I know some may chafe at this, seeing as I live in San Diego, but I can feel Autumn coming home to roost. The cold nips away at the corners of my home, and I’ve started to reach for my old favorite hoodies to ward off the mounting chill. Yes, the weather is still nice enough to surf, but I can feel the change. The days are getting shorter, too. Before you know it it’ll be October, then the holidays, and then suddenly we’re singing Auld Lang Syne.
That’s a little hyperbolic, but there’s some truth to it, too. Don’t let the dying light and the flannel-clad embrace of fall pass you by! Grab a warm mug of tea and settle in for the last summer issue of Four From the Vault!
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place by Ernest Hemmingway
Like DJ’s with their favorite Deep Tracks Only sets, I love reading the deep cuts of Famous Authors. Like, sure, we’ve all read The Great Gatsby and Of Mice and Men, but those are so much bigger than Fitzgerald and Steinbeck respectively. They’ve come to be more than just a piece of art they put together. That’s part of why I loved reading A Clean, Well-Lighted Place by Ernest Hemmingway.
Published in 1933, after his breakthrough novel A Farewell to Arms, but before The Old Man and the Sea and For Whom The Bell Tolls, the story is kind of… about nothing? It’s a lonely story about three nameless characters in a Spanish cafe during the Spanish Civil War: two waiters and an older deaf man. There’s no dramatic moment, no rising action. Everyone leaves the cafe and goes home. That’s the whole plot. As one of the waiters puts it: it’s nada. I flew through its tight three pages and wondered what exactly I read.
So, after a pause, I reread it. And read it a third time too, just to be safe. And it still was about nothing, but I came to appreciate that. Reading it again to see if there was truly nothing there almost felt comforting—is the void still there? Yes, oh, good, glad I checked. The motif of nothingness, from the deaf man to the empty fear filling up the older waiter, aligns with Hemmingway’s experience with the World Wars, of course, but it also feels a bit more optimistic. None of this matters, I don’t matter, none of it matters.
But at least there’s this clean, well-lighted place.
P.S.: Thanks to Good Friend and Loyal Reader Abby for this week's reading recommendation! And a shoutout to Yale for randomly having this story as a free PDF!
What is late-stage social media? - Mike in the Morning
I wrote about stand-up comedian Mike Falzone back in Issue 30, but that was for his podcast and this is a video of him talking into a microphone so it’s totally different, OK? 😛
Anyway, I have deeply enjoyed the return of Falzone’s Mike in the Morning segments. Besides Sacramento’s 107.9 The End in High School, I’ve never really had a morning talk radio kind of personality in my ears. Sure there are tons of podcasts, there are Twitch streams, but those don’t really capture the Just Someone Talking To You that talk radio really nails. For me, that’s what Falzone nails in these segments. I could listen to these segments, punctuated by ads and the occasional variety segment, for a very long time. Is it the tenor of his voice, the camera’s intimacy? I’m not sure, but there’s something about the whole package that grabs me.
This episode specifically spoke to me because it’s what we’re all about here at FFTV (as if there’s more than just me working on this newsletter). There’s so much schlock out there, but there’s also so much good. I’ll go on the record and say I’m generally in favor of humans, especially the ones who are loving and brave enough to make art in public. There are wonderful people all over the world doing incredible things at any given moment, but there’s no monetary incentive to promote or connect those people. So many small creators fall through the cracks.
Watching this, along with Hank Green’s recent exposé about YouTube, renewed my belief in the Internet as a good thing for humanity and reminded me that we ought to expect better from our digital lives. Not bad for a morning talk radio show, huh?
Will the new-look Champions League be more exciting?
Association football is back, baby, and that means waking up at 6 am to watch my beloved Arsenal Football Club (COYG) turn in a listless draw away to Wolverhampton and then spend the whole day pissed about it, perhaps even while pissed!
Along with the shift away from the summer-long baseball marathon comes a change in my media diet. I stop checking box scores and I turn to the tactical analyses and weekly drama of Premier League coverage. This year my podcast of choice is The Athletic FC Podcast with host Ayo Akinwolere. Like when I highlighted Effectively Wild back in the Spring, I’m focusing on a more general episode here, specifically about the change to the best football competition in the world: The UEFA Champions League.
If you’re not into football, or not familiar with the European competition, that’s okay, because I didn’t find the specifics of the change to be the intriguing part of the episode. Frankly, the conversation kind of broaches the idea that UEFA, the governing board for European football, is maybe one of the biggest functioning democracies in the world. It’s stupifying to conceptualize how each league, each club, the players and coaches, the staff and supporters, all have leverage, ways to exert power and be heard. It’s a miracle there’s a competition at all! The format change is really about compromise, power-brokering, and appeasement, about trying to navigate a way forward. I couldn’t help but wonder, perhaps naively, what we might learn about democracy from UEFA.
Beyond the rosy glasses, though, I see a more sobering vision, one of empire and capitalism. As much as I believe that football clubs—all sports teams, really—are community assets and should be owned by their communities, the reality is that so many clubs are now just imperialistic devices, built to satiate the insatiable.
Which vision is true? It’s hard to say. In many ways, this issue of football stands in for fears I feel about the world at large. All I know is that of all the unimportant things, football is the most important.
Tchia
My quippy tagline for Tchia would be Little Game, Big Heart. Built by the New Caledonian studio Aawceb, the game is a love letter to the island nation. It’s an open-world game, where the eponymous Tchia embarks on a coming-of-age story to save her father as she explores locales heavily influenced by New Caledonia. You sail across the waves, search for buried treasure, and play a lot of music. Come to think of it, it’s a lot like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.
The best part of the game for me is how focused it is. Tchia is laser-focused on 1) celebrating New Caledonia and telling a charming story about a young girl growing up. The game isn’t open-world because it’s du jour, it’s open-world because that’s the best way to celebrate a place—by building a beautiful representation and filling it with love. Every NPC, every vista, every little bit of flavor text is about celebrating this wonderful place, and you feel it through the game.
Awaceb also nails their other goal; telling a great story. About 2/3rds of the way through the game, there’s a huge plot beat that completely caught me by surprise. Because I’d been all over the world with Tchia, I knew exactly everything that led to this moment. The camera cut to her face, painted with tears, and I found myself welling up, too. It was the simple synthesis of art and interactivity, but it rocked me to my core. No other game has come close to that moment for me this year, and it’s not particularly close.
Tchia is a cute little game that’s got enough love to break your heart and fill it back up again. Little Game, Big Heart, like I said.
I honestly can’t believe the first day of Fall is on Sunday. Approaching Autumn also means we’re getting dangerously close to the one year anniversary of Four From the Vault—wow!
Anyway, see you next Fall! 😛
—Tommy