This has been another month straight out of the Twilight Zone. Each day is another train car passing the station, a bevy of silhouetted passengers under florescent lights speeding by. I’ve lost track of days and dates. Spring has become a tantalizing Red Delicious apple with a worm burrowed inside. I’m reminded of my heart mishap where I was out of commission for seven weeks. I was in stasis while the world continued to spin around me. It was as if I were standing at the bottom of an escalator, reluctant to catch the right step emerging out of the floor. And this time the escalator is just stopped. I haven’t been standing there, however. This has been quite the busy month.
1. Persuader (Jack Reacher #7) by Lee Child:
Jack Reacher books are a guilty pleasure for me. Beach reads for guys I
guess you could call them. Child might not be Hemingway or McCullers but he
does put words together in a compelling and graceful way. And I’ve talked about
the character, Jack Reacher, enough times in previous posts that you know how I
feel about him. He’s basically an American superhero sans the cape and the
armor. He’s like David Banner in the old television Hulk series, with never a need to transform into the bulky green alter
ego. This novel has our hero going undercover to flush out an ex Army Intelligence
officer who was responsible for the deaths of two of Reacher’s prior
associates. This is the second Reacher novel in which the perspective is told
in the first person, so we all go along for the ride inside Reacher’s head. And
man, what a ride.
2. Splinter Cell: Conviction on PC: If you were
to miss playing through Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell series it would be
mighty remiss of you. I remember 2003 when the first game came out, the
lighting effects blowing me away. Sam Fisher, the agent superstar of the series
never seems to age, but he sure has gotten meaner. There’s not much stealth in
this one, and there’s no knocking out the bad guys. Shoot, even to
“interrogate” someone involves slamming their heads against porcelain restroom
sinks and knocking teeth out. Fisher is on a vendetta to put the hurt on the
guys who have kidnapped a family member. I’m “borrowing” this from my own
review of the game on Steam, but I've played every Splinter
Cell game from this one back, and I have to admit this one is
probably the most violent and frenetic one I’ve played. Michael Ironside
returns as the voice of Fisher, which seems to be a role he was born to be cast
in. The visual style of the game is superb, especially the in-game GUI which
highlights mission objectives. There is a welcome desaturation of the screen to
signify when Fisher can't be seen by patrolling guards and security cameras.
Speaking of guards, the guards in this game say things that had me laughing out
loud, the threats they call out to Fisher, whom they know is hiding in the
shadows but can't locate him. I haven't found guards so hilarious since Fox
Interactive's delightful No One Lives Forever and that game
was trying to be funny.
3. Aerosmith Get Your Wings on CD: My guitar mentor , Michael Stevens, taught me “Train Kept A
Rollin’” which is one of the coolest songs I’ve ever heard in my five decades
of rock music listening. The original song hatched by The Yardbirds (pun
intended) was pretty darn good, but I have to admit the Aerosmith version
sounds much better in my opinion. Joe Perry has always exuded a flair all his
own (of course, as did Jimmy Page). I’m drawn to Perry simply because he’s a
lefty who learned to play right handed. It’s kind of a sad story. His parents
bought him his first acoustic guitar as a kid. The guitar came with an
instructional 45rpm record. The instructor on the record explained the plectrum
should be held in the right hand, so Perry doing as he was told followed suit.
When he learned to play that way he never changed. This album, their second,
bleeds their original sound, much like their eponymous first album. It spawned
three singles, but none of them hit the singles charts. As it turns out, this pointed out by my music
maven brother, Robert Burton, the song “Train Kept A Rollin’” has some
interesting history to it. Get Your Wings
album producer, Jack Douglas wanted to mesh some live recording with the
studio song. The famous session guitarist, Steve Hunter (from Decatur, IL) was
in another studio at the recording center. Douglas asked him to supply a solo
for the song. Hunter obliged by playing the dastardly good beginning solo in
the song. It’s meshed together so nicely I couldn’t tell it wasn’t Joe Perry
slinging both solos out. 4. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman on Kindle: This had been on my GoodReads.com To Read list for ages. And being typical of me to read two books (sometimes more) at the same time, one a physical print book and the other being electronically on my Kindle, I thought a nice long fantasy during these crazy days would be apt. The novel concerns a young businessman named Richard Mayhew, a guy heavily involved in his work and his engagement to a girl he considers out of his league. All of this changes when he is inadvertently whisked away to an alternate version of London, a parallel city that resides below the traditional London, a city that has fallen through the cracks. Gaiman’s mystical city beneath the city, intertwined by the sewer systems of above ground London is reminiscent of a bleak nightmare Charles Dickens would have put on paper about the back alleys and byways of his own Victorian era London. I’m not that far into the story, but what I like about Richard Mayhew is how reluctant he is to be an adventurer. This isn’t a guy sitting down to play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons with his mates, or fire up the computer for a bout of Baldur’s Gate. This is a guy who’s living a nightmare and just wants things to return to normal.
5. Vangelis Soil Festivities on CD: This was released in 1984 by Vangelis simply because “he wanted to make music, not sell a million albums.” Vangelis states it’s a concept album giving a soundtrack to the nature at our feet, the life processes taking place on the Earth surface. The songs on the album are titled, “Movements” and begins with the comforting sound of a rainstorm, which signals nurturing of life on the planet. The music continues, growing ominously dark, perhaps signifying the struggle for survival. This is a great ambient album perfect for sleeping or reading or writing (I’m listening to it as I write this.) I will never understand the connection, but Vangelis just has a way of connecting to my very soul when it comes to music.
6. Sid Meier’s Pirates! on PC: For all my gaming buddies, Sid Meier, needs no introduction. For the rest of you, he’s considered a gaming god. Anything he creates on the gaming front is lauded as exhibit A in many a divorce court. I’ve always been a fan of his Railroad games, but before those he created a little gem called Pirates! This game is a complete remastering of the original 1987 game. Firing up the game and creating a pirate you can swear allegiance to Spain, France, Holland or England and steal treasures for your country, harassing each country’s foes. Or you can simply become a pirate and terrorize them all. Or you can make it your vendetta to cash in on the bounty of every pirate in the game. The game covers a lot of ground: overrunning fort settlements, participating in ballroom dances with esteemed governor’s daughters in hopes she’ll give you information such as where bounties are hiding or a piece of a hidden treasure map. You battle other pirate fleets and victoriously take their ships and their cargoes, cashing them in for yourself. Occurring aroung the Caribbean and the Florida keys, all that’s missing is the smell of sunscreen and a Pina Coloda.
7. Company of Heroes on PC: I’ve mentioned it before. This is one of my castaway tropical island games. I’ve played the game extensively since it came out in 2006. I introduced a friend of mine from work to the game. And to my chagrin, we played five games straight and he slaughtered me all five games. Should I even be admitting this to anybody? Despite my tragic losses, this is one RTS I still have fun with even when I lose. The game’s sound design won all kinds of crazy awards when it was released. The first time you hear the grinding squeaky sounds of a German King Tiger tank, lumbering into your base like some prehistoric monster, or the eruption and landfall of American artillery, you’ll understand why it got those awards. The game is fourteen years old, and if you log on right now there are always people to play with. That is a lot to be said for this venerable real time strategy game.
8. Mad Max: Fury Road on Blu Ray: This makes the third time I’ve watched this movie. The first two times I watched it I remember thinking it was one of the best action movies I’d ever seen. But now I doubt I’ll watch it again. I don’t know if I’m just Mad Maxed out or if I noticed certain stand out things this time I’d not noticed before. In movies as of late there seems to be a Hollywood agenda to push feminism. Women should have the same opportunities as men. I just don’t like the push. It’s odd that I didn’t notice it in the movie before, but it’s actually Mad Max as the secondary character to Charlize Theron’s “Furiousa.” The actual plot of the movie is a feminist revolt. At its essence the movie is one long vehicle chase. But it’s the style of the movie that does it for me. The whole movie has an American western flair to it. There is even tribute paid to Chuck Jones and his wonderful Roadrunner cartoons. It’s been called one of the greatest action movies ever. I made that call and for once I wasn’t wrong.
9. Assassin’s Creed on PC: I’d been putting playing this game off for a very long time. I’d heard the terrible stories of how wonky the controls were, and they were right. I’m using an Xbox controller, and it’s still tedious. I remember the game looking gorgeous when it released and it still doesn’t look bad. The sweeping vistas of Jerusalem are nothing short of breathtaking. The game concerns a young man who discovers, actually, it is discovered for him that he is the descendent of an assassin who lived during the Renaissance Era. The ancestral assassin seriously shook up the world of the Templars. And now you are being coerced into being transported through time via a weird DNA strand/time continuum thingie to finish what your ancestor started. Yes, it’s hokey, but it sets up the premise of the game. What I really want to do is play all of the cooler newer games in the series, but me, being that purist that I am, have to muddle through this one first.
10. Van Halen Fair Warning on CD: When I was in high school I worshiped Van Halen. I loved their first two albums and when their third album, Women and Children First came out, I enjoyed the ride, settling into the groove of knowing Van Halen was my favorite rock band. When Fair Warning came out in the spring of my senior year it seemed a departure from their previous albums, but I was okay with that. I would soon graduate and leave for the Navy. In a way it was exciting to see Van Halen go through this change; I felt I could personally relate. I gave the album a thorough listen this month for the first time since probably 1981. Yes, it had been that long. Esquire magazine stated Fair Warning is an album every man should own. There are some remarkable songs on it, my two favorites being, “Unchained,” and “Hear About it Later.” Both of these are the band at their best, but the remaining songs, despite Eddie’s usual guitar prowess, seems to me as if David Lee Roth is trying just a little too hard. What seemed effortless on the band’s first three albums, seemed almost laborious when it came to Roth’s vocals. Not surprisingly, I became more disinterested with the band with each successive album after.
11. Black Hawk Down on 4K Blu Ray: This is probably the fourth time I’ve seen this movie. It’s a movie I’ve always been excited about ever since reading Mark Bowden’s Pulitzer Prize winning Black Hawk Down and playing the Novalogic game of the same title that came out in 2003. What usually happens on a repeated viewing of a movie is the detection of details I had missed in previous viewings. This time was no exception. I didn’t realize much of the mission-turned-into-disaster included a fierce rivalry between the US Army’s Airborne Rangers and Delta Force operatives. Another interesting note, this was Tom Hardy’s first onscreen presence. The 4K treatment is a noticeable improvement over Blu Ray. I’ve said it before, but this movie illustrates modern day Middle Eastern type CQB as good as any movie of its type I’ve seen.
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