Sirenexiv Cola II

"Sneaky Like a Fiery Fox"

[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.]

Sometimes a volume II consists of all the songs that just wouldn’t fit on volume I.  But sometimes it’s just that certain artists were so good that they had multiple candidates, and I was working very hard to restrain myself from including them all.  That latter case sums up Sirenexiv Cola pretty well: there’s yet another brilliant opener from KT Tunstall—”(Still a) Weirdo,” in fact, includes the brilliant line “Optimisitc, but never quite elegant,” which came very close to being our volume title—and the promised inclusion of alt-radio favorite “Polyester Bridge” by Liz Phair.  The Sundays and the Katydids are back; the former provide the gorgeous “Here’s Where the Story Ends,” another alt-radio favorite and quite possibly my introduction to the London band; the latter give us a slightly less folky take than last volume with “Don’t Think Twice.” And, speaking of folky, you know I had more from folks like Feist and Regina Spektor and the inimitable Tori Amos.  For Feist, the album that immediately precedes the one with her breakout hit “1234” (which was featured last volume) is Let It Die, which features her first charted single, “Mushaboom.” It’s a sweet pop gem which sweeps us into the middle stretch of this volume.  As for the Russian-born NYC-raised Spektor, “Fidelity” was her first song to chart in the US, and features some beautiful musical hijinx, such as pairing pizzicato string work with some glottal stops and stretching the word “heart” into a dozen or more syllables; it’s pretty breathtaking.  And, while I still maintain that Tori Amos’ debut Little Earthquakes is the most brilliant album of her career, “Caught a Lite Sneeze” is probably the first of her singles that I really enjoyed after that initial infatuation.  It’s somehow both dreamy and poppy, ethereal but with a strong beat.  Definitely a classic.

But that’s not the extent of our returning artists—in fact, it’s perhaps only as I’m writing this blog post that I realize how much throughline there really is in terms of the vocalists.  Bella Ruse is back with “Hold Me Close,” a spare acoustic anti-folk ballad that develops into a dreampop synth wash; its’s somehow hopeful and melancholy all at once.  We hear once again from Beth Quist; the swooping vocals of “Goodbye” show off why she’s part of Bobby McFerrin’s “Voicestra.” There’s another Meaghan Smith tune, “Poor,” which shows off her ability to start out slow and build to something beautiful.  And, on the harder side of this mix, I once again come back to Swedish powerpop star Lykke Li, with “Dance, Dance, Dance,” and P!nk, with “Stupid Girls.” The former was never a hit, but it is off Li’s first, best album (Youth Novels), and it showcases her ability to blend a lot of different instruments and styles into a coherent whole.  The latter was a fairly big hit for P!nk (#13 in the US; #4 in the UK) and contains a lot of typically smart lyrics such as “What happened to the dream of a girl president? She’s dancing in the video next to 50 Cent” and laments “where oh where have the smart people gone?” And it still manages to be a banger, of course.

Still, we must have new blood to keep a mix fresh.  One of the things I realized when putting together volume II was that I had failed to include the incomparable Suzanne Vega.  And, while normally my go-to Vega album is 99.9F°, there’s also much to be said for her follow-up Nine Objects of Desire.  And I just felt like “No Cheap Thrill,” a little more upbeat than most of her œuvre, worked best as our penultimate track.  It’s got that slinky vibe that I featured on Slithy Toves I (speficially, “Caramel”), but a bit more of a pop vibe, with catchy lyrics that compare a relationship to playing poker.

It also felt a little weird that I hadn’t included anything off Fur and Gold.  The brilliant debut of British vocalist Bat for Lashes has provided tracks for Porchwell Firetime I, Slithy Toves I, Darkling Embrace I, and Wisty Mysteria II, but this mix was really tailor-made for her.  “The Wizard” was her first single and, though it didn’t chart, it’s really a great, dreamy track that works quite well here.  I also thought to return to the smokier voice of Chrissy Amphlett and Divinyls; “Heart Telegraph” really lets Amphlett’s pipes shine, and I think it transcends the mid-80s new wave that it also indelibly evokes.  (Last we saw Ampheltt—on Totally Different Head I—I noted that she died fairly young.  Since then, I’ve actually passed her age at the time she died, so it hits even harder for me now.)

Of course, I’ve also just plain discovered some new bands since I started this mix.  A former coworker of mine introduced me to a bunch of new music, from his favorite obscure subgenre (Italo-disco) to just stuff he knew because he was much younger than I.  And sometimes he would have tenuous personal connections to a band: I believe he knew the Dum Dum Girls (who are indeed from our native LA) because an ex-girlfriend was close friends with one of the members.  Or something like that.  But he threw up one of their songs onto our big screen that we used to play “push songs” and I was mightily impressed.  “Caught in One” is my pick for their first appearance here: while they can often be a bit shoegaze-y, this tune is more jangle-pop, with Dee Dee’s powerful vocals singing about the loss of her mother (“Death is on the telephone / I lie and say she isn’t home”).  It’s a great tune.

Another major discovery was Lucius, whose Wildewoman was nearly as exciting a discovery as Tiger Suit, which is what arguably kicked off this mix in the first place.  This indie pop four-piece from Brooklyn features two harmonic female vocalists.  Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig are not related, but they tend to dress alike and wear their hair in similar styles, so you could be forgiven for thinking they were sisters.  The title track off this amazing album is a bit of a revelation; Wolfe and Laessig do that thing they do so well where they alternative between harmonizing and singing in a round-like style, and it includes great lyrics such as our volume title, as well as the chorus:

She’s gonna find another way back home,
It’s written in her blood; oh, it’s written in her bones.
Yeah, she’s ripping out the pages in your book.
...
Yeah, she’ll only be bound by the things she chooses.

Sublime.

Sirenexiv Cola II
[ Sneaky Like a Fiery Fox ]

“(Still a) Weirdo” by KT Tunstall, off Tiger Suit
“Stupid Girls” by P!nk, off I'm Not Dead
“Caught a Lite Sneeze” by Tori Amos, off Boys for Pele
“The Wizard” by Bat for Lashes, off Fur and Gold
“Dance, Dance, Dance” by Lykke Li, off Youth Novels
“Goodbye” by Beth Quist, off Lucidity
“Mushaboom” by Feist, off Let It Die
“Poor” by Meaghan Smith, off The Cricket's Orchestra
“You and Me” by Sara Watkins, off Sun Midnight Sun
“Hold Me Close” by Bella Ruse, off Bella Ruse [EP]
“Wildewoman” by Lucius, off Wildewoman
“Fidelity” by Regina Spektor, off Begin to Hope
“I Say Nothing” by Voice of the Beehive, off Let It Bee
“Caught in One” by Dum Dum Girls, off Only in Dreams
“The Gold Medal” by the Donnas, off Gold Medal
“Here's Where the Story Ends” by the Sundays, off Reading, Writing and Arithmetic
“Polyester Bride” by Liz Phair, off Whitechocolatespaceegg
“Don't Think Twice” by Katydids, off Shangri-La
“No Cheap Thrill” by Suzanne Vega, off Nine Objects of Desire
“Heart Telegraph” by Divinyls, off What a Life

Total:  20 tracks,  74:45

There’s nothing too surprising here, though there are a few obscure tracks.  Voice of the Beehive was a group comprised of two sisters from California who formed a band in London that included a couple former members of Madness.  Let It Bee is fairly typical for the late 80s, though it does include a few quite clever songs such as “There’s a Barbarian in the Back of My Car” and “Sorrow Floats” (the problem with trying to drown your sorrows, of course).  But I’ve always had a soft spot for “I Say Nothing,” their second single but first to chart (in the UK and Australia only, although they reissued it the following year and it made it to #11 on the US alternative charts), which contains the brilliant line “That’s why I drink: so I’ll be who they think I am.” It’s a bit of 80s-style poppiness that’s hard not to like.

Now, the Donnas might be a little surprising: they’re typically hard rockers in the same vein as the Runaways or Sleater-Kinney, so you might them more suited for something like Distaff Attitude (and I’ve no doubt we’ll see them there eventually).  But in their calmer moments (which still aren’t all that calm), they put out some tunes that work well here.  One of which is “The Gold Medal,” which is a surprisingly non-aggressive song about leaving someone who can’t appreciate you.  Brett Anderson (a.k.a. Donna A) has the perfect, apathetic vocal take on this song, and it’s kind of perfect coming off the Dum Dum Girls and setting up the Sundays for the quieter back third.

And that just leaves me with perhaps the most unlikely artist of all—or at least unlikely that I would own an album of hers.  I first heard Sara Watkins on A Prairie Home Companion, and at first I was convinced that she was way too country for me ... I mean, she started off playing fiddle for a “progressive bluegrass” band, of all things!  But there’s just something about her voice, and I do appreciate a fiddle, especially when it’s not particularly country-fied.  Now, her album Sun Midnight Sun does contain a few tracks which are entirely too country to be tolerated, but many—and in particular “You and Me”—are just gorgeous alt-country tunes.  Powered primarily by what I suspect is a mandolin, with perhaps a few touches of steel guitar and surprisingly little (if any) actual fiddle, “You and Me” is too perfectly apt for this mix for me to ignore it just for the sin of appearing on an album with a few other songs I can’t particularly appreciate.  So here it sits, and I’m pretty happy with my decision.

Next time ... well, Hallowe’en is coming up.  Maybe we’ll find some tunes that would work well for that.

⇐ Sirenexiv Cola I

Sirenexiv Cola III ⇒

The soul of wit

No time for even a short post this week, sadly.  The Mother is coming down with something so I haven’t had the time today to do much other than help out with errands.  Still, there’s always next week.  Let’s see what happens then.

Family Dinner

When I was kid, we would often to go to my grandparents’ house for dinner on Sunday.  Since I was lucky enough to have two sets of grandparents, this could mean wildly different cuisines.  On my father’s side, his parents, raised on farms in North Carolina, favored sprawling meals with many side dishes, and often multiple kinds of meat (usually some form of pork).  My mother’s side, on the other hand, fancied themselves as having come up in the world since their humble roots, and favored fancier, more coherent meals.  We might have turkey tetrazzini, or filet mignon with shoestring fries, or pot roast with potatoes and carrots (leading to the creation of what my grandmother called “hash” the following day).  But, if we were very lucky, we would have spaghetti and meatballs.

Now, back in my day most folks thought of spaghetti and meatballs as an Italian dish, though nowadays we know that it’s exactly as Italian as chicken tikka masala is Indian, thanks to articles from places like the Smithsonian (although I personally learned about it from Alton Brown).  But, as a child, it never occurred to me to think of it as anything other than grandmother food.  Spaghetti dinner was practically an all day affair: it cooked on the stove in a giant pot all day, sending out irresistible aromas and making everyone’s mouths water, and my mother and grandmother and Bernice, my grandmother’s housekeeper, would fuss over the proper amounts of spices to add.  When it got a bit closer to dinner, we would break out the saltines and bleu cheese as a sort of appetizer (I have never discovered where exactly this strange tradition originated).  Then it was time to eat, and there was a great family divide between those of us who just wanted to chop the long spaghetti into more manageable chunks so you could eat everything together, and those who insisted on twirling it around their forks to make giant pasta balls which you then ate followed by a big spoonful of sauce.  Some of us liked grated parmesan; some couldn’t stand the smell.  And of course we fought over the meatballs.

My mother made it at home, sometimes, but it was always considered a special-occasion food.  Both my brother and I took great pains to learn how to cook it, though we (eventually) began to deviate from the recipe in small ways.  Now The Mother makes it for us, far more regularly than I ever used to have it as a child (or even as a young adult).  It’s regularly requested by my children on birthday weekends, or holidays, or pretty much any time The Mother lets them set the menu.  There is, as far as I know, no Italian in my ancestry (although there’s an eighth of my heritage that I’ve never been able to track down), but this Italian-American dish has become very symbolic of our family’s culture, to the point where we typically refer to it using my last name (which is of course a complete misnomer, as it originates with my maternal grandmother).  Let me tell you the two family myths that are attached to its origin.

My Mother’s Story

When your grandfather was in The War [my grandfather served as a lieutenant in the Navy’s Construction Battalion—or “Seabees”—in World War II], his unit had an Italian-American cook.  That worthy gentleman [yes, my mother really talks like that] wanted to make food for his unit that was better than the standard rations, so, whenever possible, he cooked large meals with the best ingredients he could come up with.  This sauce is based on his mother’s recipe, but of course using canned ingredients instead of fresh because that’s all they really had access to.  When my father—your grandfather—came home from The War, he asked this cook for the recipe and brought it home to my mother (your grandmother) and that’s what she makes today.

My Father’s Story

That’s all crap.  Your grandmother told me one night she just got the recipe out of the Ladies’ Home Journal.

Which story is “true”?  Likely neither ... or possibly both.  But the point is, this is a meal of great significance to our family, and I thought it was probably worth preserving for posterity.  Let’s break it down.

The Spaghetti

For many years, I completely believed that we were eating spaghetti in our spaghetti and meatballs—I mean, after all, it’s right there in the name.  But, as it turns out, my grandmother always used vermicelli.  The pasta you pick is in one sense of utmost importance—after all, half the reason why spaghetti and meatballs is not authentically Italian is that Italians would not choose a thin pasta with no holes like spaghetti to go with their meat sauces—and, in another, completely irrelevant.  The beauty of this meal is that it pretty much tastes great with any pasta you like: I’ve had it with penne, farfalle, conchiglie (that’s the seashell shaped one), and even, when truly desperate, macaroni.  But most often we have it with some variation of spaghetti.  My (non-Italian, recall) family taught me that there were four different sizes of “spaghetti”:

• Spaghetti proper, which is the thickest.
• Spaghettini, also called thin spaghetti (just a bit thinner).
• Vermicelli (thinner still).
• Capellini, also known as “angel hair” pasta, the thinnest of all.

Now, personally, I find actual spaghetti way too thick.  My understanding from all those articles and whatnot is that we currently have a concept of spaghetti and meatballs primarily because, back in the turn of the century (not this one, the one before that), spaghetti was often the only pasta you could buy, if you didn’t want to make it yourself.  Spaghettini is all right; capellini is better; and of course vermicelli is the best, but I suppose that’s probably just because it’s what I was actually raised on.  Even in today’s choice-rich world, though, vermicelli seems hard to come by, for some reason, so I’ll admit to using capellini way more often than I’d prefer.  But, as I say, any pasta will taste good with this sauce.

The Meatballs

Perhaps surprisingly, this offers a lot of options as well.  For my grandmother, it was always the same: you go to the butcher, you get two pounds of beef and one pound of pork, and you have him grind them together.  Well, these days, you’d be hard pressed to find a butcher who will deal with pork at all (most of our remaining butchers are either kosher or halal), and even the grocery stores won’t do anything as radical as grind beef and pork together.  But, as it turns out, if you just buy ground meat and stick it in a big bowl and just sort of knead it all together, that works just fine.

Of course, you needn’t go to all the trouble of mixing two kinds of meat if you don’t want to.  Personally, I find meatballs made of all beef way too strong a flavor (but then again I have a compllicated relationship with beef).  I think my favorite these days is two-thirds turkey and one-third pork.  But you can also do 100% pork, or 100% turkey, or even—and I haven’t personally tried this, but I bet you it would work just fine—a plant based substitute such as Impossible.

As far as what to do with the meat, just form it into balls.  That’s it: no eggs, no bread crumbs, none of that fancy shit.  Maybe a little salt and pepper; occasionally some onion powder or garlic powder.  Make the balls a bit large (The Mother often uses an ice cream scoop for this purpose): they’re going to fall apart at least a little in the sauce, which will make it meat sauce, which is what you want.  But, in order to keep them from falling apart too much, you want to brown them a bit.

First, use some paper towels to pat the meatballs dry a bit (this is especially important when using ground turkey).  Dryer meatballs will brown better.  Next, in the biggest pot you’ve got, heat up some olive oil.  Then put some garlic in it: my grandmother would literally slice fresh cloves of garlic into thin slices and then brown them in the oil, fishing them out when they’d given up the ghost.  Nowadays we’re just as likely to use pre-minced garlic.  Use 4 – 6 cloves, or 1 – 2 heaping tablespoons (depending on how much you love garlic).  Also toss in a softball-sized yellow onion, diced fairly fine.  Once the garlic is starting to brown and the onions are starting to get translucent, start browning the meatballs.  You want them just browned enough to (mostly) hold together; you’re not trying to cook them all the way through.  You’ll need to turn them a few times to get them brown all over.

The Sauce

Obviously the most crucial component is the sauce.  The base of this is pretty simple:

• 4 8-oz cans of tomato sauce
• 4 6-oz cans of tomato paste
• 8 oz of water

We’ve also experimented with another 8 oz of tomato sauce and just skip the water, which makes the sauce a bit more intense—more tomato-y, if you see what I mean.  Stir all that together, trying to be careful not to break up the meatballs too much, though it’s fine if you lose a couple.  Cook it at a low simmer for a few hours: at least two, but probably no more than four.  About a half an hour before you’re ready to eat, it’s time to season.

In my grandmother’s recipe, there were actual amounts for everything.  However, nowadays we don’t measure any of the spices and seasonings at all.  Usually the the youngest and I handle the seasoning, and we have a simple system:

• Cover the surface of the sauce with a thin layer of basil.
• Sprinkle in a much smaller amount of oregano (perhaps a quarter as much).
• Stir it all in.
• Now, taste the sauce:
• If it’s not salty enough, add some salt (duh).
• If it’s not sweet enough, add more basil.
• If it’s not savory enough, add some garlic powder.
• If it’s not herby enough, add more oregano.
• If it doesn’t have enough kick, add some pepper.

That’s pretty much it.  If you want the original measurements, I typically remember them via the mnemonic that you need to use every one of your measuring spoons:

• 1 tbsp of sugar
• 1 tsp of basil
• ½ tsp of salt
• ¼ tsp of pepper

The sugar was the first to fall by the wayside: basil provides a more natural-tasing sweetness, and you require far less of it, and it’s healthier (not that I mean to imply that this is a low-calorie dish or anything).  Next, the salt and pepper got moved to being applied directly to the meat, which gives your meatballs a bit more direct seasoning.  Most recently, I added the oregano: I just think it provides a very distinctive flavor that gives food a very Italian identity.

About 15 minutes before you’re ready to eat, boil your pasta of choice.  And you’re done.

So that’s our family recipe for spaghetti and meatballs.  It’s lasted for four generations now, and it’s stood up to a good deal of tinkering over the years without ever losing its essential character.  It’s a fairly short ingredient list, and there’s nothing too fancy in the preparation.  But, despite all that, it’s probably the favorite meal for about three-quarters of my extended family.  It’s a meal that we love, and one that is quintessentially us.

A small recommendation

You know, when I first got over my rather silly belief that I couldn’t enjoy watching other people play D&D, I started looking for really entertaining examples of people streaming the game.  (I talked a bit about this in my “D&D and Me” series.)  And I found some great examples ... but a lot of not-so-great ones as well.  If I had to put my finger on what elevates the good from the meh, it would have to be this: streaming D&D can be a whole new form of media, a whole new way to tell a story ... or it can be just watching people play a game.  The latter is entertaining ... ish.  Watching people play sports, or poker, or things of that nature can be entertaining too.  But I wouldn’t call those sorts of things a new storytelling medium.  D&D, on the other hand, if done well, can really tell a story in a fresh new way that you just can’t experience in any other medium.  That’s the magic of it.

And I’ve tried a lot of D&D shows: video and podcast, edited and unedited, zero production values and over-the-top gimmicks.  A few really stand out.  But I may have found a new pinnacle.

The first chapter of World Beyond Number’s first ongoing campaign (“The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One”) just concluded, and I am really blown away.  This is the D&D streaming equivalent of a rock supergroup: Brennan Lee Mulligan, DM of Dimension 20 and guest DM on Critical Role (and veteran CollegeHumor performer); Aabria Iyengar, DM on Saving Throw and guest DM and player on both Crital Role and Dimension 20; Erika Ishii, voice actor, player on LA By Night, and guest player on both Crital Role and Dimension 20; Lou Wilson, actor and comedian, player on Dimension 20, guest player on Critical Role (and announcer for Jimmy Kimmel); and Taylor Moore, producer, composer and sound-designer, co-creator of Rude Tales of Magic and Fun City.  These guys have a lot of mileage under their belts, and they’ve come together to produce a podcast, with premium sound design that makes it sound like an old-style radio broadcast.  The D&D elements are still there, but they’re not the focus; primarily they just serve to remind the audience that one of the things that make streaming D&D unlike any other form of storytelling is that random chance plays a factor.  Brennan is the GM for this campaign, and he has beaucoup experience and a flair for the dramatic.  Aabria, Erika, and Lou all have a great deal of experience committing to a textured, flawed, but lovable character, and they make you fall in love with these three unlikely companions.  Together they’ve built a new fantasy world, Umora, which is every bit as fascinating as Middle Earth, Narnia, or Oz.  And the story ... is just magnificent.

You can check out their website to get started listening, or just search for “Worlds Beyond Number” in your podcast app.  If you really want an amazing experience, go give them $5 at their Patreon and listen to “The Children’s Adventure,” which is a prequel series that explains how the 3 protagonists met as children and started to develop their powers (and their personalities).  You can easily get through it in a month, but honestly you should keep giving them money even after that, because it’s worth every penny.  But you can also listen for free if you’d prefer.

I’m not usually one to plug things this hard, but, really: even if you have zero interest in D&D, I think you’ll be seduced by this show.  It’s something really unique.  Check it out.