Category: navel gazing

Inertia

Newton’s work on gravity led to the discovery of the Lagrange point, a place where opposing forces cancel one another out, and a body may remain at relative rest. This is where I am right now; the forces in my life confound one another. Better, for the moment, to be here and now, without history or future. A man in need of breakfast.

  •  Nick Harkaway, “The Gone-Away World”

1. It’s been 3 weeks since the move, and this is the beginning of my 2nd week back at work.  Yesterday’s commute was my first of what will apparently be a long series of NJ Transit nightmares, and even then it wasn’t altogether unpleasant; I was sitting down, for one thing, and I had a window seat, and the hopelessness never became the all-consuming anxious mania that it used to be on an NYC subway – I knew there was nothing to be done, and in any event it ultimately taught me how to transfer at Hoboken to the Path, which is something I’m going to be needing to do next year when my office moves downtown.

I am happy.  I love our home.  Sure, it’s not in the super-nice part of town, but whatever – it’s a 5 minute drive to the super-nice part of town, and it’s a 5-minute drive to everywhere else we need to go, and given that we don’t really go out all that much anyway, it’s the inside part of the house that counts the most, and I’m really happy with that part.  There are no more boxes; there’s only the last of the artwork to hang up.

I’m not sleeping well, though, and that’s starting to become somewhat irritating.  Haven’t fully figured out why just yet.  Some nights it’s been a temperature thing; other nights it’s been an anxiety thing – for example, we had our driveway repaved last week, and as such I had to park the car on the street, and we are in the not-so-nice part of a very nice town, and I was worried about the car getting stolen; instead, I got my very first parking ticket for parking too close to a stop sign, which is a thing I didn’t even know existed.  (Indeed, our car – a very reliable sort – is suddenly starting to fall apart, and we need to get it serviced, and I’m sure that’s going to cost an arm and a leg, and I just hope that it can all be fixed in one day.  A thing about life in the suburbs that has become immediately apparent is that if you don’t have a car, you’re kinda fucked.)

2. Another, inevitable part of moving – at least in my recent experience – is that things sometimes stop working properly once they’ve been put into their new places.  My PC’s USB ports are starting to crap out, which means my wireless keyboard/mouse and wi-fi adapter are hit or miss.  The PC is almost entirely meant as a home for my Steam library, and given that it’s 5 years old and starting to die, there’s a part of me that’s inclined to maybe just wait until the Steam Boxes hit in the fall; now that I’ve got a proper entertainment center for the basement TV, it might not be the worst thing in the world to move my PC gaming rig to the TV, and thus give myself more deskspace for music stuff.

More troubling, however, is my PS4.  For one thing, I seem to have lost the little USB Bluetooth adapter that worked with my fancy headphones.  This is not necessarily the end of the world, given that I don’t really need to use headphones anymore unless I’m chatting with someone, but it does render those headphones completely useless.  What is possibly the end of the world, though, is that my controller is no longer reliably staying paired with my PS4.  Now, I’m not really playing much of anything with any urgency at the moment (though I’d very much like to check out Volume), but I expect I will be in the coming months, and I’d very much like to not have to worry about this sort of thing once the Big Games start arriving.

3. Now that the move is done, though, I’m going to have to start getting back into the swing of things.  I’ve found that I have a bit of a creative inertia problem.  This is good sometimes, in that when I’m feeling like I’m on a roll, I keep rolling, and I churn out lots of music and/or blog posts and/or various writings.  But it also means that when I stop, I stop, and the idea of getting moving again can feel overwhelming.  This is why I haven’t been writing much here lately; I’d put nearly everything on hold for the move, and if I’d happen to find an idle hour I would open up a Wordpress window and end up just kinda staring into nothingness, half-heartedly hoping that words would just show up, given that I couldn’t seem to summon anything.  This is why I’m writing this post right now, if only so that I can remind myself that there’s a part of my brain that needs to get active again.  I need to get back to the solo album; I need to get into this blog.  My feet are on terra firma now, finally, and it’s time for the rest of my body to catch up.

Prep To Move

If all goes according to plan, we close on our house this coming Friday, and we move the following Saturday, August 1.

I left for work this morning and as I walked down the street I started becoming hyper-aware of my surroundings – the view of the Hudson from the top of my hill, the sketchy hourly-rate hotels that are inexplicably littered along my street, the greasy-bacon-and-eggs smell from the diner on the corner, the stifling heat of my subway stop – and couldn’t help but observe to myself that I’m only making this specific walk 3 more times after today.

I’ve been doing this same thing for the last few days – I can count on one hand the number of my remaining trips to the laundromat, the grocery store, the coffee shop.  We can only eat at our favorite Mexican restaurant a few more times before the trip becomes impractical (it’s a great place, but we’re not driving 45 minutes through Staten Island traffic for it).

I’ve also been feeling a lot less melancholic than I’d anticipated, regarding this move.  An old work colleague had posted something – “17 Quotes Every New Yorker Should Live By” – and after reading it I found myself inexplicably feeling somewhat hostile.  Quite a few of them required a response:

4. “The city is uncomfortable and inconvenient; but New Yorkers temperamentally do not crave comfort and convenience—if they did they would live elsewhere.” —E. B. White

That’s true, and that’s partially why I’m moving.  I’m ready for a different tempo.

8. “Every true New Yorker believes with all his heart that when a New Yorker is tired of New York, he is tired of life.” —Robert Moses

Oh fuck you.  I’m still working here; I’m just sleeping in a town where motorcycle gangs and 16-wheelers aren’t drag-racing outside my 2-year-old’s window every night.

9. “If you want to become a real New Yorker, there’s only one rule: You have to believe New York is, has been, and always will be the greatest city on earth. The center of the universe.” —Ellen R. Shapiro

I still do believe this with all my heart.  I just don’t have to live here to know it.

16. “When you leave New York, you ain’t going anywhere.” —Jimmy Breslin

Again – fuck you.  I’m gonna be a 30-minute train ride to Penn Station.

All that aside, I can’t help but wonder – am I losing part of my identity if I’m no longer a full-time New Yorker?  I was born here, I went to college here and I’ve been a full-time resident since 1996; does all that go away once I become… *gulp*… a resident of… *gasp*… NEW JERSEY?

I am suddenly aware that my long-standing email address – not to mention my gamertag across each and every gaming service – JervoNYC – will no longer be 100% accurate.  There’s a part of me that wonders if I should change it.

*     *     *

Posting’s going to be light for the next few weeks.  For starters, I’m not really playing that much right now besides replaying Tomb Raider on Xbox One, for some reason*; I’d also rented the new EA Golf Game but it hasn’t yet shown up, and given its poor reviews, I’m not really all that committed to playing it even if I happen to receive it.

After the closing, I won’t be back at work until August 10.  I’ll have internet access pretty much the whole way through (minus one brief hiccup immediately following the move), and I’m sure I’ll need to decompress at some point after the unpacking, but I’m probably not going to be doing any posting here beyond a simple “I am here and my internet works”.

* That reason is simply that the definitive edition is currently on sale for < $10.  I’ve already beaten it twice, on both PC and PS4, and I’m not really sure what prompted me to buy it again beyond that it’s a fun game and it was cheap and I hadn’t used my Xbox in a while, and maybe I’m more addicted to Achievements than I care to admit.

Weekend Recap: The Crunch

[Apologies in advance; this post was written in a very haphazard manner over a period of several hours and whatever thesis I was trying to make when I started has been completely lost by now.]

I have a friend who can, somehow, read several different books at once; I don’t know how she does it, because I certainly can’t.  My reading time is generally on the short side as it is, and it occasionally can be a struggle just to remember where I am if I have to put a book down for a few days.  (For whatever it’s worth, I’ve already read 22 of the 30 books in my Goodreads challenge, so at least I’m ahead of the curve in that regard.)

I bring this up because, just as I can’t read more than one novel at a time, I can’t play 2 AAA, story-driven games at once; my brain can’t handle the distraction (nor can it adjust well to different control schemes).  I can play one AAA game and also, say, a driving or sports game just to cleanse the palate, but that’s really about the extent of it; if I’m playing a capital-G Game, that’s about all my brain can handle.

So I am desperately trying to finish The Witcher 3 before tomorrow, when the new Batman comes out.  I’m almost there, and yet I’m also very much aware that I’m procrastinating a bit.  I don’t want it to end.  And unlike a book, where you kinda just have to keep turning the page, there is almost always a “?” on the Witcher map that’s somewhat nearby where I’m standing, and so I’ll head over there to see what it is.  Or maybe there’s a monster-hunting contract that I’m finally sufficiently leveled up for that’s nearby, and so I’ll do that instead.  (At this point, though, I’m level 33 and there’s almost nothing I can’t handle beyond falling off a staircase.  It is amazing to me that Geralt can survive a dragon fight but dies instantly when falling off a 10-foot ledge, which is especially annoying when the fall is due to an accidental geometry clipping issue.)

I don’t like this feeling of rushing.  I don’t understand why I’m not allowing myself to take as much time as I want or need.  I have no professional obligation to finish this game; none of the posts I’ve written about it here have generated more than, say, 20 hits at a time, and it’s doubtful this post will do any better.  And the thing is, Batman’s gonna be downloaded and ready to go and I can start it whenever I want.   I am a grown-ass man, goddammit!  I can play it when I’m good and ready!

Of course, starting tomorrow, people on the internet will be talking about Batman instead of Witcher and I want to be a part of that conversation.  This is absurd, because I’ve been playing Witcher for the better part of a month and almost nobody is talking about it; granted, E3 had a lot to do with it, but even so, almost nobody on my PS4 friends list is playing Witcher 3, so if there is a conversation about it, I’m clearly unaware of it.

I suppose it would be premature of me to make some sort of hyperbolic statement regarding how I feel about Witcher 3 without technically having finished it; there’s always the possibility that the story’s conclusion will be an utter trainwreck.  I am hopeful that’s not the case.

On the technical side, there’s a more distinct possibility that I’ll run into some sort of bug that breaks the game completely; the game’s already crashed to the PS4’s dashboard more times than I can remember, and I’ve also noticed that towards the end of long sessions (and not even really that long – most of my recent sessions have only been 1-2 hours long) the level geometry will start breaking – last night, I had to restart one particular story mission several times, from a manual save point I’d made right outside a door, and each time I opened the door something bizarre would appear on the screen – the walls wouldn’t be formed, bodies would not have heads (or, more nightmarishly, heads wouldn’t have bodies), etc.  So there’s that.

Still, I am prepared to say that Witcher 3 is, for all intents and purposes, the best game I’ve played since 2011’s Portal 2 or 2010’s Red Dead Redemption.  And as I would put either of those 2 games in my all-time Top 10, I suppose you can see where I’m going with this.  It’s been an absolute joy the whole way through, and it does so many things right that it could very well ruin Fallout 4 for me.  Which is fine, honestly; I’d rather a game be that fucking good than not, and it’s been an awful long time since I felt this strongly about anything.  To think that, just days before this game arrived, I’d nearly given up on gaming altogether!

On Self-Imposed Exile

Yeah, I know, I’m not writing much these days.  I try to keep writing here as much as I can, but some days it’s harder than others.  Some days it’s crazy busy; some days my brain simply isn’t working; and some days – like today – I find myself in this weird, stupid brain trap where I want to write while also, at the same time, feeling very much like shutting up and never writing again.

This happens to me every once in a while, and I deal with it in different ways each time.  Some times I fight it head-on, hoping that I’ll work my way out of whatever the issue is simply by the process of writing, regardless of whether or not I hit the “Publish” button; sometimes I hide behind a Tumblr-reblog spree; and other times I simply give in and withdraw completely.  No posts anywhere – not on Twitter, nor Tumblr, nor Facebook, nor here.  I vanish.  I hide.  Oh, I keep reading; whenever I announce that I’m taking a break from social media, more often than not what I’m actually saying is that I’m going to lurk.  And even then, there’s varying degrees of lurking.

Today is a day where I’ve been so busy that I simply haven’t been paying attention to the internet; and when I’ve had a few moments of relative peace, I’ve chosen to only look occasionally.

The trouble with writing is that it’s hard to call yourself a writer if you’re not giving anybody anything to read.

The trouble with composing is that it’s hard to call yourself a musician if you’re not giving anybody anything to listen to.

The trouble with being a good friend is that it’s hard to call yourself a good friend if you’re consciously withdrawing from other people.

It’s very easy to invalidate yourself; it can be very difficult to successfully reclaim yourself after you’ve walked away from what you tried to build.

I’m writing this because I’m in this weird stupid head space where I’ve been living for the better part of 2 weeks and it’s annoying and stupid and childish, and it’s my fault that I’ve chosen to put myself in this head space, and I very much want to get out of it.  There are exciting things happening in my life that I’m genuinely excited about – like tomorrow’s home inspection of what will hopefully (fingers crossed) be our new home, later this summer.  Like the album that I’m still working on (even though I’ve been sidetracked and distracted by this whole home-buying process).  Like my son, who is amazing, and who makes my heart smile even during my darkest hours.

But I keep sliding back into this self-imposed exile, this recursive loop of withdrawing, and it’s endlessly frustrating.

Anyway – I’m here, and I’m trying to get back into the swing of things, and I’m sorry if my recent silence has caused you any undue concern.  Here’s hoping that tomorrow’s inspection goes amazing, and that on Friday I’ll be ready to talk about E3 and The Witcher 3 and You Must Build a Boat and other such things.

Limbo / Endings and Beginnings

I have so many things I need to talk about, and (of course) I have no idea where to begin.  The following image series is more or less what I’ve been doing here for the last few weeks.
(source)

1.  One of the many reasons why I’ve been silent here of late is that there’s a BIG BIG THING that is still not 100% finished yet, and I don’t want to jinx it by spilling the beans, but at this point we’re getting pretty close to knowing for sure if this is going to happen or not, and so (since my wife says it’s OK) here’s the news:  It looks like we’re moving out of the city and into the ‘burbs.  We put an offer on a perfect (for us) house in Maplewood, New Jersey; they accepted our offer; we’re already out of attorney review; we’re getting the house inspected tomorrow (while we also examine potential day care solutions); the mortgage application has been filed; the tentative closing date is June 19.  THIS IS HAPPENING SO VERY FAST.

As you might imagine, this has more or less completely taken over my life.  My wife and I aren’t sleeping; we fret about monthly expenses, we worry about day care, we have absolutely no idea what the morning commute is going to look like (before we get on the train, that is; once we’re on the train it’s easy-peasy).  I suddenly have to get a NJ driver’s license and get the car re-registered and inspected and the dogs need to get re-registered and licensed and we need homeowner’s insurance and new car insurance and we have to find a pediatrician and we also know maybe 2 people who live in the town and and and

It’s super-exciting because the house is amazing and the town itself is amazing and we can’t wait to move in, but it’s also terrifying because HOLY SHIT IT’S A HOUSE AND WHAT IF A TREE FALLS ON THE HOUSE AND HOW MUCH WILL A REPUTABLE PLUMBER COST AND HOW WILL WE PAY FOR ANYTHING IF ANYTHING BREAKS.

2.  One of the other reasons why I’ve been silent here – and I’ve probably said this before, during similar lulls – is that it’s hard for me to talk about games when I’m not actively playing anything.  It’s true that I’ve picked up a few things here and there over the last few weeks but nothing’s held my interest; to the extent I’m playing anything at all (besides a few excellent time-wasters on my iPhone), I’ve been wrapping up old side quests in Dragon Age Inquisition since that’s at least something that I’ve already spend a considerable amount of time with.  Most of my evenings of late have been spent with both the consoles and the gaming PC turned off, though, and I haven’t felt much of a pull to get back

But if I’m being honest here, I’ve been starting to wonder how much longer I’m going to talk about games at all.

I’m starting to feel disconnected from gaming.  I’ve talked about this before, I know, but it’s different this time.  I know that I’m distracted right now, what with the house and the album and my kid and everything else, but even the eye-popping advance reviews for The Witcher 3 aren’t necessarily getting me as excited as I might’ve been only a few years ago – and if The Witcher 3 isn’t gonna do it, I honestly have no idea what would.

I had an interesting conversation with David Wolinsky yesterday over twitter.  He’d written a rather breath-taking piece for Unwinnable (which you should read right now) and I felt compelled to thank him, and then I saw his pinned tweet:

I responded that I think I might be in the middle of that specific transition, and it bothered me a little bit.  I’ve been playing games since I was 5 or 6 years old, and with the exception of my college years, I’ve been a dedicated gamer the whole time.  Within the last few years, though, I’ve been feeling myself slowly slip away from it – not just from games themselves, but from reading Twitter, from engaging with the community, from writing about games on other sites, even from delivering soliloquies such as this on this very site, where I’m free from editorial oversight and advertising pressure.  I’m feeling alienated from the culture.  Most AAA games simply aren’t made for 39-year-olds, and that’s a weird thing to wrap my head around.

I’ll end this with something I’ve quoted here before but which bears repeating in light of this feeling of alienation and disengagement – the last 3 paragraphs of Tom Bissell’s Grantland piece about GTA V, which says this so much better than I ever could:

…I have a full Xbox Live friends list, 100 people strong, and last night 25 percent of them were playing GTA V — something I’ve never seen before. The texts and messages started flying: So, what do you think? How far are you? Very few of my friends had good words to say about GTA V, even as the game’s Metacritic score holds firm at a mind-boggling 97. Then I got a text message from a game-dev friend who happens to be one of the smartest, most aesthetically sophisticated people I’ve ever met in games. He wasn’t enjoying the game, and he seemed puzzled by that. We texted for a while. Then he sent this: “I guess I’m mourning the admittance that I’m no longer the target audience of my own work.”

One of GTA V‘s characters admits at the end of the game, “I’m getting too old for this nonsense.” And you know what? I felt the same thing numerous times while playing GTA V, even though I continue to admire the hell out of much of what it accomplishes. So if I sound ambivalent, Niko, I think it’s because I’m part of a generation of gamers who just realized we’re no longer the intended audience of modern gaming’s most iconic franchise. Three steps past that realization, of course, is anticipation of one’s private, desperate hurtle into galactic heat death. I’m left wondering when I, or any of us, express a wish for GTA to grow up, what are we actually saying? What would it even mean for something like GTA to “grow up”? Our most satirically daring, adult-themed game is also our most defiantly puerile game. Maybe the biggest sin of the GTA games is the cheerful, spiteful way they rub our faces in what video games make us willing to do, in what video games are.

Playing GTA used to feel like sneaking out behind school for a quick, illicit smoke. The smoke still tastes good, Niko; the nicotine still nicely javelins into your system. But when you look up, you have to wonder what you’re actually doing here. Everyone is so young, way younger than you, with the notable exception of the guy handing out the cigarettes, and he’s smiling like he just made a billion dollars.

Back in the saddle, more or less

(blows dust off blog)

OK, so: I was on vacation last week, but given certain recent events both personal and professional, I apparently needed to unplug from the internet for quite a bit longer.

i am still here, in my mind.

It’s hard to write about games when you’re not playing anything; it’s hard to write about music when you’d rather have people actually hear what you’re doing instead of poorly describing the process of creating it.  Also it’s hard to write, in general, when certain professional obligations make it impossible to do so.

But:  I’m back from vacation now, with my batteries somewhat recharged (it’s hard to fully relax when you have a two-year-old who’s favorite words are “No!” and “Stop!”), and I’ve returned to a day job that is considerably less stressful now than it was before I left.  These are good things!  Hopefully this means I’ll be writing here a bit more frequently than in recent weeks.

I’ve been thinking a lot about loops lately.  I’ve been watching my two-year-old son get into these “fun loops” at the local playground; he’ll climb up a ladder, run over a bridge, climb some steps, go down a slide, and then run back to the ladder and do the whole thing over and over and over again; he will not be deterred; if a kid gets in his way he either waits for them to pass (if they’re bigger) or steps around them (if they’re smaller) and then continues along his path; he’ll accept a brief respite for me to wipe his nose but that’s the only interruption that’s allowed, and he screams bloody murder if it’s time to go.

Maybe he gets it from me.  I’ve had a thing about loops ever since I can remember.  Not just in terms of games or playing, either.  I remember when I was first getting into music – like, really getting into music, during endless adolescent afternoons, when I would just tune out the entire world and get thoroughly absorbed in a cassette tape – I’d get to a favorite part in a song, and as soon as it was over I’d have to rewind and hear it again, and I’d do this over and over again until I memorized exactly how long I needed to rewind before getting to the beginning of the section.  (I still do this, of course, but instead of memorizing rewind time, I’m now memorizing timestamps.)

The point being:  that famous Halo quote about “30 seconds of fun” would appear to be something that’s hard-wired into our brains from an early age.  Speaking of which, that link above gives that quote a bit more context, in that the guy who said it didn’t mean to imply that in Halo you’re doing the exact same thing over and over again, but instead they’re switching the context on you so that the 30-second rush is constantly new and fresh.  This applies to the music analogy, though, too – if I get caught up in a favorite music section, I’ll listen to something once and then focus on a specific part, and then rewind and focus on a different part, each successive time my brain holding on to something new and different.

I did play some games on vacation – and on my Vita, too, which is nice.  I’d bought a few things before we left – Shovel Knight and Titan Souls, while also still staying heavily engaged with Stealth Inc. 2 – but as it turns out I ended up getting sucked back into SteamWorld Dig, for some reason.  That game is pretty neat, I think.  I’m still very early on, but it seems to be doing this very neat open-world Dig-Dug thing, which I find very pleasing and enjoyable.

I beat the first boss in Shovel Knight, and that game is fun, but – as I’ve said elsewhere – I don’t have that much nostalgic fondness for the 16-bit era that it’s clearly emulating, and so I’m finding that while I appreciate its slavish devotion, I’m not necessarily hungry for it the way everybody else is.  (Same thing goes for Axiom Verge, too – and where’s the Vita version of that, I wonder?)

I’m not sure Titan Souls is for me, though I don’t want to dismiss it out of hand so quickly, given that I’ve only actually beaten the very first boss.

Last night I felt a bit restless (for reasons I’ll explain at a later date, if all goes well) and downloaded Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China for the PS4.  It’s an absolutely gorgeous 2.5-D stealth platformer that makes me really wish I was playing Mark of the Ninja 2; it’s still very Assassin’s Creed-ish, which means the controls don’t always work the way I expect them to, and the UI is still very crowded (which is annoying, given the aforementioned graphical beauty).  But it’s at least not the same old thing, as far as the AC franchise is concerned, and so I’ll try to stick with it for the time being.

Over the vacation I finished the Valis trilogy by Philip K. Dick.  That’s the first PKD I’ve ever read, by the way, and I’d probably guess that it’s not the best way to start off with him, especially since I’m not what you’d call a religious person by any means.  It’s certainly very interesting and thought-provoking, of course, and after reading VALIS I’m certainly interested in at least thumbing through PKD’s Exegesis, though I know that’s probably a bit too much for me to chew right now.

I did end up breaking my “no new books until I finish the backlog” rule.  (Look – when I go on vacation, I tend to splurge – and given the sort of emotional stress I was going through before we left, I maybe went a bit overboard.)  I bought a bunch of stuff, all of which I really want to get to, but I ended up going with Arthur Phillips’ “The Song is You”, which is exactly what i’d hoped it would be (I really liked his “Egyptologist“, and when I’d read the description of this book I knew I had to read it as soon as humanly possible), and it’s also feeding me lots and lots of lyric ideas, which is useful, given that I really need to get back to work on the album.

OK, so, that’s it – I’m alive, I’m well, I’m getting back to work.  (And if you can, please cross your fingers for me; I’ll explain later.  It’s good news, if the finger-crossing works out, is all I’ll say.)

Invisible Ink

I’m in something of a holding pattern right now with respect to the new album; well, maybe “holding pattern” isn’t the correct phrase.  What’s the best way to say “I’m starting to work on lyrics and I’m incredibly intimidated because I’m not as good a writer as I’d like to be and I really want these lyrics to matter“?  There’s one song in particular – it’s been one of the stronger songs right from the beginning – and I think I’ve come up with a chorus for it, but now I need to find a verse.

As I said the other day, writing lyrics is really, really difficult for me.  It’s particularly difficult this time around, though, because I’m not just writing one song; I’m writing an album, mostly from scratch, and while I’d hesitate to call it a “concept album” (because ugh) there’s definitely a thing that spurred this whole project on, and that thing is where all of this music is coming from.

I’ve never been a lyrics-oriented listener.  With a few notable exceptions, when I sit down with an album I almost never pay attention to the words; I’ll listen to the voice, but I’m almost always focused on everything else.  And when I was in my songwriting heyday (1993-1999, back when I was in bands and thinking about music 24/7), I almost always wrote lyrics only because I needed something to sing, rather than because I had something I needed to say.  I dearly wish I could simply be abstract the way Beck and Stephen Malkmus are, but I can’t (and believe me, I’ve tried, and it’s awful).  More often than not, I’m painfully and awkwardly sincere, and to my eyes and ears the words I come up with are cliched and lack any poetry.

I’m trying my best, is all I can say.  In the absence of a lyric-writing partner, that’s about all I can do.  And I’m hoping that with a little creative focus, the words can come a bit easier.

In the meantime, I’m also trying to keep myself distracted, because nothing impedes lyric creativity more effectively than me staring at a blank page for hours at a time.  So I’m getting back into my gaming backlog.

As I mentioned earlier this week, I bought a bunch of indie games; now I’m starting to play them.

I remain frustrated by the Xbox One’s apparent inability to download stuff while in a powered-down state, which was a feature I heartily enjoyed on the 360 and which I still enjoy on the PS4.  It means that I had to leave it powered on all night in order to finish downloading Ori and the Blind Forest, which I’m hoping to get my hands on this evening.  (It doesn’t help matters much that my apartment’s internet is spotty at best, which makes a 7GB download take that much longer.)

I am currently mostly enjoying Never Alone, which is absolutely gorgeous and fascinating and charming and adorable, but marred very occasionally by frustrating controls and unclear platforming puzzles.  Be that as it may, when it works, it’s wonderful.

I’m a little frustrated with Pneuma: Breath of Life; like I said the other day, its over-the-top self-awareness can get exasperating, and not all of its puzzles are fun to solve; it doesn’t do the greatest job of teaching you its rules, and while I certainly don’t need my hand held at all times, I’d appreciate some sort of guidance, however opaque it might be.  Still, though, Achievements!

I was tempted to buy Hotline Miami 2, but then I remembered that I’d never gotten terribly far in the first one on the PC, and that I’d maybe want to replay the first one to make sure I’d even be interested in the sequel, and you know what?  I don’t really like that game.  The controls make no sense to me at all, and one-hit-kills make the learning process incredibly frustrating.  It’s got style out the wazoo, but as a game it makes a rough first impression.

I’m also dabbling in Munin on the PC, which is a puzzle game I bought during the most recent Steam sale.  I forget why it was on my wishlist, but I’m enjoying it nonetheless; it’s a 2D platformer where you progress through each level by rotating each area on the screen in order to move; it has some sort of mythical Nordic art style, and it’s rather beautiful.

More on the creative process, and etc.

As in my last post, three topics to discuss.

MUSIC.  It occurs to me that, as I glance down the calendar, I’m going to be losing quite a lot of recording time over the next few weeks due to being out of town on the weekends (which often involves travelling on Friday nights, too).  I’m still sticking to my plan, though; at least one loop a night, with no mixing or tweaking or editing or even listening, until Sunday evening.  On Monday night I put down 2 loops; last night I only managed 1, but I think it’s a strong one – or, at least, it probably has some potential if I sit down with it and work with it, though I won’t be doing that until Sunday.

It’s interesting to be working in this way, to just make something and then leave it alone and deliberately ignore it for a specific amount of time; it’s not how I normally work, but then again, I haven’t been this prolific in years.  (And it’s only been 2 days!)  I’m not worrying about if the loops are good or not; my only concern is that they exist.  The thing about loops is that they can be changed and extended and manipulated very easily, whereas whenever I’ve written down chord changes and verse/chorus structures and melodies and such, I have a much harder time deviating away from that script.  (Which becomes especially frustrating when I realize that I can’t accurately recreate on tape what I hear in my head, given my recording and budgeting constraints.)

As I said – I won’t be listening to any of this stuff until Sunday.  Curiously, I haven’t been listening to any other music, either, except at quiet moments at work, and those aren’t really the best conditions to really listen to anything.  I’m curious to find out what happens to my brain after Sunday’s mixdown session, though; will I start obsessively listening to these loops, and thus risk getting creatively stuck again?  Will I start listening to other music?  Will new tunes suddenly pop into my head?  I’ve been very much an empty page this week, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s also created a little bit of a sense of disconnection between me and the stuff I’m recording.

It is what it is.  This is an experiment; it’s too soon to tell if it’s working or not.  I’m happy to be working on a regular basis, though, which is perhaps the best part.

BY THE WAY:  I’d mentioned in the last post that I’d had a friendly set of ears that was going to be helping me out with those Sunday mixdown sessions, and some other friends had piped up and said they wanted to lend their ears as well.  I’m inclined to let them, and you, too, if you want, though I’m probably not going to be handing these out to everyone.  Anyway, if you’re interested, let me know.

BOOKS.  Any concerns I’d had about the first two books in the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy have quickly been assuaged by book three.  There is, finally, action.  Plot!  Things moving in time!  Yes, there are still very long digressions and observational wormholes, but suddenly all these images from the first two books (described in occasionally excruciatingly tedious detail) are becoming relevant and clear and meaningful, and meanwhile the current story has a sense of momentum behind it that had been utterly lacking in the previous volumes.

I’m still highlighting passages by the dozens, though; sometimes these endless digressions contain deeply resonant feelings and ideas, and the translation is quite excellent as far as maintaining the author’s poetic prose.  There’s also this hilarious bit in Book Three, though, that is deeply ironic with regards to the narrator’s endless digressions – here he’s complaining about his boss, who also tends to ramble in tangents:

I wasn’t going to allow him to continue wandering and digressing, not on a night prolonged at his insistence; nor was I prepared to allow him to drift from an important matter to a secondary one and from there to a parenthesis, and from a parenthesis to some interpolated fact, and, as occasionally happened, never to return from his endless bifurcations, for when he started doing that, there almost always came a point when his detours ran out of road and there was only brush or sand or marsh ahead.

GAMES.  As noted before, my game playing is taking a backseat to everything else for the next few weeks.  I did one campaign mission in Far Cry 4 last night and upon its conclusion I was told that I should probably take care of any unfinished business before going to the next mission, which implies to me that I should probably finish those last 3 outposts, do that one last Fashion Week hunt, and maybe do the last 2 Shangri-La missions before finishing outright.

Backlogs and futurelogs

1.  I finished Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris last night.  I’m not sure that “underwhelmed” is the right word to describe my experience with it, though I’m having trouble finding something more apt.  The original game felt really fresh and new, and this feels very much like a safe treading over the same ground; there’s no flash or spark of inspired design.  The single-player campaign was surprisingly short, too, and even though I’ve still got some side stuff to do, it’s not all that much.  I’d still like to kick the tires on online co-op; I’ve heard that some of the puzzles change when there’s more than one person involved, and so maybe that would keep things from getting stale.  Nevertheless, I’m not feeling pulled back to beat my high scores the way I was the last time around.

2.  After finishing LC, I wanted to give Far Cry 4 another go, but for some reason I was having trouble logging in.  I’m not sure that the PS4 was having the same problems that Xbox One owners were, but the Ubisoft servers were taking a really, really, abnormally long time to get going, so I put it aside and went back to Dragon Age Inquisition to take a look at some sidequests.  Man, that game is hard to go back to once the campaign is over; suddenly all these quests seem frivolous and padded out.  I was able to overlook that when I was playing the campaign – if only because I was mostly just grinding, and the grinding was relatively fun to do – but now that there’s nothing big to work towards, I’m having a really hard time staying invested.

3.  I’m also kinda dabbling again in the PS4 version of GTA V; I’m far enough now where I’ve finished the first heist and I’ve unlocked Trevor.  Get ready for some hyperbole:  Michael is one of the worst “protagonists” in the history of the medium.  He’s such an obnoxious asshole; every word out of his mouth makes me cringe.  This is partly because the dialogue is so rotten and riddled with misogyny and condescension, but it’s also because the voice actor thinks he’s in Goodfellas or the Sopranos.  Even playing as the psychotic Trevor seems like a breath of fresh air.  I had a hard time with the game the first time around; it’s really excruciating to get through this second time, and I’m not sure I’m going to play much more of the campaign.  I don’t really know what the current state of the online side of things is; if you’re there, is it worth checking out?  I’d gotten my character to level 10 on the 360 before getting distracted with other things, and I’ve synced it up on the PS4, but… I’m not really interested in getting shot at while walking down the street.

4.  Switching gears:  I’m a little more than halfway through Andy Weir’s The Martian, which is something of a frustrating read.  On the one hand, it’s a fantastic premise for a realistic science fiction story, in that it’s about an astronaut stranded on the surface of Mars and his attempts at surviving and getting back to Earth, and all of his methods seem rooted in real-world tactics – as if the author interviewed a bunch of NASA people and asked them what someone could actually do.  On the other hand, a lot of that stuff ends up being a bit dry.  Furthermore, while the stranded astronaut is rather chipper and funny and is doing his damnedest to keep a smile on his face, there’s really no arc to him; he doesn’t have any feelings or emotions beyond finishing his next task.  The book seems to be much more about making his ordeal (and his attempts to rectify it) as realistic as possible, and I suppose the only way he could survive is if he didn’t stop to take stock about how fucked he is – and even though he does actually, literally say “I’m fucked” an awful lot, he generally manages to get un-fucked within a paragraph or two.  So there’s no real terror or dread to his predicament; he seems resigned to his fate, whether or not he’s successful at fixing it.  That’s an awfully good way to handle his predicament, of course, but it doesn’t make the book particularly moving.

5.  I’ve been trying to stop apologizing for not posting on a regular basis; I do my best to post at least 3 times a week, but sometimes it just doesn’t work out that way – for any number of reasons, none of which I can get into here.  But I suppose I should say that if it does get a little dark here in the next few weeks, it’s only because I’m working on some other projects which I am hoping to share with everyone soon enough.  I’ll keep you all posted on that stuff as it progresses, but in the meantime I’m trying to actually work, as opposed to talking about working (which is what I usually end up doing).

Skip Tracer

I’ve been waiting 20 years to post this, even if I didn’t have internet access 20 years ago.

…

The guitar guy played real good feedback
And super sounding riffs
With his mild mannered look on, yeah he was truly hip

…

We watched her fall over and lay down
Shouting the poetic truths of high school journal keepers

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Now we’re told so: merge ideas of song forms and freedom

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Poised, yet totally screwed up

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None of us know where we’re tryin’ to get to
What sort of life were we tryin’ to build

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Where are you now?
When your broken eyes are closed
Head in a cloudy dream, green & sailboats
Borrowed and never returned
Emotions, books, outlooks on life

Hello 2015!
Hello 2015!

I’m not sure many people would call Sonic Youth’s 1995 album Washing Machine their best, but it might be my personal favorite of theirs for two very distinct reasons:  (1) this is the album that finally got me to like them and understand them, and (2) this album, more than any other, is the one I associate with one of the most formative and pivotal times of my life.

In 1995 I was 19 years old, disillusioned with my college major, and in a band/circle of friends whose de facto leader was a super-hard-core Sonic Youth fan.  At the time, I was a hard-core Phish fan, and so Sonic Youth just sounded like mindless noise to me; I thought 20-minute noodle-jams had far more intrinsic value than 20-minute feedback squalls.

In any event, this was the album that happened to be released while my band was at somewhat of a creative crossroads, and so it was in near constant rotation at my friend’s apartment for months.   And unlike their earlier albums, this one struck a very deep chord with me right from the first listen – possibly because it’s a lot more melodic than what had preceded it (I’m not sure there’s a more beautiful song in their entire catalog than “Unwind”), or maybe because when you’re blitzed out of your mind at 2:00 am, “Diamond Sea” is a sort of life-changing event.

That apartment was our band’s HQ; but more than that, it was my home-away-from-home (or, to be more specific, my dorm-away-from-dorm).  I can’t even begin to count how many hours I spent there.*   In retrospect, I can’t even comprehend the physics involved that got so many of us to hang out in that tiny, tiny apartment.  At any given moment there’d be upwards of 10 of us squeezed into that space, the room filled with cigarette smoke and moleskine notepads and port wine and a 4-track machine always at the ready, someone’s hand always hovering over the record button just in case.

Anyway, as I said, Washing Machine was in constant rotation during the fall of 1995, and it’s a perfect fall album; cool and breezy and I might even say “wistful”, which is an odd adjective for a Sonic Youth album, but there it is.  We used to sit in that apartment in the wee hours, listening to this album on repeat, and this song would always perk us up; it’s a Lee Ranaldo spoken-word poem over one of the album’s more up-tempo tracks, and I suppose we all imagined ourselves as the “guitar guy [playing] real good feedback and super-sounding riffs / with his mild-mannered look on / yeah, he was truly hip”.

And at the song’s close, after a quiet interlude, the band starts pounding away on a very straightforward G chord, and when Lee shouts “Hello, 2015!”, I’m sure we all sat back in our respective chairs and tried to imagine what sort of robot hovercar future 2015 would look like.  We imagined – hell, we knew – that our band was going to conquer the world, and I guess we wondered if we’d be opening for Sonic Youth at a 2015 NYE show, or if they’d be opening for us.

(That band didn’t survive past 1996.)

* I even named one of my later bands after my time spent in that apartment, and if I ever resurrect my NaNo memoir project, I suspect I’ll be using “Midnight Thompson” as its title, too.