Why the MCU Is Cool: The Heroes I Like

[This is the second 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.]


So perhaps one of the reasons I like the MCU is just plain that I like superheroes.  Which, in some sense, I do.  But I’ve never liked all superheroes equally: I don’t believe anyone does.  Some you like, and some you like a lot, and some you don’t care much for at all, and some you really despise.  It’s like anything: Shakespeare plays, Beatles albums, Stephen King novels ... anything that has sufficient variety, you’re going to like some, dislike some, and be distinctly “meh” on quite a few others.

I used to find it hard to describe what sort of superheroes I like, until I realized what the pattern was: even when it comes to comic nerddom, I’m still a non-conformist.  I like the lesser-known heroes: the more obscure, the better.  With a few exceptions, when it comes to the big names, I’m not that big a fan.

On the DC side, that means I hate Superman, and most of the others I can take or leave: Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash.  The only big name I even sort of liked was Batman, and honestly the best thing about Batman was that, without him, you couldn’t have The Brave and the Bold, and that’s where a lot of the really obscure guys showed up: Creeper, Deadman, the Metal Men, Metamorpho, etc.  On the Marvel side, I thought Spider-Man was okay, but Captain America was nearly as bad as Superman, Hulk was practically cliché, Thor was boring, the Fantastic Four were annoying, and Iron Man was utterly useless: a knock-off Batman with better armor.  The only really big name I really liked was Wolverine, and I’m nearly positive that that’s just because I liked him before he got super-popular.  I can distinctly remember buying Giant-Size X-Men #1, which wasn’t the first appearance of Wolverine ... but it was the second.¹  It’s emblematic of my comic buying habits: I saw a cover with a bunch of heroes I didn’t recognize at all, so of course I had to have it.  New superheroes!  Is there anything cooler?  New people with new powers, new costumes, new personalities ... I’m one of those schmucks who is easily seduced by the new, the different, the revamped, the reinvented ... gimme something fresh and I’m a sucker for it.

So, when it came to Marvel, my favorites were always the more obscure folks: I liked Moon Knight, Ghost Rider, Warlock, Son of Satan, Hellcat, Moondragon, Power Man and Iron Fist, Tigra, Cloak and Dagger, and a billion other guys, most of whom you will have never heard of (unless you’re as big a comic book nerd as I am).  Probably the biggest (Marvel) name I can say I really liked was Doctor Strange, and that was mainly because Doctor Strange gives us the Defenders, which had a membership so fluid that there was practically someone new every issue.²  And, as much as I liked the Defenders, I also liked the Avengers.

Okay, now it’s time for a brief diversion on comic book publishing philosophy.  Let me stress that I don’t have any inside info: this is all based on things I’ve read, things I’ve heard, and a lot of observation.  The first interesting thing about comic book publishing philosophy involves a story about a lawsuit.  I’ve never been able to find out if this is actually a true story or not,³ but I read about it in some book about the comic industry, and it certainly seems true, in that it neatly explains a universal principle.  The story goes that, decades ago, when there were a lot more than 2 comic companies, company A had a hero, but they retired him.⁴  Some years later, company B made a new hero that resembled company A’s hero in some way: same name, similar costume, identical powers ... I don’t remember exactly how they were alike, but that’s not that important to the story anyway.  So company A decides to sue company B—again, I can’t remember if this was a claim of copyright infringement, trademark dispute, or what.  But, again: not that important.  The point of the story is, the court ended up ruling that, sure, the heroes were similar, but company A wasn’t using the hero any more, so therefore the similarity of company B’s hero wasn’t costing them any loss of revenue.  Therefore, no damages.

And, supposedly, this is why every comic company ever regularly trots out their old heroes, no matter how stupid (and let’s face it, some of those older heroes are pretty damn stupid⁵), even if they really don’t want to: because they’re trying to make sure their rights don’t lapse.  Titles like The Brave and the Bold were excellent for this sort of thing, because you had a big hero (in this case, Batman) to sell the issue to the masses, and you’d have a minor, or resurrected, or maybe even a long-forgotten, hero who’s just appearing to stay in circulation.  If the minor character happens to achieve some reflected popularity, that’s just bonus.  Mainly, you keep the guys in there, in the public eye.

This concept of using the big guys to sell the little guys crops up again and again, and especially in the “supergroups.”  In music terminology, a “supergroup” is when a bunch of successful musicians from other bands all get together and form a new band.⁶  In comic terms, all groups of superheroes are in one sense a “supergroup.”  But to use the term in the musical sense, there are two basic supergroups: one for each company.  DC’s is of course the Justice League of America, and Marvel’s is, naturally, the Avengers.⁷  Oh, sure: there are many, many groups of superheroes.  But most of them, such as my favorites the X-Men and the Legion of Superheroes, were created as a complete unit: in other words, X-Men members Cyclops, Angel, the Beast, Iceman, and Marvel Girl (a.k.a. Jean Grey) didn’t exist before the X-Men existed.  They were created specifically for that group.  But a true supergroup gathers heroes who were previously appearing in their own solo titles, as separate, pre-existing heroes.

The original Justice League, for instance, was Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, and the Martian Manhunter.  If we were playing “one of these things is not like the others,” I think you’d see the odd man out here.  But let’s look at the original Avengers: Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, and Ant-Man and the Wasp.  (That’s right: Captain America is not an original Avenger, although he did come along just 3 issues later.)  See the pattern here?  They always throw in a minor character or two, because that way the big guys help sell the little guys.

This pattern is generally taken to an extreme in the supergroups: the minor character(s) end up being crucial to the team, because otherwise the audience can’t figure out why the writers keep them around.  So, in many incarnations of the Justice League, J’onn J’onzz, the Martian Manhunter, is the guy who stays on the satellite and coordinates the missions for all the other members.  On the Avengers side, Hank Pym, a.k.a. Ant-Man, a.k.a. Giant-Man, a.k.a. Goliath, a.k.a. Yellowjacket, is pretty crucial to the history of the Avengers.  This creates a rather serious dilemma for the architects of the MCU, as on the one hand you need Ant-Man, and, on the other hand, Ant-Man is pretty stupid.  I mean, he shrinks and talks to ants.  Not exactly exciting as superheroes go.  You can get more action of Aquaman, with a decent writer.  But let’s explore that in a future installment.

The point here is that the Avengers, like the Justice League, always appealed to me for exactly the opposite reason that they appealed to most people.  I never cared about the fact that the greatest heroes of the Marvel universe were all there: Iron Man and Hulk and Thor and Captain America.  Because I never particularly cared for those guys.  I loved the Avengers because of the little guys: Ant-Man may be stupid, but Hank Pym is actually very interesting, and Wasp is very cool.  Then there’s Scarlet Witch and Vision and Beast and Hawkeye and Black Panther and Black Widow and Tigra and Jocasta and Hellcat and Wonder Man.  The Justice League seemed to follow a strict formula of one or two A-listers and then fill out the mission roster with the lesser-known guys, but the Avengers would often do entire storylines where the “Big Four” would never show up at all.  So, while I was in general more of a DC man than a Marvel one, it’s definitely true that I liked the Avengers more than the JLA.⁸

But that’s difficult to translate into the MCU.  The whole function of the MCU is to sell movies (and TV series).  To do that, they need to push the big names: the Big Four, of course, and Daredevil to a lesser extent (because he’s a lesser known name, if still bigger than most of the folks I liked), and they’ve finally managed to bring Spider-Man home, who’s probably the biggest name of all.  But those are not the guys I care about.  So what’s really interesting to me is how successful the MCU has been at integrating the smaller names.  We’ve only had two Avengers movies, and already I’ve gotten to see Black Widow, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, and Vision.  Now, with the advent of Civil War, they’ve added Black Panther.  Over on the Netflix side, Power Man was introduced in Jessica Jones, and he’ll be getting his own series in just a little over a month, plus Iron Fist is also in the works.  And, speaking of Jessica Jones, that opened the door for Hellcat, of all people, who is one of the most interesting comic stories of all time, and another one of my favorites.  Hell, they even managed to devote an entire movie to freaking Ant-Man, which I swore was impossible—or, if possible, could not possibly be any good.  But it was all right.  (They had to go the Scott Lang route and relegate Hank Pym to a side role, but, again: we’ll look at that angle in a bit more detail in an upcoming installment.)  Point being: the MCU has really done pretty well—surprisingly well, even—with bringing out the lesser known heroes.  And those were always the ones I loved.

So there’s one reason I’m so enamored of the MCU.  But there others.

⇐ What “MCU” Means, and What It Means to Me

Bringing the Funny ⇒

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1 Unless you count the teaser panel of the issue before his first proper appearance.  Which I don’t.

2 Although, to be fair, I also had a great affinity for the mystical superheroes, who were fulfilling my comic book requirements and my fantasy requirements simultaneously.  And Doctor Strange is pretty crucial to the mystical storylines, at least on the Marvel side.  Back on the DC side, it would be Dr. Fate and Phantom Stranger, along with some other lesser known guys (Spectre, Demon, Deadman, Ragman, Zatanna, Blue Devil, etc).

3 And I did some extra research while writing this post, only to come up completely blank.

4 Or her, but let’s face it: that far back, it was probably a “him.”

5 Exhibit A: B’wana Beast.

6 Being a child of the eighties, my go-to example of a supergroup is Asia, composed of former members of Yes, King Crimson, Emerson Lake & Palmer, and the Buggles.

7 We could discuss other supergroups: the Justice Society of National Comics (the predecessor to DC), the Invaders—originally known by the unimpressive moniker “the All-Winners Squad”—of Timely Comics (the predecessor to Marvel), the Crime Crusaders Club (another terrible name) of Fawcett, even the Mighty Crusaders of Archie Comics (yes, Archie had superheroes too).  But the big two are the only two left, for all intents and purposes.

8 Don’t get me wrong: the JLA had Firestorm and Zatanna and Red Tornado and Black Canary and Phantom Stranger.  So they had fun times too.  Just not as many.

And now for something not nearly as completely different as it was last time ...

Well, I have to bail on another post this week, unfortunately.  I just (as in hours ago) finished a long project for $work,^* and there’s just no time to work in a proper post before the weekend is out.

So, let’s play another little game of “Last Two,” which I invented about two years ago when I also didn’t have time to do a proper post.

Last two movies I watched:  We (meaning the whole family) just watched The Little Prince on Netflix, which we all thought was pretty good.  Even our eldest, jaded teen that they are, managed to keep their earbuds out of their ears long enough to get to the end.  Higher praise I cannot imagine.  Before that ... I think it was The Last Witch Hunter, which is sort of brainless entertainment, except it had XXX, Frodo, and Ygritte, which is not a bad cast for brainless sword fighting and car chases and nonsensical explosions (considering it’s a movie about witches).  But I’m not particularly hard on movies.

Last two audiobooks I listened to:  Well, I just finished Bitten, which is the first in the Women of the Otherworld series.  I wanted to try it out because I’d heard good things about, but I found it distinctly “meh.”  I’ll try at least one more to see if it improves, but it was a little too Harlequin-romance-y for my tastes.  Not bad ... just not great.  Before that I blew through Around the World in 80 Days, as a palate cleanser after coming off of The Android’s Dream by John Scalzi (which is the one I would really recommend: it was a bit slow for the first 2 or 3 chapters, then it took off like a bat out of hell and was amazing straight through to the end, plus I’ve already talked about what an awesome reader Wil Wheaton is).  80 Days is one of the few Verne books I never read when I was younger, and I picked it up at one of those buy-1-get-1-free-but-only-certain-titles sales at Audiobook.  One is always a little surprised by the casual racism when one reads a book published in, say, 1873, but it was actually the casual classism that irked me more.  ‘Cause, you know, Phileas Fogg is an English gentleman, and Passepartout is just a servant.  And here’s a fun fact that you might not know if you haven’t read the book: Fogg hired Passepartout the day they left on the journey.  So they go off and have all these adventures and Passepartout trusts Fogg implicitly depsite barely knowing him ... because he’s a gentleman.  It’s sort of ... disturbing, really.  But a sort of fun book nonetheless.  Just a bit anachronistically jarring when you’re reading it 150 years later.

Last two real books I read:  Dude, I hardly ever read real books any more.  But, weirdly, I’m right in the middle of one right now: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.  I wasn’t going to even start it until next week, but I made the mistake of reading the first several pages to see if the play format was going to work for me, and I got sucked in.  It’s not as good as sometihng actually written by Rowling, but it’s her story, so it’s still interesting enough to make you not want to put it down.  Before that ... I honestly can’t remember.

Last two bands I discovered:  Well, I just (as in minutes ago) discovered Pomplamoose.  Not sure how I never heard of them before, as they’re apparently a bit of a big deal on the Internet.  Everyone else in my house had heard of them, apparently (The Mother is the one who pointed me at them, actually).  I’m just a bit slow, I guess.  Prior to that, I guess I would say Aurora, who I was bit taken with after her appearance on Colbert.  I don’t think it was the song she played on The Late Show, but “Conqueror” is pretty amazing.

Last two albums I bought:  All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend by Aurora, obviously, and before that I think Still Night, Still Light by Au Revoir Simone.  Whom I also discoverd thanks to Colbert, because one third of Au Revoir Simone is now one third of Nice as Fuck, who was on Colbert last week (or the week before, maybe ... I forget).

Last two restaurant meals I ate:  Does Jack in the Box count as a restaurant?  I tried their new portabello-mushroom burger thing.  They keep advertising it all over the TV there, and it looks so good on the commercial ... but don’t do it.  It’s a bad, bad idea.  Before that, no family meal since last week (Topper’s pizza last Sunday—and, may I say, if you happen to live in Southern California and haven’t yet eaten at Topper’s, put down your computer right this instant and order; you won’t be sorry).  I suppose I ate out with my coworkers on Tuesday (I was sick the latter part of the week), but damned if I can remember what we ate.  Japanese, maybe?

Last two real animals I saw (excluding family this time):  I rescued a widow spider out of my shower this morning.  It wasn’t a black widow, but I’m not 100% sure if it was a brown widow or a red widow or what.  But it definitely had the characteristic widow shape.  Before that ... hmmm ... yesterday, I think it was, I saw a bright red dragonfly that swooped in and landed on one of The Mother‘s planter hooks.  It was pretty cool.

Last two television shows I watched:  Hmmm ... not counting watching things like Sesame Street with the kids, I would probably say SCTV Network 90 and Whose Line Is It Anyway?.  Last two shows I watched with another adult ... probably the season finales of Preacher and Stranger Things.  You totally have to check out Stranger Things if you haven’t yet, by the way.  It’s insanely good.

Last two podcasts I listened to:  I don’t really listen to podcasts, per se.  Judge John Hodgman sometimes.  But I do listen to streaming versions of NPR shows, so if we can count that, I was just listening to Car Talk in the car today.  They’re on repeats now, of course, since Tom died.  But I still enjoy it.  Before that ... well, I just recently discovered Nerd HQ and I watched a shit-ton of Zachary Levi’s “Conversations for a Cause” panels, which they thoughtfully videoed and put up on YouTube.  Again, not really a podcast, and, again, not sure how I only became aware of this recently, but they’re pretty entertaining to watch (top pick from the 2016 set: Felicia Day), and I find Levi just as entertaining as Hardwick, and maybe even a bit more endearing, somehow.

And that’s about it.  Hopefully that’ll tide you over until next week.  And, honestly, this post is long enough that I don’t even really consider it “interstitial,” so, you know ... be happy.

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* Technically speaking, the project is not done.  But it’s done enough to make my boss happy once again, and I think I can take the remainder of the project at a more reasonable pace.

Slithy Toves I

"Here to Eat Your Apple to the Core"

[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.

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.]

We’ve talked about Cherry Poppin’ Daddies in this series before.  We talked about their ability to crank out retro-swing, lounge, and the as-yet-unnamed hardcore-yet-retro 50’s-early-rock style.  But the first time I heard “Here Comes the Snake,” I knew it was something different.  Ostensibly, it’s a lounge soung, but there’s just something ... slinky about it.  Which of course is entirely appropriate (and I’m sure intentional) given the title and subject matter.  It’s really hard to define—I suppose it’s something in the beat that makes the song just slither along—but I know it when I hear it.  And of course the words to this particular track reinforce the theme:

Yes, I believe, but I’d rather not pray;
What I believe in I’d rather not say, baby.
Did your God show you the door?
Well, I’m here to eat your apple to the core ...

Here comes the snake indeed.  The idea of music that slithers its way into your brain somehow put me in mind of the slithy toves from “Jabberwocky” ... you know, those little creatures¹ who did gyre and gimble in the wabe.  And thus this mix was born.

A long time ago.  Newer mixes have bubbled into existence, struggled along, and even had several volumes completed before I managed to put the finishing touches on volume I of this mix.  The reason is simple: for most of my mixes, I know where to go looking for new songs to add to the collection.  But this particular theme is unusual ... there’s no genre or subgenre of music which is more likely to churn out this type of song than any other.  There are not even too many bands that we can count on going back to again and again: in a certain sense, nearly every track in this particular mix is unexpected.  So, while building the mix, I’ve just had to rely on discovery—just waiting until I happened to stumble on a song which would be perfect rather than being able to go looking for them.  So it’s just grown very slowly, very gradually, and only recently did I feel like I had enough to put things in some semblance of order.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t have some immediate ideas.  Our opening track here, “Jane’s Getting Serious” by the lesser-known of the Astleys,² was probably the very first thing to pop into my head when I thought of songs that slink along into your brain.  Very shortly followed by “Smooth” by Santana, featuring Rob Thomas from Matchbox 20.  Supernatural is an uneven album, in my opninon, but “Smooth” is the standout: really amazing guitar work from Santana (as always), and some sexy vocals from Thomas.  Both these songs were no-brainers.

But perhaps the strongest contender for this mix (after the mix-starter itself) is “Why Do We Call It Love,” which is what really caused me to fall in love with the Swing soundtrack in the first place.  We’ve seen Lisa Stansfield’s tracks from that movie show up on Salsatic Vibrato II³ and Georgie Fame’s tracks on Moonside by Riverlight, and those are good tracks.  Nothing wrong with those tracks.  But this song ... this song is just incredible.  Smoky vocals from Stansfield, that slinky beat that drives it to this mix, clever lyrics—“Why Do We Call It Love” has it all, and in spades.

Now, as I said up above, in general bands don’t immediately spring to mind when you’re looking for slinky, slithery songs.  However, if there’s an exception to that, Shriekback must be it.  Primarily centered around the keyboards and vocals of Barry Andrews, keyboardist with XTC for their first two albums, Shriekback can do big, bold party songs, such as most of Oil and Gold and much of Go Bang!, or it can do quieter, reflective songs such as most of Big Night Music and a few scattered other songs.  So throughout this series we’re going to see Shriekback on such vastly different mixes as Funkadelic Bonethumper, Wisty Mysteria, Rose-Coloured Brainpan, Bleeding Salvador, Smokelit Flashback, Moonside by Riverlight, Shadowfall Equinox, and Numeric Driftwood.  They’re versatile, is what I’m saying.  But we’ll probably see them here more than anywhere else, starting with two tracks on this very volume.  “The Reptiles and I” is a slinky but quiet little song of lists from Big Night Music, whereas Shark Walk is one my favorites from Go Bang!, a more upbeat but still quite sinuous tune that focuses more on the selachian than the serpentine.

Other early choices include Joe Jackson’s cover of Louis Jordan’s 1944 hit “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby” and Cat Empire’s interesting song about a gypsy woman haunting their dreams, “The Night That Never End.” In the former case, it’s a swing standard—I think Jackson’s version adds a bit more flair and maybe more brass, but the slinky undertones are present even in Jordan’s original.  In the latter case, it’s whatever style you want to accuse of Cat Empire of being—probably something latin-ish—and it carries the sneaky, sinuous theme through into the lyrics, in which a “gypsy lady” sneaks into your sleeping head carrying a bottle of schnapps.  The end of the song, where the trumpet-drenched bridge gets faster and faster until it peaks in a crescendo of frenetic energy, is one of the most amazing pieces of musical craftmanship I’ve ever heard.

I also remembered “Caramel” by Suzanne Vega off Nine Objects of Desire, an album which in general I like less than the magnificent 99.9 F°.  But “Caramel” is probably my favorite off NOoD, and has a perfect sinuous beat to fit in here.  Similarly, relistening to Into the Labyrinth by Dead Can Dance, I was instantly struck by how perfectly the feel of “The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove” slots in here.  The song has an Arabian vibe that’s reminiscent of a snake charmer’s tune which is perfect for this mix.

Less likely (and more of a stretch for theme here, if I’m honest) is “Take Me Dancing” by Meaghan Smith.  Last time we saw Smith was on Sirenexiv Cola, where she had a poppy electronica/orchestral tune from her excellent album The Cricket’s Orchestra.  Here we have another track from that album, which has a bit of the slinky feel we’re going for here, concentrated mainly in what I feel sure is a Hammond organ.  But what it lacks in strict adherence to the theme it makes up for in sheer joy.  It shows that, while Slithy Toves is mostly a collection of slower songs, there can be upbeat tunes that fit the mix as well.

Another thing we talked about last week was my discovery of KT Tunstall, and how I’ve not been as excited about any other artist in the past few decades or so.  I threw out a couple of candidates for next runner-up,⁴ but I should have mentioned Iron & Wine.  His album The Shepherd’s Dog is a revelation: part folk music, part alterna-pop, with a tinge of electronica and surreal lyrics reminiscent of Michael Stipe or Robyn Hitchcock.  Several of his songs slither about with an ambience that makes them well-suited for this mix.  The one I chose for volume I is “Wolves,” which is sort of the title track to The Shepherd’s Dog.⁵  It’s a slinky, slithery track that flows beautifully into “The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove.”

Slithy Toves I
[ Here to Eat Your Apple to the Core ]

“Jane's Getting Serious” by Jon Astley [Single]⁶
“Why Do We Call It Love” by Lisa Stansfield, off Swing [Soundtrack]
“Take Me Dancing” by Meaghan Smith, off The Cricket's Orchestra
“Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby” by Joe Jackson, off Jumpin' Jive
“The Reptiles and I” by Shriekback, off Big Night Music
“The Night That Never End” by the Cat Empire, off Two Shoes
“Borneo” by Firewater, off The Golden Hour
“Smooth” by Santana, off Supernatural
“Here Comes the Snake” by Cherry Poppin' Daddies, off Zoot Suit Riot [Compilation]
“Wolves (Song of the Shepherd's Dog)” by Iron & Wine, off The Shepherd's Dog
“The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove” by Dead Can Dance, off Into the Labyrinth
“Shadow” by the Primitives, off Lovely
“Shark Walk” by Shriekback, off Go Bang!
“Caramel” by Suzanne Vega, off Nine Objects of Desire
“Ghost Highway” by Mazzy Star, off She Hangs Brightly
“Sarah” by Bat for Lashes, off Fur and Gold
“I Close My Eyes” by Shivaree, off Who's Got Trouble?

Total:  17 tracks,  72:20

The rest of the tunes I more or less stumbled upon by accident.  Firewater’s “Borneo” is, like the Meaghan Smith tune, a bit of a stretch here, but it’s a rollicking fun track that upholds the upbeat portion of the festivities nicely.  Plus it flows into “Smooth” really nicely.  “Shadow” by the Primitives is another Middle-Eastern-sounding song that rolls along coming off the back-end of “Lovegrove,” and provides a nice change-of-pace from their usual alterna-pop.

Which just leaves us with our 3 closing tunes.  “Ghost Highway” is in some ways a typical Mazzy Star song, but in others it’s quite distinctive, including a serpentine beat that underscores the duo’s typical echoing, buzzing style.  That flows into Bat for Lashes’ “Sarah,” a slow, sinuous track that shows off her distinctive voice.  And we polish it all off with “I Close My Eyes” by Shivaree.  We first discussed Shivaree’s eclectic style back on Smokelit Flashback III.  “I Close My Eyes” contains quite a bit of torchy Moonside by Riverlight overtones, but it still retains enough of the undulating quality that we’re looking for here to provide a solid closer.

Next time, we’ll go back to the beginning for another installment of the mix that started it all.

Slithy Toves II ⇒

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1 According to Humpty Dumpty, toves are “something like badgers—they’re something like lizards—and they’re something like corkscrews.”

2 Weirdly, Jon Astley is not related to Rick Astley, despite them both being Astleys, both being British, and looking remarkably similar to each other.  Shame: I’d never have minded so much getting jonrolled.

3 And we’ll see them again on future volumes of that mix.

4 Specifically, Devics and Firewater, the latter of whom we’ll hear from in just a minute.

5 By which I mean that the title of the album appears in the song’s lyrics, even though it’s not the song title.

6 I try not to link to YouTube for music, and in fact I’ve never had to do so before.  But this track is stupidly hard to get hold of—I don’t believe there’s any place you can purchase it digitally at all.  Since desperate times call for desperate measures, I’ll let you know that it is possible to turn a YouTube video into an MP3 file, using any number of sites that will do the conversion for you.  My current favorite is anything2mp3.com.

To post or not to post

It’s been nearly 2 months since I skipped a blog post, and we can’t have that, so I’ll be skipping this week.

Well, okay: to tell the truth, it’s only been a month or so since I actually skipped a post.  But it’s been 7 weeks since I posted saying I wasn’t going to post.  The other skipped post was my annual traveling-for-YAPC-and-just-spaced post.  That hardly counts at all.

So I’m posting here to say that I’m not posting, which is already both oxymoronic, paradoxical, and meta, all at once.  (Yes, that’s right: it’s all two of those three things.  I said it was paradoxical.)  And, while I’m posting about not posting, I’m telling you about my other type of not posting, which was not posting about not posting.  Now, often when I post about not posting about not posting, I post about posting, which makes my non-post almost a post, although it’s typically not as long as an actual post, so I often don’t count it as a post, but rather a post about not posting (which it also is).  But this is not that.  Rather, this is a post that is reflective of the collective of my posts about not posting.  See, my posts have labels.  All my posts.  Even the posts about not posting.  Those posts get a special label, “interstitial,” which indicates their non-postiness.  You know, in case you don’t want to actually read the posts about not posting, on account of their lack of postiness, you can easily skip them, because they all have the same label.  “Interstitial,” of course, means “between things”—in this case, it means the posts about not posting which are between the actual posts about things.

But there’s also a little “word cloud” over to the left (near the bottom), and, you know what I’ve noticed recently?  The “interstitial” tag is the biggest one.  That’s not really how I’d hoped this blog would turn out.  Now, on the one hand, it’s not particularly a fair comparison, because the posts about things all have different labels (22 of them, not counting the the posts which are not posts at all and the posts which are essentially just links to other posts), while the posts about not posting all have a single label.  So, it makes a certain amount of sense that that label has more entries.  That doesn’t make it any more palatable though.

There are 82 posts with the “interstitial” tag.  The next closest would be the “Perl” posts (i.e. the posts which are links to other posts) at 52, then the “fiction” posts that represent my ongoing novel, at 37.  The largest “proper” blog post label is “music,” which has 32 posts, primarily because I find those really easy to crank out, so it’s a standard fallback when I’m pressed for time.  But another interesting point about these labels is that any post can have multiple tags.  So many of the posts which are tagged posts about not posting are actually posts about things, but just not full posts about things.  So they get stuck labeled as “interstitial” when they’re really just ... short.

Like this post, for instance.  I’ll label it “interstitial,” and perhaps also “metablogging,” since it’s a post about posting.  Which is even more oxymoronic and paradoxical (and meta) because now it’s going to be tagged as a post about posting and a post about not posting.  Mildly bizarre.

Now, 37 of the 82 posts tagged “interstitial” are also tagged something else, meaning that only 45 of the posts about not posting are actually about not posting ... or at least only 45 are only about not posting.  I’m starting to think that maybe I need a different label for posts about things that are not full posts about things.  Perhaps “partial” would be appropriate.

Anyhow, this post about not posting has turned out not to be about not posting so much as about posting, and posting labels, and posts in general.  Not sure that makes up for it not being a “proper” post, but perhaps it’s still better than being about not posting at all.  I’ll let you be the judge.

Why the MCU Is Cool: What "MCU" Means, and What It Means To Me

[This is the first post in a new series.  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.]


When I was a kid, I read comics.  And, for me, comic books always meant one thing: superheroes.  I was aware that there were such things as horror comics, and war comics, and western comics, and just plain “funny books” (like Archie)—I just didn’t care.  I can barely remember buying comics at the 7-11 for a quarter, but the vast majority of my purchases were at 35¢.  At that time, there were only two comic publishers: DC and Marvel.  (There are barely more than two today, although the situation has been getting better of late.)

I always considered myself a DC man.  Especially when I was younger, titles like Teen Titans and Legion of Super-Heroes were very appealing, and I was also fond of Justice League and The Brave and the Bold.  Oh, sure, there were a few Marvel titles I especially liked—X-Men and Defenders and a few others—but I never got very much into the major Marvel titles: Spider-Man and Daredevil I could always take or leave, and Iron Man I never cared for at all.

Of course, DC has never fared so well on the big screen.  Many people are very fond of the original Superman, although I found it a bit blasé.  (But, then, I never liked Superman as a character much either.)  Then there was Batman ... better, but I never thought it lived up to the hype (even though Burton is of course an excellent director, and Nicholson was brilliant).  And then there was ... oh, yeah, there was nothing else.  A mediocre Wonder Woman TV series, an awful version of Supergirl, a moderately decent Batman reboot, a hideously bad Superman reboot ... I’m withholding judgement on Batman v Superman because I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m not hopeful.

But you know what I love?  The Marvel Cinematic Universe (forever hereafter “MCU”).  Now, we must be clear that the MCU is not the same as “Marvel comic movies.”  The Spider-Man movies, which I have mixed emotions about, are not MCU, and the X-Men movies, which I have a real love/hate relationship with, are not MCU.  Nor are the Ben Affleck version of Daredevil, which I tolerated, nor the Nicholas Cage version of Ghost Rider, which I forgave its many trespasses just because Ghost Rider is so damn cool.  The reasons for this are complex and have to do with character rights being sold and transferred and reclaimed and bargained over and held for ransom and given back, but only sorta kinda, and so on and so forth and back and forth ad infinitum.  But the reasons are not important.  The important bit is that the MCU—defined as those interconnected movies and TV series put out by Marvel Studios, many of them centering around the Avengers franchise—is freakin’ awesome.

I just recently watched Captain America: Civil War, and it reminded me with amazing forcefulness just how intensely this is true.  The reasons that it is true have to do with a lot of interlocking factors, and that is what I wish to explore in this new series.

One aspect is the nature of the comic book stories themselves (and, honestly, the nature of comic book stories in general).  Another part is my personal relationship to the comic book stories.  Part of it has to do with the intelligence and savvy of Marvel, which is proving itself to be far superior to that of DC.  And part of it (perhaps the largest part) is the involvement of Joss Whedon, who I’ve talked about before, and whose genius is not faded one whit based on his performance thus far as the primary architect of the MCU.  I’ve thought and thought about how these various aspects fit together and what I want to say about them, and I’ve decided it can’t be done in one blog post—thus my desire to make a new series.

In this series in particular, you’ll need to forgive me quite a few tangents.¹  I’m going to need to explain quite a bit about comics (in case  you’re not a comic book fan), and quite a bit about my personal relationship to, and interaction with, comics, and quite a bit about how comic book stories are put together.  Much of this will be my personal opinion, and (especially if you happen to be a comic book person yourself) you may disagree with some of my hypotheses, and/or some of my conclusions.  That’s okay.  I believe my ramblings will be interesting even if you disagree with them, and hopefully there will be some insights even for those who are rabid MCU fans themselves.

If you’re not a comic book fan, you may not much give a shit about comic book movies, and that’s okay.  I’m also a huge horror fan, and a big fantasy fan, and I know that some people don’t care about those genres either, and they’re probably never going to understand my fascination with Stephen King, or Game of Thrones.  Fine.  But hear me out for just a second, even if you’re not inclined to care, in general.

I think that every genre of fiction, regardless of specific media (that is, regardless of whether we’re talking movies, books, TV series, music, comics, or whatever), speaks to the human condition.  Merely because I think that fiction that doesn’t speak to the human condition doesn’t survive as a genre.  Now, you personally may not see the value in a particular genre: you may think horror movies are crap, or that speed metal is not really music, or that harlequin romances should not be considered “literature,” or whatever.  But all those genres speak to someone, and there’s no point in trying to deny it.  We often like to find ourselves superior to things, and media genres we don’t understand are usually at the top of our lists of “things to feel superior to.”  But the fact that the genres are popular enough to penetrate our little bubbles of apathy are indicative of their staying power, so pretending they can’t be appreciated by smart people (by which we inevitably mean “people as smart as we are”) is pointless.

So, forget the fact that you find comic books silly for a moment.  Comic books are, first and foremost, a way to tell a story.  The fact that that method involves pictures and words does not mean we should ignore it—that’s nonsensical.  You enjoy Goodnight Moon and The Cat in the Hat, right?  And those involve both pictures and words, right?  But perhaps that’s the source of the snobbery.  Books which have pictures on every page are obviously for children: grown-up books only have pictures every other chapter or so.  Except that’s silly.  It’s a stylistic choice to throw the pictures out and demand that the story stand only on its words.  So, likewise, it’s a stylistic choice to demand that the story require the pictures to be sensible.  To take an analogy, I find musicals stupid.  Mainly because, I think a story should stand on its own without requiring the songs.  The songs can support, and even enhance, but once they’re required then it’s stupid.  If you think about it, this is the exact same situation with comics.  As long as you’re reading, say, Alice in Wonderland, and John Tenniel’s illustrations are extranneous (if still beautiful, and iconic), then you’re happy.  But if the story were incomprehensible without those pictures, then it would be pointless, or stupid?  Honestly, if you can accept a musical, you should be able to accept a comic, at least in principle.²

But even once you’re willing to accept that comics are a valid way to tell a story—and, as manga shows us, they can be powerful stories about just about anything—then you come up against the next stumbling block: the superhero.  Now, as I said way back at the beginning, there have always been comics in American culture that weren’t about superheroes, and there still are today.  But, in many ways, the superheroes “won.”  When my parents were kids, there were horror comics, and sports comics, and war comics, and western comics, and romance comics (you know: for the girls).  But by the time I came along, most of those comics had disappeared.  And the ones that hadn’t got co-opted, to the point where Jonah Hex had to team up with Batman, and former pal of Millie the Model Patsy Walker actually had to put on a costume and fight crime.³  Non-superhero comics are making a bit of a comeback in the modern day, but it’s still a fair statement that, for most people, comics equals superheroes.

And superheroes in many ways hurt comics as a medium that should taken seriously, because it’s often hard to take superheroes seriously.  Except when you’re a kid, when they’re damned serious indeed.  But that only reinforces the concept that comics are juvenile, which is not what we want either.   The fact of the matter is, it’s really impossible to generalize about comics, because there are just so damned many of them, written and drawn by so many different creators.  Talking about whether “comics” are serious or not is pointless—we could perhaps talk about whether comics by Alan Moore are serious vs whether comics by Frank Miller are serious vs whether comics by Grant Morrison are serious,⁴ but to talk about comics in general as a monolithic entity just doesn’t make any sense.  Are comics juvenile?  Sure ... some of them.  Heck, a lot of them, realistically.  But comics can also be brave, and mature, and introduce kids to diversity, or to politics, or to conflict, or to drama.  The genre of the superhero is in many ways a simplification of the basic conflict between good and evil: with few exceptions, the good guys are good, the bad guys are bad, they fight, the good guys win, and that’s the story.  Now, certain comics try—and many even succeed—to break out of that mold, but that’s the basic template.  And there’s something very pure, and simple, and joyous about that basic story that appeals to many different and diverse readers.

If you can move past the tights.

In this series, I plan to explore what makes the MCU so appealing to me, and hopefully you’ll find some reasons it should appeal to you as well.

The Heroes I Like ⇒

__________

1 Although, I’m assuming, if you couldn’t forgive my tangents, you’d have given up on this blog a long time ago.

2 Contrariwise, I suppose I’m a person who can accept a comic but not a musical.  But let’s just say I’m willing to grant you that your ability to accept, and even enjoy, a musical is not a moronic pursuit.  And I’m hoping you’ll grant me the same in return.

3 No doubt we’ll talk more about Patsy’s interesting journey when we get to Jessica Jones.

4 In the latter case, generally no.

Sirenexiv Cola I

"You Sparkle and Burn"

[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.

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.]

I once had a friend (and coworker) who, when he’d pick music to play at work, always picked from my alterna-pop CDs which featured female vocalists.  Whenever I asked him why he never picked male singers, he’d just shrug, give an enigmatic smile, and say, I like the women’s voices better.  And admittedly there are times when I do as well.  During those times, I reach for this mix.

The real inspiration for this mix was my discovery of KT Tunstall.  This was only a few years back, and I stumbled across her name in conjunction with something else—I have no clue what it was now—and she sounded interesting.  So I did what I often do in such cases: I asked AllMusic which was her best album, then went and listened to the free samples of it to see if it was any good.  In this case, that was the double-album Invisible Empire // Crescent Moon.  Which I listened to, and thought it was moderately decent, and put it on my list to pick up one day.  But nothing too exciting.  And then I decided to listen to just one more album, and I picked Tiger Suit.  And, man, let me tell you: it blew me away.  I can’t think of an artist I was this excited about since stumbling across Movitz! on The Colbert Report.¹

And, weirdly, it parallels my discovery of whitechocolatespaceegg by Liz Phair.  That’s another album that I was quite surprised to fall in love with, after hearing one song² on the radio, by an artist whose other albums I don’t like nearly as much ... even down to not being that keen on the one that AllMusic tells me I “should” like.  In Phair’s case, the critical darling is Exit to Guyville, but I’m fairly “meh” on that one.  whitechocolatespaceegg, on the other hand, is magnificent.  As a bonus, Tunstall’s style is very close to Phair’s—but not identical—so that Tiger Suit is both familiar and fresh at the same time.  I knew that I needed to put together a mix featuring Tunstall and Phair.  (And note that, indeed, they provide the first two tracks here.)

I decided to center the mix around female vocalists, with upbeat, vaguely poppy songs as sung by sweet, often sexy, voices.  Some of my friend’s favorite artists are well represented here: the Sundays, the Katydids, Tori Amos, and of course Liz Phair.  When I tried to think of a creative name for this mix, I thought of various words that might bring to mind a beautiful female voice drifting over to the listener, and of course I thought of “siren.” But I also thought of “vixen,” which implies extra attributes of cleverness and sexuality.  So I just glued those two words together, and added something to indicate the poppy nature of the whole, and there we have “Sirenexiv Cola.”

Now, obviously not every female vocalist is going to work here.  As much as I love the Cocteau Twins, Elizabeth Fraser’s dreamy vocals are not quite right for this mix.  Bold, brassy vocals such as Amy Winehouse or Alf Moyet (from Yazoo) are not going to work well here either.  Nor are the hard rockers like Joan Jett or Pat Benatar, nor the more experimental folks like Throwing Muses or the Breeders.  On the other hand, there is the anti-folk movement, which is perfect here.

Now, I rather think of Tori Amos as the original anti-folk artist, even though she was around before most of the modern artists that term is applied to were ever heard of.³  And we have a track here from Tori, one of the rare upbeat tracks off her stunning Little Earthquakes, which is certainly one of my favorite albums.  (And “Happy Phantom” contains one of my favorite all-time lyrics: “They say Confucius does his crossword with a pen ...”)  And the rest of the (mostly) ladies who wear the anti-folk label are way more upbeat than Amos: Feist, Regina Spektor, Keren Ann, Mirah⁴ ... all of whom we have represented here, of course.

Feist, you know: indeed, “1234” in particular you know, because that iPod commercial wormed its way into your brain and never let go.  Feist is way more than that one song, and we’ll hear more from her on future volumes, but there’s also a lot to be said for that particular tune, as pervasive as it was.  Spektor is probably best known for singing the theme song to Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, and the original version of that song is our closer here.  Spektor is more than just that one song too (and in fact I already knew of her before OItNB), but that song is pretty spectacular.  Keren Ann and Mirah are a bit more obscure; I believe I found both of them from following “artists like this one” type links (probably links from Regina Spektor and/or Feist, for that matter).  Multilingual Keren Ann was born in Israel and raised in the Netherlands, but she sings primarily in English and French.  The track we use here is from her first English album, Not Going Anywhere, which is quite pretty.  Mirah is a bit more hit and miss, but “Sweepstakes Prize” is a pretty awesome tune, and it provides our volume title.

In the category of other artists who shouldn’t be a surprise, we have Beth Quist, a Magnatune artist who we first met on Smokelit Flashback IV.  Most of her stuff is not particularly as poppy as “Monsters,” but she’s still an excellent choice for this mix.  Competing with Magnatune, we have Jamendo, which more often showcases folks who are putting together sonic portfolios by creating soundtracks for non-existent movies.  But they also have other types of music, including Bella Ruse, a duo from Columbus that also qualifies as anti-folk in my opinion.  Their female-fronted songs are delicate and upbeat, like the one I chose for this mix, off their debut EP.

Sirenexiv Cola I
[ You Sparkle and Burn ]

“Glamour Puss” by KT Tunstall, off Tiger Suit
“Perfect World” by Liz Phair, off Whitechocolatespaceegg
“Clean White Love” by Lisa Mitchell, off Wonder
“A Little Love” by Meaghan Smith, off The Cricket's Orchestra
“Heart of Everyone” by Bella Ruse, off Bella Ruse [EP]
“Sweepstakes Prize” by Mirah, off You Think It's Like This but Really It's Like This
“Fingers” by P!nk, off I'm Not Dead
“Get Some” by Lykke Li, off Wounded Rhymes
“You Never Know” by Goldfrapp, off Supernature
“Energy” by Lisa Germano, off Happiness
“You're the One [Blood Orange Remix]” by Charli XCX, off You're the One [US] [EP]
“Dollhouse” by Melanie Martinez, off Dollhouse [EP]
“Monsters” by Beth Quist, off Silver
“Right Now & Right Here” by Keren Ann, off Not Going Anywhere
“Happy Phantom” by Tori Amos, off Little Earthquakes
“My Finest Hour” by the Sundays, off Reading, Writing and Arithmetic
“The Boy Who's Never Found” by Katydids, off Shangri-La
“1234” by Feist, off The Reminder
“Fortune Teller” by Ed's Redeeming Qualities, off It's All Good News
“Fall Away” by Eleni Mandell [Single]
“You've Got Time” by Regina Spektor [Single]

Total:  21 tracks,  75:29

As I talked about before, I really like P!nk.  Most of her music is too party-girl for this mix, and in fact there were several times that I almost decided that “Fingers” was too risqué to fit in here.  But, in the end, I decided that I wanted to include Lykke Li’s “Get Some,” which is a pretty decent party song itself.  So then “Fingers” seemed like a pretty logical lead-in to the Swedish pop star’s driving beat.⁵  And, following Li, we have Goldfrapp, another artist who can bounce around from trip-hop to uptempo pop without too much difficulty.  “You Never Know” has a bit of a Kate Bush feel that slots in perfectly here.

There are a few other hardcore pop artists here, including Charli XCX, whose “You’re the One” is about as pop as it gets.  I prefer the “Blood Oranges remix” from her CD single / EP: I think it adds just enough flavor to tone down the over-the-top-pop to the perfect level for this mix.  Australia’s Lisa Mitchell is also normally considered pop, although I think she has enough anti-folk cred to earn her place here with the quite wonderful “Clean White Love.” And I think Melanie Martinez qualifies as pop, although she drifts around a bit as well.  We first heard from Martinez on Darkling Embrace, after all.  But “Dollhouse” is a pretty decent fit here, and I love its clever lyrics.  Eleni Mandell is more of a country singer than a pop singer, but she also has range, and I really like “Fall Away,” which was used in Monkeybone.

Finally, three songs from moderately unexpected quarters.  First up, we have a track from Meaghan Smith, who I talked about discovering back on Moonside by Riverlight.  “A Little Love” may not be quite as good as “Heartbroken,” but it’s pretty damned awesome, and it’s got a bit of electropop-meets-orchestral feel that makes it quite distinctive.  Right around the center mark, we have Lisa Germano, possibly the only major 4AD artist that I missed discovering back in the day.  But I stumbled across her again recently while looking for cool music that featured violinists, and Germano’s name naturally came up.  The second I heard “Energy,” I knew two things: first, that I’d heard it before and somehow forgotten about it, and, secondly, that it was a big ball of awesome that I’d been missing out on for about 20 years.  It’s one of the best tracks on this volume, and trust me when I tell you that’s saying something.  Last but not least, we have Ed’s Redeeming Qualities, who have a tendency to turn up in odd places, like here.  We first heard from them on Tenderhearted Nightshade, then they popped up on Zephyrous Aquamarine, and now here they are again.  ERQ doesn’t always feature female vocals of course, but Carrie Bradley, who would go on to play fiddle for the Breeders, then start her own band called 100 Watt Smile, has a beautiful voice, as well as a sure hand on either acoustic guitar or fiddle.  Silly-yet-poignant is ERQ’s specialty, and, while “Fortune Teller” has some highly amusing lyrics, it’s also touching somehow.  But still upbeat enough to work well here, introducing our closing stretch and leading, via Mandell, into the strong closer of “You’ve Got Time.”

Next time, we’ll attempt to achieve even more balance by counteracting last time’s downbeat and this week’s upbeat with some mid-tempo, of the slinky variety.

Sirenexiv Cola II ⇒

__________

1 Perhaps the closest I could come to it would be either Firewater or Devics, both of whom are great, but Tunstall still has them both beat.

2 Specifically, “Polyester Bride,” which I have no doubt we’ll see on a future volume of this very mix.

3 Similarly, I will always think of My Bloody Valentine as shoegazers, even though technically speaking the shoegazers were the folks that followed in their footsteps.

4 Note: some of those folks will be listed by some sources as “indie pop” rather than anit-folk.  I personally put them all together.

5 We first talked about Lykke Li back on Darkling Embrace.  Although in general I prefer Youth Novels, she does have other albums with good songs.  They’re just not as consistent, in my opinion.

Off to Camp

Today is an interesting day.  My eldest child, who is less than six months away from not being a child at all any more (at least according to our legal system), is going away to summer camp for the first time.  This is not because we wouldn’t let them go before now ... it’s just because this is the first time they ever wanted to go.  The Mother, of course, is as devastated as one might expect from a mother on her first child’s first day of school.  Which makes sense, if you consider that, between their initial career at a Sudbury school and later homeschooling, this really is the first time that we’ve sent them off to be with strangers in an environment which we know will be good for them but simultaneously know they will have difficulty with.  It’s a tough transition.

Now, in case you’re wondering why I’m being gender-coy with the pronouns, I can assure you it’s not because I’m having an overprotective moment where I want to keep my child’s identity so anonymous that I can’t even let you in on their gender.  No, it’s because that’s how they’ve asked me to refer to them, and I do my best to respect those wishes, even when it’s hard for me to grasp exactly where the wishes originate from.  I suspect (though I don’t know for sure until they choose to enlighten me) that it’s not a case of them being uncomfortable with the gender assigned to them at birth.  Rather, I think that the issue is they’re not that comfortable with any gender at all.  I think (and I must continue to stress that I’m speculating here) that they’ve come to realize that all gender is is a label, and no one likes to be labeled (especially not at their age).  If you think about it, we are all identified by a multitude of labels: gender, race, hair color, height, weight, social class, geographical background, sexual orientation, political leanings, occupation, technical adeptness, income level, marital status, type of car I drive, whether I rent or own my house (or neither), whether I have children or not (and, if so, how many), whether I have pets or not (and, if so, how many, and what species), which books I read, which TV shows I watch, what foods I like ... just an endless series of labels, some of which we accept and some of which we avoid, but all of which carry baggage.  Even the ones that seem innocent.  If tell you I’m a gay male, or a black woman, or a rich Jewish person, you’re going to have a picture of me, and you’ll probably even realize that you’re stereotyping.  But if I tell you that I’m a redhead, or that I’m from Minnesota, or that I live in my parent’s basement, or that I own a lizard—any of those things will also cause you to think you know me, and many of them won’t be that obvious.

Like all of us, some of those labels I own, and some I eschew.  For instance, I’ll happily tell you that I’m a liberal, and a father, and a technogeek.^*  Others I don’t talk about as much: I don’t bring up my race or my gender or my social class that often, because my race and gender and social class are pretty privileged, and I don’t wish to be defined that way.  Oh, I accept that I’ve often had an easy life because of those things (and others), but it’s often easy to imagine that people who can’t possibly have had it as hard as you have therefore never had it hard, and that’s not the same thing at all.  If you’ve suffered a lot, whereas I’ve only suffered a little, it does mean that I don’t have the right to judge you, or to talk about what you’ve been through.  But it doesn’t mean that my suffering doesn’t count.

Being stuck with one of those labels that you never particularly wanted isn’t suffering, especially when it happens to be one of the “good” ones.  But that doesn’t mean it’s totally fine either.  At this point in my life, I happen to be an old white man.  There is little separating me from those idiots you see in Congressional committees (particularly those impaneled with determining women’s reproductive rights, or settling disputes with Native Americans).  Well, apart from my long hair and scruffy beard, which, honestly, I mostly cultivate exactly because it will set me apart from those morons.  So I’m an old white man, sure, but I’m not one of those old white men, and I don’t appreciate being lumped in with them.  Do I know what it’s like to be black, or Jewish, or gay?  Nope, not in the least.  But I do have some inkling of what it’s like to have a burning need not to be judged by those labels: not to be reduced to a stereotype.

As part of the research we as parents are currently doing into gender roles and related issues, I looked at some information from a fellow named Sam Killermann.  He has a comedy show that he performs where he talks about stereotypes, and snap judgements.  Here’s a snippet that caught my ear:

It’s natural, like it’s instinctual—we just do it so fast, we jump to those conclusions, we make those decisions—you know, it snaps—and it goes into your head and you just have to let it go out ...

It’s like, there’s a stereotype, and that’s just like, an assumption about a group, and there’s prejudice, which is the next step.  That’s where you act upon it.  I don’t think it’s really possible for us to just ignore the stereotypes, for us to get rid of them all, at least not in this generation, but it’s possible for us not to act with prejudice.

I think this is key.  Stereotyping is, in my opinion, an inevitable consequence of human intelligence.  We analyze and cogitate by separating and categorizing and compartmentalizing—this ability to put things in boxes and put labels on them mostly works to our advantage.  It lets us take exceedingly complex concepts and simplify them enough to be grasped and grokked and thorougly dissescted and reassembled and twisted inside-out and turned into brand new concepts that we then put out there and let other people start the whole process all over and produce even newer concepts that then go out into the world and do it all again.  This process has enabled scientific advancements and literary achievements and depth and complexity of emotional shading and mechanical assembly and microscopic discovery that have launched us humans to the pinnacle of life as we know it.  Also, it’s launched us into countless wars, and inquisitions, and genocides, and pogroms, and bombings, and rock-throwings, and hateful words.  Because when you apply that reductive categorization and labeling to a mechanical structure, you get to understand what makes it tick, but, when you apply it to another living, breathing person, you completely fail to understand what makes them tick, because human brains have that ineffeable quality that, so far, nothing else in the known universe seems to have: it’s greater than the sum of its parts.  That is, you can understand all about neurons, and synapses, and frontal lobes and cortexes and medullae oblongatae, but still utterly fail to comprehend how another person thinks.  Because there’s simplifying, and then there’s oversimplifying.

So stereotypes are a natural, but dangerous, way of oversimplifying people, which is okay, but only as long as you know you’re oversimplifying people, and you know you better cut it out before you think you know them.  Because stereotypes may have grains of truth in them, but, unlike DNA or quantum physics, they don’t have universal truth.  And labels enable stereotypes.  And many people feel that, if we can get rid of the labels, we can get rid of the stereotypes.

I don’t necessarily agree with this.  I’m with Sam, up above, where he says it’s not really possible for us to get rid of stereotypes.  Of course, he holds out hope that future generations may be able to succeed where we will fail, and I’m not even sure I’m willing to go that far.  I’m not sure I believe it’s possible to get rid of stereotypes at all—not while remaining human.  Perhaps someday we’ll evolve into something else, and then of course all bets are off.  But, until then, I personally believe we’re stuck with them.

Which is not to say that I’m not going to respect other people’s attempts to get rid of the labels, though.  I may not agree with such attempts, but I admire them.  Striving to achieve the impossible is a victory in the journey, even when the destination is never reached.  Plus, every now and again, I’m reminded of one of my favorite uplifting quotes, from Pearl S. Buck:

The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible—and achieve it, generation after generation.

So let folks attempt the impossible, I say, and I will support them, even if I don’t quite believe in it.  ‘Cause I might be wrong.  Often am, in fact.  So, go for it.

But I also want to encourage people to learn to ignore the labels, even when they haven’t been expunged.  I think people have to learn to ignore the labels that people place on them, and also (probably more importantly, even) to ignore the labels that they, perhaps unconciously, place on others.  I say, don’t feel bad about labeling people.  We all do it.  Just be able to throw the label away after you print it out.  Because, ultimately, it means nothing.  If you get to know a person and it turns out your initial label was correct, that means nothing more than the proverbial infinitude of simians reproducing Shakespeare.  If you decide that you can jump off your roof and not be hurt, and you do so, and, by some miracle, you happen to land unhurt, that doesn’t mean you were right.  Ditto for people-labels that happen to turn out to be right.  More often than not, though, you’ll find that, even if you were partially right about people (and often you’re not even that), people are just so damned complex that “partly right” isn’t worth much.  Unlike horseshoes and hand grendades, “almost” is not particularly useful in psychoanalysis.

So I respect my kid’s desire to avoid the gender label as much as they can, as long as they can.  But I also hope they can learn to ignore the label ... I think that’ll be more useful in the long run.  I hope they can learn that they can be whoever they want to be, regardless of how other people look at them.  To sum up, I’ll use a quote often misattributed to Dr. Suess, but which is really a Suess-ification of a quote originally spoken by Bernard Baruch, a white, male, Jewish, upper-class father and stock broker who advised presidents, bought a former slave plantation, and endowed the United Daughters of the Confederacy.  But, like all people, he was more than the sum of his labels.  And he expressed the original sentiment that inspired this reformulation, which is another of my favorite uplifting quotes.

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.

And that really says it all.

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* And, in fact, I often have, on this very blog.

Perl blog post #53

Friday night I dreamt about time zones ...

This makes sense, as I have finally released an official version of my date module, which you can read all about over on my Other Blog.  So I’ve been drowning in timezone-related minutiae all week, which week I spent at YAPC, which you can also read about over on my Other Blog.  (Basically, I had two things to write about, and neither one was really a full blog post’s worth, so I just did two half-posts.  So to speak.)

As is becoming a (somewhat disturbing) tradition, last Sunday I was engaged in YAPC travel-related activities and completely spaced on the blog post again.  This pisses me off (at myself) because I knew that this was coming, and I knew that I always do this every year, and I knew that what I really needed to do was just write a quick blurb ahead of time saying that I was traveling even though I wouldn’t have been yet because I was writing this ahead of time, and schedule it to be released on Sunday, and then I’d have it covered.  I thought this to myself several times throughout the week, and I promised myself that I would do this thing, and yet I still managed to get caught up in preparing to leave (and also I was a bit under the weather, as my evil family finally managed to get me sick after 2 full weeks of trying) and, once again, totally spaced.  Classic me.

But back to my dream.  You know, often with dream elements, you sort of vaguely know where they come from, or else you have no clue and it’s just a super-bizarre dream that you can’t even remotely explain.  This dream was somewhat unique in that, while it was ultra-bizarre and made no rational sense, it was composed of very distinct and easily identified bits.  I don’t believe there was any deeper meaning in it—it was just my brain taking a bunch of mostly unrelated bits and swirling them together to make an incoherent whole.

In the dream, I needed to use a special timezone (see: date module) to move on to the next day.  I was thinking about writing my own code for this (see: YAPC), but then I realized I could just repurpose this existing code which told the story of The Comedian (see: Steve Agee’s joke on @Midnight, which I binge-watched on my return home: in response to a request for “comic book songs,” Steve quipped “All Along the Watchmen Tower”), explaining the timeline of his death, which would work perectly for my purposes, although my boss might have trouble swallowing it, because he was already suspicious of me for going rogue (see: The Last Coyote, a.k.a. the fourth Harry Bosch book, the audiobook version of which I both started and finished during my travels), and, in fact, I had to figure out which of several different versions of the timezone to use, some of which only covered one hour, but some of which covered several hours, which would of course be more efficient than having to write or rewrite several different one-hour timezones and, as long as it was going to cover the same length of time anyway, why not? and then I woke up and had to pee.  But then I went back to sleep again, and I think I may have had some similar-but-not-the-same dream but I don’t remember.

Anyhow, if you’re not so inclined to pop over to the Other Blog and read either of the two half-posts I’ve provided for you (although I highly recommend the second one, even if you’re not techincally inclined, as it’s a bit of a travelogue and doesn’t have that much technobabble in it), at least you’ve now had a rambling run-on discussion of my latest weird dream to chew on.  You’re welcome.

Saladosity, Part 7: The Savory Proteins

[This is the seventh 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.]


So far in our journey to salad nirvana, we’ve bought a whole lotta produce, plus some trail mix fodder.  Now it’s time to pick out some proteins: meat and cheeses.

Meats

The main thing we’re going to need meat for is our chef’s salad.  In my opinion, you can’t make chef’s salad without meat, but your opinion may vary, especially if you’re a member of the Vegan tribe.  We won’t need meat for any other salad (although I’ll throw in a few optional ideas), so, if you happen to be a firm vegan, you could skip this particular salad (and this whole section), and not be any the worse for wear.

For those of you still with me, let me tell you what you’re going to need for the perfect chef’s salad.  Finding good pre-sliced, deli-style meat is a challenge, even in a relatively good shopping environment such as Trader Joe’s.  If you’re a TJ’s fan too, I’ll give you exact brand names.  If not, you’ll just have to do basically what I did: spend 10 or 15 minutes at the lunchmeat section of your favorite store reading labels.  What you basically want is to find the meats that:

• don’t have any added sweeteners, and
• don’t have any preservatives (e.g. sulfites, nitrates, etc).

This will be remarkably challenging.  When you think about eating a nice turkey sandwich, it may seem insane to you that anyone would want to stick any sort of sugar into your slices of turkey.  But nearly every label you check will tell you that it has molasses, or honey, or just plain sugar.  It’s downright weird, once you start realizing how much meat has been pre-sweetened, ostensibly for your tastebuds.  Trust me: your tastebuds don’t need that, nor do they particularly want it.  Meat isn’t supposed to be sweet.  It’s supposed to be ... well, meaty.  Savory, and juicy, and just plain yummy.  But not sweet.  Yeck.

And, when it comes to preservatives, lunchmeat is some of the worst offenders in the store.  Lunchmeat needs to have a longer shelf-life than, say, ground beef.  So they fill it full of chemicals to make it last.  You don’t need that.  Pay a little extra for the preservative-free meat and just eat it quickly.  This will probably not be a problem, as it will be so tasty.

You will have to work extra hard to find meat without any added sweeteners or preservatives, but you’ll be better off in the long run: not only is it almost certainly healthier by nearly any tribe’s standards, but it’ll taste better too.  Win-win.

Turkey.  At my Trader Joe’s, I have 3 brand options for sliced turkey: Applegate, Columbus, and the TJ’s store brand.  Of these, only Applegate fits my criteria.  Columbus has brown sugar, not to mention a moderately frightening list of -ites and -ates, including sodium nitrite, sodium phosphate, and potassium chloride.  The TJ’s brand has sugar and disodium phosphate.  Applegate, on the other hand, has no sugar, and only carrageenan in the “what’s that?” department.¹  Carrageenan isn’t technically a preservative, and it comes from seaweed, so I give it a pass.²  Applegate makes an organic version of their sliced turkey, but my TJ’s doensn’t carry it.  I would probably buy it, if it wasn’t too much more expensive than the other kind.  But so far I’ve been very pleased with this product even in its non-organic form.

Roast beef.  I only have 2 options here: Columbus and TJ’s.  Again, the Columbus is a bit of a mess; it has brown sugar and/or dextrose (yet another cleverly disguised name for “sugar”), plus potassium acetate and potassium lactate, plus some varities throw in sodium phosphate as well.  Happily, the TJ’s brand is much nicer here in the roast beef department than it was in the turkey area: the worst thing on the ingredient list is xanthan gum, which is not too awful in comparison.  Again, no organic options, but I’m okay with that.

That’s all we’ll need for our chef’s salad, but there’s a few other options I can recommend.

First of all, what are you going to do with any leftover slices of meat you have?  You can make sandwiches out of them, of course, but that involves grains and carbs,³ which you probably don’t want to deal with.  Happily, I’ve discovered that I don’t need bread to enjoy a sandwich: I just make a “cheesewich” instead.  Cheesewich (patent pending) is my personal concoction for enjoying sandwiches without bread.  The concept is extremely simple: Get yourself some decent sliced cheese that isn’t going to fall apart on you, take two slices, put your meat in between them, then eat it.  The end.  Brilliant, no?  I’ve honestly found that I don’t even miss the bread any more.  A turkey and roast beef cheesewich is really awesome, and I’ve come to like it even more without the bread.  Another excellent choice for the cheesewich is black forest ham.  Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to find any without added sweeteners, but, if you’re willing to overlook that (or cheat a little every once in a while), a ham-and-cheese cheesewich makes a pretty awesome lunch, especially when paired with a small salad such as the ones in this series.

Now, while none of the salads I’m going show you other than my chef’s salad will require meat, that’s not to say that you can’t add meat to any of them.  One excellent choice is canned chicken.  It’s precooked, easy to use, and typically has a ridiculously short ingredient list (look for something like: chicken, water, salt—this is what the Trader Joe’s brand has).  You can toss this into a salad as is, or add some simple seasonings first and maybe even give it a short trip in the microwave to add a hot element to an otherwise cold salad.

Cheese

Havarti (sliced).  When it comes to sliced cheese, Havarti is my new best friend.  Way more interesting than Monterey Jack (which is hard to find sliced anyway), typically firmer than provolone, more solid (and less ... distinct, shall we say) than Swiss—it’s the perfect pre-sliced white cheese for our chef’s salad, and excellent for cheesewiches as well.  Don’t get the “light” stuff: it tastes awful.⁴

Mexican blend (shredded).  Typically this will be a blend of cheddar, Monterey Jack, asadero and queso blanco (although some crappier brands may try to sneak in Colby or even mozzarella on you).  The TJ’s store brand is pretty good.  This is crucial for our Mexican salad.  Note that nearly all shredded cheese uses corn starch to keep it from clumping.  I generally accept this as an exception to my “no grains” policy, as it’s a pretty small amount.

Bleu cheese (crumbled).  So far I have yet to find a bleu cheese dressing that I like that’s also free from disreputable ingredients.  But happily I’ve found that, if you buy blue cheese crumbles and just add them directly to the salad, you don’t actually need bleu cheese dressing.

Feta cheese (crumbled).  Feta cheese is remarkably versatile; you may recall that it’s a crucial ingredient back in our original salad.  I still like the “Mediterranean herbs” version that TJ’s sells, but whatever you can lay hands on is good.  Just look out for preservatives.

Parmesan (grated).  We won’t be adding this directly to a salad, but it’s a vital ingredient in one of our dressings.  I actually like the blend of parmesan and romano cheese that TJ’s sells, but choose your own favorite.  As always, be wary of unnecessary preservatives.

As far as other cheeses go, we won’t need any, but I can always recommend a good sliced cheddar as being excellent for cheesewiches (I actually make all my cheesewiches with one slice of cheddar and one of Havarti), and you could try some crumbled goat cheese instead of feta if you’re into that sort of thing.  Personally I find goat cheese to be a bit strong for my tastes, but to each his own.

Storage

Typically you want to put your meat and cheese into the refrigerator drawer that’s not the fruit drawer (where you’ve got the humidity cranked up) or the veggie drawer (where you’ve got it cranked down).  But the main thing you want is a good, airtight seal.  If your meat comes in one of those packages with a little piece of plastic that “seals to keep in freshness,” screw that: stick it in a Ziploc bag.  For me, my roast beef will fit nicely in a quart-sized Ziploc, as long as I cut off the corners with a pair of scissors first.  (If I don’t, the sharp corners will tear holes in the bag.)  The Applegate turkey thankfully comes with its own Ziploc-style sealer.  The black forest ham is a long package that requires a gallon-size Ziploc.  Meats stored this way should last a few weeks.  The ham will eventually get white, crusty stuff on it (this is the fat congealing), and the roast beef will just turn shiny and make rainbows in the fluorescent kitchen lights.  The turkey will be hard to identify visually.  Trust your nose for all the meats: if it doesn’t smell yummy, toss it out.⁵

If you don’t use an entire can of the canned chicken, you’ll need to put those leftovers in your own sealed containers (either Tupperware-style, or Rubbermaid-style glass containers if you’re trying to avoid plastic).

The grated and crumbled cheeses come in plastic containers that seal pretty well.  I can keep the grated parmesan roughly forever, but the crumbled cheeses will start to smell a bit sour if they last more than 3 weeks or so (at which point, toss ’em).  The sliced and shredded cheeses typically have a Ziploc-style sealer, but really make sure you get as much air out of those packages as you can before you seal them.  Air is your enemy.  (Well, actually aerobic bacteria are your enemy.  So squish all the air out of the package and starve those little buggers out.)  For the sliced cheeses (or the meats), squish the living hell out of the packages to remove maximal air.  For the shredded cheeses, be a little more gentle, or else you’ll end up with a giant rubber cheese mass that won’t work in your salad nearly as well.  If you do a good job keeping the air out, the sliced and shredded cheeses should also last several weeks.  When they give up the ghost, they will nearly always start growing mold.  Unless you’re a qualified penicillin extractor or something, that means it’s time to toss ’em out.



Next time around, there’s still more shopping to do!  Next up: condiments.

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1 The ingredient list for my particular package has only 4 ingredients, actually: turkey, water, salt, and carrageenan, in that order.

2 However, Whole30 does not.  Carrageenan is specifically prohibited on Whole30, so bear that in mind if you’re trying to follow the program strictly.

3 Which aspect of the bread you consider worse depends on which of the nutritional tribes you’ve joined.  And let’s not even get into the whole gluten debate.

4 Of course, this is true of “light” cheese in general.  If you’re a staunch member of the low-fat tribe, this will be difficult for you.  But hopefully you at least believe that fat from cheese is “good” fat.

5 Or give it to your dogs.  Remember: their digestive systems can kill bacteria that would make us sick.

Another week drifting away ...

Well, it’s been a tough week, with some work stuff going on, a sick kid, an aborted camping trip, and some outside editing duties that I’ve been trying to catch up on.  So, unfortunately, I’ve been unable to find the time to gen up a proper post for you.  I do apologize.  But next week should be much more satisfactory, I’m thinking.