Aye aye skipper ...

Well, I’m up in the game rotation again: time to get back to the Family Campaign.  My littlest one specifically requested it, so that’s a nice feeling.  Plus there’s some family medical issues flying around, and some work stuff ... anyhow, no time for a proper post this week.  So sorry not sorry.

Still: tune in next week.  There’ll probably be something to talk about.  Probably.

D&D and Me: Part 9 (All in the Family)

[This is the ninth post in a new series.  You may want to begin at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

[Last time, I talked about fifth edition D&D (5e) and how its popularity surprised and delighted long-time D&D fans, myself among them.]

So now there was a new edition, a new attitude towards the game, and, most of all, a whole new type of content: streaming D&D games.  I tried a bunch before I found Relics and Rarities, which is what really got me excited about D&D again.  Once I found that, I started obsessively checking out all of them.  Well, except for the obvious one: Critical Role.

There are a number of reasons I waited so long to give CR a chance.  Their first campaign (referred to either by the group name of the characters—Vox Machina—or simply as “C1”) has 115 episodes ... that’s over 447 hours of video to watch (thank you CritRoleStats).  Even if you skip over all the announcements and the breaks and whatnot, it would be over 373 hours: if I did nothing but eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, and watch C1, it would still take me around 23 days to get through it all.  So that was one big reason.  But probably the bigger reason was just that it was the most popular (as I mentioned last time), and I have always resisted liking the most popular thing.  It’s a personal failing, I know.  But eventually I decided it was only fair to give it a chance, and I could start with their second campaign and not have nearly as much content to wade through.  After just a few episodes, I was hooked.  One thing I that I particularly loved was how Matt (CR’s DM) set up the story by running several “one-shot” adventures¹ for small groups of characters.  Though these happened off-screen, it was obvious what the ramifications were: each character got the chance to develop from their initial character sheet in a smaller, more controlled setting before joining together in a larger group.  It’s very common for a character to change somewhat, mostly personality-wise, from your initial concept once you start inhabiting them at the table, and it also generally takes a while before you become comfortable with all the features and powers on your sheet.  With these shorter, almost-solo adventures,²  all the awkward bits could be gotten out of the way.  The first episode of C2 shows this perfectly: a few relationships are established, all the players are comfortable in the skins of their characters, and rules-fumbling—the inevitable “wait, how does this work again?”—is kept to a minimum.  This was a big inspiration for what would eventually become the Family Campaign.

But the biggest (if most abstract) impact of CR on my home games were to remind me of the joy of D&D as long-form storytelling.  A lot of streaming D&D out there consists of one-shots (like Lost Odyssey) or limited series (like Relics and Rarities), and many of those are fantastic.  But what CR (and also the Balance arc of The Adventure Zone) reminded me was just how awesome it is to have that open-ended, anything-can-happen storyling going on, where every character’s backstory somehow ties into the overall plot, but there’s also some world-threatening evil to be addressed, and quests to resovle, and intermediate character goals (like needed items or researching new spells or just becoming more financially self-sufficient) to achieve, and the DM’s job is to weave all these disparate threads together to form some unexpected coherent whole.  Matt Mercer (of CR) and Griffin McElroy (of TAZ) are two of the best in the business at this, and it reminded me of the times that I had tried to achieve such things ... always with less success than these guys, of course.  But one of the benefits of getting old is that you can often look back and see where you went wrong in the past, and, between that and just learning from the examples that CR and TAZ were providing, I started to get excited to try it again—this time using my children as guinea pigs.

Now, as I talked about two installments ago, I had been mainly running pre-published adventures for my kids up to this point.  Premade adventures can be short, or they can be long, but either way they’re quite different than the long-form stories I’m talking about now.  They’re not customized to the characters of my players, and though the best DMs will certainly extend a published adventure to include such things, it’s never the same as a story that’s been built from the ground up to be about your characters.  For years, I had been thinking that all the prep work and the frustration wasn’t worth it; now, listening to The Adventure Zone and watching Critical Role, I was changing my mind.  I was seeing the benefits being reaped before my eyes (and ears), and I knew I couldn’t deprive my kids of that joy.  So it was that, while streaming D&D didn’t ignite my love of D&D, it did rekindle it.

I’ve already talked about my youngest bringing me her first idea for a D&D character, so I won’t rehash it here.  Corva Ravenstone was extremely animal focussed—a tiger for a guardian and a monkey as a constant companion—and my middle child always plays druids, because they think that shapeshifting is just the coolest thing ever.  When my eldest proposed a custom barbarian subclass whose “rage” was actually an uncontrolled transformation to a werewolf form,³ I knew that this campaign needed to be all about animals.  Always fascinated with the concept of a beastmaster-style character,⁴ I decided to dust off my attempts to create a class that could do this without breaking the action economy; my beastmaster class would end up being the basis for my eventual GMPC,⁵ and also provide the basis for Corva’s monkey companion.⁶  This echoes my very first experience playing D&D:⁷ making new rules so I didn’t have to say “no” to any part of a kid’s character concept ... it just happened to be my daughter instead of my brother in this case.

My middle child wanted to play a changeling, which is a race which can change its appearance at will.  (Yes, a changeling druid is basically doubling-down on the shapeshifting power—that’s what’s attractive for that particular kid.)  And, to up the transmutation factor even more, I gave them a custom magic item that allows them access to many of the coolest shapeshifting-related spells.  The problem was that changelings are from a world known as Eberron, and this campaign was definitely not going to take place on Eberron.  How did this changeling (whose name is Zyx) get from Eberron to the Forgotten Realms (the default setting for 5e)?  For that matter, my child decided to complicate my life even more when they saw and fell in love with the amazing dinosaurs of Ixalan, and decided that that was where Zyx learned druiding, so that they could turn into dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts.  Now I had a whole third world to work into the backstory.  But I took that on too.

My eldest, of course, has been playing D&D (and other TTRPGS, like Pathfinder) for years at this point, and is a GM in their own right.  I didn’t need to do much besides taking their custom barbarian subclass and making it a bit more polished.  But they also had an entirely new deity in their backstory, and I had to work that into the plot.  No problem.

Stealing Matt Mercer’s idea of one-shot adventures for the individual characters before the main story starts, I came up with the idea of “flashbackstories,” which were “flashbacks” (in the sense they took place 2 – 5 years before the main storyline starts) and also “backstories,” because they set up the plot.  See, intead of “you all meet in a pub,” I decided that there would be a mysterious benefactor (more of a “I suppose you’re wondering why I called all of you here today” situation).  Each character owed a big debt to this person.  But how did they become indebted to him?  Well, instead of just writing it out as a story, let’s play it out ... as a flashbackstory.  I wanted to give each character a guide: an NPC to help them out and introduce them to the man who would perform some valuable service for them in exchange for “a service to be provided at a later date.” I hit upon the idea of using my old characters for this purpose.  My old druid Sillarin would be an excellent guide for new druid Zyx.  Bowmaster and nature cleric Ellspeth was a natural fit for the young jungle girl (and archer) Corva.  As for burgeoning werewolf Isabella, who better to help her achieve calmness of mind and body than a monk?  So she ran into Jin.  Exactly as planned, each character had a chance to explore both personality and mechanics and feel things out.  The time gap also provided a perfect excuse for changing or evolving personality traits: your character just “grew up” a bit in the intervening years.

For the role of mysterious benefactor, I wanted someone colorful (both figuratively and literally), who seemed really out of place but also really in control.  I achieved this by inventing Hervé, a Vedalken rogue with the mastermind specialization.  Vedalken are an almost scifi race, originally from D&D’s sister game Magic: The Gathering.  They’ve been imported into D&D in two versions,⁸ and they have a feel almost like a cross between Spock and Data from Star Trek: obssessed with discovering new things, and for the most part coldly logical about everything else.  The mastermind is of course a fantastic subclass for a villain, but in this case it works well for someone who is basically a “finder” character: rich people hire him to find or obtain things for them, and he always know exactly the right combination of people (adventurers, specifically) to put together a mission.  And he knows them because he’s “collected” them—basically, he wanders around bailing people with certain skills out of trouble so that they’ll owe him a favor when he finally runs across a job that could use their particular skills.  A character such as this is perfect for driving the “little” plot of a D&D campaign: he can be mysterious, and opaque with his motivations, or he can be open and offer lots of details to the characters, if he thinks it makes them more effective in doing jobs for him.  So he’s a mission generator and a font of information.  This is what you need to keep a campaign moving forward on a session-to-session basis.

For the bigger picture, though, you need a mystery to drive each character to search for something, and preferably a way to tie all the mysteries together into one big mystery.  Two of my characters (Corva and Zyx) gave me one of the best gifts you can give a DM: the gift of missing parents.  They might be dead ... or then again they might not.  Isabella’s story is more complicated: her father is the one who turned her into a werewolf in the first place, as part of some freaky cult thing.  Still, after reading a veritable shitload of old D&D lore, I came up with something that would satisfy all the backstories—even tying in the one for my own GMPC, Thurl—and also explain a bit of the world-hopping that Zyx apparently experienced at a young age into the bargain.  I won’t go into too much detail here (it’s rare that my kids read my blog, but better safe than sorry, I suppose), but it involves Planescape factions and secret societies (shades of both A Series of Unfortunate Events and Marvel’s Runaways) and, naturally, lots and lots of animals.  I call it the Family Campaign, both for the obvious reason, but also because there’s a deeper familial connection that will be revealed as time goes on.

And that brings us up to the present time.  Next time, in what may well be our last installment, I think I’ll talk about what D&D can mean in the context of learning, and of teaching.

__________

1 A one-shot is a very short adventure that’s designed to be run in a single session.  Although sometimes a one-shot might end up taking two sessions, in which case it’s really more of a two-shot.  But that’s more to do with the pace of the characters playing it than the adventure itself.

2 CR had 7 characters, so it was more practical to do them in groups of 2 or 3; for a more typical game of 3 or 4 characters, it would be perfectly fine to do proper solo adventures.

3 To be clear, this was before the Path of the Beast was a thing.  Although they’re quite similar, naturally.

4 You may remember that I went into some depth on that topic in part 4.

5 I still haven’t written my post on what this term means to me, but, for purposes of this discussion, let’s just say it’s a “full” member of the party—that is, not a henchman or a guide or a pet or a more experienced mentor type—who happens to be run by the GM instead of by a player.

6 If you remebered that Corva is a ranger, you may wonder why not just make her a beastmaster ranger and call it a day.  All I can tell you is, he’s not that sort of monkey.

7 Which we covered in part 2.

8 Specifically, in the Kaladesh Plane Shift supplement, and the official book Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica, which represent the two different Magic worlds that feature them.

Isolation Report, Week #45

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

Well, since our last isolation report, a lot has been going on, at least politically.  It’s difficult to know what to say about the events that have transpired here in the U.S. ... on the one hand, it seems completely predictable and expected.  On the other, that doesn’t keep it from being horrific.  Our only real saving grace here is that this attempted insurrection was being run by complete idiots.  Well-armed idiots, granted, but hardly brain giants.  Throughout the whole thing, I kept wondering to myself: what exactly do they think they’re going to accomplish?  Did they imagine that the entirety of the Congress was going to say “gee, people ran us out of the place we normally meet; I guess we can’t do anything now! may as well go home”?  Some Congressperson tweeted that we were lucky that one of the staffers got the official electoral college ballots before the rioters could destroy them ... but so what if they had?  Would that really have stopped the election from progressing?  Our entire government would have just thrown up their hands and said “oh, well, I suppose Trump will just have to be President forever now.” Sure, that makes sense.

So, they caused a lot of chaos, and, sadly, some people died (on both sides).  But I just can’t believe it was ever going to change anything in the long run, or accomplish any of their actual goals.  Assuming they had goals.  Aren’t these the same people who were sitting at home and laughing at the Occupy Wall Street movement for not knowing what they wanted?  But it seems to me that this was the same thing.  Except the Occupy-Wall-Street-ers never killed anyone.  I hope that wasn’t their goal.  That would be sad, and scary, and even more disturbing than it already is.  But somehow I don’t think that was ever the point.  They just listened to Trump, and Giuliani (“trial by comat!”), and the other morons, and they decided to go fuck some shit up, without any real goals or concrete ideas of how it was going to end up.  Certainly if they had planned a little better, they wouldn’t have managed to all end up on camera, faces exposed, and easily identifiable by the authorities.

But it happened, and we have to deal with it, and we’re still all locked down and not really able to go anywhere or do anything.  A friend told me that one of their relatives who works at a local hospital says they’re putting patients in the gift shop at this point.  Admittedly, you’re hearing this third-hand, so feel free to discount it as an unreliable source, but if you live in the U.S. I bet you’re awre of similar conditions where you live.  Things are getting worse, and we still have to wait another week or so before it can even start to get better.

Of course, the House has impeached Trump, again—no surprise there—and many people on television are expressing dismay that the Senate won’t vote to convict before Trump is already out of office.  I’m not stressed on that point.  Sure, he’ll no doubt do plenty more damage on the way out, but I think the important part is that he does get convicted, and that’s more likely to happen with the new Senate than the old one.  Why is it important to convict him after he’s already out of office?  Well, first of all, it’s important to send that message to any future idiots who find themselves in Trump’s position.  But I think it’s just as important that Trump not be allowed to run for office again (as some people in the media have pointed out), and that he not be allowed to reap the benefits normally afforded to ex-Presidents (as apparently no one has thought to mention yet).  A retired President continues to collect a stipend for life, plus the Secret Service protective detail, which we already know that Trump views as a money-making venture.  So I really don’t want my tax money going to support that sort of bullshit for however more years he manages to cling to life.  And, in my experience, only the good die young: true assholes can live for-fucking-ever.

I don’t know.  I guess we’ll have to see how it all shakes out.  Hopefully there won’t be any more violence, and hopefully the new administration will restore some sanity.  But I honestly don’t know.  I’m just waiting to find out like all the rest of you.

Salsatic Vibrato VII

"The Devil in Your Eye"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.  You may also want to check out the first volume in this multi-volume mix for more info on its theme.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

Last volume was the first of my mixes to debut a 6th volume, and Salsatic Vibrato stays in the lead by now being the first seventh volume.  It’s taken over three years for me to decide the volume was sufficiently complete and that I was ready to return to this brassy, upbeat territory, but I’ve been satisfied with it for a while now—I just didn’t want to skimp on my other musical tastes.  Which is not to say that there’s anything inferior about this volume: of the 14 artists (and one soundtrack) that have 4 or more tracks on a volume in this mix,¹ all but two are represented here, and for those who have 5 or more, the coverage is 100%.  So this one is representative of all that have come before, but there are plenty of returning favorites who have been MIA for a while, and, most excitingly, some brand new finds to spice up the mix.  Let’s dive in.

The volume bursts into being with 3 of the top 5 artists for this mix, which means they’re 3 of my favorites.  First, it’s back to the best offering from the Brian Setzer Orchestra, The Dirty Boogie, with the title track from that great album.  Then straight to Cherry Poppin’ Daddies’ swing compilation Zoot Suit Riot (which is probably their best) for “Dr. Bones.” Finally, it wouldn’t be Salsatic Vibrato without Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, so here they are.  I never thought This Beautiful Life, their second proper album,² was as good as the ultra-classic Americana Deluxe, but there are some gems, including the opener of that album, “Big and Bad,” which here not only provides a strong finish for the power trio opening, but also our volume title.³  A sublime start.

But where are those other two of the top 5 artists, you may ask?  Well, the Squirrel Nut Zippers are not far behind with a track from their next-album-after-their-best-album-which-is-not-quite-as-good-but-still-pretty-damned-rockin’, Perennial Favorites, “Fat Cat Keeps Getting Fatter.” Like the other tunes we’ve heard from that album,⁴ this one has a touch of surrealism mixed with an experimental take on retro-hot-jazz.  And Lou Bega is also back: I’m still milking his best album (A Little Bit of Mambo), because honestly his later ablums are not “still pretty rockin’.” Many people accuse Bega of only knowing one song, which is almost true ... he actually knows 3 or 4.  “Tricky Tricky” will never be mistaken for anyone but Bega, but on the other hand it has just a touch of hip-hop flair that sets it apart from most of his other offerings.

Other returning favorites include the Atomic Fireballs, who provide our closer for the third time in this mix, Royal Crown Revue, back for the third time with their ode to the long-gone LA streetcar line, “Watts Local,” and the Swing soundtrack, with another great Lisa Stansfield remake of an almost forgotten tune from the big band era: “Blitzkrieg Baby.”⁵  But I think the real news here is the long overdue return of Joe Jackson’s Jummpin’ Jive, which was so important to volumes I and II.  “How Long Must I Wait for You” is one of those tunes that you might dismiss on first listen, but it really grows on you over time, and I thought it was high time it earned its place here.  Contrariwise, the often-goofy-but-never-bland Lee Press-On and the Nails have only been missing for one volume, but I’m still happy to have them back; “Hat Back Boogie” is fairly silly lyrically, but its sound is exactly what this mix is all about.

We’ve got more ska too: Save Ferris also hasn’t been seen since volume II, and they too are way overdue.  “Spam” is a fun little ditty—not as goofy as LPN, but I felt that it flowed very naturally after that track, and of course sets up beautifully for our other dependable ska stars, Reel Big Fish, who made their return to the mix last volume.  This time around, RBF would like you to know that “it’s not so bad bein’ trendy,” because, you know: “everyone who looks like me is my friend.” A great ska “party”-style tune with some great lyrics to boot.

But the real musical style on display here is electro-swing, which I started experimenting with back on volume III.  And we do have a few returning artists in this area, like Caro Emerald, with her peppy “Stuck,” and Caravan Palace, with their practically frenetic “Suzy.” But this volume marks the point where I really went on an active musical search to see what was out there that I had just never found before.  And, boy, did I come up with some real winners.  Like most electro-swing, it’s mostly European in origin: Tape Five is German, and their “Bad Boy Good Man” is absolutely infectious, plus it has an amazing video, which you should go watch right now; Parvo Stelar (who, to be fair, appeared on one earlier volume) is an Austrian producer who likes to put together modern tunes that sound like they’re being played on a scratchy record player (and “Booty Swing” is the best of these, in my opinion); Shazalakazoo is from Serbia, and their style ranges from electro-swing to something called folk-step to something reminiscent of the Balkan trip-hop-rap-ragga of Poland’s Psio Crew⁶—but of course here I’m interested in the first of those, and “Sunny Side of the Street” is a highly electronic remix-remake of the old jazz standard “On the Sunny Side of the Street” (originally done by everyone from Louis Armstrong to Benny Goodman to Count Basie), barely recognizable here, but so addictively poppy that I defy you not to move your body when you hear it.

But the two finds that I’m most excited about are the Electric Swing Circus and Swing Republic.  The former is an amazing (and underrated, from what I can tell on the Internet) six-piece from Birminghan in the UK.  They have a number of amazing tracks (and, in fact we already saw one on Bleeding Salvador II), but probably the best is “Bella Belle,” who is, apparently, “soft and smooth like caramel.” This is just an amazing song, combining traditional swing brass with electronic beats and undercurrents, and vocals that trip and flow with dizzying proficiency.  Definitely check it out.  But I don’t want to sell short the other find here, Swing Republic, who I was so impressed with that they’re the only band who got 2 songs on the volume.  They meet my criteria for a moderately obscure band,⁷ and yet they’ve been around for nearly 10 years—that is to say, about as long as electro-swing itself.  They’re based in Denmark, but sing in English, with primarily female vocals, sprinkled with a few tracks which are essentially instrumental, although they often feature highly processed non-verbal voices.  Here I’ve given you one of each: “Mama” is an absolutely amazing tune which I use to introduce the electro-swing backbone of the volume, and “High Hat” is a more laid-back instrumental(ish) track which I used to close it out.  Following that there’s a short sax break from the Mighty Blue Kings, who we met last volume, then it’s back to the more traditional retro-swing for the closing block.

Salsatic Vibrato VII
[ The Devil in Your Eye ]

“The Dirty Boogie” by the Brian Setzer Orchestra, off The Dirty Boogie
“Dr. Bones” by Cherry Poppin' Daddies, off Zoot Suit Riot [Compilation]
“Big and Bad” by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, off This Beautiful Life
“Warriors” by Too Many Zooz, off Subway Gawdz
“Watts Local” by Royal Crown Revue, off Walk on Fire
“Fat Cat Keeps Getting Fatter” by Squirrel Nut Zippers, off Perennial Favorites
“Hat Back Boogie” by Lee Press-On and the Nails, off Swing Is Dead
“Spam” by Save Ferris, off It Means Everything
“Trendy” by Reel Big Fish, off Turn the Radio Off
“Quarter to Three” by Gary "U.S." Bonds [Single]
“Tricky, Tricky” by Lou Bega, off A Little Bit of Mambo
“Mama” by Swing Republic, off Midnight Calling
“Wizard Wheezes” by Nicholas Hooper, off Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince [Soundtrack]
“Bad Boy Good Man” by Tape Five, off Tonight Josephine!
“Booty Swing” by Parov Stelar, off The Princess
“Suzy” by Caravan Palace, off Caravan Palace
“Bella Belle” by the Electric Swing Circus, off The Electric Swing Circus
“Sunny Side of the Street” by Shazalakazoo [Single]
“Stuck” by Caro Emerald, off Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor
“High Hat” by Swing Republic, off Midnight Calling
“Tenor Madness” by Mighty Blue Kings, off Meet Me in Uptown
“How Long Must I Wait for You” by Joe Jackson, off Jumpin' Jive
“Blitzkrieg Baby” by Lisa Stansfield, off Swing [Soundtrack]
“Mata Hari” by the Atomic Fireballs, off Torch This Place

Total:  24 tracks,  78:02

And that just leaves us with 3 tracks in the “possibly unexpected” category.  I’ve used music from the Harry Potter movies in some interesting (but mostly expected) places so far, like Mystical Memoriam, Phantasma Chorale, and even on Classical Plasma, but I bet you never expected any to show up here, eh?  Well, “Wizard Wheezes” is from one of the later movies (specifically, Half-Blood Prince), composed by Nicholas Hooper, and it’s bright, and brassy, and a journey, and I couldn’t resist using it as a bridge.  The other two need a bit more examination.

Too Many Zooz started out playing in the subways of New York, until some videos of them went viral on YouTube.  They’re a trio: a trumpeter, a saxophonist, and a drummer ... but that doesn’t really begin to describe these guys.  The trumpet can hit soaring high notes that will send shivers down your spine, the sax is a baritone, a seldom heard instrument that gives us some fantastic low notes, and the “drummer” is one of those amazing percussionists who seems capable of keeping a beat on practically anything.  If you watch their videos,⁸ you’ll see that they also provide a contrast in motion: Doe and his trumpet hardly move at all, Leo P, even with the heavy baritone sax, seems like he can’t stop himself from dancing while playing, and King of Sludge, with his complicated drum rig, just bobs and flows in place, undulating his body as he keeps the beat.  They used Kickstarter to fund their first album, Subway Godz, which contains several tracks with hip-hop vocals, none of which speak to me, but, true to their busking roots, is mostly composed of instrumental tracks, some of which are just stunning.  “Warriors” is, I think, the best of these, starting with 5 staccato notes on the trumpet and sax, punctuated by silence, repeated a couple of times, then snapping fingers provides the initial beat while the notes start to flow together into a melody, then the whole thing just explodes into a full-throated euphonious fanfare.  It’s an experience, I promise.

Finally, a throwback to my childhood.  My father was a record collector, you see, specializing in early rock-n-roll from the fifties and sixties.  Although not a favorite, my dad always liked Gary “U.S.” Bonds, because he grew up not far from where we lived: he was the closest thing to a “local boy made good” for my father’s musical generation and geographical location.  His biggest hit was “Quarter to Three,” #1 in 1961, and listed among the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s “Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.” It was essentially Bonds slapping some vocals onto an instrumental by the Church Street Five, which was the backing band put together by sax player “Daddy G” Barge.  You can hear both Daddy G and the Church Street Five called out specifically in the song (another fun fact: the band is named after the street that ran behind the Safeway in my hometown; I rode my bike down Church Street many a time).  The song was intentionally recorded “rough,” meaning with low production values so that it sounded like a bootleg of some guys just jamming out back behind the studio.  This was part of its charm, and, as the ultimate “party” song, I felt it was a beautiful follow-up to “Trendy.”⁹  But mainly it’s here because Daddy G’s sax is so smooth, and this is one of the earliest songs I can remember that taught me what brass can bring to a rock song.

Next time, we’ll travel out West (musically speaking).

⇐ Salsatic Vibrato VI

Salsatic Vibrato VIII ⇒

__________

1 So far.  Natch.

2 By which I mean I don’t count their first (of many) Christmas albums.

3 The other really good songs from that ablum we’ve already seen here: “I Wanna Be Like You” from Salsatic Vibrato IV and “I’m Not Sleepin’” from Salsatic Vibrato V.

4 E.g. “Suits are Picking Up the Bill” from Salsatic Vibrato II, but most especially “Ghost of Stephen Foster” from Salsatic Vibrato IV.

5 It was originally done by Una Mae Carlisle, who is a person I did not know existed until I researched this post, in 1940.  Or 1941—Internet sources differ, as Internet sources often do.

6 We first met the Psio Crew on Apparently World.

7 AllMusic knows they exist, but not much more, and Wikipedia is completely stumped.

8 This one is one of the best, in my opinion.

9 For more details on the origin of the song, check out this article from what was once one of the only two newspapers you could get regularly in the town where I grew up.

Isolation Report, Week #43

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

Well, there’s been a little bit of $work (mostly catching up on some stuff I never seem to have time for under normal circumstances), and way too many videogames (primarily Portal Knights, except not on the PlayStation any more, because: fuck Sony), and there was a New Year’s Eve celebration in there somewhere.  We watched The Iron Giant, which I’ve always said is one of the greatest kids movies of all time, because a) it’s not a musical, b) it has some pretty great animation (being the first cinematic directorial effort from Brad Bird, who would go on to do The Incredibles), c) it proves, as fas as I’m concerned, that Vin Diesel (who voices the giant) is capable of complex characterization no matter what people think, d) plus a surprisingly great performance from Harry Connick Jr (as a beatnik-turned-scrap-dealer) and a dependably hateable villain from Christopher McDonald (whose Kent Mansley—“works for the government”—has an oily despicableness exceeded only by his Shooter McGavin), e) it has an equal number of very funny moments and very emotional moments (it makes nearly all of us in our family tear up at least once, and often more than once), and f) it has an amazing message, which I once used as the centerpiece of a blog post on individuality.  But mainly it’s not a muscial, a virtue I appreciate more and more as the years go on.  After that, the smallies and I played some Trine 4 until 11pm, when we gathered everyone up to celebrate the arrival of 2021 in Denver (because I didn’t really expect the Smaller Animal—who, to be fair, is now mere inches away from being the biggest person in the house—to make it to midnight), and then we played a bit more, and then it really was midnight, so we celebrated again, albeit on a smaller scale, and then everyone went to bed except for me, and I sat up and fucked around trying to finish the giant bottle of pink “champagne” I had bought at Trader Joe’s.  I did have both The Mother and the eldest helping me out this time, but no one really likes sparkling wine but me (and, honestly, I’m a bit “meh” on it myself), so I wasn’t able to polish it off.  But then the next night I did, on account of a giant bottle of sparkling wine always has less in it than you think, partially because a lot of it disappears into bubbles, and partially because most of the weight of the bottle is in the glass.  (Pro tip: sparkling wine will not survive until the next day unless you have some wine stoppers, which I finally bought some of this year.)

And that’s our New Year’s for 2021.  It’s only been a few days, but so far it’s seemed pleasant enough.  It certainly feels like 2020 was a low point, but I will not tempt fate by trying to claim that it couldn’t get worse.  Rather I shall just point out that we have a few early indicators that 2021 could be better—such as a new President and a couple of new corona vaccines—and, while neither of those things are going to be perfect, at least they’re positive signs, and I will choose to take them as such.  I wish a better 2021 to all of you, to all of us, and pretty much to all of the world.  I think we sort of kind of deserve it.