Order 50 Ltd.

Taking the “A” Train

It all started this evening with a game of Grand Theft Auto IV.

I was playing the game on my Playstation 3, doing what I normally do in these situations, which is blowing off steam. Antagonize some cops, lead them to the GTA analog of Coney Island and run my dirt bike on the beach, leading cop cars through the pier posts and the rocks. In this game (and its predecessors since GTA 3), you can listen to various “radio stations,” which are really just playlists of various songs, each “station” corresponding to a genre. Lately, I’d been digging on the jazz station, Jazz Nation Radio, because it’s awesome to ride at night through New York, with its lights and population bustling, chilling out to some wonderful jazz classics from the pre-bop era.

At one point, I tired of the chase, but was still really enjoying the riding around, specifically listening to the Billy Strayhorn-penned and Duke Ellington-led classic from 1939, “Take the ‘A’ Train”. It was so nice, and I felt so good about that song in particular, I felt like not playing the game any longer. Weeks previously, I had been watching, piecemeal, the Ken Burns’ “Jazz” documentary via Netflix. At this point, I thought, Why not see if the documentary will cover the history of that song in particular? (which, at the time, seemed perfectly reasonable). So, I ejected the GTA disc from the PS3 and popped in the Netflix disc instead, then loaded up the documentary (I was up to part 3, it seemed).

After a few minutes of watching the birth of the career of Ethel Waters, I decided, with my nervous energy, to go to the circa 1929 Victrola my parents gave me last September, and pull out the old 78s. I figured I could see if my parents had collected any classic jazz records, especially some of the terrific stuff I was hearing on the TV at that moment. I even thought, “Wonder if they have any Duke Ellington,” since I was just listening to some Ellington earlier and I consider myself an Ellington fan. About eight records in, I uncovered the most amazing thing. Continue reading…

Mr Ebert, Dear Mr Ebert

If music, painting, film, sculpture, dance, opera, television, and literature can all be art and the vast majority of works from those genres are crap (and they are; we only ever talk about the good operas/ballets/etc because the bad ones are rightfully ignored after a time), why can’t video games be art? It’s just another form of entertainment. Art should be what stands out as an effort to move an audience. Beethoven’s Ninth, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, The Godfather, The Thinker, Swan Lake, Don Giovanni, “The Wire”, and The Lord of the Rings are all examples of art (to those familiar with them). Why can’t video games have their exemplary representatives of art as well?

Between Grim Fandango and Heavy Rain, if you can’t see the potential for art in games, then you really have no practical concept of what art is. Those games affect you as much as entertain and engage you.

That’s art.

(That would be my counter-argument to Mr Ebert, with whom I mostly agree on a great many things and whom I fully respect.)

The sun shines in the bedroom.

Our newest project (oh, so many of them, there are) is a pop-rock duo named Megakelvin. The instrumentation is all 22, but the lead singer is the one and only 44. Our first single is up and running, a cover of the Vaselines‘ classic “Son of a Gun,” which was later recorded and popularized by Nirvana. You can download it at the link provided below, which is at Metafilter Music. Rock on, peoples. Rock on.

ARTIST: Megakelvin
TRACK: “Son of a Gun”
ALBUM: Perfect Concussion [EP]
LINK: #