Simon Wistow’s blog

You know, I almost forgot today was monday. Again.

I was convinced that for part of this video Gaz wore an Ushanka

An Ushanka, yesterday

quirkafleeg

I actually forgot that yesterday was Monday. I can't decide if that's tragic or not. sigh

I have a soft spot for Mark Romanek videos - especially the sublime "Hurt" for Johnny Cash, "99 Problems" for Jay-Z (although for the last I couldn't really tell you quite why) and the fantastically creepy "Closer" for Nine Inch Nails. No body seems to do lurking menace quite as well as him. Two of his videos - "Closer" and "Bedtime Story" for Madonna - are in the permanent collection at MOMA in New York (although I have to admit I don't really like either the track or the video of Madonna one).

One thing about his work - it ages incredibly well.

It kind of blows my mind that that video is 11 years old - if you showed it to me blind you'd have no problems convincing me that it's was a completely contemporary promo.

And like the rest of Romanek's work it's achingly stylish - hell, I hate 70s retro chic and yet watching this I find that suddenly it looks appealing.

And Ms Apple - worryingly thin yes (the New Yorker described her as "looking like an underfed Calvin Klein model") but somehow a seamless blend of coquettish innocence and wanton knowing. It's not often that you see a someone who manages to project remorse and relish at the same time.

Tell a lie  -  dogs do it when you catch them eating something they shouldn't but it's not quite the same, is it?

Once, in art class at school, I tried to bluff past my suckiness at the aesthetic by claiming I was creating modern, abstract peices whereby my teacher primly told me that you have to be good before you can break the rules. I think I probably responded that I was TIRED of these philistines not appreciating my work and that their insistence in wallowing in their own moribund, bourgeois notions of the same tired art clichés was bringing on a attack of the vapours.

I spent a lot of time in detention at school. A lot. Those who know me are, at this very moment, failing to feign surprise.

Anyway ...

If you are not a fan of the Warp records oeuvre then most of the output by bands like Autechre can sound like so much white noise. Don't believe me? Check out this video for "Grantz Graf"- it sounds like a skipping record. I'm being serious.

And yet it's strangely mesmerising.

Now I'm not nearly hip enough to be one of the people who really gets Autechre but I do kind of appreciate it. I even, through an series of events, have a copy of Gescom on mini-disc.

I also have a soft spot for Tom "Squarepusher" Jenkinson, another Warp artist,  who is also an accomplished 'classical' musician who fuses jazz with more abstract breaks and fast cut-ups. It's more accessible than Autechre but still pretty challenging stuff  -yet the jazz heritage clearly shines through. Like jazz itself it takes the rules and creatively breaks them.

Like my teacher was trying to point out - if you know the rules well enough then you can take risks with them, skirt the boundaries. There are obvious echoes to this in the world of molecular gastronomy which, by going back to fundamentals axioms, Principia Mathematica style, has produced results from the sublime to the shocking.

In music, squatting menacingly on both ends of that spectrum is the malevolent grin of Richard D. James.

Richard D James

It's funny - some people strive to be cool, to be known. They blow huge amounts of money, the go to all the hip parties, they make the right friends. They try. But some people are just naturally cool and some people are cool because they don't want to be.

And some people end up with a mythos.

There are stories about Richard James. That he owns a tank and a Russian submarine (true, apparently). That he owns the silver structure in the middle of Elephant and Castle roundabout (false). That he was once woken up by a courier from a record label wanting a remix he'd promised so he ran upstairs and grabbed a random DAT tape and the record company didn't notice the difference. That at 11 he created sound from a ZX81(which has no sound hardware) by using it to retune the video signal and cause different pitched hums from the cathode ray tube in the TV it was connected to.

Some of these stories he starts, some of them are started about him. Some of them are true. Some of them aren't.

Who cares? This is man who encodes image in tracks so that they're only visible using a spectogram viewer. A man who produces practically unlistenable glitches, squelches and bleeps and yet also manages to get to number 16 in the charts.

With songs like these.

Readers of a nervous disposition should probably just go watch a Norah Jones video.

of which James said

'Come to Daddy' came about while I was just hanging around my house, getting pissed and doing this crappy death metal jingle. Then it got marketed, and a video was made, and this little idea that I had, which was a joke, turned into something huge. It wasn't right at all.

The video for Windowlicker fits in 44 uses of the word "fuck" in under four minutes, averaging out at about 1 every 3 seconds. Both it and Come to Daddy were directed by Chris Cunningham who got his start doing the puppets for Spitting Image and later, the sculpture and animatronics for Alien³ and followed up Come to Daddy with the rather more mainstream Frozen video for Madonna.

To put it another way, it's Not Safe for Work. You've been warned.  It's also 10 minutes long but worth every second.

 
If you're not the kind of anal retentive like me who actually counted all the windows on the limo - there are 38.

And the French sample half way through is James' then French girlfriend and roughly translates as "I like to shag my dog" albeit in mildly obscure slang.

...

I like to think of myself as sort of an educational service. Not a very good one mind you, but a service none the less.

For some reason which completely baffles me I had Luscious Jackson's "Naked Eye" stuck in my head all yesterday. ALL of yesterday. But not all of the song. Just the hook. Over and over and over and over again.

No idea where it came from or why it lodged itself in my cerebellum but it turns out to be pretty good to snowboard too so I can't really complain. Plus you've got to love a song that starts off "Wearing nothing is divine, naked is a state of mind, I take things off to clear my head, to say the things I haven't said".

I have no recollection of ever buying a single Luscious Jackson record yet, a few years back a friend of mine was looking through my CD collection absent mindedly and commented that I didn't seem like the kind of person who would own every album. And apparently I did - not only that but one of them had my name written on the back of the back cover and another had a post-it note in my handwriting on the inside so it's not like there's any kind of plausible deniability or anything. 

To be honest it's not hard to see why I like them - textured tracks with strong bass lines and a judiciously healthy  dollop of electronic breaks and plenty of tempo and key changes which translate strangely well to an acoustic set

Named after a mispronunciation of Lucious "Luke" Jackson, a Philidephia 76ers player, their first concert was opening for The Beastie Boys and Cypress Hill and they were the first band to sign for the Beaties' Grand Royale label. So clearly they get respect.

Plus I could totally crush on Gabby Glaser.

Yet oddly I find their videos infuriating - especially "Ladyfingers" but even, to a lesser extent, "Naked Eye"^[*] - and I HAVE NO IDEA WHY.

In that way I suppose they're the complete opposite of Feeder's "Just A Day" which despite having all the ingredients present that would normally make me start frothing at the mouth I find strangely captivating and could (and have) watched repeatedly for a unhealthy amount of time.

As if further proof was needed that I am Wrong in the Brain, inexplicably the Luscious Jackson clip is the only advert that Gap have ever done that hasn't immediately sent me into a paroxysms of  tooth grinding fury.

Yes, in case you were wondering. I was dropped on the head as a child. Thank you for asking.

So the Interwebs have been all a twitter (literally I suppose) about the Infocom archive. A million others will comment on it but I have a larger point to make.

The complete nerd in me is all squeefull. Stuff like this is interesting and deserves not to be lost. Hearing the story behind stuff like this is both entertaining and also informative and instructional - like the Post Mortems at Gamasutra.

But there's another part of me that's kind of annoyed by it.

It didn't really occur to me that Andy Baio wouldn't have at least tried to get in contact with the people involved. The post obviously had a lot of effort put into it so he wasn't rushing to release anything before the attack lawyers kicked his door in or anything.

He claims to be an independent journalist and, as someone who had a sniff at the jobbing journo thing (sadly the only thing I walked away with from that period of my life was a raging booze thirst and the ability to vomit up press releases like a freak show performer),  I know that's the thing you do - you check your sources. You get corroboration and comment. For a start that just plain polite - you know, the sort of thing a decent human being does. For fuck's sake those emails were written 20 years ago when passions were high. The people involved were probably very different people 5 minutes after they wrote the emails let alone 2 fucking decades.

Moreover it also makes for a better story - there will be more information, more body, a better balanced piece. Good journalism should try and be neutral and discover both sides of the story otherwise you end up with useless pap filled with demagoguery and dogmatic crap like Fox News and Michael Moore.

But you can kind of excuse Andy because, well,  when you're that excited and you can only see the good side of something you kind of get caught up with the rush and I can genuinely believe he didn't think he was doing anything wrong.

And then the people involved turned up in the comments. This is good. This is the great thing about the web. Most of them showed cautious approval and/or pointed out a couple of mistakes. Michael Bywater pointed out that he wasn't upset more just disappointed that Andy hadn't contacted him or anyone else and points out that there was plenty more information to be had. In a slight, but in my opinion anyway, completely understandable bit of pique he signs off

"There's a lot more where that came from but not for you, Mr Baio. You should have asked nicely."

Sadly, at this point, the screaming fucktards from the Queen's own 1st Royal Batallion of Internet Dicks arrive on the scene like a thousand drooling, poop-flinging monkeys - ululating and howling and generally lowering the IQ of the place by a cold 50 points.

Let's examine some of their crimes against sense shall we? Now I admit that these are cherry picked but I'm making a point here and they're by no means in the minority.

"Get over it, Bywater. How long are you going to sulk about the past?" - Mark Miller

Err, as long as people keep bringing it up?

"Yes it would have been better to contact those involved but if they hadn't responded, or they said no then what?" - Robert McGovern

You do what any other journalist does - note the fact that couldn't be contacted. You've at least made an effort.

"Michael Bywater, while I understand your point, you also have to understand the weblog community in general. Yes, this is not cutting journalism in any sense of the word, it is a fantastic insight from raw un-filtered data." - sKurt

Various other people on that thread have made all these points and made them well. My broader point is with sKurts "You have to understand the broader weblog community" assertion and with comments like

"The world needs less "journalists" and more "uploaders". Journalists are people who corrupt the information with their own opinions and misunderstandings, making it hard to get at the truth. Give me raw data any day." - Anonymous

and

"I'm grateful Andy Baio published this stuff without going through any red tape. Had he informed and consulted everyone in advance, there probably wouldn't have been a blog post at all and we'd still be in the dark about Milliways." - Jan

Rather like the games industry itself the blog world needs to grow the fuck up. The increase in personal publishing has proved to be incredibly powerful and has started to wreak the changes that the Cluetrain Manifesto called for nearly 10 years ago. Being unfettered from corporate and government agenda is a hugely good thing. Look at the political dissidents blogging from Indonesia, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, China and Russia. From the people honestly talking about the mistakes and inside scoops from within Microsoft and Wall Street.

About 7 years ago I was involved with an abortive effort to write an anonymous leaks site for games journalists. Games Magazines live and die by their exclusives and, more so then, their ability to stick demoes on Cover Discs. If you gave a bad review to an Triple-A title then suddenly your advertising disappears. You hear rumours, get exclusives and you can't print them because you'll lose your job. This is not journalism. It's the opposite of journalism.

Penny Arcade - Kane and Lynch

This is where blogging and online journalism can help. But being an immature dickwad who can't distinguish between "the real truth", a biased story and common courtesy is actively hurting the cause they claim to be so passionate about.

And to be frank they can go fuck themselves.

san francisco: do a start up
london: start an experimental music group utilising only the sid chips from old c64s

san francisco: easy to get to the beach, the mountains, sonoma, napa or marin
london: easy to fly to europe

san francisco: french laundry
london: fat duck

san francisco: meet at zeitgeist or toronados or gestalt
london: meet at one of a bazillion pubs

san francisco: muni is cheap but slow and limited
london: tube is expensive but fast and pervasive

san francisco: one hundred years is a long time
london: one hundred miles is a long way

san francisco: profusion of white people with expensive cameras
london: profusion of white people with expensive cameras

san francisco: sushi
london: fish'n'chips

san francisco: "oh, you want to meet larry and sergei, they'll be at my next party"
london: "oh, you want to meet warren ellis and neil gaiman, they'll be at my next party"

san francisco: do a messaging website of use only to your friends in san francisco, london and helsinki
london: do a travel website of use only to your friends in san francisco, london and helsinki

san francisco: polyamorous techutropians
london: polyamorous goths

san francisco: breakfast burritos the size of your head
london: doorstep bacon butties

san francisco: therapy
london: misanthropy

san francisco: christian fascist goverment elected by naïve evangelicals
london: secular fascist goverment elected by naïve idealists

san francisco: expats saying they'll never go back
london: expats saying they'll never go back

san francisco: governed by a body-builder with a talent for self-promotion
london: governed by a bald-man with a talent for self-promotion

san francisco: fixies
london: bromptons

san francisco: people convinced that it's their birthright to change the world one social network at a time
london: people too drunk to realise they're changing the world

san francisco: echo chamber
london: circle jerk

It's a shame when good songs get over used. Moby's "Play" has the dubious distinction of being the first album that had every single one of its tracks licensed for an advert, movie or tv show. Hell, even Track 1 of the B-Sides album was used in the opening sequence of "Gone in 60 Seconds". But that does that mean it's a bad album - on the contrary doesn't that mean that it was a good album with absolutely no fillers in it?

To a lesser extent you get albums like Morcheeba's "Big Calm" which it seemed like everyone had played constantly to the point that, well, you got sick of it. There are only so many times you can hear "Down by the Sea" before each listen becomes an exercise in savage teeth grinding.

"Clubbed to Death" was kind of like that. Except, for all the over-exposure, I still love the song and I love this video.

I love the style, I love the theme and I love the ending. Although part of me wonders  if there were two post houses working on it simultaneously because some of the vfx are great yet some of the compositing is terrible. The colour palette reminds me strongly of being in Australia - particularly Sydney and Byron Bay all blown out pastel colours and strong, flat, white sunlight. Lying on a beach yesterday with the same sort of light, looking at the water through wind gnarled pine trees I had a moment of temporal dislocation and spatial dissonance.

My digressions ... let me show them to you.

"Clubbed to Death" was a slow burner - it'd been around on the UK club scene since 1995 but it wasn't until the Matrix came out in 1999 that it really started getting exposure and Dougan didn't release his Album "Furious Angels" until 2002.

To be pedantic the version that everyone knows as "Clubbed to Death" is in fact a remix called the "Kurayamino variation" or "The Variation of Darkness" - くらやみ (kurayami) meaning darkness in Japanese and の (no) being the possessive suffix (I think - I didn't do very well in Latin at school. Or Japanese at night school to be honest. Or school if I'm being brutally fair.)

Aaaanyway.

So, yes, the Kurayamino variation is a witty (I'm using the word 'witty' in the academic sense rather than in a Eddie Izzard, ROTFL, LOL sense) play on Elgar's Enigma Variations - the string movement at the start is from the first movement and the piano parts are Rob Dougan's own but are thematically inspired by the visible Theme and variations 1 and 2. Moreover the various remixes of Clubbed to Death are an echo of Elgar's own project - for example Clubbed to Death 2's classical part is built around Chopin's "Prelude No.4 in E-minor" and the "Abyssal Mix" was first reversed before any editing was done.  The whole song, according to a Dougan himself was inspired by the works of the writer Yasunari Kawabata, the film maker Yasujiro Ozu and the musician Rijuichi (Ryuichi) Sakamoto.

So there you go  - hopefully you now know something you didn't when you woke up this morning. And as we all know from GI Joe cartoons - "Knowledge is Power and Knowing is Half the Battle!". Now we have to stand and laugh as the comic side kick gets their tongue stuck to an icy lamppost or is accidentally buggered by an errant doberman or something.

For a year I didn't buy any games. Over a year actually. Partly this was because I had a stack of things to get through and finish but also because I was going to be moving sometime and would need to sell off my modern consoles.

So I gamed vicariously. Passive aggressive playing.

One of the things that was funny, from the outside looking in, was that Portal seemed to be such a huge success. Ok, so the people I know tend to be geeks but there was something about Portal that seemed to transcend normal trends. People who  wouldn't normally talk about games were cooing over Weighted Companion Cube cakes. "The cake is a lie" was everywhere. From my self imposed exile it was kind of baffling. Why this game? Why now? Even Yahtzee couldn't think of anything bad to say.

So, as part of my rehabilitation I bought the Orange Box last weekend.

Everything everyone said is true.

...

Gosh that felt good to say.

We Wuv Weighted Comanion Cube

So this is my review, a little late to the party but bear with me for I have brain items to lob at you.

First off, it's short. I thought I'd finished the training missions but that was the whole game (short of doing the XBL Achievements and the Advanced versions of the levels). But that's ok because because I got, like, 30 other games in the pack so  I'm not fussed. I mean, I kind of wish that it had been maybe 5 or so levels longer but only because I was enjoying it so really it's no bad thing - always leave them begging for more as an old dominatrix friend of mine used to say. Of course then she tried to attack my balls with a cheese grater but it was meant in an affectionate way.

Secondly the difficulty level is pitched just right. I was never stuck thinking WTF do I do now or grinding my teeth in frustration whilst composing harshly worded missives to the internet at large. Part of that is the respawn points - at one point I got hit by a glowing ball or fell into some acid or something and though "Bollocks, now I'm going to have to do that last bit again. Bugger this, I'm going to watch some TV instead." but NO! I didn't have to do it again. I was placed back at the start of the sub puzzle I'd just fallen a cropper of. And so from being just about to switch off I ended playing right through to the end. Genius!

Remember that bit, I'm going to come back to it later.

Now let's talk aesthetics. Now to be frank I don't like the way that Source, the Half Life engine, looks. It's a personal thing and it's certainly not going to stop me playing a game. It's not that I don't think it's not good, I just don't like the style. But that's not the aesthetic I'm talking about.

Aesthetic is the whole package. What would Rez be without the styling? Probably not half as fun. And this doesn't mean that graphics should trump game play but that it should enhance it instead. Look at Doom 3 for example (which I suppose could actually be an argument either way).

With Portal it's the graphics but more it's also the humour - the cold, pitch black humour which has spawned all the in jokes. I'm contemplating purchasing a WCC tshirt and a series of Aperture motivational posters. From a game that was shorter than an average length film and had about 60 lines of dialogue. WTF? I mean seriously. I felt bad for the gun turrets FFS. I am not an overly emotional man, prone to tears, hootings, ululations, renting of hair or tearing of clothes yet I felt guilty for flipping over something that was SHOOTING BULLETS AT ME. What sort of witchcraft is this?

So we have a novel game mechanic, slick presentation, jet black jokes and a pitch perfect difficulty curve. And we can see how these things combine to become more than the whole by going back and downloading Narbacular Drop which, since it's by the same people who did Portal before Valve cannily hired them all, exactly the same game. Just
not nearly as good.

Narbacular Drop

It's like one of those dream experiments where they have identical twins and lock one in a all white room and raise one normally and then take them paintballing on their 13th birthday or something. Not my dream you understand, just a theoretical gedanken experiment. I just mean that we can quantitatively measure the positive effects of a unified aesthetic when combined with a game play mechanism.

Aaaaaaaaanyway.

Something bothered me though. And I couldn't quite put my finger on it. And so I mulled. Which is actually pretty hard to do actively. Mulling is a essentially a passive activity but, with practice one can mull actively without straying into "thinking" territory.

And at some point,  it dawned on me, round about the 8th or 9th mug of tea of the day.

Sure Portal is good. But actually, in a way, only the game play mechanic and the humour are exceptional. Prey had a similar game play mechanic and it's not considered a modern classic. There have been other funny games but it doesn't guarantee them legend status.

It's that whole package again and the fact that Portal stands out as a shining beacon in a sea of mediocre turds.

Not to dismiss Valve's remarkable achievement but Portal is made to look extra special because 99% of other games released are self indulgent crap. Look back at that point that I said I'd come back to. I was praising the fact that Portal didn't actively piss me off. How fucked up is that? I know that balancing game play is an art rather than a science but if you're no good at you're job then you should be fired. We don't go watch a film, realise that it's boring and then say "Well, editing  the film to smooth out the pacing and heighten emotions is a difficult skill to master so I'll just put up with it". We don't look idly out the window as our plane plummets groundwards thinking "You know what, I'm going to give the pilot a break because, gosh darn it, this flying stuff is pretty tricky all round".

Fuck that shit.

We've put up with lame ass games for too long. With poorly designed pieces of crap that are derivative and generic and padded with repetitious, derivative, clichéd levels in order to justify the ever more ludicrous price tag. We've become so brain washed that we confuse lens flare and bloom for aesthetic.

Sod that, as they say in my country, for a game of toy soldiers.

If there's one thing my year in exile has taught me is that I can go with games for a year like some sort of Camelus dromedarius ludens and so now I'm going to do something radical - I'm only going to play games that are fun and if nothing comes out  that tickles my fancy then there's always Rock Band and Mr Driller to  tide me over.

The best laid plans of mice and men etc etc - I had a whole post written in my head and then the overdue sproggling of two of my dearest friends chose today to log in to the great MMORPG that we call "Life'.

However, since Adam, the Stamen bearing member of the Dynamic Duo, has long been my conduit to purest RAWK(!)  I felt compelled to dump a little bit of metal magic and mayhem.

So please raise your hands unto the symbol of the horns and prepare to rock out. With your cock out if you are so equipped and such inclined.