Copenhagen - All Fun and Games

I mentioned Limbo a few weeks earlier. The game was released recently to (surprise, surprise) widespread critical acclaim.

I checked out Playdead's website - apparently, they are just a km away from where I'm staying with my cousin. I dropped them a line, and hopefully they will be okay with a visitor.

Further internet investigation (thank you, Indiegames Blog) turned me onto the Copenhagen Games Collective. The group is a consortium of designers and academics who are all pushing the envelope in terms of accessible, avant garde, and intelligent video game experiences.

Work includes such gems as B.U.T.T.O.N. (Brutally Unfair Tactics Totally Okay Now), which requires an XBox, four people and a large, open room with a table, and the extremely awkward Dark Room Sex Game - a combination social experiment/party game which forces players to look at each other (NOT at the TV screen) and play off of.... um.... "audio cues" in order to find a "mutual rhythm."

I want in on that - where's my Wii?

In addition, the group comes up with non-video games, including the aptly titled debate game Fuck You, It's Art, and publishes scholarly work and research.

Keep it coming, Copenhagen.

Danes and bikes

Copenhagen is quite an amazing city. I'm one step away from moving here permanently.


One of the most striking differences from American cities, besides the old buildings and funny-sounding street names, are the ubiquitous bicycle lanes. I have never seen so many cyclist-commuters in my life. Every day is like a Critical Mass demo; of course, a Mass ride would be completely unnecessary in a city which has had bicycle lanes for 100 years.

It all started back in 1910 when the first leisure cycle paths were created. Cycling became a mode of transport starting in WWII, when gasoline was rationed. My cousin told me a story of an assassination that occured in a local bar during that era.

The getaway vehicle of choice? Bicycle. Apparently, even hitmen couldn't get around the petrol ration.

Today, it's likely the most bicycle friendly city in the world - something like 40% of the population cycles to work/school regularly. The bike lanes are smooth, wide, and isolated from both cars and pedestrians. The city works continuously to improve and expand on the lanes; part of this effort includes a current "Spread Good Cycling Karma" campaign. "Karma Cyclists" will station themselves at intersections during rush hour and provide some advice and humor for commuters.

I ran into one such group during rushhour - a team of helmet wearing, Pinnochio-nosed Cykarmalists led a consort of 40-odd cyclists in a rendition of J. Strauss's "Blue Danube Waltz," with the bikers using their bells to chime in on high notes.

Good Karma indeed. Mayor Daley, take notes.

Jet Lagging

Just arrived in Copenhagen after a long day of travelling. I'll be posting some European-flavored stuff on this blog over the next couple of weeks.

Told Tray-Sure

So Percussion and Matmos: Treasure State

Cantaloupe Music 2010

http://www.sopercussion.com/

These guys get it.

So Percussion and Matmos teamed up for their last album, which I have finally come to hear in it's entirety. SoPerc are part of the new breed - 21st century classical music at it's finest, driving another nail in the coffin of the art/pop music schism. They're in good company too; Nico Muhly, the Bedroom Community Label, Eighth Blackbird, Kronos Quartet, Third Coast Percussion Quartet, the Bad Plus and Bang on a Can are stateside allies in the dual front against auto-tunage and elitism alike.

So's bio says it best: "Edgy (at least in the sense that little other music sounds like this) and ancient (in that people have been hitting objects for eons), perhaps it doesn't need to be defined after all."

Western percussion has evolved as an experimental craft - we work on our sounds with the same intensity with which violinists work on tone. With percussion, however, there are no "good" or "bad" sounds - there is only what is right for the job. All sounds can be music, and our instruments are defined by context. We're in the business of sound collecting, sometimes taken to an absurd level. The generation of Edgar Varese and Henri Posseur took experimentation to an extreme - suddenly orchestral works called for airplane propellers, and musique concrete pieces were created from recordings of trains. Despite the public's feeling of alienation, these mad sonic scientists were central cultivators of a richly expanded palette of sounds, as well as a newfound appreciation for the wielders of these noises, whistles, sirens, tin cans and wind machines - us guys in the back.

Matmos is right at home here. The experimental-electronic music duo has cultivated the same appreciation for sound in the abstract, taking noises out of context and recombining fragments into musical work. So P. is no stranger to the realm of electronic music - the reserved, atmospheric "Amid The Noise" made ample use of computer-generated noises and processed instrument sounds - and the Matmos collaboration forms a seamlessly cohesive unit.

There is a subtle beauty in the way tuned metallophones, cymbals, gongs and found instruments alike are warped by the computer processing, creating a kind of auditory surrealism that's most evident on tracks such as "Shard" and "Swamp." I'm reminded of "TNT" by Tortoise. But where "TNT" told stories, "Treasure State" creates environments.

This isn't a groundbreaking record by any means. That's good - we don't need "groundbreaking" in music. Pierre Schaffer, John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen were groundbreaking, tearing down arbitrary walls between what is and what isn't "music." But there's a certain irony in works like Cage's note-less 4'33"; a piece that's built on ambient sound is akin to screaming "Appreciate the subtleties, dammit!" In many ways, SoPerc/Matmos succeed where Cage and his colleagues failed - their poetic use of sound draws you into an dreamscape world made up of everyday noises. When it's over, you'll start to hear the music around you.

Monster Camp

Just read this in the New York Times. So much cooler than the standard canoeing-archery-arts-and-crafts type of summer camp (well, maybe we'll keep the archery - that will be useful for camp middle earth).

Why hasn't anyone thought of this before? Kids are the ones who invented role playing games. What kind of Tolkein- or Lewis- or Rowling- or Pullman- (blasphemy!) reading child would turn down monster camp?

....Can I come too?

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

I'm adding a fresh coat of paint, moving things around, adding music, maybe throwing on some podcasts... things are going to look a little different around here.

I apologize to the five or six of you that read this blog and have gotten used to it. It will still be very green.

What I learned from Las Vegas

There comes a time in every boy's life when, yearning to see a larger world of sex, booze and slots, he ventures to America's soulless desert playground.

The time comes even sooner when the plane ticket and hotel are paid for, along with a few meals and a $25 per diem allocation.

But what I learned from Vegas was not how to pick up a prostitute at 7:30 in the morning - they literally wait for you in the hotel lobby and won't take no for an answer (but apparently "I'm gay" does the trick). My revelation had nothing to do with that bafflingly awful Rihanna song (although Rihanna, who is raunchy without being clever or even bothering to rhyme, says a few things about our generation. At least Madonna could sing) And I already knew that slot machines are a giant waste of time.

I stayed at the Palms Casino and Hotel, home of the world's only Playboy club. Pretty classy, right? The casino likes to advertise that it caters to a younger audience, and plays this up in all of their advertisements featuring - what else? - busty, bikini-clad women.

While strutting around the pool, proud of my status as the palest, skinniest dude around, I was stopped by a bachelor on vacation.

"You know why Vegas is awesome?" he asks, "coming around now - that's why Vegas is awesome"

To my right passes a barbie doll - fake blond hair, skin some shade of bronze, and t&a that would make a centerfold jealous. I swallow my puke - this whole place feels so very wrong.

"You know what that's called?" he asks
"No. What?"
"Magnificent"

Later on, I try to understand this - why am I, a heterosexual male, so completely turned off by this standard of beauty? Not only that, but most men I know feel the same way. Real guys go for real girls - the plastic female image is not only not beautiful, it seems surreal and inhuman.

My friend believes a generational difference is to blame- men in the 26-30 age group, the pioneers in the MTV generation, go for this idea of attractiveness. Some refuse to accept that they're aging, some just read too much Playboy (they picked the Palms for a reason, I guess). But this doesn't explain why the Vegas trip was a major flashback to high school, where the plastic image reigned supreme.

A few years a go I read Ariel Levy's "Female Chauvinist Pigs." High school made a lot more sense after that, but I still couldn't wrap my head around the nation's warped and contradictory attitude toward sex. We are puritanical serial monogamists who think sex is a sin unless you're married or in a committed relationship or drunk on your birthday. We coerce women into objectifying themselves until they consider it "liberating" to be topless on camera. The very idea of waxing makes me want to cringe, but countless women view it a small price to pay for beauty. On top of all of this, we still debate over the "sanctity of marriage" (The state that gave us Hollywood and Beverly Hills thinks gay couples are a threat to their "sacred family unit"? Right).

But now, passing over the grand canyon, I realize that the terrible implications of the barbie doll ideal. Vegas is like the plastic woman - shimmering, glitzy, expensive. It catches your eye, but before long the sparkle fades and you realize it has no soul. We call this place "America's playground," among other things; maybe it's time to grow up a little bit.

Don't get me wrong - I'm all for having fun, partying, and general debauchery, but why does it have to be so sexist? Maybe what we need is a kind of neo-chivalry: respect, honor and honesty without the medieval prudishness. Men and women could partake as equals, as we are meant to be - take back knighthood while taking back the night.

"Neo-chivalry..." it has a ring to it. I wonder how it would sound in a Rihanna song...