Media travelogues, reporting in every two weeks.
This week: Season 1 - What kind of man is Duncan MacLeod?
Imagine living with the constant stress in the back of your mind that you could be beheaded and die. The flipside… you get to remain young for all your days, and nothing else can kill you. Such is the bittersweet paradox of existence that Duncan MacLeod, the Highlander, must live with. In a world full of Immortals, in the end, there can be only One.
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Media travelogues, reporting in every two weeks.
Episodes viewed: “A Taste of Armageddon,” “This Side of Paradise,” “The Devil in the Dark,” “Errand of Mercy,” “The Alternative Factor,” “The City on the Edge of Forever,” “Operation: Annihilate!”
It’s easy to forget that the USS Enterprise’s five-year mission is a tour of duty. The vessel is officially on a scientific mission of peace, exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations, and boldly going where no man has gone before — but in the unfortunate event of attack, it packs firepower that outclasses any WMD you can think of. And the battlefield is leagues in scope beyond our military’s.
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Media travelogues, reporting in every two weeks.
The golden age of Nickelodeon was a seminal period of development for 80s babies. If you are capable of reminiscing about the age before e-mail, then you probably remember the very first time you flipped to Channel 12 to see a blue-nosed manx cat showcasing his nose goblins to the world. It’s also likely that you remember the cultural significance of an orange couch, a bucket of slime, and a noble teenager by the name of Donkeylips.
The early 1990s was indeed a vital juncture for the little children’s network that could, which, thanks to twin juggernauts You Can’t Do That on Television and Double Dare, had just achieved a magical balance between commercial appeal and artistic freedom that spawned a variety of cult hits. Destined to be deposited in the nostalgia banks of millions, this critical mass of live action, animation and absurd competition took America by storm and established the network’s platform for preteen pop-cultural hegemony.
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Media travelogues, reporting in every two weeks.
This week: Can Hideo Kojima find redemption with Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater?
After the debacle that was Metal Gear Solid 2, I’ve been playing the third installment of the series with a knot in my stomach. The notion of another Metal Gear game fills me with equal parts nausea and hope.
Hope, because Snake Eater is regarded by many fans as the best in the series, a redemptive return to form after we were force to watch Raiden’s shit-eating grimace hour after hour. But many fans also dress up in costumes and have accounts on DeviantArt. Plainly, they can’t be trusted.
I play on in fear.
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Media travelogues, reporting in every two weeks.
I begin this entry of my travelogue with the realization that two things must be true about Chris Ware.
These observations are not meant to be condescending or funny – well okay, maybe just a little funny – but are meant to provide some ounce of rationale that would explain the constant torment endured by the protagonists in Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth!
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Media travelogues, reporting in every two weeks.
Episodes viewed: “The Conscience of the King,” “Balance of Terror,” “Shore Leave,” “The Galileo Seven,” “The Squire of Gothos,” “Arena,” “Tomorrow Is Yesterday,” “Court Martial,” “The Return of the Archons,” “Space Seed.”
Star Trek portrays a future in which America has taken over space, albeit a very miniscule sliver of it. Though it took another world war and a new technological Dark Age to get there, by the 23rd century American democracy has crawled from the ashes to claim its rule. A new, interstellar United Nations has come into being in the form of the United Federation of Planets, a tightly organized military-industrial complex conveniently, and comfortably, headquartered in San Francisco. Life is peachy.
The acclaimed reboot of Battlestar Galactica is hailed for presenting the cosmos as the dark, hostile wasteland that it probably actually is – a fresh perspective that has birthed the next generation of Trek naysayers. But I say piffle – despite all of the technobabble, Trek isn’t really about space. It’s a moral play with our galactic destiny as a backdrop, using humanity’s newfound peace as a means to examine how it purged its darker elements, and to unearth ones that still exist beneath the surface.
And what better way to do that than with a smorgasbord of awesome villains?
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Media travelogues, reporting in every two weeks.
This week: Things take a turn for the worst in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.
By their nature, the great films of history are manipulative, selfish bastards. Leveraging expectations, they exploit their power over the viewer, tugging the mental puppet strings of their unsuspecting audience. And it’s what we want: to have our frame of mind altered in some meaningful, though not necessarily pleasurable, way.
Not coincidentally, the worst cinematic experiences are those that grow from grand ambitions, but resolutely fail to meaningfully address their audience. No matter the genius of the initial conception, the end result becomes a nauseating monument to self-indulgence.
But in even the worst case, a film will rarely last longer than three hours. My play through of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty took fourteen.
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Media travelogues, reporting in every two weeks.
This week: Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth
Editor’s note: Marco is a relative neophyte to the world of art comics, and this Long Haul serves as an experiment, a chance to see Chris Ware’s comics with a set of fresh eyes. But some context here for the similarly uninitiated: perhaps the most important graphic novel of the past ten years, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan is the generational successor to Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Hailed by The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl as the “first formal masterpiece” of the medium, Jimmy Corrigan is sure to be a touchstone in the discussion of comics as the artform continues to develop in the coming years. And now, Marco digs in …
I love Chris Ware’s art style and storytelling. This isn’t the superficial love of an adolescent with his first girlfriend - my acne has long since cleared up and my voice hasn’t cracked in over a week! Rather, this is a mature love, filled with complex emotions, respect, and—like any true relationship—criticisms.
But, of course, this is not real love, because there is no true reciprocity. There’s no two-way communication. The pages I read don’t find me the least bit interesting, nor do they want to get to know me. They don’t say, “enough about me, what about you?” But to say we don’t have a conversation isn’t quite true. Indeed, the pages seem to ask, “enough about me, what do you think about me?”
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Media travelogues, reporting in every two weeks.
Episodes viewed: “The Enemy Within,” “Mudd’s Women,” “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”, “Miri,” “Dagger of the Mind,” “The Corbomite Maneuver,” “The Menagerie (Parts 1 and 2)”
Gene Roddenberry was a man on a utopian quest. The Trek patriarch saw the blood of men during WWII’s Guadalcanal campaign and climbed to the level of sergeant in the Los Angeles Police Department – experiences that gave him an unclouded look at the human spirit’s darker side. When he established himself as a writer and conceived his masterpiece, he built upon this theme, envisioning a world in which the peoples of Earth had achieved balance, using space exploration to better themselves as well as those they encounter.
But for some reason, even in stardate 2712.4, women’s rights were still firmly grounded in the 1960’s.
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Media travelogues, reporting in every two weeks.
This week: Metal Gear Solid 1, now completed. Time to completion: 12 hours.
There was a time when no special effects could match the carnage my friends and I could create on a sheet of binder paper. The game went like this: draw four or five scribbled horizontal lines from one side of the page to the other - these were to represent hills rolling gently into the distance. Next, populate these lines with all manners of soldiers, tanks, catapults, howitzers, ballistas, helicoptors, motorcycles, spike traps, etc. Use dotted lines for bullet trails and draw the most beautiful explosions you can imagine. Finally, put in some flying body parts to your taste. Voilà, you’ve got a world war raging in your living room.
