Author: Gil

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!rebmiT

During the summer, my office is only open from 8am to 1pm on Fridays. It’s nice of the owner of the company to give us that early start to the weekend. Since Amy doesn’t get out early from her job, I usually take the extra Friday hours to get a bunch of errands done.

Today’s errand-circuit took me to Home Despot (Remington 3.5 HP electric chainsaw), the local Lukoil (a quart of motor oil), and Chik-Fil-A (the grilled chicken combo with the waffle fries is All That).

Then, fortified with Chik Courage, I set to work slicing up the tree last seen lying across my driveway:

Well, first I warned my neighbors across the street, “If you hear the chainsaw stop, followed by a wet thud, give 911 a call, then come over and try to find any limbs or fingers of mine that are still in the driveway. If you could pack them in ice, I’d really appreciate it.”

We all laughed nervously.

It turned out fine, given that it was the first time I’ve ever used a chainsaw (yeah, I wore work gloves and protective glasses), but there was one kickback that almost severed my right leg. And that taught me not to crouch down to the same level that I was cutting.

The glorious results?

Some of the pieces I cut it down to were a litte too large, so my back is sore as heck from hefting them up into the wheelbarrow, but the big work is all done. (I swept up after taking that pic; I’m such a blog-tard.)

Let the weekend begin!

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Free Market Dance Dance

BizWeek offers an essay on how failed videogame platforms are good for the business:

Of course, whereas a market leader’s role is to provide stability, there is a difference between stability and stasis. Ideally, the “big guy”, whoever it is, must represent the basic ideals of the medium as it currently stands; the moment it no longer provides that representational force, the entire industry begins to shift on its foundation. People grow restless, lose interest because videogames no longer “speak” to them. Intuitively, new users won’t be attracted by an industry that doesn’t seem in touch with where it’s going or where it is now. Sales slump; everyone blames everyone else, and the industry just becomes all the more conservative because if it doesn’t know where the draft is coming from it’s best just to wear a coat to work, leading the spiral ever downward until someone steps out of the crowd and realigns the industry with its principles, creating a new status quo — as Nintendo did twenty years ago, as Sega kind of tried to do five years later, as Nintendo’s trying to do again today.

The thing is, by nature the most vital area of the game industry lies not so much the mechanics of the upper echelon of the industry – rather, it rests below the radar of your typical analyst, in the dark, greatly loved yet poorly exposed corners of the market. Though by popular definition you might well call them failures, without your Sega Saturns, your Atari Jaguars, your Amigas and GameCubes and NeoGeo Pocket Colors, the industry would be an autocracy, governed by a single dictate — indeed, one of limited perspective and shallow, if broad, concern for growth.

For the record, official VM buddy Sang & I played the heck out of the NBA 2K2 game on the Sega DreamCast.

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Timber!

Amy & I met up with official VM pal Elayne & her (feverish and delirious) beau at Chow Bar in NYC last night. I had a fantastic meal, with the summer(time) rolls and the szechwan angus steak, with matchstick french fries. I also drank a pair of Typhoons, so I’ve now had two hangovers-without-getting-drunk in a week. That’s no fun.

We got home around 9:30 and found the following in the driveway:

I’ll probably pick up an electric chainsaw tonight at the Home Despot. If I don’t post for a while after this weekend, it’ll be because they haven’t reattached my fingers.

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Da Boot

After the World Cup, Bill “Sports Guy” Simmons (as opposed to Don “No Soul” Simmons) decided he would start supporting an English Premier League soccer team, and asked his fans for advice on which team to support. The massive article that resulted makes for some fun reading.

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noToryous?

My buddy Mitch once praised the Grateful Dead, not for their music–which he detested–but for their ability to get money out of hippies. He considered that one of the strongest legacies of the 60’s.

Conversely, this writer at the Herald (UK) contends that Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh, who recently “came out” as a Tory, is a traitor to the cause.

Of course, people’s views change over time, and there’s no shame in that. There’s nothing more common than for a youthful socialist to evolve into a middle-aged Tory. What is distasteful about Welsh’s apparent volte-face, however, is that he has made his fortune from exploiting a grotesquely picaresque community whose brutal existence has provided the most colourful, horrifying, virulently anti-establishment material for fiction since Balzac’s backstreet Paris.
While with one hand Welsh was guddling a hungry readership, many of whom had scarcely seen a book since school, with the other he was holding a champagne flute at Edinburgh’s New Town soirees.

Moreover, despite the “guddling,” she (sorta) knew it all along:

From the start of Welsh’s career doubts have been raised about just how closely his widely reported wild behaviour matched reality. Former colleagues at Edinburgh City Council remember a dapper, punctual employee who, they said admiringly, “could have gone right to the top of local government”. Even as his novels were being devoured by the poverty-stricken, the addicted and the terminally unemployed, he is believed to have been dabbling in the property market, and we’re not talking council houses.

Needless to say, I think she’s an idiot, even when she concludes that drug dealers are the “most successful capitalists of our time.” After all, Renton doesn’t really want to deal; he just wants to get away to Amsterdam, be a DJ, and live with a model. Is that so wrong?

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Everyone’s a critic

NYTimes movie critic A.O. Scott wonders why people go to bad movies, and why the hell he gets up in the morning:

For the second time this summer, then, my colleagues and I must face a frequently — and not always politely — asked question: What is wrong with you people? I will, for now, suppress the impulse to turn the question on the moviegoing public, which persists in paying good money to see bad movies that I see free. I don’t for a minute believe that financial success contradicts negative critical judgment; $500 million from now, “Dead Man’s Chest” will still be, in my estimation, occasionally amusing, frequently tedious and entirely too long. But the discrepancy between what critics think and how the public behaves is of perennial interest because it throws into relief some basic questions about taste, economics and the nature of popular entertainment, as well as the more vexing issue of what, exactly, critics are for.

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The Hebrew Hammer

I haven’t written about the war that broke out between Israel and Lebanon this weekend because I don’t know what to say.

I feel like I did in the months after 9/11: tracking all the wheels-within-wheels, trying to understand who stands the most to gain from which actions, whose decisions may backfire, which groups will break from their traditional responses.

As you can guess, I’m paralyzed. All I can do is hope for the safety of my family and friends (including my buddy Mitch, who’s reporting from Beirut), and for a quick, decisive end to hostilities.

I don’t think that’s going to happen, but the status quo hasn’t been around for years.

With all the heaviness out of the way, I offer you proof that I’m still a retard who goes for cheap laughs.

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Pynched

When I was a wee paranoiac, I heard that Vineland was soon to be released. At that point, I’d only read V., and Lot 49, but I’d made a stab at The Big One (it took 4 attempts before I finally made it through).

I read the notice in Pynchon Notes that the long-awaited new book from was soon to be released. As it turns out, the book wasn’t very good, and I’m convinced he put it out to keep his publisher off his back while he completed Mason & Dixon. But at the time, it felt like a bit of literary history was going to occur.

In fact, I actually had a dream about Vineland before it came out. I was in a bookstore, and there was a large “dump” of the new hardcover, several months early! I picked up a copy and thumbed through it. When I woke, all I could remember of that dream-book was the back cover flap. It had an author bio that read, “Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow. He lives in New York City.”

Below the text was a beautiful black-and-white photograph of an empty loft. Even as a teenager, my subconscious liked to mess with me.

All of which gets me to the following question: Wouldn’t it be great if the book actually kept this title?

(Update: Slate contends that Pynchon may have spammed his own book’s Amazon page)