Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! @ Arlene Schnitzer, 9/21/11

I recently had the pleasure of attending a live taping of the NPR news quiz "Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me." Assuming you are a fan of the show (why wouldn't you be?), I thought I would provide a bit of insight into what goes on behind the curtains.

As you may have imagined, little extravagance is put into the actual staging. With the panelists spending most of the evening speaking directly into their microphones, it was quite clear that this was a show meant for radio. Public radio at that.

Even the structure of the evening was workmanlike: every segment had to be laboriously cued up and after the show there was even a few minutes when we had to sit and watch the re-dubbing of flubbed lines.

So far this doesn't sound too appetizing does it? After all, I did spend a considerable chunk of change on something I could have just listened to for free three days later.

The real treat is that the taping lasts for about two hours and each round has considerably more dialogue than you hear on air. Most of the bits are presumably edited for timing or excess local flattery (for Portland that meant bringing a Voodoo donut on stage and copious references to Powell's) but it also seemed like quite a bit was left on the cutting room floor due to content (or for the inevitable unrated "Wait Wait… After Dark"). While a majority of the proceedings seemed scripted (particularly Peter Sagal's bits), the improvised lines stole the show, particularly the reoccurring jokes that must have been excised to fit everything into the allotted hour.

All in all, one doesn't listen to NPR for the glamour or the opulence; one does it for the Carl Kasell. And seeing "Wait Wait" live grants you an extended audience at the king's court.

The Enigma of the Absolute

Dead Can Dance is a bit of an anomaly in the pantheon of my favorite artists. The band falls clearly out of orbit of my two predominant musical spheres of interest (ambient and electronic) and barely graces other satellite curiosities (indie rock and post-punk). Instead, Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard gravitate towards that delightfully unspecific blackhole genre of World Music, which I suppose means that they use instruments that fall out of the purview of your average rock band -- eg. the yangqin.

During the group's most popular phase, spanning from The Serpent's Egg to Into the Labyrinth, Dead Can Dance could almost be described as a Renaissance cover band -- which isn't entirely inaccurate, as they did cover such medieval classics as "Saltarello" and "The Song of the Sibyl." But that doesn't quite encompass the enormity of the band's range or selection of source material, which includes 17th century Irish poetry and translations of Bertolt Brecht's stanzas. In fact, for its first few albums, Dead Can Dance sounded like what you would expect from a band signed to 4AD in the early 80s: gothic post-punk in a world of Joy Division imitators [half of the song titles sound like The Downward Spiral b-sides]. On the opposite end of band's career trajectory, Spritchaser, is graced with studio-processed didgeridoos from their native Australia and Vodun rhythms from Haiti.

Most, however, will likely recognize Lisa Gerrard as the voice behind the lyric-less wailing that you often hear in movie soundtracks as the protagonist goes down in slow-motion during that faux-nadir of the climax. Although this became a trope of 00's cinema after Gerrard won the Golden Globe for her work on Gladiator, I was first exposed to Dead Can Dance through the cultural voyeurism film Baraka, which prominently features Gerrard mourning over pictures of poverty and despair.

After my dad fell head over heels for the movie, the best-of disc A Passage In Time saw heavy rotation in the Wright household leading the Dead Can Dance to become the unintentional soundtrack to my marathon Quake deathmatches in high school. I'll forever have the classic rock hits of the 70s tattooed on my memory courtesy of my father but the Dead Can Dance are probably the only band that I inherited from him. I find it endlessly amusing picturing my parents surrounded by legions of goths when the Dead Can Dance played Kingsbury Hall in 1996.

I too was fortunate enough to catch Dead Can Dance live on the last concert of their final reunion tour in Chicago -- although "final" and "reunion" should probably be put in quotation marks. The latter as the band diligently alternated from Lisa-focused and Brendan-centered tracks throughout the night and the duo remained at arm's length; clearly, an "in it for the money" tour. The former as Perry recently hinted that two were going to reform for a new album and another world tour in 2012.

Although I feel a little shortchanged now that my 2005 concert will lose a bit of its cachet, I welcome any opportunity to see the band live again (having just seen Brendan Perry on his solo tour, I can attest that he has actually gotten better with age).

And maybe after you listen to this modest sampler of the duo's repertoire, you might be fortunate enough to catch them live as well.

The Enigma of the Absolute: A Dead Can Dance Modest Sampler

1. The Arrival and the Reunion [Aion]
2. Saltarello [Aion]
3. Black Sun [Aion]
4. Song of Sophia [The Serpent's Egg]
5. Enigma of the Absolute [Spleen and Ideal]
6. The Writing on My Father's Hand [The Serpent's Egg]
7. Ullyses [The Serpent's Egg]
8. Cantara [Within the Realm of a Dying Sun]
9. The Host of Seraphim [The Serpent's Egg]
10. Severance [The Serpent's Egg]
11. Spirit [A Passage In Time]
12. The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove [Into the Labyrinth]
13. The Snake & The Moon (Edit) [Spiritchaser]
14. The Lotus Eaters [Dead Can Dance: 1981-1998]
15. Mephisto [Aion]
16. Fortune Presents Gifts Not According To The Book [Aion]
17. I Can See Now [Towards the Within]
18. American Dreaming [Towards the Within]
19. Rakim [Towards the Within]

Enter the labyrinth via Spotify or iTunes. Unfortunately, SoundCloud started narcing me out.

Shadow of a Doubt

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow
Castlevania has always been a favorite franchise of mine. Simon's Quest was one of the first games I remember playing on my NES and it was one of the last games I played to completion with my dad (although Scott mysteriously picked up a Counter Strike habit somewhere in the past decade). Super Castlevania IV and Symphony of the Night certainly need no introduction to this audience. Yet despite dominating - and continuing to dominate on the handheld consoles - the 2D platforming era, Castlevania has only made half-hearted attempts at 3D on a couple of forgotten releases on the Nintendo64.

With this history in mind, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow deserves at least a modicum of respect for not being completely terrible. That being said, it is also not very good.

Lords of Shadow is shamelessly derivative and manages to rip off every notable game of the past few console cycles. Kratos's hack-and-slash chains are re-appropriated as the Belmont family whip. Action sequences are broken up by infuriatingly touchy Uncharted scenic explorations. Even the Colossi of Shadows make brief cameos as completely incongruent boss sequences.

As Lord of Shadows is such an unwieldy amalgamation of so many disparate games, the control set-up is frustratingly obtuse. All of the stolen - I mean creatively repurposed - special maneuvers equals a myriad of different button combinations to memorize. On multiple occasions over the course of the 20-hour (yes, it is that long) game, I had to pause and lookup online the keystroke to some skill that I had never used before to solve an impassible puzzle.

Worse yet, the level design is simply lazy. Linear corridors fork and then re-emerge in non-sensical directions. The developers didn't even make an effort to hide power-ups organically in the environment. Instead your simply encounter a wall with a notice that you will have to return with some different upgrade later in the game. Lowest common denominator gaming at its finest.

This might all sound like I hated the game -- but I didn't. Lords of Shadow has the makings of a decent first step in the franchise, which would have lent me some hope that we might see a more polished sequel on the horizon (such as how Among Thieves fulfilled the promise of Drake's Fortune.)

Unfortunately, the game ends with a twist, which while interesting, completely negates this possibility and makes me question why they even bothered heading down this High Gothic direction in the first place if they were just going to reboot with the next one.

Grade: C+

Two memories

In January 2004, I was in a wedding in the south.

Weddings are awkward anyway, so I remember trying to introduce myself to the locals who were in the wedding line.

One of them, who we gave a nasty nickname shortly after, blurted out, "We don't need to be all friendly and get to know each other." I found out later than she wasn't really a local. She lived in California.

In September 2007, I was in another wedding. There were more than a dozen people in the wedding line. (Though, less than two dozen. Losers.) The wedding was in California.

The wedding was more awkward than most. Everyone was extremely unfriendly. Again, I tried to introduce myself to the locals.

The locals, in this case, were all from the area. It was an extremely rich area, but only one of them actually came from any money. I would say were the rest worked or were from except for I don't have any idea.

They weren't very responsive to conversation or friendliness.

(Maybe it was the dark cloud that hung over that whole wedding. Maybe people from California suck in a very broad, sweeping way. Like the inane comments you'd hear during a Republican debate.)

One of the things I've most learned since High School. Talk to everyone you can. It makes everyone feel better.

The memories aren't happy ones. They are helpful ones.

Ghostly Label Showcase @ Bumbershoot, 9/4/11

The Sight Below



HTRK


Tycho




School of Seven Bells



Lusine

at the risk of seeming like all i do is watch tv: