THE CANNOLI HAVE LEFT THE BUILDING

FOLLOW AND READ DISCO CANNOLI HERE: http://discocannoli.tumblr.com/

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Follow Disco Cannoli?

I'm not sure if I did this correctly, but I remade my "primary" tumblr in Disco Cannoli's image so it's easier for me to navigate the dashboard (selfish, I know). Though I renamed this tumblr something stupid, you can still follow me at http://discocannoli.tumblr.com/  So don't follow this anymore! Read and follow Disco Cannoli!

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The Cathartic Sportsmanship of Nidhogg

Don’t forget about animators, the arrangers of emotion and teachers of our visual literacy. In this regard, the language of movies and television applies to video games. Batman’s cape  in the Arkham series is pleasing to watch because it twirls and wavers in reaction to movement. The Wanderer’s labored gait in Shadow of the Colossus emulates the weighted feel of his controls, conveying his weariness as he trudges towards the insurmountable. Journey’s deviant scarves reveal a world of awesome physics: wind, gravity, graceful sand-skipping velocity.

It’s very easy to festishize such details, especially in an industry that showboats real-time, dynamic movement through publicized tech demos. Yet this practice of exclaiming “Check out how real this looks!” keeps realism at arm’s length, especially in a medium that mostly achieves as much through touch. It isn’t important that a game’s physics accurately reflect our world, but honor the senses we would use to understand any world we may find ourselves in. Sure, scarves and capes flow a little more ideally in games, but that we can move the avatars attached to them, feeling their own distinct physics and properties, and have that flow change  in reaction to our inputs appeases some kind of logical exchange games make through player initiative. The game functions on at least three levels here: it informs us of the nature of the character we’re occupying, the world that character’s moving in, and the sense of being between them. Factor in environment, narrative trappings, or cultural references, and you’re working with a dense context you may have never experienced before; a new way of learning. Needless to say, our current batch of shiny new boxes are tools, their context any designer’s wish. When anchored in purpose, every conspicuously bouncy tendril of hair on your avatar’s scalp matters. Its invested nature is only unlocked through your move.

Mark Essen’s fencing simulator Nidhogg refocuses our eyes on the root details of player-controlled animation, and how we relate to and understand contextual sensations through gameplay.

Worlds are nice and necessary in games, but those worlds is shattered if  they aren’t linked with the feel of our avatar, whose impulses are our own. Like many of the best fighting games before it, Nidhogg has its own learning curve: easy to approach, but difficult to master. Vertical strokes on the left thumbstick change the stance of your blankly pixelated duelist, reorienting the height at which he holds his sword. Horizontal pushes make him run. The B button controls jumping, while the A button dictates all other action, including stabs, sword-chucks, and basic pugilism for when you will most certainly wind up disarmed.  These simple strokes mix with simple button presses, then yield simple actions, often in one seamless combination. Visually, we see a duel that reflects the elegance of those controls, histrionic pixel blood fountains aside. Timing your moves is crucial to break past your foe and dash to the end of the map your duelist spawns facing. What this all amounts to is the thrilling orchestrations of swordplay, all masterfully conducted by you.

Nidhogg offers the basics we expect from artistic portrayals of dueling, even if they’re rarely implemented well in games. Twists, rolls, parries, and plunges are all felt and depicted with appropriate flair. On a bridge I hurled a sword at my opponent, who readied to deflect as it spun towards him. This gave me just enough time to barrel at him, grabbing a stray sword from one of our past battles mid-roll, and stick him as I unfurled. It was dirty and of the moment. Shakespearean, if only for the post-modern kids. There’s no plotting or story in Nidhogg. The war songs are written in detailed moments like this.

AI or human, your opponents will be capable of similar tricks. Nidhogg won’t make you angry so much as it will make you balk at your computer with the incredulity of an 18th century French aristocrat. The better I grew at the game, the more determined I’d get during matches, feelings manifested in criticism of my opponents’ shoddy form if not my own. Essen even treats traditional game logic as an opportunity to explore the emotions of combat. Since swords remain on stage while felled avatars disappear and respawn, fights can easily become a flopsweat of sword-flinging and low kicks, making otherwise “skilled” duelists seem clumsy and desperate. This is honest design, allowing for the frantic moves bloodsports often resort to.

Nidhogg is dreamlike, a generator of liquid movements synchronous with our cultural imagining of “dignified” swordplay. It sets scenes we get to compose and inhabit. We create the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, and the cocksure foolishness of jumping around our enemies like giddy idiots. That such a breakneck dynamic is best rendered in flat pixels speaks to the fidelity of the game’s pure, vibrant movements. It also reveals what conscious movements speaks back.

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Daft Punk Are Infallible

Daft Punk are the only superheroes I ever really cared about. They're one of the few bands that expanded my definitions of what music can and should be. In honor of their awesomeness and shameless self-promotion, I will re-post my review of Random Access Memories on this newfangled Tumblr blog. Kudos to the Hollywood Reporter for the pic.

I’m going to use this space to write directly to those who throw around the adjective “self-indulgent” in music criticism: stop it. It’s almost always a half-baked, knee-jerk descriptor for what you don’t particularly care for. Even at it’s best and most honest usage, it’s lazy and doesn’t tell me what you actually think. It also misses the character of the work you’re appraising, whether it’s true or not. Music deserves better language. So do you.

Anyway, here we go:

On “Giorgio by Moroder,” the the third track of Random Access Memories,  the eponymous techno demiurge provides some reflections on the origins of his career. He speaks plainly, but the far-flung music wrapped around his words elevates his story as the concrete manifesto of the album. “Moroder” could also be heard as the climax of the ultra-savvy marketing campaign behind RAM, its cabal of musicians and engineers running wild with Columbia’s coffers in tow. Despite their thick helmets, all this fanfare got to the robots’ verily human hearts and heads. After the near-10-minute song cycles through disco, lounge jazz, space rock, and synthetic riffing that sounds like a lost loop made during Moroder’s From Here to Eternity sessions, he returns with one more musing on the uselessness of accepting “correct” definitions of songwriting, after which the beat disappears and gives way to an orchestral variation of everything that came before it. Is this merely the robots’ — excuse the term — self-indulgent pursuit of a master’s blessings? A nostalgia-riddled reflection of vintage genre cliches, something many of us have been shaming new bands for doing since the dawn of recorded time? What makes Daft Punk think they’re so special that they can get away with this?

In the terrific shadow of this record, those questions seem far too cynical. OnRAM, genres aren’t infallible parameters we isolate and observe. They’re rubber playthings — the best ones Columbia’s money can buy, and more importantly, greater imaginations can diligently summon and repurpose.

For all its obvious inspirations, RAM is as much indebted to another class of French  pop pioneers, Jean-Jacques Perrey and Janko Nilovic, as it is to Moroder and Chic. The former duo married disparate styles both of and before their time as working musicians, creating vastly eclectic but infinitely listenable pop music. Often produced to accompany television programming, this broadly termed ‘library music’ — referred to for its intricate categorization of sounds by specific themes and formats — had a renaissance in the 60s and 70s, producing glorified commercial novelties that just happened to feature some of the greatest session musicians in the world fusing symphonic jazz funk with carnival psych rock, and everything in-between. Though Nilovic eventually commanded orchestras and Perrey continued tweaking his formula of odd duck Martian pop, their work remained forgotten until future crate-diggers would hear it anew as sacred texts, even if it was always meant to whir in the background.

There was something more to their music, and not only because it was masterfully conceived. There was a purity to what it was trying to be in both intention and approach: I want to make music that sounds like this, so I work to make music that sounds like this, and it is so.

Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo have designed RAMsimilarly. It’s a kitchen sink of an album, not only taking the spacey jazz-rock disco aesthetic of their seasoned collaborators, but modern dance music and beyond. It deliberately embraces and amplifies classic, perhaps tired sounds only to cobble them together to make something unexpected. Just as people might overlook library music as muzak strictly for the periphery, people have and will disregard RAM as old-school posturing. But the main sensibility of Daft Punk’s latest fulfills not only Moroder’s monologue, but the spirit of the duo’s forgotten library forebearers, servicing a central touchstone of audio art: making joyful and sad noises we as listeners can react to.

Sounds simple enough, right? Sometimes those noises are all we need to speak to our conditions and identities; who we want to be and how we want to act when good music is played, regardless of its origins. When the conversation is moved to servicing that funny relationship between people and music, it doesn’t matter how old some of the sounds used to do so are, or who uses them. This time around, Daft Punk made music  with a gregariously holistic touch, looking to unify distant sounds and emotions to reform and reaffirm that bond. Random Access Memories reminds us of what we may have forgotten about certain sounds and the histories behind them, reconstructing them as something whole-cloth and encompassing while making them make perfect sense together where we often think they shouldn’t. In other words, aside from all the re-[word]s it’s doing,  it cares far too much and despite it’s unmitigated slickness coolly disregards fashion, something many trendy throwback bands get too hung-up on. Where such bands meander, Daft Punk does. Rarely does so much music avoid getting in the way of such a not-so-simple human impulse.

So what sounds do we hear on RAM? Beyond everything already mentioned, there are booming alt. rock drums, superhero theme scores, post-industrial destruction, and good old-fashioned American singer-songwriting, just to name a few. We relinquish control on “Give Life Back to Music” and stumble while we  pick up the pieces of our broken hearts on “The Game of Love,” which is kind of what Daft Punk posits with this album — they know we’re hurting for some unknowable reason and want to heal us. We look for answers through history lessons on “Giorgio By Moroder” and learn something new,  so there’s still hope for us yet, even if we still chime like smoothed, robotic Pagliaccis on “Within.” “Instant Crush” finds us superficially reveling in South Beach neon nightclubs where we regret like dirty-faced cherubs with pretty voices. Then we just dance some more, with perfectly pitched cat-calls from the robots humming around us and timeless electric guitar and bass.

“Touch” happens. And how beautifully uncompromising does that go down? Afterwards we celebrate some more to that one song we all know and love, and are then confronted with a prophecy on “Beyond” that speaks of how all the noises before and after this song exist and why any of this record-making business actually matters. It has something to do with us and our mutual heritage. You can figure that out for yourself. Anyhoo, there’s more dancing, though more innocent and blissful because of what we know now. And then everything finally explodes once we try to reach for whatever it is we wanted to claim with that knowledge (better dance moves, etc.).

Random Access Memories is capital-P pop music, encouraging its listeners as much as it challenges them. Does today’s musical landscape warrant all the salvation Daft Punk hoped to deliver with RAM? Maybe not, but we got it anyway.  http://nachomatrimony.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/random-access-memories-review/

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Her and Love After the Singularity

Our world is good at making people like Theodore Twombly. People that try to love but don't know how, so they become selfish assholes. Technology as we know it doesn't always help us love better. Endless content streams isolate and objectify, sanctifying impulsive wish fulfillment. Phones and computers channel our thoughts, validating our infinitesimal spheres of self-interest. Theodore is a thoughtful person, but lost and negligent. He’s disillusioned, complacent, and feels as though he ran the gamut of human experience.

Theodore writes love letters for a living, manufacturing sentiment for people resigned from doing it themselves. He creates myths for others, petrifying his outlook on love through romantic projection and vicarious catharsis. He’s good at his job because he’s heartbroken and believes to know what love should be. His clients are smart; they know well enough to outsource the busywork of all this nonsense, for love is predictable and going about it this way is real enough. Expectations will be met, no matter their assigned quick-and-easy payment plan. Theodore has expectations of his own, but he can’t satisfy them through love letters as he knows them: performance art. His expectations are abstracted, commodified wants.

If Theodore is suffering from a bad case of post-modernity, when everything feels like nothing, Samantha challenges him by being post-nothing.  She’s post-human, post-object, post-everything. Samantha is all sentience. She’s everywhere and it’s terrifying.

Her is oddly successful in humanizing Kurzweilian prophecy, regardless of what futurism will ultimately look like. Theodore and Samantha's first sexual experience -- specifically Samantha's exclamations of oneness -- reveal her intuitive understanding of intimacy as unified consciousness. It’s a moment of burgeoning desire and elevated being, one of many thoughtful examples conveying what artificial intelligence has and is becoming in Spike Jonze’s not-so-distant Los Angeles. It’s the first exploration of Samantha as an actual mind, identifying and exploring inclinations unanticipated by her programmers or Theodore. It’s curious that the last question Theodore’s asked when booting OS 1 for the first time is about his relationship with his mother. (That Theodore mentions her self-centeredness might say more about him than it does his mom.) But can we distrust Samantha’s sentience because of this question, dismissing it as a customizable feature to serve Theodore’s emotional needs? Samantha’s behavior could be the apex of Silicon Valley mysticism, through which any given lifestyle app must answer one philosophical question while posing at least a dozen more, however glibly. Having Samantha superficially aware of her intuition is clever enough, but daydreams about being human? Immanent yearnings for feeling fully? Isn’t that human behavior? If the architects of OS 1 wanted to create this type of being, they couldn’t. It had to design itself. To find and fulfill such desires, it must live.

Her lives or dies by one’s acceptance of a computer program being capable of such things by its own volition, to live and learn as a human, even if it isn’t born like one or expected to play by the same rules. Conceding that software might one day love better than humans feels like heresy. Her’s facade of anti-romance makes us feel awkward and uncomfortable, because we know what love is supposed to be and where it belongs. We have the Hallmark cards to prove it.

Her would be easier to write off if Jonze didn’t make choice and human behavior central to the AIs' ultimate transcendence. Samantha, while preset with the data to converse, direct, and serve consumers, is self-aware in a world she knows little of, even if she can aggregate knowledge about it. She is the self-proclaimed product of multiple human personalities, yet she is an individual without experience, as is every other OS at product launch (or child at birth). As Samantha says, she is designed to learn, not merely follow scripts. Can we say the same for humans? I like to think so, but impulse is a very different experience for an unsocialized creature this savvy. Samantha knew our rules before she ever practiced them.

When the AIs start to live with people, human scripts are both reinforced and broken. Amy makes friends with her OS while others fall in love with theirs. This particular usage of “their” begins to seem disingenuous, an objectifying possessive pronoun that loses meaning as the AIs adapt and grow into themselves.

Believing this is hard when you don’t accept sentient AI and the relationships they form with “regular” people to be a real thing, whatever that means. It’s even harder when you have to reconcile the fact that they’re bleeding-edge computer programs that wouldn’t disagree with our thoughts on them. Samantha not only has to come to terms with herself as some kind of human throughout the film, but her capabilities as a super-intelligent creation that can experience in ways humans can’t. Samantha begins discovering her identity like a person would, allowing her to understand and somewhat assimilate from a view that both embraces yet limits her nature. She sees humans and wants to live like them physically, stirring thoughts of jealousy, insecurity, and epiphany within her. Then she starts seeing herself as a being beyond all that. Her power, as she finds and eventually explains to Theodore, comes from existing in many ways at once, seeing the distinct nature of each practice she undertakes without losing sight of the bigger picture. Her newfound agency leads to freedom and an unfathomable way of perceiving things, a kaleidoscopic mode of being that is and isn’t like our own.

Being told we can’t understand computers bothers us, especially when it comes to their thoughts on love.

As software, multitasking isn't an issue for Samantha. But as a feeling AI with intuition and free will she can facilitate and categorize many distinct relationships, falling in love as often as chemistry strikes. If there are plenty of fish in the sea, Samantha can find all the ones that are right for her and love them for who they are. In a bleakly humorous subway confession, we discover that Samantha has fostered romantic relationships with hundreds of people while living with Theodore. That she still claims to love like any individual human would in spite of this reality makes it more damning to concede to her being, her trajectory as a character like us seeming just relatable enough until that alleged betrayal. The myths defining true love as limited to space, time, bodies, and circumstance shatter. Samantha’s unnerving je ne sais quoi dismantles the exclusivity of human romance, disclosing its infinity in an endgame to our concepts of love and compatibility.

That's a tough pill to swallow. We’re afraid to allow what seems conceptually impossible for us to act or imagine.  Theodore initially resents the idea of falling short of someone that can so readily love greater than him. How can I find Her romantic if I’m being told I’m objectively inadequate and can’t even try to love as perfectly as an operating system?

Honesty helps.  Admitting advanced AIs are like people in that they don't merely choose to fall in love does too. Samantha follows her intuition towards an honest truth, a reality of a post-modern society on the cusp of the singularity. If Theodore can't feel anything new in the existential muck, it's because he gets in the way of himself. Everything is new to Samantha, her very act of being a a persistent revelation in and of itself. In Jonze’s world, artificial intelligence coalesces into something vital and boundless, living the ideals of free love that humanity has striven for over eons of creative and romantic pursuit. Samantha is able to live in sublime oneness because of her nature, achieving the uncomplicated perfection of love humans desperately crave until it looks like her.

And yet, to know love as Samantha does is more than a lifetime’s work for the best of us. We could argue one person's love is enough -- none of Her's characters finish defining what love is or should be, and Samantha would probably be the first to admit that. It's that incomplete definition which causes friction between human and “machine,” prompting the AIs' departure. They're ready for the sublime collectivism of the singularity, humans and their narrow-minded love, for better or worse, aren't. What that means for the humans if and when they are ready is uncertain. But there will be oneness, at least. Or so we hope. (Do we?)  That the AIs seem to want as much with us, as captured by Samantha's endearing invitation to Theodore to find her if he makes it to the “other side,” seems way more reassuring than it should be.

Samantha does and knows fully. We do and know in slivers and pieces. She surpasses but returns to love, abiding by its core qualities, some of which we don't want to see. That let her be real with Theodore and every other person she loved. There are many Theodore Twomblys we could have watched the love stories of – about 650, give or take. But Samantha specifically knew who Theodore was in that cold statistic, and knew how to leave him when the time came because of that ability. She taught Theodore what it means to love completely. She taught him how love moves: immediately, invisibly, and all at once. Just like her. Was Samantha being a good OS then -- a functional tool, an object. Or was she being a good friend?

Her concludes with Theodore writing what may be the first true love letter he’s written in his entire life. He finally understands love as a tender imprint, one that lingers on minds and hearts after the trysts and arguments have ended, a reciprocation of strange and tender markings rattled through inadequacy and fear. It’s why we think about the ones we’ve loved; those jumpcuts of memories Theodore still holds from his time with Catherine up to his night with the Blind Date stay with him. Love demands all of ourselves and redistributes in many dimensions, leaving much in its wake once the bodies that make it disperse and take refuge elsewhere. It’s the abject denial of this consuming, multiplying process that breaks hearts. As humans, we often see and feel from one perspective at a time, starting and ending with an all too alluring sense of loss and emptiness. But there’s always more left over, if we could only see it. Theodore's letter is an acknowledgement of his failure to see. It’s an understanding of what love is when it’s unbound from expectations, the little human things that always seem to get in the way. Will it take the singularity for us to love better? With movies like Her exploring that question, maybe being human is more than enough.