Mystery at Mortlake Mansion

Having become inexplicably hooked on simple "hidden object" computer games recently, I played "Mystery at Mortlake Mansion" by Stella Games this weekend as a free download via Pogo.com.  Doing it this way entails frequent interruptions in gameplay for 30-second commercials from ad service MetaCafe.  That's not a criticism of this specific title; just a factor to be aware of when you play a "free" downloadable game from Pogo.

The visual art concept and renderings of "Mortlake Mansion" are terrific, especially the wide-shot scenes of the various rooms in the mansion house (each one duplicated in a darkly magical "shadow world").  This is the strongest feature of the game.  The music lends to the cartoonishly gothic atmosphere without becoming overly intrusive or repetitive.  The puzzles are entertaining and at the right level of difficulty.  Several are more challenging than they appear at first glance, and the degree of difficulty increases slightly as you proceed through the game.

I appreciated the map function which indicates in which rooms you have active puzzles waiting for you to solve or objects to retrieve that are necessary to complete the required actions in other rooms.  The flow of gameplay is well thought out.

The occasional speaking parts (protagonist; raven; spirits) did not live up to the rest of the game, and I found myself impatiently waiting while bits of dialogue loaded and finished.  I would sometimes read ahead and click out of them.

I experienced just one technical glitch: the large game cursor was sometimes accompanied by a smaller, regular-sized cursor on the screen.  The large cursor controlled the action; the small one was an annoying distraction.

In summary, the visual art, music, storyline, and puzzles in this Poe-like production are best in class.  I merely came to wish the raven would speak nevermore.

Neverread

Someone else will have to write the definitive review of Neil Gaiman's darkly comic fantasy novel Neverwhere, for I didn't make it past page seventy.

That's not Gaiman's fault. Neverwhere is a perfectly entertaining story, at least so far, with enough colorful whimsy and clever lines to fill a Monty Python movie. There's an Arthur Dent-type urban everyman as protagonist, a mysterious damsel in distress, two Looney Tunes villains whose urbane, Dickensian dialogue only heightens their cartoonish menace, a host of Doctor Dolittle-like transgressions of the animal-human communication barrier, and enough impressionistic descriptions of London proper and the London underground to fill a Fodor's guide.

To be sure, I'm not usually one for the fantasy genre. Fiction is already unreal enough for me; fantasy fiction seems like overegging the pudding. Moreover, having seen "Stardust" on the big screen and a recent, Neil Gaiman-penned "Doctor Who" episode on the small screen, I think I get Gaiman's recurring meme: normal meets fantastical at a mysterious frontier, to both scary and wonderous effect, à la Terry Gilliam. The spooky, semi-occult themes of fantasy lit don't often grab me -- but that's not what stopped me from reading this light, slightly subversive thriller in mid-noir.

Nor can I articulate any particular objection I had to Roy Blount, Jr.'s Hail, Hail, Euphoria!, the noted humorist's personal, crafty, scene-by-scene explication of the Marx Brothers classic flick, "Duck Soup", that kept me from finishing that book; nor can I recall why An Object of Beauty, Steve Martin's amiable novel of the modern art collecting world, failed to capture my eyeballs for more than a couple of chapters, for it too looked promising; as did a fascinating historical treatment of the New York City art world, The Pop Revolution by the late Alice Goldfarb Marquis.

I actually did finish The Year of the Hare, a wry picaresque tale set in Finland that became a touchstone of the 1970s back-to-nature movement. In truth, however, Arto Paasilinna's symbolism-laden allegory was less than 200 pages long and super-simple reading; it's one of those Euro-fables that your foreign language teacher might have assigned to your tenth grade class, were it not already in English. Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou, a starkly riotous and ribald African novel of similar brevity and simplicity, comprising a series of low episodes told to a street-smart Congolese bartender and relayed in his purported diaries, deserved a much better fate in my hands than it received, but halfway through fell victim to my all-too-brief attention span and manic library habits.

Therein lies the tale. Each trip to the public library is a festival of eyes-bigger-than-stomach reading avarice. The ritual begins with the guilt- and sadness-inducing return of a big bag o' books that I haven't even begun to read, despite initial excitement, earnest intentions, one or two online renewals, and a grace period, along with perhaps two or three books that I speed-read through page twenty or fifty in the last hour of their due date, just to get the sense of what I would be missing, before dropping them into the slot. There! Now I can focus on the two or three checked-out books still at home, left behind as it were, a sensibly small number of items awaiting my undivided attention. Naturally, as long as I've already spent the gas money to return the others, I'll just take a quick peek at the New Books section by the front door...and two and a half armloads later, I'm on my way.

Once home, I'm doomed, pile-driven to distraction by a looming, unread stack of erudition and expert storytelling on the oval side table in the living room, the defined check-out period for each item establishing an anxiety-inducing expiration date. There's compound guilt, of course: so long as I'm not reading them, I'm not experiencing the cozy, enlightened life of writerly illumination that I'd imagined they would confer upon me when I checked them out; so long as they're in my possession, I'm preventing another equally delusional County Library cardholder from checking them out with similar earnest intent. The cycle repeats.

Only one way to break this pernicious recurrence, this wretched "Groundhog Day" scenario, this Fortuna-thon: discover a new musical infatuation on YouTube to absorb my restless mental energies, and return all the books. As it turns out, they have CDs at the library, too.

Comrades! Pay Attention!

When the experimental cellist Zoe Keating posted on Twitter that she'd contributed her music to the second module of a downloadable freeware adventure game, I had to check it out.

Turns out it's the funniest effort in the old adventure-gaming genre that I've seen in decades, since the old Infocom games like Leisure Suit Larry and Zork were produced and popularized. Soviet-Unterzoegersdorf, from the Austrian art-technology company Monochrom, has me in stitches -- and I'm not even out of Sector 1!

Soviet 1960's retro-kitsch has always been good for a cheap laugh, from Kommissar!, the 1966 Selchow & Righter board game; to The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming, also in 1966; to the Beatles' 1968 hit "Back in the USSR". Why present three-dimensional characters or nuanced cultural analysis when a hack stereotype will do? Who needs Arkady Renko -- let's make fun of the Russkies!

Like "Back in the USSR", Monochrom's game works as parody on several levels. It simultaneously mocks, through mimicry:

1. The heroic slogans, stilted language, stiff attire, and physical decay associated with postwar Soviet culture, depicted in a latter day microcosm of the fallen empire;

2. The kitschy, cartoonish humor in multiple media -- including cartoons -- produced by Western humorists parodying these quirks and foibles of Soviet communist culture;

3. The clumsy attempts to incorporate graphics during the early evolution of gaming, between the peak popularity of Infocom's intriguing, text-only mazes in the 1980's and this millenium's multiplayer contests and obsession with lethal firepower.

At the player's direction, Party Secretary Gomulka marches stiffly, with all the precision and blockheadedness of a Terry Gilliam cutout animation, accompanied by old Soviet inspirational tunes being broadcast over the loudspeaker from a seriously dysfunctional LP record player, around the decrepit Red October Yard in front of the Central Administrative Office for Inner Party Processes -- basically an old barn -- picking up trash and telephoning the Supreme Soviet for instructions.

The small touches, like the noticeable warp in the audio track during the playing of "The Internationale" during the opening titles, make Soviet-Unterzoegersdorf a multidimensional parody laced with knowing jokes. Knowing that Zoe Keating's stirring cello awaits me in Sector 2 -- if I can only figure out where in Soviet-Unterzoegersdorf to secure the nation's last living chicken, at the stern direction of the Supreme Soviet -- is motivation enough to complete Sector 1. Along with the fact that I cannot wait to offer my services to the glorious fatherland, of course.

Extraordinary Renderings

It took me two or three decades of sentient existence before my rationalist ego would allow that the arts and humanities have a legitimate place in the world, equal to that of science, math, and business, my home fields. Again recently, I was reminded of the gratifying qualities of art -- some of it -- and by extension, the capability that lies in trained and untrained minds alike to perceive; and through perception, to grasp a meaning, an intent, an emotion or deep sensibility from essentially lifeless, skillfully created objects.

The Colorado Springs Fine Art Center has on display two oils by John Singer Sargent, whose works I've always found astonishing for the brilliant illumination in his portraiture. Having now seen a number of Sargents in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and elsewhere, my amateur's unschooled eye is invariably drawn to the exultant exaltation of his subjects -- forgive the purple prose -- largely through a combination of impressionism and illumination, creating a realistic effect. Sargent may captivate the easily impressed, middlebrow museum wanderer like me more than he gains favor from the cognoscenti, but I will always appreciate accessible works that the common person with eyes open can comprehend and assimilate.

While the colors and forms of a classic impressionist or a modern O'Keefe are alluring, I'm often more surprised and delighted to scan a museum wall and come across a sharp depiction of daily life: an architectural sketch, perhaps a cityscape; commerce in the marketplace; an urban panorama, realistically captured; ordinary people humorously or compellingly engaged in the moment. One type of comedy originates from the surprise you get from the sudden apprehension of one of your familiar, ignoble friends in a noble venue -- in this case, a frame -- usually reserved for the high or exalted. Like Belushi and Ackroyd chowing down in a five-star restaurant, art subjects that don't behave like grown-ups provide an unexpected delight.

Which brings us to Sargent's Portrait of Miss Elsie Palmer or Young Lady in White, in Colorado Springs. Is there a hint of Mona Lisa mischief infused in the subject's deadpan smile? Is Miss Elsie Palmer in fact a common person putting on a costume for a lark, having just changed from her colorful bloomers? Is her ability to hold still for the artist a charade, the portrait's luminescence a betrayal of her luminescent personality? Is she perhaps, just maybe, in on the joke?

See, that's what happens when you expose ordinary hacks like me to art. Fifty-five visits to forty-five museums over thirty-five years, and we presume to think we see something in it.