the weekly thing: mass of the fermenting dregs

hi, welcome to my fourth weekly thing. this hazy monday evening i'd like to talk about a band i've been listening to on my commutes hither and thither, japanese shoegaze phenomenon MASS OF THE FERMENTING DREGS (hereafter referred to as: motfd, for simplicity's sake, and also to encourage such a violent amalgamation of letters).

music is something i'm still learning to write about. it's a medium that, in my opinion, does everything it can to keep from being nailed to paper. lyrics are not enough to fully grasp any good song—if that were the case, let it be a poem or creed. lyrics are also unnecessary, and if present one need not always understand them to feel the weight of the music. at least, that's my fledgling opinion. growing up in a conservative christian background, i've had my fill of ham-handed lyrics, and from a young age began to avoid them altogether.

like any good web-based millenial growing up, the gateway drug of anime soon busted up and infected any and all previous hobbies and interests i had—the games i played became japanese-made (JRPG's, etc.), the cartoons i watched became anime, the movies and music i listened to, etc. etc. i was fanatical about GACKT and Utada Hikaru, had a crush on multiple anime characters (we can safely narrow down the timeline of my sexual awakening to this hazy no-man's land of pre-pubescence), etc. etc.

all that being said, from a younger age than most, i was steeped in a world of music so different from my physical surroundings'. i didn't (and still don't) understand much japanese beyond the typical bits that you learn via osmosis with years and years of subbed anime, but it never stopped me from being able to enjoy and emote with the music. it was almost as though the voice became the instrument and the language different notes and chords..

anyway, motfd is great. a shoegaze band formed in 2002, breaking up in 2010, and getting back together in 2015. the music is energetic and exhilarating. despite the language-barrier, the tunes are catchy and are guaranteed to get lodged in your head. beyond that, i don't know much of them at all and prefer it that way (to an extent, because i obviously wanna know when their next album drops, etc. etc.), because it becomes almost magical—songs that sink in your soul and speak to you in ways you might not fully understand yet. music from a far-away land that feels fantastic and surreal with its neon superflat (ironically). because the song's not telling you how to feel explicitly through lyrics, it's almost the most honest way to experience music.

i recommend it for boring drives, essay-writing, drawing, and running. i do not recommend it for conservative parents, mentioning at work, or playing aloud on your phone while you're walking on the sidewalk (which people do all the time with everything???).

my verdict: i'm not very good at talking about music at all, but you should still check out motfd.

the weekly thing: the underground railroad

hi, welcome to my third weekly thing. this (very hot and uncomfortable) monday afternoon i'd like to talk about a book i read for my monthly book club, Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad.

if the title was any indicator, it is by no means an "easy" book, which is simultaneously its strength and weakness. given the gravitas, it demands a certain amount of terror to even remotely begin to respectfully approach the subject matter (the enslavement of the consequently African American). though it's not the cat-of-nine-tails or the brutal punishments that await captured slaves that fills the reader with dread, so much as the feeling of futility in america; if a slave were to escape, where would they even go? what could they possibly do to secure peaceful livings for themselves and any family they might have? how could they scrub away the traumatizing lives they'd lived hitherto?

should the book have ended with this trajectory, it would have remained a brutally honest teardown of the american dream. thankfully, author Colson Whitehead's vision is not without hope, though it is certainly less "biblical" as one typically finds in accounts trying to alleviate the horrors of the early american slave-trade, openly-critical of the flawed theologies of the past and the theologies forgotten today. his answer instead: the revelation of the mythical underground railroad.

though the underground railroad in reality had nothing to do with trains or subterranean tunnels, this book has everything to do with them. cavernous mouths that defy explanation, whose origins are shrouded in mystery, filled with ornately decorated stations and their charismatic and heavily symbolic conductors. at the revelation, Cora asks a stationmaster who built the fantastic roads. ominously they reply, "who builds anything in this country?" the sublimely treacherous tunnels are shifting metaphor for many things, but perhaps the most damning is revealed in this quote from the aforementioned conductor:

Cora and Caesar climbed into the [train car] and Lumbly abruptly shut them in. He peered between the gaps in the wood. "If you want to see what this nation is all about, I always say, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you'll find the true face of America." He slapped the wall of the boxcar as a signal. The train lurched forward. (p.69)

with the case for the mythic cracked open only pages before, the reader is left to interpret what the conductor meant. as Cora and co. hurtle down the tracks towards their uncertain fates, they have nothing to hold on to but each other and a hope that must defy the strength of the powers that be.

my verdict: read The Underground Railroad.

the weekly thing: wong kar-wai's Chungking Express

hi, welcome to my second weekly thing. this monday evening i'd like to talk about a movie i saw earlier this week that's really stuck with me, Chungking Express.

Listen while you Read!

there's something intoxicating nowadays about the mundane for us 20-somethings. maybe it's envy, or simplicity; it's hard to look at the world we live in and find much to be excited about at face-value. in a society increasingly anxious about its future, gems like wong kar-wai's Chungking Express reveal the fantastic wonder hidden in the noise of everyday living. the film is comprised of two stories, loosely connected through character interaction, but universal in themes of love and estrangement. for the initiated, it's the closest we'll ever get to Haruki Murakami in film (if not, yell at me and tell me what else is), so if only for that reason check it out.

between the hapless detective's ritual of "jogging until there's no more water in [my] body to waste on tears" and the beat-cop's pep-talks with his lover's forgotten tchotchkes (btw, both the dudes are cops, and that is sorta confusing in the middle), the film oozes with an intimate familiarity for those survivors of the silent break-up. no closure, and no chance of returning to the way things were, these characters wander the no-man's lands of their (now) singular lives, carrying ghosts in tins of pineapple and plastic airplanes.

after recently watching "your name.", i sat aghast in my theater-seat; could i ever experience the Greatest Love i possibly could outside of some Fantastic Intervention (the threads of fate unwinding, interdimensional travel, some special revelation)? how could i be sure in any relationship that wasn't shattering the earth at every moment with Inexplicable Love? thankfully, the afterglow wore off and the Borgesian garden of forking paths that my emotions had wrought began to unfurl before me, leading to a simple, cool clearing wherein sat this film.

Chungking Express is a reminder that the lives we lead are beautiful, that they are lovely, and that even a simple love can be a great love.

my verdict: watch Chungking Express. (i watched in on FilmStruck, which i just highly recommend in general if you like film)

the weekly thing: tumbleseed

hi, welcome to my first weekly thing. this monday i'd like to talk about a game i've been whittling at for the last week (without much luck, but plenty of fun), Tumbleseed. 

Tumbleseed is best described as a (literal) delicate balancing act between a roguelike (procedurally-generated levels, loss of items at death, notoriously difficult, heavy on replay value (think Mystery Dungeon, Faster Than Light, Spelunky, Diablo, etc.)) and the most intense game of marbles you've ever played. using a vine, the player is charged with rolling a seed back and forth while ascending a mountain-path, avoiding precarious holes and a host of unique enemies along the way. although the path is randomly generated upon each play, nothing about its gameplay is unpredictable—rather, as any good roguelike, its mechanics are ironclad and your only surety in the shifting world. 

securing different power-ups (30) upon your ascension, each play-through is a vastly different experience as you learn to adapt to the hostile mountain's environs. one play you might find yourself blasting your way through with the laser-flowers or the pistol-seed, while another might see you stealthily climb using the cloak-seed or the jump-seed (my nicknames, as i've never kept one long enough to remember the name). the possibilities are as endless as they are unpredictable. on paper the journey may seem short-lived, sojourning through 5 areas before facing the game's end, but lord knows that aside from divine intervention you'll be spending plenty of time in the forest (like me) before you're even fit to slay your first lip-snake (again, my nickname, but i sure hope they're actually called lip-snakes) or narrowly divine your way across't the holey grounds consistently.

(there's the lip-snake!!! i hate it!!!!)

i like Tumbleseed a lot!! and many of the same reasons that i enjoyed Spelunky (although a very different game) are found here as well. it's one of those games whose mechanics stick with you outside of the game; i find myself constantly balancing the mouse on my computer screen and tilting my phone absent-mindedly when scrolling (slowly!!) through content, as though i'm subconsciously fine-tuning my motor skills for my next journey up the mountain. it's a difficult game to master, but i think that makes it a game that's all the more enjoyable for just being a fun game to play. when i mentioned "whittling", i really meant it. the reward in playing isn't manifested in achievements or unlockable content, rather in the pure unadulterated fun of becoming intimate with a cunning and beautiful (beautiful!!!) world. the game's soundtrack is fantastic, and at moments is reminiscent of Disasterpeace's stunning soundtrack to indie game FEZ. the game also reminds me of the similarly organic plot-line'd Studio Amanita's Botanicula: seedlings righteously seeking to fight for the greater good (wayyy less drug references, though.. make of that what you will).

Tumbleseed is only $15, which is a fantastic steal for this terrifying(ly cute) pinball "roguelite". i played it on my Nintendo Switch, which i think is the ideal setup as it's one of the first 3rd party games to really realize the use of "HD Rumble"—it actually feels like you're rolling a marble from left-to-right and that Flabbergasts me.

my verdict: play Tumbleseed.

(images from tumbleseed's official website, except for the last one, which is from my own righteous journey ✊ )

the "the weekly thing" thing

Hey, and hello, as part of me getting back into the swing of writing and distracting myself from: my future, politics, the eventual heat-death of the universe (classic!!)... I've decided to write about a thing I'm doing, weekly. I want to keep it similar to my recently-annual practice of "consumed" entertainment, so it'll be things like a movie or film I saw, a book I'm chugging through, a game I've played, or an article or some such that I've read. Things Like That.

I'll just keep it simple. Something like a paragraph. I like to be pretty brief elsewhere when presenting my opinion on stuff people should check out (see: my facebook), so here will be a nice little corner I can kinda unpack my interests (or un-interests) a bit.

I'll try to post once every Monday..

We'll see!