Tag Archives: birthday

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE

Posted in Film by

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE
Dir. Wong Kar Wai
2000

It is a restless moment. 
She has kept her head lowered… to give him a chance to come closer. 
But he could not, for lack of courage. 
She turns and walks away.

Mise-en-scene is the human weapon in film. The term translates roughly to “what is put in the scene,” and it is meant as the ineffable summary of the image. It belongs only to those unique combinations of director, cinematographer, and production designer who can create an uncanny and unforgettable moment on screen. Many great moments of mise-en-scene are defined by literary context – the image summarizes a pivotal moment in plot, character development, or unpacking of metaphor. Images like the Binary Sunset in the original Star Wars, or Cameron staring at Seurat in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, can create this intense feeling where the character’s psychology cannot be expressed more effectively through words. Others are defined by displaying the unusual, the elemental, as Kubrick, Trumbull and Unsworth took us Beyond the Infinite or Lynch and Deming and the team at BUF took us to the birth of JUDY and BOB in Twin Peaks: The Return.

Tokyo Story, as described below.

It takes a different kind of mastery to make the mundane the center of an overpowering moment of mise-en-scene. In Yasujiro Ozu’s masterpiece Tokyo Story, there is a cut from a conversation between Chishu Ryu and Hisao Toake where they decide to go visit another old friend for drinks – the scene cuts to a hanging lantern sign which reads “Sake.” The first time I saw this cut, I burst into tears. The sign is framed center, as are most images in Ozu’s films with legendary cinematographer Yuharu Atsuta, and immense on screen, framed beautifully by the roof of a building on the other side of the street and the other signage for the bar and neighboring businesses. It’s not just the image itself, taken out of context (like I’ve done here, just so people know what I’m referencing) but the build of one hour of images framed with similar intelligence that made my heart explode.

While all the other Wong Kar Wai films I’ve seen are beautifully shot and impossibly well-paced, none have the power In the Mood for Love has to create undeniable mundane images. The film is a sensual feast of antiromance, of not arriving at the pivotal moment, of prolonged longing and years of yearning. These images are deeply lived in by Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, giving all-time great performances as people desperately trying to decide whether or not to give in to desire. There are small etiquettes that feel less like historical put-ons and more like smart observations of how these characters behave. The way the two actors control their posture, their leaning into one another and apart, their gaze and their expressions – I’d be hard pressed to say that better acting exists.

For those who haven’t and may not see it, In the Mood for Love tells the story of two neighbors whose spouses enter an affair shortly after their move-in dates. The cheating spouses’ faces are never seen – we’re left with seeing Leung and Cheung as they try not to consummate their own love. Each cut back to stairwell into the noodle shop where they start encountering one another is a cut to the heart. The scenes of the two of them standing in an alley smoking while waiting for torrential downpour to cease are excruciating. Cigarette smoke has never looked better than in this film, its slow-motion arcs ascending into shapes that seem impossible.

Chow Mo-Wan leans in slightly – Su Li-zhen looks away.

Moments of beauty are anchored by the cinematography of longtime Wong collaborator Christopher Doyle, who granted Wong’s previous films a kinetic, experimental free-form (very 90s) and longtime Hou Hsiao-Hsien collaborator Mark Lee Ping-bing (Flowers of Shanghai, Millennium Mambo, The Assassin,) who gives this film his signature stillness and grace. They are soundtracked by the reused titular theme of the 90s film Yumeji, now almost certainly better known as the theme used in In the Mood for Love. These elements combine into an intoxicating aesthetic experience, one that despite its melancholy I never wanted to end. When the film does finally reach its conclusion, it is a wrenching goodbye.

Of all the films I’ve chosen to write about this month, In the Mood for Love is the most acclaimed. In the 2022 Sight & Sound polls for the greatest films of all time, it placed 5th with critics and 9th with directors (tying with Bergman’s Persona and Kiarostami’s Close-Up.) I exited my screening this past September, having not seen the film in a decade, accepting that I’d now adopted In the Mood for Love. My relationship with this film is still young. I won’t let it go another decade before rewatching again.

He remembers those vanished years.
As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch.
And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.

MACK THE KNIFE – ELLA IN BERLIN

Posted in Music by

MACK THE KNIFE: ELLA IN BERLIN
Ella Fitzgerald
1960

I was not aware this album had a reputation when I snagged it out of the discount bin at Strictly Discs – I liked the idea of having some Ella on vinyl and it was cheap. I knew “Mack the Knife,” “Summertime,” “Too Darn Hot,” “How High The Moon.” I still have the $7.99 sticker on my record sleeve. I’d really only listened to the Cole Porter and George Gershwin songbook albums, and while I thought Ella was an undeniable singer, I can’t pretend I really knew her well.

The first side of this album fit into my prior understanding of Ella. It’s largely midtempo, with “The Lady is a Tramp” kicking into higher gear in the second half. There’s some humor, especially on “Lorelei” and “The Lady is a Tramp,” songs that get to show her bright, fun side. The ballad “The Man I Love” is gorgeous, plaintive, intense. “Summertime” is a song she’s always owned, but here she’s able to give it a more playful heat than her classic recording with Louis Armstrong, the full string and brass section giving it a little too much ornamentation. Her Berlin rendition is more seductive, deeper until it’s higher, and the Paul Smith Quartet is light on their feet in adding improvised little flourishes rather than full breaks.

It’s side two that set my brain on fire, though. From the very beginning of “Too Darn Hot,” games with the audience start happening. She’s playing with the tempo and tone to have the kind of fun she’d never be allowed in the studio with a full orchestration. By the time she hits the first “Kinsey Report,” the band’s hot and they’re not interested in buttoning up again, hitting the interludes between songs with games that make her laugh. She starts growling, moaning, joking. They deliver the last song Ella knows on the set, “Lorelei,” with a relatively straight face, but it’s still hotter than the first side.

This album is most recognized for the next recording, the titular “Mack the Knife.” Ella opens the song by admitting she’s never sung it before and doesn’t really know the words. She changes the first line and never gets perfectly back on track. You can hear her laugh on “Sunday morning.” But then you hit “Oh, what’s the next chorus?” and she doesn’t ever even try to come back. It’s delightful to hear her simultaneously not know the song, make up something that fits the meter, and make it sound absolutely gorgeous. She jokes, “Oh, and now Ella! And her fella! We’re making a wreck! What a wreck! Of Mack the Knife!” before hitting an unbelievable scat sequence. She’s turned the song into a cat toy, batting it around and always keeping the joke on the ridiculousness of knowing the music this damn well and not having the words.

But, honestly, that doesn’t hold a candle to what she does next to “How High The Moon.” She actually jokes that the words may be wrong, but she gets through all of them before the band kicks into hyperdrive. I’d never heard scatting like she does on “How High The Moon.” The band follows her into entirely different songs (“Tisket-A-Tasket,” “Heat Wave,” , including the part where she effectively just starts buzzing. I didn’t know at the time that this was just what her version of “How High The Moon” had sounded like for a decade, had been recorded that way before, down to “the words may be wrong” – I’m as goggle-eyed as the audience even now. I’m not going to pretend that I’m an expert on scat or jazz more broadly – what I know is I heard this and I felt it was the most perfect recording of music I’ve heard then or since. Music is where you find it, and, for me, the iconic Ella live album will always be the one I happened to pluck from the discount bin.

KEY TRACKS: “Summertime,” “Too Darn Hot,” “Mack the Knife,” “How High The Moon”
CATALOG CHOICE: Ella Fitzgerald Live at Mr. Kelly’s, Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook
NEXT STOP: ‘Nuff Said!, Nina Simone
AFTER THAT: Odetta Sings Dylan

SIGNALIS

Posted in Games by

SIGNALIS
Rose-engine Games
2021
All Platforms

In Signalis, you play as Elster, a Replika android searching for her Gestalt coworker Ariane to fulfill a promise made during their working relationship. Elster arrives at a largely derelict mining facility on the planet Rotfront, where she quickly discovers that a horrific illness is corrupting and consuming the surviving Replika workers. Intermittent visions of half-remembered horrors haunt the Replika whose consciousness remains – however, Elster remains stalwart, sworn to her purpose.

These themes play out with a presentation that evokes Neon Genesis Evangelion, Shaft’s anime adaptation of Monogatari, Yoko Taro’s NieR, John Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy (and a little bit of The Fog, too), and Silent Hill. There are occasionally pulsing mounds of flesh. Real world art such as Arnold Bocklin’s Isle of the Dead, or literature like Robert William Chambers’ The King in Yellow and H.P. Lovecraft’s The Festival, is thoughtfully inserted into surrealistic montage. There’s a brief high school AU where one character tries to go to the library with their friend.

And yet the dominant influence on this game is pretty undeniable – this is, at its heart, a classic Resident Evil game, with tank controls swapped for pretty strong third person avatar play. The combat, puzzles, and exploration in this game are simply top notch. The puzzles never become too obscure to solve but require a little clever lateral thinking. There’s always the tension of wanting one more inventory slot as you realize you need to carry Owl and Hummingbird keys AND some health toward an objective. The guns get just the right amount of ammo to cycle through them as you play, and your weaker guns never “stop doing enough damage,” making it exciting to plan your loadout as you head into unknown territory. I found it hugely fun throughout, a great modernization of a classic genre, which I honestly had not expected from a horror game with this quality of art and narrative.

Elster looks on at a comatose commander.

What elevates Signalis, though, is the discovery of its plot, its horrors, its unspoken sadness. To borrow a comparison made in the pretty excellent piece by Elijah Gonzales in Paste, “I can’t help but compare it against something like the influential psychological horror film Jacob’s Ladder, which is excellent until its dunderheaded final minute provides an overly straightforward answer that undermines the complicated web of ideas that came before. By contrast, Signalis manages the difficult task of using multiple conclusions to amplify its main ideas while leaving ample room for interpretation, its unanswered questions and evocative answers buzzing in my mind long after the credits rolled.”

Because I like some game critics who love horror games, I end up seeing a lot of horror game Let’s Plays. It’s a genre that occasionally seems stale and like everything has been done. Signalis points toward a way forward into the new. This is a very considerate game that pokes at systemic cruelty, personal joy, and how terror can distort our vision of reality. Using cinematic techniques and misdirection, Signalis is capable of making the player second-guess what they’re seeing, and not in the silly Eternal Darkness “memory card corrupted” way. What elevates Signalis is the respect with which it treats its audience and the intelligence of its narrative. 

ANTI

Posted in Music by

ANTI
Rihanna
2016

2016 is both the year the Rihanna superculture goes supernova and the last time she released new music. Riding the success of a cancelled 2015 album and Anti, Rihanna appears on Drake’s Views, Kanye’s The Life of Pablo, Future’s Hndrxx, Kendrick’s DAMN, and launches the Fenty Beauty company – that last one marks her transition from musician into billionaire (derogatory.)  She’s released three total songs since the official launch in 2018, two of them for the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever soundtrack and performed the Super Bowl Halftime Show and at the Oscars. That’s the only music she’s performed in that time – no surprise appearances, no concerts, no festivals.

I note all this because the supposed conceit behind Anti was to release an album she could perform as she aged out of her 20s. She looked back at songs from the start of her career as America’s Aphrodite and felt they had been burned out, that she wanted songs that would be “timeless,” an idea she modeled after “FourFiveSeconds” with Paul McCartney. That self-awareness and intention indicate an artist working to manage her own career, taking creative control, refusing to just go through the motions. I think in touring Anti, it’s possible she found that it wasn’t the form of the music itself that burned her out.

There are genres Rihanna’s never attempted before or since on Anti. Most of the album still reflects her current general sound, shaped by PartyNextDoor, Kanye collaborators Jeff Bhasker and James Fauntleroy, and trap producers like Hit-Boi, Boy-1da, and Mustard. But there’s also the Tame Impala cover of “Same Ol’ Mistakes,” the doo-wop love song “Love On The Brain,” the sliding dub of “Consideration.” While there is a clear decision to get off autopilot, this album does sound like “Bitch Better Have My Money” and “American Oxygen,” the singles from the first version of her eighth album.

Rihanna at the 2016 VMAs, winning the Video Vanguard award.

Some of these experiments work better than others. The ballad “Never Ending” gives her acoustic backing and positions her as a more mid-00s singer-songwriter, a song that uses strong harmonies to place her voice in a unique setting. It’s a more natural use of her voice than “Love On The Brain,” which sounds better in isolation than any placement next to proper doo-wop. But it’s also a bit of a facade – while Rihanna is credited as a writer on every song except “Same Ol’ Mistakes,” once you see the credits, you recognize “Never Ending” as a Dido song adjusted for Rihanna’s voice. It’s still lovely, and it’s a thoughtful way she could take a post-pop career.

This album wouldn’t be here without the Rihanna fastball pop, though. The first eight tracks (and bonus track “Sex With Me”) are as great as anything she’s done. “Needed Me” takes a chopped up Mustard beat and trades in venomous relationship control. There’s a killer quality to a lot of Anti, an understanding that Rihanna can convincingly take the dominant role in every relationship she describes. It’s maybe never more fun than in “Desperado,” a song which wields a nasty bass line under what actually might be one of the more “meet me in the middle” heartbreak songs on the album. Even a mealy-mouthed Drake verse can’t spoil “Work,” the album’s massive single, where Rihanna lets the vocalization hit the album’s most playful.

It feels so funny to be writing this and separating the names Drake, Mustard, Kendrick, Kanye, and Rihanna without drawing a battle map. Mustard had spent four years going through a contentious divorce and producing a couple songs a year before producing “Not Like Us.” When Rihanna was still making music, these men were all on top of the world. They were collaborating, and their collaborators were all collaborating behind the scenes, too. I know there are a million reasons 2016 feels a world away, but remember when the corniest thing about Drake was his interactions with Rihanna and Nicki Minaj? When Kanye’s big controversy was the dumbass “Famous” video? Knowing what we know now, maybe Rihanna didn’t just get burned out by the music itself. 

KEY TRACKS: “Kiss It Better,” “Desperado,” “Needed Me,” “Sex With Me”
CATALOG CHOICE: Good Girl Gone Bad, “Rude Boy”
NEXT STOP: Ctrl, SZA
AFTER THAT: Take Me Apart, Kelela

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE

Posted in Film by

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE
Dir. Jim Jarmusch
2013

Core dividing lines on the reception of Only Lovers Left Alive come down to one question – are the immortal vampire artists Adam and Eve, portrayed as burned out gen-X rock idols by Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton, the coolest icons of hipster culture ever or semi-pretentious dorks? Division on that answer sets up so much of where a viewer’s sympathies lie, whether or not you think their lives are suffocatingly tedious or eternally romantic. I was originally set up by film critics to believe they were meant to be as cool as Jim Jarmusch himself, and in watching I realized too many of the film critics I read spent most of their free time reading Wikipedia pages about the Christopher Marlowe/William Shakespeare conspiracy and Rolling Stone magazine. To be clear, I actually think the film works either way – it’s just that it creates a huge split on how you choose to read the central characters.

According to Adam, the world is dying. The “zombies” (read: us) are polluting our spaces and our bodies, fighting over oil when we should be fighting over water, desecrating our architecture and dishonoring our scientists. All the vampires are experiencing some of the negative outflow, here – human blood itself is more full of toxins (well, toxins to vampires) and a bad batch can spell the end for these immortals. He’s taken on the persona of a reclusive rock star who doesn’t want any of his music being published, a droning noise rock played by Jarmusch’s own band SQÜRL. If you see Adam as the arbiter of cool, this dismay is cosmic in scope, an indictment of humanity – we have a living god, and we have failed him. If you see him as a self-pitying dweeb, you hear him say “I don’t have heroes” and it’s easier to notice when Eve finds his wall of fame with photos of Buster Keaton, Jimi Hendrix, William S. Burroughs, RZA.

Adam, riffing on a level that is frickin sublime.

“I don’t have heroes.” Adam actually doesn’t have heroes. Heroes fight valiant adventures and die. He’s made art religion, and these are idols. The work got out there – they’re immortal. Gods. He knows as well as anyone that the world is still alive. And we see that reinvigoration happen late in the film when he sees a live performance and finds it admirable. Eve tells him about the singer and says, “She’s going to be very famous.” Adam says, “God, I hope not. She’s much too good for that.” Shut up, nerd!

But whether or not they’re performing some of the exhaustion, Adam and Eve live sad, tired lives. They’re married, and they love one another, but they also need years or more apart. They’ve built lives on different continents because they badly need their space. Adam is contemplating oblivion – Eve is a little more comfortable because of her friendship with Kit Marlowe (John Hurt, perfectly warm) but knows he’s starting to become less lucid. While they take joy in so many little things, so many familiarities, they despair in different resignations. Eve is certainly more upbeat, but Tilda plays her as a little too placid, a little too indifferent, and the moments of sincere disappointment bring out a volatility.

Eve, Adam, Ava, and Ian at the White Hills gig.

That sadness comes between so many little bouts of tastemaking, art celebration, and is surrounded by a very funny supporting cast. Anton Yelchin plays the sweet Renfield to Adam’s Dracula, a young rock fan named who seems to be a middleman for expensive goods. He’s deferential, naive, and overwhelmed to meet people he admires. Jeffrey Wright plays Adam’s supplier of “the good stuff,” and his big scene is so funny, played as a too-cool-for-school doctor and dealer. Wasikowska plays Eve’s sister Ava as a menacing socialite lush, and you immediately get why Adam is so loath to let her visit. The movie is funny, cute, and everyone is having a good time. It’s really only when Jozef van Wissem’s lute score takes focus that the tragedy will set back in.

Hipster cool is consistently identified as the core of Jim Jarmusch’s appeal beyond the independent cineaste landscape. He exports cool bands, cool actors, vibes, and haunted landscapes in urban settings. That Gen-X cool is also occasionally appropriative, performative, and insular. I think what makes Only Lovers Left Alive stand out among Jarmusch’s films is that it gives the audience space to both admire and laugh at the speed with which these hipster vampires can identify wood grain by its Latin name or cite the exact year of a release. That admiration and amusement doesn’t come at the expense of the film’s dramatic stakes, either, and it became a gateway to the slow cinema Jarmusch has often cited as an admiration.

HEARTHSTONE: HEROES OF WARCRAFT

Posted in Games by

Hearthstone: Heroes of WarCraft
Blizzard Entertainment
2014
PC, Mobile

Of all the games I’m writing about this month, Hearthstone is the one I’m most embarrassed to have given so much of my time and energy. A quick-play, simplified rerun of Magic: The Gathering, Hearthstone is ugly, unbalanced, and largely based on lore I don’t care about at all. I loved WarCraft III when it came out, but I never made the jump to World of WarCraft, so the vast majority of card references are totally lost on me here.

The basic premise is very familiar to Magic players. You and your opponent have 30 card custom built decks of creatures, spells, and weapons. Each turn, you get energy in the form of mana to play cards that can attack your opponent’s creatures or their life total directly. Every turn, you get more mana, so you slowly ramp up from early jabs into colossal game-defining uppercuts until you or your opponent is defeated. The game is in building your deck to be as consistent at winning as possible and defend itself from your opponents’ strategies.

The thing it took me so many years to stop admiring about Hearthstone is its dedication to using the tactility of a collectible card game, which I’ve loved since the Pokemon TCG I grew up playing and collecting, and combining that with its digital format to do things that were completely impossible (or, at least, immensely inconvenient) in a tabletop card game. One of the simplest, “Discover,” gives you an opportunity to add one of three randomly generated cards to your hand. In real life, this would require both players having a semi-unlimited number of every printed card to function – digitally, you can just give someone the opportunity to use this card they might not own for a single game.

like cmon man this is so garish garrosh

There are mechanics that reward having only odd or even cost cards in your deck, mechanics that shuffle five random super-rare cards into your deck, mechanics that require players to only have one of each selected card in your deck (rather than the typical max of two) to get access to a special effect. These mechanics could maybe be achieved by registering with a judge before a given game or by owning a massive library of cards to play with, but they’d be onerous to track at best.

Hearthstone is at its best when it takes advantage of its digital format. Its single player adventures take advantage of asynchronous gameplay to create memorable puzzle-card gameplay. But, over five or so years, the number of mechanics forced a power creep and level of investment that made the game completely inaccessible to newcomers. I think many of its best mechanics have been lifted into other digital card games like Slay the Spire, Inscryption, and Balatro. The game’s last gasp for me was its Battlegrounds mode, a direct riff on the DOTA AutoChess mod that never quite offered anything on top of that formula other than “more money.” I haven’t played in years, and probably never will again, but I’ll always appreciate the excitement Hearthstone showed toward combining tabletop and digital card games and pushing that genre into a new era.

THE END OF EVANGELION

Posted in Film by
Together or separate?

THE END OF EVANGELION
Dir. Hideaki Anno
1997

Neon Genesis Evangelion is a mecha anime about the end of the world. Teenagers face the horrors of the apocalypse, alien kaiju known as “Angels,” in their armored Evangelion suits, which are themselves more alien than machine and less alien than it seems at first. The adults in the room, an orgnaization named NERV, serve as their scientists, armorers, tacticians, therapists, parents, and jailers. The teenagers sometimes can put on a brave face, but their egos are being destroyed. Like teenagers in real life, a lot of their hyperfixations are on sexual desire, the difficulties of connecting with other people, and social performance. There’s a lot of lingering on teen sexuality in this show, including some leering at womens’ and girls’ bodies – for some people, this is a bridge too far, and the repulsion overwhelms whatever points the show is trying to make.

Evangelion’s fourth episode is titled (in English) “Hedgehog’s Dilemma.” This central idea, borrowed from Arthur Schopenhauer, is the central thesis of our primary POV character, Shinji Ikari. In essence, the dilemma draws a parallel between mankind and hedgehogs on a cold winter’s day. The hedgehogs wish to bundle for warmth to survive the harsh weather, but their quills causes pain – so it is with mankind and emotional intimacy. We want to be close, want to let our guard down, but rejection is too painful, and those who are too willing to accept that emotional intimacy will take on other peoples’ burdens. Shinji has elected to wall himself off from all emotional intimacy after the indifferent, abusive treatment of his father, Gendou – also the commander of NERV – and therefore constantly finds himself unable to seek comfort from loved ones despite taking on the immense psychological strain of piloting the EVA. This question of emotional intimacy defines Shinji’s arc throughout Neon Genesis Evangelion, and reflections of the Hedgehog’s Dilemma play out in the arcs of many of its characters.

Together or separate?

The End of Evangelion exists as a theatrical sequel/alternate ending to the 26 episode anime Neon Genesis Evangelion. The original show ran out of money and its director, Hideaki Anno, ran out of mental health to guide the production. The myth goes that to fulfill the episode order with what little budget they had left and a network pissed off about the content in episode 24, they trekked forward with storyboard caliber sketches and cels drawn weeks prior for other episodes to create a last-minute ending, with The End of Evangelion representing “the true ending.” This ascribes the incredibly dense script of the final two episodes of the anime, filled with intense psychological and metaphysical dialogue about the nature of trauma and the relationships of every character in the show, to a hasty rewrite. That understanding also tends to ignore how this side of the show had grown over the back half of the series, and also that similar dialogue reappears in The End of Evangelion.

It’s unclear whether The End of Evangelion is an alternative ending to the final episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion . Both endings feature the onset of the Human Instrumentality Project, a psychological melting pot that will return human consciousness to a single collective. In both endings, we see characters’ consciousnesses bleed into one another, sharing memories, being unable to hide away ugly thoughts, trying to win the final argument and reach consensus. One side argues Episode 25 and 26 depict in detail what’s happening internally, whereas End of Evangelion is more focused on the physical consequences of Human Instrumentality and the war to end all wars.

All these arguments about canonicity, about intent, get even more complicated when you factor in the Evangelion Rebuild project. Anno embarked on a remake of Neon Genesis Evangelion over the course of four films. But by the early scenes of the second film, Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance, it became clear that the story was changing. Characters were suddenly arriving with altered names – their personalities didn’t line up, and not in a simple rewrite way – it eventually became clear these were new characters in old roles. By the third film, the plots had completely diverged, and the fourth film offers a new ending. Many Evangelion fans dislike the rebuilds and write them off entirely. In a literal sense, the rebuilds are the “true” ending in the sense that they conclude Anno’s emotional arc over thirty years of stewarding this series – he recently gave a statement that more Evangelion may be coming with his blessing, but he won’t be steering the ship.

Together or separate?

In The End of Evangelion, whatever sympathy the show maintained for Shinji is dissolved. Shinji is putrid. Shinji is capricious. Shinji is motivated primarily by sex or hate. Shinji is emotionally catatonic because he was forced to kill the only person who’s shown him seemingly unconditional kindness since the show began – Shinji lashes out by objectifying every person in his life, sexually or as collateral damage. Because Shinji is the pilot of the EVA Unit 01, Shinji is given the keys to the Human Instrumentality Project. Will mankind maintain its borders? Or will it all come tumbling down?

Shinji fails to make a clear decision. We see the borders between people collapse in the musical “Komm, Susser Tod” sequence, a song that sounds like a Sgt. Pepper’s era Beatles track. The juxtaposition of gore, horror, and joyous sounding pop (with apocalyptic lyrics) – it’s the Feel Bad Movie of All Time. The End of Evangelion is full of great anime action, really strong character writing, and the show’s signature score by Shiro Sagisu (whose “Decisive Battle” is so good that he’s just kept using it in future works. But I’m fully willing to hear out any argument that The End of Evangelion is overrated within the broad Neon Genesis Evangelion project on the behalf of the powerful and sad “Komm, Susser Tod” climax.

While some anime fans criticize elements of Evangelion having been done before, in series like Yoshiyuki Tomino’s Mobile Suit Gundam and Space Runaway Ideon, the next sequence innovates in its combination of live action, insert documents, and animation. This sequence combines metacommentary about human existence by the show’s cast, footage of live-action cosplayers and fans attending the preview event for the film itself, and disturbing letters and drawings Anno received after the completion of the Neon Genesis Evangelion series – as it concludes, we see that Shinji has still not made up his mind. The limbo as he flip-flops between options becomes an unbelievable nightmare.

Together or separate?

REIGN IN BLOOD

Posted in Music by

REIGN IN BLOOD
Slayer
1986

Any amount of distraction or sonic interference is enough to frankly destroy Reign in Blood. Slayer’s breakthrough album does not function as background music. Rick Rubin’s mix works when you’re locked in, but any amount of distraction drowns out every 220 bpm riff with Lombardo’s blast beat drums and Araya’s shouted vocal. It becomes noise. All the texture will drop away. When I started relistening to write this, I thought, “Oh, this isn’t very good anymore.” Then I put the laptop away for a minute and could hear it again.

I don’t actually like Rubin’s mix, but I’ve lived my whole life in its aftermath. Reign in Blood is credited as being the crossover moment between thrash and death metal, signaling the point at which metalheads could retreat into a deeper subculture while Metallica gravitated away toward more melodic hard rock. I’m not a person who cares too much about subgenres, to be honest – I follow them only to the extent the artists themselves discuss them, and music is usually more interesting at the borders anyway. What I can recognize is that this album was still deeply influential on the death metal and screamo I could never get into in high school, where drums and vocals drowned out the melodic instruments.

Every time I return to the source and give it my full attention, I can understand why. In a decade where the average metal song was between five and ten minutes long, Slayer doubled the tempo and still put twice as many musical ideas into two and a half minutes. The drum part is so forward in the mix because it creates continuity between all the very dramatic changes in riff and melody. Stop paying attention and it creates the effect of a twenty six minute song – keep your eye on the ball and the nine tracks become twenty.

The fact that some members of Slayer and Rick Rubin have turned out to be reactionary chuds over the years is only surprising to those in denial. While reading “Angel of Death’s” lyrics and controversy section on Wikipedia should be enough to convince you that they’re earnest about just depicting an evil man and not endorsing Joseph Mengele, it’s also revealing that they don’t really have anything to say about him. Throughout the album and its (excellent) cover art, the satanic imagery, the descriptions of brutal ways to die, the absolutely braindead “Criminally Insane” lyrics – this is trolling, meant to create a cumulative effect. It’s theater, grand guignol building toward an epic finale.

Everything builds to that tenth song, “Raining Blood,” which overwhelms the rest of the album in terms of groove, brilliant riff songwriting, portentous storytelling. The opening rain effect and tom drum with the siren guitar – I mean, this is just the coolest shit in the world. The solos are the album’s most discordant and insane, and they fly over the album’s chunkiest straight-ahead speed. The two ways to listen to the album, for me, are in its entirety, front to back, or just to listen to that last song.

KEY TRACKS: “Piece by Piece,” “Jesus Saves,” “Criminally Insane” “Raining Blood”
NEXT STOP: Arise, Sepultura
AFTER THAT: Dead Rituals, Swamp Witch

OUTER WILDS

Posted in Games by

OUTER WILDS
Mobius Digital
2019
Xbox, Playstation, PC, Switch

Time loop games tend to operate in one of two models. There’s the time loop that serves as a justification for clockwork gameplay mechanisms, encouraging the player to master the sequence events and execute on the “perfect run.” In some cases, this functions about the same as a quick retry button, but the narrative justification allows for a little more exploration of alternate consequences. There’s also time loops that serve as branching path narratives – if you create one chance meeting on day one and pursue that story, what’s the butterfly effect to day three when everyone else is still on script?

Outer Wilds is not quite either, though there are certainly consequential events and precise timings rewarding attention to detail. You play as a space explorer who, on the day they’re to take their little ship into the solar system, gets locked into a time loop which ends each day with supernova and armageddon. You have 22 minutes to advance from your home of Timber Hearth into the alien landscapes and prehistoric ruins of planets settled by the ancient (?) Nomai civilization. Your primary goal is to investigate the mysteries of the supernova, the Nomai’s demise, and the current status of the other Hearthian explorers. The game tracks this in a convenient journal on your ship and pins questions to your idea map, but it never offers obvious waypoints or quest markers.

The time loop primarily controls the solar system’s simulation. Weather on the oceanic planet Giant’s Deep operates on a storm cycle you can learn and, eventually, use to explore the planet’s truth. A portion of the planet Brittle Hollow breaks off at the same time each cycle and falls into a black hole that has opened at its core – to see that part of the planet, you’ll either need to arrive quickly or figure out how to navigate to it within the black hole itself. The Interloper is an icy comet that travels on the same portion of its orbit with each time cycle – that orbit affects the temperature on the comet’s surface, altering the ice pattern and your ability to navigate the surface.

Floating through the canyons on the Hourglass Twins, a pair of connected mini-planetoids which trade a desert’s worth of sand over the time loop.

You, too, exist as a part of this physics simulation. Gravity varies wildly based on your location, and your fragile little body is easy to send into the abyss and back through the loop if you’re not careful. The spaceship controls a little like the classic arcade game Lunar Lander – your body inverts the standard video game jump so that hitting the button bends your knees and releasing causes you to jump however high your body goes based on the gravitational forces near you. Learning this mobility is, for a lot of players, the brick wall that prevents interest in seeing this mystery through to its conclusion. For me, it took some practice but in the end felt natural – I was able to pick up these controls again quickly upon playing the DLC expansion Echoes of the Eye, a new mystery that builds nicely into the game’s story.

And it is that story which I think makes the game so special. The time loop, physics simulation of the game is delightful, but it is the natural science and archaeology that are so rewarding. Ultimately, Outer Wilds is a story about the end of the world – some Nomai predicted an eventual demise, others built into eternal denial. The eventual answers to the mysteries of the Outer Wilds both confront the player with futility and peace. The game’s true ending, without delving into spoilers, is a celebration of life and its ending. It’s a moving, emotional sequence that both offers outrageous spectacle and aesthetic quiet.

Special notice must be given to the game’s fantastic soundtrack. Composed by Andrew Prahlow, the score is a combination of campfire acoustica and synth majesty. It combines the Hearthian’s forest fire architecture with the unknowable mystery out in the stars. The “Main Title” and “Travelers” are songs I listen to frequently. The synth line that begins to play near the end of a loop is catchy and unmistakable without being trite or dreadful. I hope to hear more scores from him someday soon.

ROOM25

Posted in Music by

ROOM25
Noname
2018

Fandom is hard in the online era, man. Noname is someone I so badly want to root for, who does so much cool shit, who also thinks J Cole is corny and who is vocal about injustice in America, whose raps are so funny and so thoughtful ninety percent of the time. Her Noname Book Club is a genuinely really cool project! That ten percent where she gives Jay Electronica a supremely antisemitic Black Isrealite verse on Sundial, though. Noname is a gaze into the mirror of being perpetually annoying online, and while I’m not sure I’d like her half as much if I didn’t follow her on Twitter before she deleted, I also know I wouldn’t sigh as hard at the fact that I love this album.

Room25 is the debut album, and it came from a place of transition into real adulthood. She’d moved from Chicago to L.A. – she’d started having sex – she needed to pay rent. That sense of obligation maybe helps birth its tossed-off introduction, a 1:35 song fragment that feels like it started halfway through. “Self” is maybe the best the album ever gets, though – the freeflow pleasure she has on “Mister money man, Mister every day he got me/Mister weather me down, Mister me love, Mister Miyagi,” is one of the greatest rap moments of the last decade. It has that same sticky teeth feeling of the best beats by The Neptunes, the best Big Willie Style hooks, the best playground songs.

But, then again, maybe the best moment is “Blaxploitation,” which combines jokes about bad feminism and exhaustion with trying to have good politics and darker outrage about the state of the world. In terms of the album’s mission statement, “Prayer Song” and “Montego Bae” are maybe the most representative combinations of sex and politics, some lines phenomenal (“If you wanna help me to put me inside the cuffs/Put the cigarette in my back/Keep the hospitals overrun-run-run-run, Chicken Little/How my city gonna run off shits and giggles?”) and others corny (“America the great, this grateful dead and life for me/Apple pie on Sunday morning, obesity and heart disease”.)

Not being able to put my finger down is kind of the appeal of Room25. At its best, it’s one of the absolute great rap albums of the 2010s and an all-time great rap debut. There’s nothing quite like it and I’m not sure you could regulate it on purpose. That 10%, though.

KEY TRACKS: “Self,” “Prayer Song,” “Montego Bae”
CATALOG CHOICE: Telefone, “Song 32,” “Song 33”
NEXT STOP: Everything’s Fine, Jean Grae and Quelle Chris
AFTER THAT: Ho, Why Is You Here?, Flo Milli