Monthly Archives: June 2024

HIGURASHI – WHEN THEY CRY

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Higurashi: When They Cry
Ryukishi 07 + 07th Expansion
2008-2022 (it’s a long story)
PC

The memories I have of playing Higurashi: When They Cry involve the nighttime dog walks after a session just as much as the experience sitting in front of my computer. The idea of the “mystery game” has existed almost as long as games themselves. Ken and Roberta Williams created the murder mystery adventure game Mystery House in 1980, the start of their storied careers. But many of those mysteries have fatal flaws. Sometimes, they are too easy to deduce, with plot beats that land as thudding “WE KNOW ALREADY” moments. Other times, they’re impossible to deduce, either because the reality is far too implausible or because the game actively lies to create tension (maybe never more infamously disappointing than David Cage’s Heavy Rain.)

Higurashi: When They Cry is a mystery that trades on familiarity. A “sound novel,” or a visual novel with an emphasis on atmosphere in its storytelling, perhaps its most famous signature sound is the cry of the titular “higurashi,” summer cicadas. It’s a sound I grew up hearing in my midwestern suburb, not as lushly textured as the sound of Hinamizawa’s forests and fauna. I grew up with similar anime, too – a protagonist-attituded teenage boy, Keiichi Maebara, moves to a new town and meets a high-energy cast of teenage girls. After getting friendly with them and beginning to develop relationships, he participates in the town’s summer Watanagashi festival, a local tradition with carnival games and sweet rituals. After this festival, however, bodies turn up – an unfortunate recent event is the annual deaths on the night of the festival. Keiichi has been friendly with these victims, too – and, unfortunately, it may have associated him with the grudge that took their lives. Now, Keiichi must do his best to navigate a network of suspicion, often suspecting even the friends who took him in of the violence he fears may come his way next.

I say “often” because Higurashi’s storytelling structure is fairly unconventional. The game is divided into eight “chapters,” each separate executables, and a newly released (June 2022) epilogue. Each of these chapters is not sequential with one another. Rather, they offer alternate scenarios – the first four scenarios, the “Question” Arcs, portray alternate versions of the Watanagashi Festival and the violence that ensues. Different characters may appear, different decisions get made, and, ultimately, different unfortunate misunderstandings set friend against friend. The latter four scenarios are the “Answer” Arcs, and they offer different perspectives on the events of the Question Arcs – and, as a result, often far more information about the ultimate cause of this violent ritual.

The Steam release of Higurashi. Rena confronts Keiichi about underlying tensions in Ch. 1 – Onikakushi, free on Steam.

Each chapter plays out with a fairly regular structure – the first half plays out as a slice of life anime, really dedicated to fleshing out the characters and building affection for their friendships. I can’t stress enough that if you don’t have much tolerance for 2000s anime comedy, this is probably gonna be a tough sit for you. It’s worth noting that sexuality is never explicit in Higurashi (valuable in a series about literal teenagers!) but it does lean into tropes about Keiichi sexualizing his classmates, “RANDOM!!!” humor, and meta gags. In high school, this was the stuff I ate up with an appetite – shows like Lucky Star, Azumanga Daioh, and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya were my favorites. That last one owes a massive debt to Higurashi – I doubt it would have been received the same way without a loyal Higurashi fanbase, if it were written the same way at all without its predecessor.

After the laughter, dread sets in – the Watanagashi Festival has arrived. After the first chapter, you’ve come to learn what this will mean. And you know that shortly after this last gasp of friendship, the despair comes soon to follow. The thriller sequences of Higurashi are among the more terrifying horror novels I’ve read in a long time. The violence isn’t necessarily excessive, thankfully. The quality of the writing allows for genuine dread to instill, and the sound novel aspect allows it to really punctuate horrific moments.

Every Arc is, in my opinion, quite satisfying. The first is very much an introduction to the world, and it plays out in ways that might feel somewhat predictable to fans of the genre. But its primary suspect for Keiichi, a disturbed version of the girl next door, Rena Ryuuga, has a handful of moments that are chilling. And, even better, there’s elements you can’t explain right away. For one thing, it wouldn’t seem like she’s acting alone, but no explanation of her behavior can account for how she’d have accomplices. For another, one cause of death – seemingly self-inflicted lacerations, which merit more detail but I don’t want to spoil – can’t clearly align with anything you’ve seen. You’re left piecing together what you can.

The original Higurashi – When They Cry art. A local cop browbeats Keiichi for his competitive nature and lack of skill.

Those nightly reflections on my Higurashi readings are so memorable precisely because I really was able to piece together a good amount of information I hadn’t previously been told without ever giving the whole mystery away. I’d walk around, asking myself what I’d learned that night, trying to piece together the ultimate mystery. I’d think about these characters throughout my day, remembering my favorite moments, both happy and sad, scary and funny. I really grew to love them, and so solving the layered, quite complex mystery was my full hobby for almost a month as I binged the game.

I’ve often said that the runtime approach to games is totally skewed. Sure, I played the PS3 game Journey for three hours. But when I thought about it for a decade afterward, listened to the soundtrack repeatedly, and acknowledge it altered the way I thought about the transcendental – did I only get “three hours of value” out of the game? Higurashi, even just in terms of screentime, is a long game – I made liberal use of the game’s fast-forward button to get all the text on screen at once, and Steam says it still took me 50 hours to complete. If you use the popular 07th Mod to add voice acting and actually listen to all of it, you’d probably hit 120 hours of game time easily.

It took me three weeks to read, and it honestly wasn’t long enough. Higurashi is easily one of my favorite games ever, and has made me rethink my relationship to games. The novel originally released over five years, the first chapter releasing in 2002 and the eighth in 2006, and then released in the US between 2008 and 2010. It’s expanded into anime, live action films, anime sequels, spinoff games, and, of course, the maybe even more popular spiritual successor, Umineko: When They Cry. I’m giving myself time to live with Higurashi as the end of the story for now – but it’s partly that I know there’s more to discover, more time to live in the world of its writer, Ryukishi07. Compared to certain other recent mystery games (*cough*Immortality*cough) I can only just barely wait to fall back into this world.

A screenshot from the popular 07th mod. Rena confronts Keiichi again in Ch. 1 – Onikakushi.

Additional notes – the Type07th Expansion mod, and the “original” art. The Steam version of Higurashi, released between 2015 and 2016, allows you to switch between the art you’ll see on the new Steam page and the original art, the conversation you can see between Keiichi and a local cop. I am not going to argue for anyone to play with the original art unless they really want to – it definitely has a lot of personality, but, uh, it’s obviously a lot harder to take seriously. I did not install the popular Type07th Expansion mod, which adds voice acting and the art from the PS2 release- you’ll see it in the image above this paragraph. Most diehards swear by the Type07th Expansion mod. I didn’t install it. I personally preferred to play without voice acting, which allowed more ambiguity in a lot of the line readings, and the Steam remaster art is totally acceptable IMO. But I figured I’d make you aware of it, because many other diehard fans would cuss me out for not making you aware that you could play this game with what, from what I’ve seen on YouTube, is excellent voice acting!

SOUND OF SILVER

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SOUND OF SILVER
LCD Soundsystem
2007

I first found LCD Soundsystem in early 2011, when I bought This Is Happening on iTunes. I’m perpetually haunted by this decision, as “All I Want” is the first song that plays every time I plug my phone into my car. If I’d started with Sound of Silver, I’d surely instead be haunted by “All My Friends,” a song that anchored me during some of my deepest collegiate depression. The break-up of LCD Soundsystem, documented in the not-very-good-documentary-but-there’s-a-much-better-concert-film-in-the-special-features Shut Up And Play The Hits, was the first time a band I’d found as an adult and imagined a much larger future for, was supposed to be ending. Of course, they haven’t actually ended, their new music is still pretty good, and James Murphy’s constant posturing has aged into making him deeply uncool. He’s come full circle, I guess.

LCD Soundsystem’s albums were laser targeted at my “Talking Heads are underrated” resentments and my burgeoning affection for the epic build of Bruce Springsteen and Sonic Youth’s “Teen Age Riot”. “All My Friends” and “Dancing in the Dark” make so much sense together Hot Chip mashed them up. It’s soaring arena rock made with new wave synths and anchored by Murphy’s sing-talk baritone.

Sound of Silver used to sound like the future to me. It’s such a fascinating blend of indie rock trends, electronic dance pop, and irony-drenched lyrics. “Time To Get Away” and “North American Scum” are so fun to shout along to precisely because the idea of singing them has already been tossed aside. It’s cynical and playful at the same time. I didn’t understand that this was already a dead end, that the last great rock bands seeming to revel in disposability and excess signaled death rather than bravado. The danciest songs on this album play like worn-out versions of late-70s Eno collaborations with Byrne and Bowie, revived by the necromancy of `funk guitar, incredible polyrhythms, and synth stings. They’re fun, they’re funny, they’re acrid.

What makes the album not curdle over is the more sincere grief of the less ironic music. “Someone Great” and “All My Friends” are really heartfelt power pop. The former is more explicitly the death of Murphy’s longtime therapist, the literal grief of losing a loved one. The latter is more the grief of time, exploring how relationships and missed opportunities change faster than it feels possible. These have a more melodic sound and less repetitive lyrics to them, and it’s more obvious the way these songs wear their sincerity. Similarly, the closing ballad, “New York, I Love You” is undeniably a downer-ballad, still removed with some humor but also very sincerely celebrating Murphy’s home city. Less lyrically emotional is “Sound of Silver,” but its sonic journey is maybe the most adventurous and epic build on the album, situating its “teenagedom” very personally in Murphy’s own adolescence.

The end of the party is how LCD Soundsystem fancied itself at the time. The myth is that with the death of the Meet Me In The Bathroom New York rock scene, we gave in to modern pressures and got old. We’d reached the end of the line, and there was nothing left to say in the rock format. Obviously, anyone still listening to modern rock music can dispute that with their own assortment of twenty bands who are doing something exciting and interesting and personal, or who are using Pixies and Springsteen and new wave to say new things. That feeling that you’re getting old and the world isn’t following your vision anymore is attractive to people of every generation. It’s fun to listen to LCD Soundsystem sell the fantasy of being The Last Good Band, because boy, they sell the hell out of it.

KEY TRACKS: “Time To Get Away”, “Someone Great”, “All My Friends,” “Sound of Silver”
CATALOG CHOICE: This Is Happening
NEXT STOP: Challengers Original Score, Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross
AFTER THAT: Mosquito, Yeah Yeah Yeahs

M

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M
Dir. Fritz Lang
1931

As a teenager, I felt the most generic form of entertainment that existed outside the reality TV show was the crime procedural. Law & Order, Criminal Intent, SVU, Monk, Psych, Murder She Wrote, Columbo, Matlock, Poirot, The Closer, even the ones I didn’t watch like JAG and NCIS and CSI – these are more familiar formats to me than even sitcoms ever were. Fritz Lang’s M foretells a century of crime procedurals, a series that has spawned several official remakes and thousands of imitators.

Before M, the mystery story and investigation thriller were popular formats – but they tended to follow private investigators or super sleuths like Sherlock Holmes or Sam Spade. As a result, M actually has to lay an extended groundwork for the intensive labor of a manhunt. An early section of the film lays out the concepts of scouring a perimeter, having hundreds of officers interviewing self-reported witnesses, introducing the concept of fingerprinting and handwriting analysis. In modern procedurals, we accept these ideas because we’re so inundated with this story – M has to actually introduce them to a public who may never have learned about this kind of police work, and simultaneously invents the cinematic language that will be used to depict them for the next century.

The reason M survives as a masterpiece, however, is its cultural commentary and intelligence. M was the final film Lang released in Germany before fleeing the Nazis, his next masterpiece The Testament of Dr. Mabuse banned by Goebbels’ ministry of propaganda. The tension Lang feels about being a citizen in a police state is present in the film – while he does not openly portray the police as corrupt or fascistic, he does portray them as completely unable to combat the murderer. In fact, all they can do is create a public nuisance, harassing “the usual suspects” until the mob decides they’ll catch the killer themselves. Rather than a film about police justice, M becomes a film about the allure of mob mentality and how quickly natural citizens will give over to fascism and capital punishment. Without spoiling the climactic ending for anyone who hasn’t seen it, the theater which plays out at the trial of the killer is still queasy, exciting, and iconic. The film’s ending, on mothers declaring “No sentence will bring the dead children back,” is as thoughtful and reflective a final statement on the nature of criminal justice as the end of Kurosawa’s High and Low or Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.

Peter Lorre is largely considered to have broken out with M, previously a comedic character actor in small roles, and while I love later turns in The Man Who Knew Too Much, Mad Love, and The Maltese Falcon, he may never have been better than as this film’s killer. He haunts the film with his whistling of “In The Hall of the Mountain King,” a thoughtful early use of music in the still-nascent sound film format. During the film’s chase scenes, his face catches the expressionist light and shadow of this film to look both pathetic and a monster, his bulging eyes leaping off the screen. He is nowhere near cinema’s first great villain – Georges Melies played too many devils for anyone else to claim the role – but he is still a personal favorite of mine.

DAYDREAM NATION

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DAYDREAM NATION
Sonic Youth
1988

I think for the first ten years I owned this album, I would listen to “Teen Age Riot,” to me the perfect rock song, and then shut it off maybe one minute into “The Sprawl.” I can’t help what I wanted, and what I wanted was The Stone Roses. There was more I would’ve liked at the time, even just finishing “The Sprawl” or listening to songs like “Total Trash,” but I didn’t have the appetite for something as burned out and adult as “Silver Rocket.” Hell, I barely had patience for long instrumental sections – so much of my enjoyment of music for so long was built on singing along, I’m not sure I would’ve stuck through anyway. I got my fill through so many bands inspired by Sonic Youth, from Yeah Yeah Yeahs to The War on Drugs.

I started Sonic Youth from the beginning when I started getting really into the less radio friendly side of Pixies, looking to recapture the distortion and feedback of being in my twenties at the Majestic in Madison and blowing my ears out. Coming back to Daydream Nation after listening to their 80s output, it’s so much clearer why this is considered their landmark album. They’d mastered noise rock with evil lyrics a few years prior, Bad Moon Rising culminating in the extremely uncomfortable “Death Valley ‘69,” making music for the end of the world. Daydream Nation instead comes out of making longer instrumental jams, and those jams resulted in much more melodic guitar parts with a lot more texture. Without that context, I was under the impression the darkness was overwhelming melodic beauty – now, I understand instead that the distortion and uptempo rage was the starting point.

I’ve been reading through William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy this past year or so, and Sonic Youth’s “The Sprawl” came out two weeks before the publication of the third novel, Mona Lisa Overdrive. Where Neuromancer cohered into pretty cogent worldbuilding and rage about our increasingly transactional reality, the second novel Count Zero is 90% fun action and vibes and 10% conspiratorial agitprop. It’s hard not to joke that “The Sprawl” also borrows that structure, with maybe two minutes of fairly enjoyable and poetic reflection on transactional sex, imposter syndrome, and a decaying, rusting home and then six more of absolutely gorgeous guitar interplay.

A lot of the lyrics on this album are window dressing on top of a massive instrumental jam. “Candle” is a pretty simple reflection on feelings of fatalism at a young age, but any sense of anger or resolution is really only told through the dark riff under the verses or the noisy instrumental break. This still isn’t a pop album, but it represented the breakthrough into popular critical acceptance and college radio airplay that Sonic Youth hadn’t found yet. Their next album, Goo, would include more radio friendly dance music and fewer songs over 7 minutes long. It also amped up the political and pop culture references, a little less vague and poetic.

The signs of that change are in that song I loved so much as a teen, “Teen Age Riot.” That song was originally titled “J Mascis For President,” and Dinosaur Jr.’s frontman is still in there with his Marshall stacks. The opening, Kim Gordon’s “spirit desire” intro, is so funny – whatever its original intent, it comes across now as a lampoon on the post-hippie new age radicals and manifestation as resistance. Then, the power pop arrives, the perfectly tuned guitar tones of Thurston Moore and Lee Ronaldo in conversation with one another, chunk and clean. The remainder imagines a revolution with a charismatic alt-rock hero, and it ends still on the riot trail. I think there’s enough humor to the song to understand that this may be some “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” bullshit (“He acts the hero/We paint a zero on his hand”) but it doesn’t give in to that defeat. Taken out of context, that might sound like cynicism swallowing a dream – but, again, this is the daydream of the people who’ve put out some of the darkest no-wave noise rock of the 80s, so maybe it’s the start of believing in something.

KEY TRACKS: “Teen Age Riot,” “The Sprawl,” “Total Trash”
CATALOG CHOICE: Bad Moon Rising, Goo
NEXT STOP: Bossanova, Pixies
AFTER THAT: A Deeper Understanding, The War on Drugs

ROLLERCOASTER TYCOON 2

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ROLLERCOASTER TYCOON 2
Chris Sawyer
2000

I can’t remember how exactly I wound up playing Rollercoaster Tycoon, the independently developed first entry aimed at Scholastic Book Sales and cereal boxes – if it came into the house through the intended method, or if my dad (who was a PC gamer unlike me) had read about it and decided to take a crack at it himself. I loved Disneyland at that age but hadn’t been old or tall enough to really ride rollercoasters or most rides scarier than Dumbo. When I finally did get a season pass to Six Flags about four years later, I was terrified of each impending step up the rollercoaster intensity ladder. My motivation to keep going came from a love of the damn rides (I’m thankful I still enjoy them now!) and memories of playing so much RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 & 2 as a kid.

I came back to the management sim as an adult after picking up RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 in a Steam sale during the pandemic. I often struggle with sim games and creativity canvas games – RollerCoaster Tycoon combines the two. Each park template comes with a scenario goal, such as attracting a target number of guests before a certain date, or to achieve a certain park value in fixed assets built into the park. As a kid, I found many of the more difficult goals arcane, unbelievably high, too distant to achieve. Now, the goals are almost ancillary to just designing a park I’d enjoy spending time at for a day.

While the game’s many “flat rides” (here meaning rides without tracks, such as a ferris wheel, merry-go-round, or swinging ship) offer some prefab parts you can slot together to get started, designing a fun, profitable park involves building some damn roller coasters. When I’m designing a ride, I spend time mentally imagining how it would feel to ride. I have enough sense memory of certain top speeds and G-forces to be able to consider (even if probably not 100% accurately) how the turns, rattles, airtime, and inclines are for the passengers. The game’s evaluation of whether or not a ride is fun is pretty smart, but I’m only really satisfied when I make something that I think I’d enjoy.

I follow a couple of different YouTube channels that produce really high quality RollerCoaster Tycoon content to this day. The first, Deurklink, is focused on using in-game scenery, rides, and shops to create beautiful, detailed parks, the way people build scale model backdrops for their model railroad kits. The second, Marcel Vos, is an expert of the game’s programming and design, testing the absolute limits of what the game can simulate – rides that last simulated eons, theme parks with no rides that can attract thousands of guests, parks that occupy two in-game squares. This degree of expertise partly comes out of the fan-made OpenRCT2 app, which basically operates as an enhanced version of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 you can only run with a proper installation of the game. RCT2 has an extremely dedicated fanbase I’d been unaware of for twenty years, and I’m blown away by all the work they’ve done and continue to do.

I remember listening to the Idle Thumbs podcast, a show run by game developers, discussing the intentional “game design” of theme parks. They talked about visiting Disneyland with a lot of attention toward “the intended experience.” This is, to some extent, true of all architecture, but unlike more purely functional landscapes or buildings, the theme park is meant to provoke the broadest, most directly accessible form of “fun.” Unlike Disneyland, RCT2 is at its most fun when you honor the natural landscape to guide the design experience rather than flattening everything to match your design, so simulating the economics only better facilitates the play.

I imagine most people learning the game focus first on just learning the mechanics of making a profitable park which can complete the game’s goals. But you don’t have to become a wizard at exploiting the game mechanics to reach the point where it’s more rewarding to turn the game into a canvas. I haven’t been able to get into more abstract creative games like Minecraft or SimCity – it helps me a lot to have the sound of a roller coaster chain lift, the screams of joy from guests getting soaked on a log flume, imagining adolescent summers where I learned to conquer the Raging Bull’s 208 foot drop.

NIDHOGG

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NIDHOGG
Meshoff Games
2014

Two duelists meet in the battleground. Sometimes it’s a castle – sometimes a waterfall – sometimes Valhalla. They jab, deflect, jump, dodge, and spar until death does them part. This is the “normal” part of Nidhogg. Then they run.

Nidhogg is fencing football. The player who’s most recently won in a duel takes possession of the screen and sprints toward the opponent’s goal. Whoever makes it there first is swallowed by the titular world-devouring serpent for an audience of cheering fans. The other player will be reborn every few seconds to make a valiant defense and stop them, and if they win, they take possession and start running.

This ends up making for some of the most frantic twitch gameplay I’ve ever seen. It’s easy to pick up and play for two people who have never played before, but it’s also full of details  that make it difficult to master. The duelist can hold the sword at three different elevations – holding your rapier at the same height as your opponent’s thrust can block attacks, but raising or lowering your blade over the opponent’s sword can knock it from their hands. Holding the sword up above your head leaves you defenseless, but it also allows you to throw the sword at your opponent. After deflection or a throw, you can run faster, but your only defense is a smartly timed kick.

All of this is rendered in crazy pixel graphics. Your technicolor duelist bleeds their color all over the battlefield, leaving a paintball arena of battle spoils as you run back and forth over the course of a match. The animation is so precise and well-animated that each action feels snappy and responsive while also feeling expressive and surprisingly violent. The music by indie musician and producer Daedelus is synchronized to player action, so every game has its own unique soundtrack. It’s a simple game that’s easy to read – playing with friends makes for a great pass and play game.

Video games are so cool, man. I play the sequel, Nidhogg II, at I/O Arcade Bar every time I go – in the sequel, your dudes are nastier, the game offers a bunch of different weapons, and there are even more crazy stages to fight on. I still prefer the simplicity of the original game at home, but the madcap experience of playing with friends hasn’t gotten old a decade later.

MALCOLM X

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Malcolm X
Dir. Spike Lee
1992

I was thrilled when Madison film critic, programmer and friend Jason Furhman held a screening of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X as part of his Madison Library Cinesthesia screening series earlier this year. It’s a film I’ve adored since I first saw it in June of 2016, with Spike Lee having grown to be one of my all-time favorite filmmakers, but I especially appreciated watching it while so much conversation centered on last year’s biggest surprise hit, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. To be able to compare and contrast these epic length biographical films, whose stories as central American political figures were swallowed up for decades by slander and misrepresentation, was to me a unique and thoughtful programming choice. If we can convince Jason to start putting his program notes online, I’ll update this piece to include a link to them – he very comprehensively laid out the history of this film’s production and reception, and I’d feel foolish trying to sum up his work here.

Spike Lee’s Malcolm X is the ultimate example of my “cathedral” model for masterpieces. The film takes you past grand images of seemingly isolated frescoes and gives you the space to really linger in them, either relishing in the details or taking in the grand effect. I found myself focusing on the big picture on this watch – there is absolutely an effect to watching so many consecutive scenes of Malcolm’s ascent from street preacher to national preacher, so many consecutive scenes of Baines converting him, so many consecutive scenes of the violence his family was threatened with. It creates the sense of his total devotion to the cause. If the audience struggles to sit with it for an hour, imagine the conviction it took to live it for twelve years.

Contrast this with the propulsive structure of Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Nolan manages three separate timelines throughout the film, cross-cutting across decades to synthesize meaning, creating one linear thematic jist out of three nonlinear ellisions. The emotional weight of that film is reaching across time, allowing our feelings about Oppenheimer’s trial to reach back to our feelings about the Trinity Test itself. Here, Lee instead uses a cumulative emotional weight, guiding us through the story as it happened, giving the audience the responsibility to link repeated themes into syllogism. You may not have the full symbolic meaning of Delroy Lindo’s false idol of charismatic organized crime when we first see Malcolm jailed, but the image sticks in the brain long enough to start seeing parallels with Al Freeman Jr.’s Elijah Muhammad.

Malcolm talking with lifelong friend Shorty (Spike Lee.)

I find myself surprised at the resistance some film fans have had to embracing Spike Lee as one of the great American filmmakers. Do The Right Thing has fully arrived, for sure, but I feel the rest of his work is often still seen as homework, uneven, unfamiliar deep cuts. It’s maybe never been more obvious than the gap between critics and general esteem for Da 5 Bloods, once again starring Lindo, a film too few saw. Malcolm X is one of those films that breaks through partly because Denzel Washington, the greatest living movie star, gives his most beloved and iconic performance in the title role. He gets to be everything – a cult of personality, a sex symbol, the kindest man you’ve ever seen, a messiah sending himself to absolution, an angry spirit of vengeance, a funny firebrand, a wilting flower. To say everything there is to say about Washington would reward a scene-by-scene breakdown of exactly what he’s doing and the way he strings incredible continuity over the entire film.

I chose this film for the birthday project on April 24th, one week into Columbia University students camping in protest of Columbia University’s ties to the genocidal Israeli government and the ongoing annihilation of Gaza and Palestine. I find myself starting this piece on May 3rd, after a week of disproportionate police abuse of those protesters, Zionist counter-protestors at UCLA assaulting the Free Palestine encampment with fireworks and bricks, and our own UW-Madison calling MPD on the student body. I did not, at the time, foresee the renewed conversation about “peaceful protest” and police violence reaching the height that it has. Any study of Malcolm X will once again reveal that even peaceful protest will be slandered as violence, that malfeasance can be manufactured, that “progressive” is not a linear stamp where the powers that be let difference in opinion live.

UFOs

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CW: FLASHING LIGHTS, STROBE EFFECTS

UFOs
Dir. Lillian Schwartz
1971

The last weekend I visited my dad, he showed me his mind machine. It was a shoddy looking piece of tech strapped onto a pair of goggles. He told me that in order to use it, I’d have to close my eyes. The homemade headset would flash lights in psychedelic patterns over your eyes, which of course you kept shut. I used the machine for twenty minutes when I was 17, about six weeks before he died. I have no idea if he made it himself or got it from a friend of his. 

Lillian Schwartz’s UFOs is widely considered one of the very first computer animated films. Her collection, including Pixillation, Olympiad, and Enigma, are largely similar experiments in color and light, exhibited as museum films and now living almost exclusively online. It is the kind of experimental work that, for many, will serve only as a historical oddity, something for academics and archivists and no one else.

An image of UFOs, light and color for those who cannot watch the film.

I admire the film’s choice of compositions. The strobing circles that make up the majority of the runtime, the flashing rim of a flying saucer, are alienating. The rippling strokes create a very cool liquid motion effect that would be hard to successfully capture in digital effects for some time afterward. The sea of lines create such an abstract darkness that it captures the oceanic more than the extraterrestrial – though obviously many would cite terrors of the deep as more likely to be met in our lifetime than someone out there. While the fear of the unknown is on mind with this film, I don’t find its portrayal of the other as threatening so much as neutral. Confronting that discomforting fear in a safe setting feels healthy.

I am not the only person who has found this film very personally comforting and beautiful. One mutual of mine found it to capture something spiritual – another writer found it to be the ultimate overstimulation. This film reminds me of my father – it reminds me of how firm his bed was, how his brined oven baked chicken tasted, of his rat tail hair and the story he told of getting LSD from a coworker at his Starbucks cafe.

Today, writing this [April 25,] I am laid out with a sinus infection [it was COVID.] I recharged the Oculus Quest I received from Mom a few years ago, loaded up the Internet Archive video of UFOs, and shut my eyes. I saw the sort of flashing colors I remembered from all those years ago. I wondered if Schwartz ever experimented with drugs. Her work is currently exhibited at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Maybe someday I’ll go – I wonder if I’ll feel Dad as close as I did this afternoon.

LOW

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LOW
David Bowie
1977

I lifted the format of these writeups directly from Tom Moon, author of 1000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die, as he was essentially my bridge between Guitar Hero and actually enjoying multiple genres of music. In his introduction to 1000 Recordings, Moon writes, “Finding renegade jazz pianist Cecil Taylor next to sensitive singer-songwriter James Taylor, who abuts the Russian composer Tchaikovsky underscores the astounding range of musical expression available, while subtly discouraging people from hanging out in their genre neighborhoods (ghettos?) they know best. This journey taught me that there’s great treasure waiting on the other side of wherever you draw your territorial lines.”

Few figures in music history underscore that philosophy more than Brian Eno, whose collaborators range from John Cale to John Cage, Sean Kuti to Sinead O’Connor, and perhaps most famously David Byrne to David Bowie. Eno’s influence is bringing ambient and classical into pop, African polyrhythm into rock, and subverting listener expectations in ways that enriched the quality of pop songwriting in ways we might now take for granted. While Bowie is quick to point out Eno is only a contributor and not a co-producer on his experimental Berlin Trilogy, Eno’s contributions help define what makes Low so different from Bowie’s Thin White Duke era of funk-infused pop.

The Man Who Fell To Earth, Bowie’s first starring role, was originally supposed to be scored by a version of the album that became Low – Nicolas Roeg rejected it and opted for a more traditional score from John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas. Bowie was coming off Station to Station and the Thin White Duke, a persona defined by snorting coke and saying fascist bullshit. The plot of The Man Who Fell To Earth is that of an alien who becomes addicted to fame, alcohol, and TV before being imprisoned by the government – there’s temptation to apply that template to Bowie’s own decline (not to mention Bowie’s own Ziggy Stardust, whose “Rock N’ Roll Suicide” culminates the most iconic and beloved of all Bowie’s albums) but there’s no reason to read Bowie’s dependency as managed by outsiders or brought upon by anyone but himself.

Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, Low, Heroes and Lodger.

Low reflects this fragmented place in life. The first half of the album, through “Always Crashing in the Same Car,” is a series of wonderful song fragments. They’re equal parts funk, blues, rock, maximalist decadence of layers upon layers and minimalist anti-pop with vocals that crash in with forty-five seconds remaining on the track (if at all.) For an act often defined by Bowie’s yelp and star persona, Low is a spotlight of Bowie the multi-instrumentalist, trading parts with longtime guitarist Carlos Alomar and session musician Ricky Gardiner. Without looking at liner notes, it’s easy to miss where Bowie fits into some of these tracks at all (sometimes, it’s mostly saxophone!) This album bops along through the transition of “Be My Wife” and “A New Career in a New Town,” slowing slightly and becoming more traditionally rock, “Be My Wife” a song that would have fit just as well on Diamond Dogs or Hunky Dory.

On the second side of the vinyl, Low shifts to “nighttime,” Bowie’s largest adventure into the Eno-esque ambient. It’s easy to imagine “Warszawa” or “Subterraneans” scoring The Man Who Fell To Earth – the jaunty funk of side one for the narcotic highs, the droning despair of “Art Decade” filling the scenes of isolation and dependency. This is, for me, where Bowie lays out the future that leads to The Next Day and Blackstar. He’s creating an eerier sense of drama than the pomp (fun) of “Five Years.” In confronting his own darkness, Bowie’s found something more honest, and it’s something harder to look at directly.

KEY TRACKS: “Sound and Vision,” “Warszawa”
CATALOG CHOICE: Heroes, Scary Monsters & Super Creeps
NEXT STOP: Who Is William Onyeabor, William Onyeabor
AFTER THAT: Surf’s Up, The Beach Boys

DIG ME OUT

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DIG ME OUT
Sleater-Kinney
1997

My first riot grrl song was Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl,” a song I totally rejected as a high school choir boy who did not get it. I came back around with the release of Gone Home, a for-its-time narratively ambitious queer adventure game that heavily used Bratmobile’s “Cool Schmool.” I started reading feminist literature and came around on Kathleen Hanna. I added a few singles to my playlists. This is a self-flattering version of this story. A couple years later, Sleater-Kinney reunited and released No Cities To Love to near-universal acclaim. St. Vincent said the reunion album was her favorite Sleater-Kinney album yet, signaling the beginning of the end of the band as it had existed for twenty years.

1997’s Dig Me Out was the first album after drummer Janet Weiss replaced Lora MacFarlane. According to Corin Tucker, “Musically, she’s completed our band. She’s become the bottom end and the solidness that we’ve really wanted for our songwriting.” Listening to their prior album, Call the Doctor, you can hear the difference – MacFarlane is a much more straightforward 90s rock drummer, with Weiss invoking borrowed fills from 60s girl groups and the British rockers who covered their hits. There’s a sense listening through Dig Me Out that every song is equal part fill and main beat – her style gives a texture that fills each song, already short, with novel grooves.

From left to right: Carrie Brownstein, Janet Weiss, Corin Tucker

That same approach to providing new stimulus grew in the songwriting by Tucker and Carrie Brownstein, too. Corin and Carrie’s vocal harmonies and guitar lines weave in and out constantly throughout the album. While you’d never confuse Corin’s powerful, intense vibrato for Carrie’s clean, more traditionally punk vocal, songs like “Words and Guitar” and “Heart Factory” trade lead and counterpoint often enough that (similar to some great Beatles songs) you can’t easily assign “this is a Corin song, this is a Carrie song.” The intense distortion on the guitars, set in alternative tunings, and Corin’s vocal power help mask some of the more delicate pop origins of some of their techniques.

The Beatles comparisons don’t stop with the harmonies. “One More Hour” tells the story of Carrie and Corin’s breakup, a gay Rumours descendant people don’t talk about enough. Coming up together as young twenty-somethings, Sleater-Kinney burned hot for a little over a decade before Carrie and Corin hung up the band to heal emotionally and spend time on other projects. Carrie had launched Portlandia by the time No Cities to Love came out. Writing The Center Won’t Hold, Carrie and Corin informed Janet that she was no longer an equal creative member of the band. While she’s been nothing but polite in public, she told them to fuck off. Their new music sounds like music by forty somethings – the tempo is slower, the riffs are synthier, there are ballads. They’re too old to write greatest-of-all-time songs about getting head. Corin’s a mom now, so “Little Babies” got taken off the setlist.

I’ve seen Sleater-Kinney twice in concert, both times since Weiss departed. For whatever reason, their new drummer, Angie Boylan, has never quite ascended to full membership in Sleater-Kinney. Sleater-Kinney is the first band I feel like I’ve gotten into right as they got too old to be the band in people’s brains. The first of those shows was rejected by the largely geriatric season ticket holders at the Ryman in Nashville – Carrie invited everyone to the front of the auditorium because it got lonely up there. But they seem to have found their new audience now, their show at The Sylvee a riot of people just as into the music from The Center Won’t Hold and Little Rope as they were “Dig Me Out” and “One More Hour.” I’ll probably keep seeing Sleater-Kinney until they’re too old to keep touring. I love this band a lot. 

KEY TRACKS: “Dig Me Out,” “One More Hour,” “Words and Guitar”
CATALOG CHOICE: The Hot Rock, No Cities to Love
NEXT STOP: Germfree Adolescence, X-Ray Spex
AFTER THAT: Rat Saw God, Wednesday