My Arcades Project

Annals of Language Usage

2008-08-15T12:51:00.004-04:00

This is the kind of shit that tilts me. (tilt: in pinball parlance, ruins your game.)

It is perhaps worth noting here, while we're on the subject of a pinball term being applied to a non-pinball situation, that the writer using such term, JD Oxblood, would seem also to have at least a passing interest in roller derby, a sport that is, I think, yoked together in the public mind with the kind of folks who might play pinball. This seems so self-evident that I can't begin to explain why it is. I should work on that.

2007-03-06T00:48:00.000-05:00

Oh my, I've been away. And, since I'm particularly busy this week, I'm back.

So:

Maybe it doesn't come clear there, and I suppose that's understandable. Despite my absence, these ideas have been macerating in my mind, and while they seem immediate and clear to me, I've forgotten how much legwork will be required am I to present them in any coherent form. So: context.

In her masterful assessment of Futurism's pan-European manifestations, Marjorie Perloff points to Vladimir Tatlin, a model of whose Monument to the Third International is pictured above, and quotes Guy Davenport's "Tatlin!" to describe it. I cannot hope to do better here than Davenport's breathless prose:

It was at once a building, a sculpture, a painting, a poem, a book, a moving picture, a construct.

In the radio and telegraph station of the tower news of all the international movements would arrive and be instantly broadcast to all of Moscow. The landlords of Peru are hanging from the lamp posts! The red flag flies over the Louvre! The ursurers of New York have been lashed from the Stock Exchange by heroic mothers and noble youths!

The steel spiral rising from a garden of clouds was supported by tetrahedral struts. In one model of the monument, Tatlin added a second spiral. Within the spirals a central axis held the cube, cone, and cylinder. The axis leaned like that of the earth itself, at a phallic tilt, like the thrust of Tsiolkovsky's rockets leaving the earth for the moon...

It was a hundred metres higher than the Tour Eiffel.

Such exhilaration! (One finds oneself reaching for exclamation points.) Yet the technological sublime demands such exhilaration, for the rush, the speed, is at its core. But speed, though exhilarating, also scares when the one speeding recognizes it. There's more to be said about this, but if some of this doesn't get down now, it never will.

So, pinball:

Forget for a moment that the game pictured, Medieval Madness, has a middle ages theme, and note instead the ramps and habitrails. The elevated wireforms rocket the ball above the playfield, from one corner to another. Perhaps with better pictures, Tatlin's Monument would seem a better model, but as it stands, it's clear enough to me.

As in many games, the habitrails deposit the ball just above the flipper on the same side the ramp is on (but opposite the flipper with the easiest shot at that ramp), thus allowing the seasoned player a good shot for the opposite ramp: it's a cycle, and a cycle that seems to speed up as one plays it out. And as that speed increases, or even maintains a certain level, the player will begin to realize just what process he or she is engaged in—the player begins to recognize his or her own speed.

It's at that moment of recognition, usually, that the player misses the next shot.

Which is to say that the individual playing pinball is not only engaging with a model that references (probably unwittingly) Tatlin's constructivist hopes, but interacting with a model steeped in 20th century conceptions of the technological sublime.

William Gaddis: Part One of Several

2006-09-28T22:42:00.000-04:00

I can’t seem to finish the following what follows this paragraph. At one point, all the way back in August, it was done. Then I put it up here. But in the process of putting it up, Blogger ate it. Really. The second half was gone. And I didn’t have any back-up. So then I set about trying to reconstruct it, but I wanted to move on. And then I started classes and got wrapped up in that grind. But, for reasons I hope to make apparent in the coming days (and weeks), I think that this project needs to continue. So here’s this post, unfinished, and broken. I could try to make a labored parallel to Gaddis and his views on entropy, but, yeah. I should shut up.

--------------

Much of my goal in this blog involves a perhaps-foolish effort to define pinball machines as artistic objects, an effort not without obstacles. A pinball machine is unmistakably the product of a technological structure that, if not antithetical to art, is not usually viewed as conducive to it. Can a mass-produced machine function as an object of art? The answer of that question depends, of course, on who asks it, and on what definition he or she accepts. For this reason, I look to William Gaddis and his lifelong fascination with the player piano.

My few personal associations with player pianos mingle with my associations of the Musée Mechaniqué, the San Francisco institution in which I saw them. The Musée, for some years now has housed the world's largest private collection of coin-ops -- animated dioramas, risqué picture shows, player pianos, pinball games. I've spent a large amount of time considering the Musée in the past, even going so far as to interview one of the owners a few years ago. (The interview went badly, my tape recorder didn't work, and I emerged with little that was usable.) Today, the feeling one gets wandering through the Musée is of a lost tradition; one imagines the craft that went into building the machines, the intricate woodwork and the like.

Gaddis would have felt differently.

His narrator in Agapē Agape, his brief, posthumously published novel, is a reasonable stand-in for himself; on his deathbed, he struggles to make his tempestuous collection of notes, clip-pings,and data cohere into one concise work on the social history of the player piano. He has failed and will fail to assemble this work, just as Gaddis failed to assemble the nonfiction social history of the player piano he'd mused over for decades. Gaddis, half a century later, distilled his research into Agapē Agape. But the real circumstances don't matter here as much as the words he ended up using; witness the first sentence of Agapē Agape:

No but you see I've got to explain all this because I don't, we don't know how much time there is left and I have to work on the, to finish this work of mine while I, why I've brought in this whole pile of books notes pages clippings and God knows what, get it all sorted and organized when I get this property divided up and the business and worries that go with it while they keep me here to be cut up and scraped and stapled and cut up again my damn leg look at it, layered with staples like that old suit of Japanese amour in the dining hall feel like I'm being dismantled piece by piece, houses, cottages, stables orchards and all the damn dis-tractions I've got the papers land surveys deeds and all of it right in this heap somewhere, get it cleared up and settled before everything collapses and it's all swallowed up by lawyers and taxes like everything else because that's what it's about, that's what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of languages, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight, entertainment and technology and every four year old with a computer, everybody his own artist where the whole thing came from, the binary system and the computer where technology came from in the first place, you see? (1–2)

Why, it's so clear one wonders why he even asked—if you're going to write about entropy and try to mirror that entropy in your text, I guess we should expect that the words are going to pull against syntactic convention, that sentences will strain to contain uppity lexemes. And of course a defender of the modernist project will likely believe that art offers transcendence so why diagnose in flat, dry prose when one could, with work, offer the reader who encounters his writing might both learn the forgotten external truth and apprehend the unwritten higher truth. Or what they said in grade-school creative writing: show don't tell.

But where's the player piano in all this?

Here, in Gaddis' first national publication "Stop Player. Joke No. 4" is the player piano:

Selling player pianos to Americans in 1912 was not a difficult task. There was a place for everyone in this brave new world where the player offered an answer to some of America's most persistent wants: the opportunity to participate in some-thing which asked little understanding; the pleasure of creating without work, practice, or the taking of time; and the manifestation of talent where there was none.

Age was no hindrance to success. A child in Seattle who had spent his five full years among players was an expert demonstrator.

So of course you see; he'd staked out his position from the start, before he'd even read "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."

But, I can only hope somebody's asking, where's pinball in all this? Pinball does not have a mimetic function --- not in its fundamentals, at least; the backglass, playfield and cabinet art are separate from the game's function --- and it does not profess to replace something. Indeed, without the player, pinball is nothing. Unlike the video game or, crucially, the player piano, without a human player, the pinball machine does not serve its purpose. While the video game may run a demonstration, rendering game action in real-time that differs from actual play only in the lack of a human player, and a player piano demands only an operator to set it to playing, the pinball machine requires the continual presence of a human player.

--more later--

Banned in NYC

2006-08-26T16:40:00.000-04:00

This isn't news to many, I'm sure, but mayor LaGuardia banned pinball in New York City in 1942 because of connections to gambling and organized crime. Though pinball was legalized in New York in 1976, replays are still illegal (though, apparently, the law is rarely enforced). Perhaps this explains at least part of why I have yet to play pinball in this city.

Coney Island

2006-08-23T12:47:00.000-04:00

The time between my last post and this one has been occupied by the minutiae of a cross-country move. I lived before in Seattle, Washington; I now live in Manhattan, New York. Pinball is, of course, a little harder to find here. I expected this; a pinball machine generates more ambiance than revenue. In my neighborhood, my limited survey of nightlife has yet to reveal a local watering hole that could accommodate a pinball machine without breaking some kind of conceptual veil. And while I've heard tell of Barcade, my one night out in Williamsburg culminated in drinks at the equally high-concept Surf Bar (or Hurricane Hopeful; the name of the place wasn't all that clear). What I'm getting at here is this: I have not yet seen a single pinball machine in New York.

This surprises me, because yesterday I spent several hours at Coney Island. It was my first time there, and I emerged suitably sunburnt and dazed. The Cyclone is everything it should be, and strolling the boardwalk with a beer in one hand and a corndog in the other surprised me both by its legality and its banality. And while there were, of course, several midways staffed by carnival barkers whose exhortations to play sounded more like pleas, and plenty of video games and skee ball, there was, near as I could tell, no pinball. I cannot begin to suggest what a shock to me this was.

Pinball, I'd think, would be an ideal element in the Coney Island landscape. Its roots as a gambling game would fit right in with the huckster carnie vibe, and its status as relic of an earlier age would recall the lost grandeur of Steeplechase and Luna Parks. Or so I, apparently incorrectly, thought.

2006-08-10T11:30:00.000-04:00

The Who were not the first to sing about pinball.

Insert Coins

2006-08-08T19:30:00.000-04:00

I have long been drawn to pinball; I am not sure when this began. Was it at a burger joint at by the Russian River between rafting and panning for gold? In that gigantic arcade at San Francisco's Pier 39? Or a smaller, independantly owned arcade, thick with clouds of cigarette smoke? Or at the Museé Mechaniqué, beyond the watchful eyes of Laughing Sal?

Maybe it happened later, in my teenage years. Maybe my mother's words about racking up replays as a kid egged me on, made me want to do the same. Maybe I just didn't want to learn how to play Street Figher II at the College of Marin arcade that I'd stop by after class in 8th grade. Maybe it happened when I started sneaking into bars and found familar pinball tables in then unfamiliar locations. Or maybe it really doesn't matter when it started; suffice it to say that I like pinball, and, when I want to be, I can be pretty good at it too.

But this blog will not center on playing pinball per se. Instead, I hope to assemble a theory of pinball as both product of the culture industry and model for subversion of that same culture industry. Lest this seem too lofty a goal, I make no promise that I will suceeed, but I do offer that the the prelimnary research I've conducted has convinced me that such a goal is not unattainable.

As a secondary goal, I hope to write a fair amount about pinball.

Why shoud I do this? Perhaps it has something to do with Benjamin's view that "[a] native's book about his city will always be related to memoirs; the writer has not spent his childhood there in vain." Indeed, if I have grown up in pinball, I should hope that those hours, and quarters, were not spent in vain.