In the last several months I’ve done trailers for Operation: Anchorage and The Pitt expansions to Fallout 3. This was one of the first times I really got to flex my own creative muscle more fully at Bethsoft so that was a lot of fun. Got another one coming up.

New albums I’ve been enjoying include Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone, Fever Ray’s self-titled debut, and The Decemberists’ The Hazards of Love. Was disappointed with Andrew Bird’s Noble Beast and MONO’s tepid Hymn to the Immortal Wind. Am waiting on three Sigur Rós vinyl re-issues to arrive. Saw Frightened Rabbit live—they were amazing.

Girlfriend moved in with me.

Played Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney all the way through (quite enjoyable) before I realized I’d never played the third Phoenix Wright game. That’s on the way. Also got into Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise. Don’t judge me.

Might’ve impulse-purchased a pair of Swan M200MkIIs today. The deal running over at The Audio Insider is great, and they’re well spoken-of in circles that speak well of speakers. A review will follow once they arrive and I try ‘em out.

The first is the raw-yet-polished Scottish indie rock/pop of Frightened Rabbit. Their album The Midnight Organ Fight is at once driving and relaxed, moving through a number of musical idioms even while its lyrics are brooding, desperate, tortured, and ultimately some of the most powerful (and clever) I’ve heard this year. It’s no overstatement to say that this record contains some of the best writing I’ve heard since I flipped shit about The National. Album-opener “The Modern Leper” gets things off to a rousing start as lead singer Scott Hutchinson delivers one of my favorite lyrics of this year:

Is that you in front of me
Coming back for even more of exactly the same?
Well you must be a masochist
To love a modern leper on his last leg

Lyrically, the majority of the album focuses strongly on characters frustrated with love, with life, even with God. Confronted with his love leaving for another man in the lilting “Good Arms vs. Bad Arms,” the speaker pleads “And leave the rest at arm’s length / Keep your naked flesh under your favorite dress.” First single “The Twist” finds its character opining to “I need company / I need human heat.” Yet four songs later (atop a dangerously catchy tune) Hutchinson declares that “it takes more than fucking someone to keep yourself warm.” It is this album-wide back-and-forth that gives The Midnight Organ Fight its emotional resonance. Hutchinson’s characters thrum with a painful and honest melancholy that is both sympathetic and affecting.

Of course, Hutchinson is only one part of Frightened Rabbit, and while I’m wont to focus on good lyrics I’d be remiss if I didn’t compliment the band’s strong song crafting skills. Scott and brother Grant on drums, along with Billy Kennedy on guitar and Andy Monaghan on keyboards, build up songs whose pop hooks and forward momentum seem to run counter to the lyrical tone of the album. It’s the same dichotomy that The National has used to good effect, and while the two bands share only passing similarities in sound, there’s no mistaking the tactic. And it’s effective—”Head Rolls Off” brings crisp drums, simple progression and a singable melody, even as Scott delivers the controversial “Jesus is just a Spanish boy’s name / How come one man got so much fame?” Most songs lack an especially powerful low-end due to the band’s lack of a bassist, but that oomph is more than made up for by the pounding drums and forward guitars. Scott’s wavering delivery and heavy Scottish accent might prove divisive for some listeners, but its raw, honest sound aids the lyrics’ heft.

Winterpills’ 2007 effort The Light Divides, by contrast, is a more laid-back affair—a pretty indie pop five-piece hailing from Massachusetts. Theirs is (for the most part) the quieter, more back-room sort of melancholy that one might expect. Not a revolutionary CD, perhaps—one could easily cite a litany of indie pop bands who’ve explored similar territory—but beautiful and solidly-executed nonetheless. Songwriter Philip Price and keyboardist Flora Reed breathe beautiful harmonies into the restrained words of Price’s characters, as the band backs with pitch-perfect acoustic-focused pop arrangements.

Like Frightened Rabbit, there is a sense of desperation about this album. “You could make me feel so good / If you’d come here and cry” Price sings on “Lay Your Heartbreak.” Later: “I think I finally understand / The way a broken arm can hate the hand / The way a farmer hates his crop / The way a lawyer hates the honest cop.” Later still: “I bear witness to / How your dying choice betrayed your voice.” From start to finish these compositions’ emotional cores seem to embody the same cold barrenness so many associate with the band’s native New England. It falls to the band’s arrangements to keep us from slitting our wrists, and their cautious but tight arrangements keep the album’s outlook from being downright depressing.

The album’s standouts, of course, are also its poppiest numbers—”Lay Your Heartbreak” and “Broken Arm” both are catchy, melodic numbers that (at first) steal the show. Yet it’s the album’s quieter and more considered cuts—the hushed battle for solitude in acoustic-plucked “Hide Me,” or the country-tinged “Shameful,” or even the cadence-changing guitar-gauze of “Eclipse”—where the band displays the amplifying power of its restraint. Each element become heightened by the songs’ relative sparseness. The album unfolds at an unhurried pace, which at first gives it the feeling of being somewhat sleepy. Further listening reveals the germ of each song though, and each has something to offer.

Both The Midnight Organ Fight and The Light Divides tread the same roads, though perhaps in different shoes and at different speeds. Whatever their differences, they’re both a couple of the albums I’ve been thankful to discover this year.

So every once in a while, it’s nice to see someone out there proving that there’s more to life.

Firstly, I’ve always considered text selection (and the subsequent copy/paste operations) to be the sorts of operations that would require two hands. For one, pretty much all the obvious single-finger gestures have been taken. For two, these operations are what I like to call “primary activities.” I can understand wanting gestures to only require one hand in most cases, but when you’re selecting, cutting/copying, pasting or deleting blocks of text, you’re probably giving the phone your full attention.

I envision it going something like this:

1. You position the opening cursor by tap/holding and dragging to get the loupe, as you do now.
2. Instead of letting go, you continue to hold with that finger, and begin to make the same gesture with another finger to summon another loupe/cursor. This defines the end of the selection. At this point you’re selecting text. I picture this being done with both thumbs.
3. Once you have made the selection (by letting go with one or both thumbs, probably both), a contextual menu appears, perhaps attached to the second (end) loupe and represented by simple icons, with the cut/copy/paste (and potentially delete) operations. This could also be done like the “multiple operations buttons” that appear when you want to do something with a photo in a Photo Album on the phone (Use as Wallpaper, E-mail, etc.)—probably the better of the two choices in that it’s larger, draws more attention to itself, and uses words to represent possible actions instead of tiny pictograms.

There are some obvious problems with this idea though. Firstly, it’s really centered around the applications where you’re actively editing text: Notes, Mail, SMS, etc. It doesn’t work as well for “viewer” applications like Safari where you might want to copy text from a page you’re looking at. In those cases I’d almost expect you’d have to perform some odd finger operation like a double-tap-and-hold/drag to initiate “text selection mode” that gives you a cursor within the text contained on the page.

Secondly, and perhaps more of a showstopper, there’s no good way that I can see to give the user an option to paste once he’s copied something to the clipboard. Perhaps summoning the cursor-dragging loupe once something has been copied would add a “paste” icon to the loupe, which could be clicked with a second finger? It’s at this point that you either start putting UI widgets in ugly—or non-intuitive—places.

I think the real issue is that Apple seems very reluctant to give in to traditional desktop computer navigation methods—and with good reason, considering the radically different input method their device employs. While multi-touch makes navigating documents much more physically tactile and intuitive, it makes more involved editing tasks much more complicated to portray. When navigating a view is as simple as swiping a finger, suddenly all that “the cursor is your metaphorical hand” stuff seems completely out of place. It’s just a shame that so many of our current mental models for editing text rely on an intermediary device between our hands and our words.

If you’d like to see it, pop on over to prepareforthefuture.com, GameTrailers.com, or any one of many online media outlets that have it up. Alternatively, if you’re on Xbox Live, you can download the trailer in full HD with surround sound for free.

It was a ton of fun to work on, and I look forward to working on more stuff for Bethesda.

In the last month and a half I’ve:

• Driven across the country with a car full of stuff and landed at my parents’ house.
• Successfully locked down a job at Bethesda Softworks, a videogame company.
• Lost my iPhone on the Metro.
• Hunted for an apartment in DC, found one, and moved in with my friend Joey.
• Seen Death Cab for Cutie and The National live in the span of three days.
• Reunited with the greatest group of people I’ve ever known.

Not necessarily listed in order of importance, because let’s face it, that last one is by far the most important.

With any luck I’ll be going to bed in Laramie, WY tomorrow night. My car is packed with everything I’m not leaving behind, and I should be in VA by late Wednesday night, with any luck.

I’ll be blogging and e-mailing from the road (while taking breaks from driving, obviously), so feel free to contact me at matt at killmoms (dot) com, or by texting. You can also reach me by cell whenever I have service. I make no guarantees while I’m still west of the Mississippi.

• The Hush Sound – Goodbye Blues – Precious indie-pop kids grow up a bit and release a stronger, more forward album that maintains the infectious piano-driven pop/rock hooks of their previous efforts. Greta in particular has grown into a vocal force, shedding the sweet/girlish sound for one that’s richer, more mature, and all-around more appealing. Lots of great stuff here. Particular favorites: “Honey,” “Medicine Man,” “Hurricane,” and “Molasses.”
• The Long Winters – Putting the Days to Bed – I know, not a new one, I’m just very very late to the party. There’s lyrical (and musical) meat on these bones, to say the least, if you can get past John Roderick’s unique vocal stylings. Particular favorites: “Pushover,” “Teaspoon,” “The Sky is Open,” and “Clouds.”
• Panic at the Disco – Pretty. Odd. – Unexpectedly (and wildly) successful loud electric-cabaret indie rock band uses their sophomore album to reinvent their sound, to the alternating chagrin and exultation of their fans and critics everywhere. But don’t let the shameless Beatles/Kinks/Beach Boys-aping deceive you—they are, in fact, “still the same band” with the same winking, self-referential and self-aware lyrics and penchant for crafting hooks they displayed on A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out. Particular favorites: “Nine in the Afternoon,” “Do You Know What I’m Seeing?” and “When the Day Met the Night.”
• Nine Inch Nails – Ghosts I – IV – Trent Reznor gives the music industry the middle finger in a manner even more daring (and apparently successful) than Radiohead by releasing his 4 EP set in a number of digital and physical formats, including full lossless-quality downloads. While the material itself is uneven (ranges from forgettable to pretty kickass), the release is notable for sheer ballsiness alone. If you’re a fan of Reznor’s knob-twiddling, it’s certainly worth the $5 for a set of high quality MP3s or lossless FLAC files (and a fucking awesome accompanying PDF booklet—art direction and typography are top-notch).

Also, I’ve completed the vinyl portion of my Sigur Rós collection.

It is this theme—the disillusionment with modern adulthood and all its trappings—that is central to The National’s fantastic 2007 album Boxer. Where Ween was willing to laugh about it in “Your Party,” Boxer serves as the comedown that reminds us that no, it’s really like that. Frontman Matt Berninger crafts a lyrical landscape that is crushingly honest and delivers it in a resigned baritone set against a backdrop of staccato guitar, bass, piano and relentless percussion whose velocity belies the album’s morose outlook.

In fact, nearly every aspect of this album seems to evoke the schizophrenic contrast of “full-but-empty” lives. The music alternates between optimistic, positive harmony and slight dissonance while the lyrics remain brooding. This contrast is summed up in the first two tracks. The positive, piano-driven hook of “Fake Empire” suggests a fist-pumping sing-along while Berninger delivers resigned pleas: “Turn the light out, say goodnight / No thinking for a little while / Let’s not try to figure out everything at once.” Then, after a lush outro featuring a chorus of brass, the band turns menacing on the off-kilter “Mistaken for Strangers,” and the lyrics turn nigh-accusatory: “Well you wouldn’t want an angel watching over / Surprise surprise, they wouldn’t want to watch / Another uninnocent, elegant fall into the unmagnificent lives of adults.”

Even the album’s positive moments pull no punches—Berninger acknowledges that we can find happiness despite its sources’ transience. On the testament-to-modern-love “Apartment Story” he sings “So worry not / All things are well / We’ll be alright / We have our looks and perfume on.” Yet this same materialism is bemoaned two cuts later when we find two struggling lovers “Here, here in the guest room / Where we throw money at each other and cry ‘Oh my!’” Even our pursuit of happiness sometimes devolves into living vicariously through the (assumedly exaggerated) happiness of others, as on “Green Gloves:” “Get inside their clothes / With my green gloves / Watch their videos, in their chairs.”

Sonically the band falls into somewhat familiar territory, evoking bands like Interpol and Bloc Party while adding their own distinctive touches, primarily piano and brass. The aforementioned “Fake Empire,” “Apartment Story” and “Guest Room” maintain driving, positive momentum. On their darker tracks (“Mistaken for Strangers” and “Squalor Victoria” especially), the percussion comes to the forefront, pushing along bent chords and uncomfortable progressions. For most of its length, though, the music serves as a bed for the record’s potent lyrical themes rather than vice versa.

Berninger’s world—and by extension, ours—is a place that has trained us how to fuck up our lives, how to attempt self-reliance despite our own unreliability. It’s our adulthood, devoid of the meaning we assumed would be there when we arrived. Boxer is an album that documents, even in our warmest moments, our dismay at its absence.

That story sounded better in my head.

It all strengthens my feeling that I’m in the wrong place, and I might be re-crossing the country sooner than I ever thought.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

That hope was unfounded. Simply put, The Golden Compass fails on pretty much every level as a film. It is a work that lacks all the drama, narrative thrust and significance of the original work. Instead of presenting a story and characters one is inclined to care about, actors flit across the screen leaving little to no impact. Each plot point leads to another but the movie fails to give any of them dramatic weight, and so we are left with two excruciatingly painful hours of cinema.

It seems clear to me at this point that New Line is searching about frantically for fantasy epics to fill the giant-sized shoes of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and this film (like The Chronicles of Narnia before it) is just the latest story to fall prey to this misguided quest. No one at New Line seems to be able to discern that the reason for LotR’s success was Peter Jackson. That trilogy worked because Jackson had a single, uncompromising vision and an intense passion for the material. Everything that followed—the nearly perfect script, the exceptional cast and their performances, the fantastic art direction, Howard Shore’s brilliant score—were a result of Jackson’s relentless pursuit of perfection.

In contrast, The Golden Compass stands little to no chance of success. The script was originally written by British (that’s American!, Ed.) playwright Tom Stoppard, but was scrapped and re-written by director Chris Weitz, who manages to strip all the depth and significance out of the original work and replace it with dialogue and pacing that insults the viewer’s intelligence. Particularly painful is a segment in which Lord Asriel mentions out loud the threat of bandits in the area in which he’s traveling, and then almost immediately is attacked by bandits. It is fair to say that a LOT happens in the novel, but part of the process of adapting a novel is knowing how to condense it and get the important information across in a dramatic manner. Instead, the treatment here tries to cram as much as possible into two hours, and the viewer suffers for it. The whole tale feels rushed and over-explained.

When a great director and great cast combine their talents, sometimes a lackluster script can be saved from being a bad movie. Unfortunately, Weitz lacks the talent to shape the considerable raw acting prowess of his cast into characters that anyone would be particularly inclined to care about, and the cast is hampered by the aforementioned problematic script. Particularly maddening is the movie’s main character Lyra, played by first-time actress Dakota Blue Richards. While she isn’t cloyingly sweet or annoying as many child actors can be, neither is she particularly engaging. I never got the sense that she really felt strongly about anyone or anything else in the movie. She simply didn’t convey any of the fierce intelligence or rebellious nature so integral to the character. Nicole Kidman, an actress more than capable of great performances, fails to particularly intimidate in the way Miss Coulter should. Daniel Craig fails to convey any of the regal bearing or concealed affection for Lyra that Asriel should possess. And the computer-generated dæmons, especially Pantalaimon, are stripped of any of their redeeming characteristics by a script that treats them largely as cute sidekicks rather than manifestations of the characters’ souls.

After all this, even the best computer-generated effects out there can’t save this train wreck. The visuals in the film are striking, although don’t mesh entirely with my mind’s vision of Lyra’s Oxford (though what film CAN match one’s own imagination?). Worse yet, every painful minute of the film seems to be scored, and scored badly. A good film score serves to provide emotional cues and add dramatic weight to the narrative arc of the film. This score merely distracts and draws attention to itself by being terribly banal. And to cap it all off, the film ends with no sense of resolution whatsoever—you can almost hear New Line marketing drones hiding behind the massive CG bulk of Iorek saying “Stay tuned for The Golden Compass II: Electric Boogaloo!”

I’ve been working on this review for an hour and could go on, but I’m all bitched out. There is no reason you should go see The Golden Compass—it’s a wholesale failure as a movie. If you’re unfamiliar with the books but are intrigued by the story’s premise or the controversy it has stirred up, I’d strongly encourage you to read the books instead. Being targeted towards pre-teens/teens they’re certainly an easy, but rewarding, read.

In other news: I’m re-reading Drew Weing’s excellent The Journal Comic. It’s a great diary strip whose simplicity and frankness really resonates with me. I’m thinking about buying it in dead-tree format (along with some of Drew and Elanor’s other shorter works).

Andrew Bird: Saw him play live at the Orpheum on Friday night. I actually almost missed the show. I got distracted talking to friends and didn’t remember until an alarm went off on my iPhone (inexplicably) at 8—when the show was starting. In any event I booked it to the Metro and rode into downtown for a measly buck twenty-five and made it there just after 9 PM. I was in my seat just a few minutes before Bird came on stage.

Being a middling fan of his latest album, Armchair Apocrypha, I wasn’t sure about the show going in. But the highs were high enough that I figured he’d be worth a shot. I’m happy to report that he exceeded expectations—his performance was incredibly fun. He began solo, building up loops using his violin until he had a veritable string section backing him. Then he brought out his band, Dosh on drums/keyboards/loops, and Jeremy on guitar/backup vocals, and proceeded to blaze through a good selection of tunes from his catalog. The live renditions of “Fiery Crash” and “Heretics” were especially inspired. Definitely want to check out his last album.

Juno: God, what can I say about this movie that hasn’t already been said? It’s an excellent film, one of my favorites in recent memory, better and more sensitive by far than the last two comedies I’ve seen. Michael Cera and Jason Bateman are endearing as usual, but it is Ellen Paige’s heartfelt and nuanced performance that really impresses. She portrays young Juno with alternating spunk, self-confidence, wry humor, and vulnerability. The dialogue is pitch-perfect, realistic but clever. All in all it’s a fantastically constructed movie and I would pay to see it again (and might).

That just leaves The Golden Compass for tonight.

I didn’t miss it exactly, except in that “I’m far away in a new town and something at least a little familiar would be nice” kind of way. The funny thing is, even with a full year under my belt in L.A., that feeling creeps back as December rolls around. Rian and I have a little 2-foot tall tree with fiber-optic light strands in it, but that’s about as much Christmas as is going on in our apartment.

Just this morning I was talking with my co-workers about the tree back home—that it’s artificial, how we keep the lights on when we pack it up so we don’t have to re-string it, and decorate it every year from our boxes of ornaments. Maybe, in my head, I haven’t really moved out. I’m still just on a long vacation away from Virginia and someday I’ll go back.

It was with that feeling firmly in mind that I sat down yesterday to write my first Christmas letter. It’s hard to encapsulate a whole year spent in relative isolation, far from everything and everyone familiar, in one page of words on fancy paper. And as it stands, I’m not sure I’m happy with it. It’s a list of big events, certainly—job, car, apartment—but I want to try and capture the more subtle things from this year. How important, in the long run, are those “big” things? Those aren’t the story of my life. I hope my existence can’t be summed up by an 11-year-old convertible with bad brakes.

So tonight I’ll be putting on the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s soundtrack to “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and sitting down again to collect my thoughts and start a new Christmas letter—one that I hope more accurately captures my experience of 2007.

Thankfully, I will soon correct this trend. By the end of this year I will have added to my collection:

• ( ) on double colored vinyl, still factory-sealed, very rare
• Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do EP on CD
• Sigur 1 / Sigur 9 CD/DVD single
• Sæglópur EP on CD
• Hvarf / Heim double EP on CD (pre-ordered)
• Heima DVD documentary (pre-ordered)
• Limited edition Hjlómalind single on 7″ vinyl (UK only, ordered)

Oh yeah, and tonight I’m going to see the L.A. premiere of Heima at the Vista theater. It will be followed by a 3-song acoustic set by the band. Exciting!

• Become obsessed with Andrew Bird’s album Armchair Apocrypha.
• Listened to the new Coheed and Cambria (verdict: enjoyable, but not mind-blowing).
• Been to Amoeba Music for the first time.
• Fluctuated between “money” and “no money” in terrifyingly rapid succession.
• Bought Beautiful Katamari.
• Gotten drunk.
• Moved to Hollywood.

I guess that last one is the most important.

After 2004’s musically driving but lyrically disappointing Futures, I was hoping for Jim Adkins to take some time off and recapture the stronger writing he displayed on their breakout Bleed American. I’m happy to say that the three intervening years had just the effect I was hoping for—Chase This Light is a step up from its predecessor in many ways.

It’s funny, six years after my introduction to this band, I think I’m finally able to step back from the music and acknowledge just what kind of relationship I have with them. The reason I still like Jimmy Eat World despite their clearly glossy pop-leanings and somewhat formulaic songwriting is that with each album they manage to bring out my inner teenager. Their songs clearly capture that time when every emotion and event was gigantic and life-altering. Theirs is the music of extreme highs and lows, and sometimes I miss those feelings.

Which brings me to Chase This Light. It took several plays to really help the album gel for me, but now (some 15 listens later) the favorites have become clear. The driving power-riffs on “Big Casino” get the album off to a rip-roaring start, as Adkins wryly pays tribute to the gamble that is every kid’s aspiration to money, fame, coolness—of “making it.” The chorus of “Always Be” stands out: “I’m alone in this / I’m as I’ve always been / Right behind what’s happening / She’s lost in this / She’s like she’ll always be / A little far for me to reach”. It’s an honest expression of that unique brand of inadequacy and reverence so typical of adolescent love. “Here it Goes” is a hand-clapping, four-on-the-floor power-pop confection in the style of “The Authority Song.” The album’s title track is wide-eyed, pleading, and earnest in a way that can only woo a 15-year-old, but speaks to those who still freshly recall that time. “Dizzy” caps off the 40-minute record with a wide-open ode to love lost, recalling Futures’ “23.”

Reading all this, it might sound like I’m critical of the album, but I think of it a lot like cotton candy: it’s fluffed sugar, all sweetness (har har!) and no nutritional value, unfulfilling and yet utterly satisfying. While I don’t think a wildly successful band like Jimmy Eat World is capable of re-capturing the delicate balance between confidence and pensive insecurity that made Bleed American such a fantastic record, I’ll certainly enjoy Chase This Light every time I put it on… and it’s looking like that’s going to happen many more times over the next few weeks.