Vampire Survivors (review)

 

(PC/Switch 2, 2022)

I genuinely feel like when you're a kid and you have limited access to videogames, whether due to money or other parental interference, one of the biggest quality assessments of a videogame is technically quantitative instead of qualitative: 'how much content does it have? How many times can you (or do you need to) replay it?' 

In this sense, outside of games that are free to play, I think Vampire Survivors is the greatest videogame of all time purely in terms of content per dollar spent. Even if you don't catch it on a sale, Vampire Survivors (hereafter VS) is stupid cheap yet gives gobs and gobs and then increasing gobs of content. NOTE: I've alternated between playing this on PC and Switch 2 and noticed zero differences

This isn't it, but there is a stage called Bat Country!

I am not exaggerating when I say, every time I or my wife thought we had seen everything the game had to throw at us, we'd inevitably unlock something. And I don't mean merely new characters to play as, new stages, the usual things. This game keeps adding layers: new items/powerups, arcana cards, Adventure Mode, "Dark" arcana cards, this prize wheel that spins randomly during stages and gives fun good or bad effects...it is not endless, but in a good way, it feels it. And oh yeah there is an Endless mode you can unlock so maybe it is endless...

We STILL haven't unlocked everything in the base game and don't own any of the DLC despite dozens and dozens of hours between PC and Switch 2. The Minutemen once sang "our band could be your life", well, VS could be your life, too. (No word on The Minutemen's stance on DLC)

Pictured: a calm moment by '20 minutes into a stage' VS standards

There's a multitude of different elements that make this game addictive, and as it turns out, there's a good reason for that. Let me simply say you will know very quickly that this game was designed by someone (handle: Poncle, with a lowercase p actually) who used to help design gambling machines for casinos in Italy. They used their powers for good, rather than evil, with VS. The first time you get a chest with 3 items in it you will think it's your lucky day...and THEN you eventually get your first chest with 5 ITEMS in it and you're like "Poncle, you exquisite bastard!"

Ah my favorite TCG, Magic: The Survivaton

Though your first dozen or so hours with the game may not get too crazy, by the time you're well into it and can survive to the end of stages you'll start to see just how crazy and over the top this game gets visually. Outside of halting attempts to play Ikaruga, I've never been a Bullet Hell fan because they're so stressful and precise, and I'm someone who still has a hard time putting non-USB-C cables in right the first try. So I'm happy to report that the tagline for this game should really be: "YOU are the Bullet Hell!" Once you're powerful enough, you can still have a challenge playing the game seriously by upping the difficulty in various ways and trying to kill the Death bosses at the end of levels, all that good ol' power gamer stuff...AND, if you prefer (as I do), you can instead mindlessly kill and play casually and keep the difficulty at stock. Take some gummies, put on your favorite playlist, and zone out in one of the most sublime flow states of any gaming delicacy, action RPG or otherwise.

There's a procession of things I could write about to praise this game, including the detailed but retro 2D graphics which warm the cockles of my 16 bit heart, so let me give a mild critique that may or may not matter to you. The ONE bad thing I will say about this game is that it's almost flagrantly obtuse with its in-game descriptions and explanations. You'll come across a challenge to unlock a secret character, and the unlock condition is described like the above: "Be a good boy in Il Molise." Well, you might know there's a dog to play as in the game, and you'll definitely know about the level called Il Molise. But (probably) like my experience, you'll play the stage as said dog and not unlock anything. "Poncle, you abstruse bastard!" you (probably) shout out loud to no one. 

Well, there's an entire wrinkle to this unlock that I won't spoil except to say the game doesn't do nearly enough feedback to the player to clue you in on what the final piece of the puzzle is. Long story short, if you can't figure out what passive upgrades a new weapon, or what the hell any of the different opaque descriptions are in VS, just look them up. We live in the era of fan Wikis that help with this stuff and we eat good because of it.

Ok we need to end by talking co-op. It may seem simple on the surface, and it especially may annoy some people that you can't wander off on your own, so I wanted to dig into the excellent co-op design in this game. It's not as simple as in other action RPGs like say Diablo where it basically means more enemies and loot and such. Due to the way you trade off on level ups and upgrades, it's not that you're "forced" to stay together by the way the screen works; you basically have to stick together to have enough firepower concentrated in the same area to survive. 

Oddly, you can freeze snowmen in this game

I honestly don't think the co-op in VS gets enough praise and attention still to this day, 4 years after release. I feel so strongly about it especially now after I had the chance to try out 3 player this past weekend. Very intelligently designed and even more chaotic, with a lot of laughs and cries of outrage based on the random elements. In some ways it's easier than single player, in some ways it's more difficult. I actually don't have a preference as to which I find more engaging and fun, which is exceedingly rare for me. Mario Kart? Multiplayer. Mario Galaxy? Single player. Mario Survivors? Oh, wait...

The only comparison I can think of outside of Diablo games is long distance driving. I don't mind driving long distances alone though I also don't mind having people to pass the time with. VS is like that: whether you're solo or with multiple people, it's an absolute blast to play. Seriously, $5 on Steam for a god tier game that will give you months and months of content, and that's without the DLC and without being on sale.

P.S. Vampire Crawlers is incredible too, and based on the growth of VS since release I feel like by 2028-9 that game will be god tier, too.

Destroyer- Poison Season

I've had this thing for multiple albums now with Destroyer where I listen to them upon release and I'm either disappointed or not in the mood to grok what he's going for that time out. So they return to my list of albums to listen to someday, and at some point I'll get the bug to listen to a new(ish) Destroyer album and I'll think to myself "hey, this is pretty good, why didn't I like this before?" and hey presto, here we are. 

There's really just a couple things I want to talk about with this record, because Poison Season is the kind of solid but unremarkable album that an artist would be praised for were it a debut or sophomore effort. Coming as the tenth release--not counting his work in The New Pornographers and Swan Lake--and with no significant change in style, Poison Season can't help but fail to surprise us even as it also, happily, fails to underwhelm us. So:

1) The Destroyer albums that don't make my personal top five often have the same issue Poison Season does: the middle sags. Though I've developed (acquired?) a fondness for Trouble In Dreams, its momentum is sapped by the underwritten, overly long 'My Favorite Year' and 'Shooting Rockets (from the Desk of Night's Ape)', the latter of which fares better as the final track on the first Swan Lake album. Then there's This Night, which more accurately suffers from this "the middle sags" issue for most of its runtime--if ever there was an album that would be hugely improved by snipping off a minute or two of each song, and eliminating three or four tracks entirely, it's This Night. Meanwhile, the record we're here to discuss slows to a crawl after high point 'Times Square' and gives us a looser, more disco-y version of 'Archer On The Beach' (I prefer the EP version) and stays in this low gear for the remainder of the runtime. Thank baby Jesus he didn't end the album with 'Sun In The Sky' and instead gives us a mirrored bookend with a revisit of the opening song.

2) OK so I said earlier there isn't a significant change in style on Poison Season, and there isn't--the stormy, raucous 'Dream Lover' feels like it could trade places with the raunchier rock songs on Destroyer's Rubies ('3000 Flowers' or 'Looter's Follies'), the aforementioned rework of 'Archer On The Beach' sounds like the Kaputt era castaway it probably was, and despite its live/organic instrumentation, the sparse feel and lack of percussion on 'Girl In A Sling' actually recalls Your Blues. But the big change I do notice from Kaputt is that these songs are stuffed to the gills with layers of sound and orchestration. It feels throughout like Bejar is keeping us at arm's length, and his presence as the focal point of the music of Destroyer has never been more dubious. Whereas on Kaputt the assembled band seemed groovy, chilled out, and somewhat aloof, Poison Season is instead nervy, blown out, and maximalist. Often, even on the songs I really love, Bejar's vocals are buried in strings and/or a loud rock band vamping. 

To put it another way, you really have to work to catch all of his lyrics this time out. As he recedes and his band steps forward, we have to lean in and listen through the clangor. Perhaps no Destroyer album I'm as intimately familiar with as Poison Season benefits as much from headphone listening as this one; not even just to be able to hear all the different instruments and layers, but to isolate the lyrics more. Until my recent revisit, I genuinely don't think I caught the lines "I think I used to be more fun, ah shit here comes the sun" ('Dream Lover') and "someone’s got to go free, and someone’s got to follow" ('The River'), which good little Destroyerologists like me will clock as referencing lyrics from 'Notorious Lightning.' Anyway, I feel as though I've come off as more harsh than I intended to with this review, but when you've been a fan of an artist like Destroyer as long as I have, it's hard not to take the gifts for granted and focus on the flaws that could be improved...sort of like a marriage, really.

In The Mouth Of Madness

The best thing this movie does is balance jumpscare/gory horror with psychological/atmospheric/surreal horror.

The worst thing this movie does is have an underwhelming ending that feels like a shrug or a bunt, instead of leaving us with true ambiguity or a memorable visual/scene. Though it's a cliche, I think a Mobius strip style ending would have better served the narrative.

Some would argue it's debatable if the events of the film happen at all, but I think that's not the intent, given that John Carpenter considers it part of his Apocalypse Trilogy. I believe the intent of the film is a double twist, that everything really *is* happening AND, ironically, the main character we've been following *isn't* real and is a creation of Sutter Cane. (I think that's why his character is an actor in the movie at the end, like how you see Bond movies billed as "James Bond in...Moonraker.") 

I think the revelation of Sam Neill's lead as a fictional character could've been done better rather than Sutter Cane just telling it to him face to face. Hell I'd even settle for something like he dismisses it in the moment but later it's revealed to be true. Maybe with him returning to his home and finding someone else living there or calling up an old friend who no longer knows him, something like that. Keep it ambiguous if the book publisher is still somehow doing a proto ARG to promote the book by fucking with his life like that.

Ultimately I think this is a film that approaches greatness, and has many great things going for it, but there's just a bit of a muddled and hollow/unsatisfying feeling to the whole thing by the time it's over. If you've seen other "is this really happening/what is reality?" films, even non-horror/scifi ones, a lot of the tropes and ideas here will be familiar to you, albeit they are well done tropes and not mere cliches lazily followed. It certainly helps that the cast is excellent, though holy shit Sam Neill's accent travels as much as he does in the movie.

In The Mouth Of Madness sets itself up to be a 5 star classic for most of its runtime and then limps to an ending that has no stakes. Why do I say that? Well, because it turns out the main characters never had any agency to change anything at any point: one of them isn't real so nothing he did ever really mattered, and Sutter Cane's writing makes everyone else behave as he orders them to. There's an unspoken consequence to decisions like this in movies, including the audience becoming uninvested in the narrative, and it certainly makes rewatches pointless because every action the characters take is preordained and not due to who they are and who they become through the trials and tribulations of the plot. Though this movie is mostly excellent, there's a nagging asterisk that needs to be placed next to that excellent to qualify it.

Meandering Thoughts On The Film Gerry and Non-Narrative Films and etc.

 I don’t think I’m out of line by saying Gus Van Sant has had a really interesting career. Starting out making somewhat controversial films that involved drug addiction, homosexuality, and prostitution, he settled into a pattern for the remainder of the 90s of increasingly mainstream fare—which is to say nothing of their quality, as I don’t think anyone would say Good Will Hunting is a bad movie!

Following the disastrous, masturbatory shot-for-shot remake of Psycho in 1998, Van Sant quickly delivered the above average Finding Forrester, which is mainly known for inspiring the meme-tastic series of websites, YTMND, based on a cheesy line of dialogue shown in trailers that seemed to be everywhere on TV during its release window. The next thing we all knew, he returned in 2002 with Gerry, a film that stands in stark contrast to even his most experimental/unconventional work from the past.

Of course, anyone who had been paying attention to his career outside of movies would not have been as shocked. Starting in the 80s he worked on a few spoken word projects with William S. Burroughs (who had a minor role in Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy in 1989). 1997 saw him release the novel Pink, which is widely considered to be his reflections on River Phoenix’s death. The same year saw the release of his self-titled debut album, which I haven’t heard and know nothing about, and a year later, 18 Songs About Golf, which I haven’t heard but possibly know something about, assuming its title is literal.

Soon Van Sant would returned to films exclusively for the remainder of his career, beginning with the “Death Trilogy” of Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days. Though there is in fact a linear story that progresses in each of these movies, the non-narrative label hangs on them like a proud badge. We are not being shown the true beginning or ending of these stories, and often some likely crucial moments are left out completely—Gerry shows us the two titular leads talking about everyday topics like Wheel Of Fortune rather than the reality of their own predicament. But in not talking about their perilous situation, they actually are if you dig below the surface and see the subsoil, err, subtext. Like the contestant they seem to be mocking for their poor choices/playing of the game show, the two leads have similarly done stupid, arrogant things and gotten themselves in life-threatening trouble. But to acknowledge out loud that this is happening would make it real, instead of ignorable, and therein is the rub I suppose.

I would argue of all 3 of these movies, Last Days has the least going on if you don’t know what it’s inspired by. In fact if memory serves I’m not sure this movie would be anything other than pretty dull if you went in somehow unaware of Kurt Cobain and his suicide (or I suppose his final days?). Meanwhile, though inspired by a true story, Gerry has more of a definite conclusion yet somehow is less narrative. Imagine if Quentin Tarantino directed Castaway and that’s the odd vibe this movie generates: let’s have loose, improvisational conversations and not “take seriously” the survival situation we’re in.

Gerry was probably one of the first artsy fartsy movies I ever saw, during the fateful era of my late college years to my mid 20s, when I basically watched through every movie my local library had. I remember thinking afterwards that I should have hated the movie, since I spent so much of it thinking to myself, “well, this has to go somewhere, right? There has to be some kind of payoff for any of this?”

You can bluntly label the “Death Trilogy” as mercy killing, murders, and suicide (Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days, respectively) but in some ways you could argue the 3 films mix these. After all, in Gerry, shortly after ‘mercy killing’ his companion, the sole survivor soon is rescued and we’re left with ambiguous feelings based on the look on his face. Did he intentionally kill his companion and use the “lost in the desert” as a cover story? Is everything we saw really as it happened? Likely, the movie is not trying to get us to ask these questions, but they occurred to me, and that’s the beauty of a non-narrative film: you can fill in the blanks yourself just as readily as you can sit down with those blanks and be comfortable with them. Elephant never seems to ask or answer why the school shooting is happening, and perhaps in its case, that’s not the point, just as Last Days doesn’t ask or answer why the Cobain-doppelganger commits suicide.

As a side note, in the real case that Gerry was loosely inspired by, the surviving person alleged that they had made a death-pact with the companion they “mercy killed” but that they were too weak to kill themselves. Now, there’s other details to the real case that make the mercy killing aspect more questionable, but I’m not sure that’s pertinent to Gerry. Anyway, in some sense suicide as an option hangs over Gerry just as it does Elephant, a film obviously based on the Columbine Massacre, which famously concluded with a murder-suicide on the part of the shooters. Of course Last Days is about the main character committing suicide, though like Elephant this is implied and not shown. But I digress.

Let’s pivot into another discussion while my mind is wandering. Actually, wandering is a good concept to pick up on here, since most of Gerry is two characters wandering. At times there’s shots that evoke the mysterious and decimated landscapes of The Zone in Stalker (the movie, not the game, just to be clear) and here we arrive at the point I want to pick apart: the distinction between art film and non-narrative film. As there’s a huge amount of overlap between the two, let’s focus on what—in my mind, at least—sets them apart. Art films don’t strictly have to be non-narrative, though they often are, or at least obfuscate their narrative; or even negate it by not offering even the hint of one. Meanwhile, non-narrative films are almost always art films, but not always.

Let’s use two examples to illustrate the difference.

Memento is very much in my mind an art film. It doesn’t offer easy answers to the viewer, and as you experience it for the first time, I strongly suspect most people arrive at the conclusion that it’s actually going backwards chronologically, or anyway, the main layer of the narrative is (people often forget there’s another narrative in black and white exclusively that is in chronological order). Now, you can probably find a fan edit of the film that presents the main narrative in ‘real’ chronological order, but all this does is clarify what the actual order of events is. For the first 20-30 minutes, for some I’m guessing Memento feels like a non-narrative film that soon reveals itself as simply an art film. Though also presented in non-chronological order, Pulp Fiction by contrast is neither an art film nor a non-narrative film. Puzzling out its story order is not essential to understanding and appreciating Pulp Fiction, whereas the revelation is essential to Memento. It’s almost as if at first viewing Memento was edited using the cut-up technique of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. It is so baked into the very structure and framework of the film as a successful art film so that if you take away this non-narrative structure, it becomes a very different work. Indeed I have to assume if viewed with no narrative puzzle to unlock it would become a mere revenge film with a pretty good twist toward the end. So it would be a M. Night Shyamalan movie, basically.

Meanwhile, Gerry itself can be used to qualify it as a non-narrative film instead of an art film, because it straddles the line of a non-narrative film. By which I mean, the plot isn’t really the point of the movie, though there is in some sense a linear story being told. It’s almost like a hybrid of a dialogue heavy hangout movie, ala Clerks or Dazed and Confused, and a pseudo-real time survival movie ala 127 Hours. Just because a film has a simple narrative does not mean it can’t be non-narrative, or have non-narrative elements. Take something like The Mirror: absolutely an art film, absolutely non-narrative. Yet it does present vignettes of life and memories, which in some sense are story elements of the narrator’s life. What, then, eliminates Gerry from art film status? Well, to me there’s nothing going on beneath the surface. There’s no subtext, there’s no dreamlike imagery or ideas to unpack, there’s no abstraction, there’s no visual symbolism or metaphor, and there’s not truly an open-endedness to the film in terms of the beginning or the ending. Mulholland Drive seems to have a definite beginning, middle, and ending, until you arrive at the actual final moments and it feels like a dream/nightmare that could just keep repeating, a recursive story or Mobius Strip.

Now, all of that said, this is no scientific field, so you’re free to view Gerry as anything if it makes sense to you.

The Sea and Cake- One Bedroom

 Album titles can serve many purposes, including no purpose at all. Some bands barely seem to try at all with titles while others seem to be playing a meta game with their fans to see if they get the reference or intent behind it. Among album title tropes, I tend to be simultaneously the most and least interested in self-titled ones. I say least because it’s…merely the band’s name, and nothing more. Not much to discuss or interpret there. Yet in saying they’re “merely” the band’s name, this is both true and false, because if it’s not their debut album, a band using an eponymous title is often communicating something to their audience. This is why I had just said it’s also the most interesting trope to me.

While we’ll always know it as The White Album, the Beatles seemingly intended it to be self-titled, so you’ll sometimes see it referred to as The Beatles. Now, of course the better known trope associated with The White Album is a band doing a double album to stretch out and do a wider variety of music than normal. At least, when I hear people say a record is a band’s “White Album” I take it to mean that. Yet there’s another trope to the phenomenon of a self-titled album arriving several years into a band’s history, and that’s coming at a point in the band’s career when they’re changing their sound, changing members significantly, or otherwise trying to say “this is who we are as a band. It’s not a concept album or a tone piece or about a certain topic. It’s us.”

I bring all this up to say, despite it neither being a double album nor self-titled, One Bedroom by The Sea and Cake has often felt like it should be self-titled. It’s always been amongst my least favorite records by them, though I’ve come to appreciate (slightly) more its odds-and-sods approach to song variety. I mean, ‘Sound & Vision’ is the one cover, ever, the band has released, and it not only ends the album but it’s a lighthearted and fun moment for a band who, despite being always labelled as mellow/chill/relaxing/airy, have ironically never really felt FUN on any other track they’ve made. The rest of the album adds to this mixed feeling, with tracks either being standouts that are career highs—‘Mr. F’ has a circular chorus that sticks in the memory, and the lengthy jammy intro of ‘Four Corners’ that opens the record is a classic Sea and Cake groove—or they’re missteps that water the album down with what should have been b-sides. In particular the middle of One Bedroom always sags for me, and despite this album being just under 40 minutes it has that same issue Stereolab’s Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night does where it’s not a bad album by any means, there’s just a couple too many songs and the pacing is fitful. Which gets me to thinking this might have been a better EP than an album.

Given that this record followed Oui after 3 years, and their next record wouldn’t come out for another 4, it’s strange that One Bedroom feels so undercooked and rushed. It’s one of those releases I’ve always wanted to take a crack at changing the track order to see if I can make it either flow better or be more enjoyable. As a result of all of this the record is one that almost punishes close listening; I’m sure you might know what I mean when I say, not in an ambient music kind of way, but certain albums are more agreeable as background noise to another activity instead of listening intently to it. I’ve gone for walks or sat on the porch drinking beer to Oui and it is brilliant and rewards such close listening. One Bedroom, as its name suggests, always sounded best to me when I was doing homework in my bedroom when I was in school or otherwise focused on something else (reading, videogames, petting cats, etc).

Still, let’s consider the actual work. What One Bedroom reminds me of is when you buy a variety pack of beer or chips or something, and you get to the end of the pack and your least favorite things are the only ones left. “Well, I don’t hate this chocolate stout, but I don’t love it…” you think to yourself. That’s One Bedroom: the least good thing in a group of superior things. If Runner is the album for driving through a city, and Oui is for Summer afternoons with the windows open and a nice breeze going, then One Bedroom is for doing homework, certainly literally as I said before, but perhaps figuratively as you separate the wheat from the chaff in its tracklisting.

On a final note, I don’t give out scores for my reviews anymore, though in this case because my feelings about One Bedroom are difficult to qualify, it may help to quantify them with a number. In the distant past I used a 5 star rating system for my reviews and it always seemed to be the sticking point with the few people who would comment on this blog, so eventually I dropped it entirely, mostly because it seemed unnecessary in the age of streaming and nearly-limitless access to music. By which I mean, you can go listen to this album in multiple places before you consider “spending money” on it, so giving Consumer Reports style ratings feels asinine. Yet One Bedroom sort of perfectly encapsulates what I think of as a 3 star out of 5 album. It is absolutely a 3 out of 5 record, though don’t take this as based on the fact I described the album much earlier in this review as “odds-and-sods.” Not every album that has a handful of weak tracks is automatically either a 3, or even couldn’t achieve a 5. No, One Bedroom would earn this rating because I think fans of the band would probably enjoy this, while at the same time, I would never tell a newcomer to start here.

 

Unedited thoughts on Physical Media Resurgence & Backlogs & Media Access & Self-Control

 I’ve been seeing more and more videos of people younger than me doing self imposed challenges where they don’t use social media for X amount of time, or limit their media consumption to just a few things for a month, or spending a year tackling their backlog of movies/videogames/etc. And it’s interesting seeing people live in the way a lot of people HAD to in the 90s and earlier. I was just thinking recently about how I have more, and more easy access, to videogames than when I was in say 8^th grade, where unless you borrowed a game from someone or rented it, you just had the games you had to play, and nothing else. Same with CDs: I remember when I finally owned more CDs than my 15 disc CD wallet could hold, and how it felt like I had SO MUCH music, whereas now I can open Spotify and have access to thousands upon thousands of albums and songs.

At the same time, I see comments on social media about how people miss videostores and that whole experience. Of course they forget the inconvenience and limited stock and the other downsides that were the reason videostores went away, but perhaps in some way the limited stock is a desirable trait.

Anyway, all of this has me thinking it’s not a black and white issue like it’s portrayed as. When I was in 8^th grade, I would’ve given anything to have access to media like I do now. And this isn’t even a matter of we’ve been spoiled for so long we don’t appreciate what we have; I, at least, always appreciate the convenience of the Internet and nearly-limitless access to information and entertainment. So this whole topic doesn’t to me boil down to “limited media access” vs. “unlimited media access” and which one is better. As with anything, the truth is more complicated and nuanced. Yet ultimately this can be boiled down to self-control. If you can’t stop yourself from endlessly scrolling TikTok all day and checking Reddit every 20 minutes, no amount of self-imposed challenges will permanently alter your behavior. As soon as the week or month or whatever length of time the challenge lasts, I would bet dollars to donuts that most of those people eventually slide back into their old habits. YOU must control your consumption. YOU must learn the balance of mindless content vs. meaningful content you need in your life. YOU must learn to put your phone down and sit down to concentrate on an album or book wholly. But that’s not as simple and sexy as a clickbait title that screams “I lived like someone in the 80s for a week!”

So let’s do a little thought experiment. If you go to your local used media store and buy a DVD boxset of, say, The Office, and this is in your selection of physical media you’re “allowed” to watch during your self-imposed challenge. So on the first day of it, you begin watching season one of The Office on DVD. Outside of the interface and having to physically change the discs as the seasons go on, there is no fundamental difference between the two ways of watching. You could just as easily have used your self-control to say, “I’m going to put my phone down and watch the first 6 episodes of The Office on streaming.”

Ultimately you can use whatever methods or systems proposed by YouTubers and others to enjoy as much media as possible and not waste your life on social media and mindless content churn websites. But you still have to have the self-control to stick with these methods or systems, and this ultimately is what makes them a novelty rather than a paradigm shift: you are ultimately responsible for yourself. It’s always within your power to decrease your social media time and increase time spent reading or watching new TV shows or whatever.

I do think the one valuable thing people are taking from this whole topic is getting back into physical media and as a result having real ownership of media again. While I still maintain there’s a balance to find between being all physical media and all streaming, I can’t deny that with the former the movie studio can’t come into your house and steal your bluray copy of The Princess Bride.

My own system for say music is that I curate a collection of vinyl records of my absolutely favorites and rare releases you can’t always find on streaming, but I also use streaming all the time because of the ease of use and the amount of music you get for that monthly fee. Similarly with movies, I only buy a physical copy of something if I especially love it OR if it’s an obscure movie that might go out of print—it’s been re-released recently, but for a long time you couldn’t watch Dogma on any streaming services and had to track down a DVD copy, for instance.

Now as for backlogs…I think this is also about self-control, but additionally about having honest conversations with yourself. We all know that sometimes we purchase things because we’d like to think of ourselves as the kind of person who casually decides to read One Hundred Years Of Solitude but realistically most of us will stop at the purchase/acquisition. This is why so many people have dozens of games in their Steam library they haven’t touched. You WANT to be the kind of person who plays in-depth strategy games or esoteric RPGs with dense mechanics, so you buy those games, yet you never end up playing them. You can use whatever systems or self-imposed challenges you want, ultimately you have to make yourself accountable and actually play them. I have this thing where, when I’m between videogames, I play an hour or two of a few different games I’ve bought but haven’t played. This gets me to rapidly reassign games in my own ranking: Games I’ll Never Want To Play, Games I Might Want To Play Someday, and Games I Want To Keep Playing After This Is Over.

 

Unedited Thoughts on Edward Hopper

Really the most obvious thing that jumps out to one is the sense of loneliness and solitude and contemplation in Hopper’s paintings. Even when there is no human in the paintings, there is a tremendous sense of the artist or the viewer adding something to the room or landscape by viewing it. Hopper’s works often depict lone humans in different situations, and when we’re able to see their facial expressions, they’re never one of outright happiness. We see person after person in environments made by humans—buildings, cities, offices, movie theaters, homesteads, etc.—and what stands out is how lonely and solitary they feel. Anyone who has ever felt utterly, devastatingly alone in a crowded room can relate.

Rather than pick up on how Hopper’s works influenced things like the liminal art/photography movement, I think it’s worth noting that to me his paintings aren’t about the absence of things or being in an in-between zone/state of being of some sort. Rather when there’s humans they seem resistant to their current situation yet resigned to it. They’re still lost in thought or rumination about their life but their look and auras are of one who has accepted, perhaps capitulated to the situation they’re in, whether it’s an unhappy marriage or a new suddenly unhappy job or a moment or realization you know you can’t do anything about. When there are no human figures, we see ourselves in the landscapes; we feel almost invited in to project our own feelings of loneliness and alienation.

Yet in this last point I find there to be a feeling of mutuality and invitation in Hopper’s works. Even if they make you feel lonely, they also make you aware that other people have felt just like you have, even if the details are technically different. I look at a work like Man Seated On Bed (1906) and Summer Interior (1909) and especially Office In A Small City (1953) and I can see flashes of my own life, and/or people I’ve known, in these snapshots in time. With the latter work we see a common technique of Hopper’s during this mid to late era, where we see a human figure but also a bit of a voyeuristic angle were we see the exterior of the building/setting the human figure is in. Perhaps another way to see it is almost like an omnipotent viewer peering into dollhouses at the tiny lives there.

The emptiness of the cityscapes with one human figure in focus really underscores how many people over the years have felt alienated and alone despite ironically living in large urban environments. Curious then that the last painting I’m riffing off of should specify that it’s portraying a SMALL city. Anyway, I imagine the person in this painting has just sat down for their first day of work, and—peering across the cityscape that at first perhaps is scenic and lovely but will soon become ordinary and repetitive—it dawns on them that this is going to be the next however many years of their life. You are just a cog in the machine of society; welcome home.

Interesting to me that some art critics back in the day tried to associated Hopper’s later works with abstract art/surrealism, I think this is just because of the vaguely dreamlike feeling his later human-less landscapes/cityscapes/roomscapes can have. Certainly you can see Rooms By The Sea (1951) and it can look a bit along the lines of a Renè Magritte b-side, but this is another feeling the viewer brings to the work. If you visually engage with this work you can explain away how the perspective makes it seem like the door opens directly onto water, when in actuality this room may be up on a hill overlooking a body of water, with the POV disguising the steps or slop just outside the door. One could interpret this painting quite simply and just as validly as: the open door to nature brings in water and light, crucial elements to (most) life. While the room in the back has sunlight too, it’s less and fainter than the open door to nature.

Much has been commented on, even by the artist himself, with her focus on light and shadows. I feel this is mirrored in the focus on loneliness/solitude and external forces. By which I mean, even in the landscapes with no human figure, the viewer sort of substitutes in and is made to reflect on their own feelings. The landscape can match your mood or you an allow it to suggest one to you. When there are human figures, even more than one, you still get the sense they are inside themselves and looking outward, rather than imagining how they fit “into” the scene they’re in. For instance, the earlier cited work Summer Interior depicts a woman who is in her environment yet given the arrangement and her state of dress and look, she is also a million miles away from her environment focused on something else. Did she just get divorced? Is she depressed and thinking of the past? Or it is even something good that has her so flustered?