the first two Guitar Hero games). Red Octane got purchased by Activision, Harmonix got purchased by MTV, and suddenly consumers ended up with a choice of two different fake-guitar gaming franchises. So, Red Octane/Activision/Neversoft = Guitar Hero 3, while Harmonix/MTV = Rock Band. In my opinion, the only real choice between the games comes down to money, as the games are light years apart from one another in gameplay, quality, and fun.

Guitar Hero 3 is, without a doubt, the worst game in the series. I bought the PS2 version, and didn’t get a new guitar (two plastic guitar controllers is enough for my little apartment, thanks), so I can’t comment on the Xbox 360 version, nor the Wii version. But, if the game itself is anything like the PS2 game, it’s the gaming equivalent of a band “selling out.” Neversoft are the new game developers for the Guitar Hero franchise and are developers of the Tony Hawk series of games. And, frankly, I’m not sure how many of them actually play musical instruments, because the weird joy of sort of playing a musical instrument seems to be gone.

In its place, we’ve now got some terrible anime-style cut scenes (featuring everyone in your fake band other than you!), inexplicable leather clad women dancers who come out on the stage to the sound of a guitar going (I kid you not) “bow chika bow bow,” not to mention on-screen drummers who can’t keep a beat. In terms of the actual playing of the game, not much is different — no terribly consequential new bells nor whistles, and the songs are, uh, okay, I guess? Generally, it’s a waste of time at best and offensively dumb at worst. The images of women in the game seem suddenly trashier and creepier than in the earlier games in the series, and playing guitar on it seems more like button-mashing than ever before.

But, back to the gameplay — whose bright idea was it to add a ton of difficult and utterly unnecessary guitar noodling at the beginning of “Holiday in Cambodia” so I’d have to actually go and use practice mode on a song I already know how to play on the real guitar? This kind of thing just pisses me off. Somewhere, Neversoft got it in their heads that the first two Guitar Hero games were fun, but not challenging enough for “real gamers,” perhaps, and added crap to songs (moreso than the previous two games ever did) in order to be challenging for seasoned Guitar Hero players. Not to mention that, though the set list for Guitar Hero 3 looks great on paper, the songs they chose are really not that fun to play, when all’s said and done. I keep going back to “My Name is Jonas,” “One,” and a few others for replaying, but the songs I thought I’d have fun playing (“Holiday in Cambodia,” “Kool Thing,” “Anarchy in the UK”) are truly boring.

Contrast this with Rock Band, a game that is so far and above Guitar Hero 3 in nearly every aspect, there’s just no contest. Playing Rock Band with a bunch of friends is a whole new experience — my throat is hoarse from belting out “Sabotage” yesterday, and playing the drums on Expert is, frankly, like you’re really playing the drums. The avatar creation is sleek and integrated into the game (even the loading screens feature your band in goofy poses with your avatar), and while I normally don’t think I care about such things, whaddya know, it turns out I find that kinda fun. Playing the guitar isn’t any different from Guitar Hero, really, but it’s the rest of the game which makes it worthwhile — the little things, from the way the crowd will sing along with you (even your guitar solos!) if you’re playing well, to the simple game mechanic of letting other members of your band save you mid-song should you fail. And the artwork and graphic design are just fantastic.

Plus, the songs: Harmonix chose songs I probably wouldn’t have ever considered (“Maps,” “Dani California,” “Suffragette City,” “Go With the Flow,” etc.) and they simply… work. Unlike Guitar Hero 3, the songs seem like a slightly more risky mix — how many regular Wal-Mart shoppers would even know who The New Pornographers are? But, it pays off. What Rock Band gives you is a set of songs that are genuinely fun to play as a group, even if one doesn’t know them before playing. It’s like an interactive mixtape made by a bunch of people who both know a variety of music, and know how to design good gameplay.

The only two flaws of Rock Band are the crappier guitar controller (I’ve already had to fix the one we bought due to the downstroke failing on the picking button), and the heftier price tag ($180 is what I spent on the Xbox 360 version vs. $60 for Guitar Hero 3). But, it’s worth every penny and (so far at least, knock on plastic) every problem with the guitar controller. Harmonix sure seem to be, first and foremost, musicians who develop games, while Neversoft appear to be game developers who hired a few musicians to help them figure out this new (to them) franchise. Rock Band is good enough that I will probably buy an Xbox 360 within the next few months, just to play this game (not to mention playing online, which still blows my mind).

If you can afford Rock Band, go out and get it!

Fox, Barr and McG Adapting Spaced
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
October 30, 2007

Fox is teaming with writer Adam Barr and producer McG for “Spaced,” a comedy project based on the Channel 4 series of the same name from Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz masterminds Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Fox has handed out a put pilot commitment to the single-camera “Spaced,” which hails from Warner Bros. TV, McG’s WBTV-based Wonderland Sound and Vision and Granada America, which owns the format.

The project revolves around two strangers who pose as a married couple in order to rent an apartment.

Barr (“Will & Grace”) is writing the script, which garnered interest from several networks. He is executive producing with Wonderland’s McG and Peter Johnson and Granada’s Robert Green.

The original series, which ran on Channel 4 for two seasons, was written by Pegg and Jessica Hynes who starred as the fake couple, and was directed by Wright. It earned two BAFTA nominations for best comedy series and an International Emmy nomination.

————————————————————————-

UPDATE: From Edgar’s MySpace:

Oct 30 2007 12:10 AM

For the record on SPACED US, I have nothing to do with it. They haven’t even deigned to contact me.

Leave well alone I say.

Well, yeah. McG? Doing Spaced? Edgar Wright (director of the show), not even being consulted?

This is gonna be amusing. And utter crap.

I can’t believe it. Twice in my lifetime? Twice in three years? This is unreal.

The Red Sox are World Series victorious yet again, and I find myself just plain giddy today. I’ve been a fan of the Red Sox since I was about 10 and I got to see Carl Yastrzemski play during his final season. I was crushed in 1986 and pretty much stopped following the team for a few years. I remember the very moment I was wooed back into Red Sox Nation — Pedro coming out of the bullpen versus the Indians in 1999. I’ve been hooked ever since.

So, this is weird — two World Series victories, an extremely promising young core of players who came up in the Sox system (Youkilis, Ellsbury, Pedroia, Lester, Buchholz, Papelbon) and a bunch of excellent young players who were acquired from other organizations and countries (Beckett, Matsuzaka, Okajima). They’re primed to continue succeeding for quite a few years.

Which is why I’m going to repost A. Bart Giamatti’s “The Green Fields of the Mind,” which I believe I’ve posted here before (or at least on older blogs of mine). If just to remind us what it was like, just a few years ago. And to be even more happy that being a Red Sox fan is still as much as it is about the potential of having your heart broken as it is about hoping your team is left standing to spray champagne all over the place.

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.

Somehow, the summer seemed to slip by faster this time. Maybe it wasn’t this summer, but all the summers that, in this my fortieth summer, slipped by so fast. There comes a time when every summer will have something of autumn about it. Whatever the reason, it seemed to me that I was investing more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting on the game’s deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and to return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight. I wrote a few things this last summer, this summer that did not last, nothing grand but some things, and yet that work was just camouflage. The real activity was done with the radio–not the all-seeing, all-falsifying television–and was the playing of the game in the only place it will last, the enclosed green field of the mind. There, in that warm, bright place, what the old poet called Mutability does not so quickly come.

But out here, on Sunday, October 2, where it rains all day, Dame Mutability never loses. She was in the crowd at Fenway yesterday, a gray day full of bluster and contradiction, when the Red Sox came up in the last of the ninth trailing Baltimore 8-5, while the Yankees, rain-delayed against Detroit, only needing to win one or have Boston lose one to win it all, sat in New York washing down cold cuts with beer and watching the Boston game. Boston had won two, the Yankees had lost two, and suddenly it seemed as if the whole season might go to the last day, or beyond, except here was Boston losing 8-5, while New York sat in its family room and put its feet up. Lynn, both ankles hurting now as they had in July, hits a single down the right-field line. The crowd stirs. It is on its feet. Hobson, third baseman, former Bear Bryant quarterback, strong, quiet, over 100 RBIs, goes for three breaking balls and is out. The goddess smiles and encourages her agent, a canny journeyman named Nelson Briles.

Now comes a pinch hitter, Bernie Carbo, onetime Rookie of the Year, erratic, quick, a shade too handsome, so laid-back he is always, in his soul, stretched out in the tall grass, one arm under his head, watching the clouds and laughing; now he looks over some low stuff unworthy of him and then, uncoiling, sends one out, straight on a rising line, over the center-field wall, no cheap Fenway shot, but all of it, the physics as elegant as the arc the ball describes.

New England is on its feet, roaring. The summer will not pass. Roaring, they recall the evening, late and cold, in 1975, the sixth game of the World Series, perhaps the greatest baseball game played in the last fifty years, when Carbo, loose and easy, had uncoiled to tie the game that Fisk would win. It is 8-7, one out, and school will never start, rain will never come, sun will warm the back of your neck forever. Now Bailey, picked up from the National League recently, big arms, heavy gut, experienced, new to the league and the club; he fouls off two and then, checking, tentative, a big man off balance, he pops a soft liner to the first baseman. It is suddenly darker and later, and the announcer doing the game coast to coast, a New Yorker who works for a New York television station, sounds relieved. His little world, well-lit, hot-combed, split-second-timed, had no capacity to absorb this much gritty, grainy, contrary reality.

Cox swings a bat, stretches his long arms, bends his back, the rookie from Pawtucket who broke in two weeks earlier with a record six straight hits, the kid drafted ahead of Fred Lynn, rangy, smooth, cool. The count runs two and two, Briles is cagey, nothing too good, and Cox swings, the ball beginning toward the mound and then, in a jaunty, wayward dance, skipping past Briles, feinting to the right, skimming the last of the grass, finding the dirt, moving now like some small, purposeful marine creature negotiating the green deep, easily avoiding the jagged rock of second base, traveling steady and straight now out into the dark, silent recesses of center field.

The aisles are jammed, the place is on its feet, the wrappers, the programs, the Coke cups and peanut shells, the doctrines of an afternoon; the anxieties, the things that have to be done tomorrow, the regrets about yesterday, the accumulation of a summer: all forgotten, while hope, the anchor, bites and takes hold where a moment before it seemed we would be swept out with the tide. Rice is up. Rice whom Aaron had said was the only one he’d seen with the ability to break his records. Rice the best clutch hitter on the club, with the best slugging percentage in the league. Rice, so quick and strong he once checked his swing halfway through and snapped the bat in two. Rice the Hammer of God sent to scourge the Yankees, the sound was overwhelming, fathers pounded their sons on the back, cars pulled off the road, households froze, New England exulted in its blessedness, and roared its thanks for all good things, for Rice and for a summer stretching halfway through October. Briles threw, Rice swung, and it was over. One pitch, a fly to center, and it stopped. Summer died in New England and like rain sliding off a roof, the crowd slipped out of Fenway, quickly, with only a steady murmur of concern for the drive ahead remaining of the roar. Mutability had turned the seasons and translated hope to memory once again. And, once again, she had used baseball, our best invention to stay change, to bring change on.

That is why it breaks my heart, that game–not because in New York they could win because Boston lost; in that, there is a rough justice, and a reminder to the Yankees of how slight and fragile are the circumstances that exalt one group of human beings over another. It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised.

Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.

Thank you, Red Sox. See you in March.

Can you imagine the dude on the right reconfiguring an matter/antimatter intermix chamber neutron flow configuration diagnostic? Okay, thankfully, they’re ditching all that crappy technobabble-era Trek with this new film, but still?

I’m excited by the change. The rest of the casting for the new Star Trek has been either unknowns or the occasional actor with good potential (and sometimes solid pedigree, like Eric Bana, who will be playing a Romulan villain in the movie). Pegg is the first actor who seems definitely cast against type, and I’m really interested to see what he does with the role.

This movie’s shaping up to be an expensive ($150 million!) experiment, and I’m hoping they pull it off. I’m cautiously optimistic.

Edit: I just changed the title of this post to something clever! Look how clever I am! Clever!

So, here are a fewTwin Peaks lolcats I have lying on my hard drive right now.

Me, I’m going to go lie in bed and goof around with my new iPhone!

I’m working my way through the “Canon” currently, and in a rather haphazard manner. A bit over a year ago, I bought Leslie Klinger’s new annotated Holmes, and read “A Study In Scarlet” (which, frankly, wasn’t a very good story) and “The Sign of Four” (which was). Traveling Europe last summer, I picked up a beat-up old paperback of “The Hound of the Baskervilles” at an OxFam charity shop in London, and read that in Rome. And, now, thanks to discovering the Notorious Canary-Trainers, I have been slowly working my way through the short stories, reading whichever one strikes my fancy (or whichever story my friends suggest I read next). So far, in the past week, that’s been:

“The Bruce-Partingon Plans”
“The Veiled Lodger”
“The Musgrave Ritual”
“The Blue Carbuncle”
“A Scandal in Bohemia”
“The Man With the Twisted Lip”

… with probably “Silver Blaze” or “Mazarin Stone” up next (two stories I can’t recall ever reading). Additionally, I’ve picked up hardbacks of each of Nick Meyer‘s three Holmes novels (The Seven Per-Cent Solution, The West End Horror, and The Canary-Trainer), as well as a number of pastiches (The Bee Keeper’s Apprentice, Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon), and some reference books ( The Sherlock Holmes Compendium and Encyclopedia Sherlockiana). On top of that, I found my old copy of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective (the paper version, not the computer game), and plan to try to get my friends to play it with me soon.

Speaking of which… wow, this Holmes obsession is hard to explain to my friends.

Sure, they’re nerds like I am, but there’s something qualitatively different about gaming nerds and the kind of person who finds Victorian sleuthing fascinating. I’ve raised several eyebrows of friends by describing my current interest in Conan Doyle, and even though I’m currently in a graduate program trying to incorporate research on learning with new media and fandom, this is difficult to explain. Academically, I’m finding Holmes to be interesting because of how, as scholarly and fan communities, they have refined “fan theorizing” to an art — the kinds of attention to detail and erudition required to create new knowledge in these communities is simply staggering. But, as a fan, I am finding the content of Holmes’ world to be equally foreign to my current life as any game’s fantasy world, yet more appealing. The deduction and reasoning at the surface of the Holmes Canon is, to be honest, much more appealing at the moment than the hack and slash world of many videogames. That’s not to say, of course, that there aren’t many complex intellectual practices going on in and around games — that’s one of the central things I’m interested in studying in my research — but just that, for now, I’m finding Victorian detective work to be immensely satisfying and interesting.

So, a few more short blurbs on things of Sherlockian/Holmesian interest that I’ve discovered in the past week:

First off, it looks like there’s going to be a new DVD set of the complete Granada Sherlock Holmes TV series from the 1980s and early 1990s, starring Jeremy Brett as Holmes. As a teenager, I was completely enthralled with these shows, and still have a few of them on musty VHS cassettes I taped off of my local PBS station. They were all released earlier on crappier DVDs with no extras to speak of, but now have been remastered from the original negatives (!) and come in a single, beautiful box with a few extras:

Bonus Features Include:
Sherlock Series Promo
Three commentary tracks
Daytime Live
Elementary My Dear Watson: An Interview with Edward Hardwicke
An Interview with Adrian Conan Doyle
Sherlock Museum Short
Spanish/English subtitles

So, the extras are a bit underwhelming, but an improvement over the original releases. And the transfers appear scintillant from the few images that are up on the Amazon page:

The only problem — it lists for $300?! Ugh, I might have to “rent and rip,” though I’m dying to buy this.

In other news, I’ve subscribed to Scott Monty and Burt Wolder’s new Holmes podcast, “I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere.” It’s not bad so far, though I only understand maybe a third of what they’re talking about. I’ve listened to the first two episodes so far, and it’s interesting to hear the history of Sherlockian vanity presses, as well as the history of the Baker Street Journal. I’ll keep listening, and am happy to hear someone’s doing this.

One thing I noticed, however — since there are a few Holmes-related blogs and now a Holmes-related podcast, why isn’t there an (English language) Holmes wiki anywhere? Perhaps there is, and I can’t find it, but I find this peculiar, especially when modern (and, frankly, much more complex) media have had wikis devoted to them. I’m thinking of Lostpedia, Memory-Alpha, etc. — community knowledge about a fictional world that is collaboratively negotiated, all in public. I’m interested in the ways that knowledge get formed online, and find it peculiar that the only Holmes-related wiki I can find is in French.

There are a couple of explanations for this — Holmes enthusiasts tend to be older than fans of newer fictional worlds, and thus are potentially less attuned with the latest, greatest Internet phenomena, but since wikis have been around for several years, this seems unlikely. Or, perhaps there’s an ethos of scholarly knowledge-construction going on here and thus people are more interested in seeing (and arguing over) what specific individuals have contributed to Holmes scholarship rather than the relative anonymity of a wiki. Or, maybe … it’s just that no one has bothered to do it yet?

A wiki could be a fascinating experiment — what if every Sherlockian had the opportunity to contribute their own annotations to the “Canon”? It would be a simple task technically to set up such a site, but a potential nightmare socially. Since I’m quite new to all of this, I can only suspect there might be clashes of egos and pet theories in play on a Holmes wiki. If anyone even used it! Anyhow, just an idea.

More later, as my Holmes obsession branches into different directions.

The meeting was rather low-key and convivial; more a relaxed, fun reading group than anything else. I found it really fascinating to see the wide variety of different Holmes volumes everyone brought with them to the meeting — one man brought the Klinger annotated edition, a few people brought the smaller Oxford editions, and a number of older “Complete Holmes” editions (I had the tiny Bantam editions, the man next to me had the Barnes & Noble editions, etc.) One thing I saw was missing and, I think, might have been helpful was that no one had the Baring-Gould edition with them, so I’ll try to bring that next time.

Is this terribly relevant to the way the meeting went, or what we did? Nah, but it’s interesting to see that in a small community of Holmes afficionados like this, that everyone comes at it from a slightly different direction. I’d love to find out more of what motivated people to join this group, and what motivates them to continue — how much they love Holmes? The community of the group? Family? Other concerns? I’m obviously interested in how fan communities work, and certainly don’t plan to study this group without their express consent, but I’d be lying if I said these kinds of questions weren’t interesting to me. So, yeah, what’s motivated me to join up with this group?

As often happens whenever I get obsessively interested in something, I start gobbling up other media related to it. In the earlier Holmes-related post, I mentioned the radio dramas I found on my hard drive, and I’ve also been Netflixing several Holmes films. I most recently watched Sherlock Holmes and The Case of the Silk Stockings, a very odd reimagining of Holmes and Watson, starring Rupert Everett as Holmes (yes, the Four Weddings and a Funeral guy), and Ian Hart as Watson (a.k.a. Professor Quirrell in Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone):

Not horrible by any means, it was also not particularly interesting either. Every age reimagines older stories through the lens of the times, and so it’s no surprise that someone would make a Holmes story set during the Victorian era, but with the sensibilities of the 21st century: Psychological profiling, sexual fetishism, serial killers, etc. Thus, it comes off as … odd. Everett and Hart are competent, even quite good at times, but ultimately this feels like it could have been an episode of “Wire in the Blood” or any other relatively-current British crime procedural.

I wish there were more creative reimaginings of the Holmes canon making it to film — next up for me is the 2007 BBC Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars, starring Jonathan Pryce as Holmes and, presumably, a bunch of kids as the Baker Street Irregulars. This seems a more promising approach to take, though still not quite as interesting as the heyday of film adaptations such as Billy Wilder’s Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and Herbert Ross’s The Seven Per-Cent Solution, based on the novel by Nicholas Meyer. Speaking of Holmes’s “seven per-cent solution” (the dilution of cocaine he’d inject himself with), here’s a kinda cool t-shirt I’m thinking of getting:

… based on Sidney Paget’s original illustration of Holmes, after shooting up. Available via this link.

Okay, enough rambling. I have to go clean my house, as my father and stepmother are coming to visit this afternoon!

If you never saw it, here’s the video:

Yeah, okay, great. Nice try, but not terribly funny, move along, right? Well, actually, no.

Turns out Barack Obama is — several months after this video’s heyday — offended and upset by the video. Huh? Here are a couple choice quotes:

“I guess it’s too much to ask, but you do wish people would think about what impact their actions have on kids and families,” Obama said during the interview, held in the den of a supporter who just had hosted a campaign stop on her front lawn attended by about 120 people.

“This is part of the process of politics that can be difficult, (that) is making sure that your kids and your wife and your family are insulated from both things like this and what I suspect will be at some point some negative campaigning,” Obama said.

What the? He’s worrying about his family being insulated from this video and negative campaigning only garners a little mention at the end? Oh, dude, you’re gonna be in for a world of hurt soon, if you fear dumb little YouTube videos as threatening the integrity of your family.

In recent weeks, I’ve questioned Obama as a candidate — I just don’t think the guy’s close to being ready — and reactions like this show a surprisingly thin skin. Bill Clinton, for all his faults, would have handled a video like this with a laugh and a joke and, okay, maybe by trying to get the “Obama girl”‘s phone number. But Obama takes the road of victimization, and that’s not something you want to do when someone is making — for free, mind you — advertisements that get people excited about your campaign.

The other day, while reorganizing my bookshelves, I came across Isaac Asimov’s “The Ultimate Crime” — I can’t find a full text copy of the story online right now, but here’s a link to a review of it. Basically, in the story, Asimov recounts a dinner meeting among a number of friends, one of whom is trying to address a vague part of the Holmes “Canon,” what the true topic of Moriarty’s The Dynamics of an Asteroid is about, as a justification for joining The Baker Street Irregulars, the worldwide group of Holmes fans and scholars.

It struck me that this is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been interested in studying in new media: The ways that fans of texts come together and reinterpret and “fill in the gaps,” sometimes via fanfic, but very often in terms of theories that have evidence marshalled toward them, are assailed upon by counter-evidence and reinterpretations, and are shaped via the use of argument. This is something I’m studying in World of Warcraft and The Legend of Zelda fandom right now, but also something I’ve found interesting in Lost and Heroes fans as well.

Anyway, I wondered if there are still active Baker Street Irregulars groups, and what they talked about. A quick Google search later, and I discovered that not only did Madison have a “scion” (an officially recognized group by the BSI, though none of the Canary-Trainers are BSI members) but that they were meeting this Sunday! They’re called the “Notorious Canary-Trainers,” from a reference in the Holmes story “The Adventure of Black Peter.” It appears that the group is open to the public, and that their topic for this Sunday’s (today’s!) meeting is a discussion of the story “The Bruce-Partington Plans.”

Now, I’m not much for superstition or fate or anything, but I do think it’s a weird coincidence that they happened to be talking about this particular (and not all that significant) story today. The plot of it features Holmes trying to track down a set of missing submarine plans that were stolen from Her Majesty’s Navy. Holmes’s brother Mycroft makes a rare appearance, and the mystery itself is pretty decent. However, it’s purely personal nostalgia that makes this story significant for me.

When I was a kid, I used to sit in the backseat of my parents’ car with a tape recording, listening over and over again to old time radio shows on cassette that my parents had bought me. The Shadow and Sherlock Holmes were always my favorites, and an adaptation of “The Bruce-Partington Plans” was the one I listened to the most. Surprisingly, I discovered just the other day that I had a copy of this specific radio show, starring Sir Ralph Richardson as Watson and Sir John Gielgud as Holmes. Click here if you’d like to listen!

Anyway, I decided to go to this Canary-Trainers meeting today, at 3pm. To prepare, I listened to that radio show once again, found another (older) radio adaptation starring Rathbone and Bruce and listened to it, a radio version from the 1960s, as well as watched the Jeremy Brett Granada television production from “The Return of Sherlock Holmes” in the mid-’80s. And, of course, read the story once again:

I have copies of both annotated versions (Baring-Gould’s original on top, and Leslie Klinger’s new annotated Holmes at bottom). Reading the story this morning, I skimmed both sets of annotations as I went along — it was a fascinating little exercise, and I don’t think I’ve ever really read a text like this before. Sort of amusing that I’ll do this with a Sherlock Holmes story rather than, say, Plato, but I’m not fretting about that too much.

So, I’ve listened to three different audio versions, watched a television production, and read the story with two sets of annotations. I’m probably prepared, I hope! I’m going to hop on a bus soon and head out to the meeting — their website says that guests are welcomed, so I hope it’s okay that I show up unannounced. I don’t hold any illusions that this meeting will be anything like Asimov’s great little short story, but I’m curious to see what it actually is like. Plus, I’ve always wanted to join a reading group for fun, and what could be more fun than the classic stories of the Master Detective?

Here’s what we know already:Nimoy’s very likely in it, Shatner’s not. The movie is going to deal with the earliest days of the Kirk/Spock Enterprise and will feature much younger actors playing Kirk, Spock, McCoy, etc. Zachary Quinto (Sylar on Heroes) has been recently rumored as being close to a deal to play Spock, while the earliest rumors that have since been debunked were that they were going A-list, seeking to get Matt Damon, Adrien Brody, and Gary Sinise for the big three. ILM is on board to do the special effects and have confirmed they’re doing the original Enterprise, most of the others who are involved are from Lost (Michael Giacchino is doing the score, the production folks are from Lost, Damon Lindelof is a producer, etc.). The screenplay is written by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, and Abrams, apparently, which doens’t have many excited who saw MI:3 or Transformers, two other collaborations between Kurtzman and Orci. The screenplay, however, does sound potentially interesting if they can pull it off — their stated goals are make two films in one, interpretable and serving as a new entry to non-fans, and then littered with small, unobtrusive references to Trek to tie it into the show’s chronology. Abrams is producing, will direct, and it looks like at least some of the location shooting will take place in Iceland, which has some spots that would be perfect for an alien planet or two.

There’s probably more, but not much of it is consequential. Today’s the day we’re going to get some casting, more info than we ever have, and will likely even see a short preview of some of the effects or perhaps some kind of teaser trailer. They don’t start filming until the fall, with a summer or fall 2008 release.

I’ve been a Trekkie ever since I can remember, and have only ever been fanatical about the original series. I’ve never been the type to dress up and go to conventions, but I swallowed up all of the media I could about the original series back when I was a teen (I’ve already posted about my earliest Internet footprint, and reading that gives you a sense of the kind of intellectual problems the 14-year-old me was often wrestling with). I’m not the kind any longer to mindlessly just accept a new Star Trek film with bated breath (Star Trek V quickly weaned me of this habit), but I do admit to being somewhat hopeful about today’s news.

I’m excited by the opportunities that a “reboot” affords, as well as a renewed focus on the original, best Star Trek (ditching The Next Generation and on, which never really worked that well). I’m excited about the involvement of Abrams and his cronies (other than Kurtzman and Orci), based on the excellent Lost work they’ve done in recent years. I’m excited about the chance to sit down and see a fresh new take on Star Trek, really the first fresh new one since The Next Generation. This has the possibility to be a new kick in the pants to the franchise, like when Harve Bennett and Nick Meyer grabbed the reins with the second film.

What I’m not excited about are the screenwriters — their track record is awful so far. I find Zachary Quinto’s acting to be worse than sub-par, and him taking over as Spock is nigh-offensive to me. And until I see production sketches or other images, I’m scared that they’re going to try to modernize the look of the original show to such an extent that it will seem crass. I’m worried.

But, anyway, today’s the day. I’ll revise this post later with my thoughts once everything gets revealed. See you in a few hours.

Edit (7pm Eastern):

Well, looks like the Star Trek panel has come and gone, and we now have a new Mr. Spock:

… as I feared. On the brighter side, we also have an old Spock:

… as I had hoped! Nimoy will be in the movie, playing the older Spock to Quinto’s younger Spock. Since they’re going with the older Spock and have said they’re still trying to figure out a way to get Shatner into the picture as an older Kirk, I’m assuming that they’re going with the flashback from the 24th century approach. For those non-Trekkies reading my weblog, Kirk was killed off in the 7th Star Trek feature, Star Trek: Generations, while the last we saw of Spock onscreen was around 1991, and he was still running around in the 24th century. Since Vulcans can live 200 years, Spock was hitting middle age around the time of The Next Generation.

What has me most excited, however, is the new teaser poster:

It uses the original series font Star Trek BT, and I think that can’t be out of laziness. They’re making a concerted effort to be retro and appeal to those of us who cherish the original Star Trek. While I may be highly skeptical of Quinto’s casting, he is but one piece in the whole thing. They have not cast a Kirk yet, and did not reveal anything else about other roles cast, so, a bit of a letdown there. I can assume we’ll see Greg Grunberg in there somewhere, though, making this already an oddly Heroes-heavy affair.

So, to sum up, I’m not thrilled about Quinto, but what’s done is done. Let’s see if they can pull this off.

Well, it’s finally nearly here. Tonight at midnight is the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and if you’d have asked me a mere six months ago if I’d have cared about this event, I would have laughed in your face. But, stubborn grumpy old me was finally convinced to read the books (thanks, Roxy!), and then briefly went nutso trying to convince all my friends, present and former, to read them (hi Audz, hi M).

What will happen? I don’t honestly know, as I’ve tried to keep myself as far away from genuine spoilers as is possible — even going so far as to delete any emails or random message board private messages that even hint at being a Harry Potter spoiler. I’ve become adept at skimming enough of a message to know that it’s going to be a spoiler, then trashing it. And, before you get any bright ideas, after I post this blog post, I’ll likely be offline for a few days anyway, so don’t try to challenge me on this one, smartasses.

That hasn’t kept me from speculating on what will happen. Here are my guesses, and perhaps in a few days I’ll post a spoilerful weblog entry seeing how off the mark I was. Note that these spoil various points from The Half Blood Prince, so if you haven’t read that, well, you’ve had plenty of time and I don’t care if I’m spoiling it for you!

• I buy the theory that Harry is actually Godric Gryffindor’s descendent. Roxy pointed out that the Wizard of the Month on Rowling’s website was Gryffindor, and he had the same green eyes that Harry has — it’s been pointed out many times that Harry “has his mother’s eyes,” but his mother was supposedly muggle-born. So, what if she wasn’t and didn’t know that she was a descendant of Gryffindor? There are a few implications to this: (1) Narratively, it’d make for a nice parallel to Tom Marvolo Riddle’s ignorance of his Slytherin bloodline, and there have been tons of parallels between Harry and Voldemort so far; (2) it would be a great end to the Dursley storyline for them to realize that they actually are what they loathe so much (since Petunia was Lily Potter’s sister); (3) it gives credence to the theory that Harry is a Horcrux, as we were basically promised that something of Gryffindor’s would contain a chunk of Voldemort’s soul.
• Deaths, lots of them. I suspect Hagrid, Mad Eye, Lupin, Tonks, and Draco will all die heroically. Yes, Draco — the end of the last book sowed the seeds for his redemption (albeit one that comes from a deep cowardice), and I suspect he’ll go out sympathetically. I would love to see Hagrid face Voldemort himself, as one of my favorite nearly-forgotten bits of the storyline is that Hagrid is the only contemporary of Tom Riddle’s around, and had his life derailed by Tom (back in Chamber of Secrets). Will either Ron or Hermione die? There are rumors that Hermione’s going to bite it, and I just can’t see that happening. The slow build-up of the Ron and Hermione romance hasn’t even peaked yet, and I don’t see Rowling being quite that cruel to us. I predict all three of the primary characters survive and that she won’t kill off Ron, Harry, or Hermione.
• Neville will be integral in killing Voldemort for good. There’s still unresolved stuff from the prophecy (from The Order of the Phoenix) that makes me think that somehow Neville is actually the prophesized one who will get rid of Voldemort. In concert with Harry, yes, but Neville will be integral to it somehow, though I’m not quite sure how.
• We’ll see Sirius again, and find out from Sirius some of the details of RAB, aka Regulus Arcturus Black. We’ll find out that Regulus stole the horcrux from Voldemort with the help of Kreacher (how else would Regulus be able to get on the boat, get rid of the potion, and survive long enough to get out of that place?). We’ll probably see Kreacher betray the Order somehow, too, and then get dealt with by Dobby.
• Snape is quite obviously a good guy. I simply cannot understand those adults who argue that Snape’s actually a villain — there’s no payoff story-wise, if that’s the case! Reading The Half Blood Prince, we see Snape being pressured by Dumbledore to do something he doesn’t want to do, we see a nearly-dead Dumbledore begging Snape to do something just before Snape kills him, and we see Snape leaving Hogwarts without hurting anyone else. Snape, the master of Occlumency and Legilmency, is the perfect “inside man,” and I suspect that the potion was going to kill Dumbledore or incapacitate him enough that it was a mercy killing. Dumbledore knew that the potion was there, presumably knew what it would do before he drank it, and Snape was only following Dumbledore’s orders. If it turns out that Snape was really evil, what in the world point would that serve in the narrative? Basically, we’d have just another villain for Harry to overcome (atop Wormtail, Bellatrix, Voldemort, etc.), and nothing else. With Snape being a good guy we, yet again, have Harry coming to terms one last time with his prejudices. It’s simply more interesting — and it seems obvious to me, as Rowling is ultimately still writing these books for teenagers primarily, I doubt she’ll pull too many elaborate twists into this last book.

Anyway, tonight’s the night and in just three hours apparently a stretch of Soho will be turned into Diagon Alley — I’m in my hotel room in New Brunswick right now, taking a break from the CSCL 2007 conference, and I’m half-tempted to head down to the city to check this out. I’ve got a few more talks I’d like to see, however, and will end up going to those and crashing early tonight. Tomorrow morning, I have to leave New Brunswick at a ridiculously early hour in order to get to Penn Station, figure out how to get to Grand Central Station, then hop another train to Croton-on-Hudson for my friend Rachel’s wedding to her soon-to-be-hubby Bill. After that, I’ll head back to the city and figure out how to get to Brooklyn and hang out with more of my Internet pals. I’m not sure where I’m going to get a copy of the Harry Potter book, but hopefully I’ll find one in a bookstore during my travels tomorrow.

It’s been a busy week, with our GLS Conference in Madison wrapping up just a week ago, then a talk at AT&T Research I did this past week, and then the talk at CSCL that my officemate David and I did for Constance. I’m looking forward to relaxing a little when I get back, but I have two manuscripts to work on, my friend Emily might be swinging through Madison for a few days, plus I signed up for a course.

Somewhere in all that, I’ll be reading the last Harry Potter book. Wish me luck in finding it tomorrow!

Right now, my friend Kendra and I are looking at videos of Tay Zonday. He’s clearly one of America’s brightest young talents. To wit:

And, a response from MC Steinberg:

And, a remix of the original song to heightened emotional effect:

Chocolate rain.

I haven’t updated in a few days because of a variety of things — a hopefully minor but scary health issue at the beginning of the week, writing (a book chapter, a journal paper, two abstracts for two talks, and a proposal for another paper), plus general summer lethargy is finally kicking in. I’m still watching a lot of Italian movies — spaghetti westerns, giallo, etc. I saw Bava’s Black Sunday last night for the first time and it was great, and tonight after Ben’s birthday party I might head up to the last rooftop cinema thing tonight.

But, back to spaghetti westerns, have I mentioned lately that I still love YTMND? Some think it’s played out, I still think it’s hilarious, and I present to you my favorite recent, Leone-meets-Nintendo themed YTMD: Ecstasy of Gold NES.

I busted out laughing when I saw that one. I totally want to play that game! I imagine sharpshooting the noose would be really tough with 8-bit graphics. I bet the Civil War battle cut scene would go on far too long, too.

Finally, in related news, I have decided that within the next year, I will get a cat and name him Tuco Benedito Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez.

(This post will probably only get responses from Austin. Thanks for reading.)

For those of you who don’t know, Doctor Who is the venerable British science fiction institution, in production from 1963 through 1989 and then again since 2005. The latest version (originally starring Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper, then David Tennant and now Freema Agyeman) is a lot of fun — it’s still rather cheesy at times, but also much more witty, self-referential, and clever than most expected. There’s only one more week to go in the current series (in the UK, I don’t believe it airs in the US until late summer), and watching it has been a weekly tradition for me and my friends wherever I am (hi there, Matt and Jill and Chris and Sarah).

Anyway, since the show has come back on the air, they’ve put a “Next Time…” preview of the following week’s episode at the end of each episode. Nothing terribly fancy, nothing terribly special, just a quick-cut set of clips to tease the next week’s episode. What I’ve discovered is that there’s a small community of fans of the classic show (mainly the Tom Baker era, ’74-’81) who are now taking clips from those old shows and remixing them, impressively following the style of the new episode trailers.

First, here’s a “Next Time…” for this season’s “Daleks In Manhattan” (a mediocre episode, but decent trailer):

… and then two of the fake trailers made by YouTube user “Mulett,” who has made the best ones so far, in my opinion. Here’s “Terror of the Zygons” and “The Hand of Fear”:

A couple of other ones have caught my eye, but aren’t embeddable. They are “City of Death” and “The Five Doctors” (I like the clever use of the old logo). There are maybe another dozen of them on YouTube, but most are pretty poorly executed — only Mulett’s really stand out for me as excellent.

I’m not really in the mood to over-intellectualize this obviously media literate activity, but I will note this: This is a very different kind of fan activity than most fan fiction/fan media remixing. That is, some of the traditional interpretations of fan fiction are that they are reappropriations of the original “texts” of a TV show, movie, game, comic, etc. for the purposes of telling a new story, enacting a fantasy (often prurient) which is appealing to some subsection of fans, addressing narrative gaps in the original stories, or all of these. An example of these might be the pervasive sexualized fan fiction of, say, Star Trek or Harry Potter (you know, the tiresome Kirk/Spock or Draco/Ron slash fanfic), or the Doctor Who fanfic which tried to explain why Romana’s regeneration was so different from the Doctor’s.

These videos seem qualitatively different, don’t they? Different from other well-known fan remixes of videos (such as The Phantom Edit, which existed primarily to address and repair the perceived crappiness of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace). If the editors of these short movies are trying to do anything, it seems like they’re probably just having fun with the incongruity of the old Doctor Who series’ style shoehorned into the new Doctor Who series’ style.

And this doesn’t seem to get talked about much — what I’ve read about fan fiction and fan uses of media seems to rely heavily upon the reappropriation of text or story content, and rarely on the style of the editing. This kind of thing somewhat reminds me of the recent spate of trailer remixes (such as the heartwarming remix of The Shining and the zombie remix of West Side Story), but in those cases the creators were expicitly trying to adopt a jarringly different style, for, you know, to make the funny. In these Doctor Who videos, it just seems different to me.

By the way, only one more episode of Doctor Who series 3 is left to air in the UK. This has been one of the best and weirdest seasons yet.

Well, I was on local TV last night.

It was, initially, what you’d probably expect from a local news piece on videogames — a sensationalistic ‘VIDEOGAMES ARE ADDICTIVE AND MIGHT HURT YOUR CHILDREN!” kind of spin (at least from the lead-in by the anchor). But, after the hook, it turned into a collection of short soundbites that actually tried to present a marginally more complex picture, so some credit should go to the reporter and producer for not trying to present a completely skewed piece.

At the very least, I’m happy they included Kurt‘s quote about how those clamoring for videogame addiction diagnoses understand virtually nothing about what games actually are. However, it sure would have been nice if they’d have let me know exactly what the topic of the piece was — instead, it was presented to me as “Hey, can we record you playing games? Do you mind telling us why you like games and how much you play?” kind of thing, which was disingenuous and slightly unethical.

And, oh yeah, I’m the guy playing Guitar Hero. My shirt looks ill-fitted and weird because the lapel mic was stretching it. Plus, my hair looks like ass. And I look fat. But, what’s done is done. I should probably dress less like a slob, even on days in which all I’m expecting to do is sit in my office and write. Ugh, oh well, live and learn?

Here is a link to the news page, along with the piece’s copy. There’s a Flash video player on the right side of the page, and a clip should be accessible to watch from there.

To top it off, I stumbled on the Back To the Future DVD set for $11 at Half Price the other day, splurged and ordered the R2 2-disc set of Hot Fuzz when I found out the US was only getting a single-discer, plus when I saw that the Mario Bava Box V1 was only $20 from Amazon, well, you can guess what I did. Anyway, yeah, movies.

Ever since I gave up on WoW, I’ve found myself spending more time in social MOOs, and hanging out on a few that I hadn’t been on regularly since the Clinton administration. Sometime in the mid-’90s, several of us got into long, in-MOO discussions about movies and, for whatever reason, made lists of our favorite flicks. I just found mine, originally written sometime around ’98 or so, and then revised in ’01. I present it here for your perusal:

SEAN’S MOVIES
=============

2001: A Space Odyssey – Directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1968
All the President’s Men – Directed by Alan J. Pakula, 1976
L’Atalante – Directed by Jean Vigo, 1934
Citizen Kane – Directed by Orson Welles, 1941
The Decline of Western Civilization – Directed by Penelope Spheeris, 1981
The Godfather Part II – Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, 1973
Der Himmel Ueber Berlin – Directed by Wim Wenders, 1988
House of Games – Directed by David Mamet, 1987
It’s a Wonderful Life – Directed by Frank Capra, 1947
Love and Death – Directed by Woody Allen, 1975
My Dinner With Andre – Directed by Louis Malle, 1981
Network – Directed by Sidney Lumet, 1976
The Philadelphia Story – Directed by George Cukor, 1940
Point Blank – Directed by John Boorman, 1968
La Regle du jeu – Directed by Jean Renoir, 1939
Rio Bravo – Directed by Howard Hawks, 1959
Rope – Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1948
Rushmore – Directed by Wes Anderson, 1998
Shichinin no samurai – Directed by Akira Kurosawa, 1954
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan – Directed by Nicholas Meyer, 1982
The Sting – Directed by George Roy Hill, 1973
Sullivan’s Travels – Directed by Preston Sturges, 1941
The Third Man – Directed by Carol Reed, 1949
This is Spinal Tap – Directed by Rob Reiner, 1984

Ok, this list is already beginning to look dated, and rather than revise it, I’ll simply add alternates that would probably be switched in or out of the list of 24 depending on my mood.

Magnolia – Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999
The Graduate – Directed by Mike Nichols, 1967
Miller’s Crossing – Directed by Joel Coen, 1990
Paris, Texas – Directed by Wim Wenders, 1984
Down By Law – Directed by Jim Jarmusch, 1986
Once Upon a Time in the West – Directed by Sergio Leone, 1969
Before Sunrise – Directed by Richard Linklater, 1995
The Great Escape – Directed by John Sturges, 1963
The Idiots – Directed by Lars von Trier, 1998 (?)

So, I find this list pretty amusing — I haven’t watched a bunch of these movies in years and years, and don’t remember being so fond of them that I’d bother putting them down in a list like this. Of the original list, I’m a bit surprised that Wings of Desire and It’s a Wonderful Life made the list. Rope made the list primarily because of the tense staginess of the movie, but how did this make it when Vertigo or The Lady Vanishes or Rear Window didn’t?

More embarassing are the additions in 2001. I was fanatical about Magnolia (saw it three times in the theater) and now just find the movie embarassing. Similarly, Miller’s Crossing is a lot of fun, but ultimately pretty empty, Idioterne was profoundly affecting the first time I saw it, but I can’t say I revisit it that much anymore, and The Graduate and The Great Escape are classics but not films I’d likely put on a list like this today.

I guess I see my movie-watching youth in this list — I was much more entranced by big-budget and modern studio films than I remember, which has morphed into my fascination with late ’60s through mid-’70s American studio pictures (the “American New Wave”). However, I clearly felt much less comfortable with including “guilty pleasures” on the list (c.f., Star Trek II, of course). Lists like these are hallmarks of where one is in life, and what kinds of cinematic experiences resonate the most with you at that particular time, I suppose.

Just for kicks, then, I think I’ll cobble together a new list of “favorite films” — movies I either watch over and over again, or strike me right now (June, 2007) as being ones that mean something to me, presented in no particular order:

The Third Man (Reed)
Rear Window (Hitchcock)
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Altman)
Ugetsu (Mizoguchi)
F for Fake (Welles)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Meyer)
The Gleaners & I (Varda)
Paris, Texas (Wenders)
Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo)
The Conformist (Bertolucci)
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Leone)
L’Atalante (Vigo)
Blow-Up (Antonioni)
Shaun of the Dead (Wright)
The New World (Malick)
Taste of Cherry (Kiarostami)
Jazz on a Summer’s Day (Stern)
Charade (Donen)
Stolen Kisses (Truffaut)

There’s no sense in posing — I’m a rather middle-of-the-road movie connoisseur, defined by largely English-language films. But there’s this weird streak of movies made by Italians in the ’60s and ’70s that I didn’t expect — Antonioni, Leone, Pontecorvo, Bertolucci. Interesting! Maybe in a few years, I’ll revisit this list and see what I still think of it.

As I’ve stated a few times before, I’m a rural Ohio boy. And, while that would probably lead one to think I was more comfortable with nature than most, it’s quite the contrary — there’s nothing to do in rural Ohio, so I’d spend most of my summers sitting in front of the television, watching movies on those inevitable “we’ll give you HBO and Showtime for free for a week!” promotions they used to do.

So, it’s appalling, I know, but I never went to a drive-in movie (that I can recall) before 2005, when my former student and friend Thad and I saw Batman Begins at the Holiday Auto Theatre between Hamilton and Oxford, Ohio. The quality of outdoors films in general were pretty bad in both Bowling Green and Oxford, typically just the same old “family fun” movies which are, let’s be honest, very fun for the whole family, but … I don’t have kids, so not so fun for me.

Now I live in Madison, and while it’s not all that much bigger, it’s at least a notch up in terms of quality of outdoor movie series. Tonight, I went to the first night of the “Rooftop Cinema” series at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. It was a measly $5 (plus $4 for a beer) to see some wildly entertaining experimental short science fiction films. The highlights were the amazingly ’70s and clearly very gay sci-fi film Dwarf Star by Michael Kuchar, and the classic Chris Marker film, La Jetée. I snapped a shot of La Jetée, capturing one still switching into another:

Next week is animated films, and I’ll probably go.

Also, this week, the University is starting up its “Lakeside Cinema” series, screening disaster films this summer, right on Lake Mendota. Most of the movies aren’t terribly interesting to me, but I’ll definitely be there for King Kong Vs. Godzilla on July 9th and Shaun of the Dead on August 6th. I’ve seen Shaun more times than any movie of the past 5 or 6 years (maybe about twenty or thirty times by this point?) but I’ve never seen it on the a big screen.

Finally, I’m going to be heading to New Jersey and New York City this summer for a series of talks and then a short visit with friends. Today, I noticed that I’ll be there for a free screening of The Sting in Bryant Park during their Summer Film Festival. Lucky me!

Anyway, as more exciting venues to watch movies outside develops, I’ll post more. I sort of wish Madison had a thriving guerilla drive-in movement, but maybe they don’t really need one? I have a voluminous movie collection, plus access to a projector, but not the cojones to organize and do it.

Yet.

I posted recently about the Deep Discount sale, as I always do — I don’t mind giving that company free “advertising” (c’mon, maybe five people regularly read this weblog anyway), and that got me thinking about my stupid DVD collection. I linked to it in the previous post, so click on that if you want to see what I’ve got. I’m facing waves of disgust over my consumption practices and second-order blahs over the fact that I’ve bought so many movies that I have not seen. Why did I ever do this? I had a real salary for a few years and living in rural Ohio is pretty lonely, folks.

At any rate, this post is about a realization I’ve made re: my DVD collection. Many of you know about The Criterion Collection, a DVD company based out of New York who, bar none, produce the most lavish DVDs imaginable. There’s the 3-disc Battle of Algiers — one disc for the movie and extras relating to the film, one disc of extras relating to Pontecorvo, and one disc of extras relating to the political implications of the film. Or, say, the Criterion edition of Dazed & Confused, with gatefold sleeve, a fantastic little book of retrospectives, extras ranging from a great commentary track to the first screen tests of a bunch of the young actors discovered for that movie. Criterion has, for years now, made the very best DVDs.

I counted up my personal collection of Criterion movies today and it’s 115. Then, I went onto the Criterion site and looked up how many Criterion films (owned by me or not) that I had seen — it was only 76. I haven’t gone through my personal collection yet to see how many of these amazing, awesome films I haven’t had the time to watch yet, but it’s at the very least 40 DVDs. Forty expensive, lavishly produced DVDs. This isn’t exactly buyer’s remorse, but it’s something close.

So, here’s another new set of goals of mine — Goal #1: I’m going to watch every single one of the Criterion films I own by the end of this summer. That includes the Criterion edition of Armageddon — yes, I own this, though I’m not sure why — through the Criterion edition of Roeg and Bowie’s The Man Who Fell To Earth. I started off tonight by finally watching Withnail & I. A really fascinating flick, and one that wasn’t exactly what I expected… I suppose I was looking for something a little more lowbrow and a little less stage-y. Grant, McGann, and Griffiths were all absolutely wonderful, but there were times that the verbosity of the characters didn’t seem to ring true, and that the dialogue became so self-conscious that it drew me out of the film. I understand its place as a cult film and in furthering the myth that is Richard E. Grant, but it was really Richard Griffiths who stood out for me. That man is amazing.

On to Goal #2: I will aim to watch every single Criterion Collection film I have not seen. If I watched two a week, it would take me over four or five years to see them all (including the films released during those four or five years I was watching older ones!), so I’ll probably have to start watching soon, and frequently. Tomorrow night: Either Knife On the Water or (gasp) Armageddon.

On top of all of that, there are some great films on the way. A few weeks ago, they hinted that a Criterion version of Godard’s Breathless was in the works, and today they hinted that a Criterion version of Malick’s Days of Heaven is coming, too — the locusts and the “magic hour” image above was in their most recent newsletter (the typical way they hint at new releases). A swarm of locusts feature quite prominently in Malick’s lustrous and glowing film (which was often shot by cinematographer Néstor Almendros during the “magic hour,” or the 30 minutes or so just after the sun has set and the sky is still lit).

A few more upcoming Criterion discs I’m dying to get my grubby, wasteful hands on:

I’m excited. Tomorrow, I write a book chapter all day, then watch another Criterion film! And I might finally finish Wind Waker!

Well, it’s that time of year again. In early June and early December, Deep Discount runs its 20% off all DVDs sale. If you paid attention to previous versions of this weblog, you might have seen me post detailed lists of my semi-annual “DVD haul,” but not this time. I’m too poor to really partake of the sale in a big way anymore, and I’ve also maxed out on DVDs! I own far, far too many, have only bought a handful since December, and am now trying to liquidate a few hundred (here is a relatively up-to-date list of what I still own).

But, that’s not going to stop me from recommending a DVD box set. Today, the “new” The Sergio Leone Anthology comes out in the U.S., and it looks to be an amazing box set. I’ve been a nut about spaghetti westerns for years now, and was always perplexed why they had such terrible, terrible Region 1 releases. Leone’s five classic Westerns were: A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time In the West and Duck You Sucker/A Fistful of Dynamite. The first three were very early DVD releases and showed it — non-anamorphic prints, crappy sound, no commentaries, and really no substantive extras, period. Once Upon a Time In the West was treated to a wonderful 2-disc release, but as far as I know, the American release of A Fistful of Dynamite was just as crappy as the “Man With No Name” movies.

Several years ago, a new, restored and wonderful 2-disc edition of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly showed up in the U. S., but nothing else seemed imminent. I was confused by this, and became even more confused when I traveled to Europe last summer — I figured that these Italian films might have some decent Italian DVDs, but nope. I struck out completely in Rome, and was confused why one of my favorite genres was virtually ignored in their country of origin. Italians made these, but had yet to release decent editions of Leone’s films, while America (where the movies are set) had eschewed them as well. What the hell?

Compounding the confusion, when I went to England last summer, I found the best imaginable DVD releases of the first three films! Two-disc editions with commentaries, extras (such as the 1970s TV movie new introduction to A Fistful of Dollars starring Harry Dean Stanton which only aired once!) and other ephemera. They’d been out in the UK for at least a year or two at that point (!) and so I was able to snag A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More for about £5 apiece (HMV at Gatwick — duty-free DVDs!) Not too shabby, consisdering the quality of the films and the quality of the DVD treatment.

But why Britain? What is it about England and spaghetti westerns that these films would have such a treatment there first? I assume much of it must be thanks to the influence of Sir Christopher Frayling — his book on Leone and his great coffee table book on the Leone westerns are some of the best English-language popular criticism I’ve read on these films:

It’s no coincidence to me that Frayling does the commentary on A Fistful of Dollars — and maybe For a Few Dollars More, but I don’t recall. Additionally, I wonder if there’s some kind of weird fascination with westerns still abuzz in some corners of the British popular consciousness? The ending of Hot Fuzz is certainly an homage to Leone in part, and films such as Once Upon a Time In the Midlands are evoking the same. I don’t know where this comes from, but I’m happy someone’s doing it.

This is all a long roundabout way of saying I’m thankful that those UK editions have finally made it to the United States (they’re the same as the releases in this box set). I ended up ordering the new version of Duck, You Sucker, both because I’m a completist and because I really don’t like the American, trimmed down version A Fistful of Dynamite and want to finally see the original Italian cut:

If you’re interested in buying any of the movies I mentioned here, they’re pretty cheap at Deep Discount right now. $49 and change shipped for the Leone box set (that’s aroud $18 cheaper than Amazon), and the Once Upon a Time in the West 2-discer (the only Leone Western not included in the box) is less than $6, I think. Just put in “DVDTALK” for the promotional code on your shopping cart page, and it will take off 20% of your whole order.

Enjoy!

This week was the 30th anniversary of the release of the first Star Wars movie. Thirty years! I’m having a hard time fully digesting that fact — I remember going to see the movie as a seven-year-old in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with my family. We went to Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips for dinner before the movie and, later, my then four-year-old brother got scared by the sound of explosions and cried the whole way through the movie. But, I loved it — what little kid in the late ’70s didn’t love the original Star Wars flicks? (That’s me in the middle, above, sporting the Star Wars shirt, sitting between our childhood friend Kevin on the left and my brother Dave on the right, at Kevin’s birthday party I think).

I saw Star Wars (no, not Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, the name was Star Wars) only three or four times in the theater. I say “only,” simply because it was terribly common for kids of my generation to go back again and again to see the movies over and over and over, both during the summer of the original release, then when the first movie was rereleased in, I think, 1979 or 1980 just previous to The Empire Strikes Back (no, not Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back). My memories of the first Star Wars are not about action figures and comic books as much as they are of the Dairy Queen, and cornfields in the summer, of arguing about Boba Fett by the jungle jim at recess more than pretending to be a Jedi. Living in a small Ohio town in the late ’70s and early ’80s, it’s all a jumble of nostalgia at this point.

Anyway, it’s strange being an adult and thinking back on all of this. Greg Costikyan’s recent post encapsulates a lot of how I think of these movies and their impact on popular culture — wonderfully fun, but lacking even back in the original presentation of the movies. As one ages, one finds more and more problems with the films, which makes their endurance as popular culture powerhouses even more strange to me. David Brin’s breakdown of the unsavory political subtexts within the Star Wars flicks (written shortly after The Phantom Menace, I think) still bears reading. And, of course, is always very entertaining fodder for fan discussions.

Regardless, at least Lucas finally did the right thing (sort of) and released all three original films — albeit packaged with the “Special Edition” nonsense — back last Fall. They aren’t anamorphic prints, the discs are barebones, but whatever, they’re the original, original films: Greedo doesn’t shoot first, there are no shots of Coruscant, and there are plenty of “yubnubs” to go around at the end. I bought it immediately, then watched the original versions of Star Wars and Empire, but haven’t forced myself to watch Return of the Jedi yet. For all the amount of talk on this weblog I devote to nerdy obsessions from my childhood, I actually very rarely go for things solely because they’re “collectible,” but did in this case, spending an extra $10 to get the decorative tin the movies came in:

Anyway, yeah, three decades, two good movies, and some merchandise out of the lot. I’m old and jaded, I guess.

I miss the Dairy Queen and 1977.

I’ve now seen Hot Fuzz twice, and as you might expect, loved it even more the second time. For those of you who don’t know me in the real world (or from various online forums), I’ve been obsessed with the comedy of Messrs. Wright, Pegg, and Frost for a few years now, anticipating Hot Fuzz with bated breath. The first viewing wasn’t exactly a let-down, but wasn’t exactly what I expected. With a second viewing under my belt, I think it’s nearly the equal of their first film, Shaun Of the Dead.

Here’s the thing, though — both Spaced (their fantastic, fantastic Channel 4 comedy from a few years back) and Shaun featured relatively normal, uh, “losers with hearts of gold” thrown into surreal and sometimes crazy situations. There was a core of relative normalcy to the characters that carried them through the ridiculous situations (ranging from, in Spaced, punching out a male performance artist named “Vulva” while hallucinating zombies to… well, fighting real zombies). For the beginning of the zombie episode of Spaced, check this out:

In Hot Fuzz, right off the bat, we’re told that Pegg’s character, Nicholas Angel, is a nearly superhuman supercop who is then thrown into the belly of (apparent) normalcy in the sleepy West Country town of Sandford. I’m not sure that works quite as well, at least not with these actors. There’s something affably schlubby about Pegg on screen and seeing him try to be a hardass was jarring at first — the first viewing, I couldn’t stop laughing every time they cut to Pegg running.

The second viewing, though, is where I really noticed the writing. You can see how they leave hints for later gags earlier on in the movie (Shaun‘s “next time I see you, you’re dead” line, or Hot Fuzz‘s use of the swan). Something about how they write pays off multiple viewings, so it’s not much surprise that the reviews weren’t stellar (while generally positive). I dunno, I’m not sure I can fairly characterize this in a blog post, but there’s something about the repetition of these gags that makes them so, so much funnier (the second viewing, I busted out laughing at an otherwise unfunny line, when Stephen Merchant says “slender NECK”). On the DVD for Shaun, they included a “flip chart” (filmed right after Wright and Pegg had finished the screenplay), showing a glimpse of the story before they filmed it. I hope something like ends up on the Hot Fuzz DVD, too.

Finally, the extended set piece at the end of the film — from the granny kicking through the Godzilla-like stomping around the model village — worked fantastically for me. Wright should just go ahead and make a real, sans-comedy action film, just to see what it would be like. The end of Shaun was jarring to a number of friends of mine, who like their zed-word movies full of lots of spoofing but apparently can’t handle a little disemboweling. I think Wright and Pegg work best when they veer away from mockery into doing genuinely kickass genre work. I’d love to see Wright do a straight-up version of his Grindhouse fake trailer, “Don’t,” for instance:

Mainly because I think it’d be fun to see Mark Gatiss and Rafe Spall eviscerated on screen. (Grindhouse deserves its own entry, and I’ll try to do that soon).

Anyway, re: Hot Fuzz, here‘s a nice roundup from last month on my favorite film blog, the Greencine Daily, with more mixed reaction than I would like. I’m curious, were most of these reviewers to see the movie a second time, do you they’d enjoy it more? I did.