Raccoon : Notes and Scavengings

characters: 2000-2010

2010-04-06T14:07:00.001-05:00

Here's a question I've been wanting to ask for a while: Who is your favorite fictional character-- from any form of media --whose first (or only) appearance was within the last ten years?

roadtrip music

2010-04-04T22:49:00.004-05:00

Have been spending time this week digging through my current iTunes library (~12,000 songs) looking for the tracks that sound the best when on the road. Have come up with an "On The Road" playlist of around 2,400 songs. Now I just need a six-day roadtrip to test it all out.

[Note: I don't actually prefer giant playlists like that; they're too unshapely. So the On The Road playlist will actually form the raw material from which iTunes will auto-generate a "Smart Road Playlist," which will be a more-manageable 25 songs in total. So it can really be tested out perfectly fine on a shorter roadtrip of about two hours.]

Anyone want to recommend a favorite album to listen to while driving?

inevitable news

2010-04-02T12:09:00.004-05:00

Whew, I've been busy lately, and I'm sorry to have been letting this blog languish. I've been really active elsewhere on the Internet (Facebook, etc) but I'd really hate to let this blog die forever. (I am going to need to figure something out in another few weeks, when Blogger ceases its support of FTP publishing...)

But anyway. The number one thing I've been blasting away on lately is the Inevitable project, which shouldn't come as a surprise, given that the only posts on this blog for both March and February are Inevitable-related.

The latest: I re-designed the look-and-feel of the in-game Catalog to make it easier for new players to find what they're looking for. Four complete pages (and a bunch of other junk) are available for free preview over at the Inevitable "leaks blog."

I also generated a promotional postcard (using these folks) and distributed tons of them at gamer Mecca PAX East. Whether this was a useful endeavor has yet to be determined, but if you want to see the front of the postcard, this link may work.

Next piece of merch-like stuff is stickers, I think.

The last piece of exciting news is that Jon Leistiko, Inevitable's co-designer, just got nominated for an Origins Award for Best New Card Game (for his earlier game, "The Isle of Dr. Necreaux"). So Inevitable is now officially a game "co-designed by Origin Award Nominee Jonathan Leistiko." Bonus!

call for funding

2010-03-06T14:22:00.001-06:00

i made this, part three: "inevitable"

2010-02-01T08:43:00.005-06:00

Inevitable is a board game, set in a slapstick dystopian future.

Inevitable is a work of commentary, satirizing the contemporary landscape of corporate and political power.

Inevitable is a device which uses what Matthew Kirschenbaum would call the "procedural granularity" of complex rule-systems to produce robust narrative experiences in a deep imaginary world.

"Inevitable is a game of layers within layers; the product of analysis, deconstruction, reconstruction, and meta-analysis. [It] overtly and covertly works to thwart you and subvert the board game experience overall." —Jonathan Leistiko, the game's co-designer.

So... what is Inevitable, really? It's something that I began designing a long time ago—the earliest sketches I own of Inevitable materials are from 1988. It's something I have continued to tinker with, on and off, throughout the years: it enjoyed heavy play and extended development with my college crew circa 1991-1993, and then went into a re-development process in 1999-2000, right after I finished up with graduate school. Now it's alive again, and slouching towards a commercial release. It has a dedicated website and you can follow it at Facebook.

Is it playable? It is playable! I just playtested it again this Sunday.

Is it perfect? No, it's not perfect. (These recent playtests have reminded me often of game designer Jesse Schell's "Rule of the Loop," in which he declares that "The more times you test and improve your design, the better your game will be.") But tinkering incrementally with a long-running piece of design feels strangely satisfying at this point in my life.

i made this, part two: a baby book

2010-01-28T19:24:00.005-06:00

Not long ago, I wrote the following on Facebook: "As someone who does not have children and who does not particularly like babies, one would not think I would be a good person to illustrate a baby book. And yet I think I did a surprisingly good job."

Yes, it was an improbable turn. But my collaborator Amy L. Clark had written a baby book, and needed some illustrations, and I've been trying to draw more, so... we came together on it.

She wrote passages like this: "Eventually, you became a child. Most people are so busy being children that they end up being young people for a long time. There are important things to do during a childhood, some fun, some scary, some mysterious, some which require practice, many of which make a bit of a mess. You _______ and once you ________."

and I accompanied her passages with illustrations like this:

See four other illustrations (and the accompanying text) here. Copies of this baby book are not presently for sale, but if that changes you'll of course hear about it.

i made this, part one: "know your polyhedra" six-button set

2010-01-23T13:27:00.006-06:00

OK, so this is the part where I start talking about things I've made, like I promised.

First up is my recently completed six-button set, "Know Your Polyhedra." Anyone who has done much in the way of tabletop gaming should instantly recognize the commonality between these six ~~dice~~ geometric solids:

They come in a nifty little packet with a hand-numbered inlay card:

Mostly I just wanted to show these off, but if you're enough of a math nerd or a gamer geek that these make you itch with desire, I'll shoot a set your way for $5.95—less than $1 per button! Just pop in on my humble Etsy storefront. The proceeds are going into the coffers of another gamer-related project that's in the pipe... but more on that later.

getting excited and making things

2010-01-20T18:28:00.002-06:00

Not long ago, I ordered myself one of these shirts:

(I bought it here, if you want one of your own.)

It's a worthy sentiment to keep in mind during the current crisis. For me, it's a way of trying to turn what feels like a depressing indicator of failure—unemployment—into a source of creative ferment. It's a daily practice, that transmutation: it requires work. Sometimes I can manage to stay excited for the entire day and other times I hit the doldrums. But things are getting made. And I'm ready to start talking about some of them. (Some are still secrets.) So over the next few days I'll use this blog as a showcase for some things I made. And I want to know: what are you making? Show me.

yesterday was that kind of day

2010-01-19T08:44:00.003-06:00

This charmed me. I'm not sure why, but it did.

the year in reading: 2009

2010-01-03T10:31:00.005-06:00

A new year means it's time, once again, to crunch the numbers on the reading log.

This year I only completed 23 books, which represents a shocking dip, about half my usual average (last year I read 51, and the year before that I read 58).

What's responsible for the dip? I think I can blame a couple of factors.

1. The New Yorker. I enjoyed a New Yorker subscription this year, and read nearly every issue from cover to cover, all the way down to the art listings and the reviews of restaurants that I don't ever intend to patronize. This ate up an enormous amount of reading time that might otherwise have gone to books.

2. Marvel Comics. I called last spring the "season of comics," but last fall is when I created a pull-file at a comic book store (Cambridge's fine Million Year Picnic) for the first time in my adult life. The amount of reading represented by a weekly handful of comics is small compared to a weekly New Yorker, but they did occupy a non-trivial segment of my reading time.

3. Dissatisfaction with contemporary literature or perhaps just a feeling of being out of touch. Ten years ago, I could have listed at least ten living fiction writers who were producing interesting, rewarding work. Today I could make a similar list, but it would contain almost the exact same ten writers. (Take off David Foster Wallace (RIP) and add Zadie Smith?) It's likely that sometime in the past decade a new class of world-class fiction writers has begun to emerge, but I'm a bit bewildered as to who, exactly, they might be, and I haven't read an exciting debut novel from anyone in a long time. (I'm all ears if anyone wants to shoot a suggestion my way.)

Trends and highlights: most of the eleven novels I read this year were science fiction novels. One could perhaps argue that this is indicative of some escapist impulse, although novels like Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Richard Morgan's Thirteen, Ian McDonald's River of Gods, and Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy deal with at least as many thorny contemporary questions as anything mainstream lit is producing. Max Brooks' World War Z, on the other hand, doesn't really deal with much in the way of contemporary issues, but is a shockingly detailed and well-realized feat of the imagination, and ended up surprising me by being one of my favorite books of the year.

I also read a lot of stuff dealing with games and game design, including Raph Koster's clever and accessible Theory of Fun. More interesting, however, was Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman's monumental Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, a near-comprehensive overview of what games are and how they work. Clocking in at close to 700 pages, this is a book I'd been dipping into since its publication in 2003, but this year was the year I decided to complete it. (A rather dense selection of my notes can be examined here.) This was easily the best book I read all year.

The following authors wrote books I read for the first time in 2009, and also wrote books that I read prior to 2009: Warren Ellis, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. LeGuin, and... that may be it.

10 albums from 2009

2010-01-03T10:18:00.000-06:00

10. Jason Crumer, Walk With Me
Restrained minimalist compositions which periodically descend into shredding noise. Read more | Listen: "Luscious Voluptuous Pregnant"

9. Fuck Buttons, Tarot Sport
I prefer the less polished raw energy of their 2008 debut, Street Horsssing, but this follow-up is still an undeniably fine selection of anthemic psychedelic stomp.

8. Mountains, Choral
This outfit, made up of former Apestaartje personnel, has released three fine albums of pastoral drone this decade. This newest one stayed in heavy rotation for me this year.

7. Sunn O))), Dimensions and Monoliths
The boundaries of the Sunn O))) project have grown broader with each release, absorbing more and more material like some kind of black metal Katamari. This album finds them experimenting with keening choirs ("Big Church") and transcendent horn playing ("Alice"). It's not always successful, but when it works it expands their scope breathtakingly.

6. The Antlers, Hospice
A staggering song cycle about death, loss, and grief. Best way to hear it is by yourself, in a slowly darkening room.

5. Freelance Whales, Weathervanes
This album filled the slot that was filled last year by Natalie Portman's Shaved Head's Glistening Pleasure, and in 2005 by Architecture In Helsinki's In Case We Die: indie-pop music, made by young people, charming, charismatic, polished, and addictively sweet. A slightly shameful pleasure, but also a true and abiding one.

4. Phoenix, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
This is the great indie-pop album of the year: upbeat, energetic, yet also somehow grandly sad. Read more | Listen: "Lisztomania"

3. Gregg Kowalsky, Tape Chants
The idea of creating music by playing recorded matter on 6-10 cassette tape players simultaneously may sound a bit like someone trying to update Philip Jeck's turntable installations and performances. But Kowalsky's project is really its own thing, with conceptual underpinnings that differ completely from Jeck's, and just one immersion into Kowalsky's invitingly smoggy low-fi drone makes it completely clear that this is a soundworld that must be appreciated on its own terms.

2. Dan Deacon, Bromst
The eleven pieces that compose Bromst mostly sound like the soundtrack an old-school videogame that you might have experienced in a dream: all velocity and candy color. But just when you're ready to dismiss them as whiz-kid geekery they open up into something lovely, possibly even holy. Listen: "Red F"

1. Jónsi and Alex, Riceboy Sleeps
Beautiful ambient tracks from this side-project of Sigur Ros vocalist Jón Birgisson. Each track arranges acoustic instruments, voices, crackle, loops and hum into a kind of billowing fog that permeates directly to my brain's pleasure pathways.

Happy New Year to all.

aught music: 2009: "drunk as fuck: by tittsworth

2009-12-26T10:18:00.000-06:00

Way back when the Aught Music blog was covering 2000, I wrote about the Queens of the Stone Age's track "Feel Good Hit of the Summer," noting that it describes "a lifestyle so hedonistic that it would kill the majority of its listeners very quickly were they to adopt it." I also wrote that the track "evokes a special type of vicarious pleasure in the listener's head," and that this process was "is one of the reasons popular music even exists in the first place." Hip-hop, of course, excels at the creation of very dense constellations of incantations and images that trigger the vicarious-pleasure parts of listener's brains: this, in fact, forms a key part of its appeal. A great example might be Tittsworth's "Drunk As Fuck," which celebrates just about every taboo one can think of: from the reeling intoxication identified in the track's title to, uh, genital torture. Anti-social? Sure. Take it seriously and it's actually disturbing. But take it as an opportunity to temporarily put on the costume of someone irresponsible and dangerous—to become "the king of all sleazy things" without any risk to one's self—and it yields a very concentrated form of ridiculous delight.

Listen: Tittsworth >> "Drunk As Fuck [Top Billin Remix]"

aught music: 2009: "lisztomania" by phoenix

2009-12-24T08:10:00.001-06:00

I spent a lot of time this year listening to this song and trying to make some sense out of its lyrics. The opening couplet reveals some sense of the futility of this task:

So sentimental

Not sentimental, no

If the underlying rhythm and melody weren't so joyous and energetic, one could mistake this tiny packet of self-canceling non-referentiality for a very compact Samuel Beckett play. The refrain doesn't exactly clarify matters:

Lisztomania

Think less but see it grow

Like a riot, like a riot, oh

Not easily offended

Not hard to let it go

From the mess [?] to the masses

Um, OK? There's at least a noun here, relatively close to the pronoun... so... is this a song about the composer? Or about this film? Or... is "Lisztomania" a stand-in for popular manias of all sorts? That helps the "riot" lines to make sense, and maybe the thing about the "masses," but it doesn't really help with the stuff about being not hard to offend, or reveal anything akin to a point of view�

And so it went. The opacity of the song (the entire album, actually) bugged me, and then all it once it didn't anymore. When I was able to accept the lyrical content as rather inspired word salad, it freed me up to enjoy the album's bittersweet, nostalgic elation, which is actually communicated to the listener with absolute clarity.

Listen: Phoenix >> "Lisztomania"

aught music: 2009: "luscious voluptuous pregnant" by jason crumer

2009-12-21T08:06:00.000-06:00

Jason Crumer's Walk With Me is my favorite noise album of the year: it's an almost perfect hybrid of scouring intensity and measured restraint. (The first five or so minutes of this track—an irregularly looping set of piano motifs—sounds like it could have been an early Terry Riley piece or something from an academic conservatory.) Fineness notwithstanding, it still feels wrong to publicly admire a track with a title like "Luscious Voluptuous Pregnant," sort of like discussing one's own fetish(es) in mixed company. But, uh, I actually think it's a great title—sexy in a sort of upside-down way—and a good sign that noise music (even measured, restrained noise music) hasn't lost its sense of the taboo.

Listen: Jason Crumer >> "Luscious Voluptuous Pregnant"

everybody is a moron

2009-12-09T08:45:00.001-06:00

aught music : 2008 : "the healer" by erykah badu

2009-12-08T07:35:00.001-06:00

I wasn't actually a huge fan of Erykah Badu's 2008 album New Amerykah—but this track, "The Healer," was, to my mind, the single most invigorating piece of music the year had to offer. Badu's decision to marry the concepts of healing and pop music isn't in and of itself very interesting: any number of lesser talents could take those two ideas and emerge with a garden-variety homily about the enduring power of music. The greatness of this track comes from Badu's decision to use this framework as a structure into which to jam all sorts of left-field weirdness, ending up with a salvo that's a deeply compelling mish-mash of metaphysics, resistance politics, science fiction, and what may or may not be pure nonsense:

"We ain't dead," said the children

Don't believe it

We just made ourselves invisible

Underwater stove top blue flame

Scientists

Come out with your scales up

The lyrical content is a great fit with Madlib's stoned-sounding production, last appreciated on this blog here.

Listen: Erykah Badu >> "The Healer"

aught music : 2008 : "red light' by rod modell

2009-12-05T07:33:00.000-06:00

If Jacaszek's "Lament," which I wrote about not long ago, is like what house music would sound like if it emerged from a Transylvanian castle, then Rod Modell's blurred, smeary track "red light" is what house music would sound like if someone were playing it to you in an attempt to bring you out of a very deep drug-induced coma.

Listen: Rod Modell >> "red light"

aught music : 2008 : "lament" by jacaszek

2009-11-30T07:30:00.000-06:00

Treny, the 2008 album by Jacaszek, can perhaps best be described by saying that it's what house music would sound like if house music emerged from a pre-industrial Eastern European castle instead of from the dance floors of post-industrial Detroit. (Or you can say it's like that band Enigma, only good.) Gloomy, crepuscular, capital-R Romantic, and pretentious: this is the kind of music that puts me in touch with my sexiest inner Goth. Envision blood and candlelight.

Listen: Jacaszek >> "Lament"

aught music: 2008: "bedroom costume" by natalie portman's shaved head

2009-11-29T12:02:00.001-06:00

For as much as pop music ostensibly concerns itself with physicality and sexuality, it's surprisingly rare to find songs that really evoke the particulars of erotic exchange with any degree of specificity. So when I find one, I end up appreciating it with special zeal. Remember 2001, when I posted "Love With The Three of Us," to my knowledge the world's only great song about menage-a-trois? Anyway, now we're in 2008, and here's "Bedroom Costume," which is likely the world's only great song about the mutually beneficial relationship between a voyeur and an exhibitionist. Note especially the moment when the exhibitionist finally delivers her version of events, around 1:30—it's a moment that's equal parts heartbreaking sweetness and unbearable erotic ferment.

Listen: Natalie Portman's Shaved Head >> "Bedroom Costume"

aught music: 2008: "time to pretend" by mgmt

2009-11-25T20:37:00.002-06:00

Let's make some music

Make some money

Find some models for wives

Earlier this fall, I sent the following to Twitter:

OK, it shouldn't surprise anyone that the song isn't really about marrying models--the title alone gives that away. But it should still be possible to write a song about pretending to be a huge success that would be a sort of free-wheeling celebration of lavish fantasy, and that isn't really what this song does either. In fact, on one level the song actually functions as a critique of the imagination, presenting it ultimately as a withdraw from the pleasures, sensations and interpersonal connections provided by existence:

I'll miss the playgrounds and the animals and digging up worms

I'll miss the comfort of my mother and the weight of the world

I'll miss my sister and my father, miss my dog and my home

I'll miss the boredom and the freedom and the time spent alone

And yet the song's crowning touch is its assertion that, even despite these many sacrifices, total withdraw into insular fantasy ultimately remains preferable to bearing the disappointments of reality:

Yeah its overwhelming

But what else can we do

Get jobs in offices

and wake up for the morning commute?

The song takes a familiar rock-star fantasy, and by looking at it from a slightly different angle, reveals the suicidal ideation at its heart. This is genius at its bleakest, a glossy, upbeat anthem that seems intended for blasting on infinite repeat as you prepare your overdose.

Listen: MGMT: "Time To Pretend"

aught music: 2007: "paper planes" by m.i.a.

2009-11-16T10:57:00.003-06:00

Back when the Aught Music blog was covering 2005, I wrote that M.I.A. might be the Artist of the Decade, in part because she was the living embodiment of a number of important trends that defined music in the Aughts more broadly. To see that logic continue to play out, one need merely examine the rise of "Paper Planes."

It was released on M.I.A.'s second album, Kala, in 2007, but wasn't the lead single. (That was the likably weird "Boyz.") This track lay dormant until used as the backing track for the Pineapple Express trailer in early 2008, whereupon it blew up in a big way, permeating the culture until even the people who are arguably the biggest musical superstars in the world had to pay tribute. It's easy to see why: the second "Paper Planes" starts playing (about a minute in) is the exact moment this trailer starts to become cool:

Once upon a time it may have been possible to keep your categories separate: movie trailers over here, viral YouTube clips over here, music videos over here, commercials over there. But the Pineapple Express trailer neatly collapses all of these categories: I'd say that it single-handedly sold more copies of "Paper Planes" than any commercial could have, except that it actually is a commercial, for both the movie and the song. Except that it isn't. Except that it is.

One might see this as dispiriting: straight-up evidence that capitalism continues to mutate and evolve, spawning ever more pervasive forms. (The fact that the explicit topic of "Paper Planes" is the circulation of capital can be read as a crowning irony.) Or one might see it as a symbol of the unpredictability and ultimate richness of cultural cross-transmission. Probably it's a little of both, but the fact that a simple dance track can invoke these kinds of questions pretty much exemplifies the enjoyment that I derived from M.I.A. this decade.

Listen: M.I.A., "Paper Planes"

aught music: 2007 : "sexfaldur" by amiina

2009-11-09T20:45:00.000-06:00

If M.I.A.'s Arular was the first album I ever bought on the strength of tracks downloaded from MP3 blogs, then Amiina's Kurr was the first album I ever bought on the strength of hearing tracks through a streaming music service, specifically Last.fm, one of those websites that builds up a profile of what you've listened to in the past and then puts algorithms to work all in the name of figuring out what else you might want to hear. You liked Band X? You might like Band Y. That sort of thing.

The fact that these services exist still strikes me as quite amazing. Some virtual bot somewhere is hard at work identifying patterns in some vast torrent of data, just waiting for me to query it as to what it thinks I'll like? Even if the outputted results were crap, this would still qualify as a sign that we're living in a piece of science fiction. The fact that the outputted results are good— that a band like Amiina was among the first results the service ever gave me —is even more stirring: it fills me not just with wonder but also hope. We're in the future, and it isn't totally broken!

Amiina is a group comprised of four women, best known for their occasional service as Sigur Ros' backing band. Their music has all the elements that I admire in Sigur Ros— mystery, grandeur, icy beauty —with very little of the (masculine?) showboating that I sometimes detect in Sigur Ros' work: consequently, they're pretty much a perfect band to serve my way.

There will be some people who lament a culture in which people get our music recommendations not from other people but from robots. That may, in fact, be why you're here, reading this. So this is me, a fellow human, telling you that I think you should buy this record.

Listen: Amiina >> "Sexfaldur"

aught music: 2007 : "superheroes" by the toxic avenger

2009-11-06T20:49:00.000-06:00

In the last years of the decade, I went back to listening to a lot of electronic dance music. Dormant since the late 1990s, this love was re-awakened by my discovery of terrific European techno acts like Daft Punk and Justice. Try as I might, I just can't resist this kind of music: my response to it, in fact, borders on the Pavlovian. Give me some fat synth lines and some dance-floor-destroying beats and my brain automatically responds by flooding my mesolimbic reward pathway with massive amounts of dopamine. Shameful, really.

Perhaps my reaction can be best illustrated with an audio-visual aid. Here's a video of myself dancing (in disguise no less!) to "Superheroes 2007," a track by The Toxic Avenger, an act who's less well-known than some of the other French techno practicioners, but every bit as fantastic. (Special thanks to K. for introducing me to him.)

(part of the Top Secret Dance Off)

I believe that my rubbery, blurry flailings say everything there is to say that's good about this music.

Listen: The Toxic Avenger >> "Superheroes 2007"

aught music: 2007 : "friday night at the drive-in bingo" by jens lekman

2009-11-04T20:50:00.001-06:00

Euro heart-throb Jens Lekman has an outsized personality, and that personality seems sometimes to be an equal mix of arrogance and self-deprecation. This is a combination that understandably makes him hard for some people to take, but to dismiss him too fast would be an error: he has unquestionable gifts as a song-writer, and his best tracks are characterized by sharp wit and a precision of observation which remains all too rare in the indie-pop scene. Night Falls Over Kortedala, the 2007 follow-up to his well-regarded 2005 album Oh You're So Silent, Jens, misses as often as it hits, but it ends on the great "Friday Night At The Drive-In Bingo," a track which trenchantly sketches the way urban hipster youngsters like himself think about small-town life. Lekman points out the way that he/we cheerfully fetishize half-imagined "quaint" qualities of "the country," while simultaneously imagining ways that we can transform it into something more hipster-friendly, a process that would annihilate whatever sense of difference drew us there in the first place. Clever, insightful, and spry: it's songs like this that draw me to Lekman and keep me coming back.

Listen: Jens Lekman >> "Friday Night At The Drive-In Bingo"

aught music: 2006: "once again" by girl talk

2009-10-19T20:52:00.000-05:00

I hesitate to say that 2006 was the year that mash-ups "grew up," because a youthful insouciance—even a brattiness—is really central to a good mash-up. It's not a form that can really be said to "mature." But 2006 was the year, it seems to me, that a few people began to realize that if they wanted to stand out they were going to need to do more than just line up a vocal track with a backing track that kinda fit with it in some kinda funny way. They were going to need to do much more. They were going to need to take it to a whole new level. Of the people who tried to complexify the form, the most impressive, for my money, was DJ Gregg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, whose average track combines not two but dozens of culture's most memorable hooks, utterances and incantations. I wouldn't ever have thought that I'd buy an entire album of mash-ups, but Gillis' Night Ripper (2006) provides a pleasure-yield so concentrated that it easily qualifies as one of my favorites of the decade.

—Jeremy Bushnell

Listen: Girl Talk >> "Once Again"