Player Two: In Which A Colleague Goes Retro, and Level Up Gains a Gamecube Correspondent
Posted April 17, 2007 11:02:25 AM
At Newsweek HQ, most of our colleagues are either boomers in name or boomers in spirit, which means there haven't been many serious gamers among our ranks. But from the increasing number of game-related conversations we've had with our office mates, it's clear that this is starting to change. When Newsweek.com associate editor Andrew Cohen mentioned that he and his family had just acquired a Gamecube for their console-free household, we knew we had to get him to write about it. Here is his story.
After many years of inconsolable adult-onset console-lessness, my wife finally agreed to allow a videogame machine into our home. The rationale: my 9-year-son, who is new to competitive ice hockey, was advised by his coach to learn more about the game's strategy and various positions by playing it virtually. Up to that point, my two kids' gaming activities had been limited to Game Boys (not even the DS) and what's free on the Web (e.g. Miniclip.com.)
Armed with my special dispensation, I quickly sorted through the available hardware options and decided that the newest generation (Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3) represented way more gaming firepower and expense than a newbie household could handle. Seeking to take baby steps, I waited until after Xmas and toddled toward Half.com, where I picked up a used Gamecube (two controllers, two memory cards and seven games included) for a mere $75 (plus $15 shipping.) Not bad, and there's still money left for college.
My son could hardly contain himself when the box finally arrived, especially since the parcel was in the possession of the U.S. Postal Service for a full month--three weeks of which were spent in the back room of our local post office (thanks, guys.) Within minutes, we had the machine hooked up and running, and my son was blasting and grinding at will (Metroid Prime and Tony Hawk's Underground, respectively.) Unfortunately, the NHL 2003 game seemed like thin gruel by comparison, especially when my willing-to-play wife wasn't able to get it to work in two-player mode.
For myself, now that the shackles had been removed, there was only one visit to the local GameStop standing between the fulfillment of my adolescent fantasies. So while my anime-addicted teen daughter treated herself to the latest version of Harvest Moon (which I hope will serve as interactive methadone to Japanese cartoon heroin,) I gravitated toward the promise of exuberant vehicular lawlessness and fighter-jock heroics in the form of used copies of the racing game Need for Speed: Underground and the Star Wars-spinoff Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader.
But to an office-dwelling keyboard-and-mouse man like myself, the Gamecube's multifaceted controller was disconcerting. Let's see, there are all the buttons--A, B, C, X, Y, Z and pause along with the left and right shoulder buttons--the gray thumbstick; and a cross pad. And you need all of them. What the hell? F-1 Ferraris and NASA lunar landers don't have this many controls. And so, racing against my son, I crashed a lot. (What the hell?) And each time, the controller vibrated weirdly in my hands, like a novelty joy buzzer. (What the hell?) I've been a licensed driver for 20 years; my son doesn't even know what a transmission does. And he beats me every time. (What the hell?)
With all of this daunting complexity staring me in the face, I decided to focus on one game and master it. Rogue Squadron II fit the bill: it's a relatively simple space combat game with absolutely beautiful graphics, and it has an extensive training mission on Luke Skywalker's home planet of Tatooine to show you the ropes. Soon I was hunting womprats like a native, and though I still haven't beat Biggs and Wedge in the race to Toshi Station, I feel confident that I'll do so once I've logged a few more hours in the cockpit.
Meanwhile, a return trip to GameStop yielded a copy of the highly satisfying NHL 06, which has brought my wife fully into the videogame fold. We're still showing some restraint, as our Gamecube doesn't get used every day (I play it maybe once a week) but it's nevertheless rewarding to have taken this baby step into the world of consoledom. By this time next year, I may be ready to cruise eBay in search of a gently used Wii console. It takes all the old Gamecube games, right? [Editor's note: Why yes, it does.]
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Newsweek.com, 2005: 'Elements of Style,' the Musical!
Strunk, White—And Good Grammar Set to Music
'The Elements of Style,' the classic manual for clear writing, re-emerges as a hip new tome and an avant-garde musical piece.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Andrew Cohen
Oct. 28, 2005 - Can grammar be hip? Is proper comma use cool? With the publication of Maira Kalman's smart new illustrated edition of Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style" (Penguin) the classic manual to good writing, it's suddenly—and unexpectedly—a question worth asking.
'The Elements of Style,' the classic manual for clear writing, re-emerges as a hip new tome and an avant-garde musical piece.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Andrew Cohen
Oct. 28, 2005 - Can grammar be hip? Is proper comma use cool? With the publication of Maira Kalman's smart new illustrated edition of Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style" (Penguin) the classic manual to good writing, it's suddenly—and unexpectedly—a question worth asking.
The manual itself has something of an illustrious history. William Strunk Jr., a Cornell professor of English, self-published the first version in 1918 for use by his students. It contained seven rules of usage (e.g., "Do not join independent clauses by a comma") and 11 timeless rules of composition, including "Omit needless words," "Use the active voice" and "Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end."
About a dozen years after Strunk's death in 1946, one of his students, E. B. White, (yes, that E. B. White—the famed New Yorker writer and author of "Charlotte's Web" and "Stuart Little,") updated and expanded the thin, little book at a publisher's request, adding himself as coauthor. The resulting work, which has sold 10 million copies since it first appeared in 1959, has guided generations of anxiety-prone authors, from high-school students and corporate report writers to White House speechwriters and beatnik poets.
Maira Kalman, an illustrator and children's book author best known for her New Yorker covers, including the popular "Newyorkistan" map of few years ago, told The New York Times she was so taken by the colorful examples used in Strunk and White to illustrate their grammatical points that she wondered why anyone hadn't illustrated them before. Thus, her illustrations for the book contain such captions as: "Polly loves cake more than she loves me," "It was a unique eggbeater," "None of us is perfect" and "Well, Susan, this is a fine mess you are in."
Her zeal for the book has since spilled over into the musical realm. She shared her enthusiasm with family friend Nico Muhly, a Juilliard-trained composer who wrote an operatic song cycle based on the book, "The Elements of Style: Nine Songs," which had its gala premier Oct. 19 in the main reading room of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue.
Although lyrics like "Revise and rewrite" and "Do not use a hyphen between two words that can better be written as one word" suggest the didactic thrust of "Schoolhouse Rock," Muhly's work is more in the minimalist-modernist mold of Philip Glass and Steve Reich but with an absurdist dash of Spike Jones. At just 33½ minutes long, the work was impressively executed by soprano Abigail Fischer, tenor Matthew Hensrud, violist Nadia Sirota and banjo player Sam Amidon, all under the direction of Muhly and augmented by the Omit Needless Words Orchestra, which included noise-making amateur performers such as fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi and cartoonist Rick Meyerowitz (Kalman's "Newyorkistan" collaborator), as well as Kalman herself. Their brief mandated the making of sounds incorporating duck calls, meat grinders, bells, Slinkys, mallets, pillows, eggbeaters, megaphones, "chattering" cups and saucers, a typewriter and the slamming closed of a large book.
Unfortunately, the operatic style of the piece rendered the lyrics all but unintelligible to this listener—in ironic contrast to the simplifying ethos of "Elements"—though that may be more the fault of the acoustics of the library venue, which was, after all, designed for silence.
Not that any of this prevented the piece from garnering titters of appreciation capped by a standing ovation from the high-tone crowd in attendance. Although the piece may have violated E. B. White's advice to "Prefer the standard to the offbeat," it was more than effective in fulfilling another edict: "Be obscure clearly."
This article first appeared on Newsweek.com on Oct. 28, 2005
Newsweek.com, 2005: James Bond, Spy Teen
THE SPY WHO LOVED PREQUELS
AUTHOR CHARLIE HIGSON HAS BEEN GIVEN THE ASSIGNMENT TO WRITE THE FIRST IN A SERIES OF NOVELS ABOUT FICTION'S MOST FAMOUS SECRET AGENT ... AS A TEENAGER.
BY ANDREW B. COHEN
The Duke of Wellington reputedly said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of
The estate of Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, was looking to extend the half-century reign of fiction's most celebrated spy by publishing a series of new novels about Agent 007--this time aimed at readers age 9 to 12. In "SilverFin" (Miramax Books), the first in the projected five-book "Young Bond" series, we encounter 007 as a harried 13-year-old orphan newly arrived at
The Fleming estate, hoping to crack the world of kids' lit, tapped Charlie Higson, 46, the author of several horror novels for adults to write the prequel. Though best known as a star of BBC comedy programs, Higson has made a splash with young Bond. His book is already a success in the
NEWSWEEK: I understand that The Fleming estate approached you first about doing the series. How did that come about?
Charlie Higson: They had a woman working for them at the time called Kate Jones, who had been my original editor when I was writing adult thrillers ... She knew that I wrote in a fairly kind of direct, hard-boiled style that they felt would be suitable for kids. And she knew that I was a Bond fan and that I had kids.
What ground rules did the Fleming estate impose?
The main ground rule was that it had to get as close as possible with everything Ian Fleming wrote and any facts that he gave in the books, so the time scale had to fit with him ... We came up with 1920 as a birth date, but also because the early 1930s were an interesting time to write about.
In writing a book for kids, you couldn't resort to the sex and violence that are so much a part of the 007 identity. How did you deal with that?
On that front, I had no ground rules from the Flemings, because they are as new to kids' fiction as I am. And I just thought, and Kate said, write how you want to write it, and we'll see what the publisher thinks ... I had to tone down a couple bits of explicit gore. We've tried to push it a bit, because kids these days expect a bit more from fiction. I've had to cut some more bits for the American version than the English--the American publishers were smartly more squeamish.
Can you give me an example of what we're missing out in the
There's one bit where a body is fished out of a lake. In the English version an eel comes out of his mouth, and in the American version the eel comes out of his shirt collar. It's little tiny things like that ... Apparently, one of the reasons the Flemings were interested in me was because my adult books are quite extreme, they're quite violent, and very dark, and they quite wanted these books to have a bit of an edge to them, a dark edge. The Fleming books are obviously quite dark in places, and they wanted these books to not be a jolly, old-fashioned Enid Blyton-style romp ... He is James Bond, so we do expect a lot of action and death and mayhem. But you do want to be careful with kids books.
How influenced were you, or the estate, by the success of the Harry Potter books? Did you feel a need to emulate them, or else go out of your way to not resemble them?
Obviously, the success of the Harry Potter books is one of the things that made the Flemings realize that perhaps they could do some serious books for kids ... Once they decided to do Bond at that age, there's no getting away from the fact that he went to a boarding school--that's what Ian Fleming said. These are not school-based stories like the Harry Potter stories.
In
I don't like reading comic novels, but I love reading thrillers. So I've always just written, for books, the type of books that I like to read. The books I wrote before were adult thrillers ... and I'd been tinkering with the idea of doing some sort of thriller for kids. I've got three boys of my own, and I wanted to write something they could read, so when the Flemings approached me, I thought, great, what a fantastic opportunity, but we didn't want it to be a sort of jokey, Roger Moore type of Bond.
I ask because I've always thought the Fleming novels were quite unintentionally funny.
Fleming, with his own voice coming through, can be outrageously funny at times ... I wanted this to be a good, tough, straight-down-the-line action thriller. I find TV is a great outlet for any funny ideas I might have. There are moments of humor in the book, but I absolutely didn't want to write a comic novel for kids.
In the book, the Bond character is more of an Everyman, or Everykid, as opposed to the Bond in the movies, who is more like a superhero. You didn't give him any extraordinary abilities.
The adult James Bond] is a superhero without superpowers. And in the movies, he's much more impervious than he is in Ian Fleming's books. [In] the books, he's more of a real man. If someone hits him, he gets hurt. He gets angry a lot. He gets depressed a lot ... But because he has no background [in the adult books] and no domestic life, he is the sort of character that you can project yourself into slightly. And I think it's important for kids' books that they can relate to the character. So I wanted to start the books with a fairly ordinary boy and show him growing toward becoming the man that he is--growing a sort of hard shell about him ... But I didn't want to write this little shrunk-down kid in a tuxedo who is constantly coming out with double entendres and beating up guys 10 times his size.
In this first book, the villain is American--what's up with that?
[Laughs.] Well, I wanted to get away from the cliche of the villain being deformed or disfigured in some way, because I know disabled groups get quite upset, and you can't keep equating being disfigured with being evil. So I wanted to go the other way and do a [villain] who was so handsome and so good looking that he was kind of scarily perfect, so I needed a villain who was tall and broad-shouldered and [with a] perfect tan and white teeth, and I thought [laughs] it's going to have to be an American. And I also wanted to get away from it being a greasy foreigner, and Americans aren't considered foreign in
That makes me feel better. Has there been any interest in a film version?
There's been a lot of interest in the film rights. I mean, obviously, it's James Bond, and it's for kids--look how well Harry Potter has done--but we want to get the books established in their own right, and get as many of them out as we can and hopefully [they'll be] popular and successful and make it a very distinctive new brand for Bond, distinct [from] the adult movies, so that there's no confusion between the adult ones and the kids' ones, but that means getting the books established first.
This article originally appeared on Newsweek.com on May 13, 2005
Newsweek.com, 2001: Post-9/11 Rumors
NATIONAL AFFAIRS
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS: RUMOR-BUSTING
WHY YOU SHOULDN'T BOTHER IRONING YOUR MAIL OR AVOIDING MALLS ON HALLOWEEN
BY ANDREW B. COHEN
If you receive any e-mail you probably got a message about how the French astronomer Nostradamus correctly predicted in 1654 the collapse of the
Despite the fact that few consider New York "the City of God" and that no "great leader" has as yet succumbed, it may surprise you to learn that the above prediction was made not by Nostradamus in 1654 (he'd been dead 88 years by then) but by a Canadian college student in 1997 who was trying to show that any "prophesy" worded vaguely enough will eventually "come true." That prediction was correct.
Since Sept. 11, any number of rumors, scares, urban myths and bits of misinformation have been circulating via e-mail, from the story that a second wave of terror would occur on Sept. 22 (it didn't) and that ironing your mail will kill any anthrax spores (it won't) to the tale of the hip-hop album cover that prophetically depicted burning twin towers (true, but was changed before release).
Barbara Mikkelson is a self-described Los Angeles-area housewife who with her husband, David, a Web programmer, runs a popular Web site called Urban Legends Reference Pages, better known by its Web address: Snopes.com. The site currently reports the status of more than 60 rumors that have popped up since Sept. 11 under the heading Rumors of War. NEWSWEEK's Andrew B. Cohen spoke with Mikkelson. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: What's the most prevalent rumor you've come across since Sept. 11?
Barbara Mikkelson: A few are way up there. The first is Nostradamus. You couldn't go anywhere without tripping over this rumor. The second was "the accidental tourist" [a photo purported to have been taken on the WTC's observation deck moments before the plane hit]. You had a few weeks to deal with this raw wound, and then this photo brought it all back. The photo was fake but the feelings are real. The latest is the "don't go to the mall on Halloween" e-mail. This one has made it into the off-line world.
How do you go about collecting rumors?
Hearing them is the easy part. People e-mail us stuff all the time. And people tell us about stuff they hear on the street. We get hundreds of e-mails a day. I read all of them.
What are the latest?
Well, there's the story of an apparent Arab-looking man who bought a large amount of candy at Costco, then went back and bought even more candy, the implication being that he was planning some sort of mass poisoning for Halloween. I'm currently checking out that one. Then there's the story of the
What's the most surprising true rumor you've come across?
The United Airlines pilot speech [in which a pilot on a Sept. 15 flight told passengers to counterattack any attempted hijackers with blankets and pillows]. I would have bet money that that one was false. It's a re-empowerment story. I would have bet money that no professional pilot would have made that speech. These guys are trained to make passengers feel safe, not talk about knives and bombs. A pilot telling passengers to tackle hijackers with pillows is just unprecedented.
I thought I read that United was unable to verify the existence of that flight's pilot.
Yes, but I have the feeling that United is trying to protect itself, distance itself, by being "unable" to identify the pilot. I think they know full well who the pilot was on that flight.
What is your methodology for assessing the validity of a rumor?
Basically I'm first going to go to online databases to see what other people have found out. If there's a company involved, I'll go to their Web site. Companies often hear the rumors first and will respond to them on their Web site, especially wise companies. Nothing will stop a rumor in its tracks, but that will help. If there's nothing on the Web site, then I'll call the company directly. Then sometimes I'll go to the library to try to find something in writing. When I find the time, I like to go through old copies of Reader's Digest; many of today's rumors began years ago as "Life in These United States" or [other] items in the Reader's Digest.
When people hear the latest scare, what should they do before they act on it?
Use your common sense, but most important is to sit on your hands before you hit the forward button [in an e-mail]. Nothing terrible will happen if you take five minutes to think it through before acting.
This article originally appeared on Newsweek.com on Oct. 19, 2001.
Stim, 1996: The 'Cosmos Patrol' Hoax
By
When I was living in
Although
The hero of "Cosmos Patrol" is the handsome yet avuncular Commander Vasily Dobraydushev; Comrade Commander to his crew. His surname translates literally as Kind Soul. Consequently, fans of the show call themselves dushki, which means, approximately, dear little souls. Like much of Russian pop culture, the show oozes with sentimentality, up to and including tearful folk songs and lengthy toasts to the Intergalactic Brotherhood of life forms. And when Comrade Commander faces a difficult decision, he sometimes asks for guidance from the bust of Lenin in the ship's ward room.
At other times, Dobraydushev is assisted on the bridge by the coldly logical First Officer Oleg Nemetsov. Although the former U.S.S.R. was a multiethnic society, the crew of the Red Adventurer, unlike the U.S.S.
The show is such a clone of Star Trek that there is even a character called Ensign Chekhov; this Chekhov, chubby Kolya, provides comic relief with his tall tales, or vranyo as the Russians call them. In about every other episode, he lets it rip with his surefire comedy catchphrase: "I'd rather eat a Kvassian bivalve--and I have!"
Like most Soviet TV shows, "Cosmos Patrol" is first and foremost a propaganda vehicle. The implicit message is: be diligent in your studies, young people, and you too may one day honor the Motherland on the frontiers of Soviet achievement. On the show, there's a lot of talk about "scientific socialism" and "progressive technological collectivism." Science, progress, technology, bah, bah, bah--it never stops. But the payoff comes with the amusingly retro scenes in which the crew members have a chance to view their spaceship from afar: they gaze at it with wide-eyed wonder, as if they've never before seen a pointy cardboard tube with fins.
Whenever I tell friends here about "Cosmos Patrol," they always ask me how to say "Beam me up" in Russian. Answer: I don't know, since the show doesn't have a "Star Trek"-style transporter. They just land that crummy fake-looking rocket wherever they have to go.
As on Star Trek, the "strange, new worlds" the Red Adventurer visits often seem ringingly familiar. Let's see: There's the Nazi Germany planet, the Gangland Chicago planet, the Ancient Greece planet, and the planet of the Militaristic Paranoid Fascists (the
Perhaps one of the weirdest borrowings from Star Trek has Dobraydushev and a reanimated Peter the Great challenging holographic supervillains Adolf Hitler and John D. Rockefeller in a chess tournament--to the death!
The one episode that left me completely baffled involves a planet where kimono-clad humanoids relax while robot "slaves" do all the work. Dobraydushev scolds the kimono people for not treating their mechanical servants as social equals--"comrades," in his words--and eventually convinces both sides to unite in fraternal harmony. I hadn't a clue about this one--until I learned this fun fact: the Red Army used to award medals for bravery to tanks and airplanes. Hey, machines are people, too, even if Jews and Uzbeks aren't.
When not on duty, Dobraydushev and his crew can be seen indulging in typically Russian pastimes: playing chess, drinking vodka, quoting from Pushkin. One memorably mind-boggling episode revolves around a shipboard "Mathematical Olympiad." Nemetsov served as quizmaster, but the competition was won by Cadet Valentin Volkov. He's the show's slide-rule-toting teen heartthrob, a role model for Soviet youth, and he has a mischievous pet monkey named Yuri. (You thought Wesley Crusher was annoying.)
At some point I had to wonder if perhaps Gene Roddenberry had seen "Cosmos Patrol" and borrowed from it to create "Star Trek: The Next Generation." For one thing, Picard's frequent use of commands like "Engage!" and "Make it so" seems to echo Dobraydushev's "D'vai!" (We go now!) and "Eta Noozhna" (That is a necessity). Also, the Red Adventurer has a recreational facility somewhat akin to the holodeck, except that the crew only ever uses it to sip tea and listen to Tchaikovsky inside a virtual dacha.
Then-top Kremlin boss Leonid Brezhnev was a big fan of the show, and was even rumored to be responsible for its creation. Brezhnev was known for his enthusiasm for show business and the Soviet space program (and graft and booze and mistresses and diamonds and expensive foreign cars, but that's another story). A Russian friend remembers seeing a news photo in Pravda of a drunk and ill-looking Brezhnev visiting the show's set dressed in his own custom-made "Cosmos Patrol" velour uniform. If you've ever seen a picture of Brezhnev, then you know that cannot have been a pretty sight.
I'm sure there are a lot of Star Trek fans out there who might be upset at learning that their favorite show had been pitilessly exploited by mono-brow cultural commissars intent only on staging a politically palatable puppet show for a boozed-up party hack. I empathize with you. But to those people, I say this: at least you didn't have to see the Soviets' effort to create a wacky comedy about seven castaways trying to get rescued from a desert island.
Belated Author's Note: There is no such TV show as "Cosmos Patrol" and never was. I completely made it up--for money.
This article originally appeared on Stim.com in September 1996 (http://www.stim.com/Stim-x/0996September/Automedia/soviet.html)
GQ, 1991: Pinball
Cheap Thrills
Pinball is True Americana: Garish, Gaudy, Loud, Tacky ... and Fun
By Andrew Cohen
The pinball brotherhood follows a strict code: Video is evil, pinball is good.
Make no mistake, it is a brotherhood, a guy thing. At last year's annual Pinball Expo, held at an airport hotel near Chicago, there were exactly six women among an audience of 200 or so listening to lectures on cable-lacing and flipper technique. The members of the brotherhood sat enrapt by talk of digitized speech and plastic injection-molding. One of the faithful asked the plastics expert why the game-field posts on many machines build in 1976 break so often. The expert explained that indeed a bad batch of posts had been made that year, but you can identity them by seeing if they float in water: Bad ones float, good ones sink.
This was precisely the type of information the crowd had come to hear. They also got to sample the latest games from the big three manufacturers, as well as buy and sell classic machines--but not just machines. In the adjoining exhibition hall, there was a booming trade in archaic and highly prized pinball paraphernalia, such as vintage parts catalogues and schematic drawings of pinball circuitry.
People were having a good time, soaking up the atmosphere at one of the most important gatherings in the pinball world. However, much of the good humor and fellow feeling vanished whenever someone brought up arcade video games. There were variously referred to as "wimp games," "geek games," "kid games," "twitch games" and "run-around-and-kill-things games." Video is the enemy, the hated Other. That's because its overwhelming popularity a decade ago nearly killed pinball. Enthusiasm for video has cooled considerably since then, but even with the bloom off the video boomlet, pinball disciples are slow to forgive. According to Frank "the Crank" Selinsky, a pinball columnist for several coin-op trade journals and the president of an Edison, New Jersey, arcade distributorship, these days, a top new pinball machine can pull in up to $200 a week for the first few weeks, but a decent video game will still earn a bit more per week over a longer period.
In the late Seventies, pinball was enjoying a renaissance: The movie Tommy had renewed interest in the venerable American institution. Production runs of pinball machines hit their highest levels, and many players' favorites--including Wizard, Gorgar, Playboy, Eight Ball, Space Mission and Evel Knievel--appeared.
But in the next decade, such smash-hit arcade video games as Space Invaders and Pac-Man pushed pinball out of the limelight. Pinball accounted for some 80 percent of the coin-op amusement market in 1975 but had fallen to just 5 percent of arcade revenues by 1984. D. Gottlieb & Co., one of the premier pinball manufacturers since the game's birth, changed owners that same year, and video drove pinball machine-maker Stern Electronics (successor to the old Chicago Coin) out of business.
All during the bad years, sad years, members of the brotherhood stood by pinball. Remaining companies, such as Williams Electronics and Bally (which merged in 1988 and as Williams Electronics now controls 80 percent of the world market), but they never completely abandoned pinball.
"Pinball has a tendency to fall into the background when something newer comes along," says Steven Kordek, head of the eight-man design staff at Williams Electronics. "Gun games, shuffle games, video games--no matter, pin games always come back."
Kordek should know. At 80, he's been active in the business since 1937. He's the man responsible for one of the greatest innovations in pinball history. Though Harry Mabs, a Gottlieb designer, was first to put flippers on a pinball game--Humpty Dumpty in 1947 had six--it was Kordek who used flippers to their fullest advantage by putting a single pair at the bottom of the playing field, still the standard placement. Even the beloved Kordek received a cool reception when he asked the Expo crowd to lobby Congress for a new dollar coin so that arcade owners could charge more than the current 50 cents a game. "We should be charging $1.50 for all the entertainment we're giving," Kordek said to a stony audience.
What is it, beside inflation-fighting prices, that has sustained pinball's popularity over the years? "Each ball plays differently from the last ball," says Kordek. "Each game is different and very exciting. It's not like video, where you know what's going to happen and a guy can stand there and play for two days without putting in another quarter."
"It's an escape, it's relaxing," says "Jelly" Joey Cartegena, a 25-year-old doorman and the winner of a recent tournament at New York City's Broadway Arcade, the establishment recognized by aficionados as coming closest to earthly paradise.
Pinball is as authentic a slice of Americana as you can find. It's always been like a favorite black-sheep uncle--wacky, spirited, a lot of fun to be around...but a little embarrassing to be seen with. Pinball has no class, no sophistication, yet on the other hand, it has no pretension, no French terminology or obscure etiquette. Pinball is garish, gaudy, loud and tacky. Pinball is a game of cheap theatrics and visceral pleasures, of delicate tactile feedback from bumper and flipper action...
And it's a game with a poor reputation, largely because it has spent nearly its entire life hanging around in bars and bus terminals. It also caters to a short attention span: pinball designers aim to give players an average of forty-eight seconds of play per ball. And somewhere along the line, the game got mixed up with a bad crowd--gamblers, toughs, miscreants. Pinball's reputation took an additional hit in 1936, when Humphrey Bogart played a petty-vice lord who bullies mom-and-pop shopkeepers into taking his pinball machines in a little-remembered movie called Bullets or Ballots. Back before flippers, righteous folk knocked pinball as being a game of chance no better than one-armed bandits. (Some pin games of the Thirties even made cash payouts for high scores, as do slot machines.) Controversy persists in the matter of matching, the game feature that is traditionally supposed to give the player a random 1-in-10 chance of winning a free game. But it's not always a 1-in-10 chance; today, arcade operators can program computerized pinball machines to award free games a lot less often, like 1-in-100. Hard-core players think that's wrong.
Coin-operated pinball was born in 1931, but there is little agreement as to who the real father was. Whiffle Board, Baffle Ball, Whoopee Game, Dutch Pool, Jostle and El Bumpo all appeared that year. We do know that pinball is directly descended from bagatelle, a gimmick-laden variation on traditional parlor billiards that was played by idle French noblemen of the ancien regime. In the nineteenth century, it was enjoyed by the likes of Charles Dickens and Abraham Lincoln.
Richard Bueschel, an amateur pinball historian who has already published the first volume of a projected ten-volume history of the game, told the Expo audience how the start of World War II had abruptly curtailed production. With no new machines being produced, "conversion kits" were created to give new life to old games. Wartime conversions in the U.S. featured such names as Smack the Japs and Bomb the Axis Rats. Meanwhile, in Nazi Germany, American-made pin games were cruelly pressed into propaganda service and given new names such as Bomben London and Ostkrieg.
Morality was even more ruinous than war to pinball's fortunes. Between 1939 and 1942, the machines were banned in several large cities--most traumatically in Chicago, pinball's hometown. New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia led the crusade, smashing pinball machines in the streets of Gotham for photographers while accusing candy-store owners of cheating kids out of their lunch money. Incredibly, these big-city bans were on the books until the mid-Seventies.
But pinball's biggest handicap was also its greatest asset: Pinball art is probably the main reason for the game's cultural ostracism. It has seldom been subtle--in fact, think "dirty old man." Whatever the ostensible theme of a specific game--billiards, baseball, betting--there's a fourth B that usually predominates: busty babes. Make that big busty babes (although leggy showgirls enjoyed a brief vogue back in the Fifties).
Pinball is possibly the last refuge of undisturbed, unapologetic male-bonding machismo. Disturbing? Harmful? Well, maybe. But consider the alternative: big-eyed puppies and kitten in soothing pastels. No way!
A decade after the Tommy boom, pinball has again edged back from the abyss and now accounts for 30 percent of arcade revenues. The assets of Gottlieb were bought to start Premier Technology, which still makes games under the Gottlieb name. Japanese-owned Data East was launched in the U.S. in 1986 with some staffers from Stern Electronics. At the latest arcade-industry trade show, it was a pinball machine--Data East's The Simpsons--not a video game, that was the big hit.
The Simpsons, along with other recent items such Dr. Dude and FunHouse, is a fine game, but many of the mavens at the Pinball Expo contend that these games lack the feel of such Sixties classics as Slick Chick or Magic City. Steven Kordek says that one of his company's newest efforts, Harley-Davidson, is an attempt to return to the less complex pin games of the past. That's the thing about pinball: The best machine is always the first one your dad helped you play when you weren't tall enough to see over it, or the game you couldn't beat in college.
Fortunately, classic pinball is reasonably inexpensive to domesticate. While a brand-new machine can run up to $3,000, an older one in good working order can be had for as little as a few hundred dollars. Only the rarest and most desirable machines--like a '72 Bally Fireball in good condition--go for exorbitant amounts, sometimes almost five figures. Best of all, with a pinball machine of your own, you can spend more time with your family, especially that wacky black-sheep uncle you haven't seen for so long.
This article first appeared in the November 1991 issue of GQ Magazine
WSJ, 1988: Violent TV
In the First Episode, Winnie Offs
A Drug Lord and Crashes His Boat
A Drug Lord and Crashes His Boat
By Andrew B. Cohen
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
Mention violence on television, and most people think of the same old shows "Magnum, P.I.," "Spenser: For Hire," "Miami Vice." Well, here's a new one for the top of the list: "Winston Churchill: The Valiant Years."
That's one of the curious findings of a recent study by the National Coalition on Television Violence, a nonprofit media-watchdog organization. According to the study, the 1960 Emmy-award winning documentary on the British statesman, which is now being shown on the Arts and Entertainment Cable Network, averaged 126 acts of violence an hour; by contrast, "Miami Vice" averaged 31.
Violence Isn't Everything
The coalition's study of violence on television covers a six-month period, and the group has sent numerous influential politicians copies of its report. Its aim is to persuade the public that violent entertainment is a mental health hazard.
According to the coalition, however, a high average number of violent acts an hour isn't in itself a sufficient reason for condemnation. For example, the documentary "From the Ashes of War," which ran on the Discovery Channel, chalked up an average of 70 violent acts an hour yet it still managed to win the group's approval for its "pro-social" content.
"We're not against violence, but against violence being misrepresented on television," says Dr. Thomas Radecki, a Champaign, Ill., psychiatrist and the organization's research director.
Moreover, says Dr. Radecki, not all acts of violence are created equal. For example, the coalition counts a thrown punch as a single violent act, but a rude jostling is considered only one-third of a violent act.
Context is another consideration: A pie in the face may or may not be counted as a violent actit all depends on the thrower's intention.
'Unfit for Human Consumption'
The most violent show of all during the study period? "Victory at Sea," a rerun of an old NBC documentary series about World War II, now being offered on the Arts and Entertainment Cable Network. It averaged 301 violent acts an hour.
The most execrable show, however, was "Werewolf," from Fox Broadcasting Co. It averaged only 35 violent acts per hour, but they were particularly loathsome acts and, in the study, the coalition classified the show "unfit for human consumption." Apparently, Dr. Radecki and his associates weren't the only ones to do so: Fox recently cancelled the series.
This article first appeared in The Wall Street Journal of Sept. 22, 1988, page B1
WSJ, 1990: Educational Films (Page One A-Hed)
Upon Reflection,
High-School Movies
Really Were Bizarre
* * *
Educational Film Collector
Finds Gold in the Oldies;
Teens Still Hate Them
By Andrew B. Cohen
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
Phil has a problem. He can't seem to make friends at his new school. He is a "shy guy," so he tinkers with radios alone in his basement. His father tells him to "pick out the most popular boys and girls and keep an eye on them." Following Dad's advice, Phil becomes a good listener, helpful and polite. By the next class mixer, Phil is Mr. Popularity. And guess what? Seems the gang at school is interested in radios, too!
Thank Richard Prelinger for preserving "Shy Guy," a 1947 educational film that starred Dick York, later Darrin on the television series "Bewitched." Mr. Prelinger, a film collector and media archeologist, estimates that nearly 600,000 such short films--most shorter than 10 minutes--were produced for schools and business between 1920 and 1980, when videotape took over.
Mr. Prelinger, 36 years old, began acquiring these films in 1982 after realizing that no one else was preserving them. He now has more than 20,000. Most came from bankrupt production companies and film labs eager to give them to anyone willing to cart them away.
NO IRONING NEEDED
His library now ranges from camp curios like "Dating: Do's and Don'ts" (1949) and "The Wonderful World of Wash and Wear" (1958) to graver, government-made films like "Sucking Wounds of the Chest" (1952) and "What You Should Know About Biological Warfare" (1951). A few deliver Manichean lessons--such as "We Drivers" (1936, remade in '49, '55 and '62), a Chevrolet-sponsored cartoon in which Sensible Sam and Reckless Rudolph battle in a "Rocky"-style prizefight for the soul of a motorist.
Mr. Prelinger calls these works "ephemeral films," because they have outlived their original purpose, whether it was helping teen-agers overcome shyness or using silent comedy to show Frigidaire dealers that good service puts "Sand on the Slippery Sidewalks of Sales" (1927).
But, he adds, they are also ciphers to "everyday history," to the mores and values of American society. "I'm interested in finding films that show the conflicts and contradictions of their time," Mr. Prelinger says.
One favorite is a teen-guidance film called "A Date With Your Family" (1950). Ostensibly a lesson in dinner-table etiquette, it asserts that meal-time should be treated as if it were a social event of one's choosing. But under a veneer of prandial pleasantries lies what Mr. Prelinger calls a "really creepy" portrayal of suburban family life.
"These boys greet their dad as though they are genuinely glad to see him, as though they had really missed being away from him during the day and are anxious to talk to him," says the narrator of this unintentional film noir. "The women of this family seem to feel that they owe it to the men of the family to look relaxed, rested and attractive at dinner time."
The narrator advises "pleasant, unemotional conversation" for the family gathering and subtly warns the viewer to "Tell Mother how good the food is. Maybe Sis rates a compliment,too. It makes them want to continue pleasing you."
Another Prelinger favorite is "From Dawn to Sunset" (1937), a big-budget documentary that depicts a day in the life of workers at a dozen General Motors facilities around the country. To the rhythm of martial music, masses of stone-faced workers march through factory gates, where men and machinery unite in productive harmony. Later, at home, the workers use their well-earned GM dollars to buy goods for their families, enriching the community in the process.
Mr. Prelinger notes that GM was fighting unionism at the time, hence the company's stirring appeal to worker loyalty.
Mr. Prelinger's firm, Prelinger Associates, sells the use of footage from his collection for up to $90 a second. He sold "From Dawn to Sunset" footage to Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc. for use in "Drexel Helps America," a film promoting junk bonds, as well as to Michael Moore,whose new film, "Roger and Me," blames GM's restructuring for the economic woes of Flint, Mich., the auto maker's birthplace.
Recently, Mr. Prelinger contracted to market his collection through another stock footage house, Petrified Films Inc. He is at work on other projects: producing segments for "Buzz," MTV's new "magazine" program, helping HBO find appropriately ironic footage for its new Comedy Channel and assembling a videodisk for scholars of "original visual research material" on the history of suburbia.
Some of his best clips are available on two home-video samplers from Voyager Co. of Santa Monica, Calif. Other volumes to come have such themes as car culture, gender roles and educational "misinformation."
The material for these categories is rich and ridiculous. Car culture alone spawned a particularly melodramatic genre: high-school safety films. As Mr. Prelinger puts it, "With safety films, you're always rooting for the accident to happen."
"The Last Date" (1950) is a "scared" film classic. Pretty Joanne could date any boy on the football team, but she ignores warnings that Nick (Dick York again) is a "teenicide" waiting to happen. "It would have been better if I'd died in the hospital rather than look the way I do. I couldn't even go to Nick's funeral," she sobs, her face teasingly hidden from the camera. "I've had my last date."
NEW AND IMPROVED DO'S AND DON'TS
Makers of educational films say that "The Last Date" would no longer play in Peoria. The genre is now all but extinct, and the few driver's ed films still available are notable for a lack of gore and grief.
These days the emphasis is on bolstering "self-worth and teaching positive values," according to Joe Elliot, president of Chicago-based Encyclopaedia Britannica Educational Corp., the film-making unit of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. "A lot of what the films are doing is helping kids cope with very complicated lives. The pressures these kids face are a lot different from what we experienced."
Evidence of these changes can be seen in the latest Britannica catalog, where films for high-schoolers address up-to-the-second concerns in films like "Steroids: Shortcut to Make-Believe Muscles," "When Romance Turns to Rape" and "Coping With That Thing Called...Stress!"
Whether these films have ever made a shy guy popular or kept a kid from trying drugs is debateable. What's not is how many teens respond to them.
Jennifer Gravitz, a 17-year-old senior at Sachem High School (one of the nation's largest) in Lake Ronkonkoma, N.Y., undoubtedly speaks for millions of her peers, past and present, when she gives a big "thumbs down" to most educational films.
She cites one health film, "Natural Highs and How to Get Them," as one "really stupid" example, typified by platitudinous advice on staying sober. "You think, this is boring, and you just block it out," she says. The films "try to prove a point, buy they treat you so stupidly. Students will fall asleep no matter what."
But time and nostalgia work wonders. Mr. Prelinger has screened his films at museums, universities, and film festivals from San Diego to the Hague, usually to enthusiastic sell-out crowds. Though some of his audience derives from what he calls the '80s "camp and kitsch boom," he declares himself firmly anti-nostalgia and avers that others are ready to view ephemeral films seriously.
"What's really neat is to know how to look at media from some critical way," he says. "On the other hand, I don't think that watching films will change the world."
This article first appeared in The Wall Street Journal of Jan. 3, 1990, page A1
WSJ, 1990: College Admission Essays (Page One A-Hed)
Write Us an Essay,
Buster, and Make It
Interesting--or Else
* * *
Your Fervent Desire to Meet
Abe Lincoln Won't Get
You Into Best Colleges
By Andrew B. Cohen
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
Aristotle wrote, "The Good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim." Alexander Woolcott said, "Everything good in the world is either immoral, illegal or fattening." Who's right? Or are the two views in agreement? If not, what accounts for the implied dispute?
Sharpen your pencils. Get ready. Go.
If you can write a thoughtful, well-reasoned response to the above problem, you just might earn one of the more coveted prizes in academia: admittance to this fall's freshman class at the University of Chicago.
There are many hurdles to clear on the way to Prestige U., and one is answering the offbeat essay questions that appear on some schools' undergraduate admissions applications. The University of Pennsylvania has this one: "You have just completed your 300-page autobiography. Please submit page 217." Stanford requires applicants to "jot a note telling your future roommate what to expect from you in the coming year," while Smith College asks, " If you were forced to live with only three items, which items would you choose and why?"
GETTING BEYOND NUMBERS
Other schools look for scope. "If you could introduce one new idea or material thing to a primitive culture, what would it be?" asks the College of the Atlantic, in Bar Harbor, Maine. Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., asks, "If you could change any event in the course of history, what would you change and why?"