Baseball Happens

Baseball is the only sport I miss when it's gone. I'm excited when football returns in the fall, but I never pine for it between the Super Bowl and Week One. I'm happy when I'm reminded--usually on a monthly basis--that Premier League soccer is a thing, even if I'm destined to quit focusing at the end of the weekend. Only baseball carries any consistent twangs of nostalgia for me.

It features none of the apocalyptic melodrama that football embarrassingly thrusts at the viewer every week. It doesn't require the energy commitments that an American soccer fan has to make just to keep up. Baseball doesn't pressure the fan; the fan pressures herself. A fan doesn't have to apportion time and energy for baseball, though she's more than welcome to. And the fan don't have to dig through the weeds of history and statistics to understand the game, though that effort is often its own significant reward

Baseball happens. At a slow, comforting pace in the middle of summer, it is punctuated by fleeting moments of genuine excitement that refuse to be predicted or promised.

It's my opinion that Opening Day--less than a week away--is one of our greatest national holidays. Because I am a Cubs fan. And Opening Day is all I have.

This year can't be a lot worse than last: 61-101, the first 100-loss Cubs team since the mid-1960s. Hopeful Cubs fans (read: older generations that weren't raised on years of teasingly competitive teams) will point out that that debacle preceded the fabled 1969 team. With respect to the poetic, cyclical nature of the sport, once does not establish a pattern. And, anyway, things didn't exactly end well for that '69 squad*. But things are looking up. The Cubs have good, promising talent in Starlin Castro, Anthony Rizzo, and Jorge Soler. The only remaining bloated contract is Soriano's; he might be good for a veteran presence in the clubhouse, anyway. Overall, Epstein's doing a generally respectable job in the front office and the future is bright not bleak. But this is not the year. Maybe 2014.

So who do I like?

• NL East: Washington
• NL Central: Pittsburgh (sure, what the hell?)
• NL West: Los Angeles 
• NL Wild Cards: Atlanta, San Francisco 
• AL East: Toronto 
• AL Central: Detroit 
• AL West: Anaheim 
• AL Wild Cards: Tampa, Baltimore 
• World Series: Anaheim over Washington 

Sorry to disappoint, Nats fans. You know who to blame.

*The fact that many Cubs fans still hold an ultimately heartbreaking season forty years gone as a high bar is as much a cause of the problem as it is a symptom. 

The Rag Tree: a Novel of Ireland

"I sometimes quip about the length of time it has taken to write The Rag Tree by saying, I started to write a book about war and then peace broke out... through the journey of the story's own growing pains, it became a story of a country and its people amid a historic transition." 
--D.P. Costello

The afterword to Costello's The Rag Tree: a Novel of Ireland was written at the tail end of Ireland's Celtic Tiger boom, just before the collapse. To read The Rag Tree, to reflect upon the strides that Western Europe's whipping boy has made in the last century (as the reader will), and then to stick the knife of mentioning the more recent troubles would require the mind and soul of a right little shit.

After all, so much of Ireland's charm has roots in indefinable magic and whimsey. Breathtaking vistas, the liveliness of ancient Celtic traditions, pubs. Sure, this can sometimes end up looking like, as one character in The Rag Tree puts it, "Paddyland. Planet Ireland. Every castle and historic site has a ticket booth and fence thrown around it. Where's the giant mouse with the green ears?" And that exploitation is a shame. But if one of the steps to casting off the weight of 800 years of exploitation (and one too many borderline offensive homages on St. Patrick's Day) is to indulge in a little of your own, it seems churlish to blame the Irish when that fabled magic begins to work for them for the first time in a millennium.

Such is the hope of the Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) at the outset of The Rag Tree. He hopes to ensure Ireland's future prosperity through his Eire Nua referendum, an initiative that some see as a threat to Ireland's past, not to mention its freedom and independence. It's to Costello's credit that he never pointedly chooses a side on Eire Nua (though the reader can safely guess). Even the outcome of the roundabout plot to reunite Northern Ireland with the independent Republic is wisely left open-ended. In a winding story (all Irish stories are winding ones) about a country long cleaved by warfare and oppression, offering clear answers would be insulting.

The worst that can be said of The Rag Tree is that the plot seems too often driven by coincidence. Or, if not coincidence, then a mysterious, god-like conspirator calling himself "the Blackbird." It doesn't matter much either way: if you mind coincidence, you'll have a few problems with the Blackbird, as well. And normally I'd have been among the detractors of such a plot device. But here again we see the inexorable pull of Ireland and its stories: a little bit of luck and a whole lot of whimsey that will draw the reader in, whether the reader wants to be or not (actually, The Rag Tree puts a rather grim spin on traditional whimsey; I call it "grimsey").

Example: I spent much of the book telling myself that Mattie Joe Treacy's spiritual protector--a pooka in the form of a raven who goes by "Brian"--didn't exist outside the mind of the mildly-disturbed and often drunken Treacy. After a while, I decided that Brian did exist, but as a series of transient ravens that followed Treacy, though never actually speaking to the man. And by the end, I was forced to give in. Brian was a tad too charming for me and if he wanted to exist in the otherwise real, understandable world of The Rag Tree, who am I to stop him?

You can approach Irish legends with whatever eye-rolling skepticism you choose, but stubbornly holding onto that just makes you an asshole. It's not unlike dismissing the magic of Disneyland. A Disneyland with considerably more Guinness and whiskey.

Grade: B+

"And The War Came"

This month marks the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War. Remember the Iraq War? No? Well, it happened. Anyway, in observance of the aluminum jubilee, former pro-war hardliner Andrew Sullivan has been doing a retrospective, featuring reflections on the legacy of the war and an examination of his own evolved views regarding it.

Among the more trenchant portions of the thread is the focus on the war's opposition. "Opposition" here, of course, means the protestors; all the important Washington honchos of the time were behind the invasion, as Sullivan's thread notes repeatedly. As a result, visible opposition was generally limited to the street kind, which included a decent number of sensible people... and several less-sensible people. And, as we re-learn from time to time, those less-sensible people are more media-friendly (they're loud, they're colorful, they're easy to strawman, and thus end up on Fox News as the self-defeating faces of their own movement).

A lot of this is to be expected. If the question is what does an effective antiwar movement look like, the answer is that it doesn't. A pro-peace position is hard to shove into a powerful soundbite, even in clear-headed times. In the culture of swirling fear and anger that had persisted since 9/11, it was impossible. The only difference between pro-war emotionalism and anti-war emotionalism at times seemed to be that one side did its hyperventilating while wearing a suit. 

Of course it turns out that the poorly dressed anti-war loonies were, well, right. Yeah, awkward. There were no WMD's, Iraq was spiraling out of anyone's control, war crimes mounted, and it turned out we had no idea what we were doing because freedom can't be planned, apparently. The good news was that, by then, no one cared about the war and we were so entrenched in a country we had so thoroughly shattered that no one could really suggest that we should just leave. The bad news was that the war remained a really bad fucking idea.

I was about sixteen/seventeen at the time. And I was then living in a fairly backwoods part of Virginia that was firm Bush territory. Tractor Pulls were significant social events. The Confederate flag was on my high school's logo. One of the government teachers at that high school insisted totally straight-faced that socialism and communism were basically synonyms and he wouldn't hear any different because he had a bachelor's degree in Political Science and we didn't (I do now, and he's still wrong). So, being seventeen and a natural contrarian living in what I saw as a Faulknerian hellscape, you can see how I approached the various issues of the day.

In the end, I was right about the war by default; I chose to be against the side that was wrong. There were many sober, adult-type people who stood firm in their opposition based on the facts and have every right to gloat. But I wasn't one of them. I thought of myself as a part of the more respectable crew, but probably looked and sounded, by most standards, like the drum circlers and other white guys with dreadlocks. I just despised the man that had pushed for the thing.

I never understood Bush's appeal--even discounting the swagger and privilege. I shouldn't want to have a beer with the president. I know the people I drink with: I don't want them being president. Then there was the dichotomy of a Manichean-headed executive promoting vague goals built on abstract concepts. "War On Terror." "Freedom Agenda." Meaningless, borderline Orwellian phrases aimed at "the gut," because that was the decision-making organ in those years. In his most cynical maneuver, all opposition was preemptively decried as unpatriotic. Those of us who disagreed were made to feel alien in our own home, something I very much felt in rural Virginia. And this from a heterosexual, whose prospect for recognized love wasn't put to a referendum scheduled to help a president secure reelection. Bush was not the despot that many in the anti-war movement claimed, but damned if his divide-and-conquer techniques didn't reek of dusty totalitarian playbooks. I think I wrote a book about that. 

I softened in college, becoming generally disgusted with the whole bloody mess of politics. And though my early views were founded on a contrarian's fickle whims, some of the hard-wiring remains. My political consciousness was booted up during the rush to war, at which time George W. Bush taught to me to be a liberal. And his party's continuing unwillingness to cop to that administration's myriad blunders ensure that the Republican Party will have to work a lot harder for my vote than the Democrats ever will (no, a sudden interest in deficits and civil rights now that a Democrat is in office doesn't quite cut it). And I know I'm not the only member of my generation who feels that way.

Pundit historians will cite Obama and gay marriage and any number of other things as our reasons for our general reluctance to support the Republican Party. And those all fit. But it began with Bush. And his war. 

Video Games and Story-Telling

L.A. Noire came out a couple of years ago to well-deserved good reviews. After running out of Uncanny Valley jokes, the player discovers that the graphics of L.A. Noire are as mesmerizing as they are groundbreaking (how many games can produce gag reels?). And the experience of roaming through post-war Los Angeles is intoxicating--almost enough to guise the fact that the driving seems interminable. And the tone; my God, the tone. Unhelpful though this phrase often is, L.A. Noire is a unique experience.

I like Raymond Chandler novels and a host of other noir-related and -inspired works, so it may seem as though I'm gushing about something I was bound to love (that co-developer Rockstar Games was then coming off Red Dead Redemption was just sweet, sweet frosting). Except... I didn't love it. The above praise runs right alongside my apprehensions about the game, the things that make me hesitant to pop the disk back into my X-Box (and then the second disk... and then the third).

L.A.P.D. Detective Cole Phelps is a miserably dull antagonist, easily out-shown by insurance fraud investigator Jack Kelso. The cases, particularly on the homicide desk, quickly prove frustrating as it becomes obvious that Phelps is being strong-armed by his superiors against the player's will (more on that later). I also don't care for procedurals, which L.A. Noire unapologetically is; this is partly a personal thing, but the best noir-ish pulp fiction is as much about quirky character moments and shaggy dog yarns as it is about the mystery.

This is not a review of L.A. Noire. No one's interested in that in 2013, including me (though I'd probably give it a B/B+). My point is that every so often I play or remember a game that gets me thinking: what makes video games work, from a storytelling perspective? More importantly, what makes the cinematic ambitions of the medium fall flat? And I'm talking specifically about the story-driven games. The Angry Birds and the Fruit Ninjas, for all their addictive properties, can't be properly judged on the same metric.

Literature (novels, short stories... you know what literature is) excels at intimate character-building: motivation, psychology, thoughts. The best novels dig deep into an idea and use slowly-developed details to create a textured whole. Other storytelling mediums can do this, but not as comprehensively. Where a story on the page may relatively lack for immediacy and clear character dynamics, it still reigns as the best medium for case study-type stories.

Television, at its best, takes the long-form format of the novel and uses it to deliver detailed character relationships and paced, intricate plotting. The really good ones explore characters and themes at length and in depth over one or more seasons (Game of Thrones comes to mind, of course, but remember that David Simon conceived The Wire as a kind of "novel for television").

Film combines all of these into a condensed run-time and go to work with rarely subtle manipulation. It rewards spectacle and sweeping scope. Some will moan about the bullying nature of the medium, but when done successfully, it's hard to complain. If the first ten minutes of Up don't devastate you, I'm not totally sure you're human. And while the last 45 minutes of Argo seemed to count off every suspense cliche in the book (yes, there is a book of suspense cliches), damned if it wasn't effective.

Video games can perform elements of all of these but they tend to lack the strong narrative thrust. There is no Dickens or Kubrick to take the player from point A to point B exactly when and how he wants to.

Roger Ebert suffered a rare lapse into ill-informed shooting off at the hip a few years back when he said that video games could never be art. To his credit, he walked the statement back (kind of). And though the original statement was short-sighted, there's some truth there. Games require a certain degree of player agency. Too little agency and the player might as well be watching a movie. Too much and there's little to no room for the developer to tell the story he wants. The developer can add music, but has little guarantee that the cues will sync up as perfectly as they do in film. He can add interior monologue, but the player may choose to skip it (and will complain if she doesn't have that option). He can create a complex, engaging lead character, but at some point the player must be allowed to put her own stamp on that character.

And he can try to force a story in a given direction, but as games have evolved into sandboxes and as they've engineered morality systems, it becomes harder and harder to tell a story honestly. If the developer's desired story needs a character to be a good, upstanding person, it falls apart if the player decides to be an immoral monster, whose only aim was to "dominate the game." To end a story in this fashion, you have to supply a series of potential good-evil-medium alternate endings and every player can tell that that was all you did.

Take the aforementioned frustration in L.A. Noire: when a developer tries to take a gamer for a ride--the sort of emotional rollercoaster ride that might be praised in a good film or book--the gamer may resent it. Not least because she expects to be able to win the game. As far as we've come, we're still limited in our ability to explore the human experience in video games the way we do with other art forms.

Red Dead Redemption gets that compromise mostly right, by killing the main character in a cut scene mere seconds after the player is forced into an ambush (yes, L.A. Noire pulls a similar character sacrifice, and if Cole Phelps were as interesting as John Marston, I'd be talking about that). While we're on the subject of genuinely artful games, Bioshock, another personal favorite, is renowned for it's eye-sexingly gorgeous environments, a surprisingly deep examination of philosophy and human nature, and a creepy atmosphere that relies on the player's imagination to fully reveal itself. It's a refreshing example of show-don't-tell that neatly covers up the fact that 80% of the plot is killing objectivist zombies.

I'm sure every developer has Earth-shattering ideas for great, cinematic games. Hell, every gamer likely has, as well: this Cracked article showcases seven decent game ideas and explains, with an empathetic quivering infecting the prose, why those games can't happen for various reasons of mechanics and logistics. I also recommend Cracked's take on ominous trends in video games, which ends up focusing mostly on the economics of the industry. Turns out that when you expensively produce distraction-oriented entertainment that'll go to market at $60 a pop, you tend to get stingy about creativity in favor of more a stable model, helping further hinder the role of "art" in the development process.

This isn't to say there isn't art in modern gaming, but there is something eating away at me as I play games that come so close to real art and just miss it.

Goodbye, Mr. Destructo?

Mobutu Sese Soku was the CIA-backed President of Zaire from 1965 until 1997. Given his sponsors, his stomping grounds, and the length of his rule, you've probably already guessed that he was a sociopathic, murderous dictator, installed to keep the Commies at bay in central Africa.

A very different Mobutu Sese Soku was, until recently, a blogger of no mean repute, running the often great, occasionally transcendent, Et Tu, Mr. Destructo? before being raptured into the enviable air of Gawker, where he was billed as "America's Screaming Conscience."  He also boasted one of the funnier Twitter feeds that ever I did follow.

"I'M GONNA FUCK YOU UP, CHIEF!" — Joe Biden eating fistfuls of bbq Fritos from a BIG GRAB bag tucked by his crotch, watching Paul Ryan on TV
— Mobutu Sese Seko (@Mobute) August 11, 2012

I started reading Mobutu some time during his pre-Gawker days, when having my own blog still seemed to me like a waste of time. His almost free-form rants, routed in equal parts anger and semi-ironic detachment, were a strong sign that the spirit of Bill Hicks remains intact some place. He possessed a strong rotation of topics ranging from politics to sports to literature, and was armed with a reference window that would make Dennis Miller blush, if he were capable of shame. In my more self-conscious moments, I imagine Mobutu's voice tearing into my weaker posts, Something Awful-style, and I know I have to do better.

So his last piece for Gawker, in which he reveals himself as the mostly anonymous "Jeb Lund" and writes at gut-wrenching length about the damage the Internet can do to a person who deserves bad and receives worse, hit me pretty hard. In part because having this mystery lifted feels even more disruptive than the time my Sunday School teacher causally mentioned that there is no Santa Claus (not gonna lie, I always pictured him being black; Mobute and Santa, I mean). And in part for the very intimate reminder of what a terrible place the Internet can be. Mobute was forged in the fires of the Internet's most pitiless subforums and paid the price for his shenanigans there. His readers were generally unaware of that price, merely enjoying the caramelized fruits of what remained. Until yesterday. That's a reminder we could all use more often.

But I'm not so pained over the loss of his work, because we won't. This isn't the end for Lund's writing, it appears. Just of Mobute's. And, with luck, the start of something new for Lund. At the very least, Internet willing, we'll always have his archives.

Cheers, Mobute.