LEGO City

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LEGO City Police Motorcycle
LEGO City Police Motorcycle

Looking around at some LEGO blogs this week, I've discovered that the term most LEGO enthusiasts would use for me is "spacer," ca va dire one who is at play most often in the space themes, and whose original creations are often spaceships. There are a couple hints as to why in the review I gave of Mission to Mars, but I think it boils down to carrying no creative dead weight. Pirates, castles and knights, even the recent Vikings sets all have some historical dead weight. If I want to make something, it has to be something that existed 200, 500, or 1000 years ago. That means making it out of wood or stone. If I had more interest in LEGO architecture, I suppose I could have built enormous castles, but I don't.

Licensed themes have their own dead weight, which is the universe they come from. Harry Potter or Star Wars or Batman may all be cool in their LEGO incarnations (and in fact, one of the coolest video games ever made was the double license LEGO Star Wars), but it's difficult to add to that universe with your own builds.

But the space themes I grew up with: Space Police II, Spyrius, Exploriens, Magnetron, Blacktron II, Ice Planet, and so on, don't suffer from any of those limitations. You can build anything you want, and the universe is so ill defined that anything you build fits in it.

But recently, LEGO City has been drawing me in. It started with the shipping port. A container ship, a crane, and a little truck… it doesn't sound particularly inspiring, but it was all very cool. The truck, especially, which was a tiny part of the model, was very cool. From there, I continued the transport theme by building the Airport, which has a little commuter plane. And since then I have built a fire station, a police station, a hospital, and a gas station, a tiny little part of LEGO City that would represent, what? A bayside regional airport, close to a small shipping port, that happens to be located close to the major services of the town? I suppose it doesn't hold up particularly well, but it was all enjoyable.

I don't know when LEGO added motorcycles like the one above, but I'm pretty fond of them. Cars still don't look particularly realistic, which is a scaling problem, but trucks–if you like boxy cab-over-engine designs–look pretty good in LEGO scale. At home in my town are two firetrucks, a cement mixer, a garbage truck, the little container truck that came with the port, and an ambulance, all with more or less the same clever front grill.

I'll be watching the set additions in the coming months, looking to improve my LEGO city, because it looks like the strongest theme going right now. It's only a shame that I can't really add much from my own collection, having stayed away for years from wheeled vehicles in favor of space ships.

The Broken String

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The Broken String
The Broken String
Bishop Allen

Bishop Allen released their second full length album this week, called The Broken String, and I was excited to pick it up, and then somewhat disappointed to discover that 10 of the 12 songs were new versions of songs from their monthly EPs of last year. In fact, including the live versions on the August EP, I have some of these songs 3 times, and I think "Butterfly Nets" 4 times.

Fine, I guess, if these were the definitive versions of the songs, but I don't feel like I can make that statement with a clear conscience. While the songs are all arranged differently than on their original EPs, I'm not prepared to say that they're arranged better, with one caveat: I think the bass guitar is better on this record than it was on most of the EPs. Read into that what you will.

I'm especially worried about the new version of "Corazon," which may have been my favorite of the month songs (from January). It's about a piano, and the original featured a banged up old piano. That piano is somewhat lost in the new arrangement.

But the question that really needs to be asked here is "why?" It's one thing (and I think many would say still a shameful thing) for an artist to release new versions of old songs at the end of a career, as a retrospective–but these songs just came out. The EPs were ambitious, following hard on the first record, Charm School, but this is the opposite of ambitious. It's resting on laurels, and it's too soon for that.

Skip it.

LEGO’s Mission to Mars

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Mission to Mars
Mission to Mars

It is the future, and on Mars, strange energy crystals have been discovered. A mining operation sent to tap their awesome power comes under attack by creepy aliens, and the miners scramble to turn their industrial equipment into a credible defense force.

So says LEGO magazine. None of that mattered to me when I decided to start building these. I was just happy to see a non-licensed space theme again. The favorite sets of my youth were the Space Police II sets, but for a long time there has been nothing but Star Wars from LEGO's space team. The Star Wars LEGO sets were good, too–minifigures and lightsabers and X-wings and so on–but LEGO is about building and playing with your own imagination, and Star Wars carries a lot of baggage. It's hard to build something from your own collection and integrate it into that universe. Your standard LEGO sets, however, are agnostic. They don't come with the description I just gave. They come with a name, and wordless building instructions. The rest is up to you.

Unfortunately, my imagination started to unearth some troubling notions when I put these together.

But first, the good:

  • Like most new LEGO themes, the large and medium size sets all come with pieces from both factions. That means you can play both sides even if you only get one set. The price of LEGO sets hasn't really inflated in the last ten years, but they're still not cheap, so it's nice to get some play value right away.
  • At least for the good guys, you get a variety of set types. There are two major aircraft, two or three ground vehicles, a little fighter, and a base.
  • There are some new tricks using technic parts that I hadn't seen before. I'm always happy to add a new tool to my LEGO building arsenal.

Some of the bad:

  • Humans vs. non-humans again — the Vikings would have been more interesting if they had been pitted against other people of that time instead of dragons, and what I liked best about the old space sets was that the good guys and the bad guys were both human factions. When there are two human factions, you can also play with neutral factions, smugglers, or whatever. But now it's humans vs. aliens, humans vs. robots, humans vs. sharks or dragons or wolves.
  • All of the alien ships are the same.
  • The aliens aren't standard minifigures. They can stand, but they can't sit, and their hands don't move or hold anything. This basically guarantees that they will never be used again once I take this apart.

The… creepy:

  • the new "expressive" faces on LEGO minifigures. It started with EXOForce, and I guess it continues on Mars. New LEGO minifigures have anime faces. I rock mine visors down.
  • The alien storage tubes. There's a whole undercurrent here of alien capture and experimentation that is totally creepy. The medical bed with restraints at the top of the main base, and the pneumatic tubes used to push the aliens around the base, makes this more sort of an "alien autopsy" than a heroic fight for freedom.
  • The crazy mix of alien subjugation and strip mining in this set makes me really not like the Mars Mission guys very much. LEGO provides so little background for these things that it's hard to say whether the "aliens" are Martians or something more exotic. The aliens certainly don't have helmets or other life support gear, which makes the whole drama seem to me like "humans go to mars and subjugate the local population to get access to their energy crystals." That isn't the game I want to play. Probably it will turn out that the energy crystals are the alien eggs or some such thing.

On the whole, I don't think my Mission to Mars collection will live very long before being relegated to the parts bin. The sets are clever, but the story isn't for me. Especially with the great stuff available as part of LEGO City. Mars just isn't that compelling.

Phineas Finn and After Dark

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Phineas Finn: The Irish Member (Oxford World's Classics)
Phineas Finn: The Irish Member (Oxford World’s Classics)
Anthony Trollope

Phineas Finn is the second of Trollope's six parliamentary–or Pallisers–novels. It concerns the political career of a young Irish barrister, who is returned for two different boroughs, both of which are eventually abolished, learns to prize his parliamentary independence over his position in government, falls in love with 4 women, and marries. He also fights a duel and rides horses and attends the great parties and occasions of many members of the upper class, because it is a british novel. He doesn't, however, gamble, and while he amasses some debts and has difficulty about them, they are not on his own account but on those of a friend, and the debts are resolved by deus ex machina, rather than the usual device of "getting money from some lady who loves him."

Those are the ways it is similar to regular british novels of the 19th century, and those are the ways it differs from one.

It is the second in a series, so it is probably best to leave it until you have read Can You Forgive Her, although the story isn't really about the same characters (The Duke of Omnium and his clan, who are minor characters in Can You… are again minor characters in Phineas Finn) and you could probably just pick this one up. But why? If you are willing to read 600 pages of Trollope's musings on the parliaments of the 1860s, why not start at the beginning. Why are we even having this discussion. Read the first one first!

After Dark
After Dark
Haruki Murakami

After Dark is, by my count, Haruki Murakami's eleventh novel. Of all of his novels, it covers the shortest time frame (a single night), and in fact it is among the shorter of his major works. It has a lot of trademark Murakami elements: normal people, normal japan, strange parallel universe which intrudes into their affairs. Music. Prostitution. Hotels.

I read it and I enjoyed it, and if you liked any of his other novels (except Norwegian Wood), you will probably like it too. In the weeks leading up to it, I re-read Norwegian Wood, Sputnik Sweetheart, and South of the Border, West of the Sun, and after I finished it, I re-read Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball 1973, Wild Sheep Chase, Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Dance Dance Dance. I re-read Kafka on the Shore at the end of last year, so I am reasonably current in my Murakami.

For fun, then, I give you my top Murakami novels in some semblance of order:

  1. A Wild Sheep Chase
  2. Dance Dance Dance
  3. Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
  4. Norwegian Wood
  5. Kafka On The Shore
  6. Sputnik Sweetheart
  7. Pinball, 1973
  8. After Dark
  9. Hear The Wind Sing
  10. South of the Border, West of the Sun
  11. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

You could read them in that order, of course, but I actually suggest reading them in the order 1,2,4,5,3,6,8,10,11,9,7. Hear The Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 are very difficult to find. I won't disclose what my copy of Pinball cost me.

More about Baian

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The Baian the Assassin, Vol. 2
The Baian the Assassin, Vol. 2

Some time ago I got and watched Baian the Assassin volume 1, and I wrote that I was, shall we say, less than impressed. Then a funny thing happened: I got a gift certificate to Amazon.com. So I picked up Volume 2. Volume two was better, so I got volumes 3 and 4. Last night I finished volume 4 (which comprises a single, double-length episode). Over the course of the series, it is transformed from a sort of buddy assassination drama to a weird man crush these two assassins have on a young samurai, and their concerted efforts to keep him from becoming an assassin himself. It ends up being a curious proposition, because Baian, despite saying every time that it is information an assassin doesn't need in order to operate, uncovers that his target is a real slime ball worth assassinating. In a sense, you never see any people killed who don't have it coming, which really weakens his "this life is a kind of hell" argument.

I still wouldn't pick it up while there were outstanding Zatoichi volumes, but I suppose it isn't the worst show ever to air on TV.