#kozelek

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1513. Sun Kil Moon - Common As Light And Love Are Red Valleys Of Blood (Caldo Verde - 2017)

Kozelek continue l’exploration sans fin de son quotidien. Souvent redondant, parfois gémissant, il reste un sacré conteur et un excellent guitariste.

Full Album

Spotify

Discogs

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1512. Jesu / Sun Kil Moon - Jesu / Sun Kil Moon (Caldo Verde - 2016)

Même avec l’aide de Jesu, ce n’est pas tout à fait la résurrection pour Kozelek. Dieu sait pourtant que la liste des invités prestigieux est longue sur cet album, qui n’est pas mauvais d’ailleurs...

Last Night I Rocked The Room Like Elvis And Had Them Laughing Like Richard Pryor 

Discogs

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1270. Red House Painters - Ocean Beach (4AD - 1995)

Le toujours riant Kozelek débite les bons albums plus vite que son ombre. Envoûtant comme à son habitude.

Shadows

Spotify

Discogs

[patrickbrianmooney]

IFComp 2025: IFComp 2025: Kozelek's Just Two Wishes

This is a review of a game entered into IFComp 2025, the thirty-first annual interactive fiction competition. This year, there are 85 games in the Comp, all free to play. There’s some good stuff in there this year! Anyone is welcome to play and vote on the entries during the Comp period, and you need vote on only five games by the middle of October for your votes to count toward the games’ overall scores!

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair. And also because, by this point, I'm familiar with it, and it feels like a comfortable rating system to me.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

This is a surreal and disorienting bit of political fantasy that's harder than most to talk about without spoilers. But that's why I put the spoiler warning in the boilerplate text above, I guess.

There are three disconnected segments, each of which has the player piloting a different protagonist around. In the first of these, an Israeli man awakens to find the sky over Tel Aviv dark in the middle of the day. (The story's subtitle when it begins is "a triptych on anger," and this particular PC certainly seems angry enough about the life he's living after the end of a relationship.) There's some rather constrained exploration in which the player attempts to discover why the sky is dark — and starless — and why the electricity is out city-wide in the middle of the day. The PC arrives at Rabin Square to see a reassuring speech given by Benjamin Netanyahu, only to have the prime minister suddenly transform into an enormous, anthropomorphic teddy bear before being hustled off-stage.

The second segment, disturbingly, has the player playing as Donald Trump, awakening in his Mar-a-Lago mansion next to a young blonde woman whose name he cannot remember, only to discover that he, too, has been somehow transformed into a human-sized anthropomorphic teddy bear. The player navigates Trump through conversations with JD Vance and Melania Trump about his transformation before he learns that he is to be declared dead so Vance can ascend to the presidency, and Trump is grabbed and hustled off-stage by his staff. Trump, of course, is also angry throughout the piece, even before he notices his own transformation, again as promised in the story's subtitle.

The third segment takes place in a refugee camp in Rafah, one of the parts of the Gaza strip that has been more or less completely destroyed by Israeli aggression. A mother who has lost her husband and son is attempting to provide a sweet mutabbaq to her surviving daughter as a treat on her birthday. The player navigates her through the refugee camp with the mutabbaq, and comes back to her tent to find her daughter tormenting beetles by trapping them under a fruit bowl and playing with a pair of teddy bears. The story ends when the mother puts a candle stub on the sweet flatbread and lights it.

So of course the title makes sense; we know what the two wishes were, and how the two leaders came to transform into giant teddy bears. And we know who the angry person in the third segment is: not the mother but the daughter, whose revenge fantasy the story is. And of course we know why the story is shocking in its application of the basic rules of magical realism: because the magical effects are symbolic of a structural truth that holds in the real world and that ought to be shocking to all people of conscience, but which the west has had decades of practice turning its eyes away from. (To suddenly experience the unpleasant reality of discovering that you are playing a game which has just made Donald Trump into the player character is nothing compared to the unpleasant reality of being displaced in a refugee camp due to the expansionist policies of a nation whose largest-circulation-in-English newspaper has published editorials saying that the country's need for Lebensraum justifies its colonial push into lands occupied by people of a different religion and ethnicity.

This explains a great deal of the structure of the game, as well: the earlier mysteries are explained by Zulaija's birthday wishes; the game is "on rails," as it were, because of the lack of control that the central character has over her own fate. And who could blame the young girl for her revenge fantasy against the people who have deprived her of home and food and family members? It is a disturbing piece, but that is no bad thing when dealing with an evil and disturbing situation.

More to the side, the world-building is quite good for such a small game (17 rooms, by my count): the Tel Aviv section, in particular, gives the feeling of an ancient city that has been modernized by having non-reciprocal directions and making its eight or nine rooms feel quite a bit like a maze. Every bit of the game feels claustrophobic. The dialog is a little less well-developed, and I could wish the the narrative voices were better developed, just as I wish there were some more modern affordances for the player (more synonyms, doors that the PC opens automatically when trying to pass through them, etc.) but it's done well enough for the piece to be effective.

So this is quite an effective piece, all in all. I think it's going to be on my mind for quite a while.

(My rating: 7/10. I also drew a map of the game’s geography as I played.)

[amantedellarte]

Non ce la posso fare.

[newflags]

Mark Kozelek – “This Is My Town” & “My Love For You Is Undying”

Admire Koz’s ability to try new styles and reinvent himself but his current kick is atrocious. I once loved his tunes but stopped listening a few years ago now. Follow the link to appreciate one commenter’s spot-on proposal of lyrics for a song called “I Cried During Wall Street”. 

Excerpt:

“It had been a few years since I saw Wall Street, and I've always liked that movie so i went through my DVD cases because I always put them back in the wrong boxes no matter how many times i tell myself not to because it's just easier to stick them back in the wrong boxes

Maybe I should get a subscription to Netflix I had a free trial subscription a few years ago but it expired and the didn't tell me I was going to be charged and when I found out I had to call their customer service number because i couldn't find the link I'm pretty sure I yelled at them and told them to "get fucked" and my biggest fear is that I'll get the same customer service rep who's barely eeking out a living and holding on by a thread now that his wife left and his mom died unexpectedly, though you should always expect your mom to die, i guess”

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1268. Red House Painters - Red House Painters (4AD - 1993)

Pépère Kozelek promène sa neurasthénie et raconte des histoires comme pas deux.

Uncle Joe

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DIscogs

[onetwofeb]

Mark Kozelek - The Finally - 2008