Front Cover | MP3s

1. Running Crazy - Phoenix vs. Gnarls Barkley
2. Simple X - Andrew Bird
3. 2080 - Yeasayer
4. Kids - MGMT
5. Gender Bombs - The Stills
6. Friend of Mine - The National
7. Dashboard - Modest Mouse
8. Anne Elephant - Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin
9. The Taming of the Hands that Came Back to Life - Sunset Rubdown
10. The Passenger - Iggy Pop
11. We Were Born the Mutants Again with Leafling - Of Montreal
12. Challengers - The New Pornographers

This disc began as “LA LA LA,” a mix with songs where the lyrics “broke down” - abandoning words in favor of chanting and ululating. As I chose songs, however, it became clear that there was a secondary feeling at work. That the lyrics fell out of the song not because the singer couldn’t think of anything to sing - but because, at that point, there was nothing that could be sung. This disc is the sound of not knowing what to say.

Coming soon: I’m getting nervous

Phonogram by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie

Short review: Phonogram author Kieron Gillen invented New Games Journalism. NGJ is bollocks. Phonogram is good enough that I forgive Gillen for NGJ.

Phonogram is the story of Dave Kohl, unlikeable bastard and powerful phonomancer. Remember those times when you heard a song and it just plain changed your life? You might have been filled with inexplicable joy and wonder. You might have experienced a sudden oracular divination. You might have just be hypnotized for two hours as you listened to the song on “repeat.” Music is power, and phonomancers use this power to weave eldritch spells of weird intent.

This actually makes a lot of sense.

Kohl’s phonomancer identity is centered around Britannia, goddess of Britpop, risen in 1964 and returned in 1995. It was this second renaissance, during Kohl’s formative teenage years, that opened Kohl’s eyes to the power of pop music. But now someone or something is messing with the timeline, causing Kohl’s memory and taste to get all jumbled up and threatening to undo the very foundations of the British scene. So Kohl has to find out who, and why, and ideally stop them.

Phonomancer is extremely specifically about the Britpop summers of 1995 and 1996, when Blur vs. Oasis was more important than any conflict in the Middle East, and Pulp released Different Class and it became impossible to remember what music was like before Common People. The book is absolutely steeped in references to minor and sub-minor bands from the era. Each of the six issue covers is a subversive riff on a crucial album from the era (Wikipedia annotates). The OCD-level name-dropping would be obnoxious, save for two factors: a witty glossary for us poor lost Americans, and the fact that Phonogram is only using Britpop as the canvas for its tale of music, obsession, and nostalgia gone wrong. The authors have joked in interviews that were Phonogram to be made into a movie, it would be about grunge and set in America–but have also added that the story would lose anything in translation.

Like all good music, Britpop changed the lives of Phonogram’s characters. But was Britpop about anything? Or was it just about selling lots of records to a lot of people hopped up, as Cocker put it, on E’s and whizz? That’s the fundamental question of the story: how can you center your life around something that, in the grand scheme of things, might not be important?

Manic Street Preacher’s The Holy Bible was a pivotal Britpop album that never saw U.S. release due to the untimely disappearance of their guitarist, Richey Edwards. The line “I know I believe in nothing, but it is my nothing” comes from that album’s “Faster.” Before reading Phonogram, that line struck me as unbelievably nihilistic. How can you believe in “nothing”? More importantly, why? But now, I see it as unbelievably positive, an affirmation that the sheer idea of belief is more important that the object. Phonogram is about believing music has that power.

A lot of Western movie stars sell out for Japanese television commercials, but at least Tommy Lee Jones has done so with surreal class.

1. Alien Jones eats at a Yoshinoya.
2. Alien Jones works at a factory.
3. Alien Jones works at a Don Quixote.*
4. Alien Jones delivers a package.
5. Alien Jones gets a parking ticket.
6. Alien Jones works at a karaoke box.
7. Alien Jones works at a host cafe.
8. Alien Jones hands out pamphlets.
9. Alien Jones works at airport security.
10. Alien Jones goes home…or does he?.
11. Alien Jones visits a hot spring.
12. Alien Jones visits Akihabara and a maid café.

My first reverse culture shock when I returned to the U.S. was the day after I arrived in California, when I couldn’t buy canned coffee at Ralph’s. I looked and looked but just couldn’t find it. Eventually, I understood that was because they didn’t sell it, and something inside me ached. (See #10.) Cold or hot, canned coffee is a delicious and powerful shot of tasty energy for just over a buck. It fills an important market niche in between “tap water” and “32 oz., $5 latte” and, along with unflavored unsweetened teas, is something we desperately need more of in the States. No wonder SUNTORY BOSS is the boss of them all since 1992.

I should mention that I started another blog with some friends a few weeks ago. Thorp Force Five is a daily love letter to the most surreal and humorous daily comic strip in the newspaper. That strip is, of course, Gil Thorp.

Love and Berry has an English website now, so you can enjoy all the lovely backstory in your native tongue. Perhaps the most exciting revelation is that Love and Berry are both 14…in Fashion Magic Years! I think a Fashion Magic Year is about 1.3 Earth years long, due to the off-season.

I stole this from Insert Credit, but they got it from Christian originally, so it’s not really stealing.

I am going to buy this shirt. And then wear it while sporting this hat.

Update: I found out that their headquarters is literally three blocks from my apartment. As the highest-ranked personal hit for “Vestal on the Internet, I think I’m going to march over there and demand they give me tribute. Or at least make me their mascot.

Why should you watch this Half-Life 2 machinima? BECAUSE YOU ARE HEADCRAB ZOMBIE!

No More Heroes by Suda Goichii

Killer 7 is one of my favorite games of the past generation; so much so that, when I finally got around to playing it in 2007, I was grasshoppin’ mad at all the people who had slagged it in the past, making me write it off as a failed experiment. There’s nothing failed about Killer 7. It’s Invisibles: The Video Game; a decades-long, continent-sprawling deathmatch between the forces of good and evil. Or is that evil and good? It tackled East vs. West, stability vs. chaos, male vs. female, life vs. death. It was the story of seven personas trapped inside a single body, or maybe seven bodies sprung forth from a single deranged mind. Its sprawling, unpredictable, completely insane narrative had the added advantage of secret coherency. Players who stopped to ask “why?” of the goings-on got some great answers in exchange.

So I was definitely looking forward to No More Heroes, the slightly more accessible spiritual follow-up from mastermind Goichii Suda. No More Heroes is the personal tale of hapless, awkwardly cool otaku Travis Touchdown. A Japanese cultural fetishist living in the Southern California town of Santa Destroy, Travis buys a lightsaber off eBay (really) and soon finds himself thrust into the life of a professional assassin. Killing people for sport and profit is just like those games he loves so much, and there’s no doubt that countless BitTorrented anime series have burnt the plucky newbie who fights his way to the top archetype firmly into his mind. Having little better to do, the unemployed Travis dives into the professional assassins’ ranking circuit and gets to slicing and dicing.

Despite the super neon glow of Travis’s world, the game constantly reminded me of Shadow of the Colossus. The sprawling, empty sandbox of Santa Destroy is Wander’s wasteland urbanized, and, like those colossi, it’s the epic boss fights against the other assassins that make up the greater balance of the gameplay. More tellingly, Heroes walks the same tonal tightrope as Colossus; it takes the traditional game structure of “a sequence of challenges” and turns it into a meta-narrative about gaming myopia. Travis’s meteoric, blood-soaked rise to the top of the assassin’s guild is almost blissfully nonchalant; his cocky eagerness to prove his skill is at sharp odds with his psychotic opponents and unhinged surroundings.

But–and this is an important but–Heroes–is also a game about games and gaming culture. Its blocky 8-bit interface and fuzzy sound effects, rigid adherence to stage-boss pacing, and fourth-wall-breaking non-sequiturs are all in service to a greater goal. Travis may be dorky, but he’s not hopeless; he’s obsessed, but he knows that he’s obsessed. His self-deprecating sense of humor smooths over his social faux pas. When he’s not killing other assassins for blood money, he’s probably lounging around his apartment, watching rental tapes and playing with his cat. Travis is just this guy, you know?

Most narrative games aim for an imitation of life but end up an awkward, mawkish mess, failures as both games and narratives. No More Heroes gleefully embraces its gaminess, then twist and abuses those tropes into a commentary on our lives. The “our” here is gamers, those good-hearted geeks who can sometimes confuse fantasy with reality…or is that vice versa? That’s not necessarily a bad thing, argues Goichii–as long as you’re aware of it.

gonna have a good time

Why do I love the the future that never was? It’s so much more optimistic than the absent past.

Welcome to goviolet!

More information about the changeover can be found in the post below this one.

Feel free to introduce yourself in the comments and to let me know what sort of content you’d like to see. The future is wide open, so now’s the time to say “less book reviews, more mix CDs” or what have you. I reserve the right to just do what I want, however.

Here’s the new RSS feed: http://goviolet.com/?feed=rss2

I’ve asked Fritz to update the LiveJournal feed to point to goviolet.com. If that’s not possible, I’ll set up a new LJ feed later this week.

Why goviolet?

I’ve integrated a lot of previously static pages into the history of the blog, as well as set up WordPress-managed static pages for some of the larger content sections. Those can be found under “Pages” on the right.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you like it here!