The Wesleyan Argus

Author: Gabe Rosenberg

  • “The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth” Is Bizarre, Matricidal Fun

    Yesterday, I killed my mother by shooting poisonous tears at her while she threw spiders, zombies, and bloody chunks of meat at me. In the final blow, I held up the decapitated head of my cat Tammy, shooting more tears all over the room. When she finally died, her agonized cries fading into the background, I crawled into her womb and tore out her heart.

    Welcome to “The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth,” one of the most bizarre, disturbing, and downright fun video games you will ever play.

    “Rebirth,” an indie title developed and published by Nicalis, is the devilish brainchild of game designer Edmund McMillen. The game is a remake of his 2011 release “The Binding of Isaac.” “The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth” is to the original “Isaac” what the more campy, purposefully funny film “Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn” is to “Evil Dead.”

    In both games, you play as Isaac, the only child of a single mother. Isaac’s mother is very religious, and, one day, she hears the voice of God telling her that her son is impure. She tries her best to purify him, first by taking away his toys and then his clothes, then by locking him in his room away from the temptations of the world. In its last message, the voice of God commands Isaac’s mother to kill Isaac—to sacrifice him to show her devotion. Isaac sees her coming through a hole in the door and in his panic stumbles upon a secret trapdoor to the basement; he flees down the steps, and the game follows his attempts to escape from his mother.

    Much like the original, “Rebirth” is by turns terrifying, comic, depressing, and absurd. The game deftly uses its mechanics to convey these feelings. For example, Isaac fends off his foes (which range from flies to floating heads that shoot blood to clones of himself) by using his tears as projectile weapons. Enemies “pop” satisfyingly once Isaac has cried on them enough.

    The game’s visual style also contributes to these themes. The horrors and absurdities of the basement are rendered as nostalgic, almost cute 16-bit pixel art, and every item Isaac picks up modifies his physical appearance. For example, an item called Ipecac causes Isaac to vomit explosions rather than fire tears at enemies, turns him green, and changes his expression to one of queasy discomfort. These appearance changes stack up, and by the end of the game, Isaac can appear a completely different person. The lighting engine in the game is also a thing of beauty, as fires throw a warm orange glow over each squalid basement room.

    Perhaps the most important aspect of “The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth” is its membership in the “roguelike” genre. This label can mean a lot of things for a game. For “Rebirth,” each time you play the game, every room of every level is completely randomized.

    The items you receive are randomized as well, along with the enemies you face, the collectibles you pick up, and the bosses you fight. This randomization keeps the game fresh. It also gives you a reason to keep playing after you complete the game. Or after you die. Because the other important piece of “roguelike” in “Rebirth” is what’s called “permadeath.” When you die, you die. You must restart the game from the beginning.

    Thankfully, a game of “Rebirth” does not take very long to complete. All told, a single run can take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. But in truth, the game doesn’t end when you kill Mom. The more you play, the more items, enemies, floors of basement, playable characters, and endings you can unlock and explore. This is a game that you can play forever, and you may want to. After all, I’ve played the original for more than 100 hours, and “Rebirth” for 30 so far. Every piece of content adds a new and interesting spin to the game, and it is worth it to replay the game over and over to experience it all.

    Speaking of experience, there are two ways to experience the game. McMillen is infamous for inserting in his games incomplete item descriptions, as well as hiding the true effects of a given item. When playing the game, one can choose to go in blind, exploring it all for themselves for the first time. This can mean losing a lot of runs due to a terrible item you’ve never seen before, but it can also offer the thrill of new experiences in a fairly steady stream, as there is an almost obscene amount of hidden content to find.

    The alternative is to use online guides to gain knowledge of each item before you pick it up. This is interesting in its own way, as it allows for better planning and, in all likelihood, a higher win rate. Both experiences are compelling, but if you were looking for the second, I would recommend waiting a little bit to play “Rebirth,” as the community around the game is still scrambling to figure it all out. Otherwise, there’s no better time to play than now.

    “The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth” is a phenomenal game. It is easy to learn, difficult to master, and most of all, fun. How often can you say that about killing your mom?

  • Idiot Box: “The Flash”

    c/o mrsteiners.deviantart.com

    Set as a companion piece to The CW’s hit show “Arrow,” “The Flash” offers the same corny superhero fun, this time with an adorable heart of gold. Refusing to adopt the dark, gritty palate of its fellow DC Comics-television brethren, “The Flash” delights in being what its world always has been: earnest and, sometimes, a little stupid.

    Following the adventures of Central City Police’s assistant forensic investigator Barry Allen (played by Grant Gustin), the show is quick to find its feet and set off running. The pilot crams an incredible amount of exposition in through its special effects, using on-screen “Sherlock”-like gimmicks to show Allen’s genius, and revealing in flashbacks how Allen is emotionally scarred from his mother’s murder and his father’s conviction for the crime. Gustin certainly sells the part, finding little moments to display his character’s charm and sweetness with a shy smile or a head tilt. I am certainly smitten.

    Of course, all of this is cut with the usual CW fun of unrequited love, in the form of Allen’s best friend from childhood, Iris (played by Candice Patton). Unfortunately, the two actors have little-to-no chemistry between them, and the show flounders in showing why Allen harbors such a huge crush. In turn, Iris is disappointingly annoying as one of the few female characters, having been given the consistent problem of writing her dissertation, later changed (miraculously) to her journalism class project. Added family drama arrives in the form of detective Joe West (played by Jesse L. Martin), who acts as both confidant and surrogate father to Allen in times of trouble.

    Everything changes, however, when Allen is struck by freak-storm lightning and—voila—becomes blessed with incredible superhuman speed and equally incredible CW-worthy abs. The show attempts to puff this up with ludicrous science mumbo jumbo, but, honestly, nothing will ever disguise how utterly dumb this superpower is. Even worse, the use of graphics to depict Speed-Vision is absolutely ludicrous, as the show explains that everything conveniently slows down when Allen is running because he’s just that fast. This results in a number of cringe-worthy sequences with people frozen in supposed time and space, adding a red blur to depict some sort of Flash action.

    Like Allen, all of the antagonists in the show were struck in the same freak storm, resulting in a number of superhuman—or, as the show calls them, “metahuman”—powers. The particular showdowns with villains become even more problematic, as the show must find a way for Allen to save the day in a seemingly convincing way but also on a budget. From the roster of baddies, the show usually queues up ones with conveniently similar powers (two of the four I’ve seen so far involved some form of wind or gas) and quick resolutions.

    The drama surrounding Allen’s powers and exploration of them also falters with a team of quirky scientists who track Allen down to help him adapt to his newfound powers. Similar to Iris, the scientists, Cisco (played by Carlos Valdes) and Dr. Caitlin Snow (played Danielle Panabaker), add little flavor to the show and are, at most, really good at offering paragraphs of exposition. Leading them is wheel chair-bound Dr. Harrison Wells (played by Tom Cavanagh) who, like Cisco and Snow, undergoes little character development, but is tasked by the omnipotent writers to have some sort of dark, hidden agenda concerning Allen’s new talents.

    Overall, the show does what it sets out to do: entertain. Over 43 minutes, the episodes move relatively quickly and follow the same three-act structure of setting up, fighting, and defeating a weekly baddie. True, the show has problems in its canonical mythos, but it unabashedly wears its heart on its sleeve. The show never panders to the viewer, winking and nodding that, yes, this is silly. Instead, it strides bravely forth, waving its own flag and blowing its own horn, which is laudable in and of itself.

  • all-caps LADD Considers Childhood With Dynamic EP

    Noah Mertz/Photo Editor

    “Well the kids/ I think we’re alright/ now we’re losing control.”

    all-caps LADD is a group focused on transition, whether it’s the evolution from childhood to adulthood or from college student to post-graduate. As I watched LADD, composed of vocalist Jack Ladd ’15, guitarist Sam Wheeler ’15, bassist Bennett Gelly ’15, and drummer Piers Gelly ’13, open for Avi Buffalo at Eclectic on Friday, Nov. 7, I couldn’t help but feel this performance was a victory lap for a band already considering its next step. Regardless, just because this is a band at the start of its final bow doesn’t change the fact that LADD knows how to own a crowd and bring a seriously addicting blend of rock, pop, and indie rock to the table. This band plays the kind of music that makes you want to get up on a table and dance to your heart’s content until that table splits in half.

    Mad in the Coatroom is all-caps LADD’s initial studio release and, though only three songs long, it provides a fleeting glimpse into the depth of Ladd’s addictive one-liners and the smoothness of Wheeler’s guitar licks. The EP serves as an intriguing statement for a group that has taken Grand Cousin’s—whose members graduated last year—mantle as Wesleyan’s premiere student band.

    Mad’s first song, “The Kids,” starts off with an up-tempo old-school guitar riff, each eight-bar progression building upon the next until Ladd’s voice nonchalantly saunters onto the track. Wheeler’s guitar sets an upbeat and youthful tone that the band distorts as the trio of songs progresses. The song is steeped in a blithely repetitive guitar sequence but is rife with pop influences.

    “The Kids” taps into the moment when parents realize their children are out of the house, out of their control, and essentially equipped to confront adulthood, if anyone ever really is. At the same time, for a generation of young adults in transition, the song represents one final grasp at the innocence of childhood and Ladd’s suggestion in the lines, “I’d like to take you to New York/ maybe we can start a band,” becomes increasingly urgent as Ladd’s vocals become muddled together until it’s clear he’s saying, “Don’t go.” Youth is certainly fleeting and perhaps LADD implies the dreams of our childhood are as well.

    “Summer Nights” opens almost hauntingly and crystallizes the sense of loss of “The Kids.” Its woozy keyboard line meshes well with a baseline that parallels the weary sound of The National’s Scott Devendorf. On “Summer Nights,” LADD continues to wrestle with youth and a vanishing childhood, beginning to distort these ideas into more vivid feelings. The song is driven by a creeping baseline and a wistful cry: “Summer nights are over/ I miss the nights when you used to fuck me sober.” While the song begins to feel repetitive in both the progression of LADD’s instrumental layering of guitar and bass and its lyrical content—a malady that threatens “The Kids” as well—it is able to capture perfectly the nostalgia of the dog days of summer. Ladd looks back once again with almost bereavement, but in “Nights,” his perspective is tinged with regret and even guilt.

    “Summer Nights” is not a shallow or preening attempt to capture the passion of summer love. Rather, it is an honest look at the aftermath of a summer romance and the way we reflect on it and allow it to characterize our behavior once the year begins. When Ladd admits, “I feel like shit for all the ways I fucked you over,” his voice descending into a dizzy and syncopated plea for forgiveness, it’s clear why the “summer days grow colder.” Ladd examines a relationship gone awry, and questions all the ways he could have salvaged it, rather than letting it dissolve into just another summer fling that ends in regret.

    “Mad in the Coatroom,” the project’s eponymous track, concludes the record on decidedly different terms than the regret of “Summer Nights” or the thinly veiled melancholy of “The Kids.” It’s also far more expansive instrumentally than either of its predecessors, as Ladd and Wheeler are able to weave intricate guitar patterns that immediately declare a different experience. While “Mad” is still driven by its baseline, it’s more Gaslight Anthem than The National. In an EP driven so fully by each track’s instrumentals, Wheeler’s ability to improvise and play off drummer Piers Gelly ’13 and fellow guitarist Ladd sets a perfect tone here. “Mad In The Coatroom” sees LADD firing on all cylinders, as their percussion, guitar, and keyboard converge perfectly in a dazzling burst of sound. “Mad in The Coatroom” is my favorite song from the EP and represents LADD’s most fully realized piece on all levels.

    On “Mad,” Ladd strives to expand his vocal range, and his lyrics are his most dynamic and daring. Throughout the EP, he is able to lace each track with ambiguous lines that serve as driving questions as the song expands. Of course, he is still “thinking about you” and trying to “get somebody to notice.” However, on “Mad in The Coatroom,” Ladd’s imagery is far more pointed: “She found a pack of bruised Camel Turkish cigarettes in my pocket.” His voice seems more focused, perhaps because “Mad” offers some allusion to a resolution of the questions Ladd poses in both “The Kids” and “Summer Nights.” When he sings, not without some hope, “She said I could finally get to rest my head soon,” the closure Ladd seeks so adamantly throughout the EP seems miraculously in reach.

    Mad In The Coatroom is an EP about the lens through which we evaluate our childhood, filled with both pleasurable and regretful memories. Instead of judging or indicting ourselves for our past mistakes, it seeks to find the resolution that will make our next chapter more fulfilling.

  • Who Wore it Wes: Monica Kornis ’15

    Gavriella Wolf/Staff Writer

    By Gavriella Wolf

    Staff Writer

     

    Monica Kornis ’15 has tailored her style over her years at Wesleyan, borrowing ideas from the past and future to inspire her own. Though she doesn’t quite dress like a “country girl,” Kornis is a Missouri native who praises her hometown as a haven for thrift shopping. The English major (who also touts a film minor) looked critically at her own sources of inspiration and shared them with The Argus.

     

    The Argus: To what extent you consider yourself interested in fashion?

    Monica Kornis: I guess like as a mode of self-expression. I don’t, like, keep up with trends or anything; there’s people that inspire me that I see in movies, and pop culture, etc., but I don’t look up the latest trends or what was on the runway. I don’t keep track of any brands particularly.

     

    A: How long have you been interested in the way you dress?

    MK: As long as I can remember, I guess. I think like, when you’re younger, you look at clothes, and they’re all fanciful and you’re like, “Oh, I want this, I want this, I want this,” and so that’s always kind of what happens.

     

    A: Describe your personal style in three to five words.

    MK: I really like futuristic fashion, but I don’t really know if that’s my style. Things that are shiny, not things you would normally see. I guess I’m just attracted to shiny things. I like shiny things, I like leather. But I also like to be kind of minimalistic; I like wearing blacks, grays, whites. I don’t like my outfits being over-the-top. Okay, that’s three!

     

    A: What do you like or dislike about style at Wesleyan?

    MK: I think people follow, like there are people [who are] really trendy at Wesleyan, which can be a good and bad thing. I guess being trendy is like having others dictate what you wear, but also it says that you care what you look like, which is nice. So there [are] pros and cons of each, but I think that’s one of the things.

     

    A: How has your style changed, if at all, since you came to Wesleyan?

    MK: I think my style might be a little more mature, I guess, since I came to Wesleyan. Just because it comes with getting older. Like when I was first at Wesleyan, I wore a lot of floral stuff, I wore a lot of grandma sweaters. I think maybe I kind of found what I like, as opposed to when I came to Wesleyan, I’d just like wear anything that I found in the store that I thought was interesting. But now I try to match things more and piece outfits together more effectively.

     

    A: Where are your favorite places to get your clothes?

    MK: I usually do all my shopping online. I go to like Etsy, eBay; when I go back home to Missouri I go to thrift stores and they’re amazing. It’s beautiful, because all these old women give away their clothes, and people in Missouri have a very different sense of fashion than they do here, so no one wants them. But then you can get things at thrift stores in Missouri for like, a dollar, and it’s amazing.

     

    A: Who would design your dream wardrobe?

    MK: I guess I would like to design my dream wardrobe given that I had the appropriate skills, which I don’t. But I would like to design it myself and then have someone else implement that.

     

    A: Where do you draw style inspiration from on campus?

    MK: Pretty much everyone I see. Like, if I see someone wearing something really interesting, then I’ll catalogue in my mind. I think everyone does that, they just catalogue things they see online and on campus, and it all meshes together, and that’s how people create their own personal styles. I think everyone kind of makes their own style; I just draw inspiration from everything and
    everyone I see.

     

    A: Where do you draw style inspiration from off campus?

    MK: I draw inspiration from old film actresses from the silent era. I guess that’s kind of opposite of futuristic but a lot of them have dramatic makeup, and dark eyebrows, and wear black gowns, and I think that’s really interesting. And then, I think, Nico from the Velvet Underground, I think she has great style. And then Bjork is one of the people that isn’t afraid to do whatever she wants and wear crazy outfits, and I feel like that’s commendable.

     

    A: What would you like to see more of in the fashion scene at Wesleyan?

    MK: I see people that create their own style but then again, they just like buy from Urban [Outfitters] and American Apparel, and I wish I’d see more people just like, break away from that, buy different things, and cultivate their style. I guess one of my pet peeves when it comes to fashion is you see something at an outfitters that really looks good on a mannequin, and people just buy a really similar outfit. Like, at least make something. I like it more when people have their own personal touch.

     

    A: How do you think your style is going to change when you graduate and leave the Wesleyan bubble?

    MK: I guess it’d become more minimalistic. I think we’re in the stage where we can experiment and do whatever we want, and people won’t really judge us. But once we leave Wesleyan, I feel like we’re gonna be forced to conform more, because we’ll have jobs and won’t be able to wear crazy makeup or like, do our hair in the kind of ways we do it now. And so this is like a stage where we can experiment, and then we [will] have to conform, and then when I’m old, I’ll just like go wild. Because people don’t really care, [they] can be like, “Oh she’s senile, it doesn’t really matter.”

  • Music Experiment “On Foot: Brooklyn” Felt Disconnected in CFA Hall

    c/o Beth O'Brien

    Craig Shepard and Beth O’Brien’s performance of “On Foot: Brooklyn” at Wesleyan’s CFA Hall on Saturday night felt disconnected, and whether or not that was entirely the point was unclear.

    Shepard is a composer and trombonist who directs On Foot Productions, and he is described on his website as making “music related to stillness.” He studied trombone and composition at Northwestern University. In 2005, Shepard embarked on a 31-day, 250-mile walk in Zurich, Switzerland, during which he composed a new piece every day and performed it every evening. Beth O’Brien, on the other hand, is a photographer, filmmaker, and visual artist.

    Together, they created “On Foot: Brooklyn,” a project undertaken over 13 weeks in 2012, when Shepard—similar to his 2001 project—would only walk to travel, abstaining from public or private transportation, and compose a new piece every week.

    “I had a better sense of where I was, in terms of my own internal map,” Shepard said in a PBS documentary on the project, adding that he composed better when he walked.

    Each Sunday during this process, he would lead a cell-phone free, silent walk, followed by any observers, friends, or collaborators, to a different public space in Brooklyn to perform that week’s piece.

    “By committing to each other to keep silence, a group creates a bubble of stillness which moves through the urban landscape,” the On Foot Productions website reads.

    O’Brien would follow behind on bicycle, photographing them and their surroundings, taking thousands of shots, right after one another.

    On Saturday night, Shepard, dressed in concert attire with his trombone, sat in a chair on far stage right while O’Brien took her place at a desk with a computer and speakers on far stage left. The auditorium could hold 120 people, but only about 10 students, myself included, made up the audience; two left before the performance was even half-finished, which might be indicative of the performers’ failure to explain any components of their project or of the evening.

    Shepard and O’Brien both sat, silent, for a few minutes, with the “On Foot: Brooklyn” logo projected behind them, which then changed to a black screen. Eventually, the screen changed to a projection of O’Brien’s photographs, stitched together to make essentially a very sparse stop-action film showing Shepard performing in one location in Brooklyn.

    Shepard eventually began playing his trumpet in the photos, long held notes—each “piece” only used two or three notes—with large gaps in between, seemingly without meter.

    “It sounds a little like wind chimes on a slow day, so there will be some tones and some silence in between,” Shepard said in the documentary. “And they might find they start hearing some things in the space outside that they’ve never heard before.”

    At some point, the speakers would begin to fade in noises taken from the streets they walked and played, with children laughing or car sirens blaring, attempting to stitch together a sonic landscape from disparate parts.

    This happened twice, but not in any apparent coordinated matter. The friend with whom I attended the performance (who lives in Queens, NY and is a fellow soundscape aficionado) pointed out the three locations listed in the provided setlist did not match up with the two locations shown on the screen, which she identified as Canarsie (his March 4 location) and Downtown Brooklyn at the intersection of Flatbush, Atlantic, and 4th Avenues (his April 22 location).

    Knowing that, and giving Shepard the benefit of the doubt that it was not a mistake but a purposeful alteration, we questioned how each element of the performance connected. There were five elements we could identify: Our visuals of the performers on the stage; the images projected on the screen; the sound from Shepard’s trombone; the sound from the speakers; and the ambient noise of the room (taking into consideration what Shepard said above about hearing things in the space outside).

    If we could not be certain the location listed in the program was what was shown on screen, we could also not be certain that what Shepard was playing matched up with what he was playing on the screen, and we could not be certain the ambient sounds we heard matched up with where he was shown on screen or in the program.

    We were, absolutely, as Shepard seems to have intended, made more aware of the sounds around us—people moving or leaving the room, my own breathing, the whirring of the hall’s fans—but most of all, we became doubtful of all we saw and heard. After the second piece of the performance ended, both Shepard and O’Brien stood up, bowed, and left the room, without comment. I doubt this was the takeaway they intended, but without their intervention, it was the one we got.

    Corrections: An earlier version of this article stated Craig Shepard’s Zurich performance took place in 2001 with Manfred Werder and Jürg Frey. The project was in fact a solo performance and took place in 2005. In the final sentence, the article used “he” and “his” in reference only to Shepard, and has been corrected to “they” and “theirs” to refer to both Shepard and Beth O’Brien.

  • Rancid vs. The Dead Milkmen: How to Stage a Return

    October was an interesting month in punk music, a weird throwback to the era of the late ’80s and early ’90s when the genre saw a mainstream resurgence in the early days of MTV. On Oct. 7, Philadelphia’s The Dead Milkmen released their new album Pretty Music For Pretty People, followed a couple of weeks later by a return of Berkeley’s Rancid with Honor Is All We Know. These are two albums produced by very different band and yet they stand as an interesting comparison of how old punk rockers attempt to maintain their relevance after being around for more than 20 years.

    It might sound petty, but Rancid gets off to a bad and weirdly indicative start by making the cover to their eighth album consist of a green stencil of a bass and two guitars in front of a black background. It looks like a flier you’d get for a friend’s basement punk show, not the new release for a band that’s sold over four million records worldwide. It’s also a little off-putting when you start listening to the first track, “Back Where I Belong,” and realize that the lyrics remind you, again and again, that this is indeed another Rancid album.

    To be fair, it feels like the entire collection is operating on an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” kind of model. Rancid’s best early hits, such as “Time Bomb” and “Root Radical,” were anthems that created a neat blend of hardcore and pop-punk: fast and angry, yet still fun and catchy. Honor Is All We Know is definitely trying for the same feel, diving into each song with some heavy guitar power chords, overlaid with truly skillful bass work. The problem with just about every song, however, becomes apparent once this fun overture gives way to the real meat of the track.

    Take, for example, the second track, “Raise Your Fist.” As the bass and drums slowly build up the rhythm, and the guitar riff picks up the speed of the song, it seems like some decent head banging fun. But then the lyrics kick in, revolving entirely around the repeated phrase, “Raise your fists/ against the power that exists.” Rancid’s never exactly been poetic, but at least songs like “Ruby Soho” had a catchy and original energy. This new batch of songs feels like the band’s trying way too hard to recapture its rebellious spirit, with vague calls for revolution based on groundbreaking claims like “politicians are insane.” I’m not expecting Tim Armstrong, the band’s frontman, to be the next Karl Marx, but when almost every song on the album is preaching these nonsensical calls to action, the whole thing feels like a parody of itself.

    Listen to enough songs, and the entire album starts to blend together. Some tracks do stand out, but they feel like they’re just missing something. “Already Dead” and “Grave Digger” try for a psychobilly feel, only without the sweet standing bass riffs or the manic sense of humor that makes the subgenre so much fun. “Evil Is My Friend” and “Everybody’s Suffering” both have a nice ska sound to them, but you still wish for an alternative to Armstrong’s gravelly wail. The band doesn’t have the energy to liven things up, and the album is boring as a result.

    Just like Rancid, the Dead Milkmen also fall back on the spirit of what’s worked in the past. For them, it’s a tone of complete and total irreverence. However, the band manages to propel its satirical energy with enough experimentation to achieve a unique variety in its new songs.

    The album’s titular opening track begins with a bizarre circus calliope, accompanied by a frantic drumbeat and Rodney Linderman’s manic vocals. As soon as the opener concludes, we jump to more of a surf-rock sound with the track “Big Words Make the Baby Jesus Cry.” The guitar and bass on the song coordinate on a riff pulled right out of something by the B-52’s.

    Some songs try to stick with the frantic and angry pace that characterized much of their earlier work. The tracks “Now I Wanna Hold Your Dog” and “Ronald Reagan Killed The Black Dahlia” are fast, short, and sweet, blurting out crazy phrases like, “You call it class warfare/ but I call it love!” But these balance out with slower, New Wave-inspired pieces such as “Somewhere Over Antarctica,” which combines slow, haunting guitar riffs and an echoing synth mix for the strange Lovecraftian story of an Arctic explorer fleeing his crazed crew.

    Admittedly, the experimentation on the album doesn’t always work perfectly. While the keyboard riffs do give some songs a nice retro feel, in “Welcome To Undertown,” the wail goes a little overboard. It doesn’t help that the song is already a little jarring in the way it tries to address gun control. The album achieves its high point when it actually tones down its crazed creative energy in “Dark Clouds Over Middlemarch.” Compared to some of the more insane tracks, this song manages to get the job done with some nimble bass-playing, sweeping guitar riffs, and Lindeman’s vocals, all of which just pop with energy.

    Ultimately, the reason Pretty Music for Pretty People succeeds as an album runs parallel to the reasons why Honor Is All We Know doesn’t. There’s a particular kind of sound that Rancid is just trying so hard to reclaim: the same angry and anarchy-inspired anthems to inspire another generation of Doc Martens-lacing, suspender-wearing, angry punks. The Dead Milkmen, on the other hand, are trying to capture more of a feeling: the reckless abandon of not taking anything too seriously. They might be trying hard to please a fan base, but in the process they made a damn fine piece of punk music.

  • Idiot Box: Battlestar Galactica

    c/o wired.com

    It is the far distant future. In its folly, humanity has created a race of robots, the Cylons, that have turned against us. Eighty years later, they have returned to wipe humans out entirely. As a fleet of the last few thousand survivors escape into deep space, humans come to discover that the Cylons no longer look like robots; now, they are able to look like us. Cylons can be anyone in the fleet, and they might not even know it until they’re sent orders.

    They could even be you.

    “Battlestar Galactica” began as a three-hour miniseries on the Sci-Fi channel in 2003 and then continued as a full show from 2004 to 2009. That miniseries itself was a reboot of the “Battlestar Galactica” that first aired in 1978 and generated spinoffs for a few decades. But the modern “Battlestar” may be one of the rare reimaginings that has a stronger legacy than its original.

    Of course, some things stayed the same. Characters continue to shout “frak” to get around swearing on television. The original show’s characters survived, but with some updates. Some controversy arose when Lieutenant Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff) was reimagined as a woman, a complaint soon laughed out of existence as Sackhoff quickly became the most beloved cast member.

    Many other cast members deserve praise, such as Edward James Olmos, who gives his all as Commander William Adama, no matter how ridiculous his dialogue becomes. Mary McDonnell (the new president of the fleet) plays off him quite well and is my personal favorite as she struggles to make the best of the impossible decisions she faces.

    On the villainous side, Tricia Helfer is immensely entertaining as the first—and most looming presence—of many Cylons, Number Six. She takes a character who ran the risk of being mere ham and sex appeal and brings real life to the robot, and as we see more and more iterations of Number Six, she reveals her true and exciting range.

    “Battlestar Galactica” is one of the better examples of feminist science-fiction out there. Not only does it have an arsenal of well-written female characters, but the society those characters inhabit is seemingly more progressive than our own. The use of pronouns and co-ed showers imply an environment where gender is not a large factor.

    The series is lauded as one of the best science-fiction shows to date, and it’s made a lasting impression on other artists of the genre. Joss Whedon has borrowed several of its participants (from both cast and crew) in his later shows, and many cast members have gone on to do voice work in popular video game series such as “Mass Effect.”

    The praise may be warranted, but “Battlestar Galactica” is not perfect. The mythology gets stranger and stranger as the show progresses, and this does not play to its strengths. The show works best when it acts as a futuristic political thriller, asking its audience tough questions about humanity and the role of the military when our survival is thrown into question. Strange reveals about mysticism and humanity’s ancient past are exciting but seem less relevant to the show’s central focus.

    The show also gets bogged down in filler episodes that don’t really advance much of anything, and when the show tries to care about characters whom it doesn’t bother to make interesting, the audience is alienated. The inconsistent Lee Adama is most prone.

    But the show is certainly a technical achievement. Its special effects deliver shockingly wondrous space battles for television of the time, and the music is just as beautiful. Bear McCreary picks up where composer Richard Gibbs left the miniseries and delivers a vibrant and diverse score. He’s able to mix Southeast Asian sounds with more western melodies (to name just two influences) to create a musical canvas befitting the future of humanity. Any time the Cylons are involved, he adds a lively percussion with just a slightest hint of ominousness.

    The Cylons, ironically, are the heart

    and soul of the show. What does it mean to be human? Both the Cylons and the humans are working to figure that out, and the lines between the factions become increasingly blurred as the series continues. While some Cylons consistently act as antagonists for the entire series, others frequently question their allegiances. The Cylons themselves aren’t inherently evil as a group either; they’re just struggling to understand their place in the world.

    Series creator Ronald Moore explores these issues from several angles. For one thing, it’s the Cylons who are devoutly monotheistic, while humans, for strange reasons, worship updated versions of Greek gods. The question of humanity is even more interesting when characters begin to ask if they themselves can be trusted. The show works best when the entire cast has a pervading sense of paranoia—both externally and internally—which leads to some great character development. The show doesn’t always know how to handle plot pacing (it often goes either too slow or too fast), but at times it can effectively traumatize its audience with twists and turns. In fact, the show offers some of the best plot twists this side of “Lost.”

    What makes “Battlestar Galactica” so remarkable is that it realizes a fully-fleshed out science-fiction world. It makes more sense of how its starfighters can fly and maneuver than those of “Star Wars” or “Star Trek,” for instance. But more importantly, the show makes characters within that world even more realistic. The show tries to accomplish a lot, and it succeeds more than it fails—just like humanity, perhaps. It’s an intensely human show that just happens to have killer robots. But really, what more could you ask for?

  • “Othello” Makes Backstage Drama Shakespearean

    Noah Mertz, Photo Editor

    Love, lust, jealousy, betrayal, and despair: These topics and themes are great fodder for the stage. However, as adapter and director Coz Deicke ’15 and the cast and crew of “Othello” know, they are just as prevalent while rehearsing for a show as they are in their production itself.

    In this new, ambitious take on “Othello,” as Deicke staged it, the entirety of the action takes place during the rehearsal of a show. Othello (Rose Beth Johnson-Brown ’18) is a hotshot director who unwittingly inspires one of her actors, the calculating, manipulative Iago (Vikrant Sunderlal Chandel ’15), to try to destroy her when she shuns him and casts Cassio (Sarah Corey ’15) as the lead in his stead. Iago sets in motion a plan to convince Othello that her stage manager and wife Desdemona (Louisa Ballhaus ’16) is less than faithful.

    While the story begins and ends in the same place as Shakespeare’s original play does, the adaptation changes just about everything else. Moving the entire show backstage places an emphasis on performance, both of the actors and of their characters. The script, too, is elusive and unpredictable. Shakespeare’s language is kept intact in some places and replaced with colloquialisms in others, switching back and forth with precision and without warning.

    “Many Shakespeare adaptations I’ve seen are either incomprehensible to people who don’t know Shakespeare or invite a comparison to the really great Shakespeare work that theater people have seen,” Deicke said. “There’s so much more opportunity for exploration, adaptation, and transformation.”

    And transform he does. Deicke’s script is experimental and flamboyant, with a “chorus” of three actors (Conor Boughton ’15, Alexandra Stovicek ’17, and Amelie Clemot ’18) excellently portraying all of the supporting characters. Every scene brings something intense and unexpected, be it a performance decision, a change in lighting, sound, or something way too fun to reveal here.

    “It’s very heightened in a way that I’m really excited about,” Deicke said. “Everyone is real in a way, but they’re all pushed to an extreme.”

    Not only does the script play with theatricality, but there is also an element of gender politics. Whereas the central marriage of Shakespeare’s original play is one of mixed race—Othello is a Moor, while Desdemona is Venetian—this adaptation of “Othello” has the titular character and Desdemona in a lesbian marriage, one portrayed with sweet flirtation, fiery anger, and everything in between by Johnson-Brown and Ballhaus.

    “[Deicke] tried to have it not be called ‘Othello,’ and we all yelled at him and told him nobody would know what they were seeing,” Ballhaus said.

    Nevertheless, the show is still quite a departure. Until a few days ago, the entire show ran almost three hours without intermission, but on Monday, Deicke decided the show needed to be cut in half. Cut down from a 70-page to a 35-page script, “Othello” now runs at a svelte, engaging one hour and 15 minutes.

    “The process has been kind of crazy,” said Catherine Green ’17, the show’s stage manager. “And I don’t mean that as a bad thing.”

    Chopping off half a show is certainly a strenuous process, but the cast and crew were game and are now ready to perform.

    “It seems so impossible, but I decided you can either go to the highest point of the sinking ship or you can start working on the raft,” Deicke said.

    The extensive commentary of “Othello” on backstage politics, control, love, misogyny, gender, performance, and insecurity could not be sold without the exceptionally strong performances of its cast. Newcomer Johnson-Brown is definitely a talent to watch, portraying a woman trying to keep her world in control while plagued with self-doubt, slowly descending into the latter when the former gives way.

    Chandel plays one of Shakespeare’s most vile monsters with an interesting smoothness, magnetic without ever going over-the-top. Ballhaus and Corey both combine desperation and fear with a sense of wit that adds a measure of levity to even the production’s most dire scenes. And Boughton, Stovicek, and Clemot make some of the adaptation’s most complex, challenging material seem effortless and infinitely watchable.

    This is a bold, ballsy adaptation, where material comes from inside and outside the script in equal measure; where the language, relationships, and performance are linked in intriguing ways; where dozens, maybe hundreds, of props, costumes, and lighting changes are implemented; and where the world is heightened, magical, and infinitely strange.

    In the ’92 Theater this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 8 p.m., “Othello” will make something brand new out of an old classic.

  • Bulgarian Voices Brings Dissonant Beauty to Wes

    Sonya Bessallel, Contributing Writer

    From the far corner of the World Music Hall stage, three women emerged with flowers in their hair. Vlada Tomova, Valentina Kvasova, and Shelley Thomas wore woolen outfits with embroidered and scalloped shirts. Each outfit was a variation on the same theme.

    Seeing the three women together recalled images of the three Graces, or perhaps a trio of backup singers. But this show was entirely theirs. Unaccompanied, they opened with a song that they described as “in gibberish,” all about the moon. The second was about a gathering in which girls fall asleep and wake up missing clothing. Their voices formed rich, golden dissonances. The audience sat enraptured by the bright, clashing harmonies.

    After they finished, Tomova remarked that the resonance of sound in the hall was “very, very, marvelous.”

    “The way you all are seated, it’s kind of like a village,” she added, scanning the cross-legged members of the audience.

    The group onstage, Bulgarian Voices, formed because Tomova ran a Bulgarian choir in Brooklyn, NY. Kvasova, who is Russian, called Tomova because she was interested in singing together, and even teaching each other.

    “For a couple of years, we just strolled about with our tiny babies and I taught her Bulgarian songs and she traded me Russian songs,” Tomova said. “The joggers would stop.”

    Later, when Thomas, an American, joined, they became a trio. The three women use music to explore their individual backgrounds. The concert was composed of traditional Bulgarian village folk songs and Russian songs coming from villages as well as polyphonic and Western songs with traditional influences.

    As Tomova made eye contact with the other women, they synced up their breaths before beginning again. The third and fourth songs—about a girl who sees her reflection in a river and three others going to bed—continued their dissonant, sonorous pattern. Kvasova’s alto voice kept steady as the other women’s voices wove in and out. Particularly striking were the effortless slides from note to note; Thomas’s voice soared up and down the octaves. As they closed the set, Tomova remarked that the end of one of the songs was open to interpretation.

    “It leaves you wondering, making up your own story in the end,” Tomova said.

    Before starting the next songs, Kvasova hurried offstage and emerged with a tambourine for the more traditionally Russian pieces. She explained that the songs came from Rostov-on-Don, a city about a thousand miles from Moscow. Many Cossaucks, who had run away from the Czar, lived in this place; Kvasova described them as strong people.

    “You can hear it in the song,” she said.

    The Russian melodies offered a contrast to more traditional harmonies. People in the audience sat motionless, save for the smiles creeping across the lips of a few patrons. The women also sang a Russian tongue-twister about a man in love with a girl named Natalia. When Tomova burst into laughter at fudging the last syllables, she jokingly asked the audience if they wanted to try the lyrics themselves.

    For the final songs, Tomova invited all the members of the audience to sit closer and hear the harmonies differently. Cross-legged in concentric semi-circles onstage, the audience gathered as if ready to listen to stories. The trio invited members of Slavei to sing one of their signature songs, “Dilmano, Dilbero,” a Bulgarian tune about picking peppers. Grinning, audience members lent their voices to help craft the beautiful harmonies of the Bulgarian tune. One could almost imagine all those seated together as a kind of village.

  • Senior Dance Majors Choreograph Captivating New Works

    Lianne Yun/Staff Photographer

    Six female performers in black clothing and with severe ballet buns kicked off the Fall Senior Dance Thesis concert in the Patricelli ’92 Theater this past weekend. Featuring choreography by seniors Tess Jonas, Stellar Levy, Miranda Orbach, Ibironke Otusile, and Min Suh and starring a cast of performers from the University Dance Department, the five pieces of the concert—the first halves of the majors’ 20-minute theses—complemented one other and formed quite a fascinating collection.

    Orbach’s “reconfigured//form,” which turned out to be the most dramatic piece of the evening, allowed each dancer to enjoy a proper introduction to the audience, either through a delayed entrance or a pose. Dimensionality was key, as dancers often made contact with the floor, either crawling across the space or moving their limbs across the surface. They kept their leg and arm extensions low, with lines often broken either at the knee or the ankle. The loveliest moment came when all of the dancers moved together, traveling across the stage in concentric circles.

    Employing the use of metal barres and a patch of what appeared to be moss or grass, Levy’s “a thousand kisses deep” began to the sound of the sea. Comprised of seven dancers, this cast felt most like a professional dance company. With definite maturity and mutual unity, the dancers created logical, harmonious movement on both the stage and when climbing to-and-fro on the barres. With the dancers flexing and circulating parts of their limbs, this piece broke down the human anatomy into small individual partsbest exemplified in the cast’s sole male dancer and the continuous isolated movement of his torso. His physical control and energy was impeccable.

    In contrast with “a thousand kisses deep,” Otusile’s “Imole” was the evening’s most intimate piece. Opting for no music, this piece relied solely on the partnership and relationship between the two dancers onstage. Although blindfolded, the dancers’ movements were confident, running across stage in loud, percussive stomps. The two dancers would often separate before calling out to each other and reuniting through the use of voice and touch. This call-and-response broke the continual tension on stage, as the dancers grew bolder and bolder in their jumps and leaps. “Imole” luxuriated and took advantage of time, often allowing for long pauses between frantic, loud movements, demanding attention to be paid to every gesture, pose, and sound.

    “Fever Dreams” by Suh incorporated elements of Korean dress, dance, and music. Dressed in white hanboks (traditional Korean semi-formal clothing) and armed with silk scarves, the dancers moved in ambulatory circles similar to a Korean traditional folk dance. While this piece used four performers, the choreography divided the group into partnerships of two, which created fascinating vignettes, so to speak, as the partners touched, met, and guided each other throughout the stage. This element appeared unconventional at times, with dancers supporting each other’s near acrobatic poses and balances.

    Closing the show, Jonas’ “inside voice” mixed the cast’s own spoken word with a musical soundtrack, Her piece was a physical and emotional triumph. Relying only on a single lightbulb, the dancers followed the light and moved either as a whole or in groups of two. The mixing and matching of these dancers enabled some of the most interesting, brief partnerships and lifts, in turn creating a communal, almost familial voice, as evidenced by the continual loops of the dancers wishing each other love and happiness. There was a beautiful sense of symmetry as dancers transitioned on and off stage before returning to dance again with each other.

    Despite being works-in-progress, the performances at the Fall Senior Dance Thesis Concert were delights to behold. The second halves of the theses will surely delight at the upcoming Spring concert.