Matthew Simmons
Matthew Simmons lives in Seattle.
Chaser 2, a game review
One of the things I’m noticing lately is that I’m, I think not just a little sick, but completely sick of narrative video games. Or at least I am sick of games that have big, ambitious narratives.
Because I’m sick of big, ambitious narrative video games, I’ve found myself playing discrete-narrative, gameplay-centric little indie games. And old games.
So that’s why I’ve been thinking about Chaser 2 again. READ MORE >
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December 12th, 2013 / 10:00 am
December 12th, 2013 / 10:00 am
I like Marcus Kelly a lot
In my last post, I mentioned that I wanted to write a little bit about the actor and singer Marcus “Marky” Kelly, who had minor-but I think significant-career in show business from the late 1950s through the 1960s. The highlight of it all was, of course, his teen idolhood in the early 1960s. I had assumed Kelly was gone for good, and quite possibly dead, until I discovered a movie called Filtered Water (director unknown, writer unknown, producer unknown, actors unknown) in my mailbox a few months ago. The movie featured an old actor who I think might be Kelly.
But let me make it clear: I am not 100% sure that the old actor in Filtered Water is Kelly. There are, however, clues. There is a physiognomic similarity-Kelly had bright blue eyes, and a signature half-smile. The actor in the film has bright blue eyes, and a familiar half-smile. There is the timeline-Kelly was born in 1940, and the actor appears to be in his 70s. (And I know this because my folks are in their 70s, and if I look at an old picture of my Dad and a new one, old pictures of Kelly and a screenshot of the actor look to have an uncannily similar progression. The same wrinkles, the same advancing tenderness to the eyes, the same added colors in the complexion. If its him, he’s aged like my dad has aged.) And there is the voice. The actor’s voice sounds like what Kelly’s voice would sound like if it fell apart and was rebuilt. Like a voice does when we age. READ MORE >
My Top Five Films of 2013
Center Rest
(Dir. Antonio Johns)
I saw this on a train. I was traveling from Seattle to Portland by train, and the person sitting next to me asked me if I wanted to watch a movie with him. READ MORE >
Thanksgiving Morning, 2013
We had some plans but an unexpected medical procedure canceled those plans. READ MORE >
SAY, CUT, MAP by Ken Baumann
GIANT giant Ken Baumann has already dropped one amazing book on us in 2013, and before the year is out, he is going to hand us a second. The book is Say, Cut, Map and the press is Blue Square Press. Mira Corpora author Jeff Jackson blurbed it like this:
“Say, Cut, Map stakes out a literary terrain that so far has no name. Its constantly shifting cartography is made up of severed hands, premature burials, hospital wards, and fragile families. This novel of compounding mysteries redraws itself from sentence to sentence, while still relentlessly propelling the reader through its pages. Ken Baumann has constructed a dazzling mirage that pulses with real emotion.”
If you’re the type who needs a little more convincing, I asked Ken three questions about Say, Cut, Map and here they are, followed by three answers.
List your inspirations for Say, Cut, Map.
Trauma, dying limbs, dirt, romance, aid work, strangers, language barriers, sex, weather-like pain, machines, news cycles, myths, marketing, amputation, bitter flavors, opioids, travel, waste, children, philosophy, phantom sensations, sleep deprivation: complexity and how we fail against it.
You’ve said Solip came out of you in a sort of fever dream—that you sat down and it poured out of you. What about SCM? Did it also compile in your subconscious and rush out? Or was the process completely different?
Its form—sensation to disparate sensation to stranger sensation and then dialog—came right away. Making sure that each memory, fact, thought, mood, and communication (or chunks thereof) pushed against each other hard enough to spark and recast the prior stuff in a new light (and then to cause enough sparks to create a strange and hopefully haunting fire or pyre or whatever)… That took time and work.
2013 was a year of some pretty high-profile video game releases (Bioshock Infinite, GTA V, The Last of Us). It was also a year when you replayed a favorite from your childhood (EarthBound) to prepare a book. Any thoughts on the contrasts?
The AAA games that I played this year (including those three) all made me less happy and less satisfied. Which doesn’t mean I think they’re all worthless or boring. But I do think that most AAA games are massive wastes of human potential. (Am I sugarcoating it too much?) Not that the older games are better or somehow clean by dint of being old; I’m not nostalgia’s trick, or I try not to be. But older games are less jaded, less cynical, and less bent on wringing reality out in front of you—via audiovisual mimesis and a creeping indifferent fate and human error—which I think is a poor goal for video games. I mean, if I want to lose my humanity and kill myself, I don’t need to live out a virtual zombie apocalypse, I just need to call my health insurance. So it was nice to go to the earlier, more naive, and (maybe also necessarily) more fun games, particularly EarthBound, which is so peculiar and joyful that I wrote a damned book about it.
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I Like Church A Lot
Hey, I had to go to a church recently. I was doing some childcare for a relative, and it was on a Sunday. Kids of a certain age lead an orderly life. Included in the order of the lives of the kids for whom I was providing some childcare was their regular Sunday morning visit to a Unitarian church in Seattle. Being a dutiful relative, I agreed to keep the child to the child’s orderly life and attend a Unitarian church service with the child.
And I had a pretty good time. It seems I like church a lot.
Turns out even though I stopped going to church 28 years ago, and even though I attended an Anglican church during the years I attended church, I still had all the rhythms of church hardwired in me. I may not have known the specifics of the creed or the words to the hymns and the prayers, but I felt like I knew all the gestures and the sentiments. I knew when to stand and when to sit. The Unitarian service’s language seemed a little strange to me—it was 19th century, and felt American, and seemed weirdly concerned with architecture—but everything else clicked into place pretty easily.
Best of all, though, it gave me an opportunity to sit and really think about death. I mostly don’t really write anymore. I mostly just sit and think about death. I mostly try to sleep and can’t sleep because I start to think about death and then find I can’t sleep because I’m thinking about death. And I mostly feel weird about lying in bed thinking about death because it doesn’t seem like the right place to be thinking about death, so I don’t sleep. I should be trying to sleep. I should be trying to clear my mind. I fight to clear my mind. I fight to clear out thoughts of death. And I fail and fail and fail.
Churches, as I’m sure you are already aware, are all about death! They don’t ask you to clear your mind of all thought of death.
And the church didn’t just give me a place to think quietly about death. It was a place to think about it actively and in a participatory way. It gave me plenty of cues telling me that I was in a place where thinking about death was encouraged. I found myself thinking about death in the proper setting. The right context. It was fantastic.
Like:
Many of the seats in the church have little plaques on them. The plaques say that the seats were “given” to the church in honor of someone. And that someone is dead!
Many of the books in the church have bookplates in them. And the bookplates say that the books were “given” to the church in honor of someone. And that someone is dead, too!
The programs they give you when you enter the nave to find a seat are filled with the names of the dead. The songs sung in a church are slow and quiet and mention death a lot. There are moments in a church service when everyone is asked to sit quietly, and during those moments, you can hear little creaking noises and breaths and coughs. Human bodies are filled with gas, and after death they make creaking and sighing noises. And the “death rattle” is a sort of choking cough people near death make when their throats fill up with saliva they can’t swallow because they are dying and all their energy is going to that instead of to swallowing.
And, of course, a church was just lousy with older people who are really close to their own deaths. They’re the ones making most of the noises in the moments of quiet reflection. Because their bodies are getting away from them. Because getting older is just the our bodies getting away from us. Until finally, we can’t stop our bodies from getting so far away from us, they cease to function entirely. Try as we might to stop it from happening, our bodies just give up. Think about that next time you are unable to keep from coughing. Your brain fights and fights, but you cough, because you can’t will your body to stop. You’re going to die someday, and it might be like that. Your mind might be sharp or it might be dulled with medication or decay, but it might still try to will your body to keep going, but your body won’t have you telling it what to do. It will just stop working.
Thinking about that in church felt far less menacing to me than it does when I’m in bed, and the person next to me is asleep. And I’m not asleep, but I’m trying to sleep, and instead I’m worrying about death.
I like church a lot.
Have a good weekend, everyone.
Will Hill
Scott McClanahan’s Hill William book trailer is here, lit world.
YOUR MOVE, JOYCE CAROL OATES.
I Still Think About the Bomb Sometimes
After The Day After ran on ABC in November, 1983, it took me weeks to sleep normally again. The attack scene cycled through my brain, night after night. But not the panicky running and the electromagnetic pulse. Just the mushroom cloud. Just the bright light revealing the skeletons within the doomed. Just the fire and the flash.
Much of The Day After takes place in Kansas City. At the time, my family and I lived in Kansas City. Because of The Day After, and until he left office, I was always at least a little afraid of Ronald Reagan.
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This pizza place near our house had some arcade cabinets, and the one I liked best was Missile Command.
Here’s the best decision the designers of Missile Command made on the cabinet: they gave it a trackball. A joystick makes reliable moves. A trackball is about imprecision. READ MORE >