I don't want my brother coming out of there with just his joystick in his hand

So I just got The Godfather game for the Wii. I had a coupon from Amazon for pre-ordering Harry Potter, and I had to spend twenty bucks to get the rebate/discount/whatever, so the game wound up costing me about twenty-three dollars. Which seemed worth it. I'm still just begining to play around with it, but I do love using the wiimote to punch people. It's just cooler than simply pushing a button. I have no idea if I'll get tired of this (either mentally or physically) after a few hours, but thus far I dig it. At any rate, it looks like it is more respectful to the Godfather legacy than number 3. (Zing! GF3 jokes are the cutting edge of cinema humor)

Metroid Prime 3 also comes out today, which I want. And I needs to get me a classic controller so I can play some SNES games with a more appropriate controller.

Also, there's a new Aesop Rock album out. I need more money to keep up this lifestyle.

"And maybe Adil has point about the machinery of capitalism being oiled with the blood of the workers" (Sorry. I'm watching season one of The Simpsons while I'm typing this up)

This Month's eMusic Downloads (August)

The Magnetic Fields- 69 Love Songs- The third and final volume. Mainly so I can read the 33 1/3 book about the album.
Smithsonian/Folkways- Classic Mountain Songs
MC Shan- Down By Law
Rev. Gary Davis- Pure Religion and Bad Company
Graham Parker- Don't Tell Columbus
Aesop Rock- "Coffee" and "The Next Big Thing"
Nick Lowe- "I Trained Her To Love Me"
The White Stripes- "Death Letter"
Jimi Hendrix- "Like A Rolling Stone" Live at Monterey Pop

A weird mix, really.

Some TV thoughts, apropos of nothing

So, the tenth season of The Simpsons came out recently, and of course I bought it immediately (even though my back account was perilously low after the Wii purchase). As most of you should know, by the tenth season the show had begun the decline that continues to this day (although the movie was a welcome oasis of non-disappointment). Watching the episodes again, there were a few more laughs and good moments than I remembered, but my opinion really hasn't changed. Plus, the commentaries were some of the worst yet. I don't know if this is because of A) The realitive low quality of the episodes, B) The fact that I've never been a huge fan of Mike Scully or Ian Maxtone-Graham (Yes, I know that having opinions about individual Simpsons writers is incredibly nerdy. I don't care. Actually, Scully wrote some good episodes, but was a relatively terrible show runner) or C) The huge amount of work that the entire staff was putting into the movie at the same time as they were producing the DVDs. Al Jean, who is one of my favorite commentary personalities, only stays for about 10 minutes on one commentary track, and Matt Groening is absent for a number of episode commentaries.

Anyway, in order to cleanse my palate, I've been watching the third and fourth seasons on DVD, and I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the Simpsons might be the best television show of all time. Usually I have it ranked second or third with some combination of The Sopranos and Seinfeld. If you throw in South Park and Six Feet Under, you have a pretty impressive top 5 of shows all starting with the letter S. Just something that always struck me as odd.

Sorry I have nothing more interesting at the moment.

Some thoughts on the Wii

I saw Stardust tonight. I really liked it. Go see it, and find other ways of giving Neil Gaiman your money. He really deserves it more than you do, if you stop and think about it for a bit. (Other people who deserve your money more than you do include Shigeru Miyamoto, Mark Teixeira, Paul Westerberg and the late William Blake).

But that's not what I want to talk about as I try to get to sleep. I want to offer a few thoughts on the Nintendo Wii after about 10 days or so of owning one. (See how the Miyamoto reference earlier made the segue way more smooth? That's the kind of extra value you get here.)

I've been thinking about video games way too much lately (this is partly to blame on a podcast I came across called Retronauts that talks about old video games and I've been listening to obsessively) and it struck me that all three of the current generation of consoles has some key flaw. The PS3 costs way, way too much to even consider owning for someone like me, the XBox 360 breaks down way too much, and the Wii needs a bunch of good games to come out pretty soon if it wants to escape the spectre of being simply a fad.

With Metroid Prime 3 about to drop, and new Mario and Smash Brothers games on the horizon, the problem of not enough quality games might be solved soon, but I am curious if game developers will be able to make use of the whole wii remote thing, instead of being handcuffed by the unique controls. For example, being a big fan of the X-Men Legends games, I want to play the Marvel:Ultimate Alliance game, but the reviews for the Wii version pretty much all bitch about the control scheme. I've seen similar complaints about the new Madden game for the Wii.

The good news, theoretically, is that since Wiis are still flying off the shelves there will be a lot of incentive for game developers to produce games for the system. One of the key problems with the Gamecube and the N64 was the lack of a lot of quality non-Nintendo games, and the Wii should be able to avoid that.

Right.

I guess I don't actually have any insights.

Broken Guitar Strings, Bullets and Bible verses: Searching for the new old America

Thirty years after Elvis died and we've lost our way. How do we find our way back, or is that impossible?

Liner Notes for a mix cd that isn't done yet.

Tame a new land and you will wind up with dusty, bleeding knuckles. The blood stays on the strings, like Liam Neeson's blade in "Gangs of New York". The new scriptures were simply waiting to be written, just as the fourth of July was always a day waiting for a revolution.

The land was simultaenously explored and created, by patriots and pioneers and prophets, slaves and martyrs and saviors, gunmen and sailors and confidence men and salesmen and glorious charlatans and disgraced true believers. The sounds that Nick Carraway heard when he saw New York with the same eyes as the first settlers and the voices that Ahab heard are the same sounds and voices we hear when we listen today- that wild thin mercury sound of "Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again". The sounds of traveling Highway 61 with Woody Guthrie and Tom Joad riding shotgun (even if Tom Joad never rode that highway, he still did, you know?) as you plunge deeper into the bayous haunted by Jesus and Katrina. The music that Arthur Dimmesdale tried to lash out of his own body, equal parts Anne Hutchinson and Kim Deal. What the Redcoats heard when they found themselves face to face with Mike Watt and the Minutemen, who met them with muskets and promises that their band could be your life. The kind of music that coud only come from a country where Jerry Lee Lewis is cousin to Jerry Falwell. Where we drink wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee, and pour coca-cola just like vintage wine. The kind of a country where Johnny Cash wears the black to atone for the sins of Thomas Jefferson. To navigate these wilds you need Lewis and Kerouac to guide you, a compass and a Hank Williams album.

Victory!

Well, not so much victory as I bought a Wii today. I also picked up WiiPlay and Super Paper Mario. It's cool.

Some Kind of Truth Emerges

I've been reading Greil Marcus again, which is never a great thing for my thought patterns. The man is one of my true heros, but his idiosyncratic, all-encompassing ways of thinking are infectious, especially for someone who harbors fantasies of writing the new version of "Mystery Train". (The fact that I just recieved a hardcover copy of his most recent book, "The Shape of Things To Come" from amazon for 5 bucks suggests that I'm once again failing to look at the economic angle of things in this ambition). But, having just finished reading "Double Trouble", which collects Marcus' articles of the 1990s, I'm now begining to think way too much like Marcus. I was watching Gojira (the original Japanese version of Godzilla, and a damn fine film, if you haven't seen it- I promise it's way better than you think) I began thinking of the relationship between our favorite giant lizard monster and Elvis Presley. The timing nearly works perfectly- mid 1950s. Both figures started out revolutionary and legitimately "artistic" (whatever that might mean given our subject) but during the 60s and 70s both were softened and declawed and made safe. I'm pretty sure normal people don't think this way. Then, when Bonds hit number 756, I started thinking about Godzilla again, and Elvis, and how Bonds was like both in weird, more or less meaningless ways. I think this is the kind of thing that gets worse before it gets better. You have to go through to get out.

Right now I'm listeing to a lot of Gram Parsons and Graham Parker and the Byrds and Sonic Youth. I'm trying to write something that sums up all of the ideas about Elvis that have been kicking around in my skull for two or three years. I'm still looking for some kind of proper job (or at least something that looks enough like one to avoid the real thing). I'm planning on buying a Wii on Friday. I'm cautiously optimistic that the Braves series with the evil Mets will continue to go well. I'm in slight shock that last night, when I was flipping through channels during the commerical break for a rerun of Law & Order SVU I heard an Aesop Rock song (Food, Clothes, Medicine) on an episode of Dog: The Bounty Hunter, of all fucking things. I spent the weekend re-watching the last two seasons of Arrested Development for the Jagger only knows how many times. I'm reading rock criticism and Nabokov. Everything is different and nothing is different. Like Roger Clyne sang, I don't need a miracle, but I could use a push in the right direction. Or maybe not that drastic. Things have often been much worse, just more clear. When the music is this good, who really cares? And when you can convince yourself the most pressing issue is whch game or games you're gonna buy on Friday for your new system, and Gram Parsons is singing "She", things are good in a wicked and weird sort of way. A friend of mine told me today that what I really need to be doing is writing my first novel right now, and you know what? She just might be right. I might even have an idea for it, even better than my bizaare conviction that what the world really needs is a screenplay inspired by Boogie Nights about the creation of Pong and the formation of Atari.

Waiting for the gift of sound and vision, I abide.

Playlist

Nirvana- Oh Me (Unplugged)
The Byrds- Going Back (Notorious Byrd Brothers)
Replacements- Alex Chilton (Pleased to Meet Me)
Buck 65- All There Is To Know About Love (Cretin Hip Hop Mix Tape)
Kanye West- Stronger (New Single)
Big Star- Thirteen (#1 Record)
Bob Dylan- Blood In My Eyes (World Gone Wrong)
A Tribe Called Quest- Can I Kick It (Peoples Instintive Travels...)
Sonic Youth- the first four tracks off of Daydream Nation
Talib Kweli- Going Hard (The Beautiful Struggle)
Elvis Presley- King Creole
Elvis Costello- Tokyo Storm Warning (Blood and Chocolate)
Ramones- Pet Semetary (Brain Drain)
Neil Young- Shots (Re-Ac-Tor)
The Pretenders- Back On The Chain Gang (Learning To Crawl)
Bauhaus- Bela Lugosi's Dead

Oh. And if you've read any sports coverage lately, you might have noticed that every article about Tom Glavine winning his 300th game (I'm glad Tom made it, but every Mets win is a small dagger in my heart at the moment) mentions the possibility that Glavine will be the last pitcher to win 300 games. Do not believe this. This is not true. Another pitcher will win 300 games. It might not be very soon, but it will happen, and in most of our lifetimes. People said the same thing when Maddux won his 300th (and it just kills me a little that both Glavine and Maddux hit this milestone in uniforms that were not Braves uniforms). Yes, it is harder to win 300 games in the era of specialized relief pitching and the five-man rosters, but it is not impossible, especially as we see more and more pitchers going strong into their forties. If I had to pick a current pitcher to win 300, I'd take Dontrelle Willis, especially if he winds up with a team that is consistently good (we'll see if the Marlins ever enter a period of sustained winning, instead of the sporadic championship success surounded by periods of low budget overacheiving mediocracy that has characterized the franchise.

Anyway, that had been bothering me.