Reality Hunger: A Manifesto: hip-hop

259

Genius borrows nobly.

260

Good poets borrow; great poets steal.

261

Art is theft.

262

Why is hip-hop stagnant right now, why is rock dead, why is the conventional novel moribund? Because they’re ignoring the culture around them, where new, more exciting forms of narration and presentation and representation are being found (or rediscovered).

263

American R & B was enormously popular in Jamaica in the 1950s, but none of the local musicians could play it authentically. The music culture was based around DJs playing records at public dances; huge public-address systems were set up for these dances. DJs started acting more and more as taste editors, gaining reputations for the distinct type of record each of them would play. After a while, the act of playing the records also became an opportunity for style and artistic expression. They still used only one record player, but they developed special techniques of switching records in a split second to keep the music going seamlessly. The Jamaican music industry started producing its own recordings, and they, too, were utilized by these sound-system men, who would make recordings specifically for their own dances and wouldn’t let anyone else have the record. Even when Jamaican musicians were available to play these public dances, the audience preferred the manipulation and combination of prerecorded material.

264

Sampling, the technique of taking a section of existing, recorded sound and placing it within an “original” composition, is a new way of doing something that’s been done for a long time: creating with found objects. The rotation gets thick. The constraints get thin. The mix breaks free of the old associations. New contexts form from old. The script gets flipped.

265

In the 1960s, dub reggae—artists recording new parts over preexisting music, often adding new vocals and heavy tape echo—evolved straight out of the sound-system DJ movement, which was always eager to incorporate any new advancement in technology. A decade later, King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry began deconstructing recorded music. Using extremely primitive, predigital hardware, they created what they called versions. In 1962, Jamaica was granted its full independence from Britain, and more Jamaicans started coming to the United States. It was only natural that these immigrants would gravitate toward the ready-made black communities in America, especially New York City. Newly arriving Jamaicans brought with them the idea of the soundsystem DJ; filtered through an African American perspective, the music moved in a different direction than it had in Jamaica. In many ways, hip-hop was born out of the Jamaican idea of turning record-playing into an art form.

266

From when I first met King Tubby and see him work, I knew there was a man with a great deal of potential. He could make music outta the mistakes people bring him, like every spoil is a style to King Tubby. He would drop out the bits where a man sing a wrong note and bring up another instrument or drop out everything for pure bass and drum riddim; then he’d bring back in the singing. You would never know there was a mistake there because he drop in and out of tracks like that’s what he was always intending to do. He do it all live, too. He don’t build it up bit by bit, him jus’ leggo the tape and do his thing. You watch him, it like watching a conductor or a maestro at work. And of course every time it would be different. He always want to surprise people—I think he even want to surprise himself sometimes—and if he mix the same tune a dozen times, you will have twelve different version.

267

In the early 1970s, many technologies became much more widely available to the general public, including the portable PA system, the multichannel mixer, and the magnet-drive turntable made by the Technics company.

268

You don’t need a band to do this stuff. You steal somebody else’s beats, then—with just turntables and your own mouth— you mix and scratch the shit up to the level your own head is at.

269

Lil Wayne, Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead are hugely popular artists who recently circumvented the music business establishment by giving their music directly to their audience for free on the web. The middle man has been cut out; listeners get a behind-the-scenes peek at work in progress. Lil Wayne can put out whatever he pleases, whenever he pleases, and the music fan gets access to far more material than a standard album release would provide. For all three of these acts, sales went up after they had first given away some, if not all, of the new release. Their fans rewarded them for creating this intimate link.

270

In 2008, Damien Hirst, the richest visual artist in the world, sold his work “directly” to buyers through a Sotheby’s auction rather than through the time-honored method of galleries; it was the largest such sale ever: 287 lots, $200 million.

271

What’s appropriation art? It’s when you steal but make a point of stealing, because by changing the context you change the connotation.

272

Reality-based art hijacks its material and doesn’t apologize.

273

My taste for quotation, which I have always kept—why reproach me for it? People, in life, quote what pleases them. Therefore, in our work, we have the right to quote what pleases us.

274

Elaine Sturtevant, an American artist born in 1930 in Lakewood, OH, has achieved recognition for works that consist entirely of copies of other artists’ works—Duchamp, Beuys, Warhol, Stella, Gonzalez-Torres. In each case, her decision to start copying an artist happened well before the artist achieved wide recognition. Nearly all of the artists she has chosen to copy are now considered major artists.

275

Looking for songs to sample and melodies to use—picking through the cultural scrap heap for something that appealed to me—I went through the Billboard R & B charts and the Top 40 charts from the late 1940s until the present. With the aid of the search function on iTunes, I was able to hear a twentysecond section of just about any song I wanted to hear. It was fascinating to watch popular music morph and mutate year by year, especially on the R & B charts (black music has always been quicker to incorporate new songs and technologies). It was like watching stop-animation film footage, seeing this object (the main style of the time) grow and shrink like a plant, rise and fall, swell and collapse: swing music slimming down and splicing into gospel and making rhythm and blues, rhythm and blues slowing down into soul, soul hardening into funk, funk growing into disco, and disco collapsing under its own sheen as hip-hop hid in the underground. It wasn’t until after I’d gone through the whole set of charts and reviewed my notes that I realized there was a trend in the songs I chose to sample. The number of songs I picked remained consistent through the 1950s and ’60s, but by the end of the 70s it dropped off. I’d picked only a few songs from the 80s and none from the 90s. Why do the songs of the late 70s and afterward hold very little appeal for me? Somewhere along the way, as recording technology got better and better each year, the music lost something; it became too perfect, too complete. Which is why so many artists have turned to using samples and other preexisting sources in various forms: in this rush of technological innovation, we’ve lost something along the way and are going back to try to find it, but we don’t know what that thing is. Eating genetically altered, neon-orange bananas, we aren’t getting what we need, and we know something is missing. We’re clinging to anything that seems “real” or organic or authentic. We want rougher sounds, rougher images, raw footage, uncensored by high technology and the powers that be.

276

Rappers got the name MC (master of ceremonies) because they began as hosts at public dances, and as the form evolved, they began to take more and more liberties in what they said between and over the records. Emceeing evolved into a channel for artistic expression—the voice of the host or the voice of the editor fusing with the selected program. The materials of art now include bigger clumps of cultural sediment. Everything in the history of media is fair game: artists painting pictures over road maps, placing photos within comic book landscapes, Kanye West splicing together his own song “Gold Digger” with Ray Charles’s “I Got a Woman.” It’s exciting to deface things that we live among, whether what’s defaced is an Otis Redding record or a brick wall.

277

The birth of jazz: musicians made new use of what was available—marching-band instruments left over from the Spanish-American War. Jazz also made use of different forms of music, from ragtime to blues and impressionistic classical music. Later on, Jazz ran improvisatory riffs on show-tune standards. Or think of a cover version: a composition that already exists is revisioned by another artist. The original composition still exists, and the new one dances on top of the old one, like an editor writing notes in the margins. Hip-hop and dance DJs take snatches of different songs that already exist in the culture and stitch them together to suit their own needs and moods. The folk tradition in action: finding new uses for things by selecting the parts that move you and discarding the rest.

278

Facebook and MySpace are crude personal essay machines. On everyone’s page is a questionnaire, on which each person is asked to list personal info—everything from age to sexual status. A MySpace user can choose a sound track for his page, post pictures of himself, post downloads, and redesign the graphics however he wishes. Many people update their pages constantly and provide running commentary on their lives in the blog function that comes with a site. Millions of little advertisements for the self. I learn more about my younger brothers from reading their Facebook pages than I ever have from actual conversation with them. They write detailed accounts of their personalities and take everything very seriously (as many do) in a sincere attempt to communicate with others but also to control the presentation of their “image.” Every page is a bent version of reality—too unsophisticated to be art but too self-conscious to be mere reportage. In this new landscape, everyone gets a channel. It seems to be the ultimate destiny of every medium to be dragged down to the lowest common denominator, which is at once democratic, liberating, exhilarating, bland, deafening, and confusing. User-made content is the new folk art. If an eighteen-year-old girl in Delaware can’t be in a Hollywood movie, she takes pictures of herself dressed how she imagines a movie star would dress and posts them on her MySpace page. If the members of a Missoula bar band can never be on MTV, they borrow their boss’s camcorder, make their own video, and post it on YouTube. Reality-based art by necessity. Me Media. Blogs, wikis, social-networking sites, podcasts, vlogs, message boards, email groups, iMovie, Twitter, Flickr: more than a third of adult American internet users have created original content and posted it on the web. And it gets more sophisticated every day: chain email gives way to the blog, which gives way to the vlog, which gives way to the webisode. The massively popular video games Guitar Hero and Rock Band not only turn once static content into an interactive experience, but the newer versions have extra functions to let the players actually create new music with the building blocks the game provides. YouPorn, a free YouTube-like site on which users post their homemade porn, has become one of the most popular porn sites. Karaoke is another example of how realitybased art is winning at a grassroots level, among nonexperts. Karaoke is a generic version of live hip-hop. Little skill or equipment is needed to allow people to perform, but no matter how bad or ill-advised the karaoke singer is, he or she is using existing material for means of self-expression, and the audience accepts the fact that there is no band and the music is recorded. The song already exists in the culture and is known to all involved. What is also known is that the music itself has been rerecorded and is a bastardized version of the original backing track. Everyone knows there is nothing original going on, but somehow the whole thing becomes original in its dizzying amateurness. What happens in karaoke is a disposable variation on something iconic in the culture, such as a big 80s hit like “Billie Jean.” It’s reality-based art nearly devoid of art. The only self-expression is the uniqueness of the particular rendition that the karaoke singer performs. And within the space of the original hit, anything goes: squealing, shouting, changing lyrics, wishing friends happy birthday—whatever the singer chooses to do with his three minutes of spotlight. For some it’s just a gag, but others take it very seriously. There’s a communal feeling between audience and singer, because they’re interchangeable.

279

From age thirteen to twenty-four I was in a four-piece rock band (same model as the Beatles through Nirvana). I came to Seattle at eighteen, playing that form of music, but at some point I felt there was nothing else—nothing more—to be done with the standard rock format. The band broke up, and I had a year to float around artistically. The fusion of hip-hop techniques and rock ’n’ roll seemed to be much more exciting. When I came out with the new sound, many of my old friends in rock bands thought I was selling out. It was a tough jump to make. Many musicians said if I was using loops of other recordings, I was unoriginal or untalented or hiding behind technology. There was definitely a line in the sand, and when I crossed it, there was no returning to traditional rock.

280

Language is a city, to the building of which every human being has brought a stone, yet each of us is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef that is the basis of the continent.

281

Just as the letters of our language are metaphors for specific sounds, and words are metaphors for specific ideas, shards of the culture itself now form a kind of language that most everyone knows how to speak. Artists don’t have to spell things out; it’s much faster to go straight to the existing material—film footage, library research, wet newspapers, vinyl records, etc. It’s the artist’s job to mix (edit) the fragments together and, if needed, generate original fragments to fill in the gaps. For example, when Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album was released in 2004, listeners heard the Beatles chopped up and re-presented underneath the contemporary rapper Jay-Z’s vocals. The album simultaneously reflected back to the Beatles, to Jay-Z’s 2003 The Black Album (from which the vocals were taken), and to the artistic tastes of DJ Danger Mouse, who made the new piece of art. The songs work as songs, but they also work as history lessons. Another layer was added by the fact that it’s illegal to use the Beatles for sampling. Capitol Records went to court to silence the album, but it was already too far out into the culture to be stopped. Beyond the use of old media to make a new project, there was the added benefit of a “plotline” on top of the music (underground art vs. corporate empire). This combination led to record-setting free downloads.

282

The DJ known as Girl Talk is taking sampling to its inevitable extreme. He runs Lil Wayne over Nirvana, Elton John over The Notorious B.I.G. Sometimes the juxtaposition is fantastic; usually it’s not. The novelty wears thin very quickly. Anyone can throw together two random things and call it collage art. When musical artists began using existing recordings as a medium of creative expression, they created a new subclass of musicians. An artist making use of samples, while going by a variety of names, is, essentially, a creative editor, presenting selections by other artists in a new context and adding notes of his own.

283

A literary equivalent would be along the lines of “creative translation” such as Ezra Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius, in which Pound picked through the elegies of Propertius, translated them, cut them up, and reassembled them in a fashion he deemed entertaining and relevant. Examples from other forms: Thelonius Monk Plays Duke Ellington, in which Monk takes great liberties with Ellington’s songbook. Lichtenstein’s appropriation of comic book art. Picasso’s use of newsprint, among other media, in, say, Composition with Fruit, Guitar, and Glass. Paul’s Boutique: The Beastie Boys, Dust Brothers, and Mario Caldato, Jr., sample from more than 100 sources, including Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, James Brown, and Sly & the Family Stone. Steve Reich’s “Different Trains,” which incorporates audio recordings about train travel by Holocaust survivors and a Pullman porter. Musique concrète, for instance, John Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape No. 4,” written for 12 radios, each played by 2 people (one to tune the channel and one to control volume and timbre). A conductor controls the tempo; the audience hears whatever is on the radio in 97 that city on that day. Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina’s “Offertium,” which mutates themes from Bach’s “Musical Offering” until they’re beyond recognition. In “Three Variations on the Canon in D Major by Johann Pachelbel,” Brian Eno bends and twists Pachelbel. The nineteenth-century Christian hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee” was “put together” by Eliza Flower, whose sister, Sarah Flower Adams, had written the lyrics in the form of a poem. Eliza set Sarah’s poem to the music of Lowell Mason’s “Bethany.” Over the years, it’s been set to other tunes as well. Eliza Flower never gets credit for writing the song, credit going only to Adams for the lyrics and Mason for the music, although it was Flower who “edited” the two together.

284

In hip-hop, the mimetic function has been eclipsed to a large extent by manipulation of the original (the “real thing”): theft without apology—conscious, self-conscious, conspicuous appropriation.

285

Graffiti artists use the stuff of everyday life as their canvas— walls, dumpsters, buses. A stylized representation is placed on an everyday object. In visual art, as in other media, artists take unfiltered pieces of their surroundings and use them for their own means.

286

In that slot called data, the reality is sliced in—the junk-shop find, thrift-store clothes, the snippet of James Brown, the stolen paragraph from Proust, and so on.

287

In hip-hop, realness is something to have and express but not question. Realness is sacred. Realness is taboo. Realness refers to a life defined by violence, drugs, cutthroat capitalism—a life not unfamiliar to superstar rappers like The Game (who has been shot five times) and 50 Cent (nine times) when their crews shoot at each other. “I got you stuck off the realness,” Prodigy of Mobb Deep raps in the song “Shook Ones Pt. II,” probably the most widely quoted use of the term. “We be the infamous / you heard of us / official Queensbridge murderers.” It’s Mobb Deep’s realness that makes you a “shook one”; it’s Prodigy’s realness that got you stuck. This leads to the term’s larger meaning, the meaning Cormega takes, for example, in titling his debut album The Realness. There’s no title track to explain the term. It’s posted at the front of the album like an emblem representing all that follows. The same for Group Home’s song “The Realness,” in which DJ Premier samples “Shook Ones Pt. II” to isolate the words “the realness” and “comes equipped.” Melachi ends his verse by saying he “comes equipped with that Brainsick shit,” referring to the guest rappers from the Brainsick Mob, but that’s all we know about these terms. There’s no definition of realness, only a declaration that they’re equipped with it. In the spoken-word introduction to his song “Look in My Eyes,” Obie Trice says, “Every man determines his definition of realness, what’s real to him.” Realness is not reality, something that can be defined or identified. Reality is what is imposed on you; realness is what you impose back. Reality is something you could question; realness is beyond all doubt.

288

Cultural and commercial languages invade us 24/7. That slogan I just heard on the TV commercial: I can’t get it out of my head. That melody from the theme song to that syndicated sitcom that arrives at seven every night: we’re colonized by this stuff. It invades our lives and our lexicon. This might be of no consequence to the average media consumer, but it spells trouble for the artist. There is now a slogan, a melody, a raw building block of art living in his brain that he doesn’t own and can’t use.

289

The evolution of copyright law has effectively stunted the development of sampling, thereby protecting the creative property of artists but obstructing the natural evolution of human creativity, which has always possessed cannibalistic tendencies. With copyright laws making the sampling of popular music virtually impossible, a new technique has evolved in which recordings are made that mimic the recordings that the artists would like to sample. These mimic recordings—not nearly as satisfying as sampling the original record—are then sampled and looped in the same way that the original would have been. We don’t want a mimic of a piece of music, though; we want the actual piece of music presented through a new lens. Replication isn’t reproduction. The copy transcends the original. The original is nothing but a collection of previous cultural movements. All of culture is an appropriation game.

290

People are always talking about originality, but what do they mean? As soon as we are born, the world begins to work upon us, and this goes on to the end. What can we call our own except energy, strength, and will? If I could give an account of all that I owe to great predecessors and contemporaries, there would be but a small balance in my favor.

291

A great man quotes bravely and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good. What he quotes, he fills with his own voice and humor, and the whole cyclopedia of his table talk is presently believed to be his own.

292

Mixtapes are used—as they’ve traditionally been used—to advertise and promote a new record, but they’re also becoming a forum for illegal music: music that has uncleared samples and thus can’t be released through proper channels. Much more than a collection of songs, mixtapes have a host who introduces the programs and talks in between songs as if the listener were at a live show. A DJ selects the music and mixes many different songs together into new pieces. Many times the singers from the selected songs will customize the song and add new twists unique to that particular mixtape. The new vocals are often extremely self-reflexive, mentioning the mixtape itself and how it was made. In the majority of mixtapes I’ve heard, the original songs are re-presented in unique new ways, but record labels then bust their own promotional operatives. Which is similar, in a sense, to the situation regarding file sharing: the companies complaining about downloading (e.g., Sony) are the same companies making the machines that do the downloading. Instead of prosecuting people who have an interest in their product, these companies could try to figure out how to use this consumer interest to their advantage. Mass-media producers are wasting their time trying to hold the dam together, but it broke several years ago. The technology to duplicate, copy, and sample mass-produced media isn’t going away. What do we do with “outlaw” works of art? If I’m burning copies of Titanic and selling them as sup-posedly real copies of the movie, that seems illegal, but if I use elements of Titanic in a Tarnation-style film, that doesn’t seem wrong to me. I think it should be a question of intent. However, both cases are wrong in the eyes of the law.

293

Chris Moukarbel, who was sued by Paramount Pictures over a twelve-minute video based on a bootleg Oliver Stone film script about 9/11, had another video in a New York gallery exhibition that sought to marry politics and art. This one was created from film shot in the process of making the video that led to the lawsuit. Paramount filed suit in United States District Court in Washington, saying that Mr. Moukarbel’s original video, World Trade Center 2006, infringed on the copyright of the screenplay for Mr. Stone’s $60 million film World Trade Center. “I’m interested in memorial and the way Hollywood represents historical events,” Mr. Moukarbel said in an interview a month before the Paramount movie was released. “Through their access and budget, they’re able to affect a lot of people’s ideas about an event and also affect policy. I was deliberately using their script and preempting their release to make a statement about power.”

294

The progress of artistic growth in many media is being hindered, like those poor pine trees in alpine zones able to grow only a few weeks each year. For writers and artists who came of age amid mountains and mountains of cultural artifacts and debris: all of this is part of their lives, but much of it is offlimits for artistic expression because someone “owns” it.

295

Shepard Fairey, borrowing liberally from traditions of urban art and the propaganda poster, took an image off Google and transformed it into a major icon of the 2008 campaign. The image (Obama, atop the word HOPE, looking skyward and awash in red, white, and blue) condensed the feeling of the Obama campaign into a single visual statement. It wasn’t until after the election that the Associated Press realized that it owned the copyright to one of the photos from which Fairey worked. Mannie Garcia, the photographer who took the photo, had no idea it was his work until it was pointed out to him. He later claimed that it was he who actually owned the copyright. This didn’t stop the Associated Press from demanding a large sum of money in “damages” for the now famous photo, which—until very recently—it didn’t know it had and in fact may not own the copyright to. In 2009, backed by Stanford University’s Fair Use Project, Fairey countersued the AP. When Fairey later acknowledged that he had lied about which image he’d used as the basis for his poster, Fairey’s attorneys withdrew from the case. Lawrence Lessig, the director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard, who had been advising Fairey but not representing him, said that the significant issue in fair-use cases is whether the image has been transformed from the original; if it has been “fundamentally transformed,” he said, it is protected by copyright law.

296

Most of the passages in this book are taken from other sources. Nearly every passage I’ve clipped I’ve also revised, at least a little—for the sake of compression, consistency, or whim. You mix and scratch the shit up to the level your own head is at . . .

297

You’ll notice that he doesn’t assert ownership over his ideas. He’s in some kind of Artaudian condition where all the ideas are unoriginated and unsourced; that’s how he can claim anybody else’s ideas as his own. Really all he wants to do is acquire everyone’s inner life.

298

Stolen property is the soul. Take them out of this book, for instance—you might as well take the book along with them; one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it. Restore them to the writer: he steps forth like a bridegroom.

299

He dedicated his scruples and his sleepless nights to repeating an already extant book in an alien tongue.

300

The recombinant (the bootleg, the remix, the mash-up) has become the characteristic pivot at the turn of our two centuries. We live at a peculiar juncture, one in which the CD (an object) and the recombinant (a process) still, however briefly, coexist. There seems little doubt, though, as to the direction things are going. The recombinant is manifest in forms as diverse as Alan Moore’s graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, machinima generated with game engines (Quake, Halo, World of Warcraft), Dean Scream remixes, genre-warping fan fiction from the universes of Star Trek or Buffy, the JarJar-less Phantom Edit, brand-hybrid athletic shoes, and Japanese collectibles rescued from anonymity by custom paint jobs. We seldom legislate new technologies into being. They emerge, and we plunge with them into whatever vortices of changes they generate. We legislate after the fact, in a perpetual game of catch-up, as best we can, while our new technologies redefine us—as surely and perhaps as terribly as we’ve been redefined by broadcast television.

Excerpted from Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, (Knopf, 2010)

- David Shields‘s most recent book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, (Knopf, 2008), was a New York Times bestseller. He is the author of eight previous books, including Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney’s, and Utne Reader; he’s written reviews for the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Boston Globe, and Philadelphia Inquirer.

Shields has received a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is a professor in the English department at the University of Washington. Since 1996 he has also been a member of the faculty in Warren Wilson College’s low-residency MFA Program for Writers, in Asheville, North Carolina. His work has been translated into ten languages.

Citations:

259 Emerson

260 Commonly attributed to Eliot; put together two statements, one by Eliot and one by Picasso, and you pretty much have it.

261 Picasso

264 Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, Rhythm Science

265 Lloyd Bradley, Bass Culture

266 Lee Perry, quoted in Bradley, This Is Reggae Music

271 Peter Mountford, “Alistair Wright,” unpublished manuscript

273 Jean-Luc Godard, in Cahiers du Cinéma, 1960–1968, vol. 2, ed. Jim Hillier

274 Wikipedia entry on Sturtevant

280 Emerson

287 Brian Goedde, “Fake Fan,” Experience Music Project Annual Pop Music

Conference

288 Lethem

289 Last sentence: Ralph Ellison, Collected Essays

290 Goethe

291 Emerson

293 Felicia R. Lee, “An Artist Releases a New Film After Paramount Blocks His First,” New York Times

295 Last sentence: Liz Robbins, “Artist Admits Using Other Photo for ‘Hope’ Poster,” New York Times

297 Charles Baxter, The Soul Thief

298 Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

299 Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”

300 Gibson

Gilgamesh: The Videogame Review

[Warning: May Contain Spoilers]

About midway through Gilgamesh: Ishtar’s Scorn™ — newly released for PC, Playstation® 3, and X-Box® 360 — Gilgamesh falls asleep and wakes to his sidekick, Enkidu, sprinkling a “magic circle of flour” around him.

“What the f*** is a magic circle of flour?” you ask.

It’s a good question.  No one knows.

But an even better question is why the people at LitReal® Studios refuse to accept that characters like Gilgamesh and Enkidu — or Ishmael and Queequeg from their last flop, The White Whale™ — simply cannot compete with gems like Halo® 3.

——

Gilgamesh follows the story of the world’s oldest book.  The title character is king of a place called Uruk, which was apparently somewhere in the Middle East. The first level is a long tutorial in which you get acquainted with your kingdom.  Some guy who looks like a lemur comes up and explains that you can do anything here, anything.  And, I admit, for a while it is kind of fun to visit Ishtar’s temple for orgies with the high priestesses.  But pretty soon getting passed between women like a baton gets old and there’s nothing left to do but knock over the toothless old peasants who are always shuffling down the middle of the street or to claim first rights to a young bride on her wedding night.

But just as you get the idea that anything goes in this level — and I mean if you and that mongoloid Enkidu want to dig a big hole and set up a subterranean bloodcult, go ahead — there is a cut scene: the old people you knocked over are praying you will become a more just ruler.

Oh, snap!

Just to see what would happen, I restarted the game and intentionally didn’t abuse anyone.  I strolled around talking to people and buying their handi-crap.  My “payment”: a leper invited me to some kind of bocce ball tournament and a young retarded girl cornered me in Ishtar’s temple to present me with a bracelet she’d weaved from her own hair.

——

Level 8: The Search for Immortality begins when Enkidu gets Hantavirus or something and dies (where was his “magic circle of flour?”).  Gilgamesh assumes his friend’s death is punishment from the gods because they “flayed the buttocks” of The Bull of Heaven back in Level 5.  Gilgamesh feels guilty and wonders if he’ll die someday too.  So what is his answer to all this?  He runs off into the woods where he eats roots and wears a loincloth with a lion face for the crotch.  Then one day he up and decides to find real answers and sets out to meet this immortal Iraqi named Upnapishtim (you’d have to live forever to learn how to say that name).

So you take a casual thousand-mile stroll toward the seashore in order to find the boatman to take you across to meet this guy.  You finally get to the beach and of course you’re so bored that, when you spy all these giant freaks made out of rock, you can’t help but chase them around and beat them to death with their own hands.   But as soon as you’ve thrown all their carcasses in the ocean the boatman comes over and fills you in on a little secret: you just killed his oarsmen, the very ones who were going to get you across the ocean.

Double snap!

The boatman gives you a long, drawn-out lecture about how to be just and honorable and yap-yap-yap, but, just like your parents always did, he ends up helping anyway.

If you can call this help.

Your new task is to backtrack to the woods, the same woods you just came through, where you now have to cut down thirty trees to make thirty poles of a certain length.  And I mean one at a time.  With a dull stone hatchet (which is oddly reminiscent of a level from another LitReal® sh**show, Inferno™).

Eventually the two of you set sail. Things go well for about a minute.  The ocean is wide.  The sky is full of albatrosses (but Alka Seltzer® hasn’t been invented yet).  The sea is brimming with weird stuff you can’t quite make out, which makes you lean in for a closer look only to see your own reflection distorted in the roiling shadows, which causes you to whip the controller around by its chord and crack it against the screen because, come on, using the monitor as a mirror is the most hackneyed trick in the book.  But, by and by, it gets worse, and you come to a place called “The Waters of Death” where the wind completely stops and so does the boat.

Luckily, you made all those wood poles!

If you touch a drop of the water, you die.  So to get across, you have to lower a pole into the water, shove off the bottom with the pole, drop said pole, and repeat until you run out of poles.  But I hope you listened to the boatman’s directions about the poles back in the woods, because if one pole is one inch too short, you won’t make it across.  You’ll both just sit there in the boat until you die of thirst.  Or else reset the console.

——

If gamers weren’t habituated to constant improvements in graphic technology, some of this game’s details might be a saving grace.  A less accomplished gamer might have been wowed by the roiling graphics warping your appearance in the Waters of Death.  Or by the monster Humbaba’s seven-layered face.  Or by the fact that, the longer Gilgamesh stays in the “Garden of the Gods,” the more physically difficult it becomes to leave.  Or by the way his steps become so light that, if you aren’t paying attention, you just drift way up into the clouds, turn to a speck, and disappear.

But two seconds of actual content will always be erased from memory by three hours of floating around the ocean with your thumb up your butt.

In fact, it takes so long to finish this game and the conclusion is so pointless that I’m going to break my once solemn oath as a gaming critic and just tell you the ending:

When I met Upnapishtim, the immortal Iraqi, he said I had to stay awake for seven days to prove I was worthy of learning the secret of immortality.  Great, I thought.  Hit me up.  Make this worth my f***ing while.  But the second you sit down, you fall asleep.  I mean, literally, it’s so boring that you fall asleep.  And, if your experience is anything like mine, when you wake up there will be seven loaves of baked bread in a circle around you.  All discombobulated, you’re like, “Who knows how to make bread around here?” That smug immortal son-of-a-b**** just shrugs his shoulders and sends you back to the first level while you’re still screaming at the TV: “No wonder we bombed Iraq!  I’m serious!  Where’d all this bread come from?! I hate bread!!  Are you spying on me, Casey[1]!? Linda[2]?! Ned, Wendell, Pac Man[3]?! Who’s out there?!! Anybody?!! Is this part of the game?!!! Show yourself!!! Tell me what this is all supposed to mean!!!!”

——

Back in Uruk, it was like nothing ever happened.  Sure, my butt buddy Enkidu was dead, my thumbs were tired, I had a big drool stain shaped like Ishtar’s temple on the chest of my t-shirt, and the buildings seemed a little more golden, but things weren’t substantially different: the temples, the markets, the clouds, the people.  Five thousand years of retelling this same old crap but, at the end of the game, there are the same number of praying old coots and slutty little priestesses.  They say everything changes but apparently nothing does.  Anyway, I was so sick of it that I didn’t bother to crash the huge wedding party that was taking place right outside my palace gate.  The bony little bride was watching me out the corner of her one good eye, but I didn’t even stop to rape her.  I just went inside, put my feet up on the hearth, and watched the fire burn.

[1] My ex-housemate and my ex-girlfriend’s big brother.

[2] My ex-girlfriend.  I don’t know why she might have come back, but…maybe?

[3] Some guys I used to spend a lot of time with who might find it fun to torture me.

- Shane Castle is a hobby farmer, novelist, technical writer, and adjunct English professor in Helena, Montana. His story “Business Profile: The Inferno” can be read on McSweeney’s website beginning sometime in February 2010 and a short biography of the letter R, titled “R”, will appear on Fiction at Work on March 3, 2010. He is currently seeking representation for his literary adventure novel, Firestone.

On The Vanguard

All fiction was about the same thing to Frank Wilder: the crime of his never having been published. Once a reader advanced beyond the great divide of 1945 to enter the furious stew of the modern moment, any novel, Frank felt, was fair game to be scorned. He thought often on the direction of American Literature in the last half century, the opposing poles represented by Mailer and Salinger; the slow death of the important American novel through the 70s and early 80s, culminating in the election of Ronald Reagan as president and, across the Atlantic, the ascendancy of Martin Amis; the recognition of the Academy Awards Ceremony in Los Angeles as a forum of the greatest artistic seriousness; the recent onslaught of poseurs with their image-driven facsimiles of literary gravity, all of whom Frank took the liberty of referring to as “that guy,” regardless of gender: Kerouac (too vacuous), Percy (too Christian), Capote (too jaded), Pynchon (too cartoony), Wolfe (too bombastic), Updike (too flighty), DeLillo (too male), Roth (too Roth), Morrison (too praised), McInerney (too clipped), Rushdie (too shallow), Coover (too madcap), Oates (too morbid), Wideman (too fevered), Moody (too threadbare), Moore (too much), Franzen (too withering), Homes (too demented), Lethem (too ridiculous), Hempel (too elusive), Johnson (too tangled), Munro (too perfect), Chabon (too indulgent), Lahiri (too successful); the list went on—not one of them like him, not one of them just so. On more gracious days he could admit to the merit of a global contemporary like Arundhati Roy for having written one good novel, and then quit—and, when inclined to reach further back into the past, Fyodor Dostoevsky, for the sheer breadth of his comedy and rage. In the end, Frank’s unsteady feelings before a fictive page amounted to one certainty: there had to be a place for him.

“A writer of considerable talent”: the words that had brought Frank to Brooklyn. It seemed like decades ago that someone, a high school teacher, inscribed them on a story he had written, and only Frank had not forgotten. He took the praise to heart, held it there and, upon graduating from college, moved with his girlfriend to Park Slope.

In the back of their narrow studio, across the open entrance to the kitchen, hung a tattered American flag a Republican uncle had given him when he turned nine. The flag had touched the ground many times since the days when he raised it at his father’s behest—up the fifteen-foot pole next to the pool in the backyard that rang out when the rope snapped against it. The colors on the flag were faded, but, aesthetically, it pleased him. With the lights in the kitchen on, and those in the foyer out, red and blue prisms fell across the weathered couch and framed photographs on the wall.

Sometimes, Frank reclined on the couch alone in his favorite trousers, slate grey and orange plaid, with forest green suspenders, frayed and faded from nearly a century’s wear. The attire had belonged to Frank’s grandfather, Irving Wilder, himself once an aspiring novelist. Other times Frank shared the couch with Lena, his girlfriend—also his best reader—and admired the aleatoric way that the flag’s color scheme embraced her angular bangs.

Their Park Slope apartment was located in the southern outskirts of the neighborhood. Frank bought a queen-sized mattress and scarlet sheeting and laid it right on the floor. Outside, men and women in seemingly identical striped, sleeveless shirts pressed down the block. From a window, Frank watched them go by. It was what he did instead of smoking cigarettes. An Off Track Betting depot around the corner attracted low-talking clusters of wishful thinkers. Cats peeked out from under the chassis of parked cars.

“My boss is the plague in human form,” Lena said one day over lunch, at a sidewalk café, “She’s like the human dating virus. Literally everyday, the woman has a new adventure to embarrass herself with. It’s just so—ugh. Incessant. She doesn’t know how to stop! She can’t!”

Lena worked as an editorial assistant at a widely purchased fashion mag; she harbored serious respect for ripening trends. Her boss and her father were two favorite topics of conversation. Seeing Frank chafe under the weight of his modestly paying job, a visible discomfort in letting her settle the bill, she often mentioned her father.

In the mornings, she began more and more frequently to allude to the pigeons outside on their kitchen windowsill. They clustered there and cooed, as light emerged on the earth from some unseen source. Frank could hear them as he turned again to face his Santa-beard of shaving cream in the bathroom mirror. His expression was serious.

During the week Frank earned pay as the guy at the information desk of the local branch of Burns & Porter, a corporate super-bookstore whose name possessed such currency in the modern era that to invent a fictional alternative for it seemed hysterically futile. In the stories Frank wrote about someone working for Burns & Porter, the store was always Burns & Porter, never something else. Both in his stories and real-life, people arrived after having seen mention of a particular novel’s title on daytime TV and ordered one or two of those to go, maybe grabbing the famous face magazine Lena worked for off the rack while waiting in line for check-out. Modern fiction gone bad, image reigning supreme, nobody knew anything anymore, thought Frank, coolly returning the look of another customer whose unconscious gaze had affixed on his vintage suspenders.

Work, such as it was at Burns & Porter, consisted mainly of learning to obey managers and the older hands. Another important facet of the job was feigning solicitousness toward every sort of idiot customer. It drove Frank nearly mad; on the page his characters courted ever deepening darkness.

**

This morning they are at the breakfast table that Lena insisted be placed in one corner of the narrow kitchen. Granola crunches between Frank’s teeth, the slices of banana soft and sweet on his tongue. Before breakfasting with Lena, Frank had never been a guy to include banana in his breakfast bowl. Seemed somehow too dainty. But with her around, things are different.

Lena is peering at him, or maybe past him, toward the grated window immediately behind him. She flutters the open section of the Sunday Times, then closes it, letting it rest atop the others in her lap. She takes a two-handed sip from her coffee mug, lowering her head to its steaming mouth.

Then she looks at Frank and asks, “Do you love me?”

Frank sets the spoon back in his breakfast bowl. Her eyes hold his for a moment, desperate with the question, then she seems to recede into herself, gone vague in some interior space.

Frank imagines how he will describe her in the novel he is writing; how her type will become the type that all the young seekers emulate; how his novel will be a smash, resurrecting the pursuit of serious fiction across the nation, undoing years of shame and neglect; how the two of them will jump together into a fountain, like Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald; how they will, in this manner, alter history’s irrevocable course; and how, finally, as figments on a page, be granted life eternal.

What Frank says to her now should resonate. He pictures the day awaiting him—the hours in the information booth, followed by a solitary lunch, then the evening before his keyboard, where he will catapult himself once more into empty space, beating back all doubt to bring home the future lives that he and Lena must share.

“Love is funny,” he listens to himself say, “Isn’t it? Just what two people make out of nothing.”

From the sill the pigeons coo.

- Jeff Price is a freelance writer and editor.

The Shiksa

I’m in love with a shiksa—she’s right over there against the subway doors reading The Book Review—and there’s something between us. And I mean that in the worst way possible. You see I am in love with a shiksa who keeps getting farther and farther away from me. And it’s killing me! I mean it; I’m dying, I can’t breathe. You see there’s this thing between us and it keeps getting bigger and bigger. It’s not what you think. What I mean is, every time I watch her move the bangs from her eyes, or scratch her forearm, or shift her weight from the right foot to the left foot, the space between us grows a little bit larger. Well, to be perfectly honest it’s not the space that grows. Just look at me and you’ll get it; it’s my nose! Every time I so much as glance at the beautiful shiksa-love from my dreams, my already remarkable schnoz grows another five centimeters. I mean it! Mount Zion is growing out of the front of my face! I have to stand ten feet away from this pole before I have anything to hold on to.

Oh, how her brow furrows. I think she’s beginning to notice me. She cares not for looks. A prodigious nose is a handsome nose, she thinks. So accepting of human flaws, yet so perfect! My god, mein Gott!

“My gut,” she coughs. She speaks! But is it just me or does she look a bit pained? And maybe even a bit purple?

“You’re suffocating me,” she manages to sputter. Am I moving too fast? We’re in love for thirty seconds and already she needs her space! She points to her stomach.

“Your nose,” she says, “is poking me in the gut.”

- Molly Auerbach works as an Editorial Assistant for Electric Literature. She is also the bassist and band manager for art-prog sensation, Thrillington.

Tim Barrus: I Hear Voices


His real name was Serge.

He used the name Francois when he was doing sex work. He was all over the Internet.

He was pretty but he wasn’t that good a fuck. Junkies never are. They want to get high. Not have sex. Sex is what Serge did for money.

He wanted into Cinematheque. He was a talented artist but I didn’t think he could turn his life around.

“There are too many twelve-year-olds,” I tried explaining. “I just don’t think I could expose them to an addict as committed to heroin as you are.”

We negotiated. Negotiating is what junkies do.

I would let him into Cinematheque’s art program but he had to clean up his act. He went into a treatment center and he tried. I know he tried. I know it was hard. But I had to be hard, too.
I had never kicked anyone out of the program.

In fact, I wasn’t the one who kicked Serge out. The other boys did it themselves. I was amazed at how angry they were with him.

We were in Amsterdam then. He relapsed. It happens.

Eavan was the first one who came to me. Eavan is a junkie himself. They don’t have HIV for nothing.

The propaganda rhetoric calls them boys at risk. “Serge is using.”

My eyes to the sky.

“I will talk to him,” I said.

“You better do more than talk to him.” Eavan walked away.

“Don’t walk away from me, Eavan.” But he kept on going. And the New York Writing Remoras think they’re arrogant. They haven’t met Eavan. They might someday though.

Now, Eavan was writing, and had stayed away from junk.

I was going to have to wade into it. I try to stay out of all their convoluted stuff. It is not always possible.

I knew Serge was close to Remy. But I did not want to know much more than that. Remy is young. But Remy is old in ways that defy sanity itself.

“We’re lovers,” Remy tells me. Remy is defiant. It’s just his way.

The Amsterdam loft was becoming complicated. Paris had been.

There is only one reason Serge would be sleeping with Remy. Remy’s family has money.

‘Remy, are you bankrolling Serge.”

He bites his lower lip.

Shit.

“Il a un fusil.”

“What kind of gun.”

“Silver.”

Remy knows nothing about guns.

Probably a revolver. A relapsed heroin addict with a gun. Just what I needed.

Serge was gone a lot. Amsterdam beckoned. I wondered if he’d been doing tricks. An adolescent with HIV as a prostitute. None of this was good. I had worked so hard with this boy. He was in his room asleep.

I crawled into his bed.

You are thinking sex. Yes, you are.

I crawled into his bed with my clothes on. I crawled into his bed because I wanted his attention. It had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with a failure that has haunted me for over a year, now.
He was not surprised that I was in bed with him. I knew him to his core.

“Tim…”

“It’s three in the afternoon, Serge. You need to get up.” His room was a wreck. His works and his gun were in the bed with us.

He wasn’t hiding anything.

“Get up. We’re going for a ride.”

“I want to sleep.”

I pulled him out of bed by his hair. He didn’t weigh that much. Food just doesn’t interest junkies. I pushed him up against the wall. I hit him in the face with my fist. Several times. His lip was bleeding and his eye was going to swell.

He was naked.

He just took it. “What the fuck, Tim.”

“Get dressed. You’re coming with me.”

There is a beach in Wilhelmshaven. The drive there is nothing.

I needed to walk on a beach. The sea was cold and mean.

He was having trouble keeping up. “Tim, I can’t walk as fast as you!” He screamed. I left him there.
In the cold. Getting back would be his problem.

That night, they kicked him out. They took a vote. It was a done deal.

I just sat there with my head in my hands. I knew what this was going to mean. I knew.

I do not think the twelve-year-olds had any sort of awareness about what kicking Serge out was going to come to. Or mean. How could they. But he scared them and this was their chance to get rid of it.
“Are you sure,” I asked them. They were resolute. Even Remy.

He didn’t fight it. He just left. We heard he was back to his usual tricking in the Pigalle. The red light district of Paris was not unknown to them.

A few days later, Eavan is in my room. He had been on the Internet. “Serge has blown his head off.”

That was all.

You have them when you have them. You can’t save them all.

Bullshit. I want to save all of them.

The train ride to Paris and the funeral is one of those memories I only have in fragments. It was my fault. I could have talked them into letting him stay but I did not do it.

My head was coming off.

Eavan put his arm around my shoulders. “Just sleep.”

We arrived in Paris and I could not go on another foot.

“We were all he had.”

“They don’t need you to bury him, Tim.”

We took the train back to Amsterdam.

All the way back to Amsterdam, I kept hearing him scream at me. “Tim, I can’t walk as fast as you can!”
Set at naught. Defiance speaks to me. It always has. I fail all the time with them. The wolves are always at the door. The voices are articulate and come from oblivion as if pulled by horses. No, you can’t keep up with me. Egress is just a man and a boy upon this beach and you have drained me of redemption. Go to hell.

I am hearing voices.

- Tim Barrus is the author of six books and has written for the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, the Columbia Journalism Review, American Baby, Advocate Men, Men on Men, New American Library, Houghton Mifflin, Random House, Gay Sunshine Press, Knights Press, Bay Windows, Desmodus Publications, and Hustler magazine.

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