Dreaming of the Masters

The Music Desk is still trying to console itself over missing The Mattson 2 last night, but it may have indirectly been for the best.  Now, we'll always remember A Love Supreme played exactly like this, the master John Coltrane playing at the top of his form in his defining masterpiece, not someone else's reinterpretation of his masterpiece.

We brought our first copy of A Love Supreme in 1975 and 43 years later this still blows us away.

Pity Party at The Music Desk

Greetings from the Stoic Desk. We hope all is well with you, but pleasantries aside, our purpose here tonight is to report that the Music Desk has fallen into the deep end of a pool of self-pity.

The Music Desk hadn't been to a live-music show since they saw Animal Collective at Symphony Hall back on July 17, and were really looking forward to catching The Mattson 2 tonight at Aisle 5. One last show before the summer ends.

But as luck would have it, the Work Desk (also known as the Job Desk), had other plans, and kept them at work late today.  The Music Desk didn't get home until almost 8:00 p.m., thinking the doors at Aisle 5 had already opened at 7:00.  Worse, the M.D. was exhausted and still has one last day of intense deadline beating before they can relax over the three-day Labor Day weekend.  The M.D. is apparently paying the price now for the Work Desk (aka the Job Desk) being at the environmental conference down at Jekyll Island most of last week.  This week is apparently all about catching back up, teleconferences, meetings, power lunches, marketing, report deadlines, budget projections, etc., and every client wants their product, report, etc. before the holiday weekend arrives.

So, even after the Music Desk realized that the doors don't actually open at Aisle 5 until 8:30 and that they could still make the show if they left right then, they were too tired to go and too concerned about staying out late when they still have so much left to do tomorrow, and can't afford to be dragging butt all day because they were out at a show until midnight the night before.

Such is the self pity over at the Music Desk. Actually, we here at the Stoic Desk sincerely feel sorry for them, because we recognize that the only real reason they aren't going out tonight, checking out for themselves how the Mattson 2 perform A Love Supreme on electric guitar, is because of their own decisions.  They're the ones keeping themselves from going out, not the Work Desk (or Job Desk if you will).  In fact, if they really wanted to get back at the Work/Job Desk and get their revenge, they'd go to the show tonight, stay out as late as they possibly could, and then sit back humming A Love Supreme all the next morning while the other desk suffers and bumbles through the day.

But apparently that's not going to happen, as the Music Desk instead is choosing to feel sorry for themselves.  That's the bed they made, and they're all set to sleep in it.  C'est la vie. 

Meanwhile, Back In Fantasyland . . .

What with the Labor Day weekend coming down hard upon us, we've finished playing Dishonored 2 and have started on Dishonored: Death of the Outsider.

It took us 34 hours to play through 2, eight less than the original Dishonored (even though it felt longer).  One thing we've noticed is that we tend to rush through each chapter, especially once we get to about the half-way mark, but if we slow down a little, there's a lot of little things still left to be explored.  We tried to take it slow at the start of Death of the Outsider, but still managed to blaze through the opening chapter in a mere 5 hours.

The reason we sound like we're obsessed with time is that starting on July 28, our plan was to spend the rest of the year playing through the entire Dishonored trilogy.  When it quickly became evident that plan was unrealistic, we settled for making it last at least through the Labor Day weekend. As of right now, we're looking good on that revised schedule.

Alert readers may recall that back in July, we played through a little bit of Outsider while the other games were still downloading.  The preview didn't spoil anything for us, but boy howdy were we ever wrong about who some of the characters were, at least in relation to each other.  The woman above, a playable character in The Outsider, certainly wasn't who we thought she was throughout most of 2, and (minor spoiler ahead) was someone we had killed off (or thought we had killed off) in one of the DLCs for the original.  But, hey, her voice actor is Rosario Dawson so we're glad she's back, as well as the Michael Madsen character (who we're sure we've killed before).  Fantasy doesn't always have to make linear sense.

So that's what's going on here at the Game Desk.  The Sports Desk is pretty stoked about college football starting up this weekend, and the Music Desk is glad that we've finally got a good slate of shows coming up (see sidebar listing of  "Upcoming Shows").  The Politics Desk is trying not to get their hopes too high for the upcoming election, the Blue Wave, and President Pumpernickel's legal problems.  Meanwhile, the Zen Desk still hasn't spoken a word out loud in 17 years.

Finally, do you like our new look?


 

Infinite Jest V: The Helicopter Gunship

I'm sorry to report, but it's now time to post the fifth installation of the Infinite Jest series.  

Despite how random and arbitrary the previous Infinite Jest IV was, this successor, Infinite Jest V, is probably the most concise yet of the series.  As a reminder, Infinite Jest I was subtitled Romeo and had at least some theme to it, as did it's companion piece, Infinite Jest II, subtitled Juliet.  Infinite Jest III: Loneliness was a meditation on alienation, existentialism and, yes, loneliness, while Infinite Jest IV was so goofy and silly and completely random that it didn't even have a subtitle.

So, trying to get back on track again, here's Infinite Jest V, subtitled The Helicopter Gunship.  You'll understand why it's titled that almost immediately.  Hope you like it.   

Once again, I don't hold the copyrights to any of this material (please don't sue me) and don't represent that I have any of the copyrights (please don't sue me).  I make no profit off these videos, either directly or indirectly, and merely create and post them for my own and hopefully your amusement.  It's all just for fun.  Please don't sue me.

Tragically, there was another mass shooting/mass killing yesterday, this time in Jacksonville, Florida. Two killed, eleven wounded.  The perpetrator, a white male, killed himself at the scene.

White males are shooting up schools, churches, movie theaters, army bases, shopping malls, country music festivals, office parties - anywhere, it seems, that people get together in large groups. People are dying and the judicial system is backlogged with cases of white male lawlessness.  What the hell is going on with white males?

You know who's not shooting up places where people get together in large groups?  Black women, that's who!  I haven't heard of one single mass shooting that was perpetrated by a woman of color.

Therefore, I, Shokai, am calling for a complete ban on all white males from entering this country until we can figure out what the hell is going on.

Meanwhile, we should put women of color in charge of things for a change and see if the situation doesn't cool off a little.  That's part of the reason that I, Shokai, will vote for Stacy Abrams, a black woman, for the next governor of Georgia.  If I see any other women of color on the ballot, I'll be voting for their black asses, too.

I recognize the fact that I myself am a white male.  Thus said, my first word of advice is to watch out for me, you may want to cross the street or duck and cover if you see me walking your way  Second of all, there's no irony in my call for a ban on white males from entering the country - if we caucasians males want to be considered a part of the community, we have to start policing ourselves and our own community first.  After all, it's our responsibility . . .    

See how ridiculous all that sounds?  Except the part about voting for Stacy Abrams, wno unironically should be the next governor of Georgia.  But that's exactly the type of language being employed on the far right for immigrants of color, for Muslim immigrants, for anyone who's not - wait for it - a white male.  

I've got an idea - let's stop finding groups of people to scapegoat and instead roll up our sleeves and start solving some of our real problems, including passing sensible gun-control measures and dealing with economic inequality, opioid addiction, and systemic racism.  Just as a change of pace.  Just to see if something else might work for once.  

Before we say anything else, let's exercise some humility and recognize the humanity here:  Rest In Peace, John McCain.  You were a true war hero and an outstanding American politician.  Our deepest sympathies go out to your family, friends, and colleagues.

Not that it's all about me or even the slightest bit about me, but John McCain exemplifies as well as anyone else the evolution of my political views.  After eight years of Clinton, who I personally detested even though I had no particular quarrel with his politics, I supported McCain's run for President.  I self-identified at the time as a "Republican," even though my actual Republican friends were deeply suspicious of my subscription to The New York Times, my lack of hostility toward gays and immigrants, and my acceptance of the science of climate change.  I was probably a RINO in their opinion, but I still voted for John McCain in the Georgia primary, and was disappointed when George Bush eventually got the nomination (even though I went on to vote for Bush over Al Gore in the general election).

But after eight years of Bush and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, my politics turned.  Since I already had one foot in the social liberal circle, it wasn't hard for me to vote against Bush in 2004 and eventually embrace full-scale progressivism.  

By 2008, when John McCain ran for President again, this time against Barack Obama, I was a full-throttle Democrat and thought McCain was the absolute worst.  I despised him and everything about him, everything he said (although I did admire that one time when he stopped a woman's rant at a campaign rally and said that no, Obama was not a muslim).  He may have still been an honorable man in my view, but I thought he had sold his soul to the party, particularly in his pick for a vice-presidential running mate.  A mere eight years after I voted for him in the primary, I came to think he was the worst thing that could possibly happen to America.  

I wondered att h time if after eight years of Obama, the contrarian in me would drift back to the right and I'd become a Republican (or RINO) again, but that did not happen.  

But after not even two full years of our current "President" - I despise even saying his name, and don't recognize the legitimacy of his election to office (he lost the popular vote and only won the electoral vote by committing felonies with the aid of Russian and other foreign powers) - I look back at John McCain with a fond nostalgia. Sure, I may have disagreed with him, but I never thought he was bat-shit crazy (that would have described his running mate but not him).  During the Obama era,  he came to represent the best of informed, non-partisan thinking (on a couple of occasions, his vote alone saved Obamacare) and showed why the country needs a two-party system to arrive at the best ideas and solutions for our many problems. I might not have agreed with him on everything or even most things, but I never doubted his patriotism or that he was advocating what he truly believed was the best for his country.

I don't know if we'll ever see his kind in American politics again.

Brett Kavanaugh vs. The Blue Wave

Brett M. Kavanaugh, nominated by the so-called "President" to replace Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, should not be on the Supreme Court.  He should not be elected to the office by the Senate and he should not even be allowed hearings this year.   My reasons are as follows:

1. Kavanaugh was heavily involved in the Clinton impeachment, even encouraging White Water Special Prosecutor Ken Starr toward asking sexually embarrassing and sensitive questions about the Lewinsky affair during Clinton's testimony, and arguing that a sitting President can be impeached for lies, cover-ups, and refusing to testify.  Since he's almost assuredly going to take a very different position should impeachment hearings for Trump come to the Supreme Court, he most certainly will be conflicted. If he doesn't recuse himself and then later reverses his previous opinions or otherwise votes in Trump's favor, the nagging question of whether he was doing a favor for the man who nominated him, a person who notoriously demands "loyalty," will forever hang over the decision. 


2. Kavanaugh was selected and nominated by Trump himself, and every passing day it appears more and more likely that the President is heading to Court, either on criminal charges or impeachment, or both.  Trump is obviously aware of this, and anyone implicated in committing multiple felonies should not be allowed to hand-pick his judges before his case is heard.


3. This is a major election year for the House and the Senate, and with the election just a little over two months away, the people should get to decide who conducts the hearings on Kavanaugh and who gets to vote on his nomination.  By all accounts, there is a "Blue Wave" heading toward Congress, which is exactly why the Republicans want to rush the hearings and get the vote in before Election Day, when a fed-up electorate votes them out of office. Congress denied President Obama his Supreme Court nominee on the grounds that he was in the last year of his Presidency; Congress should be denied the selection of a Supreme Court justice in the closing months of their terms.  

Given that Senator John McCain of Arizona tragically will not be with us much longer, and certainly unable to vote and participate in hearings even if he doesn't soon pass, the Republicans no longer have the 51 votes needed to force the hearings.  If every single Democrat votes against holding the hearings this year, the Vice President won't be able to break a tie if at least two Republicans (say, Collins and Murkowski) also vote against them.  It's still a long shot, and I don't mean any disrespect for Senator McCain, but it's the only hope we've got.  

Dreaming of the Masters

This week's post isn't about us dreaming of the masters, it's about watching others dream about the masters.  In this case, the dreamers are two brothers, identical twins, who call themselves The Mattson 2 and have re-recorded John Coltrane's A Love Supreme in its entirety on, ahem, electric guitar.  Here's their version of Part 2: Resolution.

I'm not sure how I feel about this.  On the one hand, it seems a little insensitive in these days of heightened awareness of cultural appropriation for two white boys to be profiting off Coltrane's legacy.  There's still remaining African-American jazz musicians out there struggling to make a living and who, for whatever reason, aren't getting the same publicity or tour dates that The Mattson 2 are getting.  On the other hand, based on what I've heard of this one song, they seem to neither be copycatting the original note-for-note nor repurposing the classic original to conform with current trends (thank goodness they didn't just sample the record to produce hip-hop beats for some MC to rap over).  

I'll determine how I feel about this next week: The Mattson 2 will be performing Thursday night (August 30) at Atlanta's Aisle 5.  We'll be checking them out live and in person to pass out judgement, positive or negative, about this.   

Scenes From Jekyll Island

It's funny how things come around.  This isn't my first time on Jekyll Island, not by a long shot.  I'm here for an annual environmental conference, and in addition to previous year's conferences, since about 1982, I've also been here for geologic field trips, coastal research projects, and plain old tourism.

But the very first time I was here was way back in 1969 when I was on a cross-country camping road trip, and I got my first lesson in ecology on this very island.  I was hiking and exploring the island with my friends, and we came across a group of local boys who were camping here with their families as well.  

"What do you guys do for fun around here?," we asked, and someone answered, "Sometimes we find nests of sea turtle eggs and have egg fights with each other."

After a moment's pause, he continued, "We don't find too many eggs around here anymore," and in that instant, I connected their egg poaching and destruction with the disappearance of the turtles, and realized the effect we humans have on the species around us.

Now, almost 50 years later, I'm back on Jekyll attending an environmental conference.  

Crossing the bridge as I arrived on the island, I was behind a "Project Sea Turtle" van which had the words "Transporting Live Animals" painted on its rear.  This precipitated my second moment of realization on Jekyll.  "Aren't all cars and trucks transporting live animals?," I wondered, and then realized that most people don't think of humans as animals, too.  And that, I realized, is why one group of animals, say, preteen boys in the late '60s, could be so wantonly destructive of another group of animals,  in this case, sea turtles.

None of them knew we are all animals.

Hello Ocean, My Old Friend

My August visits to the ocean via Jekyll Island are starting to become an annual routine, and here I am again.  Different year, same ocean.

Infinite Jest IV

Probably because I simply don't know any better, here's the fourth installation of the Infinite Jest series.  Even though it picks up right where Infinite Jest III: Loneliness ended, this is probably the most random of the series.  In fact, it consists of nothing but the clips that otherwise didn't fit in III or in Infinite Jest I: Romeo and Infinite Jest II: Juliet - my only rule for IV was that I had to use every remaining clip that I had and somehow make them all fit in somewhere, and to leave nothing on the editing room floor.  It's got a dance number like II, but otherwise it's so random that it doesn't even have a subtitle, it's just Infinite Jest IV.  Hope you like it.   

As always, I don't hold the copyrights to any of this material (please don't sue me) and don't represent that I have any copyrights (please don't sue me).  I make no profit off these videos, either directly or indirectly, and merely create and post them for my own (and hopefully your) amusement.  Think of it as a post-modern pastiche representing the visual and sensory overload we all experience on the interwebs. It's all just fun.  Please don't sue me.

Truth

As much as it pains me to admit it, for once I have to agree with Rudolph Giuliani - truth isn't truth.

No, I'm not saying that x does not equal x, I'm stating that since "x" is just a symbol for something else, and what you think it symbolizes, we'll say x', and what I think it symbolizes, we'll say x'', are almost never the exact same thing, at least in their entirety.  So since truth x' does not equal truth x'', truth is not truth.

Still with me? Another way of thinking about it is that since all words and concepts are just mental models of reality but not that reality itself, the real truth, ultimate truth, can't be expressed in words. So in that regard, truth is not real, truth isn't truth.

Or to put it in still other ways, truth isn't Truth.  Truth isn't "The Truth."  "The Truth" isn't true.

A lot of my work involves litigation support and expert testimony, and it's not infrequent that I'm giving depositions or testifying in court. "Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?" I'm asked, and I have to reply "I do" even though I have no idea what "truth" ultimately means and even less idea what they think it means.  So right from the bat, I guess I'm purjuring myself.  I might have to bring Rudy along next time I'm testifying to clear things up.  

(Note: if you're an attorney reading this while gathering background information on me for an upcoming case, I was just joking up above.  Just riffing on words there. To ease your concerns, while I may not know what truth is, I believe we all know what a lie is, and unlike our President, I'm not a liar.)

      

Still, though, Giulini is an idiot, so let's all laugh at him anyway.  He had no higher meaning behind his words other than to try and weasel his way out of the rhetorical corner into which he had painted himself, and "truth isn't truth" was the best he could come up with.

What a doofus!   

Addled Muse Fire Theater, Blue Mark Studios, Atlanta, August 18, 2018

So apparently we found ourselves last night on Jefferson Street in Atlanta's notorious Bankhead neighborhood (Bankhead Highway had such a bad reputation for crime, its name was officially changed to "Donald Lee Halloway Parkway"). We were there for something called Astral Cosmica: The Journey of Ophiochus by The Addled Muse Fire Theater Company.  One had to sign a waiver at the "door" to get in (door is in quotes because it was an outdoor event), and thunder was rumbling off in the distance.  

Turns out it was basically some people with various degrees of proficiency performing various fire dance routines (flaming baton twirling, flaming hula hoops, some fire breathing, etc.) to New Age music with a story line that was something about a cosmic villain (who came off more like an abusive frat boy than a mythological foe) who kidnapped someone representing the Moon (I think), and various dancers representing different zodiac signs basically dissing him in dance.  Fire dance.  That sounds dismissive and cynical, but it was actually a fun performance, with more that a little bit of an enjoyably amateurish "let's put on a show" ethic, complete with props that fell apart on stage, missed cues, and odd delays.  But no one (I think) was at the  Addled Muse Fire Theater to see the epitome of polished professionalism but instead were there to watch people fire dance, which is what the troupe delivered and which is what we enjoyed.

To make the night even more special, just a few minutes before the show began, to my complete surprise my daughter Britney texted me to say that she was there too, sitting just a few rows back behind us. We had two empty seats next to us at the front row (I'm thinking some people might have had second thoughts about taking a front-row seat at a fire dance performance) for her and her boyfriend, so in addition to the performance I got to enjoy the extra benefit of some quality family time.

Here's a little iPhone video clip from the performance.

In summary, despite the reputation of the neighborhood, despite the threat of rain which loomed over the entire night, despite whatever the waivers were supposed to advise us of, and despite - or maybe because of - the appealing amateurishness of the performance, it was quite the enjoyable night.

Dreaming of the Masters

When I find this video in my email queue first thing in the morning, I know it's going to be an interesting day.  Best Aretha tribute or best Obama tribute?  Either way, this is great.

Dreaming of the Masters

From the masters' master's masterpiece.

Also, RIP Aretha.

In the old days, we didn't have iPhones or high-speed internet connections and gender was one of two different things and not a "spectrum," and we didn't have cures for a lot of the diseases that were around and a diagnosis of cancer pretty much meant you were dead, and if you missed a show on one of the three television channels you had to wait until the summer reruns to catch it, and it was okay to beat your kids (even in public), and drunk driving was funny and not dangerous, and the n-word was always good for a laugh as long as one of "them" wasn't around, and if you didn't like second-hand cigarette smoke, you'd light one up for yourself and get some first-hand smoke.

Infinite Jest III

 . . . and here we go, the third installment in the Infinite Jest video series (the first two are here and here).

I tried to focus this time more on emotional resonance than mere randomness, yet somehow still wound up incorporating existentialist penguins and German physicists into the mix. 

I edited the hell out of this one. You have no idea - no idea! - how many times I've been through this over and over again, snipping a nanosecond of video here and tweaking the music volume there.  It was supposed to be that the viewer was the one who could not look away from the infinite jest, but it seems in this case that it's the creator who's become the victim of the video's curse.

Still, for all the times I've watched this - maybe because of all the times I've watched this - I cannot sit through the last minute dry-eyed.

I don't claim to own any of the copyrights to this material and am neither realizing nor expecting any profit from this project - if you're the copyright holder of any of this, please don't sue me!         

Review: Dead Magic by Anna von Hausswolff

It's not often that we review music albums on this site, but it's not often that records of the quality of Anna von Hausswolff's Dead Magic come along.  In fact, the last time we reviewed an individual album here, it was Quilt's 2016 record Plaza.

By my count, the 21st Century has so far seen the release of maybe a dozen masterpiece records, true works of art that would stand the test of time, if, that is, they ever get discovered in the first place. In addition to Plaza, I would add Animal Collective's Sung Tongs, Swans' To Be Kind, and Silver Mt. Zion's Horses In The Sky.  There were other great records, sure, but Anna just set the bar pretty damn high for everyone else.  

von Hausswolff is a Swedish organist and singer, who also occasionally plays some guitar.  Her specialty, though, is playing big pipe organs, and she apparently loves nothing more that jamming out on a church organ and exploring the resonance of the cathedral while pushing the organ past the limits of its capabilities.  She's been recording since at least 2010 and has released four albums before Dead Magic, but it's with Magic that she's really come into her own.

So let's break Dead Magic down:  the album opens with a 12-minute composition The Truth, The Glow, The Fall.  The song opens with a lovely, almost droning intro, with Anna intoning "After the fall, after the fall, after the fall, I'll find you." After about three and a half minutes of that, she finds a pulsating beat on the organ, which propels the song into its second movement which contains even more powerful vocals from von Hausswolff.  But eventually, this passage ends and fades into a near ambient drone, strings that are playing no particular melody but just shimmering in mid air, until the undertones start to come up from beneath the surface and bring the piece to an unexpected crescendo.  So right there, we have a three-movement composition, each corresponding to one part or another of the title The Truth, The Glow, The Fall, and it covers everything from gothic folk to ambient to drone, and all that's just on the first track of the album alone.

The second track, The Mysterious Vanishing of Electra, is nothing short of a doom metal masterpiece.  I've posted it here before, and there's a live version posted above.  This is probably the album's defining song and by most measures the best song on the record.  It might become von Hausswolff's signature piece, to her what My Girls is to Animal Collective.  I've already listened to it countless times and even though I still don't know what it's about, at least in a literal sense, there's no mistaking the emotion in Anna's vocals.  To this day, I still get goosebumps on my arms when she shrieks "Who is she? Who is she? Who is she?" near the end.

Following up on that track would not be an easy task for anyone, but von Hausswolff pulls it off with Ugly and Vengeful.  This is another long track, a post-rock exploration that sounds like it would fit right in on Swans' To Be Kind or The Glowing Man. There's a lot going on but it roughly breaks down into two general sections, a slow but intense first half of gothic organ riffs and vocals that slowly builds up to a dramatic crescendo, which sets the stage for the rhythmic second section.  The moment the drums finally kick in around the 10:00-minute mark is nothing short of thrilling, and Anna's vocals ride along on the ensuing waves of rhythm like she were on horseback (which for all I know, she might be). The 16-plus minute piece is an emotional and satisfying tour de force of post-rock that stands right up to anything Swans or Godspeed ever recorded.  It's possible that the title Ugly and Vengeful is actually dual and refers to the two major passages of the piece, like The Truth, etc. refers to the three parts of Track 1, but the first part is hardly Ugly and contains some of Anna's most beautiful vocals on the record, although Vengeful might fit the aggressive second half. 

The next two tracks are also quite lovely but don't quite reach the thrilling highs of Electra and Ugly and Vengeful.  The Marble Eye is one of von Hausswolff's pipe organ exercises, an interesting and beautiful piece that borders on the best minimalism but lacks the emotional catharsis of the three previous tracks.  You'd think she was saving her final punch for the closing track, Källans återuppståndelse, a name that sounds right out of the Chelsea Wolfe songbook, but that piece is another pipe organ exercise, but this time with vocals.  The last two cuts are good, no doubt there, but if I were producing the album, I'd have made them the first two tracks to build up to the 1-2-3 punches of The Truth, Electra, and Ugly and Vengeful.  And isn't that the beauty of iPods and streaming services - we can now listen to the tracks in whatever order we want and aren't bound by the decisions of the producers and the record label.

Speaking of which, I feel compelled to point out that Dead Magic was released on City Slang records, and is available on their web site, Amazon, iTunes or wherever fine music is being sold.  Go check it out!

   

I'm pleased to report that my little stratagem is working.  Since July 28, I completed the 2012 role-playing video game Dishonored in 42 hours of play (according to the Steam statistics) and found it quite enjoyable.  Today, I started on the 2016 sequel to the game, Dishonored 2, and while the original was good, the improvements make the sequel even better.

The game relies on stealth and strategy over brute force, not unlike the recently completed and highly recommended Assassins Creed Origins, and is set in an odd, pseudo-Victorian England, not unlike the interesting but ultimately disappointing Bioshock Infinite.  Specific dates mentioned in the game put it in the mid 1800s, but the technologies used in the game did not exist at that time, or ever exist at any time for that matter.  It's not quite a steampunk setting like in Bioshock (there's no steam power anywhere on display), but since everything seems to run on whale oil, the game has been termed "whalepunk." 

Whalepunk or not, I like the industrial marine setting - it reminds me of the Far Harbor DLC for Fallout 4.  The story line is interesting and the characters are sufficiently conflicted and complex enough to make them more than just mere action figures.  This was especially true in the Daud the Assassin DLC for the first Dishonored (I'm still in the early parts of Dishonored 2 now and haven't gotten to the DLCs yet).  Actors voicing the characters' lines in Dishonored included Susan Sarandon, Brad Dourif, Carrie Fisher, Michael Madsen, Lena Headey and Chloë Grace Moretz.  For the sequel, the developers brought on Rosario Dawson and Sam Rockwell,

As I said above, the game rewards stealth and strategy over melee and murder, even if the trailer doesn't quite convey that.  It's not one of those games where you're just running around shooting or slicing up the enemies, but instead you have to devise clever ways to sneak past the enemies without being detected.  You employ clever combinations of alleyways, rooftops, sewers, and walkways to get around, and some of the puzzles that have to be solved (how can you get past 30 soldiers in an empty ballroom without being detected?) can be quite challenging (the answer to the question involves chandeliers and skylights).    

After I get through Dishonored 2 (hopefully in more than 40 hours), I've still got Death of the Outsider, the third entry in the Dishonored trilogy to look forward to.  While it may not all last me until the end of the year, it should at least extend beyond the Labor Day weekend, and there's a slew of new games supposedly coming onto the market after that.

This Is What Patriotism Looks Like

Constitutional law and democracy over authoritarianism and bigotry - that's the American way!  A fan takes one for the team (the American team).

It's been said that President Obama is what America aspires to be, and Trump is sadly what we still are.

But Trump and politics and music and video games and infinite jests keep distracting us from what we really want to talk about, what we should be talking about.  We should be talking about how we only have a handful of decades on this blue planet (if we're even that lucky) and the inevitability of our own demise, and how death is still one of the great conversational taboos, right up there with religion, politics and sex.  We should be talking about how the ego is an illusion and how consciousness and the concept of a "soul" are our mind's greatest tricks on our own selves, and how even that sentence, like all language, is not free from that delusional egocentricity.  We should be talking about how we should be manifesting kindness and care for all sentient and non-sentient things, and how compassion is probably the greatest expression of intelligence and wisdom.  A great sage once said that the first step toward enlightenment is being kind to your wait staff and salespersons.

Or if that's too deep for y'all, we should be talking about the Boston Red Sox, who are putting together a season this year that will become the stuff of legends.  

Dreaming of the Masters

The Masters don't get much more masterful than this.  Not only is this Oliver Nelson's greatest composition and defining work, he managed to get one of Freddie Hubbard's best solos ever, and Eric Dolphy, the Dolph, never disappoints.  Hubbard sings the blues on trumpet and the Dolph delivers the abstract truth on flute.  Oliver and company tie it all together with some tasty ensemble work.  A "sixteen-bar piece in an eight-six-two pattern, even though the solos are in a conventional 12-bar minor-key blues structure in C minor," according to Nelson's liner notes.

I think I first purchased this album sometime around 1974, and it may well be the first jazz record that I fell in love with.     

Every Day's A Good Day, But Some Days We Realize It More Than Others

Today was a good day.

As you've probably noticed, I don't blog about work or clients or the company I work for except in the vaguest of terms.  Nothing good can come of a coworker or colleague, a client or a regulator, Googling something about a project on which I'm working and come across my candid complaints or jaundiced views of the situation.  Blogging about work is the surest path to the unemployment line it's been said.

So I'll just say this: things went my way today.  Sometimes the good guys win one.  Maybe not the entire game, set, and match, but sometimes we win at least one little round.

Today was that day, and if felt good, man.

Everything that lives is designed to end. We are perpetually trapped in a never-ending spiral of life and death. Is this a curse? Or some kind of punishment? I often think about the god who blessed us with this cryptic puzzle and wonder if we'll ever get the chance to kill him. - NieR Automata

Infinite Jest II (Juliet)

Here is the second in the Infinite Jest video series.  The companion to the first entry, subtitled Romeo, I'm calling this one Juliet. 

I think it's a better video, and it has fewer long, drawn out passages. It's ostensibly about women in love and the vulnerability of women in love but at its heart it's primarily a dance video, although it's also just as much about a culture of gun violence and, um, bears. 

Hope you enjoy. 

I don't own the copyrights to any of this material and hope that you see this as a kaleidoscopic view through my eyes of stuff that I find out there on the internet, artfully arranged into an original video and presented without any intention of profit for your viewing enjoyment. 

Why Do Turtles Cry?

Wait, what?  If this Wikipedia image is to be believed, there's a butterfly in the Amazon that feeds on the tears of turtles.

I don't know if this ultimately changes anything or not, but somehow the world seems like a more interesting place just for knowing this.

Return of the Son of the Grudge Post

To finish out last weekend's - and apparently this weekend's, too - grudge posting, my bad mood over missing decals and checks and over broken household appliances was exasperated by my disappointment in the BioShock Infinite video game and that the NieR: Automata game wouldn't work on my PC, despite mods, patches and various adjustments to my computer.  Games are my escape from the tedium and banality of day-to-day reality, and are not supposed to be irritants in and of themselves.

Therefore, I eventually just gave up on NieR.  I can't refund it because I played some four hours trying to fix it (Steam only allows two hours of gameplay to allow a refund), so I just deleted the game from my hard drive to save disc space and left the game in my Steam account for some future download when I either have a new PC or am in the mood to fuss over it for a full day (or when I find credible instructions on how to fix it that don't involve tweaking my entire Windows OS).

So instead of just replaying the old games (again), I sated my appetite for virtual escapism by downloading the Dishonored game.  So confident was I that I would like the game and that it would work, I purchased the entire bundle: the original Dishonored and the subsequent sequels Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider.  

Outsider, the most recent of the three, downloaded first and I opened it and started playing just to make sure it worked.  It did, beautifully, and the game had everything I liked - realistic graphics, an intuitive control system, and even though I only played a few minutes, an apparently interesting story line.  It's a stealth game - your missions are generally to sneak undetected into enemy territories and take out villains, and attempts to fight more than about two enemies at a time usually end up in your character dying.  The highly enjoyable Assassin's Creed Origins was also a stealth game, so in that regard it's the perfect follow-up, a much better choice after Origins than the first-person shooter BioShock.

I closed the game as the other downloads continued because I wanted to play the series in order. As I'm playing through the first Dishonored this week, I'm realizing that even in the few minutes of Outsider that I played there were a couple of spoilers. Not enough to ruin the game, but a few references that make me realize that some of the "bad guys" I'm fighting in Dishonored later become "good guys," and vice versa I assume.  Dishonored is a little bit dated, it came out in 2012, and the graphics and actions aren't as smooth as in Outsider, but that's okay (I've played far worse), and as I play forward through the series, I can look forward to better and better performance and graphics. So that's cool. 

So all is well in my little world.  I can drive to the office  - legally - and work all day, and then drive home - legally - and at night pretend I'm a Loyalist assassin taking out enemies of the Empress one by one.   And then do the same thing, over and over again, all day, probably for the rest of the year based on the sheer volume of Dishonored games now on my laptop.

Isn't life grand?

Return of the Grudge Post

So, alert readers may recall that last Saturday I was in a bad mood.  Something about a missing document, which frustrated me so much that I found it hard to also cope with the mechanisms of a faulty toilet and a dysfunctional printer or the intricacies of a PayPal account.

Frankly, only one of those four problems have been solved, but I already feel better about everything.  One thing I think the Buddha and Epictetus would both agree upon is that it isn't our problems that upsets us, it's our reactions to our problems.

The "missing document" was the 2019 decal for my tag ("tags" are what we call "licence plates" here in Georgia).  The way things work down here is once a year you mail in your renewal application along with a check for the annual excise tax and proof of an emissions inspection, the the DMV mails you a decal for the upcoming year to put on your tag to prove you've rendered the appropriate dinero unto Caesar and that you're not a gas-guzzling belcher of greenhouse gases (at least not more than is legally allowed).  The decal is due at the end of your birthday month and after that, you're liable to get a ticket if you don't have a current decal.

Earlier this summer, I sent in my renewal along with a check and the emissions report, and one fine summer afternoon, the decal arrived in my mailbox.  Most years, I walk from the mailbox directly to the car and immediately affix the decal on the tag, but this year I didn't for some reason or the other (I don't remember - maybe it was raining, maybe I was in a rush to change clothes and head out to a show). And then, as you can probably guess, I was never able to find the decal again.

I turned the house upside down twice looking for that letter and the decal - once last week and again over the weekend - and simply could not find it.  I retraced my steps, I looked in the trash, I searched the car and my yard, I looked in places it logically shouldn't have been because I had already searched all the logical places it should have, and no dice.  It was gone.  

Here's what I did find - July's rent check from my tenant (I lease an unsellable condo to a nice couple in Vinings).  Back in late May, they sent me a check for July along with the June rent as they expected to be traveling this summer, but requested that I hold the July check until 7/1.  I filed it away along with a stack of bills due in July, but when the First rolled around, I couldn't find it.  It simply wasn't there.              

So even before I turned the house over looking for the decal, I had turned it upside-down looking for the rent check.  Finally, the nice couple paid me for July's rent via PayPal, with the understanding that if the check did show up, I would tear it up and not double-dip on them.  Problem was, they were first-time PayPal users and sent me the money as a vendor, and PayPal, as part of it's "Buyer's Protection" program, is not releasing my money to me until I can show them "proof of delivery" in the form a FedEx or UPS tracking number. Of course, no such document exists as there was no delivery of merchandise, so PayPal will not release the July 1 rent money to me until August 7.

Okay, fine, whatever.  I can wait.  But it's frustrating and I hate bureaucracy.  Worse, while turning the house over again in late July looking for the decal, I managed to find the July rent check.  It was right where it was supposed to be with the July bills - I don't know how I missed it the first time.  If I was only more observant, I could have avoided the whole PayPal debacle and not have to wait until August 7 for money that should have been sitting in my bank account since July 1.

So, back to the missing decal.  I found a form online to request a replacement decal, but it said that if the original was "stolen or lost," you had to include a police report along with the application.  Hey, I live in the City, there's no way I'm calling the police to ask for a report on a lost piece of mail, and there's no way that the police would respond to such a request (other than hanging up on me) even if I did.  I figured I'd just have to wing that part of it and went to print out the form, which is when I discovered that my printer was inexplicably no longer working.

No need to dive into that story now (or the story of the faulty toilet).  The long and short of it is that Monday morning, July 30, the second-to-last day I could legally drive my car without a new decal, I went to the DMV and they were totally cool about it.  As you can guess, lost decals happen all the time.  There was an $8 charge (no big deal), but they filed the required form for me electronically and said that no, even they didn't understand why the form requested a police report for a lost decal.  Within 15 minutes (probably less), I had a new decal on my tag and was now legal to drive around the great state of Georgia.

The printer's still not working, I haven't repaired the toilet yet, and I still don't have July's rent, but I already feel better because at least I solved the decal problem.  I guess the point of this post is how our minds can take one little setback (a lost piece of mail), combine it with other small setbacks (a missing check and a broken printer) and manufacture a crisis out of it, and then let that crisis affect our mood.   As stated above, it's not the events that upset us, it's our reaction to those events.

Dreaming of the Masters

When the mood was right, free-jazz firebrand Archie Shepp could also be as lyrical and melodic as the next man.  

Here's the lovely Down in Brazil from 1975's There's A Trumpet In My Soul.  Vocals by Bill Willingham.  I love the long fade out at the end, and there was many a night back in my college years when I'd fall asleep while this, the closing track on Side 1, played itself out on the turntable.

How They See Us

Politically, I disagree with the message of this meme, but I still have to admit it's pretty funny.  Hey, if we can't laugh at ourselves . . . .

Jazz Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris

This is our first encounter with Jowee Omicil, and we're very impressed by this performance.  This is how it should be done,  This is the dream of the Masters, to see their legacy and tradition faithfully carried forward into the 21st Century.

In these dark times, this gives us hope.