→ January 10, 2011
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A Pale View of Hills.

Kazuo Ishiguro is best-known today for Remains of the Day, which really means he’s best known for making the book that they turned into that movie, although another one of his novels, the dystopian heartbreaker Never Let Me Go, was recently made into a movie starring the human dimple. (Both books are on the Klaw 100.) His debut novel, A Pale View of Hills, was critically acclaimed at the time of its release but has been obscured by those two later works, although it showcases both Ishiguro’s strong yet beautiful prose and his ability to create dreamlike settings that keep the reader off balance through shifts in time or realistic unrealism.

The narrator of A Pale View of Hills is Etsuko, a Japanese widow living in England after the suicide of her older daughter, Keiko, her only child from her first marriage, to Jiro, a traditional Japanese man. Her younger daughter, Niki, from her second marriage, comes to visit from London, triggering a series of flashbacks for Etsuko to when she was pregnant and struck up a relationship with the peculiar widow Sachiko and her daughter Mariko shortly after the end of World War II. Sachiko and Mariko have an odd relationship; Sachiko leaves the ten-year-old Mariko home alone for long periods and doesn’t require her to go to school, while Sachiko herself pursues a lopsided relationship with the American serviceman known as “Frank.” Mariko appears to be bright, but is scarred by horrors she witnessed during the end of the war, and her mother appears unable to help or even cope, escaping instead into her alternate reality with her paramour.

Those flashbacks are intertwined with another series of reminiscences to a time when Jiro was alive and his father, Ogata-san, came to visit Jiro and Etsuko for several days. Jiro himself was fairly cold and distant with his father, who seemed at that stage to have a stronger relationship with his daughter-in-law than he did with his son, as the latter is poisoned by the gap between Ogata-san’s views on the loss of Japanese culture with their defeat in war. (Ishiguro explored that topic, of coming to terms with Japan’s imperialistic, jingoistic past after World War II, in An Artist of the Floating World, a book I found less successful and less enjoyable than Hills.)

Ishiguro enjoys creating layers of mystery, then revealing only some of the answers as the book nears its end, a habit that covers this book from start to finish as well. One of those mysteries is left up to the interpretation of the reader, and I’m going to discuss my own belief, so consider this your spoiler warning.

Near the end of the book, Etsuko shifts without warning when relaying a conversation between herself and Mariko from referring to Sachiko in the third person to speaking in the first person – that is, she is suddenly Sachiko. Their two stories have substantial, if slightly imperfect, parallels, but Mariko could easily be Keiko, sharing her alienation and depression, since Keiko is depicted through memories as withdrawing herself gradually from her family and life, eventually doing so completely to the point where her body isn’t discovered for several days because she lived alone with no contact with family and apparently little or none with friends. Sachiko-Etsuko is convincing herself that she’s acting in her daughter’s best interests when she is attempting to smother her grief through this chase of a foreign man whose interest in her is mainly sexual; if you believe the two women are one, the strongest interpretation is that the American, Frank, is not the man Etsuko eventually marries, not just because of the different nationalities but because of Frank’s irresponsibility.

In this interpretation, Ishiguro’s overriding theme is that of guilt and regret, something he covered again in Remains and Floating World – our difficulty or even inability to come to terms with the past, with our own actions and those of others that affected us, with the hurt we dealt to others (with or without intent) and with how our choices crippled our own chances for happiness. Etsuko’s dissociation from her memory of Mariko-Keiko is her way of coping with her own guilt: As she grieved the loss of Jiro, her quest for her own happiness (or simply a facade of normalcy) forced her daughter’s best interests into the background just when she needed more of her mother’s love and attention. Etsuko acknowledges at one point that she knew the move from Japan to England would exacerbate her daughter’s problems, but clearly she made the move anyway, for what must have been purely selfish motives. Neither Japanese society of that time nor English or American societies since then accept selfishness on the part of the mother relative to the needs of the child, and Etsuko has to whitewash her own memories to live with them.

A Pale View of Hills includes Ishiguro’s usual digressions about music and art, and Etsuko and Ogata-san have an exchange on the art of cooking that spoke to me:

”Are you really planning on becoming a cook, Father?”
“It’s nothing to laugh at. I’ve come to appreciate cooking over the years. It’s an art, I’m convinced of it, just as noble as painting or poetry. It’s not appreciated simply because the product disappears so quickly.”

When Ishiguro was writing the book, in the very early 1980s, he probably couldn’t imagine our modern culture of celebrity chefs, who earn far more than painters or poets, although I think his point about the lack of respect for a product that is consumed rather than observed or read is a sound one.

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→ January 9, 2011
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A Mercy.

Toni Morrison’s most recent novel, A Mercy, is extremely short, somewhere between novel and novella, and feels as wispy as a short story with both scant character development and a frenetic jumping backward and forward in time and across multiple narrators. And Morrison’s use of an apparently invented English dialect made a slow book even harder to read, leading me to the unfortunate conclusion that, as much as I loved her books Beloved and Song of Solomon (both among my 101 favorite novels), she hasn’t produced another novel that I truly enjoyed.

A Mercy is primarily about the young Angolan slave Florens, whose mother effectively gives her up to save her from potential abuse at the hands of her current owner, only to have Florens find new trouble with her next owner, the farmer and eventual trader Jacob Vaark, when she meets the unnamed free black blacksmith and falls into a torrid affair with him. She finds herself scorned by the main slave on the property, Lina, herself once used and rejected by a man; ignored by the distant, space-cadet slave named Sorrow, herself pregnant ny an unknown father; and loved then rebuffed by Jacob’s wife (and, early in the book, widow) Rebekka, who survives a bout of smallpox only to become cold and robotic after adopting the views of a Calvinist sect.

When Morrison is good, she’s superb, with long sagas that illuminate African-American history through broad metaphors and heavy use of symbolism, right down to peculiar character names like the legendary Milkman Dead of Song of Solomon. Those metaphors take time to develop over the course of many chapters and episodes, but A Mercy is so brief – when you fold up all of the narratives, very little time passes in the book – that there’s virtually no development of metaphor or character, with the only significant change affecting Rebekkah, who moves from one extreme (compassionate, freethinking, mostly independent-minded housewife-farmer) to another after losing her husband and nearly losing her own life.

White folk generally don’t come off well in Morrison’s books – when slavery is a recurrent theme, it’s hard to paint us Caucasians as anything but the enemy – but in A Mercy, the primary villain is not white skin but the Y chromosome. Man is faithless and violent and a serial user, using the various women in the book for sex and labor and little else. There is no love between man and woman in this book; the only love is that of a mother for her child, and even that goes awry more often than not. I have no inherent objection to a book with the theme of the oppression of women by men throughout the history of civilization, but to a book that attempts to tell that story without giving me a male character who exists in as many as two dimensions.

Morrison’s two magnum opi – Beloved is $9 at that amazon link above, and I doubt you could find a better novel for under $10 new right now – are among the towering achievements not just in women’s literature or African-American literature, but in literature, period, the sort of complex, emotional works that speak to multiple fundamental aspects of our existence with poetic prose, layered meanings, and narrative greed. Jazz and Sula hinted at that greatness, but in general I’ve found the rest of Morrison’s bibliography to fall sadly short. Perhaps those two great works were all that Morrison had in her. It’s more than most authors could produce in a lifetime.

Next up: So I’m a bit behind here – just tore through Kazuo Ishiguro’s marvelous debut novel A Pale View of Hills inside of 24 hours, and am already knee-deep in Benjamin Wallace’s nonfiction thriller The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine.

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→ January 6, 2011
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Jaipur (game).

If you missed it yesterday, I chatted right after the Hall of Fame announcement.

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Back in July when I complained in my review of Lost Cities about the shortage of good German-style two-player games, two of you recommended the card game Jaipur, an Indian-themed trading game with a solid mix of luck and strategy. The recommendation was spot on, as it’s one of the better pure two-player games we’ve tried, not quite as good as Lost Cities but perhaps our second-favorite in that category.

In Jaipur, each player is a trader looking to collect and sell cards of six different types of goods, ranging from jewels to leather. Each good sold brings in a token worth 1 to 7 bonus points, with the first goods of a type sold within a round worth more than the same goods sold later. But there are also bonuses for selling 3, 4, or 5 goods of one kind in a single transaction, so there’s a tradeoff between selling early to get the best goods tokens or waiting to collect more cards and receive a bonus for a larger trade. There’s also a 5-point bonus for having the largest herd of camels (also cards), although camels have some strategic value beyond their points.

Each player begins the game with five cards showing goods or camels, and the market opens with five cards as well, three camels and two randomly drawn from the deck. Players place their camels in a pile in front of them, so they don’t count against the hand-card limit of seven. On his turn, a player may take one card from the market; exchange as many of his own cards (hand or camel) with the same number of cards from the market; take all of the camels from the market at once; or choose to sell goods to the Maharaja (what you’d call “the bank” in other games). The round ends when the deck is exhausted or when three of the six piles of bonus tokens for goods are exhausted.

Because cards are drawn from the shuffled deck, there’s a relatively high degree of randomness involved in Jaipur, and you may go through a round where you just can’t get cards of a certain good – but the fact that there are more cards of each good in the deck than there are tokens of that good on the table mitigates that and allows you some flexibility. We found that there is a strong strategic element to Jaipur, including deciding when to sell and how many to sell, when to go for a bonus and when to try to steal the highest tokens out from your opponent who might be collecting the same good, and when to exchange several cards even though doing so may restock the market for your opponent. It’s light strategy, but enough that there are clearly better and worse ways to play the game, and on every turn you’re thinking about your options or watching what your opponent is taking so you know what she’s collecting and what cards are left in the deck.

Jaipur, like Lost Cities, is also extremely compact, with just the single deck of about 60 cards and a handful of tokens that you could just throw in a zip-top bag, so I imagine it would travel well. Even in the box, it’s one of the smallest game packages I own. If you care about graphics and art, everything’s done in bright colors and the images are appealing in a cartoonish way, although I would gladly play this game with bad art and dim colors.

I interviewed Reiner Knizia recently for an upcoming mental_floss article, and brought up my affection for his game Lost Cities. He said many people call it “the spouse game,” because in many couples you find one game-player more serious about gaming than the other, but Lost Cities seems to sit perfectly in between those two poles. That’s not the case in our house, as my wife likes about 90% of the games I like, but I love the “spouse game” description because it gives such a concise description of where Lost Cities and Jaipur are on the strategy scale. I’d still recommend Lost Cities first, but if you liked that and are looking for another game in the same general area of strategy, ease of learning, and fun, I’d recommend Jaipur for your next two-player purchase.

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→ January 4, 2011
→ By

Tinkers and The Optimist’s Daughter.

Paul Harding’s Tinkers and Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter are both short, Pulitzer Prize-winning novels of grief and troubled family history, told from different perspectives and set in wildly different scenes. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed either of them, although in a direct comparison I’d take Welty’s folksy Southern prose over Harding’s more ponderous New England style.

Tinkers (still on sale for $5.98 at the moment) tells the story from inside the head of its protagonist as he lies on his death bed, running through his thoughts during the final hours of his life, thoughts that run to his father and his father’s father, both of whom came to earlier, more tragic ends. There’s a running theme of clocks, with wordy, dull passages from an old manual on clock manufacture and repair, but the relevance of those sections was completely lost on me. The book earned a laudatory cover quote from Marilynne Robinson, one of the great masters of American prose today, but I didn’t see Harding coming near to the standard she set with her Pulitzer Prize winner, Gilead in prose or story, as tragic as it was. The one passage that stood out was the description of the grandfather’s descent into dementia as a physical disappearance, that he slowly faded out of sight, something that would have been the basis for an outstanding short story but was an afterthought of a few pages in this work.

The Optimist’s Daughter begins with the title character, Laurel, leaving Chicago to be at her father’s side as he heads in for what should be a routine operation on a diseased eye, but something goes awry during his recovery and he dies, leaving Laurel back in her old hometown with her overgrown-child stepmother and the circle of friends Laurel left when she moved to Chicago. The stepmother, Fay, is extraordinarily selfish and immature and her presence on the pages is shrill and infuriating, as she’s just a foil for Laurel’s journey toward greater self-awareness. Laurel, meanwhile, has first to sit through the funeral and the visits of old friends who rehash her father’s life, at times puncturing her gilded memories of her father and her late mother and their picture-perfect marriage that was anything but. She then finds herself alone in the house for several days before Fay’s return, ultimately looking through some of her father’s things and old papers to get an even greater understanding of her own family heritage, eventually experiencing a catharsis over a butcher-block bread board her own late husband had made as a gift for her mother but which Fay has defaced through her own ignorance.

If anything, The Optimist’s Daughter is too short, as no character but Laurel has any depth, and her path through the house seems so light on detail that it was hard to see how she was deriving any insight or solace from much of what she saw or learned. It was an easy read, with Southern prose that reminded me somewhat of Toni Morrison despite the difference in race between the authors and characters, but felt insubstantial at the end.

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→ December 31, 2010
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Ingenious app.

I’m starting to feel like the president of the Reiner Knizia Fan Club, as I’ve raved about two games he designed, the card game Lost Cities and the Samurai app (an adaptation of a board game he published in 1998). I’ll now do the same about (the app for Ingenious, another award-winning board game that is a perfect candidate for adaptation because the machine can ensure the scoring is done accurately. And since Ingenious plays very quickly, it’s become my go-to app when I know I have just a few minutes for a quick game. At $1.99 for iPhone or $3.99 for the iPad, it’s a steal given how often I play it.

Ingenious is an abstract game, meaning there’s no theme or graphics, just a large hexagonal board made up of smaller hexes, with six per side. Each vertex is filled with a single color, each color unique (that’s six colors for the Jack Morris voters in the audience). Players place two-hex pieces on the board – most contain two colors but some contain two hexes of the same color – and receive points for placing them adjacent to the same colors on the board, including any pieces beyond the immediate piece that extend out in a straight line from the piece the player just placed. Points accumulate in each color, so each player has six separate scores.

The twist, however, makes the game … well, I’ll call it clever. The winner is the player with the best “lowest” score among his six. If you neglect one of the six colors, you’ll lose. There is some benefit to maxing out a color at 18 points, as you get a bonus turn after doing so, but chasing 18s may leave you too unbalanced and you can absolutely win a game without reaching 18 in any color even if your opponent does.

For example, in that screenshot above, the player has a tile with red on one half and purple on the other. If he played that tile in the one open space on the top right with the purple side at the top, he’d get four points in purple (adjacent to two tiles, each of which extends out in a straight line for one more tile) and four points in red (adjacent to the top-left red tile, adjacent to the tile below that plus two more extending down and to the right in a straight line). And since red is his lowest color, that’s probably his best play.

The Ingenious app plays just two players and has no online component, but the AI has three levels and is very competitive, with the hardest level considering what you need in late-game moves and blocking you if possible. There is a solitaire mode which I haven’t played (I’d much rather play an AI opponent than a modified game for solo play).

My only real criticism of the app is that rotating tiles can be a little tricky. To move a tile into place, you just drag it, which works fine, but to rotate it, you have to make arcs around the tile, which only works well if the tile is well away from the bottom edge. If you’re placing it towards the bottom of the board, it’s better to press and hold on the tile until it pops to the foreground, rotate it there, and then drag and place. It’s a minor nuisance overall for a very simple but consistently challenging app.

I’ve never played the original board game Ingenious, which appears to play up to four players, but would be curious to hear any of your thoughts on it and how it differs with more than two players.

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→ December 30, 2010
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Put Out More Flags.

There was a young man of military age in the studio; he was due to be called up in the near future. “I don’t know what to do about it,” he said. “Of course I could always plead conscientious objections, but I haven’t got a conscience. It would be a denial of everything we’ve stood for if I said I had a conscience.”
“No, Tom, they said to comfort him. “We know you haven’t a conscience.”
“But then,” said the perplexed young man, “if I haven’t got a conscience, why in God’s name should I mind so much saying that I have?”

Evelyn Waugh may be best known for Brideshead Revisited (just $6 new at that link), but on balance I think I prefer his savage satires, from the incomparable Scoop to Decline and Fall to the book that includes the passage above, his World War II-era sendup Put Out More Flags. It’s funny and farcical but paints a very unflattering portrait of aimless upper-class twits and pseudo-intellectuals in the early years of the war.

The novel follows a small ensemble of these anti-protagonists, led by professional ne’er-do-well and scam artist Basil Seal, whose primary life goal seems to be avoiding any sort of honest career, or at least any career that would interfere with his other life goals of gadding about. His sister, Lady Sothill, has become the billeting officer for her town and is beset by three parentless children who cause mayhem and destruction with every host family. One of Basil’s temporary mistresses, Poppet Green, is an ardent communist whose poet friend, Ambrose Silk, joins the Ministry of Information and decides to put out a fascist-leaning literary magazine as a front. Basil’s more permanent mistress, Angela Lyne, is separated from her grotto-obsessed husband Cedric, who is one of several characters in his mid- to late-30s who hope to play at war to eliminate some hidden regrets they harbor about missing the last war.

One problem with satire is that it usually requires some understanding of the target to be effective, meaning that satires in general do not age well unless they either parody some fundamental aspect of human nature or simply layer the satire in so much humor that they can survive lack of familiarity with the underlying issue or institution. Waugh lampooned the England of that moment – the book was published in 1942 – but an almost Wodehousian silliness abounds, such as Basil’s tremendous idea to make money off his sister’s billeting gig, his scheme to weasel his way into one of the many intelligence offices in the British government, Ambrose’s constant paranoia, Peter Pastmaster’s desultory search for a wife, or the absurd exercises (with breaks for tea!) of Cedric’s platoons. Whether the English military or lesser aristocracy actually behaved in such irresponsible manners in the first few years of the war is beyond my ken, so I can’t speak to the effectivess of the satire, but after a slow start where Waugh introduces his cast of characters, the novel became quick and brilliantly funny. Some of the side plots seemed tacked-on, perhaps as a way to further the attack on some aspect of English life at the time, but in general if Basil Seal is on the scene, something ridiculous is afoot, and those parts are good reading.

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→ December 29, 2010
→ By

Pandemic.

After receiving a number of recommendations from readers and questions about it from others, I asked for and received the cooperative board game Pandemic as a Christmas gift from my sister and brother-in-law. (One benefit to this new interest in board games: Family members who complained that they never knew what to get me for Christmas or my birthday now have something to get me.) I can’t compare Pandemic to other cooperative games, as it’s the first one I’ve played, but it is a fun and very challenging game that had the four of us playing till 1 am the last few nights while dropping our share of F-bombs along the way.

In Pandemic, two to four players form a team fighting four simultaneous regional pandemics of diseases denoted by different colors – blue in the U.S./Canada/Europe, yellow in Latin America/Africa, black in the Middle East and south Asia, and red in east Asia. When the game begins, you draw Infection cards for nine cities that will contain cubes representing infected populations, with those cities containing one to three cubes apiece. More cities gain cubes as the game goes on, and there will be four to six new epidemics that create three-cube infection cells in new cities while adding cubes to cities that already have infections.

The players begin at the CDC Research Center in Atlanta and must work to cure all four diseases while preventing them from spreading to the point where they trigger one of the end game conditions – running out of cubes in any color, or experiencing an eighth “outbreak,” where a city with three cubes already is hit with another one. A player can cure a disease by collecting five cards in that disease’s color (there’s one card for every city on the board, with the corresponding color) and turning them in while standing at any Research Center. Players can build other Research Centers besides the one in Atlanta for easier mobility.

On each turn, a player can take four actions. An action can include moving from one city to an adjacent one; playing a city card to move to that city; playing the card of the city he’s on to move to any city; moving from one Research Center to any other one; treating (removing) one cube in the current city; passing a card to or taking a card from another player as long as both players are in the city on that card; or building a research center if he’s in a city and plays the card of that city. But each player has a role that makes one of those actions simpler; the Medic, for example, can treat all cubes in the city he’s in with a single action.

The complication, of course, is that diseases spread. The deck of cards contains four to six Epidemic cards that speed the spread of the four diseases, and reshuffle all the Infection cards you’ve already used to place cubes on cities. Thus cities that have already come up in the deck and received cubes will come up again, so players must split their time between collecting cards for cures and putting out fires to avoid outbreaks – especially since outbreaks can cause chain reactions that can advance you to endgame very quickly.

We played the Normal game with five epidemic cards and still found it extremely difficult. Even with four players working together, we won just twice in a more than a half-dozen plays, and both wins came just as we were about to exhaust the deck of city cards (the third possible endgame condition). It’s a massive operations research problem, where all four players jointly coordinate the movement and actions of four players to try to most efficiently balance the short-term needs to avoid outbreaks or a cube shortage and the long-term need to cure the disease. You can even choose to eradicate a disease you’ve cured – if you treat all cubes of a cured disease (any player can remove all cubes of a cured disease in the city where his pawn sits with one action), the disease is eradicated and all future infection cards in that color have no effect. But eradication costs actions you may need to use to treat uncured diseases or coordinate with other players to collect cards.

There is some luck involved – you can have a bad combination of epidemic cards appearing close together with a concentration of cubes in cities of one color and see a game spiral out of control unless you’re sitting in that region – but there are enough disparate chance-based elements that it tended to balance out in our plays, so that we generally felt like we had a shot to win every game. The real challenges are coordinating that many players and choosing when you can avoid a short-term problem and go cure a disease, but those were what made the game fun and intense. It’s also a fairly quick play for that many people, about an hour if we didn’t lose early, and very replayable even within an evening because the mix of diseases, locations, cards, and roles differs each time.

There’s also a well-regarded expansion called Pandemic: On the Brink that adds five new roles, a fifth “mutant” disease, and even a way for someone to play the spoiler as the Bio-Terrorist. I haven’t played it, but expect I’ll pick it up in time, since we’ll probably be playing Pandemic quite often.

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→ December 27, 2010
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Top 12 songs of 2010.

I won’t pretend that this is any sort of canonical list of the best songs of 2010, or even the best alternative songs of 2010; it’s merely a list of the best songs I heard, songs I liked and would recommend if your musical taste echoes mine at all. Feel free to throw your own suggestions in the comments below, as well as the usual complaints about how I’m biased against The National.

I limited the list to songs released in the 2010 calendar year, so Phoenix, which dominated alternative radio all spring and summer, doesn’t qualify, since Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix came out in May of 2009.

Linked song titles go to videos; links to amazon or iTunes to purchase come after the title.

12. Ted Leo & the Pharmacists – The Mighty Sparrow. (amazon/iTunes) When the cafe doors exploded, I … ran for cover. OK, the lyrics are a little peculiar, but I like the straight-edge post-punk energy behind this song even if Leo does sound like he’s on the verge of laryngitis.

11. Cut Copy – “Where I’m Going.” (Still a free download at Cut Copy’s site.) Straight-up early Britpop from an Australian band, with a shout-along chorus and the sort of neutered harmonies in the vocals that characterized a lot of lesser acts in the earlier movement. I suppose if I was truly playing music critic I’d either praise the song’s hook-laden simplicity or criticize its derivative music and tired lyrics. Whatever I think, I can’t credibly claim that I didn’t like the song. A lot.

10. Ra Ra Riot – “Boy.” (amazon/iTunes) I’m pulling for these guys even though I found their album pretty uneven, with “Boy” the high point. We don’t see enough bands trying to do something so different while still staying within the rough confines of alternative music – you can hear strong new wave influences here – and their use of unusual song structures and string instruments does them credit.

9. Limousines – “Internet Killed the Video Star.” (iTunes) I could see this song crossing over to the pop charts because the chorus is so catchy, and for a supposedly “experimental” band they’ve put out a very straightforward song here that merges rock and electronic elements in a song that purports to defend the guitar against the computer. By the way, kids – that drum machine ain’t got no soul.

8. Sleigh Bells – “Rill Rill.” (amazon/iTunes) The rest of the Sleigh Bells album is unlistenable, but this song’s relentless, almost sing-songy lyric hooked me from first listen and brought back memories of the 1990s trip-hop anthem “6 Underground.” Besides, there’s something enchanting about the (presumed) teenage-girl narrator breaking with stereotype when she answers the question, “Wonder what your boyfriend thinks about your braces?” with the defiant, “What about them? I’m all about them.”

7. Tame Impala – “Solitude Is Bliss.” (iTunes) Another album that didn’t quite live up to the first track I heard, but this psychedelic, stop-and-start ode to living inside one’s own head reached out of the radio and grabbed me. The bizarre video is inventive given what appears to have been a very low budget.

6. Belle & Sebastian – “Ghost of Rockschool.” (amazon/iTunes) A mournful, mystical track from the underrated and understated Scottish masters of ironic rock, not their best song (that would be the incomparable “The Boy With The Arab Strap”) but the best on their newest album. The hint of brass brought me back to one of my favorite bands of the ’90s, Animals that Swim, who never quite found an audience for their albums of original tracks that sounded like drinking songs.

5. Dead Weather – “Blue Blood Blues .” (amazon/iTunes) I was surprised to read that Jack White plays drums for Dead Weather when the meaty, heavy guitar riffs on this song sound so much like his recent style. It’s sludgy, almost Kyuss-esque with better production and cleaner lines.

4. Arcade Fire – “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains).” (amazon/iTunes) On an album about our sprawling suburban society, where culture is found in the yogurt section of the local grocery store, “Sprawl II” provides the most withering vocal attack over a very new wave-influenced track laced with synthesizers. I don’t love the singer’s breathy, thin voice, but you can always drown that out by singing along.

3. Broken Bells – “The High Road.” (amazon/iTunes) So Danger Mouse is good for one knockout song per collaborative album, right? This one, with James Mercer from the Shins, features a two-tiered vocal married to a split instrumental track, with an acoustic guitar line behind the laconic verse switching to trip-hoppy electronic sounds as Mercer brings his voice up an octave. This also spawned my first (and still only) YTMND effort.

2. Arcade Fire – “City With No Children.” (amazon/iTunes) From the start, it was my favorite track on one of the best rock albums I’ve ever purchased, and while I know many of you disagree, I think that’s more a function of how strong and deep The Suburbs is; if half the songs on this list came from that album I doubt I would have received many complaints. The absence of typical percussion and the muted sound of the lead guitar in “City” paint a desolate backdrop for lyrics describing not just alienation but self-reflection and ecological decay.

1. Mumford & Sons – “Little Lion Man.” (amazon/iTunes) A perfect marriage of alt-rock/emo angst and English folk music, with a perfectly deployed four-letter word of Anglo-Saxon origin (six letters as a past participle). The entire album (just $5 at amazon yet again) is a marvel, from “Winter Winds” to “White Blank Page” to “Roll Away Your Stone,” but “Little Lion Man” had the strongest hook, and its crossover on to American radio and eventual gold certification was one of the biggest stories in music this year.

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→ December 24, 2010
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Reiner Knizia’s Samurai app.

It’s up about $20 from yesterday, but The Wire: The Complete Series is still over half off at $96.49 on amazon.com.

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I mentioned the other day that I’ve become extremely addicted to another iOS app, Reiner Knizia’s Samurai, by the prolific designer behind my favorite two-player game, Lost Cities. Samurai is based on a board game ranked in BoardGameGeek’s top 100, but I’ve never played it (I’ll be buying it after the holidays) so my impressions of the app won’t include any comparisons to the original.

The board Samurai includes an island or set of islands representing Japan and broken up into hexes, some of which have one or more icons representing peasants, soldiers (helmets), or buddhas. The object of the game is to capture as many of those icons as possible, but the victory condition is more based on capturing a plurality of each icon type than on the overall total of icons captured – you can, in fact, capture more icons than your opponent in a two-player game and still lose if he captured more in two of the three categories.

You capture an icon by surrounding it with tokens that influence it in your direction, placing one regular (“slow”) token per turn. Your slow tokens include peasant, soldier, and buddha tokens of varying strengths (1 to 4 points) and samurai tokens that influence all icons. You also receive “fast” tokens, of which you can place several each turn in addition to your one slow token; the ronin token is worth one influence point and goes on land, ship tokens are worth one or two points and go on sea hexes adjacent to land, and special tokens allow you to replay a slow token you’ve previously played or to switch two icons on the board to snatch one out from under your opponent’s thumb. When a hex bearing an icon is surrounded on the land side, it is captured by the player whose adjacent tokens exert the most influence. The game ends when all tokens of any single type are captured, or when four tokens are surrounded but uncaptured because of a tie in influence.

Samurai plays very differently as a two-player game versus a three- or four-player game. In the two-player game, it’s much easier to set up your next move or try to force your opponent to make a specific move, as well as to deduce some of your opponent’s strategy. With three or four players, your degree of control is so much less that your moves are more turn by turn rather than part of a larger game-long strategy, since it’s harder to predict what two or three opponents will do before your next move, leading to shorter setups for captures and more thought required in how your one move will push your opponents to do (or not do) something specific. It’s a simple mechanic that plays out in complex ways, yet with short turns still moves very quickly.

The iOS implementation has outstanding graphics and a very clear tutorial to get you started. I’ve found the AI to be very strong, especially in two-player games; in three-player games I’ve run into the occasional less-than-best move (unless I just didn’t understand what the AI was doing) but would never say I’ve had an easy win. Knizia is a mathematician by training, so his games are highly mathematical in nature, and I think that lends itself to stronger AIs because the programmer can model the game more easily. In Samurai, not only does that lead to more optimal moves by the AI, it also means the AI won’t miss a complex opportunity to end the game early by capturing the final icon in one category.

How addictive is Samurai? I had to leave my iPod Touch uncharged at one point to stop myself from playing the game when I should have been packing for our trip. I can’t seem to put it down unless I’ve won at least one game, because often I know I lost because of just one wrong move. I’ll have to pick up the board game, but I have a feeling this will be a top ten board game for me, maybe top five, given how phenomenal the app is. And I’m not the only ESPNer to think so – Jorge Arangure tweeted that he’s a fan too.

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I may post again this weekend, but if I don’t get back before Saturday, Merry Christmas to all of you who celebrate it, and please be careful if (like me) you’re out on the roads.

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→ December 23, 2010
→ By

Turn, Magic Wheel.

Today’s chat transcript is up. No chat next week between the holidays.

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“Would a woman like Effie Callingham, a fine woman like her, would she fall in love with a plain bounder?”
“Why not?” said Dennis with a shrug. “When did women ever fight over a Galahad?”

Dawn Powell has, in the last twelve months, become my favorite female American novelist, a writer whose books consistently deliver unusual and interesting characters, featuring Manhattan in its literary golden age, written with a sardonic wit male writers would be hard-pressed to match. She is the Queen of Snark, more than happy to turn her acerbic eye on her own social scene, and in Turn, Magic Wheel, she is positively savage.

Drawing its title from “The Sorceress,” a bucolic poem by Theocritus that includes the repeated line “Turn, magic wheel, draw homeward him I love,” Turn, Magic Wheel covers a group of writers, wannabe writers, publishers, and hangers-on in New York around the time that Dennis Orphen, a fictional writer who made a cameo appearance in The Wicked Pavilion, has written a fictionalized biography of his friend, Effie Callingham, long separated from her famous, Hemingway-like husband Andy Callingham, now presumed in Europe with the woman for whom he left Effie. The book is days from publication and Effie is just learning that it’s about her, too thinly disguised to fool anyone, which will put her at the center of a storm of publicity.

In addition to the phonies and schemers are the lovers, including Dennis’ married lover Corinne, whose husband, Phil, is the most oblivious cuckold imaginable, while Corinne herself is unaware she’s just a physical thing for Dennis, who comes closest to actual affection for Effie. Meanwhile, Effie is pulled to the hospital when Andy’s second wife – not that he ever divorced the first – turns up in New York with terminal cancer, having left Andy (before she knew she was ill) because he took up with a Swedish chorus girl.

Powell inserts herself more into this book than the four other novels I’ve read, through the Orphen character and through her sendup of New York publishers, including the fatuous publisher Mactweed and his ambitious associate Johnson, always fearing for his position while he tries to gauge the direction of the literary wind. Orphen is the anti-romantic chronicler of his New York life, but had to fill in some missing gaps in Effie’s history for his novel, only to find himself confronted with the real-life analogues to his fictional characters and settings:

He shouldn’t have come in here, anyway, he thought, for there was in his novel no role for Dennis Orphen; he had no business following his heroine brazenly through her own secret story. Wells wouldn’t do such a thing. Proust wouldn’t have. No decent author would step brashly, boldly into his own book.

Step he does, of course, often leaving him dissembling about his identity and connection to Effie to avoid detection as the parodist of his hosts, but also to chase Effie when she abandons him (never for long) over some slight … like turning her life into a satirical novel without asking her first.

Turn, Magic Wheel rivals her best work, A Time to Be Born, for its cynical view of love. But it’s inarguable that love can be born and die as a living organism, beyond the control of its owners, and for Powell the writer, the end of love means an honest exploration of emotional pain. When Effie hears Andy’s second wife, slightly delirious from the cancer, echo as her own Effie’s wish that she had borne Andy a son so she would still have something of him, Powell writes:

There are words that cannot be borne, suggestions so burning with anguish and despair that no heart can endure them, so Effie, her lover stolen, her dream of a son now stolen, got to her feet and motioning, speechless, that she was leaving, found her way out of the intolerable room.

I’d still suggest that anyone who has yet to read any Dawn Powell novels begin with A Time to Be Born, which is a lock for the next Klaw 100, a wicked satire that functions more completely as a novel with real narrative greed and a protagonist you can actually support (even if she’s not completely innocent herself). Turn, Magic Wheel might be too biting for some readers – although I suppose if you’re here you’re not opposed to heavy use of snark – and doesn’t have as strong of a central character, with the city perhaps the real star of the book. It is, however, more evidence of the greatness of Dawn Powell, one of the most under-read authors I’ve ever encountered.

Next up: I finished Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers (just $5.98 right now, although I should warn you I didn’t love the book) on the train yesterday, and started Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

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