→ July 19, 2010
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Small World.

A few readers have recommended the game Small World, which won GAMES Magazine’s Game of the Year award in 2010. It’s from Days of Wonder, the manufacturer of the Ticket to Ride series (which I often recommend), and the game itself is a remake of an earlier game (that I’ve never played) called Vinci. Small World has been a big hit so far, as it’s a short game once you know the rules, pretty easy to pick up, and offers slightly different game play each time.

I’ve seen and heard Small World described as similar to or influenced by Dungeons & Dragons because Small World involves selecting various races, including orcs, halflings, and elves, familiar to anyone who’s played fantasy role-playing games. It’s incorrect for two reasons. One is that anyone who’s seen Lord of the Rings knows about orcs and elves. But more importantly, the fantasy aspect to the races is almost completely irrelevant to gameplay – you’re not pretending to be any of these things, but are instead using these races to try to capture spaces on the map.

The game comes with two double-sided boards, giving maps for two, three, four, and five player games, and as the name implies, there’s not a whole lot of room on any of these maps. There’s a stack of twelve races and sixteen skills which are combined into random pairs at the start of each game, after which each player selects one race-skill combination and uses it to start to take over territories on the board. Each race-skill combo brings a fixed number of race tokens, which are then used to take and hold those territories. At the end of a player’s turn, he earns one victory point for every map space he occupies, as well as various bonus points depending on his race and skill at that time.

The big twist in Small World is that you aren’t going to have enough tokens to take over many spaces, and while you need to expand to keep accumulating points, at some point you’ll become overstretched and will need to push that race-skill set into “decline”, giving up one turn of potential moves and gains for the right on the following turn to pick a new race-skill combo, acquire a stack of new tokens, and wreak havoc somewhere else on the map while still grabbing a few points for the civilization you just put into decline before those spaces are captured by others.

Each race has a special benefit attached to it, some simple (Ratmen start with two more tokens than any other race; Humans get an extra point for every farmland territory occupied) and some complex (Trolls get to place “lairs” on their spaces, making them harder to capture, and the lairs last even when the civilization is in decline). The skills* work similarly, such as awarding bonus points for occupying certain spaces, allowing moves that might otherwise be prohibited, or allowing a player to go into decline on a turn where he’s already made moves, thus saving a turn that would otherwise be lost.

*We played this as a three-player game, but haven’t tried it with just two players yet. There’s one skill that looks to me like it’ll cause trouble in a two-player game: the Diplomatic skill, where a player can declare that an opponent whom he hasn’t attacked this turn may not attack him on the next turn. With two players, that means one can force peace as long as he doesn’t attack the other one. I’m not sure if that makes him invincible, but it would seem to create a substantial imbalance.

The fact that players receive points for occupying territories temporarily rather than receiving points at game’s end makes the game play different from most of the other games we’ve tried in that there’s a clear benefit to doing something that you know is likely to be undone quickly by your opponents. For example, in one game we played, I had Pillaging (skill) Orcs (race), giving me two bonus points every time I conquered an opponents’ region, so my ideal strategy was to abandon regions I already had, taking those tokens to take over new ones, gaining 3 points for each new region instead of 1 point for a region I already held.

Each race/skill combination brings its own strategic implications, and some are going to be more desirable than others (there’s a payment system similar to that in other games, where passed-over combinations start to accumulate victory points to make them more attractive). There’s also a lot of interaction between previous moves and your choices going forward, because a civilization you’ve already put into decline is removed from the board if you put a second one into decline (with one or two exceptions), leaving you with a quick cost/benefit analysis to estimate when you’re considering whether you can wring one more turn out of the race-skill combo you’re using.

After our first game, where we screwed up several rules (almost inevitable when we play a game for the first time), we found we could get through a three-player game, which lasts ten rounds, in 20-30 minutes. Setup only takes five minutes or so, as you shuffle the races and skills and place a handful of tokens on the map, then placing about 20 other items on the side of the board for when certain races are drawn. The game is brightly colored and the drawings of races have a slightly silly bent, although one flaw we found was that when tokens are flipped over to show that that civilization is in decline, the grayed-out images of races all tended to look alike, making tallying points after each turn a little trickier.

I hesitated on Small World because I saw and heard the Dungeons & Dragons references and, since I never got into D&D or other role-playing games, didn’t think it would appeal to me. However, with no real significance to the use of dwarves or sorcerors or ghouls, there’s no fantasy aspect to Small World – just think of each race as a set of tokens conferring some specific benefit to you and you won’t have to spend the game worrying about your street cred. It’s one of the best “family strategy” games I’ve seen – below the hardcore strategy level of Puerto Rico and Agricola, smarter than Thurn und Taxis, comparable to one of our all-time favorites, Stone Age – without feeling dumb or luck-driven, and the ability to rip through a few games in an evening makes it better for a casual game night than the two-hour commitment of those complex strategy titles.

Filed Under: Games Tagged With: , , , ,
→ July 6, 2010
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Lost Cities.

As much as I love the new wave of German-style boardgames, the category lacks viable two-player options. Many games, like Settlers of Catan and Puerto Rico, require a minimum of three players, while others, like Zooloretto and Power Grid, include two-player variants that don’t work as well as the three-plus rules do. We’ve found a couple that work well for two players – Carcassonne, San Juan, and Dominion are probably the best – but the list is relatively short.

Lost Cities is a real rarity among great German-style games in that it’s strictly a two-player game, only the second (along with the card game Catan, a two-player offshoot of Settlers) in our collection, and it has the twin virtues of being quick to learn and quick to play, so that you can run through several games in an evening rather than devoting the entire night just to setting up Puerto Rico. Lost Cities – which went in the less common direction by spawning a multi-player game, Keltis, which ended up winning the Spiel des Jahres – is simple, portable (just a deck of cards and a small board that isn’t fully necessary once you know how to play), and has an excellent blend of strategy and chance that prevents the game from becoming repetitive yet gives the player some control over his fate.

Each player in Lost Cities may begin, over the course of the game, up to five “expeditions” using cards; each expedition costs 20 points once initiated, but there’s no cost associated with an expedition that’s never started. The deck of cards contains twelve cards in each of five colors, representing the five expeditions: One card each from numbers 2 through 10, and three “investment” cards that allow the player to double, triple (if he plays two), or quadruple (if he plays all three) his profit or loss from that particular expedition. On each turn, a player plays one card to an expedition or discards one to the board and draws a single replacement from the deck or the discard piles. When the deck is exhausted, you add the values of the cards in each expedition, subtract 20, and then multiply the result by 2, 3, or 4 depending on the number of investment cards that expedition, gaining another 20 point bonus for any expedition that contains at least eight cards.

The catch is that cards must be played in order – investment cards come before card 2 – but the deck is fully shuffled and players only hold eight cards in their hand at any given time. Thus, players face decisions like holding on to high-numbered cards while hoping to get lower numbers or investment cards to fill out the expedition, or risking beginning an expedition where he isn’t close to the 20 card points required to turn it profitable. If you discard a valuable card, your opponent may pick it up, unless his expedition has already gone past the number of the card you’ve given up. When the game is nearly over, a player may choose to pick up discards rather than draw from the deck to try to delay the end and allow him to play more cards – but the other player can just keep drawing from the deck to try to end it sooner.

Once we got the hang of it, we found that games only lasted ten minutes or so, meaning that one of us can try avenge his/her losses in the same night, breaking up one of our major frustrations with the Catan card game or massive multi-player games like Puerto Rico and Agricola*. There’s no particular skill required beyond arithmetic, so even the most ardent RBI-lover could handle the math, and the basic strategies are straightforward and shouldn’t take long for new players to figure out. I’d boil down those strategies to two archetypes that the players can blend as needed: You can try to hit home runs on one or two long expeditions with investment cards, or go for 5-10 points on four or all five expeditions. Your optimal strategy or mix of those two depends on the cards you draw, but since you only see eight at the start the game, you have to make some educated guesses – you could argue that there’s a little probability involved here but I’m not saying anyone needs to bust our their old permutations formula – and at some point will end up at the mercy of the deck and your opponent.

*Yes, I now own Agricola, a birthday present from a determined wife who bought one of the last copies from the game’s last print run – it’s out of stock just about everywhere until at least August – and we’ve played it twice. When I get through a few more games, I’ll write it up.

The simplicity of Lost Cities meant that I could even play with my four-year-old daughter, who wanted to play as soon as she saw the cards in my bag while we were in St. Kitts. We never keep score, but to make it interesting for her, I told her she just had to make sure each card she put down was bigger than the one before it, she had to match the colors, and her goal was to make each column add up to more than twenty (she’s not adding to twenty yet, but it turned into a whole conversation about how you add numbers together). We’d play the game and she’d be excited that, say, three of her five expeditions reached the magic number of 20. Those of you with children probably understand this more than those of you who haven’t crossed that chasm yet, but it was fun for both of us to play like that, and she enjoys playing games she sees mommy and daddy playing.

One final advantage to Lost Cities: It’s cheap for a German-style game, and so in many ways this could serve as a gateway game to the bigger, more complex entries that tend to dominate the rankings at BoardGameGeek.

Filed Under: Games Tagged With: , , , ,
→ July 3, 2010
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The Story of Sushi.

My most recent piece on ESPN.com went up yesterday – a preview of the major amateur free agents available in Latin America this summer.

—

I recommend a lot of books around here, but I’m not sure the last time I said that any you must read a particular book. If you like sushi, or just seafood in general, however, you need to get yourself a copy of Trevor Corson’s The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice (published in hardcover as The Zen of Fish), a tremendous read that blends the history of what we now refer to as sushi in the U.S. with a surprisingly interesting subplot around a class going through a sushi-chef academy near Los Angeles. Corson’s integration of the two threads is remarkable, but for me, the value was in hearing him subtly say to American diners: “SUSHI: UR DOIN IT WRONG.”

Corson boils sushi down to its core components – the rice, the vinegar in the rice, the seaweed – and even dabbles in some food chemistry by explaining why we particularly like those ingredients as well as raw fish, discussing umami and the chemicals that deliver it (glutamic acid and inosine monophosphate in particular) and why we like the flesh of sea creatures raw but generally don’t like uncooked meat from land creatures. He discusses why certain types of fish make better or worse sushi, and of course discusses wild fish versus farm-raised (wild is better, but farm-raised does have some advantages) as well as the dangers overfishing present to natural fish populations. There’s even a chapter on uni, a paste comprising the gonads of sea urchins, which I recently learned is also consumed raw in various Caribbean cuisines as well.

Those sections were interesting, but didn’t do too much to change the way I thought about sushi, since I already knew I liked the stuff. Corson also discusses the various traditions around sushi and the etiquette of eating it (use your fingers for nigiri; never rub your wooden chopsticks together; miso soup should be eaten after the meal), as well as the logic for eating certain pieces in certain ways. A good sushi chef will, if you allow him, consider the order in which you’re eating your fish, moving across a continuum from milder flavors to stronger ones, or from softer textures to firm ones. Stirring wasabi (which, you probably know, isn’t actually wasabi at most U.S. restaurants but American horseradish dyed green) into soy sauce reduces the flavor of the wasabi, because the heat is partly deactivated in liquid. The fish used in spicy tuna rolls – a thoroughly American creation – is generally refuse, scraped off the skin of the tuna after the best pieces have been removed and used for nigiri or other dishes that require better flavor and texture. In fact, most rolls are inauthentic and used to hide inferior-quality fish under ingredients that are strongly flavored, like chili oil, or that coat the tongue with fat, like mayonnaise or avocado.

I’ve never been a huge fan of complicated rolls, since they tend to layer lots of ingredients together and come with sticky-sweet sauces, and I’m not a fan of mayonnaise so I generally avoid spicy tuna anyway. Having a rich, fatty, sweet roll can burn your palate for the delicate flavors of the fish-and-rice nigiri. But Corson’s book, without ever explicitly saying, “don’t eat the fancy rolls,” presents three arguments – one based on authenticity, one on the quality of the ingredients, and the fact that sushi becomes rather unhealthy when you load it up with fats and sugars – for at least limiting your consumption of those rolls, if not eliminating them altogether. And the teachers and sushi chefs who appear in the book all share his disdain for the fancier rolls, even while they teach them at the academy because customers want them – and they’re very profitable. (Another good reason not to order them, actually – you usually get more bang for your buck with nigiri.)

A book that just discussed sushi’s history, traditions, and science would have been worth reading without an actual plot to carry it along, but Corson built his book around the story of a class at The California Sushi Academy, a school run by a longtime sushi chef named Toshi whose restaurant (adjacent to the school) is struggling and who is himself recovering from a fairly recent stroke that has sapped his energy. Corson focuses on a few specific students in the class, including Kate, the nominal star of the book, a young woman struggling to find a career while fighting depression who nearly quits the school a half-dozen times; Fie, the Danish model/actress who decided she’d rather be the bombshell behind the sushi bar; and Takumi Nishio, the former Japanese boy-band star who quit the music business to study first Italian cuisine and now authentic sushi; while also devoting some time to Zoran, the Yugoslavia-born/Australian-raised head instructor who is a True Believer in traditional sushi even as he teaches the students American-style rolls. Their stories are interesting, as are their struggles – except for Takumi, who, in the book at least, seems to be a complete natural at whatever cuisine he tries, so he’s fascinating but without much drama. Corson follows them on assignments outside the classroom, like feeding the cast and crew on a movie lot, or watches them work a shift in the back room of the restaurant, using each episode as a segue into some note on the history or components of sushi.

If you like sushi, The Story of Sushi is $10 well spent. You can simultaneously learn the history of the California roll – its inventor is actually known, and there’s a good reason why there’s an avocado in it – and why you shouldn’t really bother with it when you’re in a quality Japanese restaurant.

For more from Corson, check out his official site, which includes some notes on the people in The Story of Sushi and other links and articles about seafood.

Next review: Richard Russo’s The Whore’s Child and Other Stories.

Filed Under: Food, Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
→ June 28, 2010
→ By

Cary/Raleigh eats, part one.

I was in Cary, North Carolina, for a few days last week, and will be heading there again soon, so this is the first of likely two food posts on the area.

I’ll start with the one success, Coquette, a French brasserie in the North Hills mall complex in Raleigh, a recommendation of friend-of-the-dish Richard Dansky, who also met me there for dinner. Their duck confit crepes were outstanding all around, from the perfect duck leg to the three golden crepes to the just-right amount of mushroom-leek cream sauce; the only questionable inclusion were fava beans that brought color but a little bitterness and didn’t meld with the other flavors. For dessert, I tried their cashew toffee crunch profiteroles; the pastries, pate a choux with cocoa and cinnamon, were a little dry (hard to avoid), but I would order a half gallon of that ice cream, which was loaded with bits of nuts and toffee and had strong caramel notes in the ice cream itself. It’s served with a dark chocolate ganache sauce that I may have just eaten with a spoon. The only misstep was the salad recommended by our server, a frisee mix with a poached egg … but no other dressing beyond the runny yolk. Not really good eats, but they had plenty of other salad and starter options to try.

I tried two Q joints in the area, neither great. Danny’s, one of several in the area, is located in an industrial park right off Tryon Rd; the pulled pork was moist but had almost no smoke flavor and required saucing, but their sides were all very good, including outstanding fried okra and a small bean I’d never had before called “field peas” that had a little of the bright sweetness of English peas but with the firmness of black-eyed peas. Dixie Belle’s pork had slightly more flavor – I mean slightly – but was dried out, probably from being kept warm for too long. I know there’s better Q in Raleigh and Durham, but didn’t have time to head that far. The mom from one of the local host families recommended Clyde Cooper’s in downtown Raleigh, so I’ll try to hit that next time around.

I had a recommendation for a hole in the wall sushi place in Cary called Little Tokyo, which also seems to be held in high esteem by locals … and that doesn’t say good things about the state of sushi in Cary, because Little Tokyo is awful. I figured I was in trouble when I saw the menu was about 2/3 rolls, with nigiri and sashimi relegated to less than a full page without the same bells or whistles. I knew I was in trouble when I asked the chef behind the sushi bar what he recommended and he looked at me like I’d just said Yuniesky Betancourt should be the AL’s starter at shortstop in the All-Star Game. I ordered five different kinds of nigiri, none of which had a lick of taste. The nigiri fell apart when I picked them up with my hands, and the texture of the maguro was mushy. It’s clear they use the sauces and extras on rolls to cover up inferior quality fish. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
→ June 24, 2010
→ By

Farewell, My Lovely.

My first notes piece from the Tournament of Stars is up, along with a video of right-hander Christian Montgomery.

I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a little while I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

How can you not like Raymond Chandler? He was a serious, literary writer who chose the detective story as his milieu and even wrote one of the greatest essays ever on the art of writing (“The Simple Art of Murder”). His prose was sparse and forceful like Hammett’s, but with a constant undercurrent of wry, self-deprecating humor. And his influence has been enormous.

I think the critical consensus has The Big Sleep as his best novel, but for my money Farewell, My Lovely surpasses it, with a more involved plot, much more insight into the character of the detective, Philip Marlowe, and more dry humor. Marlowe stumbles on a giant man, Moose Malloy, who storms a black nightclub that was previously whites-only, and is more or less dragged upstairs where he sees Malloy slug the bartender and hears him shoot the owner. Shortly afterward, Marlowe gets a cold call from a potential client who wants him to provide protection for a brief job that night, and despite his own suspicion, goes along … and that’s where the fun really starts.

Chandler weaves the two cases in and out of each other as Marlowe chases one while the other might be chasing him, and while there’s a natural suspicion that the two tracks are related, the answer to that isn’t clear until the very end of the story. I thought we got more insight into Marlowe’s character in this book, from the way he uses the weakness of Jesse Florian to get more information from her to the way he manipulates her nosy neighbor to his handling of the liberated young Anne Riordan. There’s a con-man psychic, marijuana cigarettes, a kidnapping, lots of booze, and the usual spot-on prose from the master of the genre.

Next review: Philip K. Dick’s Ubik.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ June 21, 2010
→ By

Fer-de-Lance.

I’m back from a week of vacation in St. Kitts with my phone completely off and no access to email. Add to that a copious supply of rum and it might have been the greatest week of my life. I will get to a post running through the places where we ate as well as general thoughts on the island later in the week.

I also went through seven books in seven days, mostly detective stories, starting with my first exposure to Nero Wolfe in print form with Rex Stout’s first Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance. I’ve heard several of the classic radio programs starring Sidney Greenstreet as the corpulent, eccentric genius who solves crimes without leaving his office/apartment and raises and breeds orchids when he’s not playing detective. The real leg work falls to his employee and occasional verbal sparring partner Archie Goodwin, who also handles some of the orchid-management duties and often finds himself frustrated in the face of Wolfe’s ability to draw correct conclusions from limited data.

Fer-de-Lance is the first of the 33 novels Stout wrote, although he didn’t write it as an introductory novel, making references to (nonexistent) prior cases and character histories so that the novel’s beginning isn’t bogged down in lengthy details or dull tangents. The case involves an Italian immigrant who goes missing and turns up dead and a college President who drops dead suddenly on a golf course, with Wolfe and Goodwin making the connection and Wolfe figuring out how the core murder was committed but not knowing for certain who committed it until later in the book. The climax, where Wolfe reveals the killer’s identity to the police, is a bit over the top but certainly enjoyable.

Two major facets of Fer-de-Lance propelled the book forward for me. One is the two fascinating characters of Wolfe and Goodwin. Wolfe is a maddening (but not mad) genius, exacting, arrogant, but brilliant and logical, relying on the psychology of suspects much as Hercule Poirot typically does. Goodwin chafes under his boss’s condescension but ultimately must bow to Wolfe’s superior powers of deduction; he’s too much of a dandy to be hard-boiled but does fill the role of the hard-boiled detective who pounds the pavement, threatening and being threatened, while Wolfe sits in the comfort of his office. Stout sets up a number of avenues of friction between the two for subsequent books.

The other was Stout’s approach to revealing the crime to the reader, which deviated from the standard formula where the author saves the final details for the last chapter or two of the book. In many detective or mystery novels, that’s almost a requirement, as the reader’s curiosity provides velocity to the text that is lacking in pedestrian writing, but Stout’s characterization and simple and witty prose are strong enough to drive the reader forward even after Wolfe and Goodwin have settled on the killer’s identity and instead work backwards to prove that Wolfe’s answer is correct, rather than following clues to a conclusion that ends the book.

I enjoyed Fer-de-Lance but wouldn’t class it with Christie’s intricate, subtle plotting, or Chandler’s terse, literary prose; it’s faster and easier but without the same depth, definitely worth the time if you’re familiar with any of the Wolfe adaptations and want to see the character in his original form, or if you’re looking for a quick, fun, yet still intelligent detective novel.

Next up: There’s not too much new to say on the 20th Wodehouse novel I’ve read, Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, other than that it’s vintage Wooster, so I’ll skip ahead to Pierre Magnan’s Death in the Truffle Wood for the next writeup. I’m currently reading Trevor Corson’s The Story of Sushi (also published as The Zen of Fish).

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ June 10, 2010
→ By

The Big Short.

My final draft reviews are up for the American League and the National League.

I’ll be on KNBR 1050 in San Francisco at 1 pm PDT today with my friend Damon Bruce. I’m sure we’ll talk about how bad AAA pitching is and why the Giants need more veteran presence.

I’m leaving for vacation on Saturday, so between now and then I’m going to try to do a few quick dish posts on books I’ve read since the draft rush began.

—

Michael Lewis’ The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine follows three investors who foresaw the meltdown in the subprime mortgage market and each made a killing off of it, using their stories as a way to expose the lunacy of the collateralized debt obligations used to sell these destined-to-fail loans (much of which was new to me) and to do something Lewis does very well: Create villains and take them down.

Lewis has two great strengths as a writer: His prose is easy and natural, and he has a gift for finding interesting protagonists. Of the three profiled in The Big Short, none is more compelling than Michael Burry, the awkward, antisocial neurology student whose investment blog becomes so legendary that he quits medicine to raise his own value-investing fund, only to abandon that approach and bet everything on what he saw as the inevitable collapse of the subprime mortgage market. Second in interest level is Steve Eisman, the perpetually angry hedge-fund manager who spends the entire book in a state of mounting disbelief at the stupidity of nearly everyone involved in the giant Ponzi scheme of subprime mortgages. The third major winner on bets against the market, the three-man investment outfit Cornwall Capital, had an incredible run of success, turning a $100,000 initial investment into a nine-figure fund, but their stories just aren’t as compelling as Eisman’s or particularly Burry’s.

The real villains here are the ratings agencies who weren’t so much asleep at the wheel as passed-out drunk. Moody’s, S&P, and Fitch continued to give high ratings to investment vehicles they didn’t examine or even understand, and once Lewis’ protagonist investors realized what was going on, they ratcheted up their bets against the subprime market, with one going to so far as to short the stocks of the ratings agencies. Lewis does spread the blame around, vilifying the investment banks who sold CDOs while enabling bets against them, the mortgage originators who gave out loans to people who lacked the income to pay for them and which were structured to fail, and the host of people who made money from the industry and didn’t want to hear the doomsayers’ warnings about an impending collapse. But the biggest culprit of all is human nature: We respond to incentives, and the system provided incentives for almost every villain to do what he did. Originators were paid for originating but faced no consequences when their loans went bad. Ratings agencies had immunity from claims when their ratings turned out to be bogus. And nothing prevented investment banks from betting everything on black or from profiting by playing both sides of a gamble.

I listened to the audio version of The Big Short and thought the reader did an excellent job in both pacing and distinguishing between all of the while middle-aged men who populated the book.

Filed Under: Economics, Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , ,
→ April 27, 2010
→ By

Mumford and Sons’ Sigh No More.

My first stab at the top 100 prospects for this year’s draft is now live for Insiders, with a companion piece breaking down the top five prospects at each position.

—

I discovered Mumford and Sons quite by accident, hearing “Little Lion Man” on WFNX while driving to a nearby Staples last Sunday, and using Shazam on my Droid to get the artist/song info, thinking maybe it was an Irish-influenced band along the lines of Flogging Molly. On the recommendations of several followers on Twitter, I downloaded the album (just $8 on amazon), and discovered – for myself, that is – a remarkable new album that, while imperfect, seems to be a harbinger of great things to come.

Sigh No More comprises twelve songs in three rough categories: fast songs, slow songs, or slow-then-fast songs. The entirely-slow songs came off as too precious, especially with hypersensitive recording that captures little cracks in Mumford’s voice or the scraping of fingers against acoustic guitar strings, but the songs that find the band, led by singer Marcus Mumford, picking up the pace all worked, with some sounding like back-country hoedowns while others bringing to mind pints raised in the air (and sloshing on the floor) as the bar sings along. They use tempo changes effectively and go from sparse instrumentation to lush within the span of a single song, tricks that only felt like tricks when the underlying music wasn’t strong enough to support it.

“Little Lion Man” is far and away the best song on the album, opening with a staccato guitar pattern and incorporating hints of bluegrass, folk, and even jug-band country as it moves through verse and chorus, with Mumford’s wailing (in a good way) over the bridge leading into a final, devastating pair of choruses, the latter a cappella, that lay bare the singer’s shame at his (unstated) actions and the implications for his character as a whole. The group’s harmonies, strong all over the album, are razor-sharp here, and the track’s production is crisp and clean, letting the music take center stage without some of those minor frills that mar later songs on the disc. If you’re going to start with Mumford and Sons, start with this song.

On the whole, the disc represents a marriage of British/Irish folk music as it might be played in a blue-collar pub, but with the addition of a bluegrass-inflected banjo and three- and four-part harmonies that you’ll feel in your bones. The second-best track on the disc, “Winter Winds,” features a brass backing behind the repeated couplet “And my head told my heart…” that’s reminiscent of the best of Animals That Swim, a British band that married brilliant stories with music I could only describe as tunes to which you should get drunk. I heard hints of AWS all over this record, but this track in particular is more like a brilliant cover of a song the earlier band never actually wrote. The one slow-ish track that works, the seething “White Blank Page,” gets needed roughness when Mumford accentuates the natural rasp in his voice, while the title track starts slow and accelerates to the point where the track’s end may make you forget where you begun.

Mumford and Sons strive to offer intelligent lyrics, and there are flashes of that all over the disc, but if held to that higher standard it falls short, with too many cute phrases and platitudes and overreliance on discussion of the metaphorical soul. Mumford speaks of the soul not in a spiritual or transcendent sense, but as some critical part of our being that must be protected, kept free, or nourished, but these mentions are all vague and ultimately empty. If someone tells you “your soul you must keep totally free,” that sounds great, but what exactly does that mean? They’d do well to replace much of this superficial profundity and delve into the imagery that sets apart truly great lyrics and elevates them into (or perhaps just near) the realm of poetry.

“Roll Away Your Stone” exemplifies what’s right and wrong with the album. It begins with a soft, lilting pattern that morphs into a bluegrass stomp while maintaining the core melody, transitions into a down-tempo chorus with their standard soaring harmony, and finishes with a quiet couplet of just Mumford’s voice over guitar. It’s effective and rousing, and there are hints of lyrical greatness within, yet that promise remains unfulfilled when Mumford misses a chance to extend a metaphor throughout the song. The one image in the opening line, “Roll away your stone and I’ll roll away mine,” never recurs, even with an ideal spot in the closing lines: “And you, you’ve gone too far this time/You have neither reason nor rhyme/With which to take this soul that is so rightfully mine.” Substitute “stone” for “soul” and you’ve opened a world of possible interpretations, not to mention the amusing image of Mumford fiercely protecting a rock (or pebble) that someone is trying to snatch.

Returning, again, to the standout “Little Lion Man,” the lyrics – a despairing offset to the rapid bluegrass-inflected music – are more advanced than those on the remainder of the album, from the image of the title (a nod to the Cowardly Lion?) to the admonition to “learn from your mother or else spend your days biting your own neck” to, by far, the most effective use of the word “fuck” in a popular music song since Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer,” with a far less crude connotation. If Mumford and Sons can craft a song like this, they can craft a half-dozen or more, and in that skill lies the potential for a tremendous album, one that will do more than reach the top of Billboard‘s folk charts.

I was originally going to compare Sigh No More to Colby Rasmus’ 2009 season, where the performance was littered with the promise of great things to come, but I think Brett Anderson’s 2009 would be more apt, as Sigh is still a terrific album despite its hiccups and flaws, one I’ve listened to repeatedly over the last week not because I needed to do so to write about it, but because five or six of its songs have become lodged in my head to the point where I feel driven to play them again and again.

Filed Under: Music Tagged With: , , ,
→ April 13, 2010
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Street Gang.

Michael Davis’ Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street is one of my new favorite non-fiction books, both because it’s thorough, well-written, and shows the author’s strong affinity for his subject, and also because of my own affinity for its subject, a television show that defined my preschool years and introduced me to the Muppets, whose later “grown-up” variety show was in turn my introduction to both vaudeville-style humor and dark comedy.

Street Gang focuses primarily on Sesame Street‘s prehistory, from conception to launch through its first season, a period loaded with bold ideas, coincidences, and enough drama to sustain a compelling narrative. Davis weaves personal histories of staff members, cast members, and Muppets into the overall history in a way that keeps the tale from becoming monotonous – as much as I enjoyed the book, it’s hard to create much tension when you know everything more or less works out in the end – and also enlightened me by giving new dimensions to people I’d only known as characters or names on the screen. Bob McGrath’s history as a successful singer and the amazing coincidence that launched Carroll Spinney’s puppetry career stood out as two of the more interesting back stories, excluding, of course, the stories of Muppets from Kermit to Bert and Ernie to Elmo, Zoe*, and Abby Kadaby.

*The Zoe story is as close as the book comes to out-and-out controversy, to me at least, because she was part of an entire makeover called “Around the Corner,” a show change that came from a top-down business plan rather than an organic development from the writers and Muppeteers. That plan was a direct response to the scourge of children’s television known as Barney – a show I have forbidden from my house, even though my daughter has at times asked to watch it, and if that makes me mean so be it – but also included elements of merchandising strategy, a reflection of the declining age of the typical Sesame Street viewer, and questions of whether a sanitized part of the neighborhood strayed from the show’s original goals of reaching inner-city kids and was perhaps motivated by the most subtle racism. The fact that a successful character emerged from this mess only adds to the relevance of the story, and another 20 pages on Zoe would have been welcome.

The star of the book is Joan Ganz Cooney, the determined, willful, yet wholly inexperienced (at first) life force of the project who sold the vision, got the show launched, and saved it (at the expense of The Electric Company, sadly) in a 1970s anti-public-television push in Congress. I felt grateful while reading about her refusal to let the show die or deviate from its mission, even through a difficult period in her personal life, because of how important those two shows have proven in my life. Sesame Street and The Electric Company influenced me in a number of ways – I watched both programs voraciously, as well as other PBS education fare from 3-2-1 Contact to Write On to the Letter People to a now-forgotten show called The Metric System to which I can still hum the theme song to another one with teenagers working at a newspaper and fighting some villain named “Dunedin” – of which their educational influence was only a part. I grew up in an almost completely white neighborhood; it wasn’t wealthy, or privileged, but it was nearly devoid of minorities; Asian-* and African-American students constituted under 2% of my high school’s total enrollment while I was there. Most mainstream television programs were all-white at the time, and if there was a minority character, the writing was forced and he’d end up somewhere between a mildly offensive stereotype and a horribly offensive one. Yet I grew up not just tolerant, but largely ignorant of skin color – it’s never really crossed my mind, no more relevant to the discussion of someone as his hair or eye color. I can’t prove the source of that character trait, but I think the ethnically mixed cast of both Sesame Street and The Electric Company played a major role in it – if you present an impressionable child with daily images of people of different races or ethnicities interacting in normal, even boring ways, he’s going to believe that that’s the way everything should be. And I also believe that these shows helped shape the dramatic change in attitudes from my parents’ generation to the generation after mine, or even from mine to my daughter’s; racism isn’t gone, but it’s been driven underground in much of our society, and overt expressions of racism or sexism will often get you shunned or fired.

*One of those Asian-American students was the best man at my wedding and remains my closest friend, even though he kicked my ass in Zooloretto the other night.

Of course, the educational aspects to these PBS shows weren’t lost on the two-year-old me – I read at a very young age and always had a thing for numbers, which I’m sure is a shock to you all, but my parents have never described doing anything unusual to teach me letters or words or math. If you watch an old episode of either Sesame Street or The Electric Company today, it’s hard to miss the almost propaganda-like educational agenda: They hammer the letter and number of the day into the child’s head, through repetition and through context, and the fact that thirty-plus years on* I can still remember songs and sketches is testament to how powerful and effective they were.

*We own the Sesame Street Old School Volume 1 DVD set, which I recommend more for parents than for today’s kids, and when my wife saw a sketch she hadn’t seen since the 1970s, about “two little girls and a little dollhouse,” she got all teary-eyed. That’s the power of Sesame Street.

Davis finishes the book with some notes on how the show has changed, including the shift in format to suit the Sesame Street‘s ever-younger audience. The original show had a single storyline of street scenes that carried through the entire show, with cartoons and sketches interspersed throughout. The new format gets that entire story out of the way in a single uninterrupted segment off the top, and of course the final 20 minutes are now devoted to “Elmo’s World,” a scourge on my existence that seems to insult the intelligence of any three-year-old who might have learned something from the first 40 minutes of the program. Unfortunately, it seems to me that they’ve dumbed the show down – yes, they’re trying to reach the one-year-olds plopped down in front of the set, but they have to be losing the three- and four-year-olds along the way. Shouldn’t “Elmo’s World” be its own show, rather than altering such a long-term success to serve an audience outside those covered by its original mission? My daughter seems to agree; once she outgrew Elmo’s World, that was it for Sesame Street in our house. She’ll watch Word World and Peep and the Big Wide World and Sid the Science Kid and Dinosaur Train – I haven’t gotten her hooked on the new The Electric Company yet, although I think it’s very good – but Sesame Street just bores her. Maybe I’m just being nostalgic, but that makes me a little sad.

Speaking of which, my one warning on Street Gang: Buy a pack of tissues. The prologue is a long description of the memorial service for Jim Henson, and his was but one of a series of major, often premature deaths to hit active members of the show’s cast and crew. Many of you are the right age to remember the episode when Mr. Hooper (played by Will Lee) died, and Davis includes the portion of the script where the adults explain to Big Bird that “Mr. Looper” isn’t coming back. It was a brilliant, award-winning episode, and the text plus the description of the cast members’ reactions will bring anybody down even as you appreciate how well it was written.

Next up: I’m halfway through Richard Russo’s Mohawk. I’ve also got Junichiro Tanazaki’s The Makioka Sisters lined up after that – if anyone has tackled it, I’d love to know how you liked it and whether it’s worth the time.

Filed Under: DVDs, Media, Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ April 10, 2010
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Firefly Rain.

Richard Dansky has been a reader of mine since not long after I joined ESPN and started the dish, even interviewing me about two years ago on his own web site. He’s one of the premier writers for videogames, writing for Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy Splinter Cell games while also dabbling in horror and fantasy; you can read more about his work on his official site. In addition to a shared love of baseball, Richard and I have a reasonable overlap in our reading interests, including hard-boiled detective novels, so he sent me a copy of his first novel, recently out in paperback, Firefly Rain.

The novel centers on Jacob Logan, the prodigal son of North Carolina parents who returns home after their deaths to deal with the mundane details around the family house, now his, in the tiny town of Maryfield. The community is populated with your standard assortment of local characters, although Dansky keeps their number manageable and all are well drawn, especially Carl, the cantankerous neighbor who’s been keeping an eye on the house for Jacob for several years, and Reverend Trotter, the laid-back clergyman who dispenses common-sense advice without florid phrasing or excessive sermonizing.

Not long after Jacob arrives, however, weird things begin happening – his car disappears, items move around the house on their own, windows won’t close until they’re damn good and ready, and the phenomenon of fireflies refusing to fly on to the Logan property. When the weirdness escalates to a blackout, an attack by an insane dog, and worse, Jacob summons help in the form of a friend from Boston to try and help him piece together whether this is a series of crimes or a full-on haunting.

Richard described the novel to me up front as a ghost story, but I think that undersells the book. A ghost story, to me, revolves around the ghosts – you read to be scared or spooked or maybe even freaked – whereas Firefly Rain has a good story that may or may not involve ghosts. I’d compare it to Agatha Christie’s novels – yes, her Poirot and Miss Marple books were mysteries, but they’re compelling stories that you can read and enjoy on their own merits without trying to solve the puzzle (which is good, since I never get those right anyway). And Richard’s book does have an element of mystery to it, with a few clues left lying around if you care to try to decipher it, although I preferred in this case to let the story carry me along.

The best aspect of the novel is that Jacob makes few bad choices – the way he loses his cell phone might be the only one you could call “truly dumb” – and as the narrator Jacob dissects his own thinking, you can buy into some of his questionable moves, rather than seeing them as plot conveniences to keep the story moving. Even the lost cell phone ended up of marginal importance at best. I did find some of the folksier dialogue a little dissonant, but I’ve spent no time in rural North or South Carolina and can’t credibly discuss its authenticity or lack thereof. I also thought the cover text didn’t sell the book that well – it concentrates on the ghost aspect instead of the story aspect, which explores a pretty basic theme about the responsibilities of a child to his parents, both in life and after their deaths. I’ll cheerfully admit to bias here, as I’ve always enjoyed chatting with Richard, but I wouldn’t recommend a book I didn’t like just because I knew the author (in fact, I’d just pretend I’d never read it), and Firefly Rain is worth your time.

Next up: I’ve finished Michael Davis’ marvelous Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street and am now working through an early collection of Dame Christie’s stories, published under the title Poirot Investigates, after which I’ve got Richard Russo’s Mohawk lined up.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,