I Could Murder Your Ass If Only I Had a Spread Gun

I'm really, really good at the Contra games. Super C in particular. How good am I? Think of how good you are at Super C. Now imagine someone who's ten times better than you. That guy would have to do the same exercise you just did in order to imagine someone who's as good as I am. I don't claim to be a math expert, but I think that makes me 100,000 times better than you.

Recently, I was breezing through Super C (with,*ahem*, no continues) when I realized something. I'm pretty dangerous with the Machine Gun. I can cause some damage with the Laser. I know my way around the Flamethrower. I can even hold my own for a while with nothing but the standard weapon.

But my game really comes to life when I get the spread gun. Pretty much the only thing that can stop me when I have the spread gun is if I accidentally pick up a different weapon. For those of you not in the know, here's a handy illustration of what the spread gun does:



Five big, beautiful red bullets, each approximately four times the size of a man's head. One goes straight forward. Two go forward on upward inclines, two go forward on downward. It's a beautifully effective video game weapon.

But don't take my word for it. Go google the phrase "contra spread gun." Go on, don't worry: it's probably the only phrase including the word "spread" that you can type into a Google search while there are children present or you're at work. As you can see, this is not an original idea on my part: a lot of people really do feel compelled to pay tribute to the spread gun after a good game of Contra.

And I started to think to myself, "Given my demonstrated warrior prowess in the Contra world, is it possible that a career in the Canadian Armed Forces could be just the thing for me?" Had I finally found the direction my life had heretofore been lacking? Could half-a-year's time see me off in Afghanistan, stoically setting out to help accomplish whatever the latest goal is that we've convinced ourselves we have over there? It was a crazy idea, but a crazy idea that just might work. I couldn't dismiss it out of hand without conducting further research.

Alas, judging from a few minutes on the Job Explorer at the Canadian Armed Forces website, the Canadian military doesn't even have a spread gunner unit that you can join. In fact, if Wikipedia is to be believed, the spread gun hasn't even yet been invented yet in real life. Which seems a shame, especially when you consider the potential humanitarian benefits of having a gun that fires five giant bullets simultaneously at different angles on the same vertical plane. Just imagine how much bloodshed humankind could have been avoided if only more of history's great conflicts had been decided by the exploits of one shirtless commando, charging relentlessly forward through wave-upon-wave of enemy soldiers, firing from his unlimited supply of ammunition, occasionally accompanied by a similarly dressed but contrastingly colored partner, across about seven distinct environments each with their own unique hazards, before finally reaching the enemy's main base and climbing inside their giant alien master's head to destroy its brain.

Rambling

Sometimes, I must admit, I have a tendency to ramble. It's strange, because when you see people rambling, you tend to assume that they're really invested in the conversation, or at least in their own part of the conversation; yet, most of the time when I ramble it's when I'm uninterested in what I'm saying, and am just saying it to fulfill my part of the conversation. I don't really like to make idle small talk, so when people say something, I try to come up with something interesting to say that's related. Sometimes, I just don't have an interesting observation to make. Someone will say "Did you ever notice that Cadbury chocolate is always so much richer and creamier than other brands?" and I'll say "Oh, yeah? No kidding... I, well actually it was only even recently pointed out to me that mass-produced chocolate would be consistent across companies, rather than just brands, you know? Like, that every Nestle bar [it would be much easier for me, at this point, to at least stick to the established Cadbury example, but I'm dedicated to broadening the scope of any discussion I participate in.] would have the same type of chocolate, rather than just every different Aero bar, like Aero Caramel or whatever, having one kind of chocolate, and then every different Crunch bar having another, you know? I haven't had that frame of reference for long enough to really investigate the differences between the major candy companies' chocolate formulations, so I can't really agree or disagree with your assertion that..."

And usually somewhere in there, a voice in the back of my head goes "James! You're rambling!" and I realize what's happening and I try to get quickly to the end of whatever clause I'm currently at in the endless run-on sentence I've got going and somehow salvage the situation so I don't look like I'm really intimidated by a simple conversation with this person. "Whatever you do," calls the voice, "do not say something that calls attention to the fact that you were just rambling." At which point I usually say something like "Blah! Man, got off on a ramble there, huh? I'm sure you're riveted by my fascinating observations about the state of the various candy companies' chocolate formulations..." and off I go, stringing together quips and pointless observations, extending sentences into paragraph form and just generally failing to get to any point worth making.

I think that may get to the heart the appeal of writing to me: as it's a more deliberate process than speaking, you can easily avoid getting in to situations like that.

B.I.G and Me

I know everyone says they have eclectic musical tastes, but they're all lying except for me. If I bought more CDs online, it would totally screw up the Amazon recommendation list: you'd go to buy a Snoop Dogg album, and it'd say "Customers who bought this also bought Rod Stewart's The Great American Songbook Vol. 3 and Jets To Brazil's Orange Rhyming Dictionary." And when I really love an artist, I buy all of their albums.

One big result of this is that I end up with a lot of albums that I don't listen to regularly because my tastes have moved on (my complete collection of Get Up Kids CDs doesn't really see a lot of play, for instance). I try not to be one of those people who constantly assumes that now is the moment where he's achieved real musical maturity and that those CDs he bought a year ago are kids' stuff now. I can pop in 24 Hour Revenge Therapy now and then, and I still quite enjoy a song like "Do You Still Hate Me?" even if that kind of naked emotional earnestness stopped being the main thing I looked for in music somewhere around grade 11. So I listen to an oddly broad range of music at any given time: a little jazz here, a little classical there, some pop-punk now and then, a whole lot of hip hop, etc.

But there are a select few artists for whom my love runs just as deep now as it did when I first encountered them. And since they are few, I make a point of, at least once a year, taking a couple of weeks to re-engage with their entire oeuvre. I think most of these tend to be bands with multiple writers, who have a large body of work and a great deal of musical and lyrical variety: the examples that spring to mind are They Might Be Giants (surprise! I'm a nerd), Barenaked Ladies (fuck you, they're massively underrated), and the Beatles (yeah, that's right. I like the Beatles. Deal with it).

So my abiding love of the work of Christopher Wallace, aka the Notorious B.I.G, aka Biggie Smalls, aka the Black Frank White sort of sticks out as unusual: not because he's a hip-hop artist (I love a lot of hip hop), but because he only released two albums in his all-too-brief career. When you can spend two weeks every few months listening to nothing but the work of a man who put out fewer than 45 tracks during his life, you know there must be a special connection there. And it runs pretty deep. I go on 2-4 Biggie kicks a year lately, and every single time I end up spending a lot of time feeling really, really upset about the fact that he's gone. And he's been gone for about 13 years. He was gone a few months before I first encountered his music. And it just kills me, because as much as I love the work he completed during his career, I feel very confident I'd have loved the work he would have done in the intervening years even more.

But it can be hard to explain this attachment to other people. What's the connection between a middle class white slacker/academic (slackademic, to coin a phrase!!! neologism!!!) who grew up on the mean streets of suburban Nova Scotia and a black dude from Harlem who came up during one of the most horrifying periods of urban blight in modern American history? What could his work possibly say to me to make me care about it so much? Shouldn't my main engagement with his work be to cluck my tongue and criticize it for glorifying misogyny and violence and crime and materialism? By all rights, if I'm going to feel this passionately about a rapper, it should be an alternative hip-hop artist, a Mos Def, a Kweli, a Jean Grae. And I love all three of those artists. But not the way I love Biggie. Why?

Well, I obviously think there's more to his work than the things obnoxious white music journalists fret about even as they call him one of the greatest MCs of all time. I think there's something wonderful about it. And to try to explain just what that something may be, I'm going to start my blog's first regular feature: B.I.G and Me. I'll go, track by track, through Biggie's body of work, and try to explain what it is that I think is just so damn special about it. I hope you'll come along with me even if you're skeptical. I think I can win you over. Or, rather, I think Biggie can.

So the first song in question shall be "Party and Bullshit," a single Biggie released before either of his albums. And I'm going to say very little about it. I don't have a strong attachment to the song. Almost nothing about what makes Biggie so great seems to me to be in the song. The flow, the rhyme schemes, the beat, the lyrics, and even the voice just aren't there yet. It's mainly of interest so that you can see how quickly he took things to a whole other level once Puff signed him to Bad Boy and he didn't have to split his focus between hustling and rhyming. So in lieu of a discussion for this one, I'm going to post this totally awesome mash-up with Miley Cyrus, and save my energy for the really important stuff (which, I happen to think, is almost every single track on both of his albums):



Next up: "Things Done Changed," the first track on Ready To Die.

This is Calcutta. Bohemia is dead.

I love musicals. Love 'em, love 'em, love 'em. Love 'em when they're mainstream, candy-coated, toothache-inducingly sweet confections like Hairspray. Love 'em when they're dark, serious, literate bloodbaths like Sweeney Todd. Or, at the very least, I love fat girls dancing and over-the-top violence. So I thought I'd take a look back at the very first musical I was ever intimately familiar with: Rent.

Even though an image of the poster for Rent actually appears next to the Miriam-Collins dictionary entry for the adjective "dated," criticizing the play's myriad flaws is an ever-timely endeavour, thanks to the constant presence of poorly-received film adaptations and poorly-received revival tours, all of which surprisingly continue to feature the increasingly grizzled original cast, who I believe are now in their mid-to-late 60s (it's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison because of the different sample sizes, but it's nonetheless interesting to note that the combined ages of the eight members of the original cast of Rent are now actually higher than those of the four CIA scientists who invented AIDS in the 1970s in the hopes of finally bringing down the Black Panthers).

But I digress. The point is that Rent is a musical that will leave a lasting impact on you the first time you see it, as long as you try really, really hard not to actually think about it. So it's fortunate for me that I first encountered the OBCR (Original Broadway Cast Recording, for those of you who lack my musical theatre pedigree) of Rent in the 11th grade, back when listening to Jimmy Eat World was a profound emotional experience and getting a hand job was a profound sexual experience. So even today, I can watch the Rent movie and actually feel a little bit touched now and then. It can put a smile on my face. And then it ends and all I can think about is how damn stupid it is.

Specifically, I'd like to set aside concerns like how the entire second act has no pacing or structure, or how a play so frequently noted for the ethnic and sexual diversity of its cast has two straight white guys as protagonists, and focus on how, for a play that at its heart is about about artists and their struggle to create, Rent has incredibly juvenile, poorly thought out views on art: views that I've encountered in the real world, and that I think are rather pernicious. And just to drive home the point that I'm a Serious Man With Serious Views On Art, I'll make some reference to Chekhov's The Seagull.

Rent tells the tale of Mark and Roger, two young Boho types living in New York in either the very late 80s or the very early 90s, their quirky minority friends, and their struggle to make it as artists while dealing with the ramifications of the AIDS epidemic. Mark, a filmmaker, and Roger, a musician, are both struggling with creative block. In fact, Roger has apparently never written a song. They spend the one night of the first act and the one year of the second act trying to make their respective grand artistic statements. A goal which they pursue primarily not by working hard on their craft, but by congratulating themselves for being poor and living in a rat-hole loft in a crumbling building.

Throughout Rent, emphasis is repeatedly placed on the notion that the main characters, mostly artists proudly living "La Vie Boheme," are inherently superior to their sellout friend Benny, who used to be just like them but now works for a CORPORATION. Owned by his soon to be father-in-law. A rich white man. Benny's black. Mark and Roger are white kids from the suburbs, whose parents leave messages on their answering machine in the first act promising money if they need it. They barely restrain themselves from spitting on Benny when they see him. They openly imply that he's an automaton doing the bidding of his soon-to-be-white-daddy. They deride him for trying to achieve financial security, when their own starving artist lifestyle is a phone call home away from ending if it ever gets too rough. It's more than a little bit tone deaf, though at least they refrain from actually calling him "Uncle Tom."

The conflict beautifully encapsulates the shortcomings of Jonathan Larson's conception of art (oh, right, did I forget to establish that the creator of Rent's name is Jonathan Larson?): simultaneously demonstrating an absurdly reverential view of the figure of the artist (being an artist makes you better than other people!) and the bizarre conception of what an artist is (basically, a poor person who doesn't play by society's rules).

The first act centers around the heroes (everyone but Benny) trying to stop Benny from evicting homeless people who are squatting in a building his company owns. Now, I'm a big ol' lefty, and I think the existence of homelessness is one of the great moral catastrophes of our society. But of the many crimes against the homeless that we're all somewhat implicated in, requiring a tent city to be moved to a different abandoned building than the one you own is just not even in the top ten.

Here's the kicker: Benny wants to use the building to build a community center for artists, a "state of the art, digital, virtual interactive studio" where artists can "do our work and get paid." Benny calls it a "cyber-center." If Benny's nice looking clothes weren't enough to tell you that this center is a sinister thing, the fact that it's "state of the art" and would allow artists to "get paid" should surely get the message across. Technophobia and willful poverty being essential traits of the artist.

Rent romanticizes the artist while presenting the view that being an artist isn't about creating works of art, it's about living in a shitty apartment and rejecting your parents values. Now, look: the walls, door frames, ceiling, window frames, and doors of my place are done up in a paint color I believe Color Your World calls "white-ish with lots of cracks and blemishes." My mother and father are decent, honest, hardworking people. So I can relate to the joys of living in a shitty apartment and rejecting your parents' values. But you won't hear me calling myself an artist until I've produced some works of art.

Rent's utter unconcern with the creation of art is beautifully underlined by the play's ending. Mark finishes his film and Roger finally writes his song. Mark's film happens to be a shaky, hand-held shot, soundless montage of two-second clips of his friends hanging out, edited together randomly (I've heard it derisively referred to as a home movie, but most home movies I've seen at least achieve coherence). Roger's song is literally the worst song in the play. It's odd. Larson poured himself into creating his works of art. But then, when he wrote a play about artists struggling to create, he gave no thought whatsoever to their creative processes or their results. He venerates the artist as an image rather than as an identity.

Not unlike Konstantin in Chekhov's The Seagull. (See? Name-dropping Russian plays= instant Intellectual cred.) Konstantin, the protagonist and would-be artist, spends that whole play obsessing over his own notably terrible, defiantly non-mainstream play and congratulating himself for his superiority to actual writer Trigorin. He feels this sense of superiority because, even though Trigorin notably produces actual works of art (that even Konstantin begrudgingly admits are good), he doesn't spend all his time acting like an artist (he likes to fish, for instance, instead of sitting around agonizing about how to change the world with his art). The play makes this point quite beautifully, and even Konstantin seems to realize that he'll never actually be an artist due to his inability to create art (sadly, he expresses this by burning his unfinished manuscripts and then blowing his own head off). And yet, when we discussed this in seminar, the average classmate's comment went like this: "Of course Konstantin kills himself! It must be maddening for a true artist who rejects the conventions of society and the tastes of the masses to have to see someone who isn't even an artist like Trigorin succeed while he labors in obscurity!" That's why I said Rent's views on art are pernicious. Because they resulted in me being annoyed during an honours seminar.

So, to sum up: artists create art. Whether they do that while congratulating themselves for "riding your bike midday past the three-piece suits" and drinking "hand-crafted beers" is immaterial. No matter how much you venerate the figure of artist, no matter how superior you show him (or her!) to be to middle Americans, if your primary criteria for identifying who's an artist is a particular aesthetic/attitude, you're not celebrating art, you're demeaning it.

Ars Blogica

So why start a blog? Why start a blog, now, in 2010? Eight or nine years on from the days when I began ceaselessly ridiculing my friends for wanting to write LiveJournals? Approximately seven years after blogging became the next big thing? Nearly six years after checking my favourite blogs became a daily ritual? And, for that matter, something like eight months after everyone got so over blogs and realized than anything worth saying could be said in 140 characters or less?

Well, for starters, I'd like to hold off on getting a Twitter account until everybody's moved on to DotPage, the social networking site where people express their innermost selves by forming collages of primary colored dots (but no more than 13 dots per collage!).

The main reason for me to start I blog, I suppose, is just that I told a bunch of people that I was thinking about doing so, even though I wasn't really, and then they all seemed to think it was a good idea. So here we are. That simple answer, alas, doesn't beg, but does raise, further questions.

What to blog about? That's the big one. What is it that I have to say that's worth my time to type up and publish, and worth your time to read, ponder over, and be forever changed by? I turned first to the blogs I myself love to read. Perhaps I could start by imitating my influences and find my way to my own thing. Unfortunately, most of the blogs I read are about politics, and my own political opinions tend to be alarming to the sort of buttoned-down, conventional wisdom worshiping, so-called "moderates" who aren't used to hearing constant calls for the assassination of political leaders' children. I'd like this blog to have broad appeal, even if it's only to a broad range of my acquaintances, so that's out.

Setting aside the political bloggery, I mainly read various feminist blogs, from general cultural critics to body-image activists. But, frankly, I just don't think the ossified field of Women's Studies is ready to deal with the straight, white, middle-class male take on patriarchal oppression.

Next, I looked at the blogs of some friends of mine, to see if I could just steal their ideas. Amanda's theatre blog, TWISI, is popular and influential. But it seems to have got that way through tireless hard work. So...

Glen Matthews also has an interesting blog based on something I certainly don't have: an interesting job. Oh, well...

My sista-from-another-mista Meghan has quite a prolific personal blog, and that seemed like a model worth imitating. However, Meghan has several advantages over me in the personal blog-realm. She's living the romantic life of a playwright in Toronto, so she has lots of interesting experiences going to see exciting shows and presentations and whatnot: just look at the name dropping in this one post! Meanwhile, I'm here in my apartment in Halifax, and a big night out for me is when I put some pants on and walk over to Video Difference to rent a porno foreign film.

Not to mention that as both a playwright and a young woman, Meghan's filled with powerful emotions. Just look at the title of her blog: You'll Never See My Eyes. I haven't been that emo since I was in grade 10, and even then my sensitivity would have had to share space with my other fixations, resulting in a blog called My Heart is Like a Secret, Now May I Please Put My Hands On Your Great Big Ass?

So, stealing Meghan's personal blog idea may work, but I'd still need to figure out my own angle on it. So I started thinking about that. But then I started thinking about how if someone shot you with a ray gun that made one of your butt cheeks become incredibly hot, and the other at the same time become extremely cold, the worst part wouldn't be the singeing on one side, or the frostbite on the other, but the terrible steam burns right in the middle.

And right about there, I hit on an idea. You see, I have long suspected that I have ADD and was simply never diagnosed because as a child I was scared of getting in trouble and so expended great force of will to overcome the desire to act out. My mind wanders constantly from one idiot thought to the next. Often, I have to drop out of conversations in the middle because I've somehow made my way from following the topic at hand to crafting an intricate defence of the artistic merits of Commando or composing an oration on the legacy of Koji Kondo's legendary score for Super Mario Bros. It can leave me feeling very alienated (if you've ever been at a party with me and wondered why I wandered off in the middle to sit in a room by myself for an hour, it has something to do with that). But a blog can get around that. I can take these otherwise interesting-but-useless thoughts, which I keep to myself to avoid derailing conversations, and lay them out, with some semblance of order, for you, my friends, and maybe even eventually some strangers, to peruse. It could be a way for me to finally feel more connected to the world around me.

The theme of my blog could, maybe, just maybe, be it's themelessness. It could just be a melange of the various subjects that have been accumulating and ricocheting through my addled mind since I was five: video games, superheroes, politics, sex, comic books, superhero comic books, sex in politics, sex in video games, trashy genre films, serious art films, serious art films that rearrange and critique the tropes of trashy genre films, the sex scenes in all of those films, political themes in superhero comic books, which superheroes I'd most like to have sex with, and, of course, Victorian literature (not sure how that one got in there, but I am about to get a Master's degree). And people would love it for the same reason they love me: because they mistakenly believe that I'm independently wealthy, and they want into my will.

So I guess that's what we're going with. In keeping with the the ADD-theme, I picked a title (Grand Central Station of Thought), that will surely only seem more clever and less clunky every time you read it. When I can think of interesting things to say, I'll say them, and try to make some good jokes along the way. And when I can't, I'll say things that aren't interesting and fill them up with cheap jokes that try desperately to deflect attention from my own nagging sense of my intellectual vacuity. You'll probably never learn anything, but hopefully we'll both have a good time.

Shall we, then?