January 27, 2008 - February 2, 2008

Endless Love for the Owls

Filed under: Local Music

Now that Peter is gone, it is my job to listen to the Owls new disc Daughters and Suns over and over again, to marvel at how awesome they are, and to fret over the possibility that there might yet be a member of the City Pages readership not yet exposed to their bright sweet wonderfulness.

So please, watch this new Owls video for their song Channel. Honest-to-god profesh director Phil Harder worked with the band on it. You can also download my current most-abused Owls song "All Those in Favor" at the beginning of Peter's fall article.

Posted by Sarah Askari at February 1, 2008 1:14 PM | Comments (1)

MN Folk: Big in Madrid?

Filed under: Local Music

I meant to post this awhile ago, but over on MNSpeak, local illustrator and occasional Electric Arc Radio Show performer Andy Sturdevant pointed out that some crazy cool Spanish art mag wrote up a big feature on Minnesota's current folk scene. Roma di Luna, Meg Ashling, the Floorbirds (who?) and Mike Gunther were all written about in a piece that begins on page 20 of the January 2008 issue. You can download a PDF of the whole thing on the Calle 20 website.

The press came as a surprise to some of the artists highlighted--"I didn't know anything about the article. They procured the photos through the Dutch Label that released our last record, Rosa Records. It was a cool article, though," Gunther wrote in an email. It's kind of awesome that Spanish people, who are better than us because they have mad scientist chefs and lunatic architecture and tapas and also got the Mexicans to speak their language even though we live right next door, have found something to admire over here! Okay France, now you say something about our scene that you like.

Posted by Sarah Askari at January 31, 2008 7:13 PM | Comments (3)

Minnesota Book Awards Finalists Announced

Filed under: Books

Now in it’s 20th year, the Minnesota Book Awards announced its nominees this week. Helmed by the Friends of the St. Paul Public Library, four authors were nominated in each of the eight categories by 24 judges from the state.

Nominees include Kevin Kling’s hilarious tales of life with a dog in The Dog Says How, Jim Walsh’s oral history The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting, and Wing Young Huie’s colorfully fascinating Looking for Asian America: An Ethnographic Tour. For a complete list, check out the Friends website here. Feel strongly about a local author? Visit Twincities.com during March to take part in the Readers’ Choice Awards.

Posted by Jessica Armbruster at January 31, 2008 5:31 PM | Comments (0)

Burnout Paradise: No Particular Place to Go

Filed under: Video Games

Go to the GameFAQs review site for Burnout 3: Takedown – widely regarded as the best entry in the critically acclaimed go-fast-and-crash racing series – and note the number of laudatory writeups in both the PS2 and Xbox versions’ player review sections that say something like “I typically hate racing games, but…” or “this is the only racing game I’ve really liked”. (I hate to make you do the legwork there, but I personally gave up after about ten, not including the misguided soul who claimed to hate “realistic racers like Project Gotham” – apparently “you need to brake” is too strenuous a demand.) I tend to have a pretty uncharitable view of that whole outlook: usually when someone says something’s [x] for people who don’t like [x], 9 times out of 10 the people who really do like [x] will find out that there’s not a lot of substance for them beneath all the mass-appeal diluting. I try not to be one of those people that always gripes about the “sheep” who keep buying Halo and Madden titles, but as a racing game aficionado -- and by “aficionado” I mean “insufferable snob” -- Burnout is my one weakness: if it’s the only racing game you’ve ever made it a point to enjoy, all I can say is you’re missing out on a hell of a lot. Did you know that Forza Motorsport 2 lets you drop an all-wheel-drive Nissan Skyline drivetrain into a ’69 Datsun Z? How is that not awesome?

But the real problem I’ve always had with Burnout, which I’ve enjoyed off and on since the first game was released back in 2001, isn’t specifically that it appeals to people who don’t like racing games -- it’s that sometimes it seems to be made by people who don’t like racing games. Sure, each game in the Burnout series comes achingly close to matching the kind of all-out white-knuckle craziness one would hope for from a game so heavily centered around blistering velocity and the pyrotechnical consequences of directing said velocity into a bridge abutment. But ever since Burnout 2: Point of Impact, the breakthrough title that established the series as a populist success, each successive title saw someone at Criterion and/or EA usher in some huge mistake. Takedown had a notorious flaw where the AI-controlled cars would always hang right off your ass no matter how fast you drive and how many times you wreck them, but the moment you wipe out they get a 30-second lead that they never relinquish. Burnout Revenge was a bit less bullshit as far as AI went, but the challenge – which previously owed a lot to the encouragement of a daredevil weaving-through-traffic driving style -- mostly disappeared, thanks to the “traffic checking” feature which turned most civilian vehicles from a dangerous obstacle to a flimsy target you could bat away like a wayward aluminum can. And while Burnout Dominator put a bit more focus back on straight-up racing, it lacked much of the over-the-top havoc (and the mildly sociopathic, puzzle-esque 50-car-pileup-creating Crash Mode) that made the franchise popular in the first place.

So you might think that Burnout Paradise’s shift to a free, open world where closed circuits and linear routes are traded for a city street layout would follow this pattern of botching a perfectly good idea. While this kind of freeform exploration’s been pulled off successfully in other racing games – think Test Drive Unlimited and the Grand Theft Auto cousin Midnight Club Racing – neither of those games relied on the kind of blink-and-die speed or gonzo destruction Burnout thrived on. As a result, Burnout Paradise can initially be a frustrating headache. Criterion took the freedom of an open world as an excuse to do away with everything that would keep the game from being seamless, and a lot of basic practicality went out the window: there’s not much real organization of events and no quick and easy way to jump from race to race, thanks to an insistence on creating a menu-free interface that simply places the starting points for races at various intersections and makes you go all the way back to that point of origin if you fail and want to try again. My first race took me from the middle of a busy downtown to a distant section up in the mountains, and when I finished a few ticks behind first place – the natural result of having to take my eyes off the road to glance down at a mini-map or up at a blinking “turn here” indicator sign, thereby increasing my chances of smashing into something by about 800% -- I discovered that I was in the middle of nowhere and there weren’t any other nearby races to participate in. Fantastic. Might as well drive around aimlessly for a while.

“A while,” in this case, being a few hours. This is where the real fun of Burnout Paradise comes in: if you find something frustrating or poorly-implemented about the races in this game, feel free to abandon them and just dork around. Just like 90% of the people who play a Grand Theft Auto title, I eventually started straying away from the main missions and did whatever the hell else I wanted: searched for wicked jumps, smashed through billboards, busted through the chain-link gates that denoted shortcuts, and basically just took in the scenery. The locale of Paradise City is a fictionalized generic simulacrum of California that, despite a faintly desaturated and hazy color palette and the lack of any sort of day-night cycle, makes up in odd little hidden routes and secret stunt areas what it lacks in immediate personality. You’ve seen most of the game’s environments – winding mountain roads, busy interstates, waterfront docks -- in sandbox titles before, racing or otherwise, but the streets that funnel you through them tend to take you to unexpected places and often divert you towards some of the most batshit crazy stunts I’ve ever seen in a racing game.

Ever play San Francisco Rush and get stupid with glee when you found some secret ramp tucked away behind a building, one that launched your car over an entire city block? Paradise has a jump like that about every 50 yards, and the ones up in the mountains can send your car airborne for ridiculous stretches of time. It helps a lot in alleviating the boredom that might otherwise start rearing its head during your 15th trip to the junkyard (it is just about the opposite of convenience to make the player drive to a specific spot on the map just to change their car), and eventually all this aimless cruising around searching for ridiculous stuff to do will translate into a greater knowledge of the map’s layout. Throw in a few events that aren’t dependent on any specific destination -- Road Rage (run a certain number of opponent cars off the road in a certain amount of time), Stunt Runs (gain points by stringing together combos of stunts a’la the Tony Hawk games), Showtime (the lukewarm replacement for Crash Mode, where you can bounce the remains of your wrecked car around like a one-ton basketball and ricochet it into oncoming traffic) – and suddenly those races become less about trying to figure out where you’re supposed to go and more about getting there fast. Not that it’ll come easy, given how huge the map is -- it took me two weeks to get bored of Burnout Revenge; it’ll take me at least that long to start feeling like I actually know most of Paradise City’s ins and outs.

As long as it’ll take to learn how to best navigate Paradise’s streets, acquiring and mastering all of the game’s 75-plus cars could take even longer. Unlike most of the previous Burnout games, just about every vehicle feels different: each one is designated its own specific specialty (unwieldy but tough Aggression cars, fast but fragile Speed cars and agile, jack-of-all-trades Stunt cars), but they also have their own handling traits and personality quirks; some cars not only feel faster than others, but lighter, more maneuverable and easier to slide around corners. They’re unrealistic in some basic senses – the inexplicable lack of a speedometer makes it feel like each car’s going 300 MPH, and if you can keep the hammer down through a long straightaway, listen to all the upshifts and you’ll discover that your car has what sounds like a nine-speed transmission. (None of the cars have drivers, either – sure, it’d be uncomfortable to watch human bodies flail around in the game’s super-detailed wrecks, but their absence means that Paradise City appears to be overrun with Christines.) But there isn’t any perfunctory hovercraft handling here; landing one of those ridiculous jumps feels weighty and solid, and throwing some of the heavier cars around a turn with a bit of drift-braking assistance feels almost as forceful as the controlled chaos of Project Gotham’s balletic powerslides. It helps the cause of variety that these fictional cars run a diverse range of styles – hot rods, ‘30s luxury cars, ‘60s British GTs, Japanese tuners – some of which almost look like car-geek in-jokes: your first ride resembles the unholy union of a GTO and a Mustang Mach 1, and a later acquisition bears an uncanny similarity to the world-beating Ferrari 330 P3/4 that dominated the 24 Hours of Daytona in ‘67.

So all I really wanted from Burnout Paradise was the ability to go stupid fast and do wicked powerslides as my opponents disintegrate in spectacular slow-motion like Steve McQueen’s Porsche 917 in Le Mans. It gave me plenty of that, and rendered it all in spectacular 60 FPS debris-strewn hi-def glory. But dropping me in a huge city and simply declaring “here you are, go nuts” went from frustrating and disorienting to liberating pretty quickly – especially online, where me and a bunch of friends spent hours racing around, taking online challenges (jump x number of times; do a barrel roll over a specific spot; drive against oncoming traffic for a certain length) or just playing chicken and laughing like idiots. Sure, this could be a racing game for people who don’t like racing games – but it’s also a Burnout for people who don’t like Burnout.

Posted by Nate Patrin at January 29, 2008 4:36 PM | Comments (2)

Gregory Maguire

Filed under: 3 Questions

Most famous for penning Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which re-imagined The Wizard of Oz and was transformed into a hit Broadway musical, Gregory Maguire has carved himself a literary niche by looking at fairy tales and children's stories from a different angle. He's reworked Snow White, Cinderella, and in his latest novel, What-the-Dickens, he explores the idea of the Tooth Fairy and its relationship to youth.

City Pages: Your novels frequently look at tales and characters that are part of our collective upbringing and cultural backdrop. Why does reexamining these stories as an adult inspire you?

Gregory Maguire: Well, there's several reasons they're appealing, one is I think generally they're all good stories or have good elements or else kids wouldn't be interested in them. So the fact that I'm interested in them now because children have been interested in them is a credit to their original value. The stories that are uninteresting to kids, they don't talk about, they don't remember, and they fall out of the culture immediately. So the fact that I go back to them at all means that they’ve already been tried and true. They already have something interesting and arresting to them. But why I go back to children's stories instead of other aspects of our culture or other thoughts and observations and apprehensions of the world I have has to do partly with how fragmented of a culture we live in here in America. That is to say in this year of politics we're always talking about the great divide between the red states and the blue states, in terms of economics we talk about the divide between the haves and the have-nots, if we are interested in Marxists sensibility, we talk about the class structure, we talk about certain privileges of education, but the one thing that we share in common, despite which side of the great divide we hail each other from, is the common territory and experience of childhood. You don't have to have a political opinion when you're 6 to decide whether you like the Wizard of Oz or not. You don't have to decide the face content is of your moral struggle to believe in the Tooth Fairy when you're 5. These stories sort of predate the ways in which we distinguish ourselves as adults one from another, and therefore they are somewhat universal in a world that is rapidly losing universals. Now, as a writer, I suppose I could also add I'm a professional. I want to get the biggest bang for the buck so to speak. I want to sell my work, I want to hit the biggest audience that I can, and so therefore to use the material of childhood is to use the material that almost nobody says 'Oh, I don't know anything about that, I'm not interested.' Everybody who grew up in America has a memory of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. If you say “poison apple,” quick, what are your associations for poison apple? Or what are your associations with the words “ruby slippers” or your association with the first tooth you lost as a child? Almost every American will come up with the same response. And that means they are all together with me on the same page, the first page of a book that relies on that material as its fundament.

CP: What do you think is appealing to adult readers about revisiting the stories that they loved and learned from as children?

GM: Well frankly I think we cower in terror at the world as it is. I know I do, that's why I'm here with a closed door and my children on the other side of the door. The reality of things with global warming and An Inconvenient Truth, and the apparently inconvenient truth of the fiscal meltdown; that if you've been hearing the news today, seems to have happened in Europe and Japan and Canada, and will no doubt happen tomorrow on Wall Street. These things are really scary, and they're things we have to deal with, and we may not in fact conquer them, we may be conquered by them. So to go back to a time in which we were consolable, those stories of childhood were consoling and as children we were consolable, I think that's a legitimate function of art--to console. So I use the material at hand that's appealing to me. But I use it for the same reasons that anybody might use any material for art: to console, to challenge, to inspire, to question, and to remind people that even in the solitude of reading, we're not alone.

CP:You've taken on Cinderella, Snow White, Dorothy and Oz, and now the Tooth Fairy. Is there a fairy tale or character that you just won't take on because it would be too difficult?

GM: Well, after I had written Wicked, which was by no means my first book, it was the first book that brought me to wide public attention, I would get letters from people, including my editor saying 'Why don’t you do the back story to Alice in Wonderland? Why don't you tell us all about that?' And I said with all due respect, and with all interest in a vibrant financial life of my own, The Wizard of Oz is a wonderful story, but in some ways a story with a lot of holes in it. It's a story with a lot of useful inconsistencies. Alice in Wonderland is a major work of a genius by a major writer. Maybe Tom Stoppard doing Rosencrantz and Gilderstern Are Dead about the back story of Hamlet, maybe he has the cajones to do that, but I've got a little growing up to do yet, I'm not going to take on Alice in Wonderland. So, there are things that are so brilliant and so beautiful that I'm not going to touch them. Now, mind you, remember Michael Cunningham's book The Hours? It was very brave and nervy to say, 'I'm going to take Virginia Woolf as a character and I'm going to take her themes as my themes too, and I'm going to build a book that is at once an homage to what she was trying to do, but my own book at the same time.' Virginia Woolf too is one great figure in literary history of the last century. I'm amazed that he had the nerve, and I think he did and he succeeded. But I prefer to take material that's a little more porous. Maybe the material of childhood is more porous because it does leave out adult things like sex and greed and the thirst for power and the dark side to human life that sometimes make us seem as if we're little sprites in the dark, but the dark will always win. Because there are absences in children's stories, it provides me an easier place to find a foothold.

CP: Writing for adults and children pose different challenges, but you seem to switch target audiences at will, and sometimes, as with What-the-Dickens, you write in a way that appeals to both adults and young readers. How do you master that in-between style that snares both age groups?

GM: I used to put if not photographs of people, sometimes I would just put their names, and I would tape them to the edge of my computer screen. And I would just say to myself 'You are not writing for the National Book Award committee, you are not writing for the review editors for New York Review of Books. You are writing for toothy Burke Hutchinson, age nine, who lives halfway to the next town and is a friend of my son's. And he's nervy and smart and a normal second grade boy with his own limited experience of the world and his own limitless appetite to know what comes next.' And sometimes fastening on a specific reader or a specific set of readers will help me remember how to tell a story that is appropriate to them. So, if I put a picture of the name of a nine-year-old on my computer, I also might put a picture of my stepmother who raised me whose 90 and reads well, and taught me to read and care about language. And those are both up there themselves, then the selection process of what would be interesting to them both is part of what determines the tone and the prose style of the work.

CP:Do you think that writing for one audience is more difficult than another?

GM: Yes, I think writing for children is much harder. And this is I think because children have so many more pulls to their appetites, to their attention. When I was a kid, which was several thousand years ago now, or so it seems, we were not prosperous, so we didn't have many advantages available to prosperous families 40 years ago, but secondly, the world was not as wired as it is with video. So the competition for books was much less, there was TV, and that was about it, and my parents were pretty strict about keeping the TV off most of the time. Now when a writer is trying to get a child's attention, they know that probably the child is reading in a room with the TV on, or where the TV can be turned on with the flick of a remote control. They know that when a child goes on vacation, there are screens that descend from the inside roof of the SUV so they can watch Shrek the Third for the fortieth time. But if you're going get their attention then and keep it, you really have to use every fiber and muscle group you have as a storyteller to make it worth their while and to keep them from flinging the book out the window onto the highway and going back to Shrek the Third.

CP: How then, do would you suggest parents and teachers get children to read with all the distractions they face? How can a book compare to a friendly green ogre?

GM: It used to be that all you had to do was lock a child in a room for 18 hours with nothing but a book, no food, no water, no light. That would usually work. But the government doesn't smile on that anymore that the department of social services would come and put you in prison, so you can't do that. I think that what you really need to do is have your own personal domestic Oprah's Book Club. You have to in some way prove to children who are reluctant readers that reading is a communal activity too. Whether it be by reading the first chapter of a story out loud then having the kids go off and read the second chapter then coming back to read the third chapter out loud. There are lots of different ways you can invent to make it a collaborative effort and a source of joy and communion. Even if it's the only time in the week where kids get to drink soda in the living room, or whatever it is that kids need as a special treat to know that this is a special event. You can soup it up and hang on the whistles and bells and persuade children that the act of reading together is something that is worth celebrating. I have an intensely literary household, we too, like my parents, keep the TV turned off almost all the time except for elections and impeachments. And the house is stuffed with books. We have more books than many libraries in third-world capitol cities. But my children are not by and large different from other American children. You could put them in a room with 80 books, a truck and a doll, and they would invent a story about how the truck ran over the doll, and the doll lay bleeding on the carpet screaming for mercy, and the books would go untouched. And they would play that game over and over again until the doll began to run over the truck and the truck lay on the carpet bleeding motor oil and pleading for mercy. It is hard to get kids these days to turn and look at a book out of boredom so you have to be inventive and make a communal event, I really do think so.

CP: Your children's books have been favorites of young readers for many years now, so I'm curious, what was your favorite book as a child?

GM: There are so many stages of childhood, there are as many stages of childhood as there are of adulthood. So I would almost have to go year-by-year if not season-by-season. There was a wonderful book called A Diamond in the Window. It is what is known as a magic book or a fantasy, a domestic fantasy, a little bit Harry Potter-ish in that there are normal people who wander sideways into a world where extraordinary things happen, then wander back and have breakfast then brush their teeth and go to school. What's wonderful about it is that it takes place in Concord, Massachusetts, and it is filled with metaphors for how the mind can be expanded, how the spirit can be expanded by images of the mind. It's a transcendentalist book in a way. I read this book when I was 11, here I am at age 53, and I'm living in Concord, Massachusetts partly because the book effected me so much that I wanted to be a writer who lived in Concord and could think in metaphor, and have my life expanded over and over again by the images in my mind.

CP: You clearly have a very active imagination. Do you think most adults have an imagination as vivid as yours but they repress them, or is your imagination functioning on a higher level than other people?

GM: That is an interesting question and I have no idea what the answer is. There are ways in which we are boxed in ourselves. I don't think of myself as having a vivid imagination, I think of myself as having a slow mind. I know other people have quicker mind than mine. And one of the reasons I write is that I value the act of the mind, I value the act of thinking. And writing stories, and even writing letters and writing essays, helps me to know what I think. If I'm at a dinner party and somebody turns to me and says, 'What do you think of the nature of evil? Does it exist or not, and what is its nature?' I would say 'Please pass the asparagus,' and go to the bathroom and cry for an hour because I couldn't think of an answer. I might then set myself to task of what is the nature of evil; let me write a story so I can think about it. I don't know that I have a more vivid imagination, but I do know that, despite how glib I am and long-winded in answering your questions, I actually don't think very fast, and I write because I value thinking, and writing helps me know what I think.

CP: My last question. Back to your latest book What-the-Dickens: do your children believe in the Tooth Fairy?

GM: They do, even the 10-year-old who has already begun to sniff the dirty backstairs gossip about Santa Claus. The Tooth Fairy, perhaps because she or he comes with so much less commercial glitz, they fly in the secrecy of night, under the cover of darkness with a great many alibis, so they are easier to believe in a little bit because there is less to pin on them, there is less rhetoric. I heard my 7-year-old saying to my 6-year-old, 'I don't think there's a Tooth Fairy.' And the 6-year-old said, 'Sure there is.' And the 7-year-old said 'OK, but I wonder if daddy pushes the money under the pillow.' And the 6-year-old said, 'Look, if the Tooth Fairy is too busy, they write him a letter and say 'Would you please do this for me because I can't get there tonight.’'' And they kind of worked through that themselves, and went to bed. The 7-year-old lost a tooth and taped a quarter, a dime and a penny which he had stolen from my desk, to a note that said, 'Dear Tooth Fairy, here is $106, please leave me $200 change.' Any creature of the imagination that's going to give such a high return on investment has got to be believed, wouldn't you agree?

Posted by Ben Palosaari at January 29, 2008 5:30 AM | Comments (0)

Over the Weekend: 1/25-1/27

Filed under: Over the Weekend

The line between so-called high art and low art is largely artificial, and nowhere is this more ably demonstrated than on a Twin Cities weekend.

Take the past three days for example. Friday's show by local favorite Dosh at Triple Rock stretched into the wee hours, with three openers warming the crowd up for his forward-thinking electronic blend. Not feeling the modern music? Classic Chinese music and more hit St. Paul's Winter Carnival during the Ha Family's Chinese New Year performance. Acrobats, dances and more were on display to go along with the standard cold-weather entertainment.

St. Paul's Winter Carnival is in full swing. Image by James Tran.

If musical innovation and centuries-old celebratory arts didn't pique your interest -- and golf on top of frozen White Bear Lake seemed a little too genteel, or frostbite-inducing, or both -- there was always the wrestling show at First Avenue. Billed "Anarchy Rules," the choreographed violence wasn't highbrow, but featured highspots and a split brow or two.

On the topic of the upcoming flippage of the lunar calendar, newly-installed Web intern Andy Mannix hit the University of Minnesota's Chinese New Year celebration and brought back the following report:

CHINESE NEW YEAR: RINGING IN THE RAT AT U OF M

Screw Times Square. The rhythmic maneuvers of the Lion Dance at the Chinese New Year celebration last night alone were enough to put Carson Daly to shame.

Just under 500 people piled into the Great Hall in Coffman Memorial Union on the University of Minnesota campus to help ring in the Year of the Rat. A couple weeks early, sure, but who's keeping track?

The night started out traditionally, with a family of percussionists providing just the right noise for two guys in a red and gold lion costume (with some pretty impressive acrobatic skills) to groove to. Next up came an old folk song titled “Wangchunfeng” performed by pianist Kai-Li Cheng and violinists Hsuan-Wen Lin and Yinna Wang, followed by choreographed dancing from the Chinese American Association of Minnesota Dance Theater. So far, the events, set to ambient red lighting and extravagant decorations, would be enough to make one briefly mistake the room for a party in East Asia – save for the portraits of U of M fossils and heroes lining the walls.

Somebody's wishing it was the Year of the Rock Star at this point. Photo by Andy Mannix.

Later in the night, they mixed things up with a combination of customary and contemporary Chinese music, including original songs by artist Vivian. And if the music and dancing weren't enough, clever banter and strange recurring homages to ‘N Sync – including a brief tribute to Justin Timberlake – from MCs Jimmy Haung and Catherine Wang seemed to keep everyone entertained.

Finally, to make the night complete, somebody in a full-body rat costume that looked like the mascot for some unfortunately named high school football team was given the task of handing out trivia prizes. Maybe it was the weight of the costume, but this rodent appeared to have roughly the same enthusiasm for the job as Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh. Oh well, the 3-year-old girl sitting next to me seemed to get a kick out of it.

All things considered, people went home smiling. And I am personally feeling better educated and more prepared for February 7th – the beginning of the Chinese New Year.
-- Andy Mannix

Posted by Jeff Shaw at January 28, 2008 5:49 AM | Comments (1)

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