Martin Landau

            On Friday, November 18^th, on my way to class along College Street, near Bathurst, a guy wearing a black and white United States flag t-shirt and carrying a yellow construction helmet was talking on his phone. He said, “I’d like to help you out, but you’ve got to get rid of all of those charges first!”

            At Spadina, at the corner of my right eye, a woman walking alone said loudly into her phone, “Because he doesn’t have any super HEROES! Hah HAH!”

            It was like an oven in the lecture hall, so I opened the door and propped it open with a blue garbage bin. When Professor Russell arrived, he was about to close it when I told him that I’m the one that opened it because it was so hot. He agreed that it was extreme and commented that it’s always like that on Fridays because someone before our class cranks up the thermostat for some reason. He left the door open during class.

            Our lecture was on the topic of video games.

            The first question, as usual was, “Can video games be art?” And the first response, as usual, was that it’s better to ask if video games can be high art. Adorno says that film is too practical to be art and some say the same about video games.

Roger Ebert was the return of Adorno, but for video games. He declared that video games can’t be art because they have the objective of winning. The game, is masterless because it and even its aesthetic properties are not controlled by the artist, but rather each player.

We had an iclicker poll and found that 51% disagree with Ebert.

You don’t have to try to win a video game. You could interact with it as a piece of art.

He showed us a still from a video game. I’d thought he’d called it “Brade Brave” but maybe it’s just “Braid”. Devlin declared that he thinks it’s a masterpiece. He said it draws on the tradition of Mario, but the art is better and it looks better. When you die you can rewind time by clicking on the “X”. The story is about a boy that made a mistake in a relationship and wishes that he could rewind.  He said it’s a metaphor for how we feel about our big regrets.

What makes video games unique? Interactivity can give rise to unique aesthetic properties determined by the actions of consumers.

But suppose one reads a novel backwards. That also changes aesthetic properties. This would make every form of art interactive.

The solution is that a work is only interactive if manipulation is proscribed and if you make those changes.

After class I had a long conversation with Professor Russell about interactivity in art. It seemed to me that all art is interactive, so video games are actually not unique in that sense. A song like Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” is taken by Jimi Hendrix and transformed into something that most people associate with Hendrix even though they at the same time know that it’s still Bob Dylan’s composition. It seemed to me that because of that the song is interactive, just as any piece of music can be improvised            upon. He argued that the difference is that you cannot play a videogame without interacting with it while a song can be played or sung without making changes. I told him the story about how John Lennon met Yoko Ono. She had an avant-garde gallery show of various installments, one of which was a board with nails partially driven into it. It was hanging on a wall with a sign above it that read, “Hit me”. Beneath it on a table was a hammer. John Lennon came into the gallery, saw the sign, then picked up the hammer and began pounding the shit out of the nails. He was the first visitor that had done exactly what she wanted people to do, so she went over to talk to him. Devlin said that is exactly what he means by “interactive” and that video games are like that in a way that songs are not. I told him about the group poem, “The Gumby Bible” that I’d started, to which hundreds of people had contributed by adding lines. He argued that it would not be interactive in the sense that he meant the word because one can only add a line, whereas interaction would mean one could change the lines that ha been written before. I really didn’t get it. When you play a video game it only changes while you play it and if you don’t save the game it starts all over again. I guess that Hamlet though has been performed millions of times over the centuries in millions of different ways, even though it is still the same play. He said that for a work of art to be interactive like video games the invitation has to be there at the beginning, as was the case with Yoko’s hammer and nails, to interact with it,

            At Spadina, a pleasant and elderly Chinese lady approached me, smiling, with a petition while holding a little sign that read, “Stop persecution of Falun Gong”. I don’t normally sign petitions, but her silence seemed more compelling than an argument, so I put my name and address down. I think that the only English she knew was, “Thank you very much!”

            In the evening, after I got up from a siesta, a couple of middle-aged guys were arguing in front of the Dollarama. One of them, the larger one was panhandling by the door and demanding that the other one, a bald guy with a grey beard, “Go!” He repeated it several times and then made a fist and asked, “Do you really want this? Do you really want this? Do you really want this?” until the other hesitatingly walked away.

            That night I watched the second episode of the short lived late fifties, early sixties series, “Johnny Staccato”. John Cassavetes plays the lead character and he directed this episode about a famous hack songwriter songwriter who is murdered after finally writing a masterpiece. It turns out though that the victim stole the song from an alcoholic piano player played by Martin Landau. Landau’s performance was great and Cassavettes’s direction was good, but the story was kind of lame because it had no depth in the writing. The first episode suffered from that same inadequacy. Compared to some of the writing on 77 Sunset Strip at around the same time it just doesn’t stand up.