Night of a Thousand Tears

I went to the growing-in-repute "Night of a Thousand Beers" for about a half hour tonight, thinking I would have a semi-good time, and mostly just felt like a loser. This is about as big as parties get at Hampshire, and it's one of those things where if you don't know a lot of people you end up sort of wandering around trying to find an anchor point that never comes. Except this is in a room crammed with people in a great exponential excess of the fire code, so you're basically just being propelled around by the crowd, which is fun for like twenty seconds and gets really old after you realize that any human interface apart from inane five-seconds yell-eractions are impossible. (And yet you always see these cool-ass cats just hanging out on the wall, sipping a beer and carrying on a convo like they're at the fucking yacht club. How do they do that? These people should die in jail.)

I like to get drunk in a comfortable environment, and thankfully life at this college provides many instances for such activity. But going to big parties makes me feel like I have no identity. I really am like a social ghost at these things--and in general. I just kind of float around, and float through people, and they can see me, but no connection can be made. I knew a bunch of the people there, but I might as well have been a stranger because I can't seem to get in the same mode of frantic revelry as everyone else.

When I walked in the door I heard "[my name]!" from like three different directions. This happens sometimes, and it is always very exciting, and yet it never seems to amount to anything. I find when people yell my name out it's not necessarily that they're overjoyed to see me but they're rather reaffirming their own involvement in some social spirit that I seem not to be privy to. I don't mean to be such a downer, but it's like, when someone I know says something to me and and I can't hear what the fuck she's saying because there's a hundred people yelling in this room and I'm being pushed up against a wall by a beer-hungry mob, so all I say is "I'm being pushed up against a wall" and I sound like as much of an idiot as you'd expect, what else am I supposed to do next but go home and listen to fucking Nine Inch Nails and write in my sad goddamn blog.

Also my family is poor.

Got Tha Fever

I seem to be just now recovering from an illness that has plagued half our residence for the last five days or so. Someone said they had the flu, which seems plausible; I was more or less at 25% earlier in the week. I walked into a CVS on Tuesday and forgot why I was there, so I just dreamily wandered around for 20 minutes or so. On the bargain music rack I saw a copy of the Scorpions Greatest Hits, and I thought maybe that was what I had come to get. But it seemed unlikely. I overheard some old guys talking about who invented electrons. That's silly, I thought. Nobody invented those. Eventually I just decided to buy some CVS brand razors and a toothbrush and be done with it. It was one of my more economical shopping sprees.

Fear and Loathing at Amherst College

I took my first class at Amherst today, and it proved an unsettling experience. That place really scares the shit out of me sometimes. Just being there makes me resentful, all with their brisk New England charm, their buildings and facilities that aren't total eyesores. I'm always worried that one of the students will point at me and let out one of those Body Snatchers screeches, sensing my unkempt constitution and my lack of institutional pride. I saw not one dude wearing a t-shirt. Not. One. (Granted, I wasn't either; I was wearing the one casual button-down shirt I own, which I purchased at a thrift store for about five dollars.)

The class is held in this opulent lecture hall known as the "Red Room." I think of the crowded conference tables and broken window blinds of Hampshire classrooms as I sit down in a sea of padded leather swivel chairs. The professor is this geriatric guy who wears a suit and tie. I had forgotten teachers wear things like that, or lived to be that old. The syllabus claims that the course will conclude with a "Two Hour Exam." I see the words, and I know their individual meanings, but their combination appears before me like hieroglyphs on some ancient scroll.

No More School Assignments on the Blog

The Real World "magazine piece" was it, I promise.

Stranger Song

In my formative years of media consumption, the Music Television network provided much of the impetus for any interest in mainstream cultural discourse that I might have shared with my peers. In the 90s, MTV’s flash-bang program lineup was fucking irresistible, a flawless amalgam of pop-culture shimmer and glowingly pre-packaged “rock and roll” sass that held infinite appeal for even the most discerning young eyes. I once saw one of their hosts claim off-handedly that MTV programming wasn’t intended to be viewed by children. What a good joke!

Before the screaming idiot-parade of shows like Total Request Live melted the cultural appeal of the network into a lifeless, cynical muck, the flagship of their youth conquest was The Real World, the original model for the reality show—a genre that has, by now, become so prevalent and post-relevant that it’s damn-near folded back on itself. It is a testament to the original calculations of The Real World’s producers that it has largely avoided the black hole of irrelevance that has befallen its offspring. The reason for this, and the beauty of the show’s design, is that it was pointless to begins with—created before the reality show rules were written, The Real World was flying blind, inventing narrative from the loosest strands of petty human interaction. Despite the best efforts of the show’s “writers” to manufacture conflict and change, the whole affair remained thrillingly amoral. I’ve watched almost every episode since the 1999 Hawaii season, and it provided some of the more exciting television moments I witnessed as a young man. The various threesomes and hot-tub-related indiscretions during the Las Vegas season, for example, were understandably compelling viewing for a 13-year-old kid in the suburbs.

MTV has ceased to be exciting on any level. Beyond the obvious complaint that music and comedy have taken a back seat to maximally smutty dating shows and the most monotonous reality bullshit imaginable, the smallest pretense of anti-establishment swagger has been unceremoniously sucked from the network’s soul, and at times it is vaguely indistinguishable from its sickly-sweet cousins Nickelodeon and Disney Channel. But, somehow, against all odds, The Real World remains magically watchable and addictive. It’s not exactly smart or respectable, but the formula of youth and visibility plus alcohol and excess still makes for damn fine television. Meanwhile, its very concept makes it practically immune to criticism. The old and obvious insistence that it doesn’t even resemble our conception of “real” life has never even come close to being relevant: the show’s production style seems to readily admit that its design was always clearly intended as a heightened replica of modern life, a human zoo. And the animals never disappoint.

The new season of the show—its twenty-first—takes place in Brooklyn (seemingly running out of big cities in which to place their cast, the producers recycle New York for the third time, though previous seasons took place in Manhattan) and has a few new gimmicks. Arbitrarily, there are now eight cast members in the house, and for the first time since the mid-90s the roommates won’t be assigned a shared job in the city. Whatever. The more notable addition to the show is that, amongst the usual Abercrombie hardbodies and uber-cute art school pixies in the cast, there is a transwoman, Katelynn. In the premiere episode the others—apart from J.D., the gay roommate with whom she shares a teary declaration of solidarity—fail to seriously raise the subject or, in the case of one amusingly doltish bodybuilder, even realize it, and Katelynn has yet to show signs of becoming an LGBT icon like the famous, HIV-positive Pedro from the San Francisco season. But it will be interesting to see how the show reconciles its experiment in out-there sexual politics with its usual agenda of self-satisfied but passé tolerance.

Apart from their momentary serious aspirations, it seems we’re in for another season of young, beautiful anger and drunken amorousness. But I’m pleasantly reminded at once of how the show’s ambling, directionless pace affords instances of quieter voyeurism. In the premiere, at least, what really makes it for me are the little moments of un-manufacturable, genuine revelation: hipster Mormon Chet’s self-assured dancing around his obvious sexual confusion; fun-loving army vet Ryan’s repressed-trauma-bordering-on-denial; aspiring therapist Sarah’s unconsciously overbearing inquisitiveness. Between the time-warping jump cuts and the pop-up music referrals, The Real World still manages to capture fascinating moments of genuine human inadequacy. In its slow dive into cultural worthlessness, MTV should thank its stars it still has the clout to command something so spontaneously captivating. They couldn’t make this shit up if they tried.

Play Your Part

Yesterday I was playing Frisbee and someone put on Girl Talk. Okay. I can listen to it for a few minutes. I’ll grant the first few moments of the Feed The Animals album, where he interpolates “Gimme Some Lovin’” and “Intl. Players Anthem” are pretty energizing. But then it kept playing. And kept playing. And it went on and on, and on and on and on. And I wanted to tear my shirt off and scream to the heavens what I thought about this interminable dirge of Top 40 patchwork. I kept it to myself in the name of good will and good spirit, but I need to let it all out now.

Girl Talk is really, really not good. There, I said it. Come and tear my face off, rest of Hampshire student body. I know I’m alone in this. But try as I might to conform (and I do try—oh, how I love to let others dictate my tastes! I’m not being sarcastic) I cannot seem to comprehend the significance or the quality of this artist.

Musical mash-ups are a cool idea, and I suppose a Girl Talk show might be a great party, but that’s it. It holds no other value—and it’s funny that it doesn’t do anything for me, because I’m all for rethinking the arbitrary barriers and genre divisions that we impose on popular music. The basic thesis of Greg Gillis’ thing is that we should try to understand how the music we listen to is connected at its essence (or some similar, vague hokum spun by the enraptured hipster music writers, presumably on a mind-melting caffeine bender that could make the “Peanut Butter Jelly Time” song sound groundbreaking) but all I ever think when I’m listening to these self-satisfied art school audio collages is that I’d rather just be hearing a playlist of the individual songs. The general promise of the concept, and its utter failure to be as entertaining as it should, makes Girl Talk not only annoying but depressing as well.

Girl Talk is one of the most overrated acts of the new musical age. It is the sonic equivalent of the color brown—a mixture of all the other colors of the rainbow that doesn’t, shockingly, produce a magical super-color but an ugly, disposable muddle of meaningless cacophony. Girl Talk’s popularity is unbearable, as well—the result of the enraptured bleating of the musical snob-mob comprised of critics and bloggers too snooty to find enjoyment in the actual canon of modern mainstream music, trusting some guy from Pittsburgh to splice all the good parts together on his laptop, trusting that their peers will appreciate their selective taste for musical consumption in the postmodern world. I guess I should be more compassionate, and usually I would be, but I’m on the internet, so fuck it. Fuck the Pitchfork generation, fuck the falsity of Cultural Capital, and fuck Girl Talk.

P.S.: I was searching around for some validation that I am not completely insane (because, you know, I lack a single thread of confidence in my convictions). I found it—written far more eloquently and eviscerating-ly than I could ever manage. Props, random internet critic guy. You are the one sane voice howling for reason above the din of hipster idiocy.

Legends

[WARNING: massive geekery ahead]

Among my few goals during this break was to drag out the dusty Nintendo 64 and finally finish playing through The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask after all these years.

After a few hours of playing I sort of remember why I never finished it: it’s one hell of a stressful game. Majora’s Mask is one of the most admirable mainstream video games I can think of, and one that I’ve always had a hard time rationalizing as a genuinely great piece of gamecraft. The fucked up thing about it is that its biggest flaws are also its most original qualities, and they are necessary in order for its greatest achievements to occur. But before I get into that I should provide some context as to why this 8-year-old toy is important:
(Click "Read More" to... read more.)


Every guy around my age remembers Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Even if you were a Playstation kid, it was an event. It was unlike anything we’d ever seen before. Actually, that’s not true: it was very much like the old Zelda games—maybe even less complex and difficult than the previous one, A Link to the Past for the Super NES—but flawlessly transmuted to 3D. It was amazing—to this day I’ve yet to see a video game as perfect an exercise in interactive narrative. It sold all the copies; it won all the awards. ’98 was a pretty landmark year for the industry, and Ocarina dominated most of the dialogue. (I never actually even bought the original cart; I just played through the game—more than once—at a friend’s house when it came out, though I’ve since owned one or two of its several re-releases.)

So when Majora’s Mask came out in the fall of 2000, it was rightfully a big deal. And while it’s undoubtedly less well regarded than its predecessor, it received pretty fair acclaim. But its conception (and reception) highlights a sometimes-illusory perception of the nature of innovation in this medium.

The Legend of Zelda is such a venerated and important franchise that the pressure to innovate or satisfy expectations is greater than in most other cases, more so even than with the Halos or Grand Theft Autos of the world, I’d argue. Nintendo has been successful on this charge to varying degrees, sometimes with wildly unexpected results. After the first Zelda came out and blew the collective mind of the industry, Nintendo decided they would take a creative U-Turn, and thus we have Zelda II: Adventure of Link, a bizarre, very difficult action-RPG hybrid. (I like to think it’s this kind of forward, fearless thinking that earned Nintendo the clout to make their current hit games about losing weight and waving plastic sticks around.) Zelda II has since settled comfortably into its modern position as a kind of beloved black sheep, a late-blooming cult classic, and it wouldn’t be for another couple generations that they would tamper with the formula again. The pressure is such that it is tested even before people get their hands on a new game: when we gathered ‘round to watch the unveiling of the first Zelda game for the Gamecube, a couple years after Majora’s Mask, we were ready to be blown away by some bad-ass, hyper-real Lord of the Rings-esque shit akin to what we’d seen as a Gamecube tech demo:

Instead they gave us some weird cartoon bullshit:

People were pretty pissed. “The Legend of Cel-da” was one of the biggest controversies of the year, but the fuss all turned out to be for naught; the eventual product, The Wind Waker, is one of the most beautiful games ever made, and not an unusual Zelda game in any regard other than its visuals. But the post-script to this story is the next game in the series, Twilight Princess. This, Nintendo seemed to insist, was the one the fans had been waiting for, the souped-up, grown-up heir to the throne of Ocarina. And, well… it was. Twilight Princess is near perfect, but the problem, I guess, is that it was exactly what everyone hoped it would be. There was very little to be surprised by; this was the epic, grown-up (so to speak; the game was just as silly easy as Wind Waker) experience that the fans had been waiting for. Don’t get me wrong: Twilight Princess was an incredible game, one of the most amazing ever made. But when I finished it (in three weeks, somehow—that was a long one) I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was missing something, some spark of joyful experimentation—the very ideals of exploration and discovery that are the series’ foundational hallmarks.

Which brings me back to Majora’s Mask.

It was originally referred to as "Zelda Gaiden," a kind of sequel/side-story to Ocarina, and the sentiment holds up. The gist of the game is that young Link has been transported to Termina, a world in an alternate universe of his home of Hyrule. Termina is very similar to Hyrule, but one unique, important issue facing this place is that it’s fucked: the moon is falling, and in three days (two hours or so in real time) everybody is going to die. The story, while less gravely epic and way weirder than past games in the series, serves the same function as any: to encourage the player to go explore the world, kill monsters, collect some magic doodads and save everyone. The key difference here is that they’ve instilled a sense of urgency in the player by including an underlying time limit in which he must complete his task. This idea is, from a conceptual standpoint, a stroke of genius, the solution to the problem of how to enhance the player’s engagement with the story and his suspension of disbelief. But in an expansive, exploratory genre like this, it generally doesn’t work by itself: giving the player a finite amount of time in which to complete the entirety of the adventure is pretty intolerable, a type of pressure that few developers have the balls to impose on their eventual customer. (This is not to say that some haven’t tried: Nintendo’s own Pikmin for the Gamecube tasked the player to complete the game in 30 short in-game days, a requirement so arbitrary and unfair that I stopped playing what was otherwise shaping up to be a beautiful and fascinating game after the first level. And I understand Xbox 360 players had a similar experience with Capcom’s Dead Rising, a zombie game that forced players to restart from the beginning if they missed certain time-sensitive events.)

The solution to this, of course, was to introduce a mechanic that allowed the player to rewind back to the start of the three-day period, and this was no problem; Zelda had all kinds of time-travel shit it could whip out of the bag o’ tricks. They didn’t even have to come up with a new magic song for you to play! And so the basic mechanic was set: do what you have to do, then turn back time to delay the destruction of the world. And save your game.

This mechanic is what I refer to when I mention the game’s simultaneously genius and maddening construction. Making it so that you can rewind time in no way removes the frustration of a time limit entirely. You’re still undoing virtually everything you’ve done in the world, apart from a few things that are inexplicably saved—you know, so that you’ve made some progress.

What this also does, however, is allow the developers to give the game’s world a very specific and cohesive routine that you have to observe and interact with in order to progress. This mechanic affords Majora’s Mask an amazingly cool Groundhog Day sort of element in its overall structure, and the player, repeating the same three days again and again, must refer to this structure to solve many of the game’s major puzzles. (One elaborate side-quest forces you to follow complex interconnecting routines so that you can influence the events and actions of several townspeople over the three-day period—very Groundhog Day.) The result is that the puzzles and quests of Majora’s Mask are far more ornate and satisfying than those of the other games. But it also makes them more stressful, which often makes you not want to bother. As I said, it’s fucked up.

The reality is this: we say we want innovation; we want experimentation; we want new ways of looking at things and experiencing entertainment. But how much of that is just an attempt to accrue liberal cred? At some point, we just want to sit back and let the screen suck us in, as opposed to actively engaging ourselves in the world it depicts. This dichotomy is well expressed in Zelda games: they’re not especially diverse, but the diversity that is present in the series conveys the vast nature of interactive entertainment very clearly; maybe this is why the series is such a vanguard of the medium. Or why it used to be, at least.
I thought I liked Majora’s Mask more than I maybe do, and maybe I liked it for different reasons besides its polarizing time mechanic: its diversity of gameplay, or the whimsical, insouciant weirdness and melancholy darkness of its story. But I think when I finish it I’m going to replay The Wind Waker, the Zelda game of which I am most fond. I remember Wind Waker to be not much more than a series of gorgeous, exciting set pieces, an interactive animated adventure whose beauty and originality are wholly and unapologetically aesthetic. I remember that game being very light-hearted, very soothing, and none too stressful. Cool stuff just happens to you. Would that it were like real life.