Give Thanks 2012

i remember when the storm hit and there were leaves everywhere and my friends were drinking tea in my apartment, imagining what was going on in manhattan.

1. It's different this week, yes? Didn't quite have the same equilibrium.

Yeah. I felt that. Maybe it's cos I don't know this tune as well.

It's hard. I mean, what do you do with that melody? But I love it.

2. He came up to me while i was smoking and literally just sat in my lap.

3. Adam! You're actually home!

Uh, yeah. I'm on hiatus from being dead. You should try it sometime, it's quite relaxing...

4. When I was 23 I was in New York City looking for my body.

5. -someone died. There are bars of light on the pavement beside Washington Square.

6. Mummy, what's philosophy?

7. I dreamed of music that was of the body/that neither commoditised soul nor technique/Lived its melodies as the unceasing dance of bodies/I dreamed of music that carved out of the rain a cave to sleep in and be warm.

8. I sank below the street, dripped onto a subway track and kept going. Soon, warm rock and then lava. Amid the strains of guitar music there was a cluster of souls.

A soul looks like a long, white string. Most people's souls dangle far beneath them into the mantle, where their concentric movements cause them to knot and tangle in the heat.

This causes problems.

9. Judith Butler thinks my penis is a fiction. I hope it's a good one.

10. Makeup is a prison for your face.

11. I am in love with the tubist in the NY philharmonic.

There was one time I was sitting second circle and my head was full of cotton and every breath I took was a mute contortion of my lungs into new shapes of pain and the sounds of people, their ticking and fidgeting and the noise their hair makes but FWOOOM some ritual FWOOM it was fall but we were longing for spring FWOOOOOOOM spinning and nose hurts from tears sprouting in the frost FWWWOOOOM freefall, the arc of birds, blood in the morning, when my body was with the air and free, free, free, free, free.

12. this is a good place we found. For you and me and kim and yuki and ricky and leo and all of our crazy friends and all of our crazy things.

13. you can look at the traffic forever. I never get bored.
Neither do I.

Russell:

Grace tells me you were probably not conscious. It seems a peripheral matter to me. Even inanimate objects collect the detritus of the human worlds in their orbit, and so you did, gelatinously being the locus of friendship and togetherness. So perhaps in one way to grieve would be illogical : in another way this transition would be incomplete without grief. Either way, I feel the need to mark that the seasons have changed, and acknowledge that things are irrevocably different, as it is with the passing of all things and all people who bear the burden of our loneliness.

For John Votta

I did not know this man. Therefore I feel qualified to eulogize. We are constituted he and I, from the cold air on particular autumn mornings. I saw him on the street corner; he would holler the time, and I would say nothing in reply, maybe a grunt of unassented thanks, but trustless. Perhaps he was an artifact of the village, the Village, where the knots of the square-block city congregated in parades of funny hats.

I am struggling. I knew not the man but the voice as passing strangeness on a certain autumn morning, which drove me to uncomfortable hand-rubbing in the toilet cubicles beside the park. He spoke to the alien worm in my stomach that burrows and calls weirdness from the sky. It says: those clouds are the billowy shapes of your fears, and these veins and scabs are the exhaustive circumscription of your little existence; and it calls back inarticulate through the groans of half-wakers.

As I enter the park, the man is behind me but I build him in my imagination. He walks down to the corner in the burgeoning daylight. Death and struggle collide in his head. Not struggle – the village struggle, always a matter of height, always the 'I Am' in the face of the tall heroic, the infantesque colic, bones broken and feet bound, endlessly walking/negotiating the intersections of height and queer subject formation in the sun-barred back streets. Every morning from the sticky unlatching of eyelids he rebuilds himself, an unsellable story of liver spots and shortness of breath.

Breath is unacknowledged father of performativity. Prior to gendered subject formation, lungs expand and respond to the edges of the air. Perhaps he practices. Non sequitur, the time (the time) and the momentless passing of cars, the imperative Hey, the imperative subject formation directed at one but addressing the other, in a bathroom crucible addressing the passing of the centuries: Hey. Watch the fuck out. Five minutes.

Five minutes snuck up on me with my coffee and leather shoes. I stood, became a walking subject, sloped the ninety-eight steps from bench to staircase, and whisked by the man who had by now addressed his interpellations to other sun-struck denizens of weirdspace. They do not recognize him. I do not recognize him except as an urge to pick at scabs, to bleed imperceptibly. Who the fuck knew?  

Delores

A candle and a table spoon
delores in the living room
she's forgetting all the fables soon

but look at what they bought her

She tried to go out for awhile
and show the morning fog a smile
but fathers never reconcile
the darkness of the daughter

she made a penny of her rage
and inky menses dot her page
but calligraphics never caged
the warning winds of slaughter

But pay a thought to those before us
who never saw what you, Delores
saw within the rib of horrors
Death: you never sought her.

Meriden

just a little thing i wrote sometime last year that i dug up recently and thought I'd share.

I

The suburbs of Meriden. I spent a few days there, looking among roaches and empty bottles, cruising the hilly housing district with Duba and Chris Ward and moustache Dan (who had had a facial hair crisis) and Mary Jane. The hanging hills of Meriden. This is not my world. I am a grandchild of immigrants. I am a native of south-east Asia, and the reticence of those people is in my blood. And these people with a tendency toward substances and rock and roll are as removed a people from me as anybody in the world. Alien habitats - rows of wood-walled houses and green lawn, the great expanse of ambition.

The hanging hills of Meriden. I spent two years serving in the Singaporean army, mostly against my will, hacking through jungles. I encompassed the unfamiliar, the wide streets and cold forests that were everything except my crowded high-rise country. I was compelled to leave by the sharp corners of the unfamiliar. So this is my world, and these are my people. The poetry of Dylan and Garcia, Hendrix, the itinerants of the evergreen nation.

We spent St. Patrick's day making music. We sang songs that we had written. We drank and played an Italian card game and passed out and threw up in the sink. I spent the night in someone else's bed. What are we looking for. Nobody is looking for anything. We will wake up in the morning and laugh at the excesses of the night and take the train back home to New York City, where we live beside a church and a bank. The eternal pilgrims, hawking their trade by lamplight and jesus by sunlight and cutting down trees.

There is a ringing in my soul. I am tongue-tied outside the world of my childhood, as if words sprouted from the stones of an old home and were ripped from my throat as I tore through the upper atmosphere, headed west. Frankfurt, JFK: The slow progression of the soul. The sprouting of the soul. I am also hesitant to be sentimental but something inside me calls out to the trees - I want, more than anything, to be at home, to breathe the air of home, to be held and to be whispered to that everything will be alright. Too much strangeness in this country, too much freedom.

To wake up and laugh the night off. That is my desire. The warm air of Singapore. The embrace of trees. The short, brightly-lit highways. The smell of hawker food. The great expanse of ambition. To wake up in America and scrape the paint off the walls with my eyes, looking for the spirit in the mortar. The smell of cigarettes. The frantic clutching for meaning. To wake up in Singapore. I am composed of the streets of my homeland.

Perhaps there is nothing here - all was left in England by the Puritans. I have only come, then, to look for something that is not something. I have perused bonfires and leafed through the arches of New York City in the night time. I am the son of Aristotle. Perhaps the sight of moonlight on a lake through clouds of smoke is only the reflection of an alien yearning. We took the train home, smiling to each other. The pilgrims came for the New World, but they soon discovered that no world is forever new unless you are forever lonely.

II

1. Nicholas : I don’t know what’s up with Adam. We gave him some of the sweet leaf and he’s been sitting in the car all this while just staring ahead at the back of Chris’s seat. I asked him if he was alright and he just nodded and continued staring. I think he’s just far too high, the poor bird, he never took a hit for twenty years while he was in South-East Asia.

We’ve been driving for about an hour now, working through the last of that quarter ounce we got from the Doctor. I hope Adam comes out of that stoner coma, he’s usually pretty fun, but he listens to some weird music.

2. Dan : I’m glad they let me drive. I hate sitting in the back. It’s nice to be doing things when you’re baked. Just gotta remember that left turn before Chris’s… Every time Adam says something I jump a little because I keep forgetting he’s there, except he seems to have a cold perpetually and he keeps sniffling. But he doesn’t say anything, I wonder what he’s thinking about. Maybe he’s just really high.
3. ‘Hey, Dan. Put on the, uh, put on some Wolfmother. No, the first album, before the line-up changed. Man, they rocked the shit out back then, I don’t think I like them as much now. Put on ‘Woman’. Remember when we covered that at the first session last year? We rocked that shit. Pity the singer’s such a cunt. I heard he took all the rights and fired his bandmates claiming that he wrote all the songs. Well, yeah, he wrote the words, but most of those songs is the rest of the band. It’s the fucking rock and roll. Hey, Adam, now that you’re playing bass we should try ‘Woman’ again. Do you like this song?’

4. ‘So what happened to the moustache?’

‘Oh, that thing I had in New York? Shaved it off, man. The girlfriend didn’t like it.’

‘Jesus. I barely recognized you.’

‘Which one is Andrew’s car?’

‘A blue Hyundai. That’s what he said.’

‘Blue Hyundai… he’ll be up in a few seconds.’

‘Is that him?’

‘No… wait, there he is. Roll down the window.’

‘ANDREW - Get in.’

5. Andrew : It is so crowded in here. I’m so confused right now. But everybody seems nice… yeah. Everybody seems alright. I didn’t think Adam would come all the way here from the city - he’s usually just alone. I thought he didn’t like us very much… but maybe they’re just all that way back in Singapore. He seems pretty good right now though. Hey, brother, been smokin’ some of that reefer, man? Yeah man, it’s pretty groovy. It’s REALLY groovy, in fact. Right on, brother. Peace. I should put on the Dead. I think he’d like that, maybe ‘I know you rider’. Jerry Garcia, man. Really really fucking groovy.
6. I know you, rider, gonna miss me when I’m gone. I know you, rider; gonna miss me when I’m gone. Gonna miss your baby, from rolling in your arms. Laid down last night, lord, I could not take my rest. Laid down last night, lord. I could not take my rest. My mind was wandering like the wild geese in the west.
   
   
   III

We were all pretty high, so the reporting of events may be a little compressed in time or a little confused. Nonetheless, I’m fairly certain that all of this actually happened. Eric called – he was in town. We drove for forty-five minutes to his house, another twenty to the dealer’s, who dropped us a few dimebags’ worth from his second-floor window. Then we were in a basement for some time.

Somebody said, ‘Hey, it’s pretty late – why don’t we go down to the lake? Is there a road there, Eric?’

Eric said ‘Yeah, there’s a road, it’s like five minutes away.’

Then we were on a dismantled bridge that spanned halfway across the lake, now more of a pier than anything. There was a huge backhoe abandoned amidst the broken concrete and mud; we clambered over the treads and stood on the cab, looking at the moonlight coming off the water. We were quiet for a few minutes. Somebody asked if anybody wanted the rest of the blunt. I think nobody said anything – we just kept looking. It was so still. There was a cold wind blowing. I hadn’t spoken much in the last three hours, anyway – there wasn’t much to say. I was so far away from anything I knew how to talk about. But this moonlight, this lake – yeah, I was pretty baked, but so what? It was nice. Not a lot of nice things happen these days.

The best games I've ever played

I suppose I could use an outlet for my Diablo 3 - induced nerdrage. Seriously, Blizzard, way to drop the ball. But to prove, perhaps to myself, that there is in fact an objective standard for fun or whatever it is gets people hard for video games, here are some of the ones I've enjoyed the most.

1. Portal
The perfect one. Not even Portal 2 could top its simple formula of mechanics that are fun and a plot that I'm capable of giving a shit about. It turns out that the combination of a serious, thoughtfully written script and a little bit of deadpan neurotic humour was enough to convince me that the developers had made an experience worth having.

2. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.
Oh, SMAC. not s'mac, the food chain that fetishizes mac and cheese, but the bastard cousin of the Civ series. It dropped between Civ II and III but I think tops all of them any time, because it has a plot. In a free form strategy game. That happens as you progress without ridiculous scripted events and cutscenes. I won't be the first to say it, but game design has taken several leaps backward since the 90s.

3. Halo
This one's all about presentation. The ringworld-esque story might have smelled a tad regurgitated, but Bungie scored a bona fide hit by making environments I wanted to explore, enemies I wanted to shoot at, vehicles I wanted to drive, and missions I wanted to finish. The driving mission at the end is one of the finest moments in video game history.

4. System Shock 2
I didn't finish it. I'm not sure I even got halfway but goddamn. this is the scariest game I have ever played, and back then they had no recourse to fancy shaders, moody lighting, or realistic blood. Even so I had nightmares for weeks about zombies that pop out of nowhere and apologize to you while caving your skull in and eating your guts. Holy fucking jesus.

5. Starcraft
I hate to cry foul at corporate profiteering like some insufferable hipster. Indie games, like indie music, have just about as high a nonsense quotient as 'mainstream' games do. But Blizzard's post-WoW offerings have smelled too much of money-grabbing and committee design, jumping like bitches in heat on the gaming flavour-of-the-month design buzzword.

Here are some choice quotes from the first Starcraft, that I might remember the good old days of video game dialogue.

'Awaken my child, and embrace the glory that is your birthright. Know that I am the Overmind; the eternal will of the Swarm, and that you have been created to serve me.'

'You speak of knowledge, Judicator? You speak of experience? I have journeyed through the darkness between the most distant stars. I have beheld the births of negative-suns and borne witness to the entropy of entire realities... Unto my experience, Aldaris, all that you've built here on Aiur is but a fleeting dream. A dream from which your precious Conclave shall awaken, finding themselves drowned in a greater nightmare.'

'Jimmy, drop the knight-in-shining-armor routine. It suits you sometimes. Just not ... not now. I don't need to be rescued. I know what I'm doing. The Protoss are coming to destroy the entire planet, not just the Zerg. I know that because ... well I just know it. I am a Ghost, remember?'

I liked that they wrote characters who were interesting even when they weren't deep (The Overmind), and likable when they were (Raynor and Kerrigan). I liked that the plot managed to involve me. I was outraged when Kerrigan betrayed Fenix.

And then Blizzard took a giant shit on Jim Raynor in SC2. I can't even describe what they did coherently. It does sound to a lay person like myself that their post-WoW windfall managed to destroy what made them great designers in the first place: solid mechanics and workmanlike story telling, with characters who were normal enough to be real.

6. Diablo 2

Yes, it goes deeper. On the other side of the Blizzard spectrum we have D2, which lacked the solid writing and affable characterisation of Starcraft (Stay awhile, and listen!), but won the fucking lottery as far as mechanics go. I have probably spent more time playing diablo 2 than I have any other single activity in the world. It's very simple. You get rewarded for killing things by becoming incrementally better at killing things.  You derive satisfaction from killing things in large numbers, and also from becoming better at killing things in large numbers. Sometimes they explode when you kill them. The item system was well-designed, the random loot gave me a good reason to keep playing, the uniques were well-designed and thematically interesting, the bosses were tough, the enemies were varied and cool to look at (I'm thinking of Oblivion Knights here. Great balls of elemental death). The skills system was rigorous enough to demand attention, but loose enough to allow all kinds of ridiculous builds. Part of the fun was designing a build which worked in its own awkward, teetering way and finishing the bloody game with it. I remember staggering into act 2 hell with a kicksin, wearing a 6 socketed phase blade and a tiamat's revenge, kicking one thing to death and then getting mauled by everything else on screen. It was frustrating, but it was also good times.

The plot, while unspectacular, served well enough to guide you along from quest to quest and stayed out of the way while you were committing genocide on the Fallen. If nothing else, it had a pleasing symmetry to it. First 2 acts - the lesser evils. 3, 4 and 5 - the Prime Evils, each with their own unique flavour of horrible. It was an efficiently designed story.

So believe me when I say I know quite a bit about what I'm talking about when I say that Blizzard really boffed it with D3. There's no reward to the endless grind that is central to Diablo because none of the items are interesting beyond 'main stat plus damage' which is the only viable item build in the game, because all of your abilities scale off weapon damage. I loved D2 because I could design a workable character around hilarious items like Tiamat's Revenge (the triple elemental damage shield with no block and not enough defence) or the good ol 6-shael phase blade of ridiculous attack speed. Every item drop would unlock new possibilities for character building. While the skill system in D3 pays lip service to diversity, its monolithic weapon damage mechanic makes the item system irrelevant. Also, being able to change my skills at any point gives me no satisfaction for leveling up or building a character. 




EDIT: Honorable mentions. Some of these are just as good as the ones above, but didn't seem as relevant in a discussion of what makes games good.


Half-Life 2
Halo 2
Baldur's Gate 2
Angband
Diablo
Star Wars : KotOR
LoL
Fallout 3
Warcraft 3
Pokemon Gold and Silver
Portal 2

the experience of nicotine withdrawal

listen up,

on the 3rd day the shaking starts and it goes away when you finally wheeze out, fifty years later.

and in between then and then,

who can say what happens? the great auroric transition from boy to corpse,

punctuated with

palpitations and long aching dreams of short cigarette breaks