Kurt Vonnegut. Breakfast of Champions.

After having spent the day plowing through Breakfast of Champions, my first novel by Kurt Vonnegut, what strikes me the most is his authorial voice: Playful, funny, sane, warm, moral, and humane.  There’s anger as well – a lot of it – but it’s tempered by sadness.  This is all the more apparent as Vonnegut runs down the laundry list of atrocities committed by humanity against humanity.  But because the book is so buoyed by humor, there’s a sense of hope by the novel’s end that change is at your fingertips, all you must do is reach out and take it.

The plot involves the chance meeting between pulp science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and used car dealer Dwayne Hoover and the violence that erupts from said meeting.  Vonnegut fills in the spaces with commentary ranging from art to criminal conspirator acts by corporations (such as pollution) to human rights violations to the concept of freewill.  Vonnegut even steps in later as a peripheral character – nothing short of Creator of the Universe, of course.

The book is funny, even when stuck on annoying, tedious tics like cataloguing the size of every male character’s penis, both in length and diameter.  Even the illustrations sprinkled throughout get tiresome.  This is perhaps because it peaked early with its crude rendition of an asshole (literally a drawn asterisk) and a vagina.

Despite everything that threatened to sink Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut is able to pull it all off with his consistent tone.  Part of that is how he approached the descriptions, complaints, histories and transgressions of America like it was a science fiction novel itself.  So the descriptions of slavery come through with both a sense of wonder and disgust that humanity would allow such great crimes against humanity.  In this way, Vonnegut comes off like a warm, funny, foul-mouthed grandfather.  And every time he speaks my breath catches because I know my grandmother will bark a warning.  When she stays silent, my grandfather and I share a clandestine grin, knowing we both just got away with something special.

Malcolm Beith. The Last Narco.

The startlingly number of reports of cartel violence in Mexico is frightening – not to mention the brutality mentioned in the reports. Decapitation, dismemberment, castration, the list goes on. The violence is not only between cartels, but with the Mexican police and military, and even US operatives of the DEA. The cartels hold the advantage in the war with seemingly unlimited funds. They are able to recruit from within the military, the police force, and even within the Mexican government. The country has become a pit of vipers with no clear path to safety.

 It is this warzone that Malcolm Beith tries to make sense of in his book The Last Narco.

Beith’s book is in one sense a biography of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and in another way a look at the current state of Mexico. As a biography, it’s pretty light. Most of the details are conjecture, hearsay, and sometimes even myth. But that is way of things in Mexico’s violent landscape. Investigative journalism is almost non-existent with imminent threat of cartel violence – Beith notes that at least 45 journalists have been murdered in the past few years. Newspapers often print contradictory stories due to cartel and even government influence. The shadow of survival makes truth almost impossible to discern.

Beith’s book is more interesting when he takes the reader into the trenches of the Drug War. Despite the wealth of information, the book is rather artless. There is a flurry of information that can’t help but feel rushed, as he jumps from one non-sequitur to the next. This becomes his greatest enemy as it often undercuts the more tragic moments.

Despite all this, the wealth of information – not to mention the actual physical danger he put himself in – makes the book worth it, at least as an introduction into the Drug War in Mexico. There are a few more books I would like to check out for an even better grasp of this violent picture. Otherwise, I recommend the Discovery Channel special Extreme Drug Smuggling, which demonstrates how clever (and disturbed) the cartels are and HBO’s serial drama The Wire, which studies the effect of the drug trade at all levels within a city.

Asura's Wrath - Demo

Capcom has been releasing videos of Asura’s Wrath for the past year. The game features a man or mini-god, gifted with six arms and a haircut straight from some Akira Toriyama manga who battles giant gods. The proportions are supposed to be the draw, with several bosses being much bigger than the player character. According to the developers – all who obviously suffer short-term memory lost – this is because they felt most games did not emphasize size in boss battles. Their memory fog, I must note, include the entire God of War series, the recent Souls games, and Shadow of the Colossus. But the developers insist that it is only Asura’s Wrath where size truly matters.

Regardless, I was anxious to try the demo. I have a soft spot for epic battles, which must come from those fantasy binges as a kid (sort of like an acid flashback). So I was eager to check out the demo released today on PSN.

Often when a game has a boss that’s proportionately larger than the player character, the game uses several tricks to really incorporate the illusion of the villain’s size. God of War, for example, often employs a fight that has several distinct stages that is sometimes incorporated across an entire level. This gives the sense that it’s a slow whittling away and not simply hacking away at the bosses ankles. The Shadow of the Colossus has the player climbing parts of the beast to get to its weak spot. The bosses in the Souls games are just fucking hard.

The demo for Asura’s Wrath is one long quick time event that has interrupted by cut scenes and what I guess is supposed to be a story, if one could be discerned from that jumbled mess. To be fair, the only playable portions of the game were episodes 5 and 11, so I’ll withhold any other comments about the story. The fights though were really disappointing. The boss in episode was big, but besides polygon count, you never really felt or were intimidated by its size. No, I was sweating the PS controller buttons that would pop up. If I missed those, then my character was truly dead.

This game could still go either way. It’s often unfair to judge a game by its demo. Sometimes it takes a lot longer than an episode to get into the meat of the game. So far, I was not impressed. But I will keep my on the reviews once it’s released. Maybe in the full the bosses are better integrated into the levels. That is the dwarf Asura’s only hope