The Super Psyched Pants

You know who the worst people to work with happen to be? Doctors. Hands down, doctors are the most demanding people I have ever met. You know who's just underneath them? Actors, man. Actors.

Don't get me wrong, I like doctors and I like actors, but from my experience, if doctors are the most commanding, then actors are the flakiest. Sometimes they show up, most times they just don't reply to your emails.

I guess this is an odd way of building hype for a feature I'm trying to compile for USGamer.net over the next few weeks. I don't want to spoil it right now for the two of you that consistently read this, but it was supposed to be a big article from the perspective of lots and lots of people. Turns out that it's going to be a still-big article from the perspective of three people.

Trust me, though, that these three people are the linchpin of the story anyway, so they're really all I needed, but the original plan was something of a grand mosaic. But actors, I tell you. They're just impossible to get a hold of.

Anyway, keep checking back over the next few weeks to those hepcats at USGamer. It's a website you should read on the reg anyway, but since I'm one of their snazzy freelancer dudes, it just makes them that much cooler. You already knew that. What you didn't know, though, is how absolutely smashing this story is going to be if things go according to plan. Make sure you're wearing your super psyched pants when you read it. Trust me on this.

1989 Is Hell

Now that I'm just about a month through Metal Gear Solid V: The Stupid Name After the Colon, I have found that it is both total genius and absolute bullshit on equally profound levels. But we'll get to that some other time. I mostly play it in an early morning somnambulist haze, and I just don't want to talk about it right now.

I spent the weekend internalizing Ryan Adams' wholesale cover of Taylor Swift's 1989 record. It took a treadmill, a few trips to the store, and a walk around the block to really let it seep into my auditory pores. That's probably three solid front-to-back listens, and then a few searched-for songs while sitting on the front porch with a cocktail, because those particular songs stood out above the rest. That's generally bare minimum for me to make a real judgment call on an album, but since most records are short in comparison to other populist media like film or games, this many listens is about what I would put into a movie or short game. It's easy to gloss over some of the deeper layers, even if you're listening intently while purposely cordoning yourself from the rest of the thinking world to run in place for a number of miles that only matter to you and the accountants at your gym. You really got to get in there, people.

I guess since I said that I "bare minimum-ed" it means that it's kind of bad. It isn't. I guess that last sentence is meant to imply that it's kind of good. Well, it isn't either. It's definitely more of one than the other, though, and that depends on if you are goodly enough to agree with the following statement: Ryan Adams' best album by a country mile was Love is Hell. It was his magnum opus, even though he has before and since written several other albums that he himself will consider as such. 1989 is a sequel to the Love is Hell period in just about every way save for who actually wrote the lyrics to the songs. That reads a little weird, but stick with me because like all sequels, it both galvanizes what made the original beautiful and holy and rehashes shit that should have been left well enough alone.

Let's take a quick second to explain Love is Hell, Adams' would-be follow up to his breakout album, Gold. See, Gold was a creative and commercial success at a time where the accursedly-named "alt.country" genre was in something of a stride. Wilco was selling lots of records, and I think people were just good and sick of Dave Matthews once they finally graduated from college, so while Son Volt fans were still wondering when they'd get their time in the, erm, sun, a scrappy egotist that had recently left the band Whiskeytown decided to break out on his own following the strong reviews and mediocre sales of his original album, Heartbreaker (a record that spawned "Come Pick Me Up," a single that pervaded just about every romantic comedy on the planet for a year). This was Adams, of course, and the whole world basically shit themselves over how good Gold was, including and especially one Sir Elton John whom once referred to Adams as" great one;" something fans love to recount when you tell them that much of Adams' output has been found to be overrated.

Anyway, so after Gold hit kind of big, his label, Lost Highway, was all like, hey man, make us another sweet jam like that. He was like, no, baby, I just recorded an album of mope rock songs because that's been my head space for a minute. They came back with more of a nonononononono. So, depending on which myth you believe, over the next month, or the next weekend, or while he waited for a burger to finish grilling, Adams recorded the majority of Rock N Roll, a sort of sweet ode to the music that he evidently likes, because it's chock full of callbacks and shout outs to the Strokes, Pink Floyd, U2 and a bunch of other stuff. Yet, there was overlap on this record with what he had already completed for this now-scrapped mope rock album, which was reevaluated and released in two halves (and eventually, its own standalone album with expanded songs) called, you guessed it, Love is Hell. Adams, then, recorded errant songs when pressed to compile a pretty good album in the form of Rock N Roll while still getting to release a very, very good record in Love is Hell. That's kind of the way he rolls, though. He's a pretty prolific guy.

Another thing about Adams is that he's definitely a cover song guy, too, which leads us back to the present. His superlative retooling of Oasis' "Wonderwall" was the catalyst for all of this (which, yes, was on both Rock N Roll and Love is Hell), and the guy hasn't looked back, dropping stuff like Alice In Chains songs on EPs and deep Grateful Dead tracks at live shows. Having been clear to the listening world that he wanted to do a Smiths-like re-recording of all of those Taylor Swift songs marries both what he did with Rock N Roll and Love is Hell into a goofy, if fascinating cohesion: A mope rock album that pays tribute to stuff he evidently likes.

1989, when stripped of the novelty of being covers of pop songs, sounds every bit like Love is Hell to a fault. Whole guitar parts on latter tracks like "Wildest Dreams" and "This is Love" seem like they were cut and pasted from the earlier album, which is probably the primary culprit for the back end of the record sounding way too same-y than it should have been based on the source material. The album's first three tracks present a great tonal jump from mopey to funk-furious by the time that "Style" shows up, which is maybe one of the better single picks from the whole affair, but the rest of the album never catches up with it, and it settles into being too down-tempo by the middle to the point of being boring by the end. 

When taken as individual tracks, though, Adams does some cool rejiggering with these very dreamy pop numbers, even if they wind up sounding like stuff he's put to tape a dozen times over at this point. "Out of the Woods" is sappy, but ends with a nice, long fadeout that added some texture to the song. Same with "Bad Blood," probably Swift's most idiotic single, when he ripped away its overproduced faux-hip hop sound. Yes, Adams' song wound up sounding like adult contemporary dad rock, but this was probably the only thing from this whole experiment that fixed a problem that didn't really exist; something covers albums always try to do. There's really nothing edgy or dangerous about any of these songs --not that there needed to be-- in Adams' hands, but since they're coming from the prevailing pop princess of the moment, they actually kind of are for her, which is a little weird. Still, a lot of what you'll hear on this album will probably wind up in that many more romantic comedies, I suppose, because their middle-range tempo and calm, syrupy demeanor are custom made for montages that involve rain and the people that silently stare at it. 

What we have, then, is a boring album of mostly good covers which sound nothing like Smiths songs if you've ever listened to a Smiths album. But they sound like Ryan Adams songs of a certain vintage. If that kind of thing flips your lid, then you'll find something to love about 1989, more than just what it might represent. The rest of the world, though, can just listen to the original album and be equally satisfied.

See You in the Morning

Between the hours of 4:30 and 8:30am, when the sun is still just remembering that it can peak its fiery head above the small growth of trees in my tiny, overpopulated suburb, there is a man screaming at me. Short bursts come out of the crackled audio of a two-way radio, getting more intense as he realize that I don't respond. Always it is intense, this other man's screaming, though I try to avoid it as best I can. But being the meticulous guy that I am, sometimes the constant chorus of "Snake? SNAKE? SNAAAAKE?!" just cannot be avoided. Like everything, I suppose, you even get to like it.

Let me briefly point out that I'm not being screamed at in this manner --which we can heretofore refer to as "playing Metal Gear Solid V"-- for the four solid hours that I've listed above. Rather, let's call that a very generous range. As the proud-yet-confused father of a 3 week-old baby, I take these fleeting moments of tactical espionage action when I can, and I'm certainly grateful for them. In all seriousness, I didn't expect to have any time playing video games at all for these first few weeks or so as life goes through the typhoon of finding the best way to rear a child while also letting the people that birthed it retain some sanity. Every parent will tell you the same. On the other hand, I've always been an early riser, so the schedule of me putting her down at midnight, my wife feeding her between 2:30 and 3:00, and then me feed her again early in the morning has been found to be most agreeable to both our sleeping schedules, and also my appetite for sneaking up on an unsuspecting military goon and choking the hell out of him. Wouldn't you know it, when she's off her sleeping schedule, that's gratifying for a different reason, too. Metal Gear, man.

It's hard, this whole parenthood thing, but so is Metal Gear Solid V. At least, it is the way I've been playing it. Though I typically go through most video games in as bloodthirsty a manner as possible, and past Metal Gear Solid games have certainly been no exception, I'm doing my best to be as holy and true a pacifist as my tranq gun will let me through the whole ordeal so far. You can perhaps imagine my frustration, then, when I get through 45 minutes of silence --almost surgical in precision from one interrogated mook to the next-- before getting caught by some idiot that catches me in the act of doing good soldier-y spy stuff and blows my cover. Pause. Restart. Contain my screams. Plenty of right-thinking people have written reviews and articles these last few weeks about just saying "well, fuck it" and going pro-lethal, but this has become a hurdle that I simply cannot overcome. Call it pigheadedness, I suppose, but when I finish that mission, when I get that child soldier on the chopper, when I extract the opposing faction's commander, when I swipe all of the fuel that I need and nobody sees me doing any of that stuff? Elation, I tell you. There's a tickle in my chest that, well, I also get when my kid is awake and has just cracked a smile, however briefly.

The first week of fatherhood, honestly, sucks. Not this is bullshit -sucks, but more like Jesus, when is this going to get better -sucks. It is action packed in all of the ways you wish it weren't; the baby is crying, you're trying to figure out why, and sometimes feeding it and changing its diaper actually won't get your baby to stop crying. Figuring all of that out is rough going, man, no matter how much help you might be getting from the kind folks at the hospital. The last two weeks, though, have been better. You're surprised how quickly life finds its own small routines (in between the sleep when you can get it and the shrieks of a 7 pound human you love uncontrollably). Still, everything is challenge. You begin planning your day in 3 hour increments. Often, you get a half a bag of chips and call it dinner because cooking is a luxury of time you don't have. Taking care of yourself and your home must be meticulously timed, and abandoned immediately if necessary. Everything takes planning and a little bit of forethought to be executed with maximum efficiency. That is, until something out of the norm happens (like a short growth spurt that makes a baby scream and eat --somehow at the same time-- for days on end) and you have to adjust on the fly. You know, like Metal Gear.

I feel it burning in there, this new and perhaps final Metal Gear game. It is searing itself into my memories already, and finding a suitable mnemonic host in the first month of my first baby's life. Ever will the two be linked together, as other games in life-altering moments have been. Metal Gear Solid V, and all of its confounded screaming, will remind me when I took her home, fed her, swaddled her, and tried as hard as I could to get her back to sleep at 6:45 when a pivotal cut scene begins. When I look at pictures of her sleeping in mommy's arms, freaking out over the bottle we've just fed her, and wearing her first "future Batgirl" onesie, I will remember when I attached a balloon to a tank and sent it off into the clouds. Somehow, it all makes perfect sense.

At least, that's how I felt at 5:35 this morning.

Updates From Yesterday

We'll do this in bullet form:

• I still have a baby. She's very cute, if loud at times I wish she wouldn't be
• I still haven't jumped into Metal Gear Solid V yet, but that's not for a lack of wanting. The cool thing about having a baby is that everybody and their brother wants to come over to see her, and they often bring food with them. Sure, that can get kind of old, but since it's mostly in the evenings when less stuff is going on, I'm still fine with it. Currently, though, the TV that is attached to the PlayStation 4 is having a semi-family viewing of Beetlejuice. I don't have it in my heart to stop it.
• On that note, for only being less than a week old at the time, my newborn baby girl has seen a fair amount of the cannon of Movies All Humans Should Watch, and mostly by dumb ass luck since they were on television at one time or another since we got home on Friday. These include: The Dark Knight, ET, Back to the Future, and to a lesser extent, Whiplash (which was good, but a little too new for such a prestigious list). I'm hoping that the teachings of cinematic prophets Spielberg, Zemeckis, and Nolan will somehow seep into her, even if their current track records are a little on the spotty side. 
• Google has a new logo. They didn't need it.
• I am slowly chipping away at compiling interviews for a huge story I'm writing for USGamer next month. Not a whole lot of responses yet, but the key people are already on board, and that's what counts. I don't want to spoil what I'm doing yet, but it's a pretty cool project that I'm super excited to work on. If the stars would have aligned and I would have scored an interview from a specific person, it would have cracked the whole thing open and made this piece my Sistine Chapel, but alas, the world isn't full of people that want to talk about their past work, if you can believe it. 
• Still about half way through the first edit of the book (remember that?), but I'm hoping to get an edit done in the next few weeks and sent out to a few very hip cats and kittens that agreed to proof it. This is a total bullshit vanity project for me, but I still need to constructive criticism, so let's see how that goes. I'm definitely up early enough, now that I think about it, so I should probably start taking advantage of the golden hour to get this mopped up. We'll see, I s'pose.
• Beyond reasoning, my wife has forced me to go to the gym the last few days, and has reasoned enough that I'll be spending an hour or so outside of the house every day for this purpose. I was comfortable with skipping for another week, but sainted woman that she is, she knew that if I didn't stick to some sort of routine in my life I would be kind of a house-dwelling ogre. Nobody needs that. Tomorrow: chest, legs, and vomit.
• Holy shit, Jamestown+ is a smashing video game. I can't even count how long it's been since I've really sat down with a bullet hell shooter, and this really hit the spot for a two hour binge the other night when I was totally wired and couldn't get any sleep. I know that I have a giant funky chunk of open world stealth-ery waiting for me, but goddammit, I want to go back to Jamestown+ right effing now.
• Contrary to that, Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris is...good...I guess. No, it actually is pretty decent. A little more on the shoot-y side compared to it's isometric, more puzzle heavy progenitor Lara Croft and the Mysterious something something I'm too lazy to look up the name. I actually really liked that first game, and I was pretty happy to get this new one as a PS+ download last month. So far, it seems to be a bit more of an overhead metroidvania, but I really only got about an hour or so into it, so I can't tell you for sure. Man, I love unlocking upgrades and digging through environments for secrets and stuff, though, and it kind of felt like this had that kind of thing going on. Compared to Jamestown+ (you know, that game you're downloading right now, right?), I don't want to run right back over to my PS4 to play it, but I can see myself going back to it, post MGSV.
• Yeah right.
• I'm about 60% of the way through a download of Guild Wars 2, a game I have no business getting into at the moment. It probably won't work on this low-rent laptop anyway, but, well...

Huh. A lot happened, didn't it?