in which kevin reviews things he has finished recently
Kingdom Hearts II for PlayStation 2: Five hours of startlingly poignant, compelling story, with fifty hours of bad Disney crossover fanfiction sandwiched in between. Oh well--I suppose that's the only way to carry such a terrible concept and make it work. (Rumor has it that the game was conceived when a Square exec and a Disney exec were standing an elevator at a graphics conference, and one of them said to the other, "You have a highly marketable franchise! We have a highly marketable franchise! Let's make a game that will sell lots and lots of spinoff merchandise.") Gameplay-wise, it's God of War for kids, which is in no way a bad thing, unless "giddy combo-mashing fun" is a bad thing to you. Just the right level of challenge, too--I've beaten the game on Proud and Sephiroth still kicks my ass. Oh, and I know half the Internet has said this already, but I don't care what the cosmology of the game says--Roxas is a far more genuine and interesting character than Sora.
The Adventures of Chairman Mao on the Long March by Frederic Tuten: A short but bold experiment in creative plagiarism. If you went into this book not knowing anything about its premise, you could be excused for believing at first that it is a dry, textbook account of the father of Chinese communism's rise to power. By the time you get to the parts with the uncredited excerpts from Jack London novels and the historical account of 1920s silent film actress Greta Garbo seducing Mao from the hatch of a tank, it's pretty obvious that Tuten is fucking with you. Apparently Tuten was a good friend of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichenstein (the cover of the current edition was actually painted by Lichenstein himself), and his book is written with much of that same deconstructionist playfulness. Like his contemporaries, it's often hard to tell whether he's trying to make a serious point or whether he's just trying to trip every bullshit detector in criticdom. Highlights include: a scene where Mao fantasizes about the wives of other famous dictators through history, a bullshit-heavy parody of a paper on academic deconstructionism, and an end-of-book interview in which Mao reveals himself to be a hipster. Art, English, and history majors will adore this book to pieces, but other folk will probably go wtf.
I had a very special experience reading this book outside the World Financial Center at dusk. I saw rays of blood-gold sifting through the Manhattan skyline, glittering across the river, casting shadows of tables and chairs up a five-story flight of stairs, to rest on a gaggle of New Yorkers watching a crane lift a piece of the new World Trade Center into place. If only I had a 360 degree camera. That had depth perception. And no fisheye. Oh well, I guess some moments weren't meant to be preserved.
New Super Mario Bros. for Nintendo DS: A great tribute to the first four Super Mario Bros. games, but not a particularly memorable experience in itself. For a DS game, it's annoyingly non-portable, given that you have a finite number of saves for the entire game. Has its moments, though--plowing through a level when you are almost as big as the level itself is always fun.
Neuromancer by William Gibson: Okay, holy shit. I knew that this book was influential but I had no idea it was this...ambitious. I know this book inspired the Matrix trilogy, the Shadowrun role-playing games, and the entire genre of cyberpunk--not to mention the names of half a dozen real-life technologies, of which "cyberspace" is but one--but no one told me that all that stuff was based on the first five chapters. Gibson creates not only a imaginative yet chillingly familiar post-1980s future city (at least, if you read the book two decades ago), he writes an imaginative yet chillingly familiar post-1980s world. The universe of the novel spans five different countries--two of which are in orbit--each of which has entered the cyberspace age in unique yet plausible ways. And while Gibson was wildly off on some thematic and geopolitical counts (nobody expects the Japanese recession!), some technological observations were so accurate that I frequently had to remind myself that the book was first published in 1984. A lot of his observations, like the jury-rigged cyberspace nodes in the Middle East, have become true in spirit if not in fact. Now-timeless characters, a gripping story, and some astonishingly beautiful prose make this novel exceptional in its own right, not merely a fine work of science fiction. Which sets it apart from pretty much every other sci-fi novel written during the 1980s. Or the 1970s or 1960s, for that matter. Fucking starry-eyed machine worshippers.
Great Dream of Heaven by Sam Shepard: I'm willing to be the reason why this book is only worth four dollars, despite the fact that Shepard is a Pulitzer winner, is because the very very small number of people who actually read literary fiction thumbed through this at the bookstore and realized the first story, about a boy who helps a horse doctor rescue a trapped stallion, is absolutely awful. Like, dear goodness how the hell did this get published awful--it's disgusting and cruel, and there's no depth to any of the characters other than the sly but not subtle pedophilic and bestial overtones. It's a bit of a surprise, then, to discover that most of the other short stories in this anthology are actually pretty excellent. Fiction seems like a weird medium for Shepard, who won his Pulitzer for playwriting, but Shepard compensates by drawing from his phenomenal talent for dialogue. Every story is dialogue-driven--there's some exposition, some sense imagery, but all the tension and the all the character development comes from what the characters say. It's like reading a novel through a telephone, which would be a negative criticism for anyone but Shepard, who manages to spin not only believable but completely human characters from a few short pages of words. He's got a knack for finding compelling stories in the most mundane of plots: a woman's car breaks down by the side of the road; a dude at a casual restaurant asks a waitress about a sign; a Jew walks into a bar. (Okay, I made that last one up.) As my own prowess with dialogue is severely lacking (how am I supposed to write talky bits when I'm a recluse in real life?), this book is worth having to study as well as to read.
Tropic Thunder: If you've seen the trailer, you already know what to expect. Surprisingly enjoyable for a Ben Stiller film--the only Ben Stiller film I've ever seen where the audience broke into applause at the end--and squeefully meta (it's a movie about real life for people making a movie about real life!)--doubly so when you realize that most of the characters who are actors are scathingly self-deprecating parodies of the actors who play them. Manages to be much funnier than a typical Ben Stiller movie while being only half as stupid. And yes, that is Robert Downey Jr. in blackface, and no, it's not as crass as you might believe. Also, UNEXPECTED TOM CRUISE AAAAAAHH.
Welcome to Tranquillity Vol. 1 - by Gail Simone and Neil Googe Written by Gail Simone, famed feminist comics historian and talented comics writer in her own right. Drawn by Neil Googe, who I'd never heard of before, but has a knack for gorgeous pastel tones and clever panel designs. It's a very tongue-in-cheek series about a retirement community for Silver Age superheroes and their families. The protagonist is the sheriff of the town--an ordinary black woman with no superpowers. A sampling of this series's brand of humor: In the first chapter, a young hooligan from out of town comes into the Chik-N-Go to cause trouble. His name? Emoticon--and he wears a mask over his face that always shows the ASCII representation of what he's feeling. He wears a giant bling necklace around his neck that reads "EMO" in glittering studs. Hilarious, and a real delight to read, especially if you have some general knowledge of comics history.
Guitar, Month 3: exit valve for the heart.
The Adventures of Chairman Mao on the Long March by Frederic Tuten: A short but bold experiment in creative plagiarism. If you went into this book not knowing anything about its premise, you could be excused for believing at first that it is a dry, textbook account of the father of Chinese communism's rise to power. By the time you get to the parts with the uncredited excerpts from Jack London novels and the historical account of 1920s silent film actress Greta Garbo seducing Mao from the hatch of a tank, it's pretty obvious that Tuten is fucking with you. Apparently Tuten was a good friend of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichenstein (the cover of the current edition was actually painted by Lichenstein himself), and his book is written with much of that same deconstructionist playfulness. Like his contemporaries, it's often hard to tell whether he's trying to make a serious point or whether he's just trying to trip every bullshit detector in criticdom. Highlights include: a scene where Mao fantasizes about the wives of other famous dictators through history, a bullshit-heavy parody of a paper on academic deconstructionism, and an end-of-book interview in which Mao reveals himself to be a hipster. Art, English, and history majors will adore this book to pieces, but other folk will probably go wtf.
I had a very special experience reading this book outside the World Financial Center at dusk. I saw rays of blood-gold sifting through the Manhattan skyline, glittering across the river, casting shadows of tables and chairs up a five-story flight of stairs, to rest on a gaggle of New Yorkers watching a crane lift a piece of the new World Trade Center into place. If only I had a 360 degree camera. That had depth perception. And no fisheye. Oh well, I guess some moments weren't meant to be preserved.
New Super Mario Bros. for Nintendo DS: A great tribute to the first four Super Mario Bros. games, but not a particularly memorable experience in itself. For a DS game, it's annoyingly non-portable, given that you have a finite number of saves for the entire game. Has its moments, though--plowing through a level when you are almost as big as the level itself is always fun.
Neuromancer by William Gibson: Okay, holy shit. I knew that this book was influential but I had no idea it was this...ambitious. I know this book inspired the Matrix trilogy, the Shadowrun role-playing games, and the entire genre of cyberpunk--not to mention the names of half a dozen real-life technologies, of which "cyberspace" is but one--but no one told me that all that stuff was based on the first five chapters. Gibson creates not only a imaginative yet chillingly familiar post-1980s future city (at least, if you read the book two decades ago), he writes an imaginative yet chillingly familiar post-1980s world. The universe of the novel spans five different countries--two of which are in orbit--each of which has entered the cyberspace age in unique yet plausible ways. And while Gibson was wildly off on some thematic and geopolitical counts (nobody expects the Japanese recession!), some technological observations were so accurate that I frequently had to remind myself that the book was first published in 1984. A lot of his observations, like the jury-rigged cyberspace nodes in the Middle East, have become true in spirit if not in fact. Now-timeless characters, a gripping story, and some astonishingly beautiful prose make this novel exceptional in its own right, not merely a fine work of science fiction. Which sets it apart from pretty much every other sci-fi novel written during the 1980s. Or the 1970s or 1960s, for that matter. Fucking starry-eyed machine worshippers.
Great Dream of Heaven by Sam Shepard: I'm willing to be the reason why this book is only worth four dollars, despite the fact that Shepard is a Pulitzer winner, is because the very very small number of people who actually read literary fiction thumbed through this at the bookstore and realized the first story, about a boy who helps a horse doctor rescue a trapped stallion, is absolutely awful. Like, dear goodness how the hell did this get published awful--it's disgusting and cruel, and there's no depth to any of the characters other than the sly but not subtle pedophilic and bestial overtones. It's a bit of a surprise, then, to discover that most of the other short stories in this anthology are actually pretty excellent. Fiction seems like a weird medium for Shepard, who won his Pulitzer for playwriting, but Shepard compensates by drawing from his phenomenal talent for dialogue. Every story is dialogue-driven--there's some exposition, some sense imagery, but all the tension and the all the character development comes from what the characters say. It's like reading a novel through a telephone, which would be a negative criticism for anyone but Shepard, who manages to spin not only believable but completely human characters from a few short pages of words. He's got a knack for finding compelling stories in the most mundane of plots: a woman's car breaks down by the side of the road; a dude at a casual restaurant asks a waitress about a sign; a Jew walks into a bar. (Okay, I made that last one up.) As my own prowess with dialogue is severely lacking (how am I supposed to write talky bits when I'm a recluse in real life?), this book is worth having to study as well as to read.
Tropic Thunder: If you've seen the trailer, you already know what to expect. Surprisingly enjoyable for a Ben Stiller film--the only Ben Stiller film I've ever seen where the audience broke into applause at the end--and squeefully meta (it's a movie about real life for people making a movie about real life!)--doubly so when you realize that most of the characters who are actors are scathingly self-deprecating parodies of the actors who play them. Manages to be much funnier than a typical Ben Stiller movie while being only half as stupid. And yes, that is Robert Downey Jr. in blackface, and no, it's not as crass as you might believe. Also, UNEXPECTED TOM CRUISE AAAAAAHH.
Welcome to Tranquillity Vol. 1 - by Gail Simone and Neil Googe Written by Gail Simone, famed feminist comics historian and talented comics writer in her own right. Drawn by Neil Googe, who I'd never heard of before, but has a knack for gorgeous pastel tones and clever panel designs. It's a very tongue-in-cheek series about a retirement community for Silver Age superheroes and their families. The protagonist is the sheriff of the town--an ordinary black woman with no superpowers. A sampling of this series's brand of humor: In the first chapter, a young hooligan from out of town comes into the Chik-N-Go to cause trouble. His name? Emoticon--and he wears a mask over his face that always shows the ASCII representation of what he's feeling. He wears a giant bling necklace around his neck that reads "EMO" in glittering studs. Hilarious, and a real delight to read, especially if you have some general knowledge of comics history.
Guitar, Month 3: exit valve for the heart.