Disjointed ramblings about a few of my favourite things...

Album: Rain Dogs, by Tom Waits (1985)

After heavy rain, in the big cities you can sometimes see stray dogs wandering around, lost. The rain has washed away their scents and they can't find their way back home. Raindogs are the people Waits sings about on this record, people who have lost their way. The bums, the hookers, the drunks, the ones who had it all and lost it, the petty thieves, the thugs, the small-time gangsters trying to make it big-time, the murderers and the victims.

One of the main reasons this record keeps finding it's way back into my CD-player is that, despite it's sourcematerial, it's very lighthearted. It never gets too rough, or too depressing. Hearts get broken but nobody kills themselves over lost love. People got it bad but that's no reason not to "Tango till they're Sore". The good-hearted crooks manage to get away when the Big Black Mariah policecar comes cuttin' through the canebreak, packin' down the ladder with the hammer to the floor, nobody goes to jail for life.

It's a lot more of a small time crooks comedy like "Snatch" than a hardboiled crime-drama like Scorceeses "Goodfellas". And while it may not be as deep, it invites to more casual listening, on long car-rides, while cooking dinner or while working. Like a Guy Ritchie gangstercomedy, it always has that sparkle in it's eye no matter how grim it gets. From the opening modern day pirate-shanty of "Singapore" to "Anywhere I lay my head (I call my home)" a song which conjures up images of a marching band playing while a blind-drunk Tom Waits tries to get some sleep under a pile of old newspapers nearby.

Game: Deus Ex, by Ion Storm (2000)

I've been playing videogames since I was 10, but this is the first game to realy open my eyes to the art-form that games are. This is the game that made me realize how much more potential games have than movies, or even books, to tell a story. Games give you the chance to "experience" a story, rather than merely being "told" a story. The main advantages of interactive storytelling are, as I see it:

-Every time you watch a movie, or read a book it's always the exact same story. You know how it's gonna end, and no matter how much you shout at your TV, the protagonist is still going to do the same misstakes he did last time.

-With videogames, you are in control, you get to decide what happens. And your actions have an impact on how the story unfolds.

Now, this second point is not true of games. Yet. Creating a gameworld that truly responds to even your smallest actions and decides the outcome of the game upon them is a difficult task, which won't be accomplished for a long time. But what Deus Ex did was to show that the possibility as there. It had a story which gave the illusion of open endedness.

To give and example; near the beginning of the game you find out that your brother, ex-government agent Paul Denton, is working for the terrorists organization NSF. You, the player, in the role of agent JC Denton eventually confront NSF symphatizer, Juan Lebedev, the man who talked Paul into switching sides. Lebedev talks to you, and a lot of the things he says makes sense. But before you have time to arrest him or let him go, your fellow agent, Anna, rushes into the scene and tells you to execute Lebedev. This is where things get sticky, protocoll says to arrest him. Anna, who's a bit psycho, says "shoot him or I shoot you both", and Lebedev says "please let me go". Most games would have only one clear choice, with a "Game Over" screen as result of a wrong decision. In Deus Ex, however, there rarely are any wrong decisions.

First time I played this game I decided to join NSF, so I shoot Anna and let Lebedev escape. Second time I played it, I decided to follow my superior, so I killed Lebedev. However, soon after this, through a couple of plot-twists, I found myself running from the law, working with NSF, and having to conftront Anna later on in the game instead. What happened? The limitations of 20th century gamedevelopment is what happened. In order for me to get to play as an agent, fighting terrorists for the rest of the game someone would have had to write a storyline, dialogue and missions for the rest of the game along that branch of the story. It would have doubled development-time, budget and effort. Therefore you, the player, are inexorably pulled along a certain path through the game.

Call it "fate", or "destiny", if you will.

You do however have small choices you can make, your actions will decide who dies and who is still alive at the end of the game. As for the gameplay you are given a lot of choices how you play the game and tackle every situation. And during the very final mission you are given choices which decide the outcome out of three possible endings to the story. When I've broken the game down into it's core elements like this it may not seem like anything special, but I can assure you the first time you play through this game it's pure magic. You're not simply playing a game and doing what you're told and marking of items on a checklist in order to get to the next level. Rather, you really feel like the story is forming around you, and because of you.

Book: Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866)

"The ordinary must live in obedience and have no right to transgress the law, because they are, after all, ordinary. While the extraordinary have the right to commit all sorts of crimes and in various ways to transgress the law, because in point of fact they are extraordinary."

This is the theory of Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment. In order to proove this theory, to himself above all, he murders a mean old lady which he deems unworthy of life. By accident, he also kills her young, innocent maid, Lizaveta.

Raskolnikov's beliefs that extraordinary men have the right to break the law if it serves the greater good are throw into tumult by Lizavetas death at his hands. And so begins a tale of fear, remorse and ultimately, judgement. Crime and Punishment is a literary classic but don't let that deter you from reading it, you don't need to have a PhD in Literary Studies to get something out of this book. On the surface it's simply an exciting crime-novel, but if you want to go deeper it's a very interesting discussion on law versus morality. Like someone told me years ago, read it, everyone can get something out of this book.

Book: Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

"The story so far:

In the beginning the Universe was created.

This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. Many races belive it was created by some sort of god, though the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI belive that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure.

The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming of the Great White Hankerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel."

The Hitchhikers guide, and in particular passages like the one above, are the reason that I really got into reading in the first place. If you are going to read it(you should), be sure to read it in English. It can be said for most books that they should be read in the language they were originally written, but this is especially true for the Hitchhiker's series. The humor here relies so much on the words and phrases that a lot of it just crumbles if taken apart and put back together in any other language. Also, you might wanna give part 5 "Mostly Harmless" a miss, it's not very good.

84 (or so) of my favourite albums.

Cake - Fashion Nugget

Tom Waits - Rain Dogs

Mindless Self Indulgence - F.G.W.S.S.S.

Rage Against The Machine - self-titled

Tom Waits - Bone Machine

Slipknot - self-titled

Tom Waits - Mule Variations

Cake - Comfort Eagle

Sage Francis - A Healthy Distrust

Buck 65 - This Right Here is Buck 65

Mindless Self Indulgence - Tight

Tom Waits - Blood Money

Various Artists - The Matrix OST

Rage Against The Machine - The Battle of Los Angeles

The Rapture - Echoes

Madvillain - Madvillainy

cLOUDDEAD - Ten

Tom Waits - Foreign Affairs

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Henry's Dream

Aimee Mann - Magnolia OST

The Dresden Dolls - Yes, Virginia

Le Tigre - self-titled

Johnny Cash - At Folsom Prison

Todd Snider - East Nashville Skyline

The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots

Cake - Prolonging the Magic

Tom Waits - Small Change

Outkast - Speakerboxxx/The Love Below

Mindless Self Indulgence - You'll Rebel To Anything

Buck 65 - Secret House Against the World

NOFX - The War on Errorism

Fun Lovin' Criminals - Come Find Yourself

Aimee Mann - Bachelor No. 2

Beastie Boys - The Sounds of Science Anthology

Sage Francis - Sick of Waging War

The Dresden Dolls - self-titled

Tom Waits - Real Gone

Tom Waits - Closing Time

Loretta Lynn - Van Lear Rose

Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere

(hed) P.E. - Broke

Ry Cooder - Chavez Ravine

bob hund - Stenålder kan börja

Cake - Motorcade of Generosity

The Streets - Original Pirate Material

Cab Calloway - Are you hep to the jive?

System of a Down - Mezmerize

Buck 65 - Talkin' Honky Blues

Björk - Post

Johnny Cash - American Recordings 4

Cypress Hill - Skull & Bones

The White Stripes - White Blood Cells

Robyn - self-titled

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Let Love In

Danger Doom - The Mouse & The Mask

Why? - Elephant Eyelash

NOFX - Punk in Drublic

Dr. Dre - 2001

KoRn - Follow The Leader

Kent - Vapen och Ammunition

Björk - Vespertine

Le Tigre - This Island

Daft Punk - Discovery

Beck - Guero

Thee Michelle Gun Elephant - Gear Blues

The White Stripes - Elephant

Morrisey - You Are The Quarry

Nine Inch Nails - Pretty Hate Machine

Radiohead - Hail to the Thief

Gravediggaz - 6 ft Deep

The Offspring - Americana

The Postal Service - Give Up

Aquabats - The Return of the Aquabats!

Decemberists - Picaresque

Crash Test Dummies - Give yourself a hand

The Ark - In Lust We Trust

The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Björk - Debut

Fiona Apple - Extraordinary Machine

The Knife - Deep Cuts

Molotov - Apocalypshit

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Murder Ballads

Crash Test Dummies - Songs of the Unforgiven

copyright Henrik Hermans, 2005-2006