Coldplay, X&Y

On first listen, I found this album both overblown and cheesy. Consider the structure of the song “Fix You”:

• A verse, all about someone at the end of their rope and how the singer’s going to reach out and help them, sung in Chris Martin’s trademark falsetto with aery organ accompaniment.
• Second verse sung to same, with acoustic guitar strumming with increasing energy, leading to:
• Drums! Electric guitar! A big wall o’ sound playing the same riff over and over and over again.
• Both verses, this time sung by approximately twenty Chris Martins in unison with wall o’ sound accompaniment.

• The first verse, again, this time in Chris Martin’s trademark quiet voice, with subdued regular piano.

  That’s it. That’s the song. Basically one melody and a guitar riff, played on slightly different instruments, quiet then LOUD then quiet. Fini.

  And yet, dang it, it grew on me. The whole album grew on me. It almost never happens, in books or in film, that an initial judgment of something as “cheesy” ever gets replaced in one’s mind. You can come to like something that you found too slow at first, or too cerebral, or even too predictable. But too cheesy? Rarely. And yet, in music, this has happened to me time and again. The stuff gets under your skin. It seduces you.

  X&Y is no Rush of Blood to the Head, but it’s a solid album, and proof that Coldplay still has a subtle magic that will carry them far. In one of those “is Coldplay the best band in the universe?” interviews I read somewhere, when asked if he thought if his band was better than Radiohead, Chris Martin said: “No. But we will be.” I’m skeptical, but nevertheless: good luck, guys.

  The Killers, Hot Fuss

  It’s from last year, but I’m forever playing catch-up with music these days. This is the album that has finally unseated American Idiot in the highly-competetive “Stuff Nate Plays Really Loud When Driving Alone” slot. Average number of times that I listen to “All These Things That I Have Done” in a row: 2. Record number of times: 5. Great song. The band seems a little bit like a transplant from the 80’s—probably because of those synthesizers—but had they actually been around back then we wouldn’t need to be as embarrassed by that decade’s music.

  The White Stripes, Get Behind Me Satan

  If someone had told me beforehand that in the Stripes’ next album, Jack White would set aside his guitar in favor of a piano and a marimba, for Pete’s sake, I would have said “Ah. This is it. Convinced he can do no wrong, Jack White has decided to go all gonzo on us. He’s done gone and jumped the shark.”

  So now it’s official, I guess: Jack White can do no wrong. Get Behind Me Satan is awesome in a thousand unpredictable ways. The White Stripes rock the whole world.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has been occupying a hefty chunk of my free time for the past several weeks; it’s been great fun—the best game I’ve played on the Xbox since Halo 2. Now, as video games go, it’s rated M for Mature—the equivalent of a movie ‘R’ rating. The protagonist of the game, the guy who’s actions you’re controlling, is a criminal. Still, there’s something a little off in our society, when I can say “I like Goodfellas” or “I read Elmore Leonard novels” and few would bat an eye, but “I like Grand Theft Auto” garners the all-too-frequent response: “You play that game?”

Chalk it up to the age of video games as a medium—in the greater scheme of things, they’re still pretty young. Once any medium has been around for a while, individual works tend to be judged on individual merits: “That was a great film!” “That book sucked.” You’ll be hard pressed to find someone nowadays who would make a sweeping statement like “novels are bad for you,” but of course that’s exactly what lots of people said when novels first became popular. Video games are currently plagued with plenty of similar generalizations and misconceptions.

One particularly troublesome one is that “video games are for kids!” Well, no, video games are for whoever the individual games are made for. Saying so is just as silly as saying “fiction is for kids!” or “comic books are for kids!”—that latter one we’ve just about grown out of, though you still come across lapses from time to time. It isn’t even the case (and hasn’t been for many years) that “most video games are made for kids” or even that “kids play video games more than adults.”

Such misconceptions underlie a big part of the controversy over the “Hot Coffee” mod for GTA: San Andreas—a downloadable hack to the original game that unlocks sexually explicit content. Rockstar, the game’s publisher, didn’t create the mod, nor did they ever suggest that anything in the game was remotely appropriate for children. And yet we get statements like this one from Congressman Fred Upton:

It appears that the publisher has blatantly circumvented the rules in order to peddle sexually explicit material to our youth, and they should be held accountable. A company cannot be allowed to profit from deceit.

Rockstar, the publisher, is guilty of stupidity and immaturity. They created the explicit content in the first place, and when they decided not to include it in the game (probably fearing it would get an Adults Only rating instead of an M), they simply cut off the content from the rest of the game, but left the code on the disc. There’s no way they can feign surprise that someone found the content and figured out a way to unlock it—the modding community for the Grand Theft Auto series of games is huge, and Rockstar has even gone out of the way in the past to place hidden surprises in their games for those who hack them. So they had to know that the cordoned-off content would be found, and probably assumed it would create some buzz, but underestimated the response. Stupid.

Still, even if you grant that they should be held responsible for content not present in the actual version of the game (and also considering that any hacked version, while not uncommon, is technically in violation of the Terms of Service)—a shaky case at best—there simply oughtn’t be a controversy about adult content in a game for adults. The kicker is that the content in question is nowhere near as racy or explicit as plenty of scenes that you could find in rated R movies—and, given its pixellated nature, the titillation factor is nonexistent. Nevertheless, the ESRB has re-rated San Andreas with an Adults Only rating, which means that it’s been yanked off the shelves of Walmart, Best Buy, and plenty of other chains. Sales will take a big hit, needless to say.

Let’s pause here for a moment and consider what it says about our society, when a game that’s chock full of bloody and completely superfluous violence barely raises an eyebrow, but the inclusion of scenes depicting consensual sex creates a kerfluffle to the highest levels of government. That is very screwed up.

The ESRB’s move is questionable, but Rockstar dug their own grave on this one, so maybe they got their just desserts. But any further action, especially in the way of a political response, would be a big mistake.

Further reading: Greg Costikyan laid into Rockstar a while back, and recently laid into the “twits in Washington.” Both worth reading. Also see this incisive rant, via Boing Boing.

(Incidentally, unlike, say, Goodfellas, the violence in San Andreas is thoroughly superfluous and does nothing to enhance the artistic merits of the work. Those merits have to do with the incredible range of activities available in the game, the immersive, huge, continuous setting, and the designers’ meticulous attention to detail. When playing the game, there is a certain guilty thrill the first time you steal a car and start driving around like a maniac. But ultimately, it’s a great game in spite of the things that garnered it an M rating, not because of them.)

Best Batman movie made yet. That’s easy. How does it stack up against the best superhero movies ever? That’s harder to say, because in some ways it’s comparing apples and oranges. X-Men 2 and Spider-Man 2 are both excellent, but, though Spider-Man does quite a bit with the ol’ power ‘n’ responsibility theme, they’re both primarily action films. Batman Begins has plenty of action, but it is primarily a character study.

Christopher Nolan takes a tremendous risk in playing the story straight and serious. But with smart writing and impeccable performances behind him, he pulls it off. The Batman story is all tied up with revenge—doing it or not doing it—and fear—how to conquer it, how to use it. One of the classic Batman tensions is the thin line between Bruce Wayne and the loonies he squares off against, and this comes out clearly in the film.

Loved seeing Gary Oldman’s Detective Gordon, clearly modelled on the Gordon from Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One. Loved seeing the old-school Batman characters like Fox make an appearance, though admittedly I never read those original Batman comics in the first place.

Only quibble: the fight sequences are almost all frenetic blurs that are too hard to follow. At a couple of points this is the right move: in those first scenes after Wayne puts on the Batman costume, we see things from the thugs’ perspective, and the visual language is that of a horror film, where you’re not supposed to clearly see just what the thing that’s attacking is. But even in the more straightforward fights earlier and later, the shots are cut so quicly that it’s hard to pick up any clear narrative of the struggle.

Fear is everywhere in Batman Begins. In one of our first scenes we learn how young Bruce Wayne gained his fear of bats. It is fear of the corrupt and powerful that keeps good men like Gordon from acting against the system. The Scarecrow’s poison gas induces paranoid delusions that cause people to react out of fear—and Batman uses theatrics to induce a similar sort of fear in his foes. There’s that thin line between the hero and the villain—though the Scarecrow’s gas can make people fearful who mightn’t be otherwise, while Batman plays upon the inherent weakness in his enemies. There’s a message implicit here, one that comes through loud and clear by the end: fear is something you conquer, and acting out of it is a sure road to failure. It put me in mind of Tony Blair after the London bombings, and how telling Britons not to be afraid was one of the first things out of his mouth, and how similar language has been conspicuously absent from Bush’s pronouncements, post-9/11 and since.

Anyway—I don’t mean to say that this is a conscious or even prominent reference in the film—it was just something I happened to respond to when I saw it. Still, living as we are in a time when how we respond to fear is important, people could do a lot worse than go see this movie.

Warning: Unless you totally don’t care about spoilers, read Book Six before you read what follows.

Harry Potter fans will all remember the moment in Book Four when Harry touches the Goblet of Fire and is teleported into the graveyard where Voldemort, finally ready to take physical form again, has laid a trap for him. It’s when the bottom falls out of Harry’s, and our, world—what had once been a fairly genteel story about kids at a wizarding school becomes something far darker. Harry’s friend Cedric dies. The broader conflict of this seven-book series comes to the fore, with the familiar outlines of high-fantasy plotline: flawed good stands off against ultimate evil, with even the safe havens held most dear at risk.

All of this raised the bar tremendously for J.K. Rowling. And now, a couple more books in, it’s clear that despite the great things now afoot in her world, she insists on maintaining the formula of all the earlier books. Book Six, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, like its predecessors, still spends most of its time concerned with the ins and outs of the academic year at Hogwarts, and on the relationships and growing pains of Harry, Ron, and Hermione. The plot, like that of its predecessors, is an intricately crafted magical mystery. The tone does not fundamentally change—at no point, despite the high stakes, does it ever approach anything that would merit the term “epic.”

Thank goodness for all of that! Rowling shows restraint in keeping her story tied to the everyday experiences of Harry and is friends (at least until the final chapters, when, as with Books Four and Five, the rollercoaster kicks in). And either she got a grip on her overwriting or her editor started cracking a whip—Book Six is considerably shorter than Four or Five, though still closer to Four than Three. (It may appear longer because it went back to the larger font size of the earlier volumes. But Book Five is now the clear outlier in terms of length, as well as the only book so far that is markedly longer than it should have been.)

Halfway through I realized that: 1) it was still unclear who the antagonist was, 2) the conflict that held the most interest was whether Ron and Hermione were going to get together, and 3) that that was just fine with me. By that point, too, not only has Harry not engaged in any particularly heroic action, but he’s busy cheating in Potions using the marginalia in his used textbook, once the property of the mysterious Half-Blood Prince. Hermione has also cheated in order to get Ron on the Quidditch team. And Ron spends most of the book acting like a grade-A asshole. They are all self-absorbed, and tend to make selfish decisions. In other words, they’re behaving just like the teenagers they are. And, befitting a story about teenagers, questions of Who’s Going Out With Who dominate the middle section of the plot. Why wasn’t this incredibly annoying? Simple: we know these characters, we have watched them grows up, and time and again Rowling nails gets the psychology of their situation exactly right.

Though I’m overall very happy that Book Six keeps its attention on the characters—that there are no big battles ‘till the very end, and that Voldemort doesn’t even show his face—one downside is that the buildup to the climax, in the form of Harry being suspicious of Malfoy and Snape, gets old after a while. There are a handful many scenes in the form of:

HARRY: But listen, guys! Draco is up to something!

RON a/o HERMIONE: But Harry, we think you’re making too much of it.

And the other letdown is that, at the end of the day, all of Harry’s suspicions turn out to be entirely justified, just like they always are. He was right about Draco being up to something. He was right that Dumbledore shouldn’t have trusted Snape. What’s different is that this time we as readers are held (successfully, I think) at a point of uncertainty about whether Harry is right or not; that counts for something, though I found myself wishing he was wrong and thus a little disappointed when he wasn’t.

I’m still not entirely sure what to think about all the Pensieve Chapters, in which Dumbledore takes Harry through a stroll through the memories of people who encountered Voldemort early in his life. Ultimately they add up to a whole lot of exposition—an info dump about Voldemort’s background that Rowling tries to make less cumbersome by spreading it throughout the book, though it’s still basically an info dump. Viewed purely in the context of this book, those chapters are unforgivable—all they’re doing is providing background on a character who doesn’t even show up. But viewed in the context of the whole series, and especially Book Seven, I have a feeling they’ll be essential. The Pensieve Chapters also give us lots of Dumbledore—more dialogue with him, I suspect, than the rest of the books combined. And it’s good stuff, too, not just Dumbledore being the enigmatic Headmaster, but one who’s starting to confide in Harry as an equal, preparing him to go it alone because, as he surely must suspect and possibly even expect, his own days are numbered.

The War on Terror analogies come on strong in Book Six. (A while back I noted a “memo to John Ashcroft” section of Book Four.) The struggle against Voldemort and his Death Eaters is a war only in the same imprecise sense that the WoT is. Their actions are, so far, exactly those of terrorists—not blatant attempts to conquer, but attempts to undermine and sow fear by striking at anyone, anywhere. And, as it is in the real world, the government (in this case the Ministry) is making plenty of mistakes in dealing with the situation. Stan Shunpike, imprisoned in Azkaban just so that the Ministry can be seen to be Doing Something, is a transparent reference to Guantanamo. But here, too, Rowling’s focus on the mundane redeems what might have been a hamhanded bit of political finger-waving—her real concern is how the kids and parents alike must contend with the fear of a constant and ambiguous threat, and that part, from Mrs. Weasley’s constant worries to the tense conversations at Hogwarts about whose parents are pulling their kids out, Rowling gets just right.

The rollercoaster starts the minute Harry nearly kills Draco with the Sectumsempra spell he learned from the Half-Blood Prince. He’s unwilling to face the dark implications of the act, and before he has time to truly face them, he learns of Snape’s role in exposing his parents (a little too conveniently, I thought), and before he can contend with that Dumbledore is whisking him off to the cave. Suddenly, a plot which has been leisurely ambling along kicks into high gear, and before we can blink, Dumbledore is dead.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, I strongly approve of the de-mystification of Voldemort’s background. Again, this is not epic fantasy—it is fitting, even necessary, that we see Voldemort’s history and his relationship to Hogwarts. He is no longer E-vil, but someone for whom an inexhausible desire for knowledge, coupled with a basic inability to love, yields a personality prone to the dismantling of his own soul. The Horcruxes will make for some convenient plot milestones in Book Seven, but they’re also an outgrowth of Voldemort’s magpie-tendencies and an ironic symbol of the self-destruction he’s engaged in while in pursuit of immortality. Going into the final book, he’s still the Big Bad, but now he’s one that’s three-dimensional.

And the Cave, oh, the Cave. Great chapter. Dumbledore’s last hurrah—and what fun it is to see him in action, too. We see the subtlety of a powerful magician, and always his understated humor, even as he moves toward his death. Does he know it? That’s not entirely clear, though I hope we’ll hear a little more from him (maybe through his painting?) in the next book.

We have a bit of Tolkienesque recovery going on in the form of the Inferi. They are, basically, zombies, as common a fantasy bugaboo as you can find. But because they haven’t been seen before in Harry’s world, and because of the fear and awe the kids express when contemplating them, and of course because of the way they’re perfectly described in the scene itself, they become terrifying and new, as if Rowling was the first one to invent the concept.

And, of course, there’s Snape. He has always been one of my favorite characters in the books, and always one I felt got a bum rap. I always hoped that beneath his gruff demeanor and his obvious dislike of Harry was a guy who would do the right thing when the time came. And room was left for this, right up until the bitter end. In the excellent scene in chapter two, Snape wins the trust of the Death Eaters by making them think he knows from Voldemort what Draco’s mission is—but, if you look closely, at no point is he forced to demonstrate this knowledge. At the time I assumed he was still Dumbledore’s mole. And, I say with more self-congratulation than is probably warranted, I had him pegged as the Half-Blood Prince fairly early on, and loved the fact that Harry’s ace-in-the-hole was knowledge gleaned from the one professor he despised.

The upshot is that when Dumbledore was slumped there at the edge of the Astronomy Tower, and it was clear that Draco was not going to be able to summon the will to kill him, and when Snape arrived on the scene, I really really thought he was going to turn against the Death Eaters and save the day. And when he didn’t, I felt, not the “I knew it!” rage that Harry must have felt, but the deep-down sense of betrayal and disappointment that must have been going through Dumbledore’s head before he died. And the power with which that moment punched me in the gut is more than enough reason to forgive Rowling for taking things a different direction than I might have liked.

But I can’t resist a little bit of speculation on the future redemption of Snape. As I noted, it’s still entirely possible that he was lying to Bellatrix in chapter two about Voldemort confiding in him about Draco’s mission. But it quickly became evident that the only way for him to gain their trust in him was to take the Unbreakable Vow to assist Draco in his mission. And that vow is, y’know, unbreakable—so perhaps, in that moment when he nailed Dumbledore with an Avada Kedavra, he was still doing what the vow compelled him to do. And, again—and it would be so cool if this is how it plays out in Book Seven—maybe Dumbledore knew all of this was coming, and realized that the only way to get Snape in position to strike a crucial blow against Voldemort and redeem himself was if he himself was allowed to die in this manner.

Yeah, that would rock. Ms. Rowling, feel free to steal this idea. I won’t tell. (and see the update, below)

Anyway, even though it shocked me while I was in the moment, in retrospect, Dumbledore had to die in this book. This way we get the post-Dumbledore Harry—grown-up, innocence lost—for a whole book. It became clear in the past couple of books that Dumbledore really was incredibly powerful, to the point where a showdown with Voldemort didn’t have quite the necessary sense of tension while he was still around. But while that he would die was inevitable, the way Rowling manages to wring the last drop of tragedy out of the moment isn’t by making it more violent or by throwing in a few extra deaths, but by making it for nothing—Harry and Dumbledore didn’t even get the Horacrux they set out to find. There’s no upside, no “well, if they hadn’t gone, X or Y wouldn’t have been possible.” The upshot of the whole book is that the good guys got creamed, pure and simple.

All this sets us up for Book Seven, which looks like it will be very different from the others. Harry & Co. may not even return to school—if Hogwarts opens at all. The familiar formula of Books 1-6 will likely be abandoned for something else, and, while I praise Book Six for sticking to that formula, I think the time is now right to break the mold. Let’s see our heroes get out into the world. Harry’s stance at the very end—carefully cultivated all through the book by Dumbledore—is one of determination, not despair. His readiness to get out there, find the Horacruxes, and bring Voldemort down is inspiring. Get out there and kick ass, Harry. Two years is going to be awfully long to wait.

UPDATE: As is so often the case, getting a chance to talk about the book with others has helped clarify things, and now I wish I hadn’t softpedaled the whole notion that there’s something more than meets the eye with Snape going on. Thinking about it more, it seems self-evident that Dumbledore knew what Snape would do. My friend Julia also pointed out that in making sure things went this way, Dumbledore was protecting Draco. This is true both of his soul—making sure that Draco had a chance to kill him but realized he couldn’t—and his body—ensuring that Draco’s mission wasn’t a failure so that Voldemort wouldn’t just kill him outright.

So yeah, my estimation of Dumbledore, and the book as a whole, has been kicked up a notch or two since first writing about it. (see also James’ point in the comments.)

UPDATE2: Don’t miss the comment by Anonymous, who theorizes that Dumbledore ain’t really dead, and has some very interesting textual tidbits to back it up.

. . . to Polytropos, now two years and two days old.

A “year ago”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/2004/07/birthday_blog.html, I said I could imagine what a blogslump might be like. I think it’s safe to say that since then I’ve fallen into one. Post-election doldrums sort of bled into a general sense of bloggui — which, I say somewhat optimistically, I think I’m pulling out of. At any rate, there’s a whole bunch of stuff that I _mean_ to write about in the next couple of weeks. Harry Potter! Boardgames! Grand Theft Auto! There — now that I’ve said it, I’ll have to do it.

Here’s looking to year three: may it be more proliferous than year two!

“James Doohan, 1920-2005”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4701167.stm

“Which theologian are you?”:http://quizfarm.com/test.php?q_id=44116. Via “Ed Hand”:http://edhand.com.

I was a little surprised at my result . . .

You scored as John Calvin. Much of what is now called Calvinism had more to do with his followers than Calvin himself, and so you may or may not be committed to TULIP, though God’s sovereignty is all important.

John Calvin 67% Anselm 47% Karl Barth 47% Friedrich Schleiermacher 40% Paul Tillich 40% Charles Finney 33% Augustine 33% Martin Luther 33% Jonathan Edwards 27% J�rgen Moltmann 27%

Which theologian are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

. . . since my answers to a lot of those questions have changed since college, when I actually thought of myself more or less as a Calvinist. But, as the blurb notes, the guy himself was his own thing. Kinda quirky sometimes.

Of course, I am in no way qualified to judge the overall integrity or accuracy of the quiz. I invite any reader who is (Jeff? Chris?) to take it a bunch of times with different answers and comment on its tendencies and biases.

Time was, when another Harry Potter book was coming out, it was a simple matter to reread the first few in order to remind oneself about what has happened. No longer. I made the mistake of starting Book 5 _without_ having reviewed Book 4, and was constantly losing track of stuff because of names or events I had forgotten. Smarter this time around, I went out in search of a detailed synopsis of Book 5, expecting to find it at one Potter fansite or another. Turns out, though, that the real goods are at good ol’ Wikipedia. Check out their excellent synopsis “here”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Order_of_the_Phoenix.

Not only are we on the cusp of a new Potter book, but Cormac McCarthy’s long-awaited latest, _That Is No Country For Old Men_, is due out just a few days later. Maybe I’ll alternate reading chapters from each, just to blow my mind with the contrast. On second thought, nah, the world’s crazy enough as it is.