Sunday, August 16, 2020

Minor Magic Items

[This is a post I wrote primarily for an audience of people who play fifth edition D&D.  Nearly three years ago now, I pondered starting separate blogs for my eclectic interests, but I never really did.  If I had, though, this would certainly be on the gaming blog.  So, if you’re not a D&D player, you might want to give this one a pass.]

As part of my ongoing family campaign, the players have accepted a side quest to help out an important NPC in the city they happen to be staying in (temporarily; they’re passing through on a longer journey set for them by their “mysterious benefactor”).1  Of course I expect them to complete this mission, and thus I have to be prepared to have the NPC reward them for their service.  I could just break out the hard currency, of course—no one ever turns their nose up at gold—but it seems boring.  The characters are not wanting for cash right now, and D&D 5e has a bit of a weird relationship with money anyhow: since the game discourages an active economy in magic items, once you get to a certain level of equipped-ness, you often can’t find much to spend your excess gold on.  But they’re still moderately low level (2nd through 4th, right now), so I also don’t want to drop a bunch of powerful items on them that will raise the overall power level and make me regret my decision later.  What to do?

Obviously the solution is minor magic items.  I’ve now spent a bunch of time combing my books and the Internet for the perfect items to gift my players with, so I thought it might be nice to share some of my findings with other folks: perhaps this info can help your game as well.

First of all, I gather from searching the Internet that there seems to be a some confusion as to what a minor magical item even is.  So perhaps we should start with what it isn’t.

  • A minor magical item is not the same as a consumable magic item. A major effect is always a major effect.  Limited use of that effect does not magically (haha) make it a minor effect.
  • A minor magical item is not the same as a wondrous item. “Wondrous item” is a term which here means “item we couldn’t fit into any other category.” While it’s true that sometimes a wondrous item may have a minor effect, many (many!) more of them have pretty major effects.  “Minor” does not mean “not a sword or a suit of armor or a staff or a ring or a ...”
  • A minor magical item is not the same as a trinket. A trinket is a strange or unusual item which is designed to spark roleplaying opportunities.  It might not even be magical at all.

Let’s dispense with these in order of ease of dispensing.  Wondrous items are a category of magic items; it has absolutely nothing to do with whether it’s a minor item or not.  (To be fair, this is the term least often confused for “minor magical item,” so I think most people already get this.)  Consumable items are, again, a completely orthogonal concept.  A major magical item might be consumable, or it might not.  A minor item could also be consumable, but let’s be honest here: if the effect is already minor, it seems pretty mean to then limit the number of uses on top of that.  The question of trinkets is a bit harder, but not much.

First off, as mentioned above, some trinkets aren’t magical at all.  Here are some examples from the trinkets table (Player’s Handbook, pages 159 – 161):

  • A mummified goblin hand
  • The deed for a parcel of land in a realm unknown to you
  • A small cloth doll skewered with needles
  • A tiny silver bell without a clapper
  • A l-inch cube, each side painted a different color
  • An empty wine bottle bearing a pretty label that says, “The Wizard of Wines Winery, Red Dragon Crush, 331422-W”
  • A black pirate flag adorned with a dragon’s skull and crossbones

These are all great, flavorful items, and they can all provide interesting story hooks for clever players.  But no magic.

On the other hand, here are some other examples from that same list:

  • A shard of obsidian that always feels warm to the touch
  • A small, weightless stone block
  • A candle that can’t be lit
  • A nightcap that, when worn, gives you pleasant dreams
  • A silver teardrop earring made from a real teardrop
  • A tiny mechanical crab or spider that moves about when it’s not being observed
  • A wooden box with a ceramic bottom that holds a living worm with a head on each end of its body

Also great, flavorful items, but these are all definitely magical.  Not very magical, granted, but then we were looking for minor magic items ... right?

This gets us to the heart of what a minor magical item is.  A major magical item has a major effect.  Whether it’s wondrous or not doesn’t change that; neither does whether it’s consumable or not.  A minor magical item has a minor effect.  So why aren’t magical trinkets minor magic items?  Because a trinket has no effect.  Sure, the nightcap may give you pleasant dreams, and the block may not weigh anything even though it’s made of stone, but none of that actually has any effect on the game.

So what would be an example of an actual minor magic, item?  There are a few in the DMG, but not too many.  Happily, Xanathar’s Guide to Everything gives us a whole mess of ’em.  Here’s one:

  • Boots of False Tracks (wondrous item, common): Only humanoids can wear these boots.  While wearing the boots, you can choose to have them leave tracks like those of another kind of humanoid of your size.

A very small effect, granted, but still something that could be useful in a game.  You might have to work pretty hard to come up with a way to use it, but that’s part of the joy of a minor magic item.  It’s real magic, it’s impressive to the common folk, it’s useful in the right situation, and it encourages creative play.  And what it doesn’t do is make the GM’s job harder.

See, as a GM you have be very careful with those major magic items.  Your players might be very excited to get a ring of invisibility, and you might feel quite magnanimous giving them one, but now you have to consider that you’ve got at least one character who’s never going to have to worry about sneaking past your sentries any more, or how to burgle that precious artifact that’s so closely guarded, or how to eavesdrop on crucial NPC conversations.  Oh, sure: you can demand stealth checks anyway, on the grounds that someone might hear them, or claim that your evil genius BBEG obviously would install “anti-invisibility preparations” (even if it’s only something as dirt simple as coating the floor with flour), but you can’t always ignore or override power that you specifically gave your players in the first place: it frustrates them, and why did you even give it to them if you didn’t expect them to use it?  So, every time you contemplate awarding some sort of major magic item, you have to think carefully about what impact it’s going to have on the game, and how it’s going to make your life harder: that is, how it’s going to make it more challenging for you to challenge your players.

But with minor magical items, you have none of these problems.  What plotline do you have planned that could possibly be upset by a pair of boots that can leave confusing tracks?  Or (to use a few more examples from Xanathar’s) a helmet that makes one’s eyes glow red? or a sword that gives off moonlight? or a tankard that allows one to drink as much as they like and never get drunk?  No, the minor magical item is awesome because the player gets to feel cool and special, and the GM never has to worry about being swept up in a magical powers arms race.

As for the creative play aspect, the OSR2 proponents are fond of touting old-school D&D as facilitating “item-based problem-solving.” The idea is that modern D&D is all dripping with magic items so no one bothers to come up with uses for simple things such as mirrors, or a box of silver pins, or a pouch of herbs and spices.  But of course this is silly.  You can still encourage your players to use their equipment lists to their full extent; you just have to figure out to make it a bit sexier.  In those old-school days, you wouldn’t dream of going into a dungeon without your ten-foot pole, but that was because your GM would gleefully drop you into a spike pit if you didn’t tap all the floors along the way.  Also, if you didn’t use some sort of ear horn to listen at all the doors, you would eventually acquire ear seekers.  And if you didn’t have a silver mirror, your GM would inevitably spring a medusa or a basilisk on you.  Wasn’t old-school D&D fun?  It taught you to develop complex and bizarre shopping lists if you wanted to live: not exactly sexy swashbuckling adventure.  But that’s how it rolled—there were buttloads of bean-counting built into the game, actually.  Most of it has largely fallen by the wayside in the 3 major rules revisions since then, because most people don’t find detailed resource management all that fun.

But the OSR fans have a point that you really had to get the most out of your equipment list if you wanted to survive.  Figuring out how to make do with limited resources can be fun, as long as it doesn’t devolve into the aforementioned shopping list exercise.  But we can have the best of both worlds: minor magic items give the players something that they really want to use, because it’s all magical and cool, but because it has very limited application, it forces them to work hard to come up with a situation where they can actually put it to good use.  See?  Item-based problem solving and cool magic items as a reward and nice, modern rules with no complex resource tracking.  All your bases are covered.

Now that we know what minor magic items are and why we want to use them, where can we get them from?  Well, as mentioned previously, Xanathar’s is a good place to start.  The section is actually called “common magic items,” and it starts on page 136, but “common” isn’t quite the same as “minor” either.  Oh, many common magic items are minor as well, true, but some are just consumable, and those (while very useful) aren’t the type of thing we’re exploring here.  Happily, the list of items in Xanathar’s are all minor as well as common.3  In fact, some of them border on trinkets: I’m a bit hard-pressed to come up with a creative use for, say, armor of gleaming that would have any actual effect on a game.  But in general it’s a great list.

The DMG is, sadly, slimmer pickings.  Note that page 135 of Xanathar’s gives you a vital clue: anything on tables A through E in the DMG is considered a minor item.  But, looking at those tables (pages 144 – 145 of your Dungeon Master’s Guide), what you see is almost exclusively consumable items.  Still there are a few proper minor magic items to be found:

  • On table A, we have the bag of holding (which is right on the edge of tipping into a major item) and the driftglobe, which is a great minor item.
  • On table B, the alchemy jug is a fun one, and the cap of water breathing, goggles of night, helm of comprehending languages, mithral armor, ring of swimming, and saddle of the cavalier all qualify.  The mariner’s armor is at the upper end (like the bag of holding), but still pretty safe.  The robe of useful items is, weirdly, consumable, and the lantern of revealing is semi-consumable in that you have to keep putting oil in it.  The two wands have major effects; they’re only considered minor items because of their limited charges.  I would also be cautious with the cloak of the manta ray, the immovable rod and the rope of climbing: they’re not as minor as they might first appear.
  • Table C adds Quaal’s feather tokens, most of which are great minor items (watch out for the bird and whip ones though), and the decanter of endless water, eyes of minute seeing, folding boat, horseshoes of speed, periapt of health, and sending stones are all good choices.  Heward’s handy haversack is what you give your players when you feel like a bag of holding is going too far.  The chime of opening and the necklace of fireballs are more of those unexpectedly consumable ones.
  • Table D doesn’t add much, but the horseshoes of a zephyr are fun.  Nolzur’s marvelous pigments are technically consumable, but a moderately thrifty player will probably never actually use them all.  Portable holes are another of those more-major-than-they-seem items.  Bag of devouring is a cursed item, which is a whole different kettle of fish.
  • Table E is 100% composed of consumable items, although sovreign glue (like Nolzur’s marvelous pigments) is one that you’ll probably never actually use all of.

So, a few good things there, but not as much as we might hope for.  But don’t count the humble DMG out yet!  Look on page 143; see that table marked “What Minor Properties Does It Have”?  The concept here is supposed to be that you have some powerful magic item, and you want to give it a little extra flavor by assigning it an additional, magical effect.  But there’s nothing saying that you can’t just have a magic item that has one of these minor effects and nothing else ... voilà, minor magic item.  In fact, some of the pre-existing minor items seem cut directly from this cloth: a driftglobe is just an item that only has the “beacon” minor effect, while an orb of direction is just an item bearing only the “compass” property.

Another useful trick, if you decide to come up with your own items, is to look at cantrips.  Now, cantrips come in two distinct flavors; they don’t have technical designations, but they’re often referred to as “damage-dealing cantrips” vs “utility cantrips.” You probably don’t want to give your players even more ways to magically create damage.  Besides: it’s boring.  But those utility cantrips can be quite useful to draw inspiriation from.  Again, some of the existing minor items seem to follow this recipe: it seems obvious that clothes of mending are based on the mending cantrip, and an instrument of illusions is just a more flavorful way to cast minor illusion.

But perhaps you don’t want to mess around with creating your own.  Surely there must be someone out there in the big wide world wide web who has done it for you?  Feel free to search for yourself: now that you know to avoid lists that are just consumable items, or trinket lists, you should have better luck.  Here’s a few that I’ve found that I like:

  • Goblin Punch has a list of 100
  • S. A. Hunt has collected over 100 from around the Internet for you4
  • Spouting Lore has smaller lists of items, one for rogues, one for rangers, and even one for magical swords that aren’t too overpowered
  • Tales of Scheherazade has some introductory text which references the same “item-based problem solving” article that I linked to above—which itself contains a list of items that are very much trinkets, not minor magic items—but then goes on to provide 100 items, the majority of which fall safely into this category

It’s taken some analysis, and some research, and some creativity, but I’ve come up with what I think are some great minor magic items for my party.  Hopefully I’ve short-circuited some of that work so that you can do the same.
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1 By the way, I would be remiss for not giving credit for the bones of this side quest to Justice Arman and his team in their excellent Baldur’s Gate: City Encounters.  My characters are not actually in Baldur’s Gate, but that doesn’t keep many of the encounters from being very useful, including this one, which is #12 (“Little Calimshan”).  Transplanting Rilsa Rael (an NPC from Descent into Avernus) to my city—which happens to be Sammaresh, for the Forgotten-Realms-savvy—was trivial, and the idea that Sammaresh (just across the Shining Sea from Calimshan, and therefore much closer than Baldur’s Gate) would also have a Little Calimshan neighborhood seemed perfectly natural.

2 Remember: “OSR” stands for “old-school revival”; that is, modern offshoots of D&D based on the 1st and 2nd edition rulesets, but updated slightly to make them less confusing.

3 Even the consumable ones, such as beads of nourishment.  But, again, those are really a separate category.

4 Fans of The Adventure Zone will no doubt recognize a few of those.











Sunday, August 9, 2020

Isolation Report, Week #22

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

Today I drove to Burbank Airport (much closer and more sedate than LAX) and dropped off The Mother and my littlest one.  By this point, they’ve landed in Denver.  Flying during these trying times is certainly not something our family was looking forward to.  But due to some family medical issues, this trip really couldn’t be postponed.  So we put masks and goggles on them, we availed ourselves as often as possible of the many thoughtfully placed hand sanitizer stations, and we got in and out as quickly as possible.  That’s the best we could do.

I have to say, this was only my second time at Burbank, and obviously my first during the pandemic endtimes.  I was quite impressed at how helpful the airport and airline employees were.  When there were buttons to be pushed (such as the “walk” button for the crosswalk), there was nearly always a masked and gloved employee to push it for us.  We ended up touching nearly nohting the whole time, and everyone was super polite, not annoyed as you sometimes see with overworked transportation workers.  It was easy in, easy park, easy out.  I hope I get the opportunity to use Burbank more often.  You know, if flying ever becomes a thing we do on a regular basis again.

At $work, I was able to polish off a new project that came up with some urgency, so I’m pretty happy about that.  It wasn’t a difficult one, but it had deployment challenges, and a few times when I could have taken shortcuts: that is, doing lower quality work that could be completed faster.  But happily my bosses weren’t interested in that route, so we got it done in a relatively short timeline without compromising.  I was pretty pleased about that.

I haven’t been keeping up with the news as much due to Colbert being off for the past two weeks and Noah being off for the past one.  Possibly this is a good thing.  From what little I have heard, I’m probably better off taking a short break from it.

The grocery store Friday was the best it’s been for a while—possibly the best it’s been since pre-week-zero.  So that’s something to be appreciated.  Then there’s the fact that ... actually, come to think of it, that’s it.  That’s about all the silver linings I can come up with right now.

Recommendations for how to pass the time:

  • I’ve finally gotten caught up on The Adventure Zone: “Graduation”.  If you haven’t checked it out yet, and even if you don’t normally care for D&D podcasts, I highly recommend it.  As good as Griffin is as a GM, I think Travis may be even better.
  • Umbrella Academy season 2 is pretty friggin’ awesome—possibly even better than season 1.
  • Portal Knights is still a great timewaster, although now my gaming partner is gone to Colorado.  No worries: my middle child just got a copy of PixelJunk Monsters 2.  We used to have a great time playing the original, years ago, so we’re hoping to recapture a bit of magic.  So far, it’s been pretty cool.
  • Quibi, in its desperate attempt to remain (or maybe even become) relevant, has stumbled on a fun way to leverage the pandemic: they’ve done a “remake” of The Princess Bride, with different celebrites reprising the roles, each one shooting their part in their backyards or what-have-you.  Each scene features different actors for the same characters, and of course the whole thing has to be cut together to make it seem as if they’re interacting with each other when in actuality they’re nowhere near each other.  It’s all very low-tech, of course, and nothing matches (for instance, the Man in Black hands Vizzini a glass of red wine, but it’s become white wine by the time it gets to Vizzini’s hand), but that’s part of the charm.  Some of the casting is utterly inspired—Jack Black for the Man in Black’s climb up the cliffs of insanity, Dave Bautista for Fezzik’s rock smashing, Patton Oswalt for Vizzini’s battle of wits (for the princess? to the death?)—and it’s all great fun.  Of course, you can’t watch the whole thing, unless you have Quibi (which of course no one does), but you can watch what might be the best stretch of it on YouTube.
  • I find that just sitting outside (by the pool, if it’s not too hot, or under the patio fan in the side yard) while working from home can be quite relaxing.  I have a new laptop and its battery life is much better than my old model, so I can be outside for quite a bit longer than I used to manage.  I’m still working, but just reminding myself that the outside world didn’t go away just because I never go outside any more can be good for the mental health, I think.
That’s enough for this week.  Shooting for a longer post next week.

Sunday, August 2, 2020

D&D and Me: Part 7 (The Next Generation)

[This is the seventh 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 my longest-running character, a monk in D&D’s third edition.  This was also one of the last characters I played with my long-time gaming group.]


In 2005, I moved to Southern Maryland, and in 2007 I moved again, this time to Southern California.  I didn’t find a new gaming group in either location, so, after roughly 15 years of weekly gaming with very few breaks, I began a long hiatus away from TTRPGs.  From actually playing, in any event.  I still kept up with the news, and I would buy a book occasionally, just to read for myself.  In many ways, this period harkened back to my original experiences with D&D: just reading new rules, messing around with creating characters or storylines, but not really playing.

In 2008, D&D released its fourth edition (referred to, of course, as “4e”).  I was actually quite excited about this in all the hype leading up to the release, but once the product was in hand ... I was disappointed.  Not sure if it would have really made that much difference, seeing as how I had no one to play it with anyway, but for some reason I was really quite irked at how bad the new version was.  Luckily, that was about to change.

I don’t need to go into a long explanation about what Pathfinder is, because I’ve already done that, if you care to read it.  The short version is, Pathfinder updates the D&D 3e ruleset with major improvements, but little structural change.  I’m not opposed to structural change, mind you: the jump from 2e to 3e was huge, and I loved it, because things got better.  But this change—from 3e to 4e, that is—felt different, and definintely not better.  Pathfinder, on the other hand, was somehow both amazing in how much was changed and in how much remained the same.  By the time it was officially released in 2009, I had already been avidly following the public playtest, and I was ready to try it out.  If only I had someone to play with ...

But, of course, by that time my eldest was 11 years old, and that’s plenty old enough to learn TTRPGs.  I was back to being solely a GM, of course, but that was okay.  In many ways, those early days of Pathfinder were eerily similar to my early days of D&D: after a long period of just reading rules, I had a young child to teach, I had to constantly invent new rules because you can’t stifle a kid’s creativity, and I was generating settings from scratch with way more emphasis on fun adventuring than rational worldbuilding.  That the young child was son instead of brother made little difference; that the game was Pathfinder instead of D&D pre-1e was only different in that it was much easier to teach.  The big contrast was that, now with about a decade of GM experience under my belt, I mostly knew what I was doing.  I also knew enough to play around with other games: we spent quite a bit of time experimenting with post-apocalyptic RPGs, for instance.  In Pathfinder, my kid played a half-wood-elf-half-drow named Krad Demonshield who started out as a custom class I made called “witchblade” (that ever-elusive search for the perfect blend of fighter and magic-user) and then multiclassed into another custom class I made which reused my favorite alt-classname “nightblade,”* this time cast more as a shadow-magic-wielding assassin (but, you know, the good kind of assassin).  There was also another fantasy character, a minotaur named Foghnar, but I don’t believe we used Pathfinder for that one.

Pathfinder was really fun for me.  I spent a lot of time developing classes, which is one of my favorite things to do, and I also enjoyed a lot of the supplemental classes that were released for it.  Their witch was so good I abandoned my attempt at building one, and their oracle was so close to something I’d been working on (which I called a “hermit,” after the tarot card, which was its inspiration) that I completely reworked mine to be a slight tweak of it.  Their magus gave me major tips for reworking my witchblade, and their hybrid class the hunter may be a better ranger than the ranger.**  I loved the rules, which were still way more complex than they should have been, but I was comparing to the previous editions of D&D, and in that light they look delightfully slim.  The combat was still a major pain, especially from the GM point of view, but character creation was a joy, with ever-so-many options, and fairly easy (at least for a long-time 3e player) to add even more of your own.

Eventually my child went off to teach Pathfinder to their friend group, and became a GM in their own right.  This led to less tabletop gaming for me, but that was okay.  I had other things to do, and GMing is a pretty big time commitment, so as long as the kid was having fun and carrying on the family traditions, I was fine.  The GMing I had done up to then was still pretty satisfying.

Of course, the only downside was that I didn’t really get to play a character.  I had NPCs, sure—Krad Demonshield, for instance, was almost always accompanied by his paladin friend Alcinor—but they weren’t really my characters in the same way that my PCs had been.  They were sort of GMPCs, although I didn’t really treat them as such.  But it’s a gray area when you’re playing one-on-one campaigns.

Of course, I had another child as well.  He was far too young to play with us during our Pathfinder heydey, but, then, children have a tendency of getting older.  By the time we’d burned out on Pathfinder, my middle child was now 11, and it was time for him to get in on the action.  He first played a Dungeon World one-shot*** for the eldest’s sixteenth birthday, and we moved on from there to a new campaign where I got to create the first paladin character I actually enjoyed, Arkan Kupriveryx.  Because, you see, by that point, fifth edition was out.



Next time we’ll talk 5e and the rise of actual play D&D games.

__________

* See part 5 for further discussion on the origin of that term.

** Although probably still not as good as 3.5e’s scout.

*** For those not familiar, Dungeon World is sort of like D&D crossed with Apocalypse World, and if you don’t know what that is, probably just best to think of it as a “modern” TTRPG designed to focus more on narrative than rules.











Gaming Series


Lately I’ve started a bunch of series related to gaming, in particular my love of D&D and similar TTRPGs (tabletop roleplaying games—sometimes, in older posts, you may see me refer to them as PnP RPGs).



D&D and Me

My personal story about how I came to love the game and my formative experiences with it.


GM Philosophy

These are posts which outline my personal tenets as a GM (game master).  This is mainly to have a formal place to point players to if they want to know what to expect in my games.


Multiclassing

One D&D topic that’s near and dear to my heart is multiclassing: the ability for one character to advance in more than class.  I started a series exploring how this was handled in various editions of D&D, hopefully to culminate in some ideas about what the perfect multiclassing system might be.


General D&D 5e Musings

Occasionally I write something more general about fifth edition D&D in particular.  There’s not a lot of throughline for these.  It is, by its nature, an open-ended series.


General Pathfinder Musings

Before D&D’s fifth edition (affectionately known as 5e) came out, I was pretty big into Pathfinder.  I have some musings on that too:


General Heroscape Musings

Outside of TTRPGs, my other big gaming love is Heroscape.  Here are some thoughts about that game:


General Fantasy Musings

Sometimes I just like to talk about fantasy gaming in general, storytelling through TTRPGs, etc.  Like these:


Gaming with my Family

Of course I sometimes game with my family, and I sometimes write about it.  Here are some samples:  (Note: Most of these are about D&D, but some are about Heroscape.)

Heroscape tournament reports

Most years, I attend an annual Heroscaper tournament with a group of folks called the SoCal League.  Typically I take at least a human child or two along for the ride, so here’s a family subcategory consisting of those posts:











Sunday, July 26, 2020

Isolation Report, Week #20


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


I had to go to the doctor for the first time during the pandemic: apparently, I (probably) have diverticulitis.  My grandmother had this for many years, so it doesn’t surprise me too much.  Now I have to go find a gastroenterologist, and I’m sure there’s a colonoscopy in my future, which is never pleasant to look forward to.  In other sad news, The Mother‘s dad and brother aren’t doing well, so it looks like she will have to undertake a short plane ride in these troubled times, which definitely isn’t pleasant to look forward to.  Our littlest will accompany; neither of them would sleep much otherwise.

We subscribed to HBO Max; it was the same price we were paying for HBO Now, so we figured why not.  Mostly what’s on HBO Max is the same as what’s on regular HBO, but there are a few extra things.  One of which is Doom Patrol, one of those marvelously inventive comic book series (like Preacher or Legion) that is oh-so-much-more than a typical superhero story.  While he wasn’t the inventor of the Doom Patrol (a group which actually preceded the X-Men by a few months, despite seeming like a rip-off of them, which makes it decades old), it’s Grant Morrison we truly have to thank for this bit of Dadaesque surrealism (see also Happy!, on Netflix).  While the core four characters predated him, Morrison gave us Crazy Jane, Danny the Street, and the amazing Willoughby Kipling, expertly portrayed by Mark Sheppard (a character actor who’s made a career of brilliant recurring characters in great series such as Supernatural, Warehouse 13, and White Collar).  If you don’t like shows where you are constantly trying to figure out what the fuck is going on, definitely do not watch this one.

Let’s see ... what else ... we’ve been playing some family board games.  The Wizard Always Wins, Betrayal at House on the Hill, and Bears vs Babies; all highly recommended.  Also some card games—Minecraft Uno and Timelineand of course the littlest one still sucks me into Portal Knights on a semi-regular basis.  That game is for me what I understand Animal Crossing is for other folks during these weird times: we mainly just battle things and go on quests so we can get more materials to build our awesome house.  It’s up to 3 stories now, with a rootfop observatory on top and a vegetable garden and pool out back.  There’s also a large bathroom with a red crystal ceiling, a little marketplace full of vendor stalls out front, and a cannon in the side yard that we occasionaly fire off the edge of the world just so we can watch the flaming cannonball shoot off into the abyss.  We really do spend a lot of time on it ... it’s weirdly soothing, vaguely creative, and surprisingly social.  Plus my kid loves it when we share decorating tips.

So things aren’t too bad on the personal front, although I grow ever more fearful at the state of our country.  While the rest of the world seems to have figured out how this whole virus thing works, we’re traveling backwards in time; as The Daily Show recently pointed out, we’ve now arrived at 1918, when the president said to ignore the doctors and scientists and encouraged large gatherings, people claimed that wearing masks to avoid infecting each other was unconstitutional, and localities triggered a second wave by reopening too soon.  Protests for racial justice continue unabated, but the news seems to have forgotten (or perhaps merely grown apathetic).  In point of fact, we’ve now progressed to the point where our president is sending in secret police to disappear people off the streets, and our system continues blithely on.  Is this what people felt like in Argentina in the 70s? in Russia in the 30s?  (I hesitate to mention Germany in the 40s due to Godwin’s law, but I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t crossed my mind.)  I bet you all those people in all those countries said the same thing we’re all apparently thinking: “obviously that could never happen here.”  I mean, I’m assuming people are thinking that, because otherwise why the fuck isn’t everyone in the country freaking the fuck out right now?  A couple of news stories that faded fast and a few sternly worded tweets from the opposition?  Is that really all the reaction we can get for secret fucking police? kidnapping people?  I dunno, man ... I’m not feeling particularly sanguine about the future.









Sunday, July 19, 2020

Saladosity, Part 15: Autumnal

[This is the fifteenth post in a long series.  You may wish to start 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.]


(If you need a refresher about my salad-making lingo, go back and review our first salad.)

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure why this salad is called an “autumn salad” ... I don’t personally find it particularly autumnal, but I searched online for salads with similar ingredients, and what little concensus there was in the naming of it pointed to the seasonal moniker, so here we are.  Perhaps its because the fruit and nuts we’re going to add are commonly harvested in the autumn ... although, these days, you should have no problems finding any of this stuff year ‘round.  Still, “autumn salad” is what I’ve always called it, once I started calling it anything at all, and that’s what we’re sticking with here.

The Fruit

So this is one of those salads with some fruit in it.1  Hopefully that doesn’t turn you off.  Trust me that this will all work out.

What this salad really should have in it is pears.  However, I dislike using pears for two reasons:

  • I have a hell of a time keeping pears from going bad.  I like this salad quite a bit, but it’s very much a “once in a while” salad.  It’s a bit more of a pain to make, and it does contain some added sugar, so I just don’t eat it as often as the others.  That means that I often don’t get around to the pears before they go bad.
  • Pears are, at least for me, a huge pain to prepare.  They’re annoying to peel, due to the irregular shape, and it’s annoying to try to get the core out.

Now, if you have some secret way to get pears into chunks, and you eat pears often enough that they won’t get bad, I definitely encourage you to substitute pears.  They’ll actually make this salad even better.

If, on the other hand, you’re a mere mortal like me, just use apples.  They keep for-friggin-ever, they’re super easy to peel,2 and, because you bought all the stuff I told you to, you have a corer-slicer which will give you beautiful slices in a matter of seconds.  Once you have the slices, take half of them, cut each one into about four chunks each, and use that for your salad.  Eat the rest: they’re yummy.  Adjust amount and size of apple chunks to your taste.

The other fruit we need for this is dried cranberries.  This is the first place we’re going to have to be okay with added sugar, because I’ve never even seen any dried cranberries that were unsweetened ... and, honestly, even if you could find some, you probaly wouldn’t want to eat them.  Even sweetened, they’re not particularly sweet.  The added sugar just makes them tolerable.

The Nuts

You want walnuts for this.  Now, as I mentioned previously, I personally can’t find roasted walnuts—if I could, I sure would buy them.  If you’re ambitious enough to want to roast the walnuts yourself, again I encourage you to do that.  But we’re trying to keep it as simple and pain-free as we can, so I just use raw walnuts.  They’re perfectly lovely.  You bought the pieces, right?  That saves you having to chop them, and they’re usually cheaper to boot.

You could try other nuts, if, say, you really hate walnuts.  But honestly I think that makes it a whole different salad.  Try it at least once with the walnuts.  (Okay, you’ll most likely have to make it with walnuts several times, to use up the whole bag, but that’s not so bad.)  I think you’ll dig it.

The Dressing

For this one, you’re going to want a slightly sweet dressing.  If you really don’t want to make it yourself, you could try a raspberry vinaigrette, or a balsamic fig.3  But it works best with a good honey mustard.

Now, the primary problem with honey mustard dressing is that you can’t actually buy a good honey mustard dressing.  Oh, sure: you can find some decent honey mustard dip ... I like Ken’s, personally.  But if you have a burning desire to slather a chicken nugget in something, there are several good store-bought honey mustard choices.  For salads, on the other hand, most premade “dressings” are totally infeasible.  They’re too thick and goopy—that’s a great quality for a dip, but not really what you want in a salad dressing.  The answer, happily, is simple: make your own.

And it’s also super easy.  You won’t even need the food processor for this one.  Just a bowl and a spoon and a very small amount of elbow grease.  Although we do have to do a little bit of prep work first.  But don’t worry: this is prep stuff you just do occasionally and then you’re set for a while, not stuff you have to do every time you want to make the dressing.

Lemon Juice

Remember when I told you I was going to tell you how to juice your own lemons and it would really easy?  Okay, now’s the time.

Take your lemons and put them on the cutting board.  Slice them all in half around what would be their equators if they were little yellow Earths.  Now take your handy-dandy juicer that I told you to buy and plug it in.  Use the smaller reamer.  Now, one at a time, just put the lemon halves in your palm, put them onto the reamer, and push down.  That’s literally all there is to it.  But I’ll give you a few extra tips:

  • You can adjust the basket to allow as much or as little pulp as you like, but for this application you’ll probably want as little pulp as possible.
  • Once the pulp starts getting torn out, squeeze the lemon gently to bring more of the pulp into contact with the reamer.
  • A good juicer will spin both ways.  Once you feel like you’ve gotten all you’re going to get, lift your hand up, the juicer will stop, and then push down again.  If you’re lucky, it will immediately begin spinning in the other direction.  (If you’re not, you’ll have to lift up and push back down a couple of times.)  It will only take a few seconds for this second reaming, but you may be surprised how much more you get after you thought you were all done.
  • I mentioned before that lemon juice will keep forever, but it does eventually get so damned sour that you can’t stand it.  Also, it will develop white solids that you should strain out, because they’re sort of fibrous.  But if all that sounds icky to you, just freeze your lemon juice.  They way I love to do it (when I do do it) is in an ice tray.  Ice cube sizes vary according to tray, of course, but in my experience most ice cubes are almost exactly a tablespoon (a.k.a. 3 teaspoons).  I like the ice trays that have little covers on them, because that way the juice won’t pick up stray flavors, but that’s mostly my anal retentiveness showing.
Homemade Mayo

Now that you have lemon juice, making your own mayonnaise is trivial.  Take a mason jar and crack an egg into it.4  Add 2 tablespoons of lemon juice (that’s 2 cubes, if you froze it up above).  Squirt in just a small squirt of mustard: I like brown mustard for this, but any will do.  It’s mainly there for its emulsifying properties.  Toss in a heavy pinch of salt.  Top off with oil up to the 1½ cups line, or maybe a smidge above it.  Many places advise that you let this come to room temperature before proceeding, but I don’t find that it makes much difference (unless you need to wait for the lemon juice cubes to melt, of course).

Now just jam your handy-dandy stick blender (a.k.a. immersion blender) into the jar and turn it on.  Mayonnaise will magically appear.  It’s insane, I tell you.

Tips:

  • You can experiment with different types of oil.  Sunflower is probably the best; canola is terrible for you, and olive and grapeseed just taste bad.  Avocado oil is nice, although you will end up with mayo that has a slightly greenish tinge if you use only avocado.  Personally, I like about half-and-half sunflower and avocado.  Occasionally I’ll go a little heavier on the avocado—perhaps to as much as 2/3—but then again I don’t mind greenish mayo.
  • Until you’ve done this a couple of times, starting with a smaller amount of oil is better.  You can always add more as you’re blending.  Remember: more oil makes it thicker, which can be a bit counterintuitive if you’re thinking of the oil as a liquid.  But the emulsification of the oil is what makes the mayo, so more is thicker in this case.  Basically, start your blending and, if it’s too thin, add more oil.  If it’s too thick ... well, you’re sort of hosed.  Try again.
  • You may need to gently move the stick blender up and down a bit to get the oil on top.  If you’re really good, you can cock the blender at a slight angle and create a vortex that sucks the oil down to the blades, but don’t feel bad if you can’t manage that.  Just plunge up and down a few times (gently) and you’ll achieve the same effect.
  • This mayo is absolutely not just for this dressing.  Use it all the time.  Never buy mayo again.  Seriously: once you figure out how easy it is to make your own mayo, there ain’t no going back.
Put it all together

Ready to make some dressing?  Here’s what you’ll need:

  • 4 big spoons of homemade mayo
  • 1 tablespoon of lemon juice
  • 5 big squirts of yellow mustard
  • 1 little squirt of dijon mustard
  • 4 big squirts of honey
  • 2 heavy pinches of garlic powder
  • 1 heavy pinch of salt

Just throw it all into a big bowl and stir it up.  The end.  Use a funnel to put it into an old salad dressing bottle and stick it in the fridge; it should last a couple of weeks, but don’t wait too long.

Feel free to mix up the ratio of yellow mustard to dijon, or add or subtract honey to your taste.  You should find this version way more tangy than sweet, but still sweet enough that you know it’s honey mustard.  I’ve also experimented with using vinegar instead of (or in addition to) the lemon juice, which makes it super-extra-tangy, but eventually I decided the lemon juice was the better call.

Don’t leave out the garlic powder though.  I was frustrated for months trying to create the perfect honey mustard before I found some recipe that suggested garlic powder.  Like you probably do, I thought this was an utterly insane idea.  Until I tried it.  Trust me on this one.


Autumn Salad

And now you’re ready.  At this point, you’ve already done the hard bits, so this is just assembly.

  • base veggies
  • walnuts
  • dried cranberries
  • feta cheese crumbles
  • apple slices
  • honey mustard dressing (normal)

There’s sweetness in the apples, the sweetener on the dried cranberries, and the honey in the honey mustard.  There’s also tartness in the cranberries, the feta cheese, and the lemon juice and dijon in the honey mustard.  Plus the crunch of the walnuts and the veggies ... this is one of my favorite “dinner” salads.  As I say, it’s not an everyday thing, but once every few weeks or so it’s a real treat.


Next time, we’ll experiment with some “south of the border” flavors.

__________

1 But not a fruit salad.  Totally different head.

2 Although, again, if you enjoy eating apple peels, you don’t even need to bother.  But ... blech.

3 Try Annie’s for some quality pre-bottled dressings: they have both of the kinds I mentioned.

4 You don’t have to use a mason jar, of course, but it’s easiest, because it has lines on it for 1 cup, etc.











Sunday, July 12, 2020

Isolation Report, Week #18


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


Well, there was an Independence Day celebration here in the US ... sort of.  We mainly just swam and made s’mores around the firepit.  That’s about as much patriotism as I can muster these days.

The past two weeks all my regular news sources have been on vacation, so I’m looking forward to seeing what the world has been up to tomorrow.  Wait ... did I say “looking forward to”?  Yeah, maybe that’s not the proper phrase.  Come to think of it, I’ve actually been fairly unstressed the past couple of weeks.  Maybe I shouldn’t go back to watching news stuff ...

I continue to be disappointed in how quickly it seems the coverage of racial justice protests seems to be disappearing.  In one panel I watched recently, the folks worried about “ally fatigue.”  I wish I knew what the right thing to combat that was.  But I understand the sentiment.

Critical Role has come back, and Narrative Telephone is also continuing, so that’s the best of both worlds.  I’m blasting through all the TV shows I said I wanted to catch up on ... perhaps sometime in one of the next few reports I’ll explore how much television I’ve blasted through.  Then again, that also might depress me.

I’ve also caught up on nearly all my outstanding podcasts, so I’ve gone back to audiobooks.  I had been behind for a bit, and, at the beginning of the pandemic, I wasn’t doing well even keeping up with new podcasts, since my commute was gone.  But I’ve worked out now how to work some podcast/audiobook time into my schedule, and I just started my first new audiobook in nearly a year.  So that’s ... progress?  Something.

I also took a few days off to turn the 3-day weekend into a 6-day weekend.  I spent a bunch of time fiddling with the code for my Google Sheets GM sheet: that is, the thing I use to help me run my D&D games.  There’s a bunch of products like that out there, but I don’t care for any of them, mostly because I have my own idiosyncracies and house rules.  So of course I continue to write my own.  A few months ago Google Apps Scripts upgraded the version of Javascript they use to run the back-end stuff behind Sheets, so I’m finally getting some features I’ve been longing for—when told the situation, my boss said something along the lines of “welcome to 2017.”  I still don’t like Javascript much, but admittedly this is way better.  Anyhow, I upgraded everything, and that of course caused some problems, and I wrote some brand new systems, which was pretty exciting.  Anyway, that took up nearly a week.  And I lost a few more chunks of time to Portal Knights with the baby girl.

Anyhow, I think that’s all there its to talk about, really.  Next week should be another full post, barring any unforeseen circumstances.









Sunday, July 5, 2020

80s My Way I


"There's a New Wave Coming, I Warn You (1979 - 1981)"

[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 series introduction for general background; you may also want to check out the mix introduction for more detailed background.

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.]


Well, it’s only been 3 years since I said I was going to start on this mix, and I think I’m finally pretty happy with volume I.  At this rate, I’ll be done memorializing the 80s in about 2047.  Hopefully I live that long.

This whole mix is trickier than most, for reasons that I outlined—okay, more like belabored—in the intro.  And the first volume is super-tricky, because I’m attempting to epitomize a genre which didn’t really exist yet.  What to include? what to skip?  There’s a lot to consider.

After a lot of agonizing, I decided to include a number of songs which were not really alternative at all, but I consider them (at least in retrospect) as harbingers.  I open the volume with the undeservedly forgotten “My Girl” by Chilliwack, usually considered one-hit wonders here in the US, though less so in their native Canada; I then follow that with Australia’s Little River Band and their guitar-heavy “Night Owls.” Both came out in 1981; the former reached #3 and the latter peaked at #6.  In many respects, these were perfectly normal, straight-up rock songs, particularly the single by LRB: often known for softer, power ballads like “Reminiscing” and “The Other Guy,” this was one time that they just rocked out.  Chilliwack wasn’t much known for anything, but their song also featured some solid rock guitar work.  So why do they appear here?  Well, in between the almost expected hot licks, these two experiment, just a touch: “My Girl” features some beautiful almost-a-capella harmonies backed only by a drumbeat, while “The Night Owls” plays around with dynamics, creating a hint of lonely echo on some of the background power chords.  Throughout this mix, I will not be afraid to throw in songs that I only discovered much later, on the grounds that they should have been part of my 80s, but these are two songs that I distinctly remember hearing at the beginning of the decade, and they were two of my earliest memories that something ... different ... was on the wind.

Also in this camp are the classic “Jessie’s Girl”—possibly more famous for rhyming the word “moot” and confusing an entire generation who didn’t realize it was a word1and Billy Joel’s “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me,” which simultaneously touched on the very edge of the new sound while singing about it, a new level of meta which came to characterize a lot of 80s pop culture.  Joel sang: “Next phase, new wave, dance craze, anyways, it’s still rock and roll to me,” and he was right ... and yet he was wrong.  It was still rock and roll, but just barely, and it was morphing every day.

What were we to make of “What I Like About You” by the Romantics, for instance?  It certainly wasn’t punk, and it absolutely wasn’t new wave,2 but it somehow was something more than simply rock.  And how about “Kids in America” by British pop star Kim Wilde?3  That ain’t pop—Wikipedia wants us to believe that Wilde was “inspired by the synth-pop stylings of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Gary Numan,” but I’ve got news for you: it ain’t synth-pop either, although that’s closer.  There is a strong synth throughline, and I’m betting that’s clearly a drum machine you’re hearing, at least for part of the song, but it’s also ... more.  It holds on to the standard forms of rock and pop, while going in new directions.  Wilde sings:

Giddyup to East California,
There’s a new wave comin’, I warn ya ...

and any line that prophetic is not to be ignored.4

And there’s even weirder stuff in the mix.  The Easybeats were sometimes called the Beatles of Australia, and they too drifted into the psyschedelic territory that the Beatles trod.  Two of them in particular began a project after the Easybeats were no more that they called Flash and the Pan which went even deeper into psychedelia, and, in 1980, they released an album called Lights in the Night and their first single was a bizarre little track called “Welcome to the Universe,” which combines ambient synth, voice distortion, rock guitar, and a rollicking piano performance that could almost be considered boogie-woogie.  When I first heard this song,5 I had no idea how to categorize it.  Hell, I’m not sure I do even now.

And then we have the real new wave.  There are two songs that will always exemplify the sound of new wave to me: “Pop Muzik,” by M, and “Cars,” by Gary Numan.  Now, “Pop Muzik” is a bit to the left of europop, and it’s got a lot of disco influence as well, but the synth layers, and the way the guitar is used—not licks or power chords, but just individuated notes that seem to vibrate in your head—that’s new wave, baby.  But if I had to describe new wave in one word, that word would absolutely have to be “Cars.” It’s nothing but synth and drum machine, and whatever buzz there is is not provided by guitars at all: it’s just more synth, made jagged-edged and discordant.  “Cars” is the first time I can remember hearing sounds that were essentially sci-fi sound effects used as actual music ... and it works.  A healthy chunk of the entire genre of electronica can be traced back to Gary Numan, as far as I’m concerned, and while I’m not a hardcode Numan fan, there’s no denying the absolute majesty of this song.

Of course, the other two classic new wave bands of the 80s are DEVO and the B-52’s, and both are here, because they were both putting out amazing songs right from the start of the decade.  Sure, including “Whip It” means I can’t6 include “Working in the Coal Mine” or “Girl U Want,” but come on ... “Whip It”?  That was a harbinger of the decade if ever there was one.  Likewise, “Rock Lobster” is here bumping out “Private Idaho” and “Channel Z,” but I decided to include it for a couple of important reasons.  First of all, while the B-52’s are undeniably a new wave band, they’re not synth purists the way some of the others are.  “Rock Lobster” includes some great guitar work that almost sounds like it’s played on a bass guitar (but it’s not).  Again, this echoey, almost ringing guitar sound would become very prevalent in much of the alternative to come.  But one of the most interesting things about “Rock Lobster” is that it was originally released in 1978—and then appeared on 1979’s The B-52’s, when it entered the charts, and finally peaked in 1980.  So I feel fully justified in including it here, but it’s fair to note that this is the earliest song to appear on the mix.  That kind of ahead-of-its-time phenomenon is too important not to celebrate.

But the real reason this retrospective on the 80s actually starts in 1979 is “My Sharona.” Unlike the B-52’s, there was no other option for the Knack, but there was also never any question not to include this iconic track.  If “Cars” single-handedly defines new wave, “My Sharona” does the same for post-punk.7  This track isn’t quite the punk that the Ramones and the Sex Pistols were delivering, but it owes so much to it: you can clearly hear the punk in both guitars and drums.  The harder edges of alternative stem mostly, in my opinion, from this one song.

Of course, another band that is often the recipient of the “post-punk” moniker is Joy Division.  I’m not sure I can entirely see it, though.  Let’s take “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” for instance—their highest-charting single, which, sadly, peaked well after lead singer Ian Curtis was already gone.8  It’s an almost goth tune, with all the sense of melodrama that the word implies, but also containing a fair amount of synth.  Compared to “My Sharona,” this is an entirely different sound, but a no less important one.

Of course, the heavy synth makes sense, as the post-Ian-Curtis remnants of Joy Division would go on to become New Order, one of the most important synth bands of the decade.9  Synth pop, in fact, is one of the most crucial musical components of my 80s, because it’s where most of my all-time favorite albums of the decade truly fall.  And synth pop really starts, in my opinion, with Soft Cell, and 1981’s “Tainted Love.” It may not have been the first,10 but it was the one which exploded onto the scene and changed the landscape in a pretty fundamental way.  The song itself explodes into being too, using sounds which we previously had thought were only useful for laser blasters in Star Wars.  It’s a cover, although most people have never heard the original,11 a rockin’ Motown number.  Soft Cell remakes the song so fundamentally that people will forever think of their version as the way it should be sung (similar to what the Marcels did to “Blue Moon”).  It stayed on the charts for a record-making 43 weeks: nearly a year, all told.12  To my mind, it ushered in a new era that would eventually bring some of the greatest bands of the 80s: Depeche Mode, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Tears for Fears, New Order, a-ha, Naked Eyes, my all-time favories Yazoo—all of whom we absolutely will be hearing from on future volumes.  On this volume, though, the only other synth pop classic from the start of the decade, in my opinion anyhow, is “Don’t You Want Me” by the Human League.  I don’t know that the Human League lives up to the standards of some of those other bands, but at least Dare was a pretty good listen all the way through, whereas Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret is pretty awful apart from “Tainted Love.” Still, while a few other tracks on Dare are pretty cool (I particularly like “The Things that Dreams Are Made Of,” and I have a soft spot for “I Am the Law,” goofy as it is), there’s no doubt that “Don’t You Want Me” is a powerhouse pinnacle that the League would never reach again.

Many of the other choices here are fairly predictable.  Picking only one Police song is particularly painful, especially since Synchronicity was such a major part of the soundtrack of my senior year in high school.  But “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” was the first Police track I ever heard, and it really did have quite a big impact on me.  Picking only one Men at Work song is a bit easier, but there were still several other good choices (“It’s a Mistake,” “Dr. Heckyll & Mr. Jive,” or even the contemporary hit, “Who Can It Be Now?”, which I almost certainly heard prior to “Down Under”).  But, in the end, this is such a great tune, with some impressive flute work from Greg Ham (more typically their sax player).  Likewise, the Go-Go’s present a number of excellent candidates, including “Vacation,” “Head Over Heels,” and, once again, a contemporary song that technically preceded my choice here: “Our Lips are Sealed.” This was a much tougher choice, as I like both songs equally, and I changed my mind several times before settling on “We’ve Got the Beat.” It’s a great example of the dancier side of alternative, and I think it presages stuff as diverse as Animotion and Bananarama.  Finally, the Vapors certainly didn’t give me anything to work with even remotely as well-known as “Turning Japanese,” which, despite its racist overtones, is still such an intrinsic part of my 80s memories that I couldn’t exclude it.



80's My Way I
[ There's a New Wave Coming, I Warn You (1979 - 1981) ]


“My Girl (Gone Gone Gone)” by Chilliwack [Single]
“The Night Owls” by Little River Band, off Greatest Hits [Compilation]
“Welcome to the Universe [single mix]” by Flash and the Pan [Single]13
“My Sharona” by the Knack, off Reality Bites [Soundtrack]
“Jessie's Girl” by Rick Springfield, off Working Class Dog
“It Must Be Love” by Madness, off Complete Madness [Compilation]
“Harden My Heart” by Quarterflash, off Quarterflash
“It's Still Rock and Roll to Me” by Billy Joel, off Glass Houses
“Pop Muzik” by M [Single]
“Cars” by Gary Numan [Single]
“Tainted Love” by Soft Cell, off Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret
“Turning Japanese” by the Vapors, off New Clear Days
“Kids in America” by Kim Wilde, off Kim Wilde
“We Got the Beat” by the Go-Go's, off Beauty and the Beat
“Down Under” by Men at Work, off Business as Usual
“Call Me” by Blondie [Single]
“What I Like about You” by the Romantics, off The Romantics
“Don't Stand So Close to Me” by the Police, off Zenyattà Mondatta
“Generals and Majors” by XTC, off Black Sea
“Don't You Want Me” by the Human League, off Dare!
“Rock Lobster” by the B-52's [Single]
“Whip It” by DEVO, off Freedom of Choice
“Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division, off Substance [Compilation]
Total:  23 tracks,  84:38



I’m not sure there can be any real “unexpected” or “non-obvious” tracks on a mix like this, but I will address a few of the songs that exist at the edges of alternative.  Let’s start with Madness, who are 100% pure ska.  And yet, they pepper it with just enough pop that a track like “It Must Be Love” can break into the ostensibly rock charts; while it only reached #33 in the US, it got all the way to #4 in the UK and #6 in Australia.  Strangely, this is another cover that I (like, I suspect, most of you) never knew was a cover: the original was a more folksy affair by a British guitarist and poet named Labi Siffre.  I would say the Madness version is better, but perhaps it’s more fair to say it’s just different.14  This track, along with Madness’ other contemporary hit “Our House,” was a big part of what led me to discover and then treasure retro-swing, which of course leads inevitably to Salsatic Vibrato.15

But I would have to say my love of saxophone in particular was engendered by hearing Quarterflash’s “Harden My Heart.” Quarterflash is one of those bands that’s hard to pigeonhole into a style: Wikipedia just calls them a rock band, but that’s so generic as to be useless.  They remind me slightly of Romeo Void16, but also of Scandal,17 which is a bit of a feat, considering how different those two bands are.  Scandal is solidly female-fronted post-punk, while Romeo Void leans hard into the new wave side.  Quarterflash is neither, really, though guitarist Marv Ross has some chops that certainly feel punk-inspired.  But the revelation of Quarterflash is of course Rindy Ross, whose velvet vocals are filled with a longing quality that her gorgeous sax playing only echoes and accentuates.18  Saxophone as part of rock music was nothing new of course; we’d been hearing it since way back on “Get a Job” by the Silhouettes in ‘57, if not long before that.  But the sax in alternative music is different, somehow: less punctuation and more emotional backdrop.  Rindy Ross prepared me for Andy Hamilton’s break in “Rio,” and Kirk Pengilly’s amazing scales in “What You Need.”

The reason Blondie is such an amazing icon of the alternative movement is their refusal to stick with one style.  They’re playing rock, mostly, but each song delivers a different sub-style: “The Tide Is High” gives a little reggae, “Sunday Girl” leans towards an almost loungy jazz, and “Rapture” was the first proper rap that some of us white kids ever heard.19  But “Call Me” is the one I went with here: with its strong disco influences, this track is just a poster child for the transition from 70s to 80s.  I never liked disco, but I love this song.  The fact that Blondie can make me like things I never did before is a testament to their genius, and their influence on the 80s alternative movement.

Finally, I threw in “Generals and Majors” by XTC.  While XTC is a band that not as many folks are familiar with, for me they provided just as many options as the Police: all the way from “Making Plans for Nigel” in 1979 through “Mayor of Simpleton” in 1989.  I suspect that 1982’s “Senses Working Overtime” was the first track of theirs I ever heard, while 1986’s Skylarking is one of my all-time favorite albums, including classics like “Earn Enough for Us” and “Dear God.” But, while I never heard “Generals and Majors” until close to the end of the decade, it’s such a classic XTC tune that I felt like it had to be the one I chose.  It’s poppy, satirical (“generals and majors always seem so unhappy, ‘less they got a war ...”), and most of all layered.  Layers of guitars, layers of percussion, layers of synths, I’m sure, although never too obvious, there’s whistling, and soft vocals, and jangle-pop guitars, and just a touch of post-punk.  There is never any question that XTC should be considered “alternative,” but that’s only because you have no idea where else you could possibly put them.


Next time, we’ll see the first second volume of a pre-modern mix.







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1 If you have an older friend who tends to say “the point is prob’ly mute,” it’s entirely Rick Springfield’s fault.

2 Fuck you Wikipedia.  You don’t know squat.

3 We talked about the weird dichotomy of Wilde back on Salsatic Vibrato V: in the US, she’s thought of as a one-hit wonder, while in the UK she’s a mega-star.

4 So much so that I made it the volume title.  Natch.

5 The fact that I ever did, and how that came about, probably deserves its own blog post.

6 According to the rules I set out in the intro, that is.

7 I typically despise terms like “post-punk” or “post-grunge,” as “post-X” just means “the music that comes chronologically after X,” which could describe most anything.  But, then again, the term “alternative” is already pretty generic and meaningless—especially after alternative music became mainstream in the 90s!—so I’ve pretty much given up.

8 I also confess that “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was not a part of my 80s experience at the time: I had to go back and learn about them a bit later in the decade.

9 I predict we’ll see them show up around volume VII or so.

10 Wikipedia wants to credit first Giorgio Moroder, who was of course busily inventing Italo disco, and then Gary Numan, who we’ve already pointed out was the progenitor of new wave.  Then they throw in “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles, which is harder to argue with ... I suppose that’s synth pop, sort of, but I just never really thought it was that good of a song.  Which is why you don’t see here on this volume.

11 I certainly hadn’t, before writing this post.

12 Admittedly, nowadays the record is closer to nearly two years.

13 As always, I hate linking to YouTube.  If you want the 9-minute version of the song, you can find it on Amazon ... but you don’t.  It’s not that good of a song.

14 If you want to hear the original to compare for yourself, as always YouTube is your friend.

15 On which mix Madness have made two appearances: once on volume III and once on volume V.

16 Who we will absolutely hear from when we reach 1984.

17 Ditto.

18 For the ultimate Quarterflash experience, though, you must listen to “Find Another Fool,” where Rindy not only channels Pat Benatar, but also provides us with what has to be the world’s only saxophone-electric-fiddle duet.  Yeah, that video is ultimate 80s cheese; maybe try just closing your eyes and listening.

19 I’m not claiming it was a good introduction, of course.