Check the Rime

I'm out in San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference, which has increased my love of the world of video games, like, a thousandfold. Seems to me like this is where the ideas flow and where people think of games as a medium first, and an industry second.



Last night, Sony threw a great party where Guru and Q-Tip performed. I haven't been a hip-hop concert in ages and honestly, my old, still-on-East-Coast-time ass was thinking about not going. "Oh, I should go home and work. Oh, it's too late. Oh, the show won't start until 1 a.m. Oh, what do I need to see those fools for? I saw them back in the day."

Fuck all that.

This show did what it was supposed to do, which I think was transporting folks back to the days when Sony dominated the home console market, instead struggling for second place the way they are now. The party started at 9, and it was a cool block party set up in a club called Mezzanine. Open bar, finger food, blah blah blah. The event firm did have some nice touches, though: basketball hoops off to the side of the stage, '70s-era flicks projected onto the wall, b-boys and girls uprocking and spinning, and my favorite bit, two barbers cutting heads, so you could get that "fresh fade from Rob" look without going to a barbershop right behind the mall.



Anyway, the other cool thing about this show was that Guru strolled onto the stage at about 10 pm, meaning that I wasn't going to lose my voice for screaming over the music or drink too much because I was bored. His hype man (no, I don't know his name; he's a hype man, for Christ's sake) was type annoying during his crowd warm-up and after, but Keith Elam opened strong with "Mass Appeal." From then on, it was a set heavy with post-Gangstarr and Jazzmatazz cuts. Guru's behind may be on the fringes, but he's stayed busy. I stopped paying attention after the second Jazzmatazz album and, honestly, the shit they did wasn't impressive enough to make me want to run out and get a complete set. I was glad to see that Guru apparently doesn't suffer from much of that angry-rapper bitterness that sets in when trends pass them by. He seemed sincere about the shit he's putting out now through his 7 Grand label. One thing that struck me about his half of the show is the depth of Guru's lyricism. Dude wrote and continues to write some pretty insightful lines. Two things bothered me about his set, though: (1) both Guru and hype-dude kept on reminding us that we were hearing hip-hop and jazz, but a live instrument was nowhere to be found. Kind of a glaring contradiction, no? (2) they also kept on referring to tunes as classics and while some of them were, some of them most certainly weren't. And, y'know true classics don't need calling out.



Which brings us to The Abstract Poet Incognito. I won't be writing as much about this set because, well, I documented much of it. I will say this, though: Tip still wants it. Jonathan Davis came out fired up and showed off a masterful command of the stage and crowd from the first note. The song transitions were seamless and even surprising at times. Dude struck some humble notes during his mic time and never ever seemed to evince an ego which, if I had his body of work, would be more than a little justified. (Unlike Mr. Fiasco, Jonathan Davis really earned his right to swagger.) Tip's band-and-DJ back-up was tight and the man himself ripped lots of classic Quest stuff. He did it all solo, too, reciting other people's parts and even crooning some hooks. The new stuff (maybe two tracks?) sounded good and seems to move away from the overly fusion-y indulgences of the never-released Kamal the Abstract album. (Todd, you better still have that somewhere for archival purposes...) Apparently, there's a new album called The Renaissance coming out in June and after last night's set, be sure that I'll be copping a CD when I get the chance. I'll let the video do most of the talking, but I'll close out by saying that it's awesome when an artist justifies the rose-colored warm fuzziness of your nostalgia.

Hater Aid

Issuu's a new website that converts PDF documents into Flash files. I decided to try it out on an old magazine piece I wrote a while back.

If Elected...

It feels like I've been away longer than I actually have, but it has been a while. I've been pretty busy and generally pretty proud of the stuff I've been doing. I'm itching to share some of what I've been working on with however many loyal readers I've got out there. (Feels so weird to type that...) Things will hopefully be approved and/or launching soon and folks will get to sample the various and sundry projects that have taken up my time.

On the book front, I had a meeting with my editor last week. We're just trying to build up momentum here and get the idea machine cranking so The Celebrity Collaborator can just jump in and press the gas. The FUNBE (friend/upstairs neighbor/book editor) and I got to talking and tried to deconstruct the intensity of the the two leading Democratic candidates' sparring. We got particularly stuck on this idea of Bill Clinton being the first black President.



While it's not that surprising that this meme has come up as Clinton and Obama vie for the Democratic nomination, it's pretty amazing that people treat it as if it's an actual issue. Let's be real: the whole thing started as a joke. A warm jest, an inclusive jape. Bill Clinton, savvy image-worker that he is, never seemed to protest too much under this make-believe melanin mantle. And, sure, he's got some offices in Harlem. And, yes, you can trot out all the other things people point to as signs that Bill's got that one drop floating in his veins: the single-mom Southern roots, the saxophone, the Links/Jack-and-Jill crew he hangs with, the ladies-man swagger and all the empathy and rhythm in his voice. Debate those all you want, but the reality still remains: Bill Clinton ain't no Black President.

I'm not talking about his political record here. I'm talking about the elusive hoodoo that makes up the collective subconscious and wells up in certain individuals. While the FUNBE (who I must note is a smarter man than myself) and I were parleying in that midtown Manhattan office, I decided that maybe, just maybe, Black President isn't even an electable position, at least not in the way that the U.S.A. selects its Commander-in-Chief anyway.

Because, the way I envision it, becoming Black President is a hearts-and-minds thing. It's about groundswell.



Fela Kuti was a Black President. (It's the title of one of his albums and where the germ of this idea started in my head.)

Miles Davis was a Black President. (Yeah, even with all his fucked-up shit.)

Marvin Gaye, Isaac Hayes and James Brown were the Black President at the same time. (No, not Co-Presidents. Separate Black Presidents with overlapping terms. Chew on that.)

Duke Ellington was a Black President. (Thus proving that you can be royalty and President at the same time.)

Jacob Lawrence was a Black President. (On the strength of the campaign posters alone...)



Zora Neale Hurston was a Black President. (First female President in 2008? Yawn. Got there like 70, 80 years ago. Thanks for playing, though.)

Ralph Ellison was a Black President. (Hell, Invisible Man's practically a manual about the electoral process.)



That nameless, faceless S1W (Remember them? Peace to the Security of the First World soldiers. ) in the crosshairs of the Public Enemy logo? He was a Black President.


Dave Chappelle was a Black President. (And he can return to active duty whenever he wants, as far as I'm concerned.)

See, Black Presidents wage sociocultural campaigns and get elected in invisible caucuses. No announcements need to happen, because the results become readily evident. Sometimes the hoodoo vote and the ballot-and-button world might collide. (I'd like to think that Shirley Chisolm was a Black President.) The status of Black President comes from the planes of persona, iconography and metaphor, from participating in those areas in both conscious and subconscious ways. It's a dangerous alchemy that a BP candidate can't always control and, moreover, shouldn't necessarily try to. Eventually, one might find that the right stew jes grew.


I'm not gonna run the metaphor into the ground and start parsing who the Black Cabinets and the Black Prime Ministers are or have been. We can debate and disagree* on who's actually on the official roster of past and present Presidents; that's just part of the dynamic. No one person decides. Most importantly, I'd even say that you kind of know who isn't a Black President. (Sorry, Tavis...) Heck, I'll even go so far as to say that, if elected, Obama may not even wind being a Black President. He could wind up being an African-American President or a multiracial President, but it may well be that he didn't do so hot on those invisible caucuses. (However, I will quote a writer I spoke to recently who said that all it took was watching Barack greet an associate while stumping to convince him. "He gave dude a pound. Side handshake, pulled in to the chest and the pat on the back. That's not scripted. That's instinct.")


Looking back, maybe Toni Morrison was putting some rootwork on Bill. ("Oh, you know, let's call him that if it'll help him–and us–out.") What Slick Willie may not know is that nowadays he's dangerously close to Anointed Ofay** territory and those guys never become President. They're frickin' harbingers of doom.

Developing...



*Lord knows there's lots of people on the bubble. Let’s talk it out, people! Jesse? Al? Dyson? And, yes, anyone who knows me knows that I'm being generous by even putting that last guy down as a maybe.

**If you don't already know, you'll just have to pick up the book to find out what this means. 'Course, that means I have to write it, too.

Hear Ye, Yearly!

I've been writing for Time Out Chicago for a minute now and you can check out my year-end video game list on their website. I tried to do something a little different. I hope GLaDOS likes it as much as I like her Christmas screen. I also did some quick hits in the same vein for Entertainment Weekly.

A for Effort

A few weeks ago, while reading another blog, I stumbled upon the fact that the Washington Post compiled a list of everything that has gotten an “A” grade over the course of 2007 in the Media Mix grid of their Sunday Source section. I’ve been writing about video games and comics for this section of the WashPost for about four years now (I think) and this seems to be the first time that they’ve done something like this.

It’s kinda jarring to look back and see what games and comics offerings I stamped with the first letter of the alphabet. For the most part, I don’t have much Reviewer’s Regret about much of these grades. Out of 52 weeks of the year, I gave out 14 A grades, give or take. (These ain’t super-reliable numbers, since some weeks MediaMix doesn’t run and other weeks I’ll do two reviews or no review.) I did go on to give Rock Band and the Captain America Omnibus A-minuses a week later, so that works out to be a little more than a third of the time. I’m sure somewhere out there someone is grading my grading. It’s what the intarwebs was made for!

Devilishly good

Continuing on the theme of “Stuff Evan Should Be Up On But Isn’t,” I finished reading eight volumes of Hellboy a few weeks ago. I don’t know if it’s everything that’s in print but it seems like it’s the bulk of Hellboy-related material. My first memory of seeing Mike Mignola’s work was either on Marvel’s Alpha Flight or the house ads that were running in Marvel Comics for the Rocket Raccoon mini-series in the eighties. I remember thinking that his blocky, ink-heavy style immediately stood out from other prevailing sensibilities at the time and it still does more than 20 years later.


Hellboy’s a demonic spawn summoned to earth who winds up working as a paranormal investigator. The premise essentially riffs on the Entity That Should Be Evil But Isn’t idea, which probably goes back a long ways. (Of course, now I can’t get the Son of Satan, Marvel’s 1970s-era character of my head.) The thing I’ve grown to love about the Hellboy character is his almost-blasé, workaday attitude when it comes to dealing with bizarre creatures or macabre revelations about the Dark Forces of the Universe. He’s like a shit-talking, gun-wielding plumber (with the Right Hand of Doom, of course). Slimy, tentacled Elder God about to breach the borders of our reality? For Hellboy, it’s just time to make the donuts.



Maybe it’s because I inhaled the bulk of it in a short span but it’s pretty striking how much Hellboy is its own thing. In the trade paperbacks, Mignola’s not shy about citing influences and sources but he manages to make them into a singular experience. There’s a real sense of mythos here that you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere else in comics nowadays. All throughout the collective work, Mignola’s lean plainspoken dialogue really lets the moodiness of his art emanate from the panels.

I’ve never seen the Hellboy movie but loved Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, so I’m looking forward to renting the DVD and seeing what kind of job Ron Perelman does as the big red guy.


If this two-page sequence makes it into the movie, then I'm there opening day.

"Find the Haitian"

If anybody’s still checking this blog after a woeful six-week absence, then please accept my sincerest apologies. I’ve been busy with lots of things. One of them was finally watching the first season of Heroes.


To everyone who ever said “Oh my God, how are YOU, of all people, not watching this show?”: You were right. I was cynical at first. The initial episodes were slow and I kept waiting for a misstep, for the threads to go awry and fall apart. But the mix of unapologetic superhero trappings, strong emotional performances and generous screen time for a large cast of characters won me over.

For a long time comic nerd like me, the fun was in catching references, seeing where inspirational material peeked through and what the show’s writers did with that.

Claire’s dad Noah Bennett seems to a version of Henry Peter Gyrich, the government agent in Marvel Comics who’s always trying to keep mutants, the Avengers and various other powered types in line. I love the way they deepen the motivations of that character type. I also love the ethnic mix on the show. I haven’t watched the second season, but I hope that they continue to dodge the tokenism that plagues so much speculative fiction.

Something about the universe the show creates–either the implied stakes of the action or the metaphorical significance of the characters’ powers–makes emotional moments in the show ring unexpectedly true. It could be the simple fact that we get to watch the actions and consequences play out, as opposed to reading between the lines of still images. There were a lot of moments where I was watching the show and thought, “That wouldn’t have worked on the printed page.”


I also love the way the first season played with conventions of the superhero genre: secret labs, the blessing/curse dichotomy of having powers, the way they play around with the idea of secret identities. I saw the ending of the finale coming a mile away and thought it fell a little flat. But, that doesn’t matter. The best thing about serial fiction is that, if you’re clever enough, you can continually build on a mythos to keep it fresh. The best thing about Haitians? Everybody thinks we’re spooky.