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All images courtesy of 2K Games

It's difficult to pick a specific moment in Spec Ops: The Line where I first realized it wasn't just another bog-standard, jingoistic military shooter about killing a bunch of Middle-Eastern enemies. Or, rather, it's difficult to pick when I first realized that The Line knew it was another bog-standard, jingoistic military shooter about killing a bunch of Middle-Eastern enemies. The game knew what it was, and it hated itself for it. More than that: it directly questioned the player for daring to enjoy such a game. Late in the game, a loading screen tip sarcastically asks: Do you feel like a hero yet?

Sure, there's the infamous white phosphorous scene where the player, staring through the reflection of playable character Captain Martin Walker, launches white phosphorous shells at former US troops. The deed is performed on a black and white screen, in a homage to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare's "Death From Above" level. But before the dust settles, the player is forced to walk through the devastation they caused; the game rubs your face in it. Of course, beyond the burnt husks of the dead Americans are the equally charred bodied of the exact refugees that Walker thought his violent act would save. The game says to the player, "What? You thought bombing people was really going to resolve things neatly?"

This is the game's turning point. The moment from which there is no turning back for Walker and his team. But it's clear long before this point that something is different about this game. It's in the upside-down American flag and eerie, stretched-out Jimi Hedrix rendition of Star-Spangled Banner on the menu screen. It's in the wounds on Walker's body, obtained in cut-scenes, that persist and multiply throughout the course of the game. It's in the slow-motion headshots that don't feel like celebratory gore so much as being forced to look at what you have done.

Released five years ago, The Line was immediate divisive: a messy, janky, violent game that wears its Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness influences on its sleeve. For some it was a revelation; for others it was just another insincere blockbuster with a thin thematic veneer. At the start of the game, Captain Walker and his two subordinates are on their way to the ruins of Dubai on a reconnaissance mission. Six months earlier, an entire US Battalion went AWOL after the city was destroyed by a sandstorm-and Walker's team has been sent in to investigate a new radio transmission.

Inevitably, it doesn't take long before the shooting starts. At this point, Walker's team is meant to withdraw and call for backup, but instead they go a bit further to see what is happening. Then they go a bit further to rescue a captive (they fail). They go a bit further to check on something else. Eventually, they've gone too far and 47 refugees are dead at their hands. The squad sees things and, worse, does things that irrevocably changes them. By the end of the game, Walkers's squadmates are dead and he is an utterly broken man. The 'line' that the characters cross isn't a single moral choice but the constant, stubborn refusal to just stop killing people.

The majesty of The Line is in its character development, something completely absent from the majority of videogame stories. We are used to thinking of videogame characters as blank canvases, as mere vehicles for the player's intentions to travel from the start of a game to the end. Over the course of The Line, however, Walker is constantly changing, both mentally and physically. Every decision-especially the decisions he is unaware he is making-has a lasting effect on him. In the face of the horrors he witnesses and enacts, he slowly breaks down. At the start of the game, he is all military precision and calm, telling his squad to 'acquire targets.' By the end of the game, he is bloodied and torn, shouting at his squad to 'kill that fucker.' Voiced by videogame everyman Nolan North, Walker is a character study of the average videogame protagonist coming to terms with the messed up things we players make them do.

One critique levelled at The Line is that it is exactly the type of game it critiques. It preaches that this sort of game is messed up, while putting in no effort to not be this sort of game. To be certain, if you wanted to play a powerfully anti-war videogame, you would be better off playing Unmanned or September 12 or even This War of Mine . To say The Line is trying to be anti-war is to miss the point of what The Line is actually expressing. Not a clear moral message but a nihilistic frustration at its own existence within the blockbuster publisher-studio model. This is a game that hates itself.

By most accounts, the process of making the game was fraught. Publisher 2K wanted to relaunch the obscure PlayStation franchise, throwing German studio Yager at it and, frustrated with the game's progression years later, sent the game's writer Walt Williams over to work on-site full-time. From conversations I've had with different parties, it was a pretty tense relationship between publisher and studio. You can see hints of it in public statements from senior Yager staff that left the studio shortly after completion, such as Corey Davis who bluntly called 2K's insistence of a multiplayer component " a cancerous growth" on the side of the game.

Talking to me for an interview with Unwinnable, Walt Williams explained how they didn't originally set out to make The Line in this cynical, nihilistic manner, but it came from a point of frustration at the genre they were tasked to work with-how military shooters have long depicted warfare as 'fun:'

There was this point where the pain of the product began to show itself within the project. It reached this point where it was like, "Oh, you want to play this kind of game for fun? Fuck you, I'll show you what's fun about this." And it just started to turn. But once we started to analyze that emotion in that sense we were like, well, actually, there is something here. There is something to this that is very real and which should be said.

To call The Line a hypocritical game is thus not incorrect. It is the generic military shooter that 2K wanted (one that, perhaps inevitably, did not sell as well as 2K hoped) whose development was tasked to people deeply critical of just what the military shooter had become. The Line is angry at itself for existing, and angry at the players who want these games to exist. It's a deep-seated conflict that gives the game a sense of personality-of imperfect, conflicted humanity-that so few large commercial video games are allowed to possess.

Ultimately, as Dan Golding put it at the time of the game's release, " The Line is an attack on those of us who uncritically enjoy military shooters." The Line asks us to consider just how messed up these violent actions we regularly, uncritically demand of our playable characters actually are. It doesn't make a clear or simple moral judgement but instead forces us to contemplate just what sort of complex experiences we've commodified for our own entertainment.

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Five Years Later, 'Spec Ops: The Line' Still Hates Military Bullshit

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All images courtesy of 2K Games It's difficult to pick a specific moment in Spec Ops: The Line where I first realized it wasn't just another bog-standard, jingoistic military shooter about killing a bunch of Middle-Eastern enemies.

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Comment on the curation. What is the reasoning behind the curation? (any specific mood: just a chronology of images; shared influences, etc.). Does this curation enhance the audience’s understanding of the art work?

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Is there a shared narrative across the pieces in each specific exhibition?

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In the exhibition you have chosen, can you identify influences within the artwork? (pay attention to style, form, themes, subjects, as well as genre, intertextuality nad genealogy and history of ideas)

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Family Album (2011)

Curation: Shows the before and after of the Soviet Monuments and how they’ve been removed and or changed.

Meaning: Instead of taking photos for the sheer memory, it represents an overview of how family’s change over time. This shows the regions struggle for independence, this was also to record personal family histories and signals the fluid political contexts these societies have survived.

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Curation and Meaning - Team Trial And Error

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Curation and Meaning - Team Trial And Error

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Meaning: It’s a portrait scenery of the native land that was once flooded, and symbolism of cross cultures of technology and ideas

Curation: The symbolism of cross cultures of technology and ideas. Also as an insistent reminder that this is Aboriginal land

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El Gringo 2003 and Ku’ (camp dog) 2010

El Gringo is adogs perspective of being in an outside environment threatened by the outside worldwide orher dogs, Ku’ is a similar perspective of a dogs perspective in the outside world threatened by other dogs and it’s surroundings.

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Common Narrative: The tropical collection is about the richness and uniqueness of the northern region of Queensland, collaborated with different artists for the World War Two tourist market.

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Influences- Richard Bell challenges the preconceived idea of Aboriginal art by creating a large painting with the words “Australian Art Does Not Exist” printed across it.
Culture- Is apart of Aboriginal culture but takes away the traditional “dot paintings” that are often associated with indigenous artwork

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Attrib. To Nambo and Pulka (1860-1900 )

A shield, 3 boomerangs and three clubs are displayed. Displaying objects that belonged to Badtjala husband and wife Nambo and Pulka. They were situated in Fraser Island. The artwork describes the historical duties of the aboriginal couples in the eighteen hundreds. These were hunting equipment and were signs of trust and friendship once given as gifts.

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Curation & Meaning:
"The life Style" Exhibition expressed, from my perspective, the general sense of what it like to be human. Including the development of our choices and ideas

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Illustration by Fumio Obata

Kim Kardashian has been taking selfies since 1984. That was the year she first immortalized her own face in an admiring close-up-round cheeks filling the frame, flash shining in her toddler eyes like a premonition. Some other baby Kardashian wails beside her, unmoved by the photo op, but Kim confronts the camera head-on. Her little mouth curves upward and destiny clicks into place.

That image is the first entry in Selfish, Kim Kardashian West's new book of selfies. To be clear: This book consists entirely of selfies. That's 445 pages of them, arranged chronologically over three decades, a flipbook of thickening makeup and increasingly complicated hairdos. Over time, clubbing nights with Paris Hilton fade into engagement ring snaps; tiny Jenners evolve into leggy teens; one day North pops into the frame, simply the newest cameo in her mother's selfied life. Selfish is an insane project, a document of mind-blowing vanity and deranged perseverance. It's also riveting. I can't recommend it enough.

It's easy to see why the selfie has become a cultural punch line. There's no better emblem of a whole generation's ills as projected by previous generations, no better totem of the self-absorbed screen zombies conjured in Times trend stories with headlines like " My Selfie, Myself" and " For the Love of Being 'Liked.' " And if the selfie has a mascot, it's Kim Kardashian. Not just because she, judging by her output, is never not in the process of photographing herself-but also because the selfie as a medium seems tailor-made for her own diligently cultivated brand.

Unlike the many other gussied-up ingénues who rose through the ranks of reality TV, Kim Kardashian's public image has always been a uniquely nimble balancing act. She manages to project a whole mess of seemingly incompatible traits: wholesome (family values) and scandalous (sex tapes), self-aware (jokes about her own materialism) and oblivious (carrying a Hermès bag painted by her 1-year-old child), highbrow ( Vogue covers) and gauche (photo shoots of her butt). Even before Kanye West helped grease her entry into pop culture's inner sanctum, she'd somehow cemented an image as the most grounded of reality TV's leading ladies, the usual whiff of desperation counterbalanced with more apparent ownership of her song-and-dance.

Photos by Kim Kardashian courtesy Rizzoli.

But if this act can often seem gaudy and tone-deaf, her tackiness has never seemed less like indiscretion and more like a savvy self-differentiator than it does in Selfish. This book, needless to say, does not have grand literary ambitions. It has no literary ambitions at all. It barely has words. The words it does contain are so aggressively repetitive that they feel like a true feat of editorial indifference. "Bikini selfies are my favorite," Kim remarks in one caption. "Bikini selfies are my fave," she later adds. She is not coy with her themes. "The pictures in this book bring back so many memories," she writes. Then: "I love that we have these memories." Also: "These pics bring back so many memories." Not to mention: "I love doing photo shoots and having memories." I've never seen someone make so little effort to be interesting-a banality so confident it feels like a revelation. "I love," she writes at one point, "that I have thousands of pics."

Through her shapeshifting selfies, she records milestones like birthdays and pregnancies and births. She also records lesser milestones like "About to do The George Lopez Show." Some selfies are fascinating for their lack of context, like the picture of Kim in a construction hat captioned only: "I was in Africa in a diamond mine." Some feature perfect comic timing, like the page that includes a photo of Kim behind the wheel of a car and the words, "I took a selfie at a red light while driving. I think that's illegal now."

What makes Selfish so crazily engrossing is the way it breaks down, image by nearly identical image, the precise, self-determined path of Kim Kardashian's rise from socialite to household name-and the way that over the course of hundreds of consecutive selfies, the evolution of her public and private selves gets fully entangled. It's never quite clear whether she is mugging for herself or her husband or her kid or knowingly mugging for us, the consumers of the beautiful Rizzoli art book she always knew she'd produce. Selfish comes to feel almost like a modern parable for the anyone-can-be-famous age. If you have ever entertained the thought that Kardashian selfies were mere judgment lapses, or the idle fruit of late-night boredom, the total intentionality on display in this book is like a punch to the gut. Here is a woman who presciently hoarded thousands of pictures of her own pouty mien, anticipating the day when some publisher would pay her to compile them. Clearly this is someone who has spent her life devising elaborate ways to get herself seen, and it's mesmerizing to see the full arc of her self-actualization so vividly on display.

If there is a supporting character in Selfish, it is makeup. "I can look at any photo of myself and can tell who did my hair and makeup, where I was and who I was with," Kim says. (The requisite "no makeup selfies" she includes feel about as out of place here as a business suit at a drag show.) In 2008, she met Mario Dedivanovic, who would become her lifelong makeup artist, and she captions a photo of his disembodied hands applying lip-liner to her mouth: "After this photo shoot he took me makeup shopping because I loved how I looked and how that made me feel."

This is the source of much of Selfish 's appeal: Yes, it is obsessed with surfaces, and it is bracingly unapologetic about that obsession. Kim doesn't even pretend to view the world as more than a scenic backdrop for her own embellished face. "I don't think I've ever taken as many selfies as I did in Thailand. It's one of the prettiest places I've ever traveled to!" she tells us, posing before a sliver of Thailand mostly obscured by her hair. She makes zero effort to encourage you to like or identify with her; she casually assumes a certain commonality of caste. "Helicopter ride from the Hamptons to the city," she writes, or "This amazing chateau had an entire room that was an aquarium." One highlight is a vignette about the time she put on a green Lanvin dress in a restaurant bathroom during a dinner with Kanye. Why? "There were so many paparazzi that showed up while we were eating. I wanted to change into a dope new look."

The promise of Kanye looms over Selfish long before he arrives, helping to propel the book's nonexistent plot. His first mention is in the caption on a car-backseat selfie from 2011: "I just got this Fendi coat and was in New York. I was in a taxi and took this selfie to actually send to Kanye to see if he liked my new coat. He did!" A Yeezus concert gets captioned #wifelife. There's also a mirror pic, sexily captioned "Meet me in the bathroom..." Kim preens while Kanye gives the camera the dead-eyed Kanye stare. It's a selfie that perfectly captures one of the main reasons they make such a compelling pair: the way their egos seem like exact inverses of each other. If Kanye is restlessly reaching for ever-higher planes of greatness, Kim could not seem more existentially secure. While he worries over his place in the pantheon, she is firmly anchored in the here-and-now, cherishing the look of her cheekbones in the light.

So the boldest thing about Selfish is not just that she's inviting you to look at her several hundred times over-it's that she's forcing you to look at her the exact way she wants you to, from the exact angle, in the exact lighting of her choosing. You could call Selfish a sneakily feminist document, an act of reclamation by one of the world's most photographed women. But that would be ridiculous. Forget the male gaze, or even the female gaze-the only gaze that matters here is Kim Kardashian's, directed squarely at herself, Kim Kardashian looking at Kim Kardashian back and forth until the end of time. Selfies may be generally regarded as badges of insecurity, but here they seem like the opposite: evidence of real, uncomplicated self-love.

Who will buy this book? Surely no one. But halfway through comes a development that may serve as incentive to some-several pages of nude photos, astonishing mostly for the exceptional evenness of her tan. This includes a photo released during the 2014 celebrity hack, which she captions, "I wasn't intending to put these in the book but I saw them online during the iCloud hack. I'm not mad at them. Lol."

The very last selfie in Selfish is a shot of Kim and Kanye's entwined hands. "I'm officially Mrs. West," the caption says. So Selfish turns out to be a classic marriage plot-the story of a party girl who over-applies bronzer transformed into a happily wed woman who can expertly contour her own nose. The intended message may be that Kim is renouncing Selfish-ness in favor of partnership, that marital sacrifice means photographing merely her hands instead of her cleavage and face. But the more emphatic message is that she's won. It feels like a natural endpoint for a book charting the 2-D narrative of Kim Kardashian's ambition: from less famous to more famous, from reality starlet to #wifelife, from dope new look to dope new look.

Selfish by Kim Kardashian West. Rizzoli New York.

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Kim Kardashian's 445-Page Book of Selfies Is Her Masterpiece

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Kim Kardashian has been taking selfies since 1984. That was the year she first immortalized her own face in an admiring close-up-round cheeks filling the frame, flash shining in her toddler eyes like a premonition. Some other baby Kardashian wails beside her, unmoved by the photo op, but Kim confronts the camera head-on.

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Warning: The following will contain Firewatch spoilers, right up to the game's ending, so it's probably better if you go and play the game before reading this. You can read Polygon's review as well.
Firewatch's opening resembles a Twine game or a Choose Your Own Adventure book. "You are Henry," it says.

You're presented with narrative vignettes interspersed between snippets of you-as-Henry trekking along a gorgeous mountain trail. You're asked to make some choices here, and my first reaction was disappointment. You're given stark either/or options and they're restrictive; my agency was minimal. My stamp on the character's backstory was inconsequential. Every choice ends up with Henry in the woods, running from his problems.

The inability to be perfect

You are Henry, but Henry is not you. I'm so accustomed to games either offering myriad choice or no choice at all that it was momentarily jarring to be asked to dictate events within the limited degrees of Henry. Some were innocuous, such as choosing to own a big dog or a small dog. Others were life-changing. About half-way through the prologue, you're asked how you respond to Henry's wife Jules being offered a job in a place to which you would not like to move.

Both options are inherently selfish. I could either dissuade my wife from taking her dream job or I could insist that she commutes. There was no option to behave selflessly, to move with her, and this bothered me.

I'm the kind of player who plays as a good person. My characters are saccharine moral arbiters; saintly and self-sacrificing. Hell, I've literally sacrificed my digital life for the greater good in other games. It can be a struggle to behave well in real life, so being able to pick obviously good choices in games is cathartic. The only outcome is that I experience the relevant plot variant. There is no risk.

Campo Santo, the game's developer, doesn't want to offer me this path with Henry. He is selfish. Campo Santo has taken away the option to be flawless. They've removed an aspect of my agency and, in doing so, created a character who's arguably far more like us than any paragon of justice we'd like to create.

But they do still offer a degree of control, and this matters. Simply presenting a flawed, selfish character makes it harder for us to empathize, even if we can see ourselves reflected in them. Forcing players to be complicit in their selfishness, albeit using narrative restrictions, causes them to feel responsible for the protagonist. I chose to encourage Jules to commute, so the onus is on me. I chose to put her into a care home; that's on me, too, even though it isn't, not really. It's on Henry. But I am Henry for the next six hours, so does it matter?

The only choice in the prologue which leads to any visual feedback is a throwaway, comical option. Ultimately, the outcome of the choice boils down to being the manner in which you see Henry's penis. It's a microcosmic representation of how the entire game works narratively. Regardless of whether you pose like a macho man or a Victoria's Secret model, Henry is still the same man beneath the surface, with the same anatomy, look and personality. He doesn't change, but how people see him or imagine him might.

Your options to sculpt Henry into the man you want him to be are limited, even once you've left the prologue and begin directly interacting with Henry and his fire-watching female counterpart and boss Delilah in the present.

Interactions with Delilah on the first night are informed by Henry's exhaustion and crankiness. There is no option to be perky, friendly or engaging, because Henry has just hiked a bunch of miles and he's exhausted. The opportunity to maybe open up and help Henry to grow as a person is provided at exactly the moment it should be: after rest, recuperation and a good night's sleep. His new life has begun. It's time for you to help figure out what that means.

Everyone is flawed

It's soon obvious that Delilah is more than just a voice on the earpiece. She's Henry 2.0, his female counterpart, a stark contrast to what we've learned about Jules. She remarks on how anyone who takes the fire ranger job has a story and is damaged in some way. She's including herself in that diagnosis.

The player may be given the opportunity to help Henry learn, grow and heal, but Delilah's damaged stubbornness and selfishness remains steadfast. Delilah makes mistakes; her decisions would be unfortunate in real life, let alone a game one is trying to "win," but they're hers. They feel like they come from a real place inside a real person, one who is also running from themselves.

It's notable, too, that Delilah is never the antagonist. Delilah becomes your confidante and potential lover but also occasionally your accidental foil. This makes for a far more honest portrayal of confronting oneself than if her role had been that of a cackling villain. Your reactions to her may include frustration and disappointment, but ultimately they lead to a desire to understand and support her. It's a relationship based on growth, whether through Henry's obvious shift in personality or Delilah's steadfast stubbornness. It's a perfect metaphor for the average relationship with one's own self.

Delilah is a woman who has worked the job for nearly a decade and been seemingly unchanged by her experience. She's not growing, and the fact that Henry and the player are still not enough to change her mind in many situations is refreshing in a medium where you can often achieve impossible persuasion simply by having high enough stats.

You can encourage her to inform the police about the missing campers, but she won't. You can ask her to wait for you in the tower before evacuation, but she doesn't. By the final interaction, if you choose to ask her to come with you into the future, not even you or Henry believes that she will. In all these cases, she can be persuaded to agree with you, and to commit to doing these things. She just simply doesn't follow through on any of them. She's a rare thing in gaming: an NPC with agency.

This isn't just nuanced narrative design. There's a moment about two thirds through the game where you can choose whether or not to set fire to a camp. I chose not to, and I don't know whether it's possible to start the fire yourself - I imagine it - but Campo Santo needs that camp to be on fire for the plot to progress, so burn it does.

Likewise, much of Delilah's stubbornness seems to exist either to propel the narrative or avoid technical additions. Perhaps she doesn't inform the cops because the narrative would have to diverge and include another, optional plot strand to build tension. Perhaps she doesn't wait in the tower because it would require an additional character model and animation set, playing out in real time as you escape and seen by a limited percentage of players.
None of the characters are infallible, and the player never has enough agency to make them so
At almost every turn, the lack of divergence can be explained away by cost-cutting and resource management. The only other human faces you see in the game at all are pictures; you never lay eyes on another human directly in the entire game. You see hints here and there, and a masked figure in the final scene, and that's it.

But so what? Budgets are finite. Time is finite. Somewhere, concessions have to be made. I've always believed it's preferable, if you don't have the time and money to tell the story you want to tell, to change the story into one you can tell to the end. The alternative is to just keep telling the story until you have to stop with an unceremonious "to be continued," and that's far less satisfying than a complete, restricted narrative. What I find so marvelous with Firewatch is how Campo Santo justifies those restrictions, and uses them in the pursuit of narrative depth and metaphor.

As a developer myself, it was striking how many times it felt like what I perceived to be limitations in budget or time actually made the game stronger, although I am speculating on whether this was the driving force behind how the game plays out.

Perhaps Firewatch would be less satisfying if all the moments in which the narrative doesn't diverge could be attributed to resource management. But, deftly, at the end of the game, Campo Santo makes sure this is not so. This takes the form of Henry and Delilah discovering their antagonist and what he's done. The player discovers is left to piece together what it means.

After you report this discovery to Delilah, you have the opportunity of empathizing with your antagonist and trying to change Delilah's opinion of the individual, which was already negatively skewed before she began to suspect what the person had done. As Henry, you're privy to a discovery that suggests things aren't as black-and-white as they appear, and in fact suggests that a degree of altruism in the antagonist's actions. Delilah, despite having less to go on than Henry, isn't receptive to this possibility.

The game ends with Delilah remaining steadfast in her feelings, no matter what Henry says, and this is purely a narrative decision. It serves as a great footnote on how Henry has changed into a more empathetic person and starkly highlights how, despite Henry's influence, that empathy is still absent in Delilah. Or maybe it's an indicator of the difference in approach between men and women, or simply between Henry and Delilah. It's open to interpretation, and even the reading that Delilah is failing to empathize isn't condemning of her.

There are plenty of justifiable reasons why she might not choose to do so. While Henry has additional insight as a retrospective observer, Delilah bore witness to the majority of events as they unfolded, and as the game ends there's still the possibility that due to his empathy and growth, Henry's got this one wrong. None of the characters are infallible, and the player never has enough agency to make them so. And that's just perfect.

Olivia White is one half of Owl Cave, a small indie development studio creating adventure games. Her previous games include Richard & Alice and The Charnel House Trilogy, both of which are available to purchase. She also dabbles in interactive fiction and digital storytelling as LND Games, and does a bit of games journalism on the side.

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Firewatch took away our ability to be good people, and that's where it shines

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Warning: The following will contain Firewatch spoilers, right up to the game's ending, so it's probably better if you go and play the game before reading this. You can read Polygon's review as well. Firewatch's opening resembles a Twine game or a Choose Your Own Adventure book. "You are Henry," it says.

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It's easy to see why Damien Chazelle's was such a hit at the Golden Globes. The film is a charming romance of Hollywood nostalgia, one that boasts eye-catching cinematography, a robust musical score, and a crackling chemistry between the two leads. Its clear-eyed look at love and sacrifice will resonate with anyone who's had creative dreams. But if you know anything about music, the movie stops dead in its tracks when Sebastian, played by Ryan Gosling, starts to profess his love for jazz. It's not just Emma Stone's Mia who finds his jazz pedantry annoying. Nearly every jazz musician under 40 would be peeved, too, and with good reason: Sebastian would hate what they're doing. What should be a homage to jazz turns out to have narrow vision of the genre, aiming to draw hard boundaries around what it should and shouldn't be - a stance that's out of step with what the jazz scene actually looks like today.

The film's debate about jazz unfolds so quickly that it's easy to miss the nuances of what's being said. Sebastian feels that jazz is dying and wants to save it; as other essays have mentioned, the decision to position Ryan Gosling as the savior of jazz is racially tone-deaf at best . His character wants to show the world how to love "pure jazz," a term with multiple meanings. Based on the film's approach to jazz, Sebastian seems to be modeled after the neo-bop school of jazz artists. For at least the past 30 years, musicians of the neo-bop movement have bemoaned the addition of rock and hip-hop into the genre - a development usually called fusion jazz - seeing it as a death knell for the purity of their music. They usually think that jazz should sound they way it did before 1965; sometimes they shun electric instruments altogether.

Chazelle subtly plays into this with Sebastian. It's easy to see that Sebastian prefers acoustic piano; most modern jazz musicians play acoustic and electronic, but neo-bop followers try to avoid any computers in their instruments. Throughout the film, he references Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker as symbols of authenticity. He even worships a stool - yes, the thing you sit on - that was used by Hoagy Carmichael. When he is seen with an electric keyboard, it's with a rock band doing cheesy '80s covers for a pool party, or with his friend's new jazz group, and we're meant to see these gigs as Sebastian compromising his vision. The film never comes out and says exactly where Sebastian lies in the jazz spectrum, but for jazz fans, it's clear he follows the neo-bop school of thought - a notion of "real jazz" that's selective and combative. (It's worth noting that the director's earlier films, and Guy & Madeline on a Park Bench, don't share such a prescriptive vision of what the genre should be.)

This kind of thinking isn't just dated; even at the height of the movement, neo-bop was divisive. Many neo-bop artists shunned any outside influences, and derided fusion music as worthless, taking barbed shots at artists we now consider musical pioneers. Miles Davis was often scorned for "selling out" when he crafted the groundbreaking album Bitches Brew, one of the first great jazz-rock records. To them, Miles was abandoning his roots, resorting to cheapened music to move records. As with many artistic debates, taste hardened into ideology; those who followed in Davis's footsteps were considered morally inferior. Only in recent years has the neo-bop school of thought lost ground. Now, most of movement's advocates have passed on, or bowed out to make room for the next generation.

Today's artists have realized that letting go of these conservative notions is best way to "save jazz." La La Land presents these arguments in the form of Keith, the fusion artist played by John Legend in the film. Though his words sound reasonable - he asks Sebastian how he's going to revolutionize jazz by being a traditionalist - Chazelle stacks the deck against him: Keith turns out to use a laughably '80s sound that's meant to seem completely disconnected from his jazz roots. For extra measure, he also uses a cheesy stage show complete with dancers - a luxury no modern jazz artist could afford, or would even consider. It's almost as if, well, the movie wants us to hate new jazz.

This is a vision of fusion jazz that sounds nothing like the contemporary jazz scene. Take Esperanza Spalding, a gifted musician who has brought renewed attention to the genre. One night she might go onstage with a band that mixes rock, R&B. and other influences; on another she might play with veterans Geri Allen and Terri Lyne Carrington in an all-woman trio. The same holds true for Robert Glasper, whose experimental troupe might do a jazz cover of a Nirvana song or pay homage to the late hip-hop producer J Dilla, but who also spends time in a more traditional group, the Robert Glasper Trio. Both Spalding and Glasper are highly regarded within jazz circles, drawing sizable crowds and winning Grammys in the process. Other acts like Kamasi Washington, Thundercat, and Otis Brown III refuse to be fixed on the idea of purity; they'd rather push jazz to evolve. Despite what La La Land might have you think, the genre has already reckoned with and resolved the debate over the sanctity of jazz.

And though it's tempting to say that the genre is dying, look elsewhere and you'll see the blood of the genre flowing in different places. In 2015 Kendrick Lamar dropped the critically acclaimed album To Pimp a Butterfly, a sprawling effort that pays homage to many genres, including jazz. (Glasper, Washington, and Thundercat all pop up in the album's credits.) Butterfly sounds less like a compromised vision than a bold exploration that pokes at the boundaries of different genres. Just last year, A Tribe Called Quest made their return after the tragic death of member Phife Dawg. The group is well-known for infusing hip-hop with jazz elements, and their new album, We Got It From Here ... Thank You 4 Your Service, continues in that tradition while updating the sound. It's almost been universally hailed as a triumph. Twenty years ago, these albums would have been blasphemous to jazz purists, who didn't think hip-hop was "real music." This may sound ludicrous to the modern reader, but back in the '80s and '90s it was absolutely a common belief - one that La La Land shares, to its own detriment.

Ironically, a movie that venerates the jazz greats of the past could stand to learn a lesson from one of the most iconic musicians of the genre: Miles Davis. Davis was never opposed to traditional jazz, but he preferred to push forward and experiment with new ideas, a notion explored in Don Cheadle's 2016 film Miles Ahead. That film has its own flaws, and at times it approaches self-parody, but it does a better job of freeing the reins of jazz. In the film's final scene, Cheadle's Davis breaks from the fictional story to play a concert in the present day. His band is filled with some of the biggest stars of the genre: legends like Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock, newcomers Spalding and Glasper, and even blues rocker Gary Clark Jr. This moment of collaboration gives us a vision of how jazz works in its finest moments: It's an exchange between minds, between different backgrounds. The moment might be a bit too on the nose, but it offers no pretense either. It carries a simple message: Let the music grow.

By contrast, it's hard not to detect a whiff of ideological snobbery to La La Land. The movie will undoubtedly continue to rack up awards, and introduce newer generations to jazz. It's just unfortunate that, as parts of the jazz world have finally ditched rigid definitions of what the genre should be, the conservative vision is now being pushed to global audiences again. If Sebastian, and perhaps Chazelle, really want to save jazz, the solution is to let people freely choose what they enjoy about the music. La La Land shows that people will like jazz if it's introduced to them without condescension; perhaps the director could step outside of the film's narrow vision and realize this, too.
Seve Chambers is a journalist based in Brooklyn. He is currently working with Brian Jackson, Gil Scott-Heron's former collaborator, on his memoir.

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La La Land Is Clueless About What's Actually Happening in Jazz

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It's easy to see why Damien Chazelle's was such a hit at the Golden Globes. The film is a charming romance of Hollywood nostalgia, one that boasts eye-catching cinematography, a robust musical score, and a crackling chemistry between the two leads.

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All images courtesy Game Grumps

The way I feel about Black Mirror is the way I feel about the world. I'm tired of its smug cynicism, its edgy humor, the way it beats you over the head with a placard saying "everything you enjoy is terrible and technology is bad, actually".

I know the world is bad, and finding escapism in more bad things just seems pretty futile. But in amongst the nihilism of Black Mirror's latest season came San Junipero, a pearl of goodness in the oyster-grit of self-indulgent technophobic wallowing.

A renaissance is happening, and it is wholesome as fuck.

Dream Daddy is the San Junipero of my Steam game list right now. Nestled amongst games like Danganronpa (the world is dead and so are all your friends) and Killing Time at Lightspeed (you're flying to another planet and all your friends are slowly forgetting about you), Dream Daddy promises that everything's going to be ok, stroking your head gently while introducing you to dads who just want the best for their kids. It's pure, wholesome fun-a fact that might surprise people coming to the game expecting a dad-themed fuckfest.

" Dream Daddy does a good job of luring you in with the promise of thirsty hot dads, and then rewarding you with wholesome relationships and a genuinely heartwarming father-daughter relationship," says Greg Batha, UI designer and developer on the game. "In a lot of the streams I see people be like 'alright I'm ready to fuck some dads!' and then immediately, you get the family photos scenes, and they're like 'oh no, I wasn't ready to cry today.'"

It's actually not a huge surprise that Dream Daddy has proved so popular with its genuine warmth and sweetness. "These are rough times," says Rachel Sala, game artist on Dream Daddy. "People crave positive sincere content. Remember the Bob Ross stream? People lost their shit." But more than that, wholesome content is also just how some of us prefer to respond to stress.

Brie Code, programmer, writer and all-round inspirational human, recently wrote about "tend-and-befriend" as an emotional response to stress. Unlike fight-or-flight, this response limits the release of adrenalin. "Your body releases oxytocin or vasopressin when you're stressed, followed by opioids. This calms your sympathetic nervous system," Code describes.

Like her and her friends, I dislike adrenalin. It sets off my anxiety, and I'm probably not alone in that. I don't watch action or horror films, and I can't deal with roller-coasters (they make me cry). But when games are so geared towards getting that sweet adrenalin rush, what are those of us who prefer tend-and-befriend supposed to do?

Become game developers, it seems. The barrier to entry into the indie games industry has never been lower, with resources like Unity tutorials and game-publishing website itch.io free for all to use. There are Self-Care Game Jams, Merritt Kopas' curation of " Soft Chambers", and people making games like Morning Post, in which brightly colored characters smile at you as you throw post at their faces. There are even Twitter bots like Aloe that are a soothing, reassuring presence on a stress-filled Twitter timeline.

"Genuine good-hearted content is popping up," says Batha, and points out that there's a ready and waiting market: "people looking for that sweet wholesome content." Sala agrees. "Edgy, insincere stuff is losing its edge," she says, and she's not wrong. We're saturated with satire. It's okay to like things, it's okay to have feelings, and it's okay to not want to read the news every day.

The wholesome revolution is here, and long may it live.

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In a Shitty World, 'Dream Daddy' Works Because It's Genuinely Wholesome

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All images courtesy Game Grumps The way I feel about Black Mirror is the way I feel about the world. I'm tired of its smug cynicism, its edgy humor, the way it beats you over the head with a placard saying "everything you enjoy is terrible and technology is bad, actually".

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These days I've been doing a lot of thinking about what it means to be a woman in a man's world. It's hard to watch the news and not find myself envisioning a dystopian future where any sign of femininity is a liability, and every night when I find my place in the irradiated dirt, I thank my lucky stars for getting Lasik and an IUD before the world turned to shit.

That feels pretty real to me. But maybe it's just the movies I've been watching:
The sun blazes down relentlessly on a desert wasteland, all that remains of a familiar English-speaking country in the aftermath of devastating nuclear war. A dust-caked vehicle makes its way into frame, screaming down the endless stretch of packed earth that passes for a road in this hellscape. Inside the retrofitted truck, we find a masculine hero, a sharp-shooting bad bitch, and a backseat stuffed full of dizzying beauties-all of them pursued by a grotesque warlord hell-bent on reclaiming his harem.
I'm not watching Mad Max: Fury Road for the dozenth time. No, this is Hell Comes to Frogtown, a movie released a full 27 years earlier. Let's zoom out for a minute.

In the wake of Mad Max (1979), The Road Warrior (1981), and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), George Miller's engrossingly singular Mad Max universe spawned a whole host of grimy, low-budget doppelgängers. Arguably chief among them is Donald G. Jackson's feverish homage, Hell Comes to Frogtown.

Frogtown is unrepentant schlock that earned its cult status by handily out-crazying its source material at every opportunity. Where Mad Max has motorcycle gangs, Frogtown has a crime ring of mutated frog-men. Where The Road Warrior has a wild-eyed feral kid, Frogtown has sex-crazed feral women. Where Thunderdome leans into Mel Gibson's leather-clad swagger and questionable haircut, Frogtown ups the ante on hyper-masculinity with "Rowdy" Roddy Piper rocking a full-blown Canadian tuxedo-shirtless-and a somehow even more questionable haircut.

When Hell Comes to Frogtown was released in 1988, three years after Thunderdome, nothing about the film warranted a close reading. It was a wild ride through a nostalgic facsimile of Mad Max's Wasteland, and it did something to fill the void left when Miller shelved his universe. A fun little movie to send your uninitiated friends into fits of laughter, but nothing more.

27 years after Frogtown, George Miller returned to the Wasteland with Mad Max: Fury Road. At the time, a scant few cinephiles pointed out its similarities to Frogtown, but no one in the blogosphere offered thoughtful analysis. Even recent interviews with George Miller fail to raise the question of why Fury Road shares so much in common with its lo-fi predecessor. For what it's worth, Miller has stated on the record in at least one interview that the plot for Fury Road came to him in 1999, when he " conceived of a story where violent marauders were fighting, not for oil or material goods, but for human beings."

I'm here to tell you that, without a doubt, Hell Comes to Frogtown got there first.

Yes, I think that Mad Max: Fury Road is a blatant rework of a Mad Max knockoff movie featuring mutated frog-men. More importantly, I believe this fact does nothing to diminish Miller's filmmaking. On the contrary, the too-close-for-comfort parallels between these movies only further establish Fury Road as a work of feminist-allied genius, and a master class on gender relations in storytelling.

How similar are these movies? It all starts with our titular heroes: Tom Hardy's "Mad" Max Rockatansky and Roddy Piper's Sam Hell. Both men are undeniable physical specimens. Tom Hardy's notable capacity for muscularity was well known to audiences by the time of Fury Road's release, as Hardy had packed on nearly 30 pounds to play Bane in 2012's The Dark Knight Rises. For his part, Roddy Piper's work with the WWF around the time Frogtown came out pitted him against those indisputable legends of sports entertainment, Hulk Hogan and Mr. T. Suffice it to say that Piper and Hardy were cast in no small part because they look like unambiguously macho, manly dudes.

But they're action movies! Action movies star ripped guys-that's a given. Both Frogtown and Fury Road, though, use their muscle-bound stars as tools to put an unexpected spin on the established arc of the action hero. Tom Hardy and Roddy Piper are treated like pieces of meat. Not like pieces of ass, to be clear, but pieces of meat. Both Mad Max and Sam Hell are unwillingly dragged into the action, not because they are brave or strong, but because their bodily fluids are valuable from the perspective of their dystopian future societies.

Max's story starts when he's captured by the War Boys, an army of young men rapidly dying of radiation sickness and in constant need of blood transfusions to keep fighting. When Max's blood type turns out to be the universal donor, he's branded, tattooed and reduced to a "blood bag," the unwilling blood supply for a sickly War Boy with a death wish.

Sam Hell's story starts in an eerily similar way: he's captured by the Med-Techs, a faction of the all-female governmental regime who use virile men as a tool in their fight to repopulate the earth. When Sam turns out to be a fertile male, an increasingly rare commodity in the post-nuclear future, he's fitted with an explosive tamper-proof chastity belt, branded "property of the Provisional Government," and enlisted as a soldier in the repopulation effort-whether or not he's up for the challenge, emotionally speaking.

Already it seems like Max and Sam could easily commiserate about the unexpected and physically demoralizing circumstances they find themselves in. If Sam Hell could stop himself from cracking wise long enough for notably laconic Mad Max to work up something to say about it, that is. But we don't yet have a blatant example of the Mad Max canon universe absorbing and repurposing elements of its own fandom. That comes once we meet the women.

The fight that Max and Sam are dragged into, kicking and screaming, isn't their own. In both movies, the fight, the plan, and the glory belong to a woman who resolves to kick ass and take names on behalf of other women.

Sam meets Spangle, an unflappable Med-Tech on a quest to save a group of young, fertile women from sexual slavery under the grotesquely mutated Commander Toty and his army of irradiated frog-men. Max meets Furiosa, a defiant War-Rig driver on a quest to save a group of young, fertile women from sexual slavery under the grotesquely mutated Immortan Joe and his army of irradiated War Boys.

In all seriousness, the only real difference in terms of major plot here is that Immortan Joe is ostensibly a human being, while Commander Toty is a giant mutated frog with three penises.

Once we get in the car-either Furiosa's War-Rig or Spangle's Med-Tech vehicle, it doesn't matter which-we get a good look at these young, fertile women. There are five harem escapees in Fury Road, and another five in Frogtown (though only four of them make it into the car). Stuffed into the backseat, the sight of these nine beautiful, meticulously groomed women has a surreal effect, not unlike a mirage in the irradiated desert landscape. They interlace fingers and link arms in an ever-shifting tableau of female solidarity, still wearing the impractical, revealing costumes that clearly mark them as sex slaves.

When the harem escapees start to talk, it's clear that despite their circumstances, they are far from the shell-shocked, glorified props you'd expect them to be. They have identities of their own, which they've constructed in direct opposition to the oppressive violence of the societies around them. In Frogtown, the escaped women call themselves Passives. They abhor violence, believing that "only the truly meek will inherit the earth." In Fury Road, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley's Angharad speaks for her group, proclaiming there will be "no unnecessary killing" and calling bullets "Anti-Seed. Plant one and watch something die."

The razor-sharp parallels between these two groups of women can be pinpointed in a single, uncannily similar scene in both movies. During a heated shoot-out in Fury Road, Furiosa exhausts the ammunition in her rifle and tosses it to Angharad in the backseat. "Reload the clip," Furiosa demands. Angharad stares wide-eyed at the weapon in her lap, "I...I can't." It's clear that this isn't a simple matter of Angharad not knowing how to load the weapon; she will not follow the order on moral grounds.

In Frogtown, Sam Hell, Spangle and the Passives are ambushed and held at gunpoint. Their only hope of defense is Sam's sword, sheathed on his back just out of his reach. "Hand me my sword," he whispers to the woman behind him, one of the unnamed harem escapees. She shakes her head and replies: "I can't. I'm Passive."

To my eye, these scenes are virtually the same, and offer the most solid evidence for the influence of Frogtown on the plot of Fury Road. Fundamentally, they both uphold the same moral lesson: these women were worth saving because they refused to take part in the ubiquitous violence around them.

Once you've noticed the parallels, it's really easy to see as a brilliant rework of the plot of Hell Comes to Frogtown. But it's no surprise that these movies aren't routinely mentioned in the same breath-not because of the nearly 30-year span of time between their releases, but because, while they share a similar strange premise, a similar cast of unlikely characters and similar specific ideological messages, the two films are resolved so differently that it renders them nearly incomparable.

Where Donald G. Jackson's characters play out a heterosexual white male nightmare of emasculation and duty, George Miller's tale unfolds into a populist epic with complex implications for modern feminism. If you want to understand why, you have to look at the question asked repeatedly over the course of Fury Road: WHO KILLED THE WORLD?

The answer for both the women of the Wasteland and the escapees from Frogtown is the same. Men killed the world with nuclear war. Men laid waste to the land and poisoned their bones with radiation. Men robbed humanity of healthy babies and a future.

In Frogtown, humanity's solution to the problem of nuclear fallout was forcible takeover by a female-run government. At first it seems like a fair and fitting punishment for the world's remaining men, simple retribution for the senseless violence they perpetrated when they held power. It's a tempting revenge fantasy, imagining the current political status quo overturned and replaced with its polar opposite.

But the society of Frogtown seems no better off. They've simply traded nuclear war for the fight to repopulate the earth, and an overbearing male government for an equally overbearing female counterpart. The new regime may look different, but the average man or woman is still a pawn to be played. By the end of Frogtown, Sam Hell's life doesn't look much different than it did in the beginning. He remains a captive, required to fulfill his duty of impregnating as many fertile women as possible whether he wants to or not. By the end of Frogtown, when Sam finally realizes that his fate is beyond his control, he offers up a smile and accepts it. He's still government property, still only as good as his bodily fluids.

The Passives face a similarly disempowering end. They're freed from sexual slavery, only to be immediately recruited in the fight for repopulation. "Don't worry," Spangle says, "Mothers are regarded as national heroes." We never learn if the Passives wanted to be mothers or not. They have so little agency by the end of the film that they go from serving one master to another without so much as a word about it.

At first it seems that Fury Road arrives at the same solution to the problem of male violence: remove men from the equation. Furiosa's plan from the beginning of the film is to escape with the wives from the V8-supercharged society of men. They hope to seek safe harbor among the Vuvalini, or Many Mothers, the strictly female society of Furiosa's birth. But George Miller rejects the viability of this solution outright: by the time Furiosa and the wives arrive, the Vuvalini tribe has been reduced to a handful of women, and their feminist utopia has ceased to exist.

Instead, Miller finally gives Max something to say. He tells Furiosa, "If you can't fix what's broken, you'll go insane."

So Furiosa and the wives go back to the Citadel they've just succeeded in escaping. Not in search of an isolated female paradise, and not to strip men of power and claim it for their own. They go back to empower a broken society with the hard-won truth they have learned, that people are not things.

In the fight to reclaim the Citadel, Max is redeemed and empowered in ways that Sam Hell could only dream about. He gives all he can to Furiosa and the wives, protecting them and accepting their protection in equal measure. When Furiosa lies dying of blood loss, Max loses no time in finding the IV he received as a blood donor for the War Boys. When he gives his blood to Furiosa by choice, Max neatly shakes the identity of blood bag that he's been fighting tooth and nail from the start of the film.

When their enemies are dead and the time has come to claim the Citadel, Furiosa and the wives take their places among the disenfranchised masses and ascend, as equals, to the seat of power. Max does not join them. He watches in silence until he is sure they have succeeded, and simply disappears into the crowd.

I can't recall a clearer depiction of a feminist ally. I can't imagine a more humanist call to action. I can't think of a better ending for the story of Hell Comes to Frogtown.

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From Frogtown to Gastown: Feminism in the Apocalypse

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These days I've been doing a lot of thinking about what it means to be a woman in a man's world. It's hard to watch the news and not find myself envisioning a dystopian future where any sign of femininity is a liability, and every night when I find my place in the irradiated dirt, I thank my lucky stars for getting Lasik and an IUD before the world turned to shit.