Two decades after the day when StarCraft players first flooded onto Blizzard’s online gaming platform, Battle.net, in force, the game remains one of the finest examples of the real-time-strategy style that made the bones of Blizzard, its renowned developer. It launched a fictional universe, spawned a successful sequel, and inspired Blizzard to take on even more ambitious follow-up projects. Even more importantly, it provided a genre-redefining proof of concept for what online competition could be, fueling the growth of an industry and subculture that have entered the mainstream today. “Back in the day, folks in the U.S. and Europe looked to South Korea’s Starcraft scene for inspiration,” says T.L. Taylor, a comparative media studies professor at MIT who has written a number of ethnographic books about online gaming. “It provided a playing field for incredibly talented players to show us what true virtuosity in digital gaming could look like. StarCraft was also a title a lot of folks currently working in the industry cut their teeth on. Its importance can’t be overstated.”
Neither can the difficulty of the crunch time that created it.
Four Organs begins with a pattern of eighth notes played by the maracas—a steady, unyielding rattling that’s sustained for the duration of the piece. When the organs come in, they too play repeated figures of eighth notes, and although Reich manipulates both the lengths of the notes (augmenting them steadily) and the notes themselves (which, taken together, make up a dominant eleventh chord), the piece can sound repetitive at first, monotonous, bewildering. That night, it didn’t take long for some rather prominent coughing to break out, before the crowd let loose with less subtle forms of protest: boos and catcalls, the agitation growing over the course of the piece’s 15-plus minutes. At one point, an older woman approached the stage, took off a shoe, and banged it on the stage, imploring the ensemble—which included Reich and Tilson Thomas—to stop. Someone else sprinted down an aisle, yelling, “All right! I confess!” Other aggrieved patrons simply left. With the commotion escalating, the musicians could barely hear each other play, forcing Tilson Thomas to call out the beats over the noise. This was no easy task.
I’m not the first to wonder about the ubiquity of Thai restaurants in American cities and suburbs, and most seemingly informed and lay analysts have suggested that it’s simply because Thai food tastes good, or happens to hit the American palate in just the right way.
But as it turns out, there is a much simpler answer: The Thai government paid for it.
Few poets write like Li-Young Lee these days, facing the biggest and broadest questions head-on — What is the purpose of human life? How should we reconcile our best and worst impulses? Which is more real, the spirit or the body? Fewer still ask these questions so well, and so movingly, in terms anyone can understand, making vast abstractions feel specific and, for the most part, grounded in a lived life. "You publish doubt and call it knowledge," writes Lee in one of several poems in this new collection, his fifth in 30 years, in which an unnamed interlocutor, a stand-in for the beloved, interrogates the poet's choice of vocation. I can't think of a better expression for what a poet does: articulate life's interminable uncertainties, perhaps making a fool of himself.