The Golden Nunchuk

I guess this is what they call a “first world problem,” but I’m just going to plow ahead with the minimum amount of shamefacedness.

Which reward should I get from Club Nintendo?  

The Hanafuda cards for 800 coins, or the replica handset of Game & Watch: Ball for 1200 coins?

Both are snazzy in their own way, both are legitimate collectibles, both are utterly useless and, frankly, underwhelming, considering what our compeers overseas have been offered over the years. 

Briefly: you buy Nintendo games and register them at Club Nintendo’s website to acquire coins, which you can use to “buy” special items.  As is customary with all things in video gaming, the special items are always cooler in Japan and Europe than they are in home sweet America.

Witness: specially designed retro controllers, limited-edition games, exclusive soundtracks.  Not impressed?  How about a Kirby throwing disc (don’t call it a Frisbee unless you want Word to auto-capitalize it):

Or the deluxe Professor Layton box set:

There’s also the Wii Golden Wheel available in Europe:

And best of all, Skyward Sword owners need scratch their heads no more, because here at last is the Wii Golden Nunchuk:

 

Just not in America.  I mean, why would we bother with rewards that a person might actually use?  I realize this goes against the very meaning of “collectibles,” which I believe comes from a Greek word that means “crap you thought you wanted, but that ends up stuffed into a shoe box under your bed.”

(Ok, so I wouldn’t really use the Golden Wheel, but come on, people!  Imagine the gold Wii-mote nestled in that thing!)

I suppose I could mount either the Game & Watch or the Hanafuda set in a shadowbox.  My god, I could feel the futility oozing out of that statement as I wrote it. 

*          *          *

When I was a child, I dreamed of displaying all my G.I. Joe action figures in a massive glass case, each one posed to best feature his or her combat role and abilities (e.g., Snake Eyes dual-wielding swords, or Lifeline hunched over a prone soldier, medical case at the ready).  I also heard fables of people going to China and buying a gargantuan crate that contained the entire collection of G.I. Joes in one go.  Of course, I never acquired all the Joes, nor did I ever display them in such fine fashion.  And while I look back fondly on what was an innocent dream as a child, it makes little sense as an adult to keep hanging on to things that have no use. 

To be fair, there is an aesthetic justification for having such things.  Toys and trinkets are often little works of art, delightful to behold.  But art can be an isolating experience, visual art especially.  Art museums, more so than going to the movies or a concert, are best enjoyed with company, someone to talk to about what you are seeing.  And unless I’m going to host regular viewings of my swag collection, what use is it for me to gaze alone?  I imagine that the thief of the Mona Lisa finally tried to sell the painting only because he had grown bored of staring at La Gioconda on his dining room table every day. 

*          *          *

I think the very first super-swag I got was a free copy of Dragon Warrior for the NES that came with a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine.  This was a legendary limited time promotion – the gift of a full-fledged game, and a well-known and desirable one at that – and still the king of all promotional giveaways, at least in the nerdlyverse.  This was not a symbolic gesture like most swag; it was something I could pop into my Nintendo and use right away. 

Collectibles tend to walk a fine line between art and mere consumerism (isn’t that the line where pop art lives?), but I would argue that we don’t need to choose between the extremes of pure asceticism and vulgar consumption.  Luxury goods and leisure activities give resonance to serious work, and vice versa.  So I’m not saying we shouldn’t have luxuries.  I just enjoy them more when they are useful luxuries.

Although, looking back, I can’t say that Dragon Warrior was a very useful game, since I never got very far in it.  But hey, I tried.

Bonus: here’s a guy rabidly wetting himself over a moderately pleasant windfall.

I wore the mummer’s motley well, whatever that means.

I was recently asked where Final Fantasy XII stands among the Final Fantasy games.  There is no one-word answer to this question.  I could say that it ranks dead last, but that would be unfair . . . to the other Final Fantasy games.

There was a time when I thought I would probably never beat this game.  I started it, logged dozens of hours, got distracted by being an adult, and lived apart from it, occasionally wondering if I ever even enjoyed playing it. 

I didn’t know why I eventually came back to it.  I didn’t feel like it was a choice.  Maybe it was like the island in Lost, some awful place that compelled me to come back.  Maybe it was that knot in my psyche that had to be undone before I could move on with my life.

Maybe this was my Vietnam. 

*          *          *

My brother asked me if I felt a sense of accomplishment after beating this game.  “Accomplishment” is not the word I would use.  That would imply that I had done something.  In fact, I would say that the playing of FFXII felt more like something was being done to me.  It was like someone had been hurting me, and then finally, after years and years of it, they stopped hurting me. 

More than any of the previous games, it approximated what it would be like for an average Joe with barely any combat training, humble armaments, and an empty wallet to go out and wage war on monsters and fiends.  You would die quickly and often.  You probably wouldn’t want to go on living.  Your battle cry would be lifted from the knights of Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “Run away!”

Many role-playing games have the “monster in a box,” a monster that disguises itself as a treasure chest only to spring upon unwary adventurers.  FFXII has them.  It also has monsters disguised as save points.  That’s right.  Those things that normally heal you and represent refuge from the savagery of perpetual warfare.  Fake save points.  How messed up is that? 

Treasure chests have specific locations throughout the world and dungeons, but they only appear some of the time.  Oh, any particular chest might hold one of several items, depending on mysterious conditions, so instead of getting, say, the rare penetrator crossbow you hoped for, you will get 16 gil. That’s if the chest appeared at all, which it didn’t.  So, I guess, consider yourself lucky?

A glance at the strategy guide reveals that the most durable foe, Yiazmat, has 50,112,254 hit points.  That’s millions.  I mean, yeah, he’s an optional hunt, but still . . . that just ain’t right.

To the west of the main town of Rabanastre lies the Dalmasca Westersand, a vast desert.  To the west of this lies the Ogir-Yensa Sandsea, an enormous desert.  To the west of this lies the Nam-Yensa Sandsea.  No, that’s not a lush forest; it’s a large desert.  And no, you can’t fly an airship over the Yensas because they’re Jagd.  Instead, you have to walk through the whole thing to get to the Tomb of Raithwall, who was the Dynast King, who was given deifacted nethicite by the Occuria, which is not to be confused with manufacted nethicite, which is entirely different. 

I’m so glad this game is voice-acted, so I don’t have to imagine the appropriate way to deliver the line, “Zargabaath, do not tell me you join in this mummer’s farce!” 

For no reason whatsoever, mummers are a big deal in this world.

To use any particular piece of equipment, you have to unlock the “license” for it by earning “license points” in fights.  But even after doing so, you still have to buy the weapon or armor you want to use.  Money comes almost exclusively from selling “loot.”  Loot, when sold in specific combinations, unlocks “bazaar goods.”  The game tracks the “loot” sold, but does not inform the player of either how many of each kind have been sold, or what combinations are required for getting any particular “bazaar good.”  You could create a spreadsheet and keep track of it yourself, and then hoard the “loot” until you have the preferred combinations as reported in your strategy guide, but then you won’t have any money to buy weapons and armor, which means you won’t be strong enough to defeat enemies for their “loot,” which means you won’t be earning many “license points,” which means you won’t be able to unlock the “licenses” for equipment that you couldn’t afford anyway, which means you’ll be closing in on 65 hours of gameplay, and yet you’re still using a freaking Ancient Sword that was already underpowered when you got it near the beginning of the game!

This is a game where opening any of four unremarkable and unmarked treasure chests near the beginning of the game dooms you to not being able to acquire the game’s most powerful weapon later on.  Who on the development team came up with such a needlessly cruel way of punishing the player?  And more importantly, what did they get from doing this?  I ask you, What did you get?!?

Oh, in case anyone cares, the supreme weapon in question is the Zodiac Spear, to be found in the Necrohol of Nabudis, in the region of the Nabreus Deadlands, in the kingdom of Nabradia.  I’m pretty sure this game has more names in it than the Bible.  (Lazy Bible writers, take note: there are no repeat names in FFXII.)

I didn’t know this term, “buffs,” until after I started playing this game.  After I had earned enough “buff” spells, I discovered an excellent strategy for staying alive: keeping my characters buffed at all times.  One by one, I buffed my characters.  Protect, shell, regen, haste, even bravery and faith.  And berserk on Basch to dramatically improve his killing potential.  I usually had to cast berserk on him several times because, yes, it can miss.  Ten minutes later, as I finished buffing out the last character, the first character’s buffs were already wearing off.  Sometimes, other people would watch me play the game, and would complain that this ritual buffing was tedious to watch.  To which I reply: imagine how I feel. 

These strategies were ludicrous, but the power of the game was such that it made me think that completely crazy things were completely normal.  The moment I realized that I may have crossed the point of no return was when I stormed into a boss fight yelling at the TV, “We’re going to do this guy!  We’re going to do him into the ground!” 

 *          *          *

FFXII is the largest and most complicated game I’ve ever played; nothing else comes close.  I wouldn’t call my experience a love-hate relationship, because neither “love” nor “hate” reflects how I feel about this game.  It was more like agony and ecstasy – the agony of trying and failing to understand the gameplay on anything more than a superficial level, the ecstasy that came from giving in to the craziness, and allowing myself to engage the art in the most absurd way.  

What is my lasting impression of the time I spent in Ivalice?  I believe Clive Owen said it best in The Bourne Identity as he watched his life force fleeing from him:

“Look at this.  Look at what they make you give.”

The Goodbye Song

I was recently asked the question: If you could have a “goodbye song,” one song that would play for the entire world before you left it forever, what would it be?

The question doesn’t ask what your favorite song is.  That is a major implication, but you’re also invited to consider whether a favorite song is the one you’d want the world to hear.  And do you interpret the question to mean that, by extension, the world will remember the kind of person you were based on the song you chose?

Songs are like air molecules; they constantly float about me, and I keep sucking them in.  But I have to write about them before I can understand what they mean to me.  For me, writing is the process of figuring out what I think about things.  So here we go . . .

I could pick something like “Act Naturally” by the Beatles, if I wanted my kiss-off to the world to be that human existence is a great cosmic joke. 

If I want to send the message that life is about having a good time, it would probably be “Down on the Corner” by Creedence Clearwater Revival.  If I wanted that good time to play well among Europeans, I’d pick “Sexbomb” by Tom Jones. 

There are specific songs that I think of when I’m in certain moods.  When I’m having conflicts with people I care about, I always think of “We Can Work It Out” by the Beatles, which to me embodies a meta-level ballet/wrestling match between Lennon and McCartney.  When I’m sad, I automatically think of Sarah McLachlan’s version of “Song for a Winter’s Night,” or “Lost Cause” by Beck, or . . . anything by Natalie Merchant. 

If it’s the song I’ve sung the most times in Rock Band and Guitar Hero, it would be “Hungry Like the Wolf” by Duran Duran.

For a message of pure romance, nothing beats “The Way You Look Tonight,” written for and still best performed by Fred Astaire. 

If I wanted to be a greedy scoundrel, I would choose “You Never Give Me Your Money” by the Beatles, which is really like three songs in one (a technique that reached its apotheosis in McCartney’s “Band on the Run”). 

The song I loved best as a child: “Straight Up” by Paula Abdul.  The song I love best with my sexy inner child: “2 Become 1” by the Spice Girls.  The song I loved then and now with equal fervor: “Beat It” by Michael Jackson. 

The two songs I most recently tried to mash up were Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” and “Wish You Were Here,” but then I realized it wouldn’t work because I couldn’t remember which was which.  Or maybe it worked too well . . .

If I wanted the perfect jukebox song, I’d pick Sam Cooke’s “Another Saturday Night.”

“On Your Shore” by Charlotte Martin is the song that would play when Aeneas lands in Italy . . . in my film adaptation of The Aeneid.  Someday . . .

If it’s a brilliant song that I never play for guests because they’ll never like it (because it takes as its subjects sharecropping and an orphaned child), it would be “Annabelle” by Gillian Welch.  (Also “Names” by Cat Power – not safe for fragile souls.)

I shouldn’t neglect the influence of movies (and nostalgia), and it was Back to the Future that etched “Earth Angel” and “Johnny B. Goode” indelibly into my childhood.  (Equally memorable was “The Power of Love” by Huey Lewis and the News.  Don’t be a hater.)

If I’m going to express my ethical philosophy, then no song says it better than Queen’s “I Want It All.”  (Except maybe “Fat Bottomed Girls,” but that’s more what you’d call a personal history.  Kidding!)

If it’s the one song that will keep the aliens from enslaving humanity, which is probably the noblest ideal I’ve mentioned so far, it would probably be Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill,” because I honestly believe she sings the language of the aliens. 

*          *          *

Gather all those songs, and it would make a pretty good mix tape, which kind of leads me to my final answer.  I’ve always believed that music, and art in general, should be free.  Despite the fact that every artist you’ve ever heard of (except Emily Dickinson) has made money off their art, there is nevertheless something vulgar about selling that which is supposed to express the height of human creativity, and thereby reacquaint you with your soul.  So I think if I had to choose one goodbye song, it would be a song that realistically belongs to everyone.  The problem is, any song like that (“Happy Birthday,” “We Will Rock You,” your national anthem) has lost its meaning or ability to move you.  On the flip side, I could pick something hopelessly obscure, probably something I’d have to write myself, and that would express the world as I’ve absorbed it.  I feel like everything in between these extremes is just another great song. 

And so . . . I have to cheat.  I choose not a “song,” but an aria, “Che gelida manina” from La Bohème, because . . .

Because it’s opera, it is meant to be performed over and over and in a variety of ways.  You can hear it however you want, and you can probably play it better in your head than any orchestra or singer could perform it.

Because it predates recordings, there is no expectation of a definitive performance. So in theory, even I could sing it and make it my own.  In theory!

Because it’s a love song, and love, especially new love, is universal.

Because it’s a song about art and being an artist, a writer of poems and songs.  A song about song seems appropriate for this purpose.

Because it is as beautiful as anything else I could have chosen.

Finally, because I first heard La Bohème when someone shared it with me.  Someone wanted me to hear it.  So if there’s one song I’d pass on for others to hear, this would be it.

The Gateway City

For being such a well-known place and such an old city (by American standards), St. Louis is actually a relatively small city.  St. Louis is home to Anheuser-Busch of Budweiser fame; it hosted, in the same year, a World’s Fair and an Olympic Games (1904 – the first Olympics in the United States); the Cardinals are a storied baseball team.  Most of us are familiar with Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis and the film Meet Me in St. Louis.  St. Louis has most of the things that seem to characterize a cosmopolitan city: museums, trendy restaurants, nightlife, a large urban park, a symphony orchestra, a passable light rail system, an international airport, a well regarded research university, three major sports teams, and at least one iconic feature: the Gateway Arch.  Yet as I drove around town on a recent visit, seeing various neighborhoods, and trying to figure out what made this place special, it was hard to escape the feeling that there wasn’t much going on.  It felt like a smaller version of a city like Chicago, or even San Diego.  It was sort of a Portland of the Midwest, though less hipsterific.  But it’s hard to distinguish yourself by being a smaller version of something else.  As Emerson wrote in the Divinity School Address,

Imitation cannot go above its model.  The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity.  The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm.  In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man’s.

*          *          *

Gateway Arch, designed by Eero Saarinen.  The one thing everyone knows about St. Louis, this symbol is ubiquitous in the city, found in souvenir photos and knickknacks, integrated into logos, and even used as a replacement for the “N” in some signs.

   

A placid scene from the Occupy St. Louis presence downtown, in the shadow of the Arch and the Old Courthouse.

Washington Avenue with the lights on.  The locus of nightlife downtown.

The original office building at the Anheuser-Busch brewery.  I’ll never forget the smell that saturated the air around the complex, richly earthy and almost appetizing.  Malted barley, maybe?  Yeast?  I don’t know, but I like it.

Inside the City Museum, something like a funhouse crossed with a wrecking yard, but nothing like a museum.

Rue Lafayette, a café cum antiques and vintage goods store.  Note the A. E. Housman poem, “With Rue My Heart is Laden,” framed.  Is there a pun there?

What we know as Panera Bread actually started in St. Louis under a more local moniker.  (No, I didn’t go inside for a snack, although on my first visit to St. Louis, some seven years ago, I did go to this very one, and thought, "This food is good.  They should really expand nationally."  I guess they went with that.)

I found religion when I tried the gooey butter cake, one of the triumvirate of uniquely St. Louis delicacies (the other two being toasted ravioli and St. Louis-style pizza).  It tasted like a moist brownie, but not chocolate.  Or something like the widely available raspberry bars or toffee almond bars, but . . . gooey-er.  Like manna, my friends.  I'm talkin' Old Testament.

Toasted ravioli.  I felt very much that this is the right way to prepare ravioli.  I don’t dislike your typical boiled ravioli with sauce, but I don’t think I’ve ever thought to myself, “I really have a hankering for some ravioli today!”  And I’ve always thought it kind of silly when upscale restaurants have some version of ravioli on the entrée menu, whether something exotic like rabbit or elk (no matter how outlandish the animal, you never get any discernable flavor from the ground meat paste that goes inside the dough), or a token vegetarian option.  But when I tried the toasted ravioli, I thought, “Yes, this is something I could find myself craving.”  Perhaps, alongside the Arch, the home-grown cuisine can truly be considered the pride of St. Louis.

*          *          *

St. Louis compares favorably with another medium-sized Midwestern city I’ve visited: Cleveland.  That probably doesn’t sound like a recommendation, but both of these cities have beauty to find, and I’ve enjoyed my chances to visit less obviously enchanting places.  When you go to New York, if you’re a certain sort of savvy traveler, you try to look for “off the beaten path” attractions and “neighborhood joints,” and you marvel at your good luck and ingenuity when you capture a taste of what the “locals” do, as opposed to getting mired in tourist traps.  But when you visit a place like St. Louis, it’s pretty much all “off the beaten path,” and it allows you to appreciate discovering a place without the mist of preconception between you and it. 

My only regret upon leaving the Gateway City was that I didn’t try the St. Louis-style pizza, which is distinguished by the thin and crispy crust and the trademarked Provel cheese, a kind of processed cheese that I have heard will “stick to your mouth” and is “kind of gross.”  Apparently, this oddity can only be found in St. Louis and the environs, and the locals seem to either love it or hate it.  Maybe some even love to hate it, which is as strong a recommendation as I can think of for trying it. 

              

Next time, St. Lou.  Next time . . .

Herman Sinaiko, Superstar

At least two men who were known for wearing turtlenecks died last week. While Steve Jobs receives the kind of farewell that typically conducts American presidents down the River Styx, you probably won’t hear about Herman Sinaiko’s death on your evening newscast, or Slate, or CNN, or the Huffington Post. But those who heard the University of Chicago professor talk about Plato, Aristotle, art, criticism, beauty, knowledge, theater, and so many other subjects, will agree that with a single discussion, he could change something inside you, or rather, draw out some quality or thought that you didn’t know was in you. 

Sinaiko was hailed at UChicago for his dedication to teaching undergraduates. He was one of the greatest teachers I’ve ever had, one of the most humane people I’ve ever known, and a magnetic speaker. Listening to Sinaiko was, I imagine, like listening to Cicero or Demosthenes. The measure of this man was that he, in his greatness, didn’t make me feel small. Rather, he made me feel great as well, and that I could do great things. 

I used to attend rock concerts frequently, mostly smallish venues with medium wattage artists, stars who would show up occasionally on the radio and in Rolling Stone. Artists you could walk up to after the show, and who would sign an autograph and shake your hand. And though I invariably did approach them and ask them to sign my CD liner notes, it was always an awkward affair. What would I say to these people who didn’t know me, whom I would probably never talk to again? You were amazing? Thank you? 

In June of this year, I was at the University of Chicago for a day, and I happened to see Mr. Sinaiko walking rather jauntily on campus. I hadn’t seen him in over ten years. I wanted to walk up to him and re-introduce myself, but I didn’t. I suppose I was embarrassed to approach this monumental man who probably didn’t remember me, and tell him . . . tell him what? You were amazing? Thank you? 

I wish I had gone up to him and interrupted him just briefly. I would have told him that I took two classes with him, and in that short time, he left me with this indelible message: it is noble to help the helpless. It was the ethics not only of a humanist intellectual but of a comic-book superhero. I think in the minds of many of his students, he was both.  

Bouncing Babies

The first personal computer in my family was an MS-DOS-based machine, though it wasn’t very “personal.”  I don’t know what the brand was, or if it even had a “brand” in the normal sense of the word.  In the time that it loitered in my home (probably several years), all I ever really extracted from that humming box of chips and wires was a game called Bouncing Babies, which challenged the player to rescue purple pixel babies tumbling out of the windows of a burning apartment building.  I controlled a trampoline wielded by firemen at ground level, and the goal was to catch the falling babies and bounce them to the safety of an ambulance.  Kind of like Pong or Breakout, but with imperiled infants.

Oh, I also learned the neat trick that if you typed “DIR” into the DOS prompt and pressed Enter, you could bring up a directory of all the files on the computer.

That was it.  That was all I ever learned to do on that machine.

I think I was in 6th or 7th grade, and around the same time, I was playing Oregon Trail in computer class at school on an Apple IIe.  Here was a computer that was almost as old as I was, the best that public school funds could procure for my technological edification, and I got just as much or more out of it as I did on my newish home computer, supposedly a cutting-edge device.

But let’s be real here.  I had a Nintendo.  What were bouncing babies and death by dysentery compared to Mario and Final Fantasy?  Heck, even the Atari 2600 outclassed the foolishness of playing games on a keyboard.  If this was what personal computing was, I could pass.

Of course, no one ever taught me how to use DOS, or even the Apple IIe.  And I suppose that was the point.

In those neophyte days, I remember being reassured by a family friend, who worked in the software industry, that the computer was just a passive, slavish machine.  It can only do what you tell it to do, so I shouldn’t feel intimidated by it.  And yet, unless you were a software engineer, there was no intuitive way to know how to tell the machine to do anything.  It should have been obvious to everyone that the easier it was to tell a computer how to do things, the more enjoyable and useful a computer could be.

Throughout my life, I have come late to computer technology, internet innovations, even (especially?) viral phenomena.  I sent my first email in 1997, just before entering college.  I bemoaned the inexorable drift away from handwritten missives.  As I warmed to the idea and practice of email, I still insisted on writing a date at the top of every email I sent, as though it were a formal letter.  Yes, I wrote the date.  Even though the date and even the time were automatically stamped.  Every email.  Oh, and back then, I wrote the term as “e-mail,” with the hyphen.  I wasn’t the only one, but maybe I was the only one who did it on principle, instead of succumbing to the slurred, lazy, and (in my mind) inaccurate “email.”

In college, I found out from friends about downloading music online.  That’s right, mp3s, the term that for a few years replaced “songs” in the lexicon of cyberspace (do people still say “cyberspace”?).  We would go to a website called Scour, download their downloading program, and then search for any random song we could think of.  This was well before any talk of legality or piracy.  Nor did we worry about viruses and Trojan horses.  We were like boys stumbling upon a stash of fireworks, or hillbillies discovering oil.

And yet I remember saying it was “a fad.”  I had the curmudgeon’s gift of grouse; Andy Rooney would be proud (I mean, he would be if he weren’t such a curmudgeon who hated everything that was born after the Battle of the Bulge).  I couldn’t deny the thrill of downloading “Secret Agent Man” by Johnny Rivers on a whim and listening to the 128kbps mp3 file on my computer’s tinny speakers (satisfyingly retro, hissy like a vinyl record on a turntable, or better, a wax cylinder on a phonograph – ask Andy Rooney for details).  But I started to get tired of simply sitting in front of a computer searching for songs all night long.  Eventually, I ran out of songs to look for.  My mind couldn’t contain that many names.  I couldn’t see how other people wouldn’t get tired of this activity.  And then there were some songs I desperately wanted to acquire, but that were nowhere to be found (“Halah” by Mazzy Star; yes, it was the late 90s).  What would I do then?

* * *

Just as I came very late to the internet and technology game, I came very late to an appreciation of what Steve Jobs was.  When the announcement was made in August that Jobs was stepping down as CEO of Apple, I knew that his death was imminent.  A man like this doesn’t step down, doesn’t let go of the bouncing baby he had fathered and rescued from the flames, unless he knows it’s the end.  I said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if he dies tomorrow.”

And then for the first time, I realized that he represented something very important.  He was an artist of technology, one of the very few of his kind.  As expensive as his products were, as overbearing as his acolytes were, as publicly dismissive as the man could be toward legitimate criticism of his work and ways, it was clear that he believed in the world he created.  I used to think that he was getting fat off of duping the public into buying things they didn’t need, but I think the truth is more complicated.

He got rich by giving people things they didn’t realize they wanted.  He didn’t ask them what they wanted; he told them what to want.  To the extent that he was wrong, we could call him a tyrant or megalomaniac.  But to the extent that he was right, wouldn’t we have to acknowledge that he had shades of a philosopher-king?

* * *

Years ago, my brother won an iPod.  This was a 15-gig device, very early generation.  A Mac-aholic could probably tell you which version it is.  It was the first Apple product that anyone in my family owned.  My brother never really used it, but for a while, I used it every day, listening to all those old college-acquired mp3s at the office.  But I had my reservations.  I cursed the iPod for its frictionless casing, which put me in constant fear of having it slip through my fingers.  I lambasted it for occasionally bugging out and freezing, as if it were a Windows-based system.  I scorned the pretentious white cable that eventually malfunctioned and left me unable to connect the iPod to my computer.  I lingered in my grumblings that a portable music player was nice, but really just a luxury, as all of these overhyped Apple products were.  I didn’t like this little machine, and I didn’t like the iTunes software that served it.  And yet I used it every day, and I never seriously believed that any competing system would operate better.

But after a few years of use, I put the iPod down, and have rarely used it since.  Whether you want to create more or consume more, technology is supposed to make that process easier, faster, better.  The reason I eventually put down the iPod was because I realized it wasn’t making my life better.  I loved music, but having it on all the time while my mind was trying to engage my workday tasks, or driving, or other things that held my attention hostage, I think I started to associate music, even good music, with the parts of my life that I would rather have spent doing something else.  This, along with the overwhelming availability of music, whether through paid or unpaid channels, had desensitized me to the experience of listening.  I was acquiring music, new and old, to “see if it was any good,” but I wasn’t actually listening to it.

I had become the passive, slavish machine.

That’s one of the central ironies of Steve Jobs’s creations and of his legacy.  As much as his life sets an example of doggedly pursuing your own excellence, and as genuinely inspirational as his Stanford commencement address was as a message of perseverance and non-conformity, he created things that, though they arguably had a moral aesthetic, were strictly amoral in use.  They could be tools of liberation or subjugation, depending on the strength of will of the user.  Thus, we see that the hammer-throwing blond girl and the pasty-faced drones of the iconic Mac Super Bowl commercial are siblings, bouncing babies born of society’s equal capacity for self-exaltation and self-annihilation.

* * *

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life." - Steve Jobs

The Walk

I don't see time begin and end. In my head, the twin towers are still alive.

- Philippe Petit, tightrope artist

The Most Interesting Thing I Saw at Comic-Con

Comic-Con. Also known as The Con. Super C. The C Cup . . . squared.

If you spend most of your time beating the streets outside of the Convention Center, it may surprise you to know that there are actually comics at Comic-Con. Tons of them, in fact. Aisle upon aisle of tables piled high with nothing but old Archies, Avengers, and maybe even a few copies of Bruce Wayne, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. It may further surprise you to hear that the most interesting thing at the big show isn’t necessarily catching a fleeting glimpse of Lyndsy Fonseca as security(?) dudes yell repeatedly in your ear, “one picture only!” and “keep moving!” Nor is it the sackload of swag I collected, most of it Twilight-related, including a pin adorned with a photo of Edward vampire.

Nor is it even this.

In fact, the most interesting thing at Comic-Con may actually have been . . . this:

Yes, a comic. Haven’t heard of this one, you say? Neither had I. I don’t know what it is that captivated me about young, racially pure Hansi. Maybe it’s the Pippi Longstocking braids, or the subtle warmth of those baby blues. Or maybe it’s the fact that she freakin’ loved the swastika. Whatever it was, I needed to know more. Fortunately for me, our lover of the crooked cross is the subject of much adoration on the Internet. Feel free to read all about her sordid history here, here, and here, and you are welcome to read the entire volume here, but be warned: the allure of our golden-tressed heroine, much like the allure of Nazi propaganda, is inexorable, and you may find yourself becoming . . . Some Jerk: The Dude who Loved the Hansi!

Still Hansi-curious? Here’s a small taste:

Yes, I know. You’re wondering, where can I find $600 before Czardoz does? I suggest you start by checking your sofa cushions. I’ll be running to the bank . . . to rob it!

Seed of doubt, kernel of truth

As a sequel to my previous post, “Curse all seeds!” I’m happy to report that the Slate Explainer has answered “a version” of my seedless watermelon question . . . here. My thanks to the Explainer!

For reference, my original question was: Why does so-called seedless watermelon have seeds? Specifically, the little white “seedlets.”

The Explainer only answers my question directly in the Bonus Explainer at the end of the article, and then only briefly, but I won’t fault them for that. It’s kind of a thrill to get a published response at all, and they offer a detailed answer to the question they are more interested in: what is the difference between seed types/colors in watermelons?

Regrettably, I have never specifically wondered about the difference between white seeds and black seeds in a “regular” watermelon. So for me, the entertainment value of this question is about on the level of, say, how common is premarital sex at BYU? Or, what is the congressional gym like?

I was more interested in the socio-economic ramifications of what I considered a biological oddity.* People buy seedless fruit for the perceived masticatory convenience. So why market an item as “seedless” when it has some seed-like elements, even if they are only “hard seed coats”? Honestly, does it make much difference to my mouth whether I have to spit out mature seeds or empty seed coats?

I’ve been told, “why don’t you just swallow them?” Well, that’s not really the point, is it? For people who don’t care either way, it’s easy to recommend a “grin and bear it” mentality. And if I were some soft, dandyish type who was born with a silver ladle up my petard, accustomed to suckling on the teat of an overfed nursemaid, I could see this as a valid point. But I’m not bemoaning a world that allows people to be victimized by the arduous chore of watermelon-eating. I’m just annoyed by the lack of clarity, consistency, transparency, whatever you want to call it.

Maybe I’m the only one who’s bothered by it. And I admit that my intellectual curiosity about this far outstrips my gustatory qualms about seedless watermelon.

But no, I’m still not swallowing.

_______

* I’ve also enjoyed reading about the genetics behind growing a seedless watermelon, which is the triploid (three sets of chromosomes) hybrid of a diploid plant and a tetraploid plant.

Curse all seeds!

Dear Slate Explainer,

I’ve been enjoying my fair share of watermelon during this hot summer. Perhaps to the dismay of the watermelon seed spitting champs of Luling, Texas (as well as greenhorn porch-swingers and curb jockeys all over the South), I always buy seedless watermelon. However, it has always bothered me that there are all those little white seeds or “seedlets” in there, as well as the occasional “normal” black seed.

Why does so-called seedless watermelon have seeds? Seedless oranges and grapes generally have no seeds whatsoever. I buy seedless fruit because I don’t have the patience for the oral gymnastics of sifting through seeds. What gives?

Thanks.

Czardoz Contra World

* * *

A few days ago, I emailed a version of the above to the Slate Explainer, a column that answers questions “about today’s news.” Not directly factual questions about specific events, which would be boring, but rather, thematically germane questions, the kinds of quandaries that particular events get you thinking about. So you would likely find a question about choreographing fireworks displays during the Fourth of July, or a question about lethal doses of radiation during the Fukushima nuclear tragedy in Japan, or even a question about the various spellings of Gadhafi (Qaddafi?) during the apex of Libyan revolution coverage.

I especially enjoy questions that address cultural touchstones, things that everyone has some experience with, for example: what happens if you eat the silica gel that’s packed in with your ramen packages and Blu-ray players? And I can’t help reveling in questions with some lurid fascination, like: would your dog eat your dead body? Or, what does whale taste like?

So, do you think they’ll answer my question on the website? I hope so, because I certainly think it has more entertainment value and intellectual breadth than, say, whether someone can really make you go to rehab, or how the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement compares to that in the other major sports.

Is it petty of me to say that I am terminally annoyed with the white seedlets in seedless watermelon, from both mouthfeel and nomenclatural standpoints? The former point is obvious; the latter, well, in a marketplace that has established the meaning of “seedless” to mean “without seeds” for other fruits, isn’t it somewhat fraudulent for the watermelon to gallivant through the produce section under the same banner? Wouldn’t it be more honest to call it a “white seed” watermelon as opposed to a “normal” or “black seed” watermelon? Actually, who’s to say what’s normal? I wasn’t aware until researching this issue that the familiar yellow Cavendish banana is actually a “seedless” fruit, produced through vegetative reproduction rather than sexual reproduction. They seem pretty normal to me!

In an era where the bioengineering of food is commonplace, where inaccurate and misleading labels are as old as Rhode Island and the Indians of Christopher Columbus, and where getting a raw deal is considered business as usual, perhaps we’ve lost our innocence on numerous fronts. It’s a loss I can bear, but in the absence of innocence, I should like very much to retain my sense of outrage.

* * *

UPDATE!

During the course of writing this post, I received an email response from Daniel Engber, Explainer editor, who told me that they “might answer some version of it tomorrow.” Cross your fingers!

Ode to my father

For Father’s Day, I thought I would do something I’ve never done before: share a few anecdotes about my father, in homage to a man I’ve long underappreciated and have had difficulty connecting with. Here are a few of the moments I’ll never forget about my father.

* * *

Once upon a time, during a visit to Oakland, it was suggested to my father, my brother, and me that we see the local Mormon temple, which was reputed to be quite aesthetically pleasing. Once there, we walked the grounds, and somehow got roped into taking a “tour,” their version of a tour involving very little architecture or landscaping, and quite a bit of religious propaganda, most notably in the form of a short movie about the Mormon “experience.”

After the movie, our guide, a smile-happy young woman, asked us what we thought of what we had just seen. Though I gather the questions were directed at all of us, she specifically looked at my father, and he took the lead in answering.

“I thought it was very nice,” he said, “that you believe in a father who takes care of you.”

Our guide nodded approvingly. Then she made the mistake of asking my father, “What do you believe in?”

My father looked at her with the placid expression that he had maintained throughout the film and conversation, and said, “Nothing.”

Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder beside him in the theater-style seats, I tried desperately not to laugh out loud. I could feel coming upon me a crack of smile the size of the Grand Canyon, and it was only a combination of jaw-clenching, lip-biting, and hand-over-mouth that saved me from an epic guffaw. The man had said he believed in “nothing,” as if it were the blandest comment in the world.

Our young lady looked slightly bewildered, and I’m sure she didn’t want to respond in any fervent way, for fear that something was lost in translation. In a way, I think something was lost, because although I know my father was honestly expressing that he has no religious beliefs, I don’t think he realized the idiomatic impact of his blunt statement.

Embroiled as our societies are in various destructive culture wars and ideological arm-wrestling matches, I’d like to think that one day, I’ll be able to say with a straight face and clear conscience, “I believe in nothing.”

That was the last time we visited a Mormon temple together, but hopefully, not the last.

* * *

On a family daytrip to Davis, California (the reasons for the trip would bore you as much as Davis bores most sane people), I asked to be dropped off for the afternoon to see an old college friend who was now attending UC Davis. I met up with her, just the two of us, and we talked, laughed, and drove around while the rest of my family pursued their own Davis delights.

When my family retrieved me, my mother asked me, “Did you have enough time together?”

My father interrupted in a good-humored way and said, “When it comes to the people you care about, when is it ever ‘enough’ time?”

When it comes to life lessons, I was never particularly receptive to the ones my father tried strongly and directly to instill in me. But once in a while, he would utter an offhand remark that reached right into the most humane and sympathetic part of me.

* * *

My favorite memory of my father comes from my grade school days.

When I was a boy of about six, just starting to walk that one long block to school on my own, my father would walk me out of the house and up to the street curb, and then let me cross the street by myself. At the opposite side of the street, it was my habit to look back at my father, and invariably, he would move his hands up to his head and make a gesture of finger-combing his hair. He was telling me to smooth down my disheveled jungle of hair. I would try my best as I walked the rest of the way to school. Looking back now, I wonder why he didn’t just put a comb in my pocket. I also wonder why the best memories are always the simplest.

Though I don’t tell him nearly enough, and though his attempts to give me advice might strike me as imperious and officious now, I hope he realizes that I appreciate his concern. And no matter how well I've learned to tame my hair, I hope my father will continue to look out for me as he did back then.

* * *

Note [The following will perhaps be of only minimal interest, and only to my long-time readers.]:

I wrote and edited the above post all in one day, and so it is in very real terms a first draft, as opposed to almost all my other posts, which are heavily scrutinized and modified before I publish them. Not to say that there is any treasure hunt of typos or grammatical boners to be found. Rather, it is only remarkable to the degree that anyone cares about the “voice” of my posts, which perhaps is less clear in this one than in my more carefully written posts. If I ever get around to revising this post, I may put the new version alongside the above version as a useful comparison study. For myself, I mean, because I’m sure no one else cares!

Gotta Catch His Ball!

Though the above photograph is about as blurry and confused as a Psyduck, the viewer should be able to discern the unmistakable image of a tiny boy dressed in what could only be interpreted as an Ash Ketchum costume, with a canary yellow balloon trailing behind him as a fanciful representation of Pikachu. Look carefully. See the red and white hat peeking out from behind the bus door. See the blue backpack and blue shoes, the overall air of shrimpy insolence. Revolting, isn’t it? This may not be a perfectly accoutered Ash (see below), but the imagination involved makes it stand out from mere verisimilitude.

I stalked this mother and child parade for about the length of a street block, trying to capture the money shot while eluding their notice. Astonishingly, the sight of a grown man bounding after a little runt and snapping pictures has the tendency to cause ignorant passersby to mistake said man for a child snatcher. My aversion to being featured on yet another episode of To Catch a Predator forced me to take a timidly defensive posture, like, I don’t know, a Metapod? (He only knows how to “harden,” hahahaha! Disgusting.) Shackled as I was by our suspicious American culture, this photo, shot with my ancient Nokia cell phone’s 2-megapixel camera from a great distance, obscured and fuzzy as it is, was the best and only one I could get.

As the old adage goes, the best camera is the one you have with you. I would have liked to have been wielding my Pentax DSLR with a super-telephoto lens attached at the moment that I stumbled on the lad. But, like a Pokémon trainer who comes upon a rare Pokémon but has no master ball . . . uh . . . and then he has to use his other ball . . . um . . . and his type is weak against some other type . . . er . . . I’m not good with these Poké-nalogies.

What other franchise could I try . . .

Like Elliot Salem and Tyson Rios bro-ing it up in Army of Two, you use the tools you have. If you don’t have a guitar to celebrate surviving a hairy back-to-front tandem parachuting gauntlet, you muscle out some air guitar and make funny noises with your mouth. Don’t have a girl to hug after dishing out a nasty decap? Just walk up slowly behind your partner, grip him tenderly but snugly around the waist (back to front, natch), and lift him gently off the ground until you can feel his manly weight upon you. Then lower him like a child cradled in your loins, his warmth commingling with yours. And hush, no words now, lest you disturb the sanctity of this moment.

Ugh, what depravity. I guess pedophilia is still worse, right? Right???

Another two bite the dust. What now?

Here they are, the ten songs that I wish I could have played on either Rock Band or Guitar Hero. I’m not saying that the inclusion of some or all of these would have saved either franchise from the ax (that’s a pun, see?), but they would have added some legitimacy, zest, variety, and vigor to decent song lists that consistently fell short of greatness, hewed too close to a noise rock comfort zone, and included far too much that was disposable (I’m looking at you, Slipknot, and “Chop Suey” by System of a Down).

I searched the official websites of both series to see if any of these songs were available either as downloads or innate to any of the boxed games, and as far as I could tell, they were not. If I made a mistake, let me know, and more importantly, buy me that song.

1. Crowded House – Don’t Dream It’s Over (1987)

A bit of a “soft” choice, but all instruments are represented, including keyboards, plus there’s a backing vocal. And it's a great song for singers of either sex.

2. Erasure – A Little Respect (1988)

Synth-pop gets little respect in the rock world, but with the arrival of the keyboard in Rock Band 3, this song would have easily led the vanguard of keyboard tracks (though, as it turns out, this vanguard is now more of a funeral procession).

3. Foreigner – I Want to Know What Love Is (1984)

A real singer’s song, the kind of thing both series are short on. That made some sense in the pre-Rock Band days, but with the coming of the microphone and the acknowledgement that these games weren’t just for would-be power shredders, it would have been nice to have this song, the king of the power ballads.

4. Golden Earring – Twilight Zone (1982)

You can play “Radar Love” on Rock Band, and while that’s a fun song, “Twilight Zone” is the one I want. It’s like riding on the knife edge of insanity.

5. Guns ‘n’ Roses – You Could Be Mine (1991)

A classic, especially memorable from the Terminator 2 soundtrack, and the kind of song that these games were designed for. So what was the hold-up?

6. Led Zeppelin – Stairway to Heaven (1971)

I’m no Zeppelin aficionado, and I would understand a little backlash in selecting this, a too obvious choice, and too lengthy a song. But I listened to it again the other day, and it is a truly marvelous piece of music. And I can’t think of any other Zeppelin song I’d choose over this. Let’s say it falls into the category of “missing definitives.”

7. Smashing Pumpkins – Ava Adore (1998)

Both series feature decent selections of Smashing Pumpkins songs, but neither features this, which I consider their best song. You can keep “Today,” which shows off the band at its most saccharine and user-friendly. “Ava Adore” is a song for the Gothic Nosferatu within.

8. The Sounds – Midnight Sun (2009)

A relative obscurity, and recent, but this list needs a representative of where music is going now. This is perhaps my favorite song from my favorite good-time band of the last several years.

9. U2 – Pride (In the Name of Love) (1984)

If you could have only one U2 track, which one would it be? As much as I love “One,” I wanted more of an earnest rocker than a ballad of yearning. So it was a toss-up between “Pride” and “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” While I think the latter is a more pleasing song, I’m going with the former because it’s more of a vocal challenge.

10. Veruca Salt – Seether (1994)

“Volcano Girls” is available as a download in Guitar Hero, and while that may be a more rocking song overall, “Seether” is their iconic hit, one of the defining songs of the 90s, and it should be here. Plus, it's nice to have the harmony vocal.

I suppose it’s no accident that this list is heavily populated by the songs of my childhood and adolescence. Take them for what they’re worth; they’re just one man’s opinion. All in all, I think Rock Band and Guitar Hero did a good job; it wasn’t exactly easy to make this list, and though I can think of many other songs I would have like to have played (Phil Collins and Rod Stewart, anyone?), the above are the closest to being essential.

So long, music games. You made a good show of it. I guess we still have karaoke night.

Booth and the Double Button

My former teacher at the University of Chicago, Wayne Booth, wrote an essay entitled, “Is There Any Knowledge that a Man Must Have?” In it, he discussed the aims of liberal education, and while I suspect he didn’t have in mind such a mundane task as sewing a button, Mr. Booth possessed a breadth of interests that surprised most.

On a recent winter trip to Seattle, in the midst of uncommonly cold weather (as confirmed/alleged by various longtime locals I happened to come across), I recalled Mr. Booth’s question when the buttons of my overcoat (the only coat I had brought for this weeks-long trip) started popping off.

The coat was barely adequate to fend off the chill in the first place, and it would certainly be useless to me if it couldn’t close. At the same time, I had never in my life sewn a button. I think my only sewing experience of any kind was a crafts project in elementary school. I didn’t plan to spend the rest of my trip indoors or furiously hugging myself to keep my coat closed. (Nor did my budget or temperament allow for the purchase of a new garment.) So I had a choice: take the coat to someone to fix the buttons, or sew them myself.

How hard could it be? I thought. So I bought a rudimentary sewing kit at Walgreen’s and, with the internet as my guide, I got to work. Here are the malefactors (shown with size references):

You can see that there is not only the main, larger button for the front of the coat, but also a smaller (let’s call it an anchor) button that attaches to the interior side. I didn’t fancy the idea of cutting my teeth on this pernicious “double button,” but I figured that one doesn’t choose the crisis, only the response.

Once I got going, I realized that it was indeed a simple operation, though none of the videos and guides I initially consulted made clear how to accomplish the final knot that the button required. So I improvised a little, and though my technique wasn’t entirely orthodox, the button held well enough. I tackled a second button with more assurance, but left too narrow a shank this time, meaning that the gap between button and fabric was barely wide enough to accommodate easy buttoning. But it worked. And voila! The coat, she is done:

I returned to the question: is there any knowledge that a man must have? (Or as Mr. Booth revised at a later, more politically correct time: what knowledge, if any, should everybody pursue?) Specifically, is sewing a button a skill that everyone should learn? Once I had done it, I had to say no, I didn’t need to have this particular knowledge, and if I had a personal handmaiden to sew my buttons and darn my socks till the end of days, I wouldn’t feel like I had lost some crucial piece of my humanity.

But the question is not about specific fragments of knowledge. Rather, it asks of each of us what it is that we need to know in order to be truly free as human beings. I wouldn’t say that learning to sew a button was an Olympian achievement, but I did enjoy the small freedom I felt in doing it myself, and knowing that when the time comes, I could do it again.

As soon as I join the ranks of professional seamstresses (we really need a masculine form of that word), I will announce the pricing for my services.

* * *

Wayne Booth was a great man, a great humanist. I was proud to know him, and only regret that I never got to know him well. Though the academy has a reputation for snootiness, I never knew a professor so at ease with bringing together the prosaic and the divine. I trust he would not begrudge me the use of his good name and good words in pursuit of matters sartorial.

“A man can be ignorant even of Shakespeare, Aristotle, Beethoven, and Einstein, and be a man for a’ that – if he has learned how to think his own thoughts, experience beauty for himself, and choose his own actions.” – Wayne Booth

It's a-you? It's a-me!

Mario has achieved the top of the flagpole! Hooray! 5,000 points!

(Totem pole at Victor Steinbreuck Park, Seattle)

“My name is Ozymandias . . .”

On April 15, 2006, the Hotel San Diego was demolished to make way for an empty hole. The official story is that the feds wanted the downtown site at 339 W. Broadway for an expansion of some courthouse. Thanks to typical gubment alacrity, the site remains a dirt lot almost five years after the wrecking crew turned one of downtown’s few distinctive buildings into a heap of rubble. (To be fair, I recently noted some stirrings on the site, so construction may be visible soon.)

Though it wasn’t a bad looking piece of architecture, I had no special affection for the Hotel San Diego, and I wasn’t in the audience the morning it collapsed upon its own ghosts. In the ensuing years, whenever I drove past the site, I would casually notice the vacant space where the hotel once stood, and wonder at the wisdom of destroying a city’s heritage only to make way for a bigger jail. San Diego doesn’t have nearly the quantity of grand old buildings of a city like Detroit, nor does it have the same level of urban blight. You would think a city like San Diego would have the luxury of taking more care with its historical buildings.

Fast forward to 2010. A few months ago, I was driving through Liberty Station in Point Loma. In 2006, this was home to the nicely cleaned-up remnants of the Naval Training Center. Acres of old buildings stood empty, and what once housed navy personnel was being prepared for a second life as home to freshly painted offices, art studios, galleries, and retail stores. Today, Liberty Station is starting to fulfill its original promise as a tidy village of pedestrian traffic, bland commercialism, and artistic endeavor.

So imagine my surprise as I drove up a random street within the complex and slowed to examine a hulking mass of metal on the side of the road, sitting on a lawn, shaded by trees. Upside-down and laid low as it was, I recognized the name and shape as soon as I saw the front - it was the original sign from atop the Hotel San Diego:

I had thought the sign would be scrap metal somewhere by now, and yet here it was, intact, a little rusty, but functional, a sign without a building. Why was it kept, and why here, out in the open, vulnerable to any vandal with a mind to befoul it? It’s a little ironic that a remnant of a dead era should be casually dumped in a place intended for revitalization and nostalgic restoration.

Just about a week ago, I was at Liberty Station again, and the sign remains on the same patch of grass. If I had more of the journalist in me, I might dig for a story of what’s to become of it. If I do learn of anything, I’ll revisit this in a future post. Until then, I am thankful for this little curiosity on the side of a road, and a few lines of verse it called to mind:

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings.

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

- Percy Bysshe Shelley