Showing My Cards: August 2024
God what a busy summer I had! I set out this year intending to do more and got my wish in spades. Biology and epidemiology slammed the breaks on our summer of activity as I contracted COVID at a wedding and spent a week popping Ibuprofen, quaffing Gatorade and watching mindless YouTube. I’m fine, as are my partner and our unfortunate housesitter, but my illness has really thrown my writing schedule out of whack and I’m still struggling to recapture it. Not writing for a week because you’re ill is understandable enough but the anxiety that I’ll wake up in October without a word to my name has me compelled to show my cards. Let's get to it.
MUSIC
Chart Courtesy of tapmusic dot net.
Earworm of the Month: Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits
Felt the Dire Straits phase coming on towards the end of August like I felt COVID coming on when I got back from Ohio. A sort of building inevitability in one’s sinuses, not unlike the building keyboard/drum breakdown that punctuates the extended intro to “Money For Nothing.”
It’s perhaps a bit presumptuous but this really is a perfect rock album, right? Alright fine I’ll let you negotiate me down to a perfect 80s rock album. You have your MTV smash in “Money for Nothing” right at the beginning, your insurance/pharmaceutical commercial special in “Walk of Life,” the sleazy, wanky saxophone on “Your Latest Trick,” and then a slower, more contemplative back half of the record. Best appreciated once you’re no longer a hyperactive child that wants to hear “Money for Nothing” again. Had this one on the rental car speakers while driving around Ohio, providing texture to flat country. Dire Straits fit neatly into that category of hardworking British bands that could have conquered the universe if they’d been a little cuter. Throw em in there next to Buzzcocks.
FILM
Eyeworm of the Month: Party Girl directed by Daisy von Scherler Meyer
What a lovely surprise this was! My film intake didn’t rebound as much as I’d hoped but I definitely picked winners when I made the time. I threw on Party Girl on a pretty sleepy Friday morning just to have something on in the background and found myself hooked in short order. Light, funny, charming, earnest, and charming in its simplicity. She’s gotta get it together and she gets it together! Voila! Movie!
I have a real soft spot for these kinds of movies that were so ultramodern for their time that they become period pieces in retrospect. Liev Schreiber’s fuzzy Kangol looms large. Parker Posey is so hot she can hit me with a car. We miss when DJ’s spun actual records. We miss the Dewey Decimal System (not really). We miss when New York was actually cool. Such a film. Lovely falafel.
LITERATURE
Wordworm of the Month: Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein
Another month another nonfiction tome. A true crime memoir with a TV series to match. (I will not be watching the show. Please respect my culture as a non-show-watcher). Tokyo Vice didn't exactly light my pants on fire but the 200 odd pages left in Tanith Lee's excellent The White Serpent made it the winner by default. Maybe Generation Kill and Under the Banner of Heaven wrecked the grade curve for true life narratives. Maybe I've just developed a tolerance to White Guys Gawking At Asia.
I'm being unfair, as is my right. Jake Adelstein spins a perfectly respectable narrative together from the notable episodes of his career at the Yomiuri Shinbun, the largest newspaper in Japan (and the world, when measured by daily circulation). Tokyo Vice is full of interesting facts like that and brings some compelling episodes to the table. Despite my earlier comment (which I will not remove despite not being quite sure why I wrote it in the first place) it never gawks at Those Wacky Japanese to the point where I considered putting the book down. But I still find myself liking it less as I think on it more.
In appropriate noir fashion it ends with a pyrrhic victory for our intrepid gaijin reporter. A big story broken, a crime boss revealed as a stoolie with a bad liver, a major American University culpable for providing expedited organ transplants to human traffickers and industrial scale loan sharks. But our hero is a marked man. And of course there's the matter of his wife and children. The word “divorce” never appears in regards to Jake Adelstein’s relationship with his wife Sunao, or at least I missed it if it did. But it's obvious if you read between the lines at like a fifth grade level. It speaks to mixed feelings on the part of our author. While the professional achievements of Jake Adelstein's life are on display for all to see (see it now on HBO Max!) his personal failings are shunted to the side. Obfuscated. That's the word for a lot of my problems with Tokyo Vice. Obfuscation. 25 year old sources still kept anonymous, unless they're dead for one reason or another. The truest monsters in the book exist as vague outlines of some supervillain, like The Joker towering over Gotham in a Denny O’Neil era Batman cover. Without that monstrous personage at its center I find it hard to engage with the central narrative. Under the Banner of Heaven had smilin’ babykiller Dan Laferty and a plethora of other bigoted Jesus freaks and pederast polygamists. Generation Kill had Sergeant Brad “Iceman” Colbert and his merry band of stimulant addled, kill-crazy Recon Marines. Tokyo Vice’s Tadamasa Goto exists at such a remove that I can't seek to understand him in the same way I did Colbert or Laferty.
Not that any of that is Adelstein's fault necessarily. Japan is a very corporate place and so you end up with very corporate organized crime. The worst guys are guys who spend all day telling lesser guys to do bad things. The Yakuza put their gangland affiliations on their business cards! But with the absence of that compellingly amoral persona I find myself projecting my negative feelings onto Adelstein himself. Running around buying champagne and female companionship for foot-soldier gangsters and nymphomaniac vice cops in the hopes one of them will give him a name of the next guy who can dine out on his dime in the hopes he'll give the next name. On a reporter’s salary. With a wife and kid at home.
VIDEO GAMES
Pixelworm of the Month: Quasimorph, Magnum Scriptum
Is your portfolio effectively diversified for the end of days? Are you optimally positioned to profit from the apocalypse? Are inhuman, bloodthirsty intruders from the Venusian bramfatura threatening your financial independence and violating your NAP? Then consider contracting the services of PMC Magnum. We’re really into murders and executions, and unlike many other players in the field of mergers and acquisitions, we meet every workday with an enthusiastic drive to provide maximum results for minimum overhead and grease the gears of solar-system scale anarcho-capitalism with the blood and excrement of our clients’ competitors.
Quasimorph is the kind of dirty, hostile, opaque indie game that seemingly spawns out of the ether whenever one or more eastern European programmers congregate. Perhaps the bramfatura grows especially thin in the former Warsaw pact nations and games from alternate realities (where these things are feature rich and can be made for reasonable budgets) occasionally fall out. Owing debts of inspiration to System Shock, Escape from Tarkov, Hotline Miami, and the original XCOM games, Quasimorph has become a minor addiction over the last few weeks. It’s a dungeon-crawling, room-clearing, inventory-managing, contract-completing, loot-bartering, turn-based extraction-shooter with roguelike elements, so yeah, it’s a Slavcore Indie. It’s even in early access, though it’s feature and content rich enough to warrant the purchase, especially if you can get it on sale.
There’s a real fine margin twitchiness about Quasimorph. Rarely does a turn based game feel so frantic. Guide your cloned operator through the bowels of some dismal satellite factory, wrapped up in dirty rags to abate catastrophic blood loss after being shot full of holes with an industrial nail gun, chomping down synthetic pills to fight infection, and chainsmoking to keep the walls of reality from closing in. Downing energy drinks and meat-scented hamburgers to keep your calories up. Suddenly you’ve found a few cases of liquor and some men’s magazines, which are currently trading very well at the Megachurches on Venus. Gotta make space for ‘em. May as well drop the rest of those energy drinks. There are alternative means of keeping yourself fed in the field. You have a knife, You have a whole factory full of dead people. They’ve all got limbs and loins. Do the math. The game even keeps track of how many times you commit cannibalism! Though maybe you shouldn’t. Raises the Quasimorphosis. You may find that an Aztec-flavored hell knight just emerged from the golf-ball sized hole you blew through a wrench-wielding corporate drone. Get dismembered horribly. Die horribly. Get laughed at by the game. Slam your desk. Dial up another clone. Die again. Get frustrated. Abandon the contract. Decide that if you can’t beat the apocalypse, you may as well see if it’ll pay you.