Steve Winwood - "Higher Love" (1986)

Jon just gave me an LP, Steve Winwood's Back in the High Life. It's great. This music triggers a lot of memories for me, mostly the neighbor's pool on summer nights, staying in hotels on vacation, and watching music videos on cable in someone's basement. This is the kind of music that instantly strikes you as sounding "eighties." It was made in 1986, which i believe was the most "eighties" year of the eighties. In support of this thesis, i have compiled a truncated list of movies and records that came out in 1986:

Movies - Blue Velvet, Crocodile Dundee, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Short Circuit, Top Gun

Music - Big Black's Atomizer, a terrible Cheap Trick album The Doctor, Bad Brains's I Against I, Master of Puppets, Reign in Blood, Slippery When Wet, Peter Gabriel's So, Graceland, PIL's Album

The most striking thing about this album is how great it sounds. Take the first song, which you will surely recognize, "Higher Love." This makes me wistful for the days of analogue recording. It starts off with a pretty spare drum intro (and in full 80s style features live and programmed drums as well as extra percussion) that establishes the wonderfully spacious sound of the recording. It's really like entering an aurally defined open, reverberant room... it's hard to explain why this is so cool, but much like My Bloody Valentine, there is a physical aspect to the sound that draws you into it in a way that's altogether different from the appeal of rhythms and words.

Once the song gets going there are plenty of layers of instrumentation, and I should add that the bass sounds particularly amazing. Great bass is definitely one of the areas in which vinyl cannot be beaten. The lyrics are pretty astounding, embracing fully first world privilege in a way that now seems so emblematic of the 80s. On the one hand, there are the obligatory reference to the state of things: "Things look so bad everywhere/In this whole world, what is fair?" Just about the level of awareness of the global situation evinced in "Do They Know It's Christmas?"

But what's the real vibe of this song? There's a totally triumphant feeling here, that we've achieved such a marvel of material comforts that all that remains is direct and unmediated communion with God Itself. You know, a Higher Love. Morning in America. Maybe the dude from the video will take that super hot girl to some unspecified exotic local and help out some locals, gaining a deep spiritual understanding in the process, and perhaps birthing world music as well. If Peter Gabriel hadn't done it, it just might have been Steve Winwood.

Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King (2004)

This is an RPG for the PS2. I got it for $6.67 at Gamestop (a $10 game but part of a "Buy 2 Get 1 Free" deal and the other two games were also $10...so $20/3). Looking at the play clock as I wrap up the alternate ending, I see upwards of 110 hours. Even allowing for about 10 hours of occasions where I left the system on if I had to walk away in the middle of a dungeon and couldn't save, I'm still faced with the fact that I spent 100 hours playing this game.

There are two ways to process that number:

1) OMGWTFBBQ I am a nerd. I grew up on NES and SNES RPGs (Final Fantasy/Dragon Warrior and countless derivatives thereof), but the highest play clock I can remember was Final Fantasy VI (or III as it was called at the time), which was somewhere near 50 and was only not 35-40 because I had to grind at the end to get through the final boss Kefka, that cackling punk. I remember that leveling up process as mind-numbingly boring, though I didn't have years of mind-numbing "real" work in an office as a frame of reference then like I do now.

Still, that's just half the amount of time I put into Dragon Quest VIII. I must be regressing into my childhood, right? Who has that kind of time to play video games? Aren't they for kids?

2) Using a metric, say, dollar per hour of entertainment, and comparing to another form of leisure activity. $6.67/100 = $.07/hour of entertainment. By contrast, $10 for a 2-hour night at the movies is $5/hour of entertainment. That's over 70 times as expensive.

Undoubtedly there are also negative repercussions to consider in terms of sheer timesuck and social negligence when I choose to disappear into the world of a videogame. The purely financial/"quant" argument doesn't take into account the spread of those 100 hours, which were concentrated entirely in the space of a month rather than dispersed over a much longer period, as watching 50 movies would be. And I can't deny that by the end I had turned into an addict, flipping on the PS2 almost before I had even got my jacket off at the end of the day, staying up odd hours to find out where the story went next or scouring FAQs and forums filled with unpunctuated tween jibber-jabber about where this or that extremely rare item was.

But any amount of solipsism, psychoanalyzing, or guilt I feel about my time investment won't take away from how awesome this game is. The story is stock Dragon Quest, swords-and-sorcery-and-fair-maidens fantasy stuff, and if you've never been a fan of the old-school JRPG game engine, it strictly adheres to the formula - no Active Time Battle or anything like that to try and force some time-critical "excitement" into battles. (Some of the aforementioned 10 extra play-clock hours where I walked away were in the middle of a battle, and it was amusing to come back and see the enemies just as I left them, still breathing heavily and doing their little dances waiting for me to attack.) But I think originality is overrated, and it's all in the presentation, as they say, and holy crap the presentation!



It's like taking the reins of your favorite 2D animated movie, but in 3D. I think that's the most succinct way to put it - playing a movie. The character/map/dungeon designs are classic: where many games strain so hard to ape reality in their graphics that they take on a creepy quality and magnify the distance between the game and real life, DQ8 embraces its cartoon fantasy roots. The soundtrack was recorded by a REAL symphonic orchestra and the voice acting is across-the-board TREMENDOUS good. As I'm typing this a playthrough of Final Fantasy X is on in the background via YouTube, and it's insane how much bad voice acting destroys my enthusiasm and exposes all the cliches and flaws behind the game right away - by which I really mean, I will never finish Metal Gear Solid 3 because David Hayter's growling as Solid Snake is atrocious. Okay, I might finish it, but I'll have my hands to my ears all the way.

(From what I gather DQ purists are not fans of much of what I mentioned above. The original Japanese version of DQ8 has (of course) Japanese voices, but also MIDI music, and I actually read some comment (I know, first mistake) saying that dudeman preferred the MIDI to the symphonic because the mix was "clearer." Yeah, clearer, and lifeless. Many of the NPCs in towns will say different things to you depending on whether it's day or night, but the night music was MIDI and I was so turned off by it that I didn't bother talking to people at night unless I had to.)

The depth of the characters is astounding, and I envision hundreds of man-hours being put into the script. You can talk to your three companions at any moment on the map, and depending on where you are and what you're doing, they almost always have something different to say, and it's very often right along the lines of what you're thinking. The game really comes alive and gives you the feeling of an actual adventure with companions and not fountains of exposition and motivation.

I haven't even begun to touch on the mini-games (a monster team and arena, a casino) and sidequests that are actually fun, and besides which were excuses to prolong the experience, but I'm running out of enthusiasm gas. I found a random clip that doesn't give much away and shows what the "everyday" experience of the game is like, so if this looks appealing, imagine what it would be like with REALLY GOOD characters and writing, and I will have successfully conveyed how great it is.

Milk (2008)

This film was pretty sweet and so was my viewing experience. We saw Milk in a new Sundance theater. They renovated a midsized theater complex near the revitalized Japantown/Fillmore district, added a wine bar, and don't take your tickets, EVOR! You can walk in (I did for Sex in the City) and take a seat. I guess the upshot is people buy their specific seats (like a ballgame, etc.) and can kick you out of theirs, but if the theater's not full, you can watch free. Also, you can bring wine to your seat and the seats are huge and comfy, & the theaters small. So it was worth the $3 amenities fee per ticket.

Or maybe I'm just happy because the film was inspiring. I guess you can get something done when you cut your pony tail and put on a suit. They didn't give good explanation of the "Twinkie Defense," the sensationalized excuse for Dan White's short prison sentence. It was actually just evidence of his bipolarity, the real reason he got off relatively easy.

Also, the Asian character was fairly one sided, something I believe Angry Asian Man complained about when they were casting for the role. The Times of Harvey Milk has more real footage, and better interviews.

Monty Python's Spamalot

I must say that I was a bit skeptical of the quality of a touring performance of the acclaimed musical based on the acclaimed movie based on the legend of Arthur (all three bases noted as "loosely"). At one time in my brief existence on the this planet, I was a student of musical theatre. From that I gained appreciation for most of the production— lights and video and explosions of confetti; moving set pieces and bedazzled codpieces. All in all it can be handily described as "Fun."
The best jokes were the ones of topical Blow-goi-oh-vich nature inserted into the various French and Knights Who Say Ni tauntings. And I could appreciate the numbers and dances that referenced Fiddler, Cabaret, Phantom, Les Mis etc. Considering it was m'lady's first musical experience ever, some of those parodies may have been lost on her, though they were still amusing and she had fun.
And as much as I love parody and satire, I don't think I need a musical of the Meaning of Life, Life of Brian, or Flying Circus. In Spamalot, much of the dialog was lifted and the story was patched together to conveniently explain the enrollment of the knights in the round table, but they were leading me astray. I wholly expected certain Holy Grail elements that never materialized. It would have been spectacular to have a Black Beast of Arrgh!, but understandably did not appear. While I don't understand why I didn't get the shrill sound effect when The Ni Knights dictate the procurement of aaaaaa..... SHRUBBERY! (TREENNGG!)
Missing.
But for the lame missing parts, it was fun.
Richard Chamberlain, whose career spans something like 50 yrs, played Arthur. very. very. slowly.
Some of his dance numbers looked like group activities from a retirement home... without the daily servings of prunes.
Constipated bastards.