Saalon Muyo

You may have seen something like this before. A bunch of artists descend upon a particular month and choose it for their own. This month, they decide, will be the month they complete a Single Work In a Short Amount of Time. Novelists chose November. Musicians? Their month starts tomorrow.

Isaac Quatorze, better known to me as Denys Gareau, was one of the participants in last year’s FAWM: February Album Writing Month. The work that came out of it was called Sin of the Summer, and it’s not just my friendship speaking when I say it’s got some killer work on it. The crucible that is insane-deadline writing can produce some amazing work. Even when it doesn’t, the experience is no less worth the time.

I sat down to talk with Denys today, on the eve of this Leap FAWM, to see how he was feeling about his second run through the gauntlet. I’ll continue to check in with him through the month and see what an album in a month looks like from the inside.

So the marathon starts tonight, does it?

ostensibly at midnight…..

here’s the thing

i quit caffeine about a year ago due to some anxiety problems, and my usual bedtime is around 8:30pm these days due to early work days. i have tomorrow off, and i went and got a large strong caffé mocha and just downed it…

so it’ll either be a writing marathon until 3-4 in the morning or i’ll have a heart attack

And this will be your second FAWM, right? Did you quit caffeine after the last one?

shortly before, i think… yes, this is FAWM number 2 after a really successful go at it in 2007

How are you feeling about it?

well i couldn’t use a single word to describe the feeling, that’s for sure…. of course i’m excited. there are a lot of amazing people on the FAWM site, musicians and writers with incredible ideas and helpful comments. that’s something i’ve looked forward to for 11 months, and i’ve already been rekindling some of those “relationships” on the FAWM forums this month

on the other hand, i’m shit-scared. things aren’t as…. serene for me as they were last february. work is insane, my family is having some challenges, and i haven’t touched a guitar or keyboard since last summer

i do foresee a struggle reaching that number 14 this year. hell, it was a struggle last year… so this should definitely be uphill.

What got you to participate last year? What drew you to it?

I looked up FAWM last year after hearing about a friend of a friend who was doing something called the RPM challenge. it’s another online speed challenge that also runs in february, but with RPM, the idea is to record and produce an entire album in the month of february. the songs can be pre-written, you just have to make them sound pretty.

well after looking it up, i realized i couldn’t do the RPM cause i didn’t have an album of songs written and ready to record. but my search pulled up the FAWM site, and that one looked more my speed. the focus in this case was to write 14 songs. recording was optional, as long as you posted at least 14 song titles, and if possible lyrics and/or demos.

i decided to do it because i hadn’t written a decent song in several months, and because the number 14 has always spoken to me (hence the pseudonym)…

The album that came out of it was called Sin of the Summer. Can you tell me a little bit about what influenced you when you were writing it?

a little bit of everything, eric. at the start of the month, i was influenced by the music i listen to, which is all over the map. as the weeks went by and i started running out of steam, i took influence from stranger places… little snippets of t.v. dialogue i’d written in a notepad… the cool sound of a keyboard preset slowed down to 10% of its actual speed…

they also have weekly challenges on FAWM to help those with writer’s block… for example, one week was a challenge to write a song about a colour (that inspired ‘violet’). other weekly challenges were to write a 2-chord song (’right-wing cowboy’), a duet (’déjà-vu’), and a song about a street (’hamel’ and ’st-jean baptiste’)

i took inspiration wherever it popped up, as hokey as that probably sounds. in a challenge like FAWM, you kinda have to run with whatever you’ve got.

What was writing 14 songs in a month like? How often did you feel like quitting?

my feeling about the 14-song goal changed from day to day, depending how the writing was going. i’d say i never felt like quitting, but i did get pretty down on myself at one point. i had written 2 songs in a row that i felt were subpar, and my fingers were starting to hurt like hell from guitar playing (i have arthritis in my hands). i never thought “shit, i’m gonna quit this.” but i did feel like i was sucking, and that i would continue to suck.

fortunately, the other participants on the site always have constructive feedback. those two subpar songs had their good points, as i came to realize, and with other FAWMers suggestions, i was able to retool them and actually use them on the final album. the songwriting also got better, and some of my favourite songs actually came in the last few days of february!

What about your writing style had to change to accommodate such a compressed schedule?

the second-guessing. writing for FAWM opened my eyes to the fact that i had always spent about 10% of my songwriting time actually writing, and the other 90% second-guessing myself and trying to edit and write simultaneously. as you have no doubt discovered by now, that’s a recipe for a fruitless process.

I’m listening to the album as we speak, and one thing that’s impressive is how polished it sounds. Did you finish songs as you went, or was there a mad scramble to polish things after everything was written?

Thanks for that compliment! i know that “polished” sound can be a good thing or a bad thing, and my goal was always to make something that didn’t sound radio-ready, while still avoiding too much lo-fi ugliness.

your question is actually really interesting, cause in retrospect i did spend too much time “polishing” during FAWM 2007. they are very clear on the site about the fact that any songs posted are demos. nobody is expected to put out a phil spector wall of sound. sometimes i think the reason my songs got so much attention on the site is because they were more fleshed-out demos than a lot of other participants were posting, which is kind of unfair to the others.

in response to your question, about half the post-production was done during FAWM, and half in march, as i was preparing ’sin of the summer’ for release.

this year i plan on making my demos more off the cuff, and then letting the songs stew past february, and take my time with post-production after the hectic event is over.

You mentioned relationships with other FAWMers. Can you talk a little bit about the support you get from the other participants? Is there a lot of talk between people as the month goes on?

The whole event is built around those relationships and that support. in fact, some of the logged-on FAWMers aren’t even songwriters, but friends, spouses, acquaintances and past-FAWMers who are just there to listen to the demos and give feedback. i’d say there is a fair amount of ass-kissing, in all honesty…. there are those FAWMers who will leave nothing but positive comments on a song that’s definitely lacking.

i mean, who am i to say? maybe the same song that struck me as a piece of crap really touched someone else. but i’ve seen songs where the writer truthfully wrote “my guitar isn’t tuned very well, and i missed the high note in verse 2″, and you’ll always have a couple people leaving comments like, “oh no, the guitar sounds great, and that high note was perfect!”

but for the most part, people are truthful. some are brutally honest, which can be helpful, or in some cases just obnoxious. one guy last year left comments on at least a dozen people’s songs telling them they had serious timing issues, none of which were noticed by anybody else. it’s all so subjective.

but what more could you ask for than a soundboard of very different people, from different musical backgrounds, to listen to your songs and give you instant feedback?

Anything in particular on your mind going into this year’s FAWM? Do you have a sense of what you want this album to feel like?

well first of all, i’m not aiming for an actual album this time around. they use “album” in the event name, but they’re pretty clear about the fact that the goal is just 14 songs. whether or not you want to base your writing around an “album” structure is optional.
one of the reasons i got stressed last year is that i decided from the onset that i wanted to make an album out of my FAWM songs. so every idea that didn’t feel up to par freaked me out. i would kind of panic, think “jeez, i don’t want this shit on my record!” and that contributed to the lower points.

this year i want to have more fun.

i plan to collaborate with a few other FAWMers, in what capacity i don’t know yet, but there have already been collaboration offers made and accepted on both sides.
i also want to go with those questionable ideas i would have panned last year.

if i end up writing circus techno, then so be it.

Thank you for your time. We’ll talk again next week to see how things are going. Good luck!

thanks, eric! happy february…

So TV Guide has a weekly podcast. Well, they probably have a few, but they only have one that I listen to. It’s called TV Guide Talk and I’ve got one of those love/hate deals going on with it. On the one hand, it’s got an awesome film critic. On the other hand, for months I’ve sat through discussions on such deep shows as American Idol and Desperate Housewives in the vain hope that a show I actually watch will get brought up.

So what is the TV Guide Talk about?

In this exclusive weekly Podcast, you can listen to Michael Ausiello and the TVGuide.com crew as they provide inside scoop, offbeat opinions and answers to your questions about the latest entertainment headlines, the hottest TV shows, the newest movies and the biggest celebrities.

Erin found it first and listened to it for months before getting me into it. Like anything involving media criticism, it left me shouting impotently at my iPod a lot, but in all honesty I enjoyed it. It had an easy to follow format: 4 people in a room, first talking about television news and reviews, then moving on to movie reviews. It was fun. It at times infuriating, it spent too long talking about empty reality shows like Big Brother and too little time on deeper dramas like The Wire, but it was a good time.

When I started listening, the show had a consistent crew: Michael Ausiello was the Rumor Guy, Maitland McDonagh reviewed films, Dan Manu was the leader, and Angel Cohn…was um…ok, I’m not trying to be a jerk, but I don’t have a clue what Angel’s job was. I think she blogged on the site. It was a good crew. Manu got on my nerves, but he ran a tight ship. Angel was flighty, but funny. Ausiello was a know-it-all, but he was there for scoop, not his deep opinion. And Maitland. Maitland was what kept me coming back every week.

Since then, things have changed. Like when any successful crew breaks up, things haven’t been the same since. Manu was the first to leave, and for a few weeks his role as moderator was filled by Ausiello and Angel. The most memorable thing from those weeks was the amount of shuffling papers as they tried to figure out what to talk about next. Then, just as Matt Mitovich, the new moderator, joined the crew, Angel left. And with her ended the era when people on the podcast actually, you know, watched TV.

When people started leaving, the rotation of temporary ‘casters began. With most, we were lucky if they had done more than TiVo the week’s shows. More and more, the podcast began to sound like the same kind of vapid, crap-is-ok television criticism that shows up all over the place. A difficult, challenging show like Battlestar Galactica, would get nitpicked for nonsense like “It’s ridiculous that Lee shows up in court in a tailored suit!” while unqualified praise would get dumped all over unambitious crap like Private Practice. There was no sense of what the goods and bads of a series were, and how series’ actually compared to each other. The few people on the podcast who actually watched television watched all the same shows so most things just got ignored.

Then this week, one of those mean things I suggest about many television critics was proven. They don’t read. All they really know is television, which makes much of their criticism sound shallow.  At one point in this week’s podcast, the fact that neither Michael Ausiello nor Matt Mitovich read came up. As they were laughing about it (because not reading is certainly cause for laughter), Mitovich informed us, “Reading is overrated!”

Sigh.

I like the podcast. I do. But I listen to a show about television shows to hear discussion about those shows. What’s been happening is barely discussion. The fact that half of the podcasters think reading is a silly and boring thing to do can’t be unrelated. I like Mitovich and I think he could be a good moderator, but he needs a stable fourth host to balance things out. Plus he seems like a decent guy, and that goes a long way.

All that said, I’m sticking with it for two reasons. One is solid, the other is a hope.

Maitland is glorious. Seriously, listen to the podcast and skip ahead to her movie talk. She’s funny, her opinions are well developed and she knows her field. When she does comment on one of the few television shows she watches, she’s got something worth saying there, too. Plus, did I mention she’s really funny?

The second is Matt Roush. I’ve always loved his writing in the magazine and his time as a guest host on the podcast has been just as enjoyable. Unlike the other television critics, he watches as much as possible, and he doesn’t give shows a free pass just for being distracting. If Roush is brought on as the fourth host, the podcast might end up even better than it was before.

On the other hand, if we end up with a fourth host who neither watches much television nor can put the medium in context with other, more mature media like, well, books, my patience may run out. I can always fast forward to Maitland if I have to.

I’m going to kick media critics a bit here, which I know is nothing like me.

The Wire is as good as television gets. In fact, watching it has spoiled me so rotten that the police-and-crime aspects of other television shows have started to make my teeth hurt. The authentic feel of both the police and criminals on the show, and the work they do, is such a marked difference from most television that The Wire is basically in its own league. Pretenders need not apply.

It’s the brainchild of David Simon and Ed Burns, two Actual People who became writers. Simon was a newspaper reporter who spent a year with the Baltimore homicide unit before writing The Best Nonfiction Crime Book Ever, known to others as Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. Burns was a Baltimore policeman-turned-teacher who eventually teamed up with Simon to write The Best Nonfiction Book About the Inner-City, known to others as The Corner: A Year in the life of an Inner-City Neighborhood. Both books are marked by for their honest and accurate portrayals of their subjects.

Simon and Burns created a sort of amalgam of the two works with The Wire. We follow both the players in the West Baltimore drug trade and the cops investigating them. The really amazing thing is how dead-on the world is portrayed, right down to the dialog. The show doesn’t try to explain its slang and jargon; its characters just use it and the writers allow you to use context to follow along. It works, too. I knew nothing about the life on a West Baltimore corner when the show started, but while I always had to work to keep up, I never felt lost. In fact, this is one of the things the show has been praised for: it expects you to be smart.

So this year on The Wire we add the newsroom of the Baltimore Sun into the mix. This has caused some consternation among critics, all of whom work in newsrooms of one sort or another. When the police, the drug trade, the docks or the school systems were shown as decaying institutions that have failed in their missions, that was cool. That was edgy. That was real. But don’t knock the journalists! For instance:

The problem is that the newsroom aspect is likely to resonate only with those with an intricate understanding of the media. Many fans may be driven away by the insider-speak and newsroom politics.

- Melanie McFarland, “On TV: ‘The Wire,’ like newspapers, is about writing”

Really? You mean the fans without intricate understanding of drug and homicide investigations, dockworkers unions, drug corners, school systems and mayoral elections who stuck around this long are going to be driven away because they can’t understand how a newsroom works? Reaching for problems much?

This is the kind of thing critics do when they feel personally annoyed by a show but can’t find objective criticism to level at it. There are potential problems with The Wire this season. The McNulty fake serial killer plotline, for example, is irking some people for good reason. But critics are basically saying that they don’t like the newsroom plot because it’s:

1. Too realistic
2. Not realistic enough

That’s a sure sign that good criticism is afoot, isn’t it? It’s ok, guys. None of us like being kicked in the shin, especially when we deserve it. Right?

When Detective Kima Greggs is learning the ropes as a murder police in HBO’s The Wire, her mentor advises her to look at the scene with soft eyes. Hard eyes will focus on the wrong things and miss the big picture. Soft eyes will tell you the most about a crime scene.

A lot about the world is that way. A lot has been said about the problem of our media misrepresenting issues and politicians misleading us on the nature of problems on their own gain. A lot of it is true, too, but the real problem is how it all changes our own way of seeing our own world.

When we discuss poverty, we start talking about Welfare to Work programs and jobless rates and what you should be able to spend food stamps on. When we talk drugs, we debate policing strategies and mandatory minimums and race. When we worry about schools we do so in terms of class size, standardized testing and school taxes.

We look at our world with hard eyes, scrutinizing the details of dauntingly large pictures. We find the details most pleasing or upsetting, set up camps and draw knives to defend our understanding of them. Why? Because it’s easier to demonize the specific application of a specific welfare system by pointing out potential abuses than it is to address the more general problem of increasing poverty among families. That’s how we roll.

There’s no way to solve the endemic problems of the manner in which we live with hard eyes. It takes soft eyes to understand that our worst demons cannot be thought of as a collection of symptoms and anecdotes, to see our issues as the complicated beasts they are. Poverty can’t be addressed through a debate on how many months someone should collect welfare. Frankly, poverty may never be addressed at all. The same goes for education, crime, health and global politics. But if we’re going to do battle at all, we must do so with a clearer understanding of what we’re fighting.

Details matter. They do. At some point, you’ve got to address them, and if you get it wrong, you’ll screw up the big picture. It’s the distraction from the fact that there even is a bigger picture that destroys us. It’s the petty arguments over meaningless minutia that divides us and allows us to be conquered.

Hard eyes will notice the bullet casing on the ground next to a victim’s head. Soft eyes will see that the shot could never have come from the same side of the body as where the casing now lies, the subtle drag marks in the dirt and a bullet hole and some blood on the wall thirty feet away. Hard eyes may catch a shoplifter, but soft eyes catch a murderer. Which crime would you rather solve?

I never knew a scripting language before.  Ok, so I never knew any language before a half-year ago, so that’s not surprising. But as I’m finally beginning to pick up the pseudo-hacking traits I always dreamed I’d have, it’s clear now that some kind of dynamic, scripting language is missing from my toolbox. My first thought was to go back into the language I dabbled with a dozen times in the past but never truly learned: Perl. I always liked its philosophy and it’s got about a billion other people who use it, so it seemed like a natural.

Then I thought: well, if I don’t know any of them in the first place, why not explore more than one and pick the one that works best for me? I knew a little Perl, but other people have been talking up Python and Ruby a lot. It couldn’t heart to dabble there first, right?

Right. I decided to grab a book on Python first. Maybe it was the Monty Python reference or perhaps it was the kinda cool IDLE real time interpreter that came with the distrobution when I downloaded it. I figured I’d end up with something a lot like Perl and end up going back to the one I sorta-kinda-knew, anyway, so it’s not like it mattered. I picked up the book on Saturday and started to poke around.

Me think me in love. I’ll grab something on Ruby, I swear. No reason not to. But something about Python’s orientation toward easy list management hits me in my sweet spot. Screwing around with lists of things is probably the most common thing you’ll do with a language like this (well, maybe any language), but most languages make list management a stabbing headache. Sorting and searching and adding new stuff to it and all the other things you have to be able to do before the list is useful is built right into the core syntax. So built in that it’s featured in that simplistic overview section O’Reilly puts in the early part of their Learning X series. Usuaully you get something like “This is an array. You can add initialize it like this, but we’ll stop there before you start imagining ways to kill yourself too early.”

As a relative newbie whose primary interest is in design, one of the things I look for in a language are features that make me think of problems I could solve more easily. Throwing something in that gives me the “Holy crap! I could have made this other thing I built 100 times simpler and better with this!” reaction is the first step to making me a convert.

Python’s doing this in spades. If I already knew Perl well, I’d probably stick with it and actually learn it. It’s a good language with a huge community and a lot of excellent tools built in it. It’s a venerable, powerful language. And Python could just be attracting me with shiny newness, though it has less shiny newness than Ruby, so probably not.

I’ve got some more learning to do before I make a decision, but golly gee is Python cool.

The most dangerous, ill-informed and frankly silliest political debate in this country is over healthcare. I go from annoyed to worried about the way our policy debates play out, but the whole health tango just plain maddens me. By and large, political debate uses the same tactic Microsoft employed against their competitors: FUD.

Fear.

Uncertainty.

Doubt.

Our conversations about healthcare are not exempt from this idiocy. In fact, since it’s an expensive question that touches on our biggest fear - death - bringing up the subject leads to all kinds of rhetorical shenanigans. This has led to tragic and horrible delays in fixing a health system gone awry.

Bring up healthcare reform and someone’s bound to shout “socialized medicine!” It’s an empty bit of fear mongering that also happens to be meaningless. The term “socialized” is tossed in because it makes people think of communism which makes people think of nuclear holocaust. But it’s a specious argument. Does anyone level the same complaint at our socialized police force? No, because we have no issue paying tax dollars to keep us safe from crime. Use my tax dollars to keep us safe from disease, though? Hell no.

The argument then proceeds to poorly researched insinuations about Britain or Canada’s “mismanaged” health systems. These usually involve mentioning wait times or supposedly poorer quality care. Like any good FUD, these insinuations are not entirely false. But like any good FUD, they’re far closer to wrong then they are to correct.

Canada and the UK are not the only countries with government administrated healthcare, yet they are invariably the only ones brought up in any debate I’ve ever had on the subject. Thus the individual failings of these two systems are not evidence against a significant shift in our own policy. Nor do vague threats of wait times hold water against the millions of people in our own country who don’t see a doctor at all because of a lack of medical insurance. Yet we’ve backed down every time medical insurance companies and their political allies show up because it makes us just scared enough.

I’m not going to get into the minutia of this debate. I’m going to bring up one thing and one thing only, because I think it encapsulates everything we need to know. The United States is 38 on the ranking of countries by average life expectancy. Now, there are significant factors at play here, like our obesity problem and the kinds of junk we put into our food, but still. 38.

Now, let’s move up the list to the top 10. With the exception of Macau, which I know nothing about, every single one of those top 10 countries have some form of government administrated health care system. Not all of them are completely free to the public, but all of them ensure their citizens can get the coverage they need. The United Kingdom, with their broken healthcare system? They’re 22 on the list, and they have nearly as bad an obesity problem as we do. (They’re third on that list. We’re first, though we’re first by about 10% of our population). And Canada? Yeah, they didn’t make the top 10. They were 11.

What does that mean in years? People in the U.K. have a life expectancy of 79.4 years. In Canada it’s 80.7 years. The U.S.? 78.2. Canada’s people are waiting longer, after all. They get to wait an average of 2.5 years longer to pass away.

There’s an honest debate to be had about what our healthcare system should look like. Let’s have it, and let’s throw away the FUD shell game the socialized medicine hysteria is forcing on us. And let’s remember that even if the U.K. and Canada have flaws in their healthcare system, it’s still universal and people are living longer. The two are probably connected.

Nothing like having the raw power of a great language at your disposal, right? Toss a pile of awesome libraries into the mix and you can do just about anything. Even Microsoft couldn’t deny it, so when they came up with the .NET Framework, they built up a bunch of .NET classes to let you avoid having to reinvent the wheel. “See?” they said. “Who needs Perl and Java and Python and PHP? You have .NET now! Feel the thunder!”

Great, except that The Thunder locks you into MSThunder(tm) whenever it can. I’ve been researching image formats for an hour, looking for one native .NET library that can save an image as a vector graphics file not encoded into an opaque, binary format. If you know Microsoft, you know I haven’t had much luck. There are some n ice formats out there that can handle this, of course. Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and Vector Markup Language (VML) are two I’d like to use, but no such luck. At least not until .NET 3.5, which my company will not move to so I can do a useful diff on two printed reports for an test automation.

What I am given are Windows Metafile Format (wmf) and Extended Metafile Format (emf), both encoded in shockingly opaque binary. I’d like to use them. I would. It’s a native format, and while I don’t like Windows native formats, I’m lazy. But both formats are big lumps of unreadable junk. Was an open format such a threat to Microsoft’s vast image format hegemony that they had to save it in a useless format? Because we all know what an industry standard the Windows Metafile Format is.

This is something that should be easy. This is a problem that should be solved. It’s not. And if it were any other development comminity, someone else would have solved it and released the library under an open license. Only no one does that for .NET, for a bunch of reasons stemming from crap like Microsoft’s unusable binary file formats. Microsoft won’t play nice with anyone, so no one plays nice with them. If I want a library for .NET to save in SVG or VML, I’ll have to pay for it. All because Microsoft is trying to win a war that shouldn’t be fought, and producing junk development tools that lock you into their badly thought-out framework.

I’m sure there’s a way of doing this, and it’s probably not as hard as I think it is. But this is the kind of junk that makes programming no fun. And just like the other programmers out there, whatever interst I’d have in solving this problem and releasing it to the community is killed by Microsoft’s general attitude.

Screw it. I’m going to try again on Monday.

I used to view poetry and prose as literary forms on opposite ends of some imagined spectrum. At one end, the Severely Poetic end, were the kinds of experimental, dissociated poems I couldn’t understand. The literary equivalent of a concert using only the sound of dripping water and squealing brakes. At the other end was Utilitarian Prose, like much of what gets written on blogs such and mine. All content, little to no concern for form. Beside each of these extremes I imagined popular poetry and popular literary prose. The poetry beautiful, perhaps, but built of words for their own sake. The prose subservient to the story it was used to tell. On this continuum I would place the writers I knew. ee cummings close to the Severely Poetic, David Eddings stuck within the confines of Utilitarian Prose, Guy Gavriel Kay a crossover artist, living in both worlds at once.

This spectrum was bullshit, but not bullshit entirely of my creation. The world of modern literature adheres largely to some version of this spectrum. Prose and poetry are separate entities, both built of words but using those words to different ends. One man can write in both styles, but not at once. Mixing styles may be possible, but results in prose that is poetic but is still prose. It’s a perceptual divide that wasn’t built entirely by one group, nor was it built suddenly. In fact, I think writers may be most to blame.

For much of history, there was no real difference between poetry and prose. At least, not when it came to fiction. Nearly every great work of ancient fiction was written in one meter or another. Most religious works were metered as well, including sizable chunks of the Bible. I’m no linguistic historian, but I think it’s safe to say this is due to storytelling’s origins as an oral form. The spoken word always works best when there’s a rhythm and consistent phrasing to it, and that’s basically meter. Prose as we know it was more often used for non-fiction, where the effect of meter and phrasing wasn’t a factor and where an oral tradition wasn’t as strong. In other words, the intended effect dictated the style, not the content itself.

There’s a trend in an art form to define itself more and more fully. When an art form begins, it often happens subconsciously, as an expression of the time and culture and intended audience and available materials. They don’t start off trying to be a specific form of art. They just start off trying to have a different effect than the other forms out there. It’s not until later that names and definitions get applied. Once the setting of boundaries begins, the rules and regulations become more important than the effect of the art. To be classical music is to use a specific kind of phrase variation. To be ballet is to adhere to certain postures and movements.

After a while, the lines on the chalkboard become the art form, and the everyone - artists included - accept them as fact. That style starts to become inbred, producing no important new works because that would require something crossing one of those lines. After a while, artists start producing a form only for other artists of that form. Then it dies. Classical music is a historical artifact to be appreciated but not reproduced. The same can be said for most forms of Opera, ballet and Gregorian chant. I fear it’s happening to poetry.

Through self infliction and the market forces of the publishing industry, poetry has become an art form separate from others. Poetry isn’t a way of telling stories or delivering a message, but a funny collection of short lines and (sometimes) rhyming words. The part in people that respond to verse has been usurped by popular music, leaving the broader form of poetry out in the cold. Poets write for other poets. I know, because I had this opinion myself, engaging in discussions of the perils of free verse poetry and pointless abstraction, missing the more important point that meter and structure carries a power other forms don’t. Poetry isn’t a point on a spectrum of literary styles. There is no spectrum in the first place.

The art of using words is too complicated to be restricted by simple styles. Styles are important. They’re a kind of cognitive contract between writer and reader, giving them a hint as to what they’re in for. Taken too far, though, and they lead to someone sitting in a classroom bemoaning poetry and wanting to just read another book, never noticing that the two are cut from the same cloth. They lead to me.

If art has a point, it’s found within the effect it has on its audience. That’s what matters. The effect. All of the stylistic choices we make are an expression of our emotional state or our opinions, fashioned in the hope of making someone else feel what we feel. I write prose because it’s a form I know how to manipulate. It’s a style I can use to a predictable effect. That’s as far as I should take it. It’s not prose vs. poetry. That’s simplifying something whose beauty is in its complexity. It’s time to challenge that enforced simplicity before we marginalize an important style of writing.

I’ve probably gone off the rails a few times in this one, making broad statements that don’t hold up. Fire back if I’m wrong. I’m just rolling this one around right now, trying to see where it leads me. That’s bound to lead down some dead ends.

Television gets a bad rap. I can’t say its reputation for superficial stories and sensationalistic plotting is undeserved, either. The problem with television is systemic; television exists to sell ad space, which means the shows broadcast have to be good at keeping viewers in their seats for as long as possible. At best, viewers who turn on a channel should keep watching that channel from show to show. The best way of keeping viewers in their seats is not to present them with challenging art. It’s to put them into a trance. Flip through the dials and you’ll find that most television are carefully crafted to engage just enough of your brain to keep you watching, and no more.

The bad guy in television is not the medium itself, but the economic interests that fund it. Great television is possible, just not regularly profitable. Great art forces its viewers to think. Great art may bother people enough not to watch it. Great art may even cause its supporters to turn off the television when it’s done to give them some space. To let them meditate on what they’ve just seen. Meditation with the television off does not sell Clorox.

Every so often, a great show slips is way onto a fall schedule. Most of the time, it gets canceled before it gets a full season. A lucky few make it beyond that, either due to great ratings or that rarest of factors: a networking executive who appreciates art and is willing to take a hit in the wallet for the boost it gives to the image of his or her network. Homicide: Life on the Street stayed on the second way, lasting seven years despite lackluster ratings.

The West Wing survived the first way. It got great ratings, despite its often challenging subject matter. It did so because it cloaked its ambitions in humor, great direction and compelling characters. Despite all of this, though, the challenging part of the equation eventually got its creator and lead writer, Aaron Sorkin, fired. With him went his co-producer and best director, Thomas Schlamme. The thing with challenging art is that it’s as much of a challenge to create as it is to absorb; Sorkin’s show had budget and deadline problems that became more important to the network than the fact that they were producing one of the best shows on television. After all, the point was to sell ad space. A brain-dead show with the same ratings as a good show made just as much money. Why bother to let a good show be expensive and late when you can make more money by making it cheaper and less good?

What you lose when you sacrifice quality for dollars is the chance to get an episode of television like “Two Cathedrals.” The West Wing was, for all of Sorkin’s tenure as producer, an expertly written show. Sorkin’s dialog was consistently top notch, and the regular use of steadicam “walk and talks” kept things moving even when you had scenes whose sole purpose was to educate on the obscure political topic du jour. The show was also well plotted as a rule, mixing season long arcs with multi-episode and stand-alone stories in such a way that a newcomer has a lot to enjoy while they get up to speed. In fact, I came in mid-season two and, despite not knowing much of anything about the characters who earlier plots, was stuck in my seat nonetheless. What I’m getting at is that it was all really, really good. It was so good that it’s easy to misjudge just how good “Two Cathedrals” really is. It might look like just an exceptional episode of The West Wing. It’s not. It’s one of the best hours of drama ever filmed.

The West Wing followed the presidency of Jed Bartlet. It picked up during his first year as President, introducing us to his staff and the daily problems they faced. In early season 1, something was revealed that would fuel much of the later drama of the series. Bartlet had Multiple Sclerosis and had kept it secret during his campaign. When we learn of it, we also learn that only 14 people have been told. His doctors, his family, and the highest ranking members of his cabinet. For a long time, little attention is given to Bartlet’s MS. It’s relapsing remitting, meaning between attacks he’s fine, and his attacks are rare.

The MS poses a problem, though. When it comes time to reveal it to the public, will they be able to accept it? Were laws broken when it was not disclosed? Will Bartlet run again, despite his own fear and a promise to his wife not to seek reelection? And can he be expected to make this decision when his long time friend and assistant Mrs. Landingham dies just days before he must announce?

“Two Cathedrals” is a dense 42 minutes, and for most of it we’re with Bartlet. While he wants to run again, feels that his work his unfinished, doubts plague him. He’s worried about what this revelation will do to his family and to his staff. He’s worried that the public might not accept his reluctance to disclose a personal health problem. And he’s worried that, even if he does seek reelection, that he might lose. If he doesn’t run, at least his Vice President Hoynes has a shot at winning. And through all of it, Barlett remembers his first meetings with Mrs. Landingham when she is brought in as a secretary at his high school. And he remembers the way she challenged him then.

Two scenes stand out. The first follows Mrs. Landingham’s funeral. Bartlet orders the National Cathedral cleared so he can take a moment alone. Then he turns to the alter and begins an angered speech to God, mixing Latin with his own words. Bartlet is a religious man. He once considered going into the catholic seminary before meeting the woman who would become his wife. Bartlet’s anger at God isn’t borne of a weak, shattered faith, but of a man who’s conviction has left him confused and bitter. Gratias tibi ago, Domine (Thank you, Lord), he says, cursing the will of God that took Mrs. Landingham in an accident on the very day she bought her first new car. Haec credam a deo pio, a deo justo, a deo scito (Am I to believe these things from a righteous God, a just God, a wise God), he asks. Have the things he’d done for people in his country not been enough? Has he not been a good father? Was the assassination attempt just a year before that almost killed a staff member just a warning shot? Furious, he calls God a feckless thug. Then, remembering his father admonishing him for smoking in the cathedral at his school, Bartlet lights a cigarette, takes one pull and stomps it out on the floor. “You get Hoynes,” he says, and leaves.

The second scene takes place hours later, just before he’s due to announce whether he’ll be running for president again. He has a press conference and one of the reporters is bound to ask the question. To make it easier for him, the press secretary tells him to call on a health reporter for his first question, allowing him to answer a different question with some follow-ups, giving him time to get comfortable. Then he’s left alone in the Oval Office to think.

A freak tropical storm is battering Washington, and the door leading outside blows open due to a bad hinge. The storm blows wind and rain into the office. Bartlet shouts for Mrs. Landingham to close it. As he realizes she’s never going to be there again, Bartlet imagines her there. And, as goofy and cliched as it sounds, begins a moving conversation with the vision of his old friend that puts him back on track. “God doesn’t cause car wrecks and you know it,” she says, “Stop using me as an excuse.” They begin to talk about the problems still left to solve, about the things Bartlet is still passionate about. Then she accuses him of something she had accused him of as a child.

“You know, if you don’t want to run again, I respect that. But if you don’t run because you think it’s gonna be too hard or you think you’re gonna lose, well, God, Jed, I don’t even want to know you.”

The conversation ends, and Bartlet walks out into the storm, letting the rain and wind batter him. It’s time to go to the press conference. In two scenes, neither lasting more than 5 minutes, Sorkin gives us the full progression of Bartlet’s doubt and fears without cheapening anything. The speech in the cathedral, I think, should sound familiar to anyone of faith who’s had to face trials that seem to refute their beliefs. And Bartlet’s impassioned conversation with a memory of his friend reminds him and us of how difficult it can be to separate out the good reasons for not doing something from the fear and doubt that usually hangs us up. There’s not a bad moment of writing in the episode, but those scenes are as good as anything I’ve ever seen scripted.

One last thing, to end this article and the episode. In one of his flashbacks, as Mrs. Landingham tries to convince him to help increase the wages of the women at the school, Bartlet puts his hands into his pockets, looks away and smiles. Mrs. Landingham knows the sign. He’s made his decision and he’s going to do it.

When he arrives at the press conference, he takes the stage and looks at the health reporter he can call on first to give himself some breathing room. He doesn’t call on him. The first question comes: “Are you going to run for a second term?” Bartlet puts his hands in his pocket, looks away and smiles. The episode, and the season, comes to a close.

That’s what they call a home run, folks.

Whoever decided that a realistic economics system is a vital component of a fun game, please dismiss yourself from the industry immediately. We’re stuck with your legacy, but at least you won’t be around to make things any worse.

I’m not just talking about video games, though it’s worse there than anywhere else. Any kind of game. Role playing games. Board games. LARPs. MMORPGs. If there’s a FPS out there with an economic system, I’ll bust some skulls, I swear. The curse of Economics affects all gaming, dragging otherwise fun games into the bean counting muck.

Before I go any further with this argument, let me lay out some justification. Think back to college, if you went. If you had to list your 10 least favorite classes, would Economics be on the list? Unless you were pre-med or pre-law, my guess is the answer is yes. If not, I still doubt you enjoyed the class much, and probably couldn’t tell me anything useful you got from it.

Ok, I’ll admit. An economics system is a necessary evil. Unless you’re making a total platformer like Super Mario Bros., where Item Acquisition is controlled by which level you happen to be on, you’re going to need some way of keeping players from getting everything at once. I’m not arguing against economic systems in game.

I’m just saying they aren’t any fun.

No one programs because they want to handle memory management. No one becomes a carpenter because they like to sand things. And no one plays a game to balance their checkbook.

Many games require an economic model. Some very realistic strategy games demand an extremely nuanced economic model. In fact, realistic strategy games may be somewhat exempt from this arguement. They’re a different beast.

Anyway, as I said earlier, you’re going to need one for many of the types of games you want to design. The trick is recognizing that it’s there to make the game work and is not a Feature of your game. Or rather, it’s only a feature of your game if it does its job without requiring your players to think more about the in game economy than they are about the, well…gameplay.

Two examples. Both Role Playing related. The first is not from a computer game at all, but from a LARP. Live Action Role Playing. I have a soft spot for LARPing, and due to that soft spot end up playing at this LARP called OGRE. I have a number of issues with their game system, but we’re talking about economic systems. OGRE is obsessed with creating an “in-game economy.” Unfortunately, as in most LARPs, the materials available in-game to cobble an economy out of are limited. Food and shelter are out, because you have to give your players shelter and they’ll just bring their own food if they have to. Same goes for clothes, since a bunch of naked people at a camp will do something other than LARP. So what can you do? What is your in-game money supposed to buy?

Depending on the system, lots of things. Things like spell scrolls, potions and other powerful items can be sold in-game easily. Also, while LARPers bring their own foam weapons, you can restrict the player’s use of those weapons by saying they need an in-game tag to make them “real” weapons. This way, you can at least increase the power of weapons by selling better tags. Given proper availability of money and items, you can nicely control the flow of power through the game using your economy. Great.

Then things go off the rails. In its desire for the dreaded realistic economy, OGRE starts making a lot of common mistakes. First, it doesn’t put much money into the game. Second, it set up an economy where everything costs more than you can reasonably pull in. A meal in the inn, if you want hot food, costs you 3 coins. Figure 4 meals in a weekend, and that a new player starts with 10 coins and you start to see the problem. Third, purchasable items rarely come into the game. Most items are only made by players (remember, it’s an “in-game economy”), and those players can only make items at the start of an event, because it’s more realistic that it would take time to make a sword. So if you don’t know who makes things, or you happen to use a weapon no one made before the game started, you can’t buy it even if you have the money. Fourth, weapons degrade over time, becoming unusable after a certain number of events, and weapons can be destroyed in-game using spells that cost less to use than a weapon costs to make. Also, many characters only have a single weapon they can use in combat, so having no weapon means you sit out every battle.

That this all adds up to is an economy so realistic that you can’t afford anything, and even when you can, you can’t find what you want to buy. Would the intention of some kind of in-game economy have made the game more fun if it was done right? Yes. Absolutely. But did anyone come to LARP to fret over whether they could afford to purchase a sword so their character would be able to do something that weekend? Did they pay real money they earned in the real economy to sit around doing nothing because no one has a spear tag?

On the other side of the same problem is World of Warcraft. In WoW, they wanted to have the same sort of in-game economy that ORGE went for. In game money is used to buy things, and the best things come from other players, allowing money to flow from one player to another for things. Or, better yet, for people to trade their respective skills for things from each other. WoW, as it was made by seasoned game designers, doesn’t make the beginner mistakes OGRE does. They make different mistakes that are just as bad.

Everything in WoW costs lots and lots of money. Just like in OGRE, weapons degrade and can fall apart. WoW lets you pay NPC smiths to repair your items, but if you die a lot it can get expensive, since death degrades your weapons (a realistic touch, no?). New weapons can break the bank. Even more expensive is the cost of training character skills. And let’s not even talk about the cost of player-made items or player-found items being sold at the Auction House.

The casual player is lucky if he can afford anything beyond base equipment. After spending hours getting to a new level, it’s disheartening to learn you must spend more hours getting the money to train the skills that gaining a new level only made available for purchase. Getting cool stuff in WoW means either finding it yourself (tedious), making it yourself (tedious and expensive) or having a friend who did one of the above two things feeling sorry for you and giving it to you.

How do you get money in WoW? Grinding. Spending hours killing stupid creatures, picking up their Cracked Horns or Slimy Eyeballs and selling them to NPC merchants. So basically, you get home from your real job to work for a couple of hours in the WoW spider-mines so you can afford to buy a new sword. You know what, Blizzard? I’m sure the reason people play your game is to simulate the crushing tedium of their real jobs, fancied up by letting the character be a Night Elf while they do it.

No one plays a game for an in-game economy. No one. Even strategy games that require them to be realistic aren’t played for the economies. They’re played for letting the player Pretend To Be A General. The game is creating a fantasy world for the player, and no one’s fantasy is to come home and be an accountant. Especially real accountants.

In game economies, at least the monetary side of them, should be invisible to the player. Look at Civilization, where the economy came down to Gold Coin, Books and Luxuries. The numbers of them didn’t even matter; as long as there was a positive number next to them in the world screen, you were safe. I didn’t even know what the Luxuries things were for years, and I was able to play the game. The economic model was part of Civilization. It wasn’t what made it fun.

An in-game economy should be a few things. It should be simple enough that the player never feels like they’re managing their bank account, and it should trade in an abstraction of money that’s easy to understand at a glance. It needs to be there to support the game and give the sense of a world that actually works without being as complicated as stock speculation.

It needs to be something else, too. See, where the bad in-game economies fail is that they revolve around purchasing the essentials. Food, weapons, healing. You earn money to spend them on things you need to play the game. You spend your entire time in game earning money just so you can keep playing the game. That’s what you do in life. When I hear “realistic in-game economy”, that’s code for “make you count pennies to buy food.” When players earn money, it shouldn’t be for essentials like weapons and skills.

It should be for a Batcave. Or a sidekick. Or an airship. The death of a game is when it asks you to simulate the parts of your life you hate. An in-game economy should assume the minutia of money management is going fine and let you spend that Gold Coin on something you’ll feel cool for having. A healthy in-game economy, at least in a multi-player game, isn’t fueled by abstract money going from person to person. It’s an economy of prestige. It’s someone seeing a character with an airship and joining his crew because someone who has an airship is just that cool. It’s item creation that requires more skill than time or currency, allowing people to trade something they made for something someone else made.

Economics isn’t fun. Community is. Don’t confuse the former for the latter.