That Passed The Time

Time for a good ol' Friday Grab Bag and for once there's no need to scrabble around for something to fill it because I had the foresight to bookmark a few possibles as I came across them. These are the odd news items, the kind of things I'd most likely share on social media, if I was on social media. 

I'm not, am I? No, didn't think so.

Waiting For Keanu

First up, Keanu Reeves. Everyone loves Keanu now, not like in the 90s, when he was the butt of so many jokes. I always liked him. I have a picture of him on my wall not five feet from where I'm sitting. 

Okay, not a picture specifically of him. I'm not saying I have a shrine or anything. It's a movie poster for My Own Private Idaho that I probably lifted from the waste bins outside a video store, back when there were video stores. I don't actually remember where or how I got it but I've had it for about thirty years.

I saw My Own Private Idaho at the cinema. I used to go to see movies at the cinema back then quite a lot. I went to see it for two reasons. Three, if you count River Phoenix. 

The first was Keanu, of course. The second was the director, Gus van Sant. He directed one of my all-time favorite movies, Drugstore Cowboy. I'm pretty sure I had the poster for that too. I wonder what happened to it?

I used to be in the habit of quoting from Drugstore Cowboy, particularly "Goddam hat on the bed", which I would say whenever something was where I didn't want it to be. It's such a great film. I've seen it several times. I ought to watch it again.

I've only seen My Own Private Idaho once and I don't remember a whole lot about it except that River Phoenix has narcolepsy and goes to sleep in the middle of the road and that the whole movie is about as slow as it could possibly be and still qualify as a moving picture. 

What I do know, though, is that remembering even a little about My Own Private Idaho makes a tiny bit of  sense of the news that Keanu and his Bill and Ted co-star Alex Winter are going to be playing Vladimir and Estragon in a Broadway production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot sometime late next year. Without that it would make no sense at all.

Waiting for Godot is my favorite stage play, which is something like saying Ornette Coleman is my favorite jazz artist - at the same time pretentious but born mostly out of ignorance. It's not like I go to the theater a lot but I do own a record by Ornette Coleman and I did direct a production of Waiting for Godot when I was at school, so at least I'm not just picking supposedly cool names out of the air.

My version of Godot was generally reckoned to be quite decent for a bunch of teenagers, if surprisingly cheery, given the downbeat subject matter. That was in the 1970s. Now, of course, everyone is happy to treat Godot as a black comedy so I like to think I was ahead of my time. 

I would love to see what Keanu and Alex do with the existentialist classic. I hope something from it turns up online.

In a way, I find it more surprising the play is going to be on Broadway at all than that it's going to star Bill and Ted. Thinking about it, I guess Bill and Ted are a bit like an upbeat, optimistic version of Estragon and Vladimir, which I suppose might be what gave someone the idea in the first place. I wonder who they'll get to play Pozzo and Lucky? 

Rock and Roll 2D6

While we're on the subject of hats, did I ever mention that Lita Ford from the Runaways once took my beret and wore it for a whole song? I know damn well I did! It's one of my few rock 'n' roll anecdotes, along with Rat Scabies giving my band a crash cymbal he most likely pinched from the support band's kit and me going deaf for three days from sitting inside the bass cabinet for a whole number by Satan's Rats.

I'm pretty sure it was Lita Ford, anyway. I don't think it was Cherie Curry or Joan Jett, although I guess it could have been. It was all a very long time ago...

I'm certain it wasn't Jackie Fox, the bass player, who probably counted as "the quiet one" back then. With good reason as it turned out. Forty-five years later, Jackie's back but not with a band. This time it's with a board game because it turns out the ex-bassist is a big-time board gamer now.

The game in question is called Rock Hard: 1977 and Jackie explains both how it came about and how it plays in a long and detailed Designer Diary for BoardGameGeek News. The gist is that the game draws on Jackie's own experience as one of the Runaways to create her dream game with "the strategy of a good Euro; the "fun" factor of an American-style game; true integration of theme and mechanisms; quick turns even at full-player count." 

I imagine someone reading this knows what that means. I just know it's a game about being in a rock and roll band, made by someone who really was and you don't get many of those.

I can't tell you how much I want Tobold to get Rock Hard: 1977 and review it. Unfortunately, I expect it's more likely the game will turn up in our Game Room at work than that Tobold will get his game group to try it. If it does, I might buy it myself. I don't usually play board games but I'd make an exception for this one.

The Real Genshin Impact

Away from the news for a moment, back in Blaugust Krikket was wondering why mobile games couldn't get respect. Naithin opined it might be because most of them didn't deserve it. I chipped in to ask why no-one was talking about Genshin Impact. Then this appeared at GamesIndustry.biz. 

To save you reading the whole thing, the thrust of the argument is that Genshin Impact changed the whole mobile game market by proving it wasn't just possible but insanely profitable to develop titles for mobile that had the aesthetic and technical standards expected of so-called AAA PC and console titles.

Producers MiHoYo went on to demonstrate it wasn't a fluke by releasing a similarly high-quality, successful follow-up, Honkai Star Rail and then following that with the game Mailvaltar's playing and making me wish I was, Zenless Zone Zero. And all within a handful of years, thereby also casting a huge shadow over the increasingly unsustainable development times for Western games.

The main reason I'm not playing ZZZ is because I'm playing Genshin wannabe Wuthering Waves instead - or I would be, if I wasn't spending all my time in Once Human, currently available on PC but coming very soon to a mobile phone near you - assuming you have one that'll run it. Again, these are all top-quality, very popular games that seem to be taking a fraction of the development time of any comparable Western release. Not there are many of those...

All of these games are both F2P and Mobile, two tags treated by many PC gamers as negative signifiers. Is it a case of, as Naithin put it, respect the best, forget the rest  Or, as Daniel Camilo of GamesIndustry would have it "more and more gamers... left wondering why they should pay a premium for games, when titles such as Genshin Impact, Zenless Zone Zero and soon-to-release NTE are free."?

NTE, by the way, is the ineffably-named Neverness To Everness, a "supernatural open world" game to be published by Perfect World for PC, Mobile and console. I'd tell you more but the website is both super-spiffy and not at all informative. 

It looks fantastic, though. I've pre-registered, of course. All these games are better than anything else I'm seeing right now and they're free. Why wouldn't I? Why wouldn't you?

Here She Comes Now

Charli XCX (For it is she...) said something very strange the other day: "I’m just so deep in this, I can’t see outside of ‘brat’, but it’s funny. I kind of want to make a Lou Reed record, to be honest. That would definitely be a pretty big swing. Uh, hell yeah, it would!

Except what even does it mean? What is "a Lou Reed record?" anyway? I have most of them and I couldn't tell you. 

I'm guessing Charli doesn't plan on releasing her own version of Metal Machine Music, although it might go down better in the clubs than a Charlified Sally Can't Dance. And let's not even talk about a Charli XCX take on Berlin...

I had to dig into this a bit deeper, by which I mean I googled it, and it turns out Charli has form when it comes to Lou. He was reportedly her top artist on Spotify this year (Whatever that means.) and she's apparently mentioned him frequently as an inspiration. If I could love her more, I would.

At this point you could be forgiven for thinking I was leading up to something by either Charli or Lou but oh, no! That would be far too obvious!

This week, Clairo released a really excellent cover of Lana del Rey's magnificent Brooklyn Baby, one of my favorite songs of all time. It's such a great cover I'm not about to throw it away at the end of a grab-bag post (Although I have linked it if you can't wait for it to turn up here sometime later.) so it's very lucky that YouTube, seeing I was going down that road, popped up an alternative for me to use instead.

If there's anyone hotter than Charli this brat summer, it can only be Chappell Roan. She's breaking crowd records at Lollapalooza but just a year ago, when I first discovered her (Yeah, I'm like Columbus that way - shit hot at finding things that are already there...) she was playing 600 seaters, doing covers with one person accompanying her on acoustic guitar. 

And guess what one of the songs she covered was? Yep. Brooklyn Baby.

Still not sure how that connects with Charli and her Lou Reed fantasies?

"Well, my boyfriend's in a band - He plays guitar while I sing Lou Reed".

That's close enough for me!