This past week I was attempting to recover from two months of crunch on Epanalepsis (it’s coming along great), and I made a small game called Vomit Bear. I made some mouth sounds music and enlisted the help of a lot of wonderful people who made sprite art for the game.
Let me know what you think in the comments!
Discontinuity becomes continuity only once it has entered the movie-viewer. It is a purely interior phenomenon. Outside the viewing subject there is no movement, no flux, no light in the mosaics of light and shadow that the screen always displays in stills. But within ourselves, we get the impression that is, like all the other data of the senses, an interpretation of the object, that is to say, an illusion, a ghost.
– Jean Epstein, The Intelligence of a Machine
A great video across the board.
The irony that I can’t shake “Shake the Disease” is not lost on me. I listen to music in little ritournelles, a French-y word for saying that I get stuck in audio ruts as a mode of habit. I listen to tight constellations, but like any constellation, too much gravity tends to muck it all up in the end. I might listen to the same three or five songs over and over again for a week. After that I might never listen to them again.
“Shake the Disease” has lasted for some reason, entering a pantheon with Murder By Death’s “I Came Around” and The Hold Steady’s “Hurricane J.” I don’t quite know what’s grabbed me about this particular Depeche Mode track (although I enjoy the silence as much as the next fella.)
It might have something to with the vulnerability or the recognition that an object of affection might elicit a response so strong that all one can do is deal with the response itself rather than the elicitation. The lyrics are some sort of half-love song, but so many things operate this way; hell, my own response to the song is caught in a similar adaptive loop.
And, y’know, that video is pretty daaaaaaaamn.
There’s a temptation to say that popular interpretations of blaxploitation has even lost their racialized content, but there’s often a toothless trace. In Funk of Titans, after players beat a set of levels they face off in a rhythm-game dance off against white musicians. First, an “ancient pop” star who’s a cross between Lady Gaga and Medusa, then a leisure suited-Disco Cyclops (whose music genre is “rap” for some unknowable reason?), and finally “What if Eddie Van Halen was a Centaur.” In the climactic showdown, there’s a brief gesture toward the appropriative history of rock: “Please,” Perseus says, “Rock is just jazz without style!” The coding is clear: Jazz, like Funk, is black. Rock is white. But rock isn’t just white, right? It emerges from Jazz and other historically black music. And there are plenty of black rock artists. Like so many modern takes on blaxploitation, Funk of Titans wants to leverage the sexiness of racial conflict without getting its hands dirty, so to speak. There’s room for the righteous brother, but no place for him to explain that “the genre you think is ‘yours’ was built on the back of un- and underpaid black musicians.”
And, it feels, there’s little place for the rest of the deep variety of blaxploitation, either. Those films were about black folks being on screen together, doing any number of things besides Funk-Fu. Black protagonists sleeping with black lovers and laughing with black best friends. Sometimes they were action films and sometimes they were comedies. Sometimes they were period pieces, even! Like you said: the films are inextricably tied to the context of its time, and they certainly have problematic tropes of their own right. But if we must have blaxploitation games (and “New Blaxploitation” works at all), it should reflect the wide array of possibilities in the genre AND our contemporary contexts. Lord knows we still got the need for black folks on our screens.
“Blaxploitation and Derivative Works: A Letter Series on Funk of Titans“
The fascinating thing about all of this to me is that Funk of Titans understands “blackness” as an aesthetic skin devoid of lived and embodied content. I interpret the developer’s reasoning here as a partial understanding of how genre works, seeing it as merely a layer to be added to a substrate of a game type as opposed to a vital part of the connective tissue of the game. Greece becomes interchangeable with any setting; the blaxsploitation hero becomes a type among many.
The Twitter bot method of game creation.
You might know Varoufakis as the new Greek Finance Minister who basically has the world by the throat. I came to know him via his previous job at Valve as a market analyst/director/weird practical research guy. When he was at Valve, he was solving problems around aggregate wealth and dealing with inflationary markets; he seems to be doing the same in Greece.
I love the video above because Varoufakis’ Marxism is laid bare. He cares about process and knotty problems, and he has literally zero time for any theory of economics that doesn’t take those very Real issues seriously. I also enjoy that he takes the Piketty phenomenon to a meta and ideological level in order to contextualize it while explaining that critiquing it as a phenomenon. He doesn’t say that Piketty produces a particular ideology therefore he is bad. Instead, he says that Piketty produces bad ideology that doesn’t sew up the problems that it claims to, which could allow for some real assholes to dismiss Piketty too easily. That’s the kind of critique I’m down with.
Above all, I enjoy Varoufakis because he’s clearly a theory-heavy thinker who wants to make that theory available to the public in a graspable way. He’s packaging for educational consumption, and I think that’s some of the best public intellectual work that one can do.
And yet, on reflection, Rifkin’s examples turn out to be anything but collaborative at their heart. Companies such as Uber and Airbnb are fiercely profit-driven, taking large cuts from all the exchanges they facilitate. They are middlemen themselves, albeit somewhat more efficient and open than their predecessors. What’s more, the digital payment systems that underpin their services are also highly centralised and very expensive. Rifkin unintentionally highlights this when he claims that the ‘web-facilitated scaling of financing brings the marginal cost of lending to borrowers to near zero’, only to clarify that Kickstarter takes 5 per cent of all funds raised on its site, with another 3 to 5 per cent going to Amazon Payments. Those costs are not even close to zero. They represent (to borrow a phrase) a vampire squid attached to the face of the Collaborative Commons.
– David Z Morris, “RoboCorp“
Technology fashions are almost always pushed by a combination of old established money being fronted by wunderkinds, and they’re almost always young, white, and ready for something new. Worth remembering that the children of this technological revolution are the same disaffected postteens that fueled fascism of all sorts (in the US and abroad) in the early 20th century.
Go here to listen to John Carpenter’s new album Lost Themes. I’m buried up to my neck in work right now but good ole John Carpenter is keeping me solid.
Culture is a paradoxical commodity. It is so completely subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly equated with use that it can no longer be used. For this reason it merges with the advertisement. The meaningless the latter appears under monopoly, the more omnipotent culture becomes. Its motives are economic enough. That life could continue without the whole culture industry is too certain; the satiation and apathy it generates among consumers is too great. It can do little to combat this from its own resources. Advertising is its elixir of life.
– Horkheimer and Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment p. 131
Particularly salient in the age of corporations hiring their own content producers and advertisers in one fell swoop.
In Philip K. Dick’s The Simulacra, there’s a tiny, ill-defined creature named the papoola. We never see a real papoola in the novel, but instead several characters interact with a robotic replica of the papoola (shades of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
The real papoolas, the organic kind, live on Mars. Communication between the colonists there and the people on Earth, the land of robotic papoolas, is sparse; the real papoolas might even extinct. The robot papoolas only exist to fulfill a single function: they sell things. They trick a mind. They make you feel good–good enough to approve someone’s trip to the White House or buy a car you don’t need so you can emigrate to a planet that you don’t want to go to.
The papoola emerged from beneath the Loony Luke sign, and Al caused it to waddle on its six stubby legs toward the sidewalk, its round, silly hat slipping over one antenna, its eyes crossing and uncrossing as it made out the sight of the woman. The tropism being established, the papoola trudged after her, to the delight of the boy and his father.
“Look, Dad, it’s following Mom! Hey Mom, turn around and see!”
The woman glanced back, saw the platter-like organism with its orange bug-shaped body, and she laughed. Everybody loves the papoola, Al thought to himself. See the funny Martian papoola. Speak, papoola; say hello to the nice lady who’s laughing at you.
That quotation is from early in the book, but the papoola appears over and over again as a plot device that gets lots of characters from point A to point B in a nearly-magical way. The papoola is ubiquitous. The papoola triggers happy thoughts. Attaching the papoola to anything immediately makes it palatable.
To some degree, the papoola is a stand-in for many mediated animals in the age of the internet. Funny cats and dogs serve the advertising, eye-catching function of the papoola. We could find/replace “papoola” throughout the novel with “Grumpy Cat” as a mode of updating the text and it would remain fundamentally unchanged.
The papoola controls minds. What does that say about animals on YouTube?
[Weirdly, writing this post reminds me of this other post on the quizzle.]
this cage is worms 