Or, stuck in the games-as-art loop again.

Reading this profile of Braid’s Jonathan Blow, so full of generalized scorn for the entire oevre of video games, I thought, “ooo, this is going to get Brainy Gamer’s brain-panties in a twist.” And sure enough, they are twisting, in a rather constructive way:

Maybe Clark [the author of the profile] is exhausted. I have a feeling this is the real story, and I’m sympathetic. I’ve been there. Maybe you have too. We’ve played games from their infancy, and we thought they would matter more by now. We thought we would be long past the “art” question by now. We thought we would see more games for grown-ups by now. I watch the E3 press conferences, I walk into my local GameStop, I hear my students talk about games, and all I see are guns, guns, and more guns. It’s so easy to be disappointed. Clark quotes Chris Hecker’s lament, “It’s just adolescent nonsense.” Often I think he’s right.

But then Clark delivers another zinger, and I hear a gauntlet hit the ground:

It’s tough to demand respect for a creative medium when you have to struggle to name anything it has produced in the past 30 years that could be called artistic or intellectually sophisticated.

Really?

Brainy Gamer (Michael Abbott) goes on to call for the creation of a Smart Game Catalog, a crowd-sourced list of “smart” games, which is already taking shape. (I think a list of artistically meaningful games would carry more water than “smart” ones, which can too easily be written off as time-wasting brain crack, but then again I’m a hopeless pedant and you have to start somewhere.)

Some loosely grouped thoughts about both these pieces follow – I got into a chat about this with my pal Y who is a smart and sophisticated follower of film and literature, who sees little that interests him in games. Some of these points came out of discussion with him, and some thinkage I did subsequently. So yeah, ideas inspired by the chat about the article about the article.

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How could I not post this?

I don’t know why but I found this video impossibly funny.

That is all. (via waxy)

Last week I tweeted “Fun fact: the Sheppard subway has lower ridership than the Queen streetcar.” This is true, according to TTC numbers, which say the Sheppard line had 47,700 riders per day in 2010, whereas the 501 Queen had 43,500 and the 502 and 503 Queen have 7,800 (also from the TTC). So hearing Ford and his “rump of sycophants” (nice turn of phrase, Gee) force this issue into a suburbs vs. downtown battle royale, in which the hideous downtown elites want to hog all the subways for themselves and force real people to ride “trolley cars” or “fancy streetcars”, well, it’s frustrating. I’m one of the theoretical downtowners who wedges himself into the trolley car every day. I think of the near-empty cars sailing through Toronto’s least busy subway station, Bessarion, and try to pretend I’m hogging a subway right now.

I may not need to pretend much longer. New TTC Chief Andy Byford has been doing more than whisper about the awkwardly-named Downtown Relief Line:

“Fundamentally, there will come a point with the city’s population increasing exponentially where we do need that new capacity,” Mr. Byford said. “The downtown relief line has got to be looked at and has got to be talked about right now.”

The DRL is an idea that has been floating around in some form for many decades. As this Spacing post nicely summarizes, a 1911 proposal was for Toronto to have Bloor, Yonge, and Queen subway lines. The 1985 plan “Network 2011”, which also proposed the Sheppard subway, positioned the downtown relief line as a way to relieve congestion at Bloor and Yonge:

The first phase of the DRL would have been built to relieve the Yonge line south of Bloor and at Bloor-Yonge Station, by encouraging downtown-bound passengers from the Danforth line to transfer at a point further east to avoid Yonge. Following the study of different route options, the alignment chosen would have met the Danforth subway at Pape Station, running under Pape to Eastern Avenue and across following the railway and Front Street to Union Station and on to Spadina Avenue on the west.

Here’s a map of that plan, courtesy blogTO:

Transit expert Steve Munro recently examined the 1985 plan:

The Sheppard subway was expected to have 15,400 peak riders by 2011, but the actual number on the existing line is 4,500. The projected peak demand for the full line in 2011 is now 6-10,000.
[…] The Downtown Relief line was projected to have 11,700 peak riders by 2011, and the demand projection today is 12,000. This is no surprise given that the DRL would serve a demand that actually existed 25 years ago, rather than a notional demand in a regional plan.

How’s that for downtown subways? Here are a couple of maps of possible DRL routes:

Those are obviously quite different. First, the western part is considered by Munro and others less urgent, since the University line already relieves the Yonge line travel from the west. But
there are also capacity problems at Union station, so that might not be the best intersection point with the Yonge-University line.

Why is this line a subway and not LRT? First, there is no space for the downtown part to be above ground. Secondly, given that as much as 40% of the peak Yonge line traffic might divert to take the DRL, and also considering the high ridership on the Queen car as well as the neighbouring King and Dundas lines (57,300 on King, 31,000 on Dundas), the demand already warrants a subway.

How feasible is this line? It would cost somewhere between $3- and $9-billion, depending on length and route chosen. The Sheppard subway extension would have cost $3-billion. It wasn’t funded, but council has asked for a study of “new revenue tools” (i.e. taxes) that might pay for transit expansion, and has also moved to consider the Downtown Relief Line. Obviously, the new head of the TTC is a proponent. As this fascinating article makes vividly clear, the Yonge line is already at capacity.

If Rob Ford’s re-election pitch is going to be “subways, subways, subways”, relief line advocacy might be an effective way for more progressive councilors to save themselves from being branded “anti-subway”. I suppose this is a downtown elitist subway, but there are DRL proposals that have it going up the Don and connecting with the upcoming Eglinton LRT. This would be a good way of making sure Eglinton Station itself doesn’t go the way of Bloor-Yonge.

But before that, perhaps it needs a better name? Downtown Elite Line?

If Elephant Man is about spectacle, Blue Velvet is about mystery. It’s essentially a film noir narrative, deviating from the norm by putting a young college student in the detective role, allowing a coming-of-age story to shine through now and then. Needless to say, as the opening foreshadows, the world our youth discovers beneath the surface is a dark one.

I’ve seen this film so many times already there’s very little for me to say about it, but what I noticed this time was how good the dialogue is. There’s a part where McLaughlan and Dern are having their first conversation, McLaughlan looks at a house they’re passing and says, “I used to know a kid who lived there, he had the biggest tongue in the world.”

The film is not without its spectacle, of course. The images in the opening alone would overpower a weaker film, to say nothing of the severed ear in a field, the frequent song breaks, using a lamp for a microphone. But it’s all hung over this mystery plot, which is eventually brought together in a somewhat conventional way. (Not that it makes a ton of sense; I can’t figure out why Frank is dressed as “The Well Dressed Man”.) If there is an epic battle throughout Lynch’s career between spectacle and narrative, narrative won this one – but will eventually lose the war.

Incidentally, Lynch says the ending came to him in a dream. “The dream gave me the police radio; the dream gave me Frank’s disguise; the dream gave me the gun in the yellow man’s jacket; the dream gave me the scene where Jeffrey was in the back of Dorothy’s apartment, sending the wrong message, knowing Frank would hear it. I don’t know how it happened, but I just had to plug and change a few things to bring it all together.” (pulled from here, originally from the interview book Lynch on Lynch)

Also from that page is the Pauline Kael quote: “This is American darkness – darkness in color, darkness with a happy ending. Lynch might turn out to be the first populist surrealist – a Frank Capra of dream logic.” But American darkness was going to get a whole lot darker.

This was fascinating for various reasons. It’s a classical narrative, but it still features a few dream-logic sections. It was nominated for eight Oscars, rare for Lynch films, and you can see why, as it features an outsider hero who gains a place in society. At the same time, it is about spectacle. Lynch compares two modes of spectacular presentation, with Merrick put on display in both the freak show and scientific contexts. Later, he is put on display to society, and while he is given a voice in this context, the question of exploitation still lingers. Viewers of the film are, of course, implicated in this exploitation.

There are three major surrealist passages in the film, at the beginning, climax and end (excluding the Fellini-esque return to the freak show in the second act). The beginning expresses Merrick’s birth trauma through slow dissolves of slow motion elephants and closeups of his mother screaming, with expressive and disturbing sound design of course. The climax occurs when Merrick watches a play: his ultimate triumph in the film is to assume the position of spectator rather than spectacle. Rather than show the staging of the play in detail, Lynch again shifts to slow dissolves, semi-abstract closeups of stage action details, and slips in a shot of Merrick’s “owner” in a cage. It’s a beautiful idea; Merrick’s victory over the antagonist is purely imaginary, through the art of spectacle. The final passage is right at the end of the film and represents Merrick’s death, which visually mirrors his birth as it returns to the closeup image of his mother. Instead of elephants, we have the night sky and a long dissolve to white.

So in the most intense moments, Lynch turns to surrealism, but leaves the rest of the plot to a more conventional telling.

Because it’s been a while for me, and because my lady still hadn’t seen some of my favourite living director’s films, I decided to curate a personal David Lynch film festival for us. We’re watching at least one film a week. Here’s what’s on the list so far:

• Elephant Man
• Blue Velvet
• Dune (not a great representative film, but we both wanted to see it again)
• Wild at Heart (similarly, not his best, but I remember it fondly – I saw it in the theatre as a teen)
• Twin Peaks pilot
• Lost Highway
• The Straight Story
• Mulholland Drive
• Inland Empire
• various shorts (he has quite a few, and I’ve seen barely any of them! Still figuring out which ones to watch)

A few of these are available on Netflix in Canada: Elephant Man, Dune, The Straight Story, and the entire run of Twin Peaks(!). There are Blu-Ray releases of some, but nowhere near enough: Dune, Blue Velvet, and a German box set that has Mulholland, Lost Highway and Inland Empire.

I will try and write up most of these films as we go. We’ve gotten through a few films already, and my writeups are lagging, so I wanted to post this part first.

MINECRAFT 1.0

I wonder if some of Minecraft’s appeal will dissolve now that it’s a 1.0 product and will probably see less frequent updates.

I seem to play it once every few months and whenever I do, I see something new, not just because the human perceptive system is selective blah blah but because quite literally new things have been added to the game since I last played. I was roaming around and I saw a wolf. Wolf!

One’s natural reaction is to search on the Minecraft wiki to see what you can do with a wolf. If you feed it a bone, you can tame it. Then it will follow you around and attack your enemies. You can even tame a whole pack. God damn!

The preceding paragraph indicates the other arcane appeal of Minecraft that is rare in games: it’s almost a game about looking things up in a wiki. The game does a notoriously poor job of telling you what you can and should do, so you’re trained to consult out-of-game sources from your first in-game night, when you were probably eaten by zombies since you didn’t build shelter before nightfall (surprise!) because you didn’t run up to a tree and punch it to make wood blocks (surprise!) enabling you to make a craftbench enabling you to make tools etc etc…

That’s the risk, that what any rational game critic would call improvements to the early game will take away some essential charm. Similarly, the cessation of the perpetual beta, if it does in fact mean the game needs fewer updates, could take away some of those surprises, which were legion this last play: wolves. Breeding animals. Enchanting. Potions. Back to the wiki!

There’s so much good there though that one needn’t fear too much. Almost certainly that sense of wonder, exploration, and enterprise will remain. I watched a doc about early man whose thrust was that homo sapiens was unique because of his ability to imagine what wasn’t there. He could imagine the path of a herd of big hairy prehistoric elephant type things, and conceive of a trap to put there. He could imagine the path of a projectile.

He could see a near-infinite world of blocks and imagine building the USS Enterprise out of those blocks.

It’s not genius but it’s ingenuity, and that’s what makes Minecraft feel so human. I know as a downtown champagne-socialist elitist I should decry the path of human history which paved paradise with highways and clogged our seas with oil, but you can’t help sometimes being impressed.

Like if you ride on a jet, don’t you sometimes think, “Dude! We fuckin’ made this. What have monkeys built lately?”

The hero of Minecraft is born with nothing in his hands and then he punches a tree and soon his basic needs (hut, torches, pork chops) are taken care of and after a bunch of lifting he is riding a minecart out of the earth’s core up into his sky castle. It’s the ascent of man in a nutshell.

If games have real-life value inasmuch as they train us to deal with life in certain ways, Minecraft teaches us to see how much is possible in this world of ours, to learn more about it, and then go fucking build that.

BTW as of press time (ha! I love saying that) Minecraft is actually version 1.1, and the latest snapshot release added, amongst other things, the breeding of ocelots.

For free, to add a few features:

The non-linear editing program was initially launched to protests by the pro-editing community, but Version 10.0.3 addresses nearly all of the remaining criticisms of the post-production tool, adding multicam support, external broadcast monitoring (still a beta feature), and detailed chroma-key controls. And perhaps the biggest criticism—the lack of an upgrade path for projects built into previous Final Cut versions—has now been addressed by a third-party plugin called 7toX, from Intelligent Assistance.

Happy now, internet?

The recent fear and loathing about Apple dropping the “pro” market was based on two things: the perceived dumbing-down of FCP, and the neglect of the Mac Pro. It never made sense to me though. Why would Apple bother with a huge, from-scratch rewrite of Final Cut if it planned to ditch it?

The speculation was that since it a) borrowed some interface from iMovie, b) contained some DSLR-friendly features, c) was drastically cheaper, and d) was missing a bunch of features, that Apple was targeting “prosumers” (shudder) and not “pros”.

a) If the same people who rethought iMovie a few years back were doing the same to FCP, it follows that some interface will be shared. If they’ve figured out better interfaces for editing, they’re going to want to use them. As I stated before, traditional editing software packages (NLEs) are based on a tape-to-tape interface metaphor which isn’t helping anyone anymore. We should be happy that Apple is trying to improve it.

b) DSLR workflow is a file-based workflow, which is obviously the future. Things like background transcoding and auto-sync are just plain handy for whichever files you are importing, whether prosumer like AVCHD or pro like Redcode.

c) FCP X is $300 to Final Cut Suite’s $1000. Suite contained extra software like Colour and Soundtrack that Apple no longer offers (it has folded some features of these apps into FCP itself). It also contained Motion and Compressor, which Apple is now selling separately for $50. Furthermore, there is no upgrade pricing on the App Store, so the next time Apple decides to charge for a new version of FCP X (XI?), we will all be paying another $300 + $50 + $50 – and if you want Logic to take the place of Soundtrack, add another $200. It’s not that much cheaper.

d) This latest update should allay concerns about dropped features. This is how Apple does it: they don’t include features they feel they haven’t gotten right yet. The original iPhone was missing a bunch of features we take for granted now (copy & paste, multitasking, third party apps).

I’m actually pleasantly surprised multicam support has been added already (especially since I have a project coming up that will need it). So the big question mark now is the Mac Pro. Informed opinions say that Apple is just following Intel’s rather slow-moving Xeon roadmap, which suggests a March update. Okay then!

I still think this Snake Eyes christmas mashup from 2 years ago is really good:

But then again, I’m biased.

Now that iOS 5 lets you change text & email alerts to your own sounds, I decided to totally trick my shit out with retro video game magic. Now instead of receiving annoying work emails, you’re actually accruing gold coins! Sonically speaking.

Anyway, since I couldn’t find any existing files that were formatted the right way, I converted some myself. And how could I hoard such lovely sounds? So here ya go!

Mario iPhone Alerts

It’s the final piece of the puzzle, the missing link of new logo promotion:

Love the magic golden sax man.

The look of The Comedy Network, the channel I work for (along with SPACE), is changing next week and I have been snowed under with all the work that entails. Everything my department does – all the promos IDs, bumpers, tags etc – had to be replaced. It’s exciting work though and we’re all really happy with the new look.

To make ourselves just a little bit busier, we also did a teaser campaign about the new logo. Here are the spots. In case you’re too lazy to click that, here are two:

There’s one more spot that only starts airing on tuesday – I’ll post it here shortly thereafter.

In 1970-ish, “The Italian Elvis” Adriano Celentano recorded a song called “Prisencolinensinainciusol”. To the Italian ear it sounds like English, but to the English ear it sounds like gibberish, which is what it is. If the Joycean slurry of near-meanings wasn’t awesome enough on its own, it’s set to a stripped down, crazy-funky droning four-on-the-floor arrangement so that the whole setup prefigures both rap and disco. (That said, I think James Brown and Bob Dylan are the real influences, and there’s nothing magical about the song’s foreknowledge, but that doesn’t make it any less thrilling). Add to that the boss dancing, and you have a timeless classic on your hands.

I tried to figure out how the internets learned about this, but I can only trace back so far. There’s this, announcing an edit of the song, and giving a bit of history. (Here’s the mp3 of Greg Wilson’s edit BTW.) There’s this, which gives us the black and white original:

Which is then picked up by Sasha Frere Jones, then Metafilter, then BoingBoing, and then years later, your unreliable narrator stumbles into the whole mess via an Easter egg in the game Glitch. Anyway, the important part is when you search Youtube for Prisencolinensinainciusol and uncover gems like these versions with different sets of subtitles, all set to a mashup of the two videos:

Precinct Calling Ace Vantuso / Prison Colon ends in I choose all / Freezing culmination I choose all.
hope something / poke something / awesome babe!

It’s amazing to see how we project meanings onto sounds. It’s worth adding that in Celentano’s words, from the intro to the TV show staging, the theme of the song is incommunicability, that “we don’t understand anything anymore”, and prisencolinensinainciusol means “universal love”. I also love this karaoke staging of the song for drunken Portlandians, which seems to sum it all up.

Let me just say that when I added the song to iTunes, I chose the genre “heaven”.

[Glitch is a free browser game made by the people who made Flickr and before that, GNE . Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi just joined their company. I have been playing it a lot. Note about screenshots: the game is still in beta, so it may look different when you play it.]

(image courtesy txkimmers)

I finally buy a house. It’s in Bortola, which turns out to be pretty far away from what I imagine to be the center of the action.

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I sent the following letter to Mayor Rob Ford and my local Councillor, Mary Margaret McMahon. You should do something too, the vote is tomorrow or wednesday.

Dear Mayor Ford and Councillor McMahon,

I am writing today about the removal of the Jarvis bike lanes.

As a driver and a cyclist, I understand the frustrations of both groups. Toronto has terrible commute times, and it’s very important that we do something to improve them. But eliminating the Jarvis lanes will not improve matters. Existing cyclists will clog up the curb lane, forcing cars into the passing lane. It will needlessly endanger the cyclists and frustrate drivers. City planners found peak transit times have increased by only two minutes since these lanes were built. The city’s staff considers them a success, and casual surveys of motorists on Jarvis indicate the majority want the bike lanes to stay.

When I’m driving a car, I like bike lanes because they keep bikes out of my way. And the more bikers on the road, the fewer motorists. As a cyclist, I know that bike lanes are safer and encourage more people to take up cycling. Bike lanes are a win for both groups and while it may take a few years for bike lanes to reach optimal use numbers, I encourage you to have the patience to plan for our city’s future and not for the present.

Toronto’s population is increasing by 100,000 people a year. New condo buildings are springing up in every neighbourhood in the city. We cannot continue increasing our city’s density and expect all the new residents to drive, as we have no more road space for cars. We need strong alternatives, and cycling is one of them. Let’s build for the future by building strong transit and a functional bike network, not retreat into an impossible past by pulling up newly built bike lanes at the taxpayers’ expense.

Thank you for your time.

This AV Club post about terrible lyrics reminded me of my favourite worst lyrics ever, which I seem to post about once every few years:

I was feeling no pain
Feeling good in my brain.

Tom Petty/Traveling Wilburys, “Last Night.” Like yeah he was feeling plenty good in his shitty brain, that he let that zinger make it to the record. To be fair, these are the following lyrics:

I looked in her eyes
They were full of surprise.

Kind of puts the savant back in idiot savant. There’s a story there, at least.

I’m glad Zack Handlen brings up Katy Perry – that song Firework drives me insane. OK so ostensibly it is about celebrating one’s individuality. Then why use the metaphor “firework”, a device so rarely used individually that the singular form of it just plain sounds weird? And in fact, if you set off a single firework, everyone would be profoundly disappointed. Perhaps the song is actually a subversive takedown of individuality, and I should recalibrate my distaste.

“This video was created as an official response to the Newsweek article calling Grand Rapids a “dying city.” We disagreed strongly”. Holy shit. (via)

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