One of my favorite computer games is Lux Delux. If you've never heard of it, it's essentially the boardgame Risk. You can play the classic set-up:
a variation of the classic set-up:
or any one of the hundreds of user-created maps.
The Vietnam War
The Punic Wars.
I'm not here to simply promote the game; I'm here to explore / reveal the depths of madness I plumb while playing it. It's not enough to merely play videogames, after all; one must provide background and context and sometimes orchestrate the plot twists for one's self.
Take this, for example:
I spent countless hours playing Defender back in the 80s. It's a pretty simple concept, so I liked to add details. Each time I died, I'd pretend the next life was the first guy's brother, or old buddy, volunteering for the mission in a spirit of payback. Or if I kept failing to kill a particular enemy on my sorties, I'd pretend he was the Red Baron of the bunch, or, even better, a former colleague who defected to the other side. This time, it's personal.
I'm sure normal people don't have any of the above (or the below) going on while playing, but in the immortal words of Danny DeVito's character from Twins, "Do I look normal to you?" This sort of stuff is half the fun of videogames to me. (I talked a little about this in my blog for Stephen King's and Stewart O'Nan's Faithful re: Blubbs Canasta, the best and longest-lived Cuban-defector-near-giant-pitcher to ever take the virtual mound.)
A few weeks back, I found I was really drawing out my games. If I was having trouble with one particular computer opponent, it wasn't enough to win; I had to surround him and pummel him, invent insurrections and false flags, etc.
But why waste any further time when I can show you? Always willing to draw back the curtain on the Dog Star Omnibus mental bullpen, I present to you:
Canada: The Winnipeg Protocol
First, I love Canada. For reasons I never understand, it's popular (though perhaps not as popular as it once was, which is a good thing) for Americans to make fun of Canadians. Probably popular in the other direction, as well. Anyway, none of this is in that spirit. Like many American policymakers of the 19th (and probably 20th) century, I just like the idea of conquering Canada.
Though when I do need some extra incentive, I pretend I'm attacking armies of Caillous... and crushing them.
Second, I'm not actually a bloodthirsty tyrant, but I enjoy playing the role when playing Lux. Die, Mutant Scum.
Third, I don't always name (or screencap) the individual games I'm playing, lest you think I'm more of a lunatic than I actually am. They're derived from whatever starting point I'm allotted. I like to let the computer randomly assign armies at the beginning of each game and then decide on a path and premise from there.
For today's class, that was Winnipeg. Here's how things looked after the first round.
What happened here was they started me (General Blue) off with Winnipeg and a couple of surrounding towns, so I just consolidated that into the image above. Unless otherwise noted, all of these images are what my screen looked like at the end of each turn.
Round Two:
Master of NW Ontario and the Lower Prairie!
I like to avoid a two-front war, but sometimes, history forces these things upon us.
Round Three:
I invaded Flin Flon (that's its real name; good for Canada, naming a city after a science fiction character) and didn't do a very good job of it. Now my upper left flank is dangerously exposed. I sack the commander in charge of this operation and replace him with a loyal subordinate known for his no-nonsense approach to fortifications. General Black's taking Iqaluit from me will not go unpunished, but I'll table it for now.
Between Rounds Three and Four, I get to cash in my cards:
Which leads to:
Edmonton falls! And Toronto is getting nervous. Technically, the invasion of Edmonton is called an "unlawful widening of the war" by the United Nations, but they just don't know the facts on the ground, man. (Plus, this nets me vast oil resources. This has no correlation to gameplay; I don't get anything but a couple of extra armies at the beginning of my turn for holding Edmonton. But in my imagination, I see my tanks guarding thousands of barrels and a giant refinery.)
And Toronto's getting nervous. Ex-cel-lent.
Round Five:
Not much to see here. A nominal expansion out of Flin Flon and strengthening my borders. Onto Round Six:
Uh-oh. My "Niagara Offensive" was a failure. Now Toronto knows I've designs on their city. (I tell the world I'm only responding to its citizens calls for a crack-free mayor.) I need to get my card, though, so looks like I'm going for the Upper Prairie.
End of turn. Wasn't able to completely take the Prairie, but I moved some armies into Ontario.
Between Rounds Six and Seven, another card cash-in:
Ergo:
Ruler of All the Prairie! Now I can play defense in the west and start attacking the East. In a reversal of Manifest Destiny, I have my propaganda ministers start preaching "Our Glorious March to the Atlantic."
Round Eight: I take Toronto and move chemical weapons into Polar Bear Park.
Round Nine: "Everyone knows the people of Quebec cry for liberation from their French-speaking oppressors."
Round Ten: My Atlantic campaign is bogged down in the great mutiny of 2013. The highways are littered with the crucifixions of its ringleaders. This cost me valuable time. So... say your prayers, Yellowknife; I'm comin' at ya, live, like Tesla. Using the extra armies from my third card cash-in:
My spies tell me the Western Inuit (here represented by General Orange) have no love for Generals Black, Red, or Green. I promise to restore them to their former positions if they allow me to absorb them into my flank. They agree. So:
Of course, whenever you knock out one of the other Generals, you get their cards.
Time to avenge myself on General Black!
And everyone else on the Atlantic seaboard. In exchange for promises of tribute and fealty, I let the Inuit roam freely in their native lands.
Next Round: I feign overtures of peace with Western Canada while fortifying key chokepoints:
But wait! This is interesting:
Generals Red and White attempt to re-take Edmonton! My garrison is reduced to a mere two armies. But they hold the line. This provides me with the perfect excuse to resume hostilities.
So, I attack Dawson City in the Yukon in Operation... Pacey Witter.
It's all over but the crying, Generals Red and White...
BEHOLD A GOD WHO BLEEDS!
As for you, General Green: you don't die...
Time to spread my troops through the provinces, to (ahem) "keep the streets safe."
This is where the game can continue indefinitely if I just want to keep inventing scenarios for myself. (Food riots in Vancouver? More troops. Earthquake relief in Nova Scotia? More troops. Rumors of a terrorist attack in Ottawa. God bless our first responders. J-Lo concert out of control in Manitoba. Assassinate J-lo. Etc.)
But finally, enough of this!
I probably don't need to tell you how this went.
One of the most fun features of Lux Delux is that you can write your own victory messages. Here's a sampling of some of the Attaboys I give myself once I win:
Extra points if you can name the movie. (Without googling. You're on your honor.)
Ditto for this one.
This one is probably my favorite. It's meant to be taken as a badly-translated fortune cookie message of some kind, not like a cry for help or anything.
There are more, but I'll spare you. (Two of them are just lyrics from Motley Crue's "Kickstart My Heart." Whoah! YEAH!)
This was likely a very tedious blog to read, and I don't blame you if you skipped it. At least I have answered the question "Say, what would a blog about Lux Delux look like?" for myself, freeing up space and time for other pursuits.
In the 80s hard rock world, people telling you how to rock or even worse maneuvering to obstruct your access to rock were the worst people in the world. This message was delivered over and over again. In the world of the future imagined in Quiet Riot's "The Wild and the Young" video, the first single from the band's third * album QR III, this is taken to the logical extreme: a totalitarian regime centered entirely around the idea of depriving the population of rock and brutally oppressing any who defy this decree.
* Technically, they had a few albums before what is commonly known as their first, but there's no need to get into all that.
Here we see people's axes being confiscated and thrown in the wood guitar chipper.
Oh no! That metal mask is the Quiet Riot mascot! Has he joined the state-sponsored War on Rock?
Never fear:
Frankie (Banali, the drummer) is here. Our man on the inside.
Despite being introduced seconds before as a prisoner being unloaded from one of the armored buses, Frankie is somehow able to pose as one of the guards (above) and lead his band-mates (Kevin Dubrow, Carlos Cavazo, and Chuck Wright) down a sewer and a conveyer belt to an underground storehouse of captured instruments. He gets behind the drums, everyone settles into their rock band roles, and they start rocking out.
The sun never sets! For souls on the run! The wild and the young...
They are watched on the video monitors by very angry women in military uniforms.
Their anthem inspires their fellow rock prisoners to revolt, and fascist thugs soon surround our heroes and train their guns on them.
But wait!
It was just a dream. Or WAS IT?
Wink Martindale reports that Congress has just passed a law requiring all albums to have their lyrics printed on the back cover so parents can know what it is their kids are buying. IS THIS HOW IT STARTS?
This was a common anxiety at this time in hard rock history. Around the same time, Grim Reaper wrote the classic "Rock You To Hell" which asked America "Is this the beginning of the future? No books, no sound, no rock and roll? Don't let other people run your liii-iii-AI-YI-YI-IIIIFE!!" See also:
Or Whitesnake's "Still of the Night," which saw David Coverdale detained at the end by The Rock Police's sister agency. Or Corey Hart's:
One of the odder entries in this sub-genre of 80s Orwellian-themed videos.
Back to "The Wild and the Young." After Kevin wakes up and Wink's pronouncement from the tv, the camera pans to the bus driver:
Oh no! Carrie White Burns in Hell!
The tour bus is driven into a warehouse where, presumably, the anti-rock concentration camp of Kevin Dubrow's nightmare has become a reality.
I'm going to assume you already have this one bookmarked or on a playlist or are probably listening to it right now. What? You don't? You aren't? Here's a link to the video.
Rockers go in, but they don't come out.
At least with their pants.
These last two screencaps really made me chuckle. Presumably they couldn't find many extras who were willing to have their heads shaved. Don't touch the hair, bro. There is a scene where a longhair is strapped to a chair while two shirtless mustached dudes gleefully shorn his locks, but the scene is so poorly lit that screencapping it doesn't really convey it too well:
Likewise, this shot of a gas-masked thug about to beat a rocker in shackles amidst a swirl of escaping steam.
I have no idea who directed this video. I'm charmed by this, actually; it's nice to find out there are some mysteries a Google search cannot instantly solve. It also allows for me to assume this was directed by David Fincher. Or maybe even David Lynch, a prequel (or a sequel) to the bizarre 60 second entry he contributed to the Lumiere film.
It was meant to revive Quiet Riot's fortunes, which had ebbed in the three years since they achieved massive success with Metal Health. But the video (and their makeover from skinny street urchins to poofed-out Edwardian-garbed rock insurrectionists) failed to excite MTV viewers and despite repeated phone calls from your humble narrator to the folks at DIAL-MTV, came and went. QR III was a commercial disappointment, and Kevin Dubrow was fired shortly thereafter.
Attempts to keep the band afloat with a different singer were similarly unsuccessful.
Chuck Klostermann wrote the book, literally,
on this sort of thing, but he gives scant space to Quiet Riot.
Understandably, I guess, but I never got the memo. I went on listening to Quiet Riot throughout the 80s, blissfully unaware of their woes, insulated in my bubble of Circus, Blast, and Hit Parader magazines.
Their stay at the top of the McPyramid of Absolute Rock lasted only from when I first heard "Bang Your Head" to when I first heard Pyromania.
I remember being surprised that no one else on the bus had memorized all the words to Condition Critical, their follow-up to Metal Health, over Christmas break.
It's easy to look back on both the video and the song as a rather calculated and formulaic appeal to adolescent allowance money, but "The Wild and the Young" remained an anthem of my teenage years for far longer than it should have. (It and Bon Jovi's "To The Fire," which was right after it on an old mix tape I had and thus comes to mind whenever I think of it.) And the video, obviously, made quite an incursion into my developing brain.
The allusions to the PMRC throughout the video are a little dated, making it seem like the two ladies in military uniforms are simply generic fuddy-duddies. But they were pointed references to Tipper Gore and the other "Washington Wives," whose campaign to put parental warnings on albums which featured gratuitous allusions to sex (i.e. 98% of "cock rock") and/or violence or drugs (the other 1.5%, with .5% reserved for Iron Maiden's ownership of the "Historical Fiction and Songs about Movies" category) made them Public Enemy Number One for the heavy metal faithful. Motley Crue brazenly changed the lyrics in their cover of "Anarchy in the UK" to include a reference to them ("Is this the PMRC?!" they chant incredulously at song's end) and artists as diverse as Cyndi Lauper, Jello Biafra, Rage Against the Machine, and Frank Zappa all released anti-PRMC material.
The "Parental Advisory" sticker ended up helping any artist or band to whose album it was affixed, and as the 90s turned into the 21st century, this forgotten and shameful chapter in American history was put to rest with the Advent of Britney. While we seem to have been spared the Sex and Rock and Roll Police on every corner, we ironically have less freedom in 2013 than we did in 1986, despite rock and roll's increasingly reductive orgy of sex and death going mainstream. What was shocking for W.A.S.P. to say back then is simply expected of our young pop princesses now.
Still from Nicky Minaj's "Stupid Hoe." Can you imagine Blackie Lawless (i.e. the dude from W.A.S.P. who wrote more than a few of the songs the PMRC was so up in arms about) as a judge on American Idol? The idea is preposterous for a few different reasons, but it would have been unthinkable in the 80s.
Quiet Riot still tours and more power to them. Any fun had at their or this video's expense is certainly at my own, as well; in the 80s, I was as eager to answer the call for the jihad against those who would tell us how to rock as any in my marketing demographic.
Well well well, the end of another blogging project. Parting is bittersweet, my friends.
I guess the meadow beyond the King's Highway was full of stars.
It's
imperfect, of course, and incomplete, even more of course. I'm sure I'll add to it somewhere down the line.
I'm happy enough with setting this as the finish line, though (not counting the DS9 blogs, still to come.) I was unsatisfied with the overviews I'd read or heard, particularly for TOS, whose psychosexual catacombs are criminally unmapped, and set out to create an alterative road map to the Trekverse. But it ended up being a Billy Pilgrim-esque defragmentation of that portion of my mental hard drive related to Star Trek: that house on the hill with many windows and pocket dimensions in the back of the closets.
Forget that house on the hill metaphor: if Trek is the Great Pyramid of Giza, this was akin to Caliph Al-Mamoun-esque
tunneling through its walls and stumbling upon the chamber that leads
to the heart of the mystery. But the mystery remains unsolved, and the
pyramid remains the pyramid. (And hardly anyone remembers Al-Mamoun.)
I'm often puzzled by (and sometimes irritated with, to be honest) the insistence that people get into Star Trek for its rosy
depiction of a future that works for everybody. That's part of it, sure, and
it's certainly a nice part. (And important, as fiction and myth are collective dreaming which leads to
individual action and yadda yadda.)
But so much is made of this that I sometimes feel like its subversive theatricality is undervalued. When it comes to the "family" aspect of Trek, I have to agree with Patrick Stewart, who said of the original draft of Insurrection, "I
think that is sentimental and uninteresting and eventually leads to
space heroes sitting round a campfire singing 'Row Row Row Your Boat.'"
Truth. I don't feel it's uninteresting altogether, mind you, just the over-emphasis.
The Genes, Bennett, Berman, and Abrams Eras represent such different periods in my own life and interaction with the Trekverse, as I'm sure they do for you. How could one feel-good broad stroke cover all of it? For anyone, really? And yet, it is such a common refrain out there and in all the books. (Shatner's Get A Life is practically gushing with this kind of sentiment, and it's not an ironic reflection on the title.)
I don't mean to knock the admirable accessibility and general good nature of Trek; I'm just way more interested in the crazy implications of its intersection with my own life and development, its abundance of interpretations, and its relatively deft handling of complex themes in a pop art environment.
It'll be interesting to read future overviews of Trek by people with no personal memories of growing up with it. A series such as this one, comprised of at least 40% personal memories and associations, will be obsolete in 2071. But just as likely not: the franchise could very well still be kicking at that time and producing new material.
K'plagh.
I'll get another post up with links to all points previous for ease of searching sooner or later.
If I
didn't cover your favorite episode(s), my apologies. Take comfort in the
statistical improbability of our ever being marooned on the same desert
island together; you'll more-than more than likely never have to abide
exclusively by my choices. But if that's how it happens, just remember: the bullets are not real.
As sincerely as I can convey this via the computer screen or mobile device, live long and prosper.
