BRAINWORMS: November 2024

All New Title, Same Great Taste

Oh boy! Here I go rebranding again!

I rather unceremoniously fell out of love with Brainworm as an all-encompassing label for my Substack output. This was, I feel, uncool. Brainworm never did anything wrong while I mostly ignored this site for months on end. Ergo, I’ve decided to award it this position of honor on the Stack. Its name and heraldry shall adorn this prestigious feature forevermore.

MUSIC

Chart Courtesy of tapmusic dot net.

Earworm of the Month: GNX by Kendrick Lamar

I jinxed myself, in retrospect. Last month while remarking on Tyler, The Creator’s CHROMAKOPIA I noted that it was the very first time I’d had occasion to respond to a new album within its release window. Seemed like the sort of thing that may not happen again for awhile so of course it’s now happened two months in a row.

Dropping raw without promotion or fanfare, GNX sucker-punched the discourse on an otherwise unremarkable Friday in November. If there were any doubts after the summer’s various dramas, consider them dispelled. 2024 has been a year of many things (Year of the Freak Off, Year of Slop, Year of Brainrot) but it has most assuredly been a Year of Kendrick. Spending the dog days of summer winning a rap beef so comprehensively that your opponent is attempting to file lawsuits about it and now dropping a full-length project to take command of the last quarter of the year. Masterful as always from Pulitzer Kenny.

So what about the record? Well what about it? It’s good. I think. Certainly his most approachable in years. Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers proved divisive upon its release in 2022 and while DAMN. stacked accolades to the ceiling it’s hard to ignore its weird gullies (Is “God” the worst track in Kendrick’s discography? Might be). In keeping with the precedent set last month I’ll avoid sweeping critical evaluations. Suffice it to say that I think it’s pretty good and the public seems to agree. Though whether we’re all just caught up in the excitement or actually like the record remains to be seen. A pause before making any real evaluations is more vital when interfacing with Kendrick’s work than it is for most other artists. The thinkpiece writers love his ass and so the discourse around his work tends to obscure the work itself. Is GNX a 2Pac tribute? Is he in his “villain era?” Are we cool or cringe when yelling “Mustard?” Should we cut Jack Antonoff’s thumbs off and banish him to a remote monastery where he may pursue a life of fasting and penitent prayer? I look forward to hearing these and far dumber arguments from whatever alleged humans still make an alleged living writing about music.

Anyway Buick should bring back the Grand National. Genuinely shocking that they never tried to do that during the last decade and a half’s modern muscle car boom. Fuck bein’ rational, give ‘em what they asked for.

Good enough for Dale Senior, good enough for Kendrick, good enough for me!

FILM

Eyeworm of the Month: 12 Angry Men directed by Sidney Lumet

Boy what a month at the movies it was! I’ve gone long in a few spots here so in the interest of expediency I’m gonna link my review on Letterboxd for this one and call it a day. Suffice it to say that I finally patched this particular blind spot of mine and couldn’t be happier. I really do love Lumet’s New York. It’s so sweaty. That same primate grease and cigarette grime you encounter in Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon was cooked up for the first time by those twelve (very accomplished) angry men in that private room with the malfunctioning fan.

LITERATURE

Wordworm of the Month: The Outfit by Richard Stark

Another month, another Parker novel. I can’t help it. I have a disease, an addiction, the only cure is more Parker.

As previously stated I do a great job of reading on planes. The holiday season and other factors have unfortunately bogged me down in my reading schedule. I thought some Parker may be just the ticket to jump-start me and wouldn’t you know it, I was right! I polished off The Outfit in roughly three sittings while on a weekend vacation and felt revitalized enough by the endeavor to go bang my head against some Don DeLillo again when I get the time for it.

In attempting to isolate the appeal of these books (beyond Stark’s prose, which is teach-tape quality for anyone looking to write propulsive, action-oriented fiction) I really do keep coming back to the prevalence of US east coast travel and northeast highway driving in particular. Parker’s always driving somewhere to see a guy about something. He’s gotta go to North Carolina for a truck. He’s gotta go to Georgia for a car. He’s in Syracuse buying guns from a guy. He’s in Scranton, lying low, getting ready to drive to Buffalo for the job. Then he’s going to Miami and staying in the good hotels for awhile. Stark’s regional view gives his work a kind of Americana twang. Gives extra heft to the idea of Parker as this true independent, leaner and much much meaner than the corporate criminals out for his head. They’re too comfortable, too stable to ever really threaten Parker and his ragged, anarchic tribe. He’s not trapped in any given city or social circle, he goes where the work is and works with the people who are best placed and equipped to get it done. He doesn’t have friends, per se, just knows a lot of people. It’s all very Michael Mann (another creative I adore). Honestly I’m convinced Mann is a Stark fan as well.

VIDEO GAMES

Pixelworm of the Month: Suzerain, developed by Torpor Games

Have you ever wanted to be president? If you answered yes, just know that I think that opinion should legally bar you from being president. If I had my way we’d choose heads of state via national lottery and every man and woman would live in fear of having to uproot their lives and move into the mausoleum on Pennsylvania Avenue for four agonizing years. However, you are entitled to your insane and dangerous opinions (for now). Maybe give it a trial run by picking up a copy of Suzerain?

Functionally a visual novel with some maps attached to it, Suzerain thrusts you into the role of Anton Rayne, newly elected president of the fictional country of Sordland. The economy is in the toilet, the constitution is broken, the army is twenty years out of date, crime is out of control, quality of life is steadily declining, and the education system sucks. Sort it out, Mr. President, or else.

I was pretty taken with the first few hours of Suzerain. The game gives you space to craft Rayne’s background and agenda according to your preferences. Your set of advisors and associates are well-written and occasionally rather endearing. The dilemmas you are faced with are compelling and well-realized. Getting into the role is really fun. I’m President Deals, baby! We’re reforming the constitution! We’re fixing the economy! We’re courting foreign investment! We’re holding the fat cats to account and winning a fair deal for Sordish workers! We’re building the rural highways! (Observe as I discard my “President Deals” suit jacket, roll up my sleeves, and don my “President Infrastructure” hard hat.) We’re reforming the schools and advocating for the women of Sordland! (What’s this? Now I’ve taken the hard hat off, loosened my tie, and slung the jacket boyishly over my shoulder, that’s right, President Social Issues is in the room, sitting on the teacher’s desk, ready to give you kids the straight talk you crave.)

Yet, as we pass from November into December, I find myself less and less certain that I’ll bother finishing the game. It’s not them, it’s me. More specifically, it’s the challenges of complex narrative design in games and how I, as an individual player, interface with them. The trouble with Suzerain is that I can’t play it naturally because I know it’s a game. Games need certain things in order to remain engaging and (to an extent) predictable. A needs to lead to B which leads to C. C should probably be some sort of escalation of stakes and circumstances which increases the drama of the scenario. We’ve known this since we were playing these games with pen and paper, you can start a Dungeons and Dragons game bashing goblins over the head but you should eventually build to a dragon of some sort.

The trick is to make it feel like the player chose C, or brought it about as a result of their actions. The deeper I got into Suzerain, the more I felt railroaded into certain choices and scenarios. The anxiety that I’d locked myself out of the best path to take kept growing. I felt the big end-game crisis (war with a belligerent neighbor) nudging me in the ribs and I honestly could not summon the enthusiasm for it. If I wanted to play a war game I’d play a war game. The idea of running a war via dialog trees just doesn’t hold appeal for me. I need to see which button activates which device for that sort of thing. Give me the information, the percentages, let me see the data.

Maybe this wouldn’t be as much of a problem if I could go back and revise a few decisions (maybe put President Social Issues on the backburner and get an aviator jacket and a pair of sunglasses so I can be President National Defense) but Suzerain doesn’t allow this. It runs on an auto-save system to prevent this. I get the logic from a design standpoint, the player’s choices matter and they should own them and live with them. But it makes me anxious to the point that I'd rather play something else. Frankly, it’s a credit to Torpor Games writing staff. I like Anton, his family, and his menagerie of advisors and policy wonks too much to condemn them to a mass grave because I wanted to be an effete reformer rather than a cigar chomping realpolitik enjoyer.

I guess I really shouldn’t be President!

BLOG BIZ

We’re arriving at the end of the year and so I’m thinking the move will be a kind of year-end wrapup edition of BRAINWORMS. I dunno what form this will take and so I’ll ask you to be open-minded. Year-end awards are such a drag. I wanna do something weird. You’ll know what exactly that means shortly after I do.

In any case I plan to continue leaving the essay faucet open. I’ve felt fulfilled by my recent output and the response has been very positive. I think I can state with a reasonable degree of confidence that I’ll have at least one more for you guys before the holiday.

As a coda, allow me to just say that I really do appreciate the support I’ve received since recommitting to Substack. There’s a community here that I’ve really begun to cherish and I hope to grow this blog and my personal social circle on the Stack in the coming year. Thank you for reading. Stay tuned for lots more.