Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness

It took me much longer than I thought, but I actually finished "Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness", originally released in 1980. Had to use a DOS emulator as well. The game itself is very similar to Ultima IV, which I played on my brother's Commodore 64. One thing that took me quite a long time to adjust to - there's nothing to look for in the dungeons, their sole purpose is to fight monsters. Another thing - you actually have to kill the jester to win, so there goes your morality. Expectantly moving onward to Ultima II.

An afterthought - It maybe that you can steal the key and avoid killing the jester, but i'll have to start over for that. Fuck Karma.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

'No matter how dreary and grey our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home.'

The Scarecrow sighed.

'Of course I cannot understand it,' he said. 'If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably live in the beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no people at all. It is fortunate for Kansas that you have brains.'"

)L. Frank Baum, The WonderfulWizard of Oz(

The first half of Baum's book is surprisingly close to what you would expect after watching the 1939 Hollywood classic, grey Kansas included. The mostly unknown second half however is much more reminiscent of Carroll's Alice's Adventures. A great wall made of China is one of the clearer Carroll style nonsensical wordplays. This nonsensical allusion also draws the attention to another Odyssey which is even closer to The Wonderful Wizard - the Chinese "Journey to the West".

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Taleb's Black Swan has its fair share of problems. Quite a few parts of this book tend to step into the wrong side of personal, and its length is not equally balanced by its scope. To make matters worse Taleb spends the first 80 pages of this book stating the problem of induction. The books main problem though could be ascribed to something Taleb never actually puts into words – the attribution of this book to the genre of 'Popular Science'. Economists jokes aside, this is not a popular science book – it is not wide enough in scope, and not as half as coherent and robust as works more commonly attributed to the genre (i.e., works by Dawkins, Penrose, Pinker and so on).

Most popular science books try using the accumulated wealth of knowledge in a doctrine in order to show the scope of implication of a simple theory. Like many popular science writers Taleb has a thesis. What he lacks is a doctrine. The plethora of facts and details are not the outcome of the theory in this case, but rather its crutches. Even worse is the fact that there is no real plethora here – Taleb tries to convince us that he roams freely between Economics, Philosophy, Mathematics and Cognitive Sciences, when, in fact, occasional name dropping aside, the philosophy is quite absent, the Economics and Cognitive Sciences do not form a coherent whole, and the math is nearly nonexistent. The miles long bibliographical list shows exactly that – Taleb can speckle his book with Cicero (in Latin mind you), Umberto Eco , Russell, and quite a few others, he may try to present himself as the tie-loose intellectual – but at the end these are all drowned in 30 pages long list of very strictly within disciplinary borders Economics and Cognitive sciences articles.

The failures of this evangelistic book disguised as popular science, however, do not tell the whole story. When Taleb focuses on his life experiences he can be very perceptive. The few pages dedicated to the hardships of everyday life for long-term strategists, for instance, are quite outstanding both as a literary feat and as a robust psychological-sociological hypothesis.

Cultural Theory: The Key Concepts

An index of this lexicon of key concepts in cultural theory should have been split into three parts: Habermas, Lyotard and all the rest. It is almost uncanny how these two creep up into almost every single term. Besides this somewhat unexplained over representation the choice of terms could be described as delightfully idiosyncratic, but so it is in every lexicon. I appreciated the introduction of terms taken from the world of art, usually missing from such lexicons as if to blur the debt cultural research owes the Humanities. Other oddities, such as the full 10 pages dedicated to Quine's Holism seem at odds, to put it mildly, with the two short sentences dedicated to "Code", or the single paragraph dedicated to "Gender" and "Intertextuality".

One very annoying tendency on numerous terms, including all those regarding Psychoanalysis, is the attempt to give them a complete definition as seen in their domestic territory. Beyond being completely unusable to the non-Illuminati, this type of definition could be ascribed to an attempt at writing philosophy but it neglects completely the historicity of the term: I don't want to know what it means, if it can mean anything at all, I want to know how the term is used.

There are a few exceptional terms that are really excellent – most of these being the terms that their mere inclusion is a surprise. As such, it seems, their contributors seemed to be writing with less of the weight of the world on their shoulders. One such term is Theology, which neglects to mention anything except Christian Hermeneutics, but then again the subject is always fun. "Metaphor" could hardly have been improved.

The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932-1940

What starts out as the gnarly somewhat comic correspondence of these great minds, becomes a full-fledged tragedy, gun in first act included, in its second half. The never accomplished/always talked about meeting between Scholem and Benjamin becomes the utopian meeting point for the political and theological, as well as a missing point of solace for both Benjamin, as he moves knowingly onto his annihilation, and for Scholem, as he watches knowingly the Jewish entity he so wished for acquiring features taken from its worst enemies.

The Kindly Ones

The Kindly Ones might not be the "first masterpiece of the 21st century" as some critics hailed it, but it is certainly a powerful work and its scholarly groundwork is quite literally breathtaking. Besides the ethic qualms, which I see as beside the point with regard to this multifaceted book, the greek/musical structure remains a burden and does not give the story sufficient robustness.

SPOILERS: Two more thoughts. I found it strange that nobody referred to the allusion to Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita literally spelled out by Dr. Mandelbrod/Leland in the very last episode. I thought the Leland/Voland was a simple one. I wonder about the possible existence of a historically documented Thomas Hauser.

The End of Mr Y

The blurbs on the back cover of The End of Mr. Y have all the right names praising it, including Phillip Pullman (His Dark Materials) and Douglas Copland. The novel itself could be described as a rough integration of Pullman's philosophico-theological trilogy with Borgesian scholastic thought experiments and an added dash, or even more than a dash, of Gibson's Neuromancer.

In many ways Thomas succeeds in creating a well written and realistic day-to-day life for her young scholar heroine in the first half of the book. The heroine herself seems better constructed than almost any character presented in similar books and the scenes of day to day low budget lives and dialogues have more than an edge of acute perceptiveness. This emphasis on the strong realistic tone seems to be one of the things Thomas wanted to put into the book as part of its comprehensive "thought-text experiment" scheme.

The same scheme which brightens up the first part of the book is also the exact cause of its downfall in the second half. Thomas constrained the writing trying to create a Never Ending Story type of book where reality and text meet. In order to achieve that the heroine delves into a destructive self reckoning on a path that might suggest that suffering for truth might bring on a reality where fantasy really exists (and it does). Such narcissistic goals – and I don't mean this in any bad way – can not be met with anything except failure if one wishes to achieve it with anything but the most religiously intended texts.

A couple of points where the text of the first half of the book comes off as unrealistic seem indeed to be misfires more than anything else. Such a moment occurs when two post-grad students in Biology and Theology give the heroine blank stares when she brings up the topic of Quantum Physics. It would be a strange couple indeed if they have managed to assemble so many off-curriculum activities or even in-curriculum activities in order to be able to escape the inevitable occasional mention of the concept in all of their years in the university. Nevertheless, Thomas is very good with creating believable non-identical characters and she exhibits her superior character skills delving into the minds of various mice and cats on the scene.

The general philosophical outline and suggestions the book brings up could be summed up as a Derrida meets Augustine – an idealistic world where consciousnesses create reality with a very nice use of the "History is but a single moment" theme. Having said that, Derrida read Augustine and did not come up with such a radical philosophy. Together with Heidegger, Derrida gets quite a few mentions in this book. This seems to be intended to give the book a more scholarly feel and achieves in doing the exact opposite.

One thing I have realized during the reading of the book is why Scientology is so effective: institutionalized religion has never been able to give a very satisfying answer to the Copernican revolution and to its after affects, namely the belief in the existence of other intelligent species and the existence of inhabited planets besides earth; even Thomas, with a very radical retelling of the story of Genesis has not been able to bridge this gap.

White Teeth: A Novel

White Teeth is a solid debut. The first few hundred pages are a bit overworked and cumbersome, and the literary flare, metaphors and clever observations do not exactly form a good working relation with the plot. Still, as the story continues Smith gets into her pace and things come off quite nicely. There are a couple of pieces that seem to be bits of texts that were gathered in the table drawer - the school ground's fragmented and bordered Geography is one. These bits are condensed with literariness and less ambitious in terms of infusing them with plot. They are also very solid, to say the least.

Despite the shaky start and the hum-drum feeling some parts of the text give off, when Smith succeeds in proportioning the cleverness with plot (not necessarily the "literariness") as she does in the first few pages of the "Chalfan Family" episode the outcome is remarkable. I liked this book. Having said that, the "big finish" contains many inadequacies including outright plot inconsistencies, This is something the editor should have done something about. All in all however the somewhat uneven level of writing can be overlooked in view of the few extraordinary bits.

Jitterbug Perfume

Jitterbug Perfume is too clever for its own sake, too new age for my sake and too long for anybody's sake.

It's quite funny at parts, but I'm much a bigger fan of somewhat similar in style Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Hunter Thompson and a few others. I also like my books with a much reduced dosage of lecturing. In terms of writing when Robbins gets a hold on his clever bone he is ok, but the book still has oh-so-many plot lines that come off into nothing really exciting. It feels as if they are playing the mortar bits for all that preaching that goes on.

It is true that I have something anti-New-Age. This is not because of basic assumptions, or at least the more bluntly obvious ones. "Control your thoughts and you can control everything": Instead of arguing about its truth or falseness I would rather discuss the nature of this statement. For some reason this sentence is regarded as optimistic which seems to me to be, at the least, necessary of justification. Thoughts are not as that easily manipulated. The problem remains - humans are social beings. Our thoughts, so to speak, are not just our own. In short, The Matrix seems problematic without a V for Vendetta.

As Phoebe says after kissing Rachel - "I've had better". (Yey for me another Friends quote)

Rich Dad, Poor Dad

I read this book on a certain weird turn applying for an analyst’s position in a fancy strategic financial advisors company. Don’t ask how or why, but I did and they went along. The first thing I wanted to achieve was a proper mindset. Hence this book.

On the upside this book was intelligent enough to disturb me. On the downside at times it was so mind numbingly obtuse that I was literally left without words. Such is the case with the story about the young woman that had aspirations of becoming a writer and wanted to know how she can become rich. Kiyosaki's answer is that she should find a job as a saleswoman, writing over the weekends. He continues by saying that up to the point of writing he still can not understand the reasons that made the young writer storm out. Indeed, his answer was absolutely wise and truthful: writing is not the best of ways to become wealthy. What he fails to understand is the oh-so-obvious fact that what the young lady REALLY wanted to know is how she can become rich by writing. This case about sums up the narrowness of this book: for Kiyosaki money is freedom and power and hence happiness - when working one has to make sure that he is actually making money. In short he equates “working” with “making money” - when you work and the work you do is not making money for you, you must be kind of dumb.

Infuriating, as you must understand. Infuriating, but, to a very large extent also very true. What Kiyosaki unwittingly presents is a programmatic combination of Marxism with the sociological insights of Bourdieu, turned into a success book. Marxism would note the inherent gap between the possibilities of the rich and those of the poor. Bourdieu further adds the difference in accumulated cultural wealth - the differing notions and practices. Kiyosaki specifically refers to the different notions with regard to economics. The rich and the poor do not view money, or economics, in the same way. To sum his views, for the rich economy is a game (though a deadly serious one), for the poor it is a matter of destiny-History. the rich think about ways for making money, the poor think about ways to get jobs. The difference may seem trivial but it is not: as the Marxist view suggests lending yourself for a paycheck is the absolutely worst way to accumulate wealth.

There is also a historical lesson that can be learned here. Class barriers in our age are not necessarily material, they very well might be, at least to a degree, socio-psychological. The practices of the rich can be learned. But in order to do so, you must view yourself as part of the game. If you have a problem doing that, well, basically, not-meaning-to-be-offensive-or-anything, you're screwed.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Just finished reading the seventh part of the saga in the British version. First things first: I really liked the small octavo size and the very handsome proportions. The recycled paper seems to be a bit lighter than usual, and though bulky the book is fun to hold in hand. I also liked the cover illustration which is more than the usual tip-of-the-hat to the Discworld series graphics. In short, it's a fun book to have.

Just to get this out of the way, I'm not a proper "Harry Potter" fan. On the other hand I do like the series and appreciate what went into writing it. Besides, most of the stuff that I mentioned in my 60 pages long "The Enchantment of the Modern: A Critical Intertextual Reading of Harry Potter" from 2003 was on mark, so, yey for me, I guess.

So. The plot is solid, with much more skill put into the narrative then, let's say, in the first four books. That means that you won't find here the usual hum-di-dum school stuff 9/10 through, and all the action left to a helter skelter of 20 pages in the end, or the deus-ex-machina solutions. Rowling even lets go of the public school backdrop that helped her so much to create the series, a backdrop that in the last few volumes grew less and less relevant to what goes on in the main plot.

Despite some 200 pages of somewhat indifferent reading the book really takes off at about page 350. The plot is thick, but not overcrowded, the tempo high, and the crescendos calculated is if by a slick Hollywood producer.

I read some reviews that say that the book leaves one a bit emotionally detached. While finding this partially true I really think that the real end of an epic saga is a tricky business: the somewhat detached mellow hue is a usual mark of such endings, and so it must be - you cannot just hammer out ongoing emotive escalation onto infinity.

JKR kept at her tricky game of being "gory" but not overly "mature" in this volume. For the first time, or at most the second, the sexual topic is hinted at in the domination-subversion relations the characters go through. Brutal rapes, or something close to it, can be discerned behind the somewhat sweet flashy-greeny-"evil" which makes most of the fleshing out of "bad things happen" in the series at least twice. This does not mean that this volume gets anything close to the more common "when a sword goes through you your shit comes out but that won't stop you from getting raped if you're a woman" type of "life sucks"-fantasy that is so abundant these days, but, it's still more than can be trivially expected.

I'm not so sure that ALL the various little plot lines really got the attention they deserve, but then again you can't get everything. I For instance, would have liked to see one of Percy's puns appreciated for what they are. This has not turned out to be my wild fantasy dream last volume "Neville Longbottom and the Deathly Hallows" where you see Harry inconsequentially dying off in the first two chapters, but, financial advisors and public lynching considered, it remains a solid, well written, if not overly surprising, satisfying finish to the saga, and that's saying a lot.

Good on you JKR, and, yes, it is going to stick around for quite a while.

The Princess Bride

What a perfect movie The Princess Bride is. As in Spinal Tap, another true joy, what Rob Reiner succeeds in doing (with the help of Goldman's amazing script) is the perfect parody – a parody that also works on the level of the genre – in this case a "true love" story. This movie has so many memorable quotes (some would say the whole script is a memorable quote), and so many hilarious scenes (Miracle Max and his wife) that one can almost overlook the genuine sincerity that shows through. There is also more than a hint of something darker here – the sincere friendship of psychopath sadists of Count Rougen and Prince Humperdink would have a cinematic equal only 20 years later in the image of Dexter – a 13 episodes long series that seem to expound on the warm conversation these two exchange when down in the pit of despair.

Cashback, 2006

Saying that Cashback is Darren Aronofsky plus tits would be a bit harsh, but not too much so. I haven't seen the short film, but the full feature, though beautifully shot, tends to outrun itself and turns all gooey and sticky at the end. The concept of art presented here is very naive and the ideas about the sort of artist who gets his works presented in fancy galleries is even more so. Though presented as a thoroughly male point of view film the very much sexist presentations of women cannot be justified by any political agendas and must be assigned to a somewhat immature scripting. There are some good acting performances (the Supermarket manager), and there is also a tendency to leave the camera on for just a split second after all the important stuff takes place giving it a slightly more New-Wave feel. When all is said and done, "cute" would be my highest praise.

Songs From the Second Floor

Roy Anderson's film is slow, surreal and depressing. This should not be necessarily bad - slow, surreal and depressing can be many things. It can be lyrical, as in Bela Tar's "Werkmeister Harmonies". it can be extravagantly visual, as in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "Delicatessen". It can even bask in the artzy-schmartzy glow of its creator and its own creation (Lynch's "Erasurehead"). "Songs from the Second Floor" shares all of the above, but it does not do so in a sufficient level to make the viewing rewarding. in many ways this movie hit me in all the wrong directions as it dampened my already soaking wet spirits – it might be the case that such "no redeem is possible" films should only be seen in a good mood.

On the upside the serious lack of lackluster might be balanced by Anderson's cinematic language. Anderson has a very acute understanding of spatial relations and unlike many others he succeeds in making the 2D screen seem very 3D, not just in terms of visual data but also emotionally. The scenes are not merely crafted – they are in a very concrete way sculpted. The closest match to this visual tinkering would have been "Erasurehead" had not Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle presented a much more adequate match with its strong emphasis on spaces. What all these "creations" have in common is the painstaking realization of a "mood", a feeling, a single headstrong director aims at and achieves in an "epic" production. In this sense the film is a realization of "being Roy Anderson" as much as it is about anything else.

Surprisingly this film has a host of critics hailing it. It was even called "Bergman meets Monthy Python". As for me - I didn't quite see how this would be the right description. It is not, despite what people say, funny (and I guess that that's what the critic meant), and Monthy Python have always dealt with death and God. I guess that the allusion specifically addressed a scene where a man is being sawed into two by a magician and starts yelling and needs to be taken to a hospital to be stitched up. This might have been "Pythonesque" had the man been amputated, or "Bergmanessque" had he simply died. But it is neither. He suffered. Small pains but none that could be called heroic, pains that lead to despair more than anything else.

It is the dear sister Despair, as depicted in Gaiman's Sandman series that this movie hails as its master - apathy, inconvenience, static states. In another scene a salesman buys some large plastic crucifixes in order to make a killing in the pre-millennial angst ridden market. When the deal is done he says that he "has a cross to bear", and indeed in the following sequences we see him trudging through the plot with a large paper wrapped crucifix. It is in this bodily, overly concrete no-place-for-allegory state that this movie dwells – despair is not "pain" as such. It is the negation of meaning or transcendence. Yet in the few sequences that have the score rising from the background we are made to remember that despair's twin sister is desire and that the two, as the Socratic insight goes, cannot be separated.

Avalon, Mamoru Oshii

Avalon achieves quite a rare thing by being wholly and completely one of its kind. A blend of Ghost in Shell with La Double Vie – this Oshii meets Kieslowski makes for an interesting watch if only for its oddity – a Polish speaking anime with real life photography (heavily digitalized of course). The main battle fought here by Oshii – directing animation vs. directing photography - is not successfully fought out: what goes for somber or urban in the static animated characters in conventional Anime passes on as pure bad acting, or rather undirected acting, in real life photography. As can be seen in the special features included in the original DVD Oshii is constantly using the “will work on it digitally” phrase. The photography for Oshii remains just another Gizmo.

On the brighter side, seeing the eastern European scenery as a possible place for sci-fi is very rewarding: the modus vivendi created by the dominance of the American film industry makes our (mine) visions of the future very much American. Thus to remember that Poland too will be part of our future, not forgetting Stanislaw Lemm, of course, nor Tarkovsky’s amazing Sollaris and Stalker, makes for a breath of fresh – sepia toned – air.

While the film presents some tantalizing moments the extra features included in the original DVD, despite being overly long, are a true joy. A documentary showing Oshii trying to cope with the Polish crew and the crew's uncomfortable experiences presents some extraordinary sequences. The embarrassment at the endless singing in Oshii’s birthday is probably one of the most rewarding sequences in all of the DVD, film itself included.

The Lives of Others

"The Lives of Others" is a well-made drama. The plot - a Stasi officer gets involved in the lives of a bohemian couple and "switches" sides - is quite trivial, but the pace is right and the photography, with its consistent lack of Hollywood glamour does tons of good. Be it as it may, and important as the theme of oppression under totalitarian governments is, this film cannot be described as overly political as it shows us only that which we already know: bad guys are bad, good guys are good, and those who are in between - are in between. The realistic bits about the methods of interrogation – its banality, infallibility and simplicity - are among the best, presenting the contextually justified reduction of the human psychology to bare stimulus-response.

Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy

If there's anything that kept a steady form in film history it's the solo male comedian flick. Each of today's top leading solo comedians (Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, Rowan Atkinson) takes on one of the leading figures of the 20's and the 30's: while Rowan Atkinson lovingly restages whole scenes from Keaton (the pool scene from "The Cameraman", for instance), it is Adam Sandler who does so for Harold Lloyd, the 20's "third comedian". And rightly so, for Sandler's sensitivities, as well as his penchant for Cinderella stories, fit perfectly with Lloyd happy-go-lucky, yet not overtly funny films. There is hardly a laugh out loud scene in Lloyd's films but they are all feel good movies. It takes a while but once you start realizing that Lloyd is bashing out almost anything and everyone in his society (including some outright racial gags) one can find in him, as much as in Sandler, some Diogenesian qualities. In fact, like Howard's "Conan the Barbarian" influence on fantasy fic, Lloyd's influence, and his typical Cinderella flicks, are much more conventional in today's cinematic culture then any of his better known contemporaries, be it Chaplin or Keaton.

Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, 1931

"Tabu" stands somewhere between Flaherty's Nannook, Murnau's "Sunrise", and, of course Merian C. Cooper's "King-Kong" (Flahrety cooperated with Cooper on a previous film). It is part of the legendary explorer/documentor/producer heritance so elaborately illustrated in King-Kong, and beautifully rendered in Peter Jackson's version. In fact some scenes from King-Kong seem to originate from Tabu. The story is short and simple as most stories in the silent tradition: Reri and Mahti are south pacific lovers, Reri is put under a tribal tabu (by a letter :)) and the tragedy unfolds. Watch for the dance scenes, their vibrancy is equaled only in Ekberg's La Dolce Vita scene.