Future Cities Is Bright

It seemed fitting that I read through The Tangential’s first foray into published print while riding shotgun along the bleak highways of North Dakota. Desolate and dying dystopias filled much of the book’s pages, with little bits of hope and happiness scattered in and out of each piece.

Future Cities—which features short pieces of fiction by local literati Becky Lang, Jay Gabler, Heidi Schatz, John Jodzio, and more (like not-so-local-Portable.tv’s Kat George)—is a collection of little glimpses into possibilities for the future. Each piece is unique to itself, but each fits well smooshed together under the giant umbrella of Future Cities without screaming at you “THE FUTURE IS NOW.”  

The future does seem to feel a lot like now, however. There are break ups, there are new-agey penitentiaries, there are time capsules, jello, hashtags. Trivial Pursuit, Kohl’s, and Funyuns still exist, which is good. Crispin Best’s piece “I Woke Up and it Was the Future. Hi. Things Seem the Same.” does an excellent job of conveying just how similar and different things are between the present we readers know and the futures depicted throughout the collection.

Regular readers of The Tangential will notice a lack of lists, how-to’s, and much of the snark found on the site. This collection moves more into the thought-provoking types of pieces they’ve published lately (like this). That’s not to say this will disappoint the site’s wide range of fans. In fact, Gabler’s piece feels like a nice compromise between the two.

Of course the biggest difference is that this is collection is a fiction compilation, whereas the website is mainly nonfiction. This book proves that these writers can hold their own in both literary realms. The characters are relatable, and none of the prose reads awkward or seems forced. Not one writer seems to be thinly veiling themselves in their characters.

Without reading a byline, each story is pretty easy to attach to the correct author, as the writers all have their unique voice and subject matters. This makes sense, as shorter pieces get more hits online and help satisfy our general internet ADD, whereas a book allows the writers to slow it down and really come into their own with more poignant pieces and deeper themes than you might find on the interwebs.

A quick read, this book gives me hope for the future of The Tangential and what else they’ve got up their publishing or partying sleeves—if you haven’t been to one of their more recent events, I suggest you go to whatever they plan next. Worthwhile.

Guys! The Twin Cities has so much goodness going on in the literary realm that it only feels right to start off 2013 with something so well done. Pick up your very own copy of Future Cities by clicking here. You won’t be disappointed.

Learning to Get Over THE END

Recently, while sobbing over the beautiful, though only moderately satisfying final issue of Sweet Tooth—my illustrated steady since November 2009—I realized that finishing a work of serialized media that you've been actively following from the start is so much more hardcore an experience than almost anything else (besides finishing a 100-hour video game). I didn't go to business school, but I still know that a good payoff requires a good investment.

For books—especially good books—I used to feel this surging emptiness when they were over. The characters I had just spent the last week with were no longer around to keep me company. How was I supposed to exist without his wry insight into a situation I'd never be involved in, or her witty banter with a character I so would have tried to date if he were real? More importantly, how was I supposed to determine the next good book to invest a week in?

Now, while I guess I still feel some of those things to a certain extent—especially with really really good books—what I really feel is more along the lines of, "Well, I enjoyed our time together and this was really lovely, but it was just a brief (and wild) fling, so I'm off to the bookstore to find one to take your place. Ta!" And with movies, it's the same way. 

Look, I feel a little ashamed about my love-em-and-leave-em approach to books and movies these days, but what's a week or a couple of hours in the face of two years (sometimes much longer for other comic fans)? Two years spent pining for that one Wednesday per month when the next part of Lemire's grand arc would be available to me? Two years spent re-reading issues trying to pick up the story where it left off. TWO YEARS spent accidentally buying the same issues over and over again because I couldn't quite remember if I already had that one at home. Two years spent hating then loving then hating then loving and loving and loving Mr. Jeppard. Two years developing a weird crush on Bobby the beaver hybrid. Two years spent trying to figure out who Sweet Tooth would become and why the sickness was really killing everyone. That's a lot of history, guys.

When I think about how crushed and unprepared I felt when I saw that final "THE END" written in issue 40 (even though I knew it was coming), it becomes all the more clear to me why binging on TV shows via Netflix or powering through an old serialized comic in the course of a weekend is so sickly satisfying—you're skipping the joy and pain of real attachment and subsequent loss. 

There are three pains greater, though: good things get cancelled, writers get busy (I'm looking at you, Warren Ellis, and you, David Lapham), or the story starts out great but degenerates into a terrible mess (I'm looking at you, Garth Ennis). It's hard to want to get invested in something when these three things threaten to swoop in and poop all over your good time.

But you know what? When it lasts, it's so, so, so worth it, and you're going to fucking feel that ending like a punch in the gut.

Pinner Palette: Chocolate

Who said brown was boring? There are a lot of shades of the chocolate rainbow, and all of them are potentially delicious.

By Holly Harrison, Marketing Director and feelings-eater.

Wise Choice

Wow. We're still pretty speechless after our Story Adventure extravaganza at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts for last week's Third Thursday event. Pretty much the only words we can find are "thank you, thank you, thank you!" Thanks to the 60+ volunteers, the MIA, our sponsor Allegra Printing, our amazing writers (Ed Bok Lee, John Jodzio, Maggie Ryan Sandford, and Katie Heaney), Jennifer Davis, Allen Brewer, the folks at the Theater of Public Policy, Kill the Vultures, and most importantly the 2,465 (!) adventurers that braved a night of art + lit.

It might have seemed like a novel concept, but for Paper Darts, visual art has long been an integral part of the local literary publication. — vita.mn

For those who couldn't make it (or for those who want to relive it), here's a taste of what it looked like to have PD take over the MIA:

Photos

More photos:

• City Pages: Third Thursday: Art + Lit with Paper Darts
• Minneapolis Institue of Arts' photos

Hidden Highlights

Adventures in Poetry

Participants had four stories to choose from, each very different. Ed Bok Lee's story required participants to write phrases on their adventure cards and at the end of their journey, they were instructed to combine all the phrases on the back of the cards, resulting in a finished poem. Here was one of our favorites:

Empty House of My Body
Cole Sarar + Charles Borchert

Fuck “know thyself,” the dictum I live
by is “Kill the Silence.”

I am water mixed with dreams on fire.

As a child I once thought I’d die
from extra, faulty organs.

If every house had just one book,
the world would be the story of
lots of visiting strangers.

People in glass houses should throw
more parties.

When the revolution comes, there
will be no television; there will only
be historical reenactments.

Sometimes, I’m nostalgic for a time
when I didn’t know my whiskers
could hurt anyone.

Improv Elevator

Taking the 30-second ride in MIA's vintage Otis Elevator meant participating in an improv story creation experiment. Each rider contributed one word to the tale, round-robin style. The sentence-long stories were live tweeted by an account created for the night: @ImprovElevator.

 

Tweets by @ImprovElevator

Arty Party with Allen Brewer

Just past Kill the Vultures but before the Improv Elevator, local amazing artist Allen Brewer was snuggled in a classroom working on his VERBATIM project, which seeks to make new art based on descriptions of existing art. Third Thursday participants were invited to make their own art based on provided descriptions of five pieces of art from the museum or write their own descriptions for Brewer to use in his project. He received 55 descriptions for his project over the course of the night! Here are some pieces of art that our talented TTers created:

Big Thanks from All of us at Paper Darts!

Indie Game Friday: Fight for Fortune

Due in part to people tossing iTunes gift cards in with some gifts last year, I've been spending a bit more time on my iPhone. These are three of the games that sucked me in in the past few months.

Endless Road

Endless Road takes the runner craze and plunges it in minimalism, resulting in an experience that can be as stunning as it can be frustrating. But for $0, what do you have to lose?

The aforementioned “endless road” simultaneously folds out in front of and collapses behind the player’s car. To avoid falling behind (and off the edge of the road), you have to keep up your speed by hitting power-ups and swerving around obstacles.

Outrunning the collapsing road delivers you to new environments, full of new simple shapes and new carefully placed flecks of color. The map has multiple paths selected randomly for each race, meaning that world one / stage four could be one of eight different terrains.

The game is not without its frustrations, of course. It’s not easy. And once you find yourself doing really well, you may get so far ahead onscreen that you’re unable to see what the road has in store. Grabbing coins earns you helpful powerups, but you’ll have to play for a real long time (or spend real life coin) to make significant upgrades. I know you can’t really fault a free to play game for including microtransactions…but I just did it anyway.

Endless Road shows that when it comes to gaming on a small screen, less is more. It’s basically the IKEA of racing games, and it’s totally worth a shot.

Endless Road » Free on iOS 
 

Writer Rumble

I’ll come right out and say it—while not an overly pretty game, Writer Rumble is a good fit for our readership. Y’see, it’s a literary fighting game. For 99¢ you can pit legendary writers against monsters…or against each other.

[Un]fortunately it’s not much of a blood bath, which I suppose makes sense. The cartoony Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Agatha Christie, and friends fight with the magical power of words. As a player, you search for words from the board of scrambled letters below the action. Make a new word and your writer of choice sends some high impact letters at his or her foe.

You can choose between surviving against waves of monsters solo or facing off against other players, locally or online. I wasn’t confident in my skills at first and turned down a few match invites while wading through the instructions. After experimenting with different authors/fighters and their special powers, I took to the online sphere and was repeatedly rejected by strangers. So I may not be able to report on the full experience, but I did enjoy taking down monsters in that seriously haunted library. I imagine fighting against other players—or watching two famed authors fighting each other—would be a ton of fun. Maybe one day. Maybe one day.

Anyway, give it a try and coo at the cute Cthulhu.

Writer Rumble » 99¢ on iOS (Coming to Android "Early 2013")
 

Gunman Clive

Gunman Clive is gorgeous. Gorgeous and punishing.

This mobile title puts you in the boots of rough and tumble hero Gunman Clive as he charges through a dusky, pencil sketched Old West to save the mayor’s daughter. The graphics are smooth and the music is incredible and it’s all fun and games (hah) until you encounter your…third enemy, maybe?

If you’re a fan of NES-era platformers, Gunman Clive is your jam. It wants to kick your ass, and it probably will. It’s not that the level design is particularly gruesome (though the checkpoints aren’t very forgiving)—it’s the controls. A directional pad on a touch screen is not an easy thing to perfect, so I’d find myself turned in the wrong direction when trying to duck and shoot an enemy, because without being able to actually feel the d-pad, it was hard to know which button I was pressing before it was too late.

Or maybe that’s just me. It wouldn’t be the first time I straight up sucked at a game.

For $1.99, it’s well worth the frustration. Even without the retries, it’s a fairly long game, and the quirky characters and environments and powerups will keep you coming back even after you’ve become numb to how beautiful the game is.

Gunman Clive » $1.99 on iOS and Android

Choose Your Thursventure

I'm going to get to the fun promo preview about tomorrow's Third Thursday event with Paper Darts at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, but I've got to make a confession first.

I am one-hundred-percent scream-at-the-top-of-my-lungs, butt-clenchingly excited about this project. Paper Darts getting asked by the MIA to participate in an event of this magnitude was like that time the hottest hunk in town kissed me. Luckily we're all adults that learn from mistakes, so we played it cool, and just said "yes," instead of "omigodwetotallyloveyouandwantyourbabies." Planning this event—despite setbacks (like faces getting crunched on the ice during a more metaphorical crunch time), and anxiety about the breadth of the project or our ability to pull it off (don't worry dudes, we totally will)—has been an amazing experience.  

What really rings my bell here is that while the notion of an interactive story game came up in a rather frantic and random way, the concept means something bigger for organizations like us. Just last week I was worried that the project wasn't going to come together—that it had too many moving parts and that it was going to flop. But I see now how unfounded that fear was. Organizations like Paper Darts, that are dedicated because we love what we do, are MADE to take the big risks and to make things challenging for themselves. That's why we exist. We work for the thrill of it (if the word "thrill" is still here when you read it that means I meant to put in something less cheesy and must've forgot to). Anyway, every day that we do this represents a choosing. Every day we say "yes." And sometimes "oh shit." But that's okay.

In the end, after all that needless frettin', thanks to the hard work and dedication of everyone at Paper Darts, the Third Thursday team at the MIA, the participating authors, and all of the volunteers we have amassed like a snowball of YES, it looks like the event is going to be pretty cool after all. And you know what? Fucking of course it is. 

All right, so what do you have to look forward to (besides Thursday night and all the subsequent days of your life)?

Here are the special things we and the MIA will have ready for you tomorrow night, in no order of excellentness because each thing going to reign supreme in its ultimate greatness:

1: Exquisite Corpe with Jennifer Davis

If you're familiar with Paper Darts then you know how much we love art, especially the art of Jennifer Davis. If you aren't familiar with PD then consider this your schooling—we LOVE art. The fantastic Jennifer Davis has created a beautiful beast that has been sliced up into pieces for you to color and put in position. She'll be there too, working her colorful magic on the creation's head. 

2: Adventure stories by Ed Bok Lee, John Jodzio, Katie Heaney, and Maggie Ryan Sandford

If you're familiar with Paper Darts then you also know we're pretty into writing, especially surreal, irreverent writing that pumps us up. If you aren't familiar with PD then consider this your schooling—we LOVE, surreal, irrevernt writing that pumps us up. These four authors have written four stories (each with multiple paths and endings) that will wind you through the galleries at the MIA. It's going to be bomb...or whatever you want to call something that's going to be off the hook, or totally righteous, or...ahh...did I already say bomb?

3: Kill the Vultures

The MIA team always picks killer bands to go along with their Third Thursday events, and this one is no different. Read our interview with hip-hop duo Kill the Vultures and get hyped.

4: Arty Party with Allen Brewer

Remember what I said about PD loving art? Remember what I said about PD loving words? Well, Allen Brewer's got our number with his upcoming "Verbatim" exhibit at the MIA's MAEP gallery. Tomorrow he'll be asking folks for detailed descriptions of art from the museum. From those descriptions, he'll be making new works of art. He'll even be hanging out making some during the evening. You'll also have a chance to make some art using descriptions we've cooked up of pieces from the museum. Check out this feature we did on Allen and his lovely art.

5: Jerry Belich and his Choosatron Deluxe Adventure Matrix

Mr. Belich represents a brain that just won't quit. He is the mastermind behind the Choosatron Deluxe Adventure Matrix—a world in a cardboard box, an adventure at the touch of a button. He'll even provide the quarters! Read our interview with the amazing Jerry Belich and gasp in wonder.

6: The Theater of Public Policy

 

If you're familiar with life, then you know improv comedy is awesome. If you aren't familiar with life, then you're probably a baby and can't read this anyway. Lucky for us T2P2 has agreed to come hang with us for Third Thursday. Not only will they be helping y'all craft single-word stories in that amazing Otis elevator that the MIA has (look for them at @ImprovElevator #ThirdThursMIA), but they'll be stationed at two of the story endings to help make your adventure come to life.

Okay, okay. I've rambled about this event (which'll likely be the event of 2013, guys, and it's only January) long enough.

Are you gonna come or what?!

Catcher in the Linkspam

The most-shared, most-reposted of the arty internet.

01. Hikari Shimoda
They may have a candy-colored palette, but the themes in Hikari Shimoda's paintings are in no way sweet.

02. 3D Fashion Photography by Matjaž Tančič 
In a series titled "Mimicry," Matjaž Tančič has added a fun twist to fashion photography with anaglyphs.

03. Animations Made with Ink, Wite-Out, and Coffee
Don't miss Jake Fried's latest psychedelic animation, The Deep End.

04. Rainbow Igloo Made of Milk Cartons
Daniel Gray takes winter fun to the next level. (And you can too.)

05. A Smart Expedia Campaign by Oglivy
Using airport IATA codes to spell traveling sentiments: simple and brilliant.

06. Wild Animals Roaming the Grocery Store
Photographer and master Photoshopper Agan Harahap has an interesting new project called Garden Fresh. 

07. David Sedaris Reads Fifty Shades of Grey
Sedaris is asked to read a passage of the erotic novel aloud, and he totally commits to it. 

08. Sean Lewis
Sean Lewis is a Canadian whose handsome illustrations are inspired by American history. Weird/awesome.

09. OakOak
OakOak converts worn street fixtures and other signs of urban decay into humorous street art. 

10. Haroshi
Haroshi has made an impression on the art world for his bright recycled skateboard sculptures. 

—

By Holly Harrison, Marketing Director and rainbow maker.