Talking Dreams

“No one wants to listen to your dreams.”

I mean, this is obvious, right?  So glaringly true that it’s practically a cliché.  After all, This American Life put it on a list of “Seven Things You’re Not Supposed to Talk About” in 2013.  In 2015, Amy Schumer worked it into a comedy skit on her show ... and that’s barely scratching the surface of how many comedians have made a joke about this.  Hell, given a Google search for the quote that introduces this blog post, we can find any number of articles expressing this thought, from sources as silly as Cracked to those as prestigious as Scientific American.  So, there’s nothing else to say about it, really.  No one wants to hear about other people’s dreams, it’s undeniably true, end of story.

Except ...

Well, I do.  I enjoy hearing about other people’s dreams just as much as I enjoy talking about mine.  Oh, sure: I don’t talk about my dreams with anyone else outside my family, pretty much in the same way that I don’t try to convince other people that Keanu Reeves can act or that Nickelback is a pretty good band, even though those are both things I believe.  But there are memes and then there are memes, ya know?  And you don’t buck “facts” that are buried in the public consciousness this deep.  Not unless you want to get into physical altercations.  Hey, I’ll bring up politics at work any time—hell, I’ll even bring up religion, if I’m feeling particularly saucy—but I will not try to convince my co-workers that Chuck E. Cheese has pretty decent pizza.  I’m not crazy.

And, honestly, I’m only going to be half-hearted in my attempt to convince you that listening to other people’s dreams isn’t the horrible thing you’ve always been told.  (And, as always, if half-hearted is still half a heart too much, feel free to remind yourself of the name of the blog.)  But it just sort of bugs me how very wrong almost everything about this myth is.  Let’s start with a quick overview of how much wrong there is in the articles from the afore-mentioned Google search.

First off, we can dispsense with the silly ones.  Cracked says:

There is no greater gap than the one between how fascinating dreams are to the dreamer and how fascinating they are to literally anyone else in the world.  Dennis from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia probably put it best: “Listening to people’s dreams ... is like flipping through a stack of photographs; if I’m not in any of them and nobody is having sex, I just don’t care.”

Of course, we must always remember that the entire point of Sunny is that it’s a show about terrible people and how funny it is to watch terrible people do terrible things.¹  Those of us who are not terrible people probably agree to a staggering degree that at least some photographs of other people not having sex are worth looking at.²  Also, the author was kind enough to use the word “literally,” which means his statement is trivially disprovable by providing a single counter-example, of which I am one.

The author of the opinion piece in the UK’s Metro was kind enough to do the same, right in the title: “Literally no-one cares about your dreams.” She continues:

There is no sentence less interesting, less exciting or less compelling than: ‘I had the weirdest dream last night’.

I can (literally, even) think of dozens of sentences less exicting or compelling to me.  In fact, probably the weirdest thing about this article is that the author ends it with:

For those who are still in doubt about whether or not it’s really such a heinous crime to share the story of your dream, ask yourself this: when someone tells you about a dream they’ve had, do you find yourself rapt, begging them to carry on, to make the story longer and to provide more detail?

Well, ummm ... yes, in fact, I do.  In fact, the dream that the author invents to prove how boring dreams are is this:

... they were at the office, but it wasn’t really the office because it was in Yorkshire, and everyone kept talking about sheep.

And, perhaps bizarrely, I really want to hear the rest of that dream.

The article from Vice is a bit of a head-scratcher.  Its title is “Why People Can’t Stop Talking About Their Extremely Boring Dreams,” and it admits:

When it comes to sharing our nightly musings, the overwhelming message seems to be: Just don’t.

But then the author goes to interview Alice Robb, author of a book on dreams, and gives us this:

Robb says it can feel “very intimate” to share a dream with someone, especially depending on your relationship with that person.  But, she adds, “because dreams so often are really cutting to the heart of our emotional lives and emotional concerns, sharing them is one of the best ways to process and understand them.”

I sort of get the feeling that the author of the article is trying to have it both ways.  Or perhaps that she wishes she could advocate sharing her dreams with others but realizes that she’s never going to get anywhere with that message.

The Scientific American article is the most disappointing though.  Titled “Why You Shouldn’t Tell People about Your Dreams” and, just in case you missed the message from getting beaten over the head with it the first time, subtitled “They are really meaningful to you but not to anybody else,” it contains a plethora of “facts” that just don’t ring true:

Because most dreams are negative (support for the threat-simulation theory), our bias in favor of negative information makes them feel important.

I feel really sad that this author’s dreams apparently reinforce this belief for him, because very few of my dreams are negative (at least of those that I remember; common theory is that you forget most of your dreams).  Many of them are utterly bizarre, of course, and sometimes they’re vaguely discomfiting, but that’s very different from “negative.” Of course, this author disagrees with my assessment of “bizarre” too:

We tend to think of dreams as being really weird, but in truth, about 80 percent of dreams depict ordinary situations.

There’s a scholarly article linked there as well, to “prove” the point, but I can only surmise that there’s a different definition of “ordinary situations” going on here, or that we’re just counting percentages differently.  Perhaps 80% of the dreams I can’t remember were about ordinary situations.  It may even be true that 80% of the dreams that I would never even want to share with anyone else are about ordinary situations.  But, come on: if I want to tell someone about my dream, it’s because it was downright weird.  Why would I want to regale you with a dream about an ordinary situation?  Why the hell would I even want to relive that dream ... because a big part of wanting to share your dreams is wanting to hold on to them.  Telling someone else about your dream manifests it, gives it reality in a way that almost nothing else will—not even writing it down.  Assuming you have a good listener, and the two of you can chuckle over the absurdities and marvel over the oddities, sharing a dream with another living, breathing soul can bring out more details than you initially thought you remembered, plus now someone else will remember your dream too.  And you can trot it out later and chat about how weird that was.

But here’s the most bizarrely incongruous passage.  Admittedly, this is the end of one paragraph and the beginning of another, but the author is the one who butted them up against each other, not me:

Just like someone having a psychotic experience, the emotional pull of dreams makes even the strangest incongruities seem meaningful and worthy of discussion and interpretation.

These reasons are why most of your dreams are going to seem pretty boring to most people.

What the hell?  “Most people” find psychotic experiences with strange incongruities and emotional pull boring?  Really?  Apparently I don’t know “most people,” because very few of the people I know would find that boring, and any I can think of off the top of my head who would aren’t people I wish I knew better, if you catch my drift.  How much imagination do you have to lack if you’re thinking, “you had a psychotic experience? that also carried emotional weight? oh, puhh-leeze—I could care less”???  Well, I’m sorry, but send those people to me.  I am fascinated to learn more.

Nevertheless, it would be foolish to completely ignore such a prevalent opinion, even if I do feel there’s quite a bit of bandwagonry going on here.  So, if you find yourself about to hear about the dream of a friend of yours, and you’re dreading it, here are some tips that maybe will make it a more pleasant experience.

A dream is not a story. It seems ridiculous that I have to point this out, but a lot of the complaints I hear about listening to other people’s dreams revolves around what an incoherent mess it is, and how there’s no proper ending to them.  Well, duh ... they’re dreams.  Dreams don’t follow internal story logic.  Dreams don’t have nice tidy beginnings and middles and ends, rising actions and falling actions and character growths.  They’re just little snippets.  Enjoy them as little snippets: little disconnected slices of unreality that can be appreciated in isolation and examined, not for meaning, but for intrinsic interest.  And, speaking of “not for meaning” ...

Stop trying to interpret the dream. This goes for whether you’re a listener or the dream teller.  Dreams don’t have to mean anything.  Sure, maybe sometimes they do, but there’s no way for you to tell whether this particular dream has a meaning or not, so stop trying to psychoanalyze it and just go with the flow.

Never ask “why?” This is sort of the combination of the above two points.  When someone tells you their dream and you respond with “but why did that part happen?” you’re missing the point.  It isn’t a story, so there is no logical answer, and it probably doesn’t have some deeper meaning, so there’s no deep psychological motivation to be found either.  It’s a question that can only make the teller feel dumb, and, I hate to tell you, but it doesn’t even have the side benefit of making you look smart, because it sounds like you’re trying to make dreams make sense, and smart people don’t do that.

And, finally, one tip for all the folks that, despite their better judgment, have decided to share their dreams anyway:

If your dream isn’t weird or unusual in some way, then don’t bother. Being a dream doesn’t exempt boring conversation from being boring.

I actually debated with myself on whether or not to share a dream of mine with you, dear reader.  On the one hand, it seems practically hypocritical not to support my premise with some actual, personal proof.  On the other, I recognize that I won’t sway everyone (or perhaps even anyone), and there’s also no point gifting people with a juicy dream if they’re not going to appreciate it.  I’ve decided to split the difference and give you just a few snippets from the dreams that I’ve had over the years.  After all, even the entire dream needs to be examined in terms of snippets, as I’ve explained above, so why not cherry pick what I consider to be the most interesting bits and leave them for you here?  Perhaps some of these will intrigue you and make you more interested to hear what other people might want to share.  Just don’t fall into the trap of thinking, “that does sound interesting ... I wonder how it turned out?” Remember: dreams don’t have endings.  It didn’t “turn out” any particular way; it just trailed off, or transmogrified into a totally different dream, or I just woke up.  Still, these are some of my favorite dream moments.

I dreamt that I wasn’t me, but that the actual me was also in the dream, and I ended up killing myself.  I dreamt I was driving a sports car and sometimes it would take off so fast I couldn’t keep up and then I would have to chase it down and get back into it.  I dreamt that I was with an old man and two younger men (his sons? grandsons? nephews?) and the old man told them they were forbidden to be angry until sundown (because of the religious holiday), and so they sat down until dark came and then the old man sprang up and shouted “Now we go get the bastards!” I dreamt I was writing a script that was being produced while I was still trying to finish it, and one of the characters was a disgusting cartoon cat named “Stash.” I dreamt that I dropped a pill in the carpet and, when I went looking for it, I found three completely different pills, one of which was a shiny rose-pink one partially covered with a hard white candy coating designed to resemble foam.  I dreamt my vacation cabin was invaded by badger-like creatures that hunted like the velociraptors from Jurassic Park.  I dreamt that my little sister was upset because she had to do a magic trick in front of her classmates and she was afraid they would find out that she was actually a witch.³ I dreamt that I was in love with the manager of an all-girl band, and at the end of the dream she turned into a ferret in my arms.  I dreamt that a sister and brother swam out to the middle of the ocean to a house that sat up on stilts, too high to reach, and they rang the underwater wind chimes that were the secret way in.  I dreamt about hoods made out of writhing tentacles that were forced onto your head, making you catatonic.  I dreamt that we were attempting to defeat a demonic carpet using holy water and blessed post-it notes on which had been written the address of Hell.

Somtimes I dream about famous people.  I dreamt that I was a noble at the time of the French Resistance, and my friend was played by Ryan Gosling.  I dreamt that Alex Keaton (as portrayed by Michael J. Fox, naturally) grew up to be an alien geneticist and lived in Eureka.  I dreamt that Terry Jones tricked me into giving him the answer he wanted about Parliament.  I dreamt that President Obama helped me investigate a mystery during which we uncovered a body but we couldn’t notify the authorities just yet, because we were too close!  I dreamt that I was telling Liam O’Brien about a dream I had in which I tried to ward off a bullet by holding up my hand and (of course) the bullet went right through it.⁴ I dreamt that I met actor Clifton Gonzalez Gonzalez and was trying to remember what movie I knew him from and he was helpfully recreating some of his past roles to try to jog my memory.

Sometimes all I get out of the dream is litte more than a name.  These are all names from my dreams: Stephen J. Tourettsal, Mark Hanahan, Renwe, Johnny “D-Legs” Crab, Freefall,⁵ A.B.E. (whose name was short for “Android Beyond Expectations”), Dar Beck (a weatherman), Memory (the ex-girlfriend of my eldest child), Merlock and Etheros and Devane (ethnic Riufus⁶ from Latvia and/or Russia), Boxilea Toxicity Brown (“Boxy” for short), Aryn Gill (an anthropomorphic duck wih a human sister named Deborah who had had small role in Pretty in Pink), Mitch (a female aerospace engineer; apparently her real name was Abigail Mitchell, at least according to Samuel L. Jackson, who shouted it out during an emotionally charged scene), the Captain Alexander (a drink, made with Alexander rum, of course⁷), Briscol (a town), Nacho de Vaca (a medieval town in Spain), fontana blue (a color), Pedrolischizenko (a dog whose owner only spoke to him in Hungarian⁸), SQL Snitch (a database of criminal informants), macrocellular degenerative evolution (an alien genetic disease), YaHaNaHael (a monster), Pontebello (a fancy book about cake and Hermetics).

Sometimes I all remember is a quote: “Men and women cannot coexist without blood somewhere.”⁹  “When a statement conveys a Great Truth, it matters not if it is a little lie.”

None of these are sensible, and very few of them have any deeper meaning.  But I think they’re all interesting, at least.  If any of my friends have bits and pieces of vignettes that are as interesting at these, I would love to hear about them ... cultural taboos be damned.  Dreams are insane, and surreal, and wonderful, and perturbing, and occasionally all those things at once.  I’m glad I know as many of them—mine and those of others I’ve been fortunate enough to hear—as I do.  Perhaps you should give it a try some time.  You never know what you’ll hear.

__________

1 Whether you actually find this funny or not probably varies from person to person.

2 If you somehow don’t believe that, just go find any of the number of sites full of staggeringly beautiful nature photos.  Here’s one to get you started.

3 Note: I do not have a sister, little or otherwise.

4 Note: the dream I was explaining was not a previous dream I’d actually had, but rather part of the same dream.

5 A character who I ended up adapting for my ongoing novel; you can see a cameo from him in Chapter 2 concluded.

6 Note: not a real ethnic group.

7 Note: not a real rum.

8 Note: I do not actually speak Hungarian.

9 To be fair, I was much younger when I dreamed this one.

That fresh new operating system smell ...

So, this weekend, I finally upgraded my laptop’s operating system, a disagreeable task that I’ve been putting off for about 4 months now.  Many of my friends and coworkers are no doubt wondering what the big deal is: just do it already.  Some of you may even be thinking that I was avoiding it just because it would involve rebooting my computer.  But my computer was crashing every few weeks anyway, which is why I agreed to this unpleasantness in the first place.  No, it’s not the pain of rebooting—don’t get me wrong: that’s a very real pain—it’s the massive time suck.  For the past several months, I’ve been working on some tricky stuff at $work, and the thought of being without a computer for a big chunk of the weekend was just a non-starter.

And, in case you’re thinking that my assessment of the amount of time it would take to upgrade my OS as “a big chunk of the weekend” is an exaggeration, I’ve now completed the task and I can tell you: it’s around 8 hours.  That’s soup-to-nuts, of course ... starting with trying to back everything up (upgrading your OS shouldn’t delete all your files, but it’s one of those things that you really don’t want to take any chances on), upgrading all the packages to the latest versions before starting, doing the actual upgrade, then trying to reconfigure whatever was deconfigured by being upgraded against your will.  But, still: 8 friggin’ hours.  It’s a major chore.

But the good news is that I completed the second of my 3 simultaneously ongoing major projects on Friday, so I had some free time, and I figured, what the hell.  So now it’s done.  It’s too early to say for sure, but I’m cautiously optimistic that the laptop situation is improved.  Maybe not entirely fixed, but at least better.  Probably.

It’s a short week this week, so this is all you get.  Tune in next week for something more substantial.

Moonside by Riverlight II

"Fuckin' Posh Like Dave Beckham"

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

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

Fun fact: when my eldest was a toddler, they thought that the refrain of Fatboy Slim’s second biggest hit¹ was “funk so rubber.” Besides that being a cute-kid story, it might also occur to you to wonder why my toddler had such excellent taste in music.  Well, I’d like to think I could take credit for a lot of it, but I definitely can’t take credit for that one: his mother is the big Fatboy Slim fan in the house.²  Now, “The Rockafeller Skank,” as it is officially known, is perfectly fine, but I’m not a huge fan like others in my family are.  However, the first time The Mother played “Wonderful Night,” I was entranced.  I’m not a huge fan of rap, but there are a few songs I like—mostly Ice-T or Public Enemy or some of the many random KRS-One breaks in the middles of songs in my collection—and there’s something about the rap here (performed by Lateef the Truthspeaker) that I just love.  I seem to be physically incapable of not singing along, even though I’m not very good at keeping up.  The wordplay is amazing, with verses like this:

We live the masterful life that’s mythical.
Feel its chords and its vibes atypical.
Do what you want; it’s all right, this mystical
Time you’ve got that’s alotted is plentiful.
If you stay in this moment so critical,
Let the music change your brainstem’s chemicals,
Make you feel like your spirit’s invincible
Force centrifugal
Reaching up to your pinnacle
Now.

And, of course, the most exquisite line ever, which was always going to be the volume title: “fuckin’ posh like Dave Beckham.”³  Cook’s mixing is excellent too, but Lateef is the star of this show for sure.⁴

In many cases volume II of one of my mixes is all the leftover bits that didn’t make it on volume I.  For Moonside by Riverlight, I didn’t have very many tracks left over.  “Wonderful Night” was one, and it only “didn’t make the cut” because, while I think it’s perfect for this mix in general, it just didn’t work anywhere in the first volume: it was too upbeat.  There were a few more upbeat tunes on volume I, but nothing like this.  In fact, you could make a good argument that this shouldn’t be considered lounge at all, but it just has a smooth feel to it that makes it perfect for this mix in my view.  And I’ve placed it squarely as the opener so that it can set the tone for what’s to follow.

Overall, these are still the smooth, jazzy, lounge-inspired tunes this mix promises, but several of them are a little more happy-making.  Following immediately after Fatboy Slim, we have “Skokiaan,” which was not originally done by Louis Armstrong, but he did one of the first versions in the US, and this is almost certainly the most famous one.  I’m pretty sure I know this song because my kid plays Fallout 3.  Nearly all the music in that is eary big-band fare, and my eldest really got into it.  They curated a Pandora channel seeded with Frank Sinatra and that sort of thing, and we were listening to it one day and I heard this.  Again, I’m not a huge Armstrong fan, but I can appreciate him sometimes, and I really dug this tune.  As often happens when I hear an old standard, I go looking for other versions to see which one I like best.  Sometimes, as with “Jump Jive and Wail” or “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” I end up finding a more modern version I prefer.  But sometimes, just as with “Sing Sing Sing” (from Salsatic Vibrato III) or last volume’s “Whatever Lola Wants,” you can’t beat the original.⁵

On the other hand, when it comes to “One for My Baby,” neither the original (by Fred Astaire, from 1943’s The Sky’s the Limit) nor the definitive (by none other than the godfather of lounge himself, Frank Sinatra) can compare to Hugh Laurie’s version, as far as I’m concerned.  Now, if you’ve watched A Bit of Fry and Laurie,⁶ you already know how musically talented Hugh Laurie is.  So when I found out he had put out a couple of albums of old jazz, blues, and lounge standards, I had to check them out.  I have to say, as much as I love Laurie, these albums are a mixed bag: while the man can play like nobody’s business, his voice isn’t perfect for every track, and some of them are too faithful to the originals for my taste.  But, as just about every artist does, when he hits it, he hits it hard, and “One for My Baby” is, to my mind, the best of the best.  When it comes to doing a slow, whiskey-soaked drawl, Laurie’s voice is perfect, and even the great Sinatra can’t beat him here, in my opinion.  It’s the slowest (and most melancholy) track here, and especially given the lyrics—a hard drinking man is expounding his troubles to a bartender at closing time—it’s the perfect closer for this volume.

Most of our returning artists hew to the slightly-more-upbeat throughline of this volume.  Cherry Poppin’ Daddies are back with “Pink Elephant,” Meaghan Smith brings us the slightly bouncy “I Know,” and there’s yet another excellent Yukimi Nagano vocal from Koop, “I See a Different You.” Pink Martini’s contribution this time around (the title track from their album Hang On Little Tomato) is a bit slower, granted, but, considering some of the tracks we’ve heard from them,⁷ I think it’s fair to say it’s fairly upbeat for them.  As for our final returning artist, many times when Lee Press-On and the Nails do lounge, they come off as almost unbearably goofy.  But “Well Did You Evah?” is somehow sophisticated and just the right amount of silly at the same time.

There are a few other obvious choices too.  It’s pretty amazing that we didn’t hear from Squirrel Nut Zippers last time, especially considering most of the time when we get to hear Katharine Whalen sing, we get exactly the smooth, loungy sound this mix is all about.  “It All Depends” is from Bedlam Ballroom, which is certainly not as good an album as Hot, but still quite good, and this is one of the highlights for sure.  The Blue Nile, who so far have only appeared on Numeric Driftwood III, are another natural choice; “Tinseltown in the Rain” is somehow both happy and relaxed, and I think I have an increased appreciation for its imagery now that I live in the environs of Tinseltown and know how rarely it actually rains.  Similarly, the Dream Academy’s amazing and poignant “Life in a Northern Town,” which I’ve loved since I first heard way back in 1985, is a natural here.  I can’t say it’s exactly upbeat, but it’s bold, and its “hey"s have a tendency to explode into otherwise quiet spots in the song in very exciting ways.  And, once again proving that anywhere the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies can go, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy is sure to follow, we finally see a contribution from them here.  “The Maddest Kind of Love” is pretty, and smooth, and fits in nicely on this volume.

Among my newer discoveries, I came to Feist not that long ago, and, while her ouvre is typically more suited to other mixes,⁸ one can’t deny that she can croon when she puts her mind to it.  “Gatekeeper” is an excellent example of just such a moment.  Shivaree you may recall me first discussing back on Smokelit Flashback III, and I even pointed out that their selection there (“Little Black Mess”) had some Moonside by Riverlight leanings.  So it should be no surprise to see them make their debut here with “New Casablanca,” which is one of their slower tunes, but it works very well here heading out to the closing of “One for My Baby.” Finally, Carmen Rizzo is someone we’ve seen several times before in this series; I first (and most extensively) talked about him on Smokelit Flashback IV.  He’s amazingly talented and verstile,⁹ and even beyond his initial appearance we’ve seen him on Rose-Coloured Brainpan II and Shadowfall Equinox IV.  Here, the lounge aspect is mostly provided by the smooth vocals of Grant-Lee Phillips.¹⁰  “As the Day Breaks” (apparently sometimes listed as “Snowflakes”) still retains the worldmusic vibe that Rizzo is so good at, but it also works very well here.

I also want to want to call attention to something I’ve done here that I don’t believe I’ve talked about before.  When I’m working on ordering tracks, I start by pairing up two tracks that seem like they ought to flow into each other, or perhaps three or four tracks that all seem to have something in common.  Slowly the small groups get shuffled around and joined together into larger and larger groups, and, in an ideal world, I end up with one continuous group comprising the entire volume.  But, then again, sometimes I end up with two gropus that seem like they could go together, or maybe they could each be separate, but also neither is long enough to make its own volume.  When this happens, I have two choices.  I could divvy them up into separate volumes and try to fill them out with more songs that go into each group.  Or I could just “glue” the two groups together with a little bridge.  Notable places we’ve seen this before are Rose-Coloured Brainpan I, where “Please Please Let Me Get What I Want” bridges the firmly downbeat first half to the ever-so-slightly more energetic second half that kicks off with “Groovy Tuesday,” and on Salsatic Vibrato III, where “The Dirge” leads into the powerful back-half opening of “A Tap Dancer’s Dilemma.” In the former case, that particular Smithereens track just wasn’t a strong enough opener to anchor an entire volume; in the latter, Diablo Swing Orchestra certainly could have carried a separate volume, but I had metamix reasons for wanting to keep those two groups together.  This time out, the first group comprises the first two-thirds of the volume, and the inimitiatble Caro Emerald kicks off a strong second group with “A Night Like This.” Much like CPD and BBVD, we first heard from Ms. Emerald on Salsatic Vibrato,¹¹ but her slower tunes work very well here.  But I needed a bridge to join up the two groups, so I went with “Intro” from Bonobo’s Animal Magic.  It’s slightly reminiscent of Jane’s Addiction’s “Thank You Boys” (which we saw last volume), and I think it makes a nice opener for the back-end of the volume.  But, just in case you were wondering why I had a song called “Intro” in the middle of the tracklist, hopefully that makes it make more sense.

Moonside by Riverlight II
[ Fuckin' Posh Like Dave Beckham ]

“Wonderful Night” by Fatboy Slim [Single]
“Skokiaan” by Louis Armstrong [Single]
“Hang on Little Tomato” by Pink Martini, off Hang on Little Tomato
“It All Depends” by Squirrel Nut Zippers, off Bedlam Ballroom
“Exquisite” by Shriekback, off Big Night Music
“Life in a Northern Town” by the Dream Academy, off The Dream Academy
“Tinseltown in the Rain” by the Blue Nile, off A Walk Across the Rooftops
“I Know” by Meaghan Smith, off The Cricket's Orchestra
“Blue Moon” by Models [Single]
“Pink Elephant” by Cherry Poppin' Daddies, off Zoot Suit Riot [Compilation]
“Well Did You Evah?” by Lee Press-On and the Nails, off El Bando en Fuego!
“Feeling Good” by Michael Bublé [Single]
“As the Day Breaks” by Carmen Rizzo, off The Lost Art of the Idle Moment
“Intro” by Bonobo, off Animal Magic
“A Night Like This” by Caro Emerald, off Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor
“Baby I'm a Fool” by Melody Gardot, off My One and Only Thrill
“I See a Different You” by Koop, off Koop Islands
“Maddest Kind of Love” by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, off Americana Deluxe
“Gatekeeper” by Feist, off Let It Die
“New Casablanca” by Shivaree, off Who's Got Trouble?
“One for My Baby” by Hugh Laurie, off Didn't It Rain

Total:  21 tracks,  78:32

First up in the unlikely category: “Blue Moon,” by Models.  Nowadays, we have a tendency to think “Blue Moon” is supposed to sound like the doo-wop version the Marcels put out in 1961.  But few remember that “Blue Moon” is a Rodgers and Hart composition first recorded in 1934 or ‘35.  When the Australian band Models (criminally almost unknown in the US except as a one-hit wonder for “Out of Mind, Out of Sight”) decided to do a version for the 12” of their first big Australian hit “Barbados,” they remembered.  This version hearkens back to many of the earlier versions, such as the Connee Boswell, the Billy Eckstine, and especially the Mel Tormé (from 1949).  Of course, I’d never heard any of those when I stumbled on this track at the end of the cassette version (only!) of Out of Mind, Out of Sight in 1985.  It was exotic and strange, and somehow evocative, and I’ve always had a soft spot for it.

There’s also a tune here from Shriekback, who I’ve noted previously is probably best suited for Slithy Toves, where they’ve contributed three tracks across two volumes, but they’ve also showed up in such diverse places as Rose-Coloured Brainpan, Shadowfall Equinox, and even Numeric Driftwood.  Their track here, “Exquisite,” is also a little bit slinky, and a little bit relaxing, but mostly it’s just smooth; it’s drawn from perhaps their mellowest outing, Big Night Music.

And, not so much unlikely for this mix as unlikely for me in general, two final tracks.  First up, Melody Gardot.  Now, if you don’t know who that is, that’s understandable, but hie thee hence forthwith to Wikipedia and read about how she nearly died in a car accident, learned music to help her regain her memory and sense of time, and eventually became an amazing singer.  In my opinion, her album My One and Only Thrill, is pretty fucking amazing, but I can’t really tell you why.  It’s full of jazzy torchsongs, which is not something I’m normally attracted to.  So, I can’t explain it, but I think she’s amazing, and “Baby I’m a Fool” is possibly her best, and I knew I had to include it here.

Finally, with nearly every artist that I dislike, there’s one song that is the exception.  Take Whitney Houston for instance—I really don’t like Whitney Houston.  In particular “Greatest Love of All,” which I especially despise.  And yet, there is “How Will I Know,” which I think is awesome.  And so it is with Michael Bublé.  I don’t particularly care for Mr. Bublé in general, but every once in a while he hits a good one.  There’s his turn with Barenaked Ladies on “Elf’s Lament,” which was so amusing that I named Yuletidal Pools I after him.  And then there’s “Feeling Good,” which is just a pretty damn good song all around.  I suppose it’s mostly because he hews so closely to the Nina Simone version (as opposed to the original,¹² which is more operatic and a bit bombastic), so I suppose we have Nina to thank more than Michael.  But, as good as Simone’s version is, Bublé’s has something that speaks to me even more.  It’s a moderately downbeat song with an upbeat message, and it’s perfect for this loungy mix.

Next time, we’ll have a crossover of sorts as my love of music and my love of D&D collide.

⇐ Moonside by Riverlight I

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1 In the US, where I live.  In the UK, it was his 5th biggest; interestingly, “Praise” was the biggest on both sides of the pond, but the intervening three I’d never heard of before looking up his discography on Wikipedia just now.

2 Although I am quite fond of the band where I originally heard Norman Cook—which is who Fatboy Slim is when he’s at home—the Housemartins, and even moreso the other musical act spawned from it, the Beautiful South (who I’ve talked about before in this series).

3 In order to fully appreciate this line, you need to know who Dave Beckham’s wife is.

4 It also has quite an awesome video.

5 Although, as I say, the Armstrong technically isn’t the original here.  But then the Goodman “Sing Sing Sing” and the Vaughan “Whatever Lola Wants” aren’t the originals either, as it happens.

6 And, if you haven’t, go do that right away.  Easily one of the top 5 British comedy shows of all time.

7 Such as “Veronique” on Rose-Coloured Brainpan II or “U Plavu Zoru” on Phantasma Chorale I.

8 For instance, we’ve seen her thus far on Porchwell Firetime and Sirenexiv Cola.

9 For instance, he’s one-third of Niyaz, another third of which is Azam Ali, another person whose versatility I’m somewhat in awe of.  You can listen to me blather on about her over on Apparently World I.

10 Who you may know from Gilmore Girls, if that’s your sort of thing.

11 In her case, on III and VI.

12 By which I mean either the Cy Grant version or the Gilbert Price version: take your pick, as they’re not significantly different from each other.

Closing out another Virgo birthday season

Well, all our birthdays are done for a bit: 4 out of 5 for the year, in fact.  This was a pretty easy weekend overall; our eldest is now 21, and thus fairly independent.  Not nearly as much work, don’t you know.

Still, not a lot of time left over for blog posts, I’m afraid.  Hopefully more next week.

What My Kid Did This Summer

According to the schedule, this week really should be a long post week.  However, we’ve entered the Virgo birthday season again: this weekend is The Mother‘s birthday weekend, and next weekend will be the eldest spawn’s.  So you’ll need to wait a couple more weeks for something substantial.

In the meantime, I picked up the middle spawn from camp on Friday—I mentioned last week that I thought it was his third year, but it’s actually his fourth.^*  Getting him to tell you what he did at camp is always somewhat painstaking, but the person who does the pick-up has the best shot, so I endeavored to gather all the info I could so I could report back to The Mother.  Here’s what I managed to get out of him:

• He ate pizza a lot.

• He had several counselors who he’d had before, including his lifeguard, codenamed Trillo.  (Counselors at Camp del Corazon, many of whom are medical folks, go by nicknames while at camp, for some reason that has never been completely clear to me.)

• Another of his counselors was an actor who looks like a viking.

• This year he had the camp’s first female doctor; her codename was Snowflake.

• He shot his badge with a BB gun, although he just sort of grazed it so you’d only notice if he specifically points it out.

• He won a competition at “disco bingo” and the prize was that his cabin got to jump off the dock into the water (this is a privelege normally reserved to seniors).

• He kayaked to Spain again.^**

• He went snorkeling and saw Garibaldis and a stingray and a leopard shark.

This is more info than we usually get, so we’re quite excited.  And possibly a bit jealous: I’ve never gotten to see a leopard shark in the wild.


Birthday weekend for The Mother was fairly chill; she and I are wanting less and less to go out and do “exciting” things and more and more just to be able to relax at home.  Sure, you can argue that we’re home all the time, so it’s nothing special to stay home.  But, here’s the thing: under normal circumstances, home is where you have to teach school, and pay bills, and take care of children, and clean up things.  Any time when you can actually just chill out, with your laptop or tablet, maybe hang out in the pool, have a glass of wine or a hard cider, and just do a whole lot of glorious nothing ... those are actually some lovely times.  This year we gave The Mother a hammock and a waterproof case for her Kindle to facilitate the relaxation vibe.  So far it’s been quite nice.


Anyhow, that’s pretty much all I got for this week.  Next week, most likely a brief recap of the next birthday weekend.

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* I did say that I was starting to lose track.
** As the story goes—as well as I understand it second-hand from my 13-year-old—there’s one “island” (no more than a large rock, really) that was accidentally omitted from the documents of the sale of Catalina Island.  Therefore, it’s “technically” still owned by Spain, and, thus, you can kayak to Spain from Catalina.

Another Camp Week

Today our middle child went off to summer camp again.  This is his third year, I believe; it’s starting to get to the point where I’m losing track of how often he’s gone.  You may recall that this is the child with the heart condition, which might make you wonder how we can send him off to camp, until I remind that we are amzingly lucky and live sufficiently close to Camp del Corazon, which is a summer camp designed specifically for kids with heart conditions and staffed by off-duty pediatric cardiologists and cardiology nurses.  It’s an amazing opportunity for my kid to go off to Catalina Island, which is a place even I haven’t gotten to go to yet, despite it being one of the first places I indentified as a must-see when I moved here 12 years ago.  So we take full advantage of it and he seems to enjoy it, although—as I’ve mentioned before—he’s the type of kid who likes to play things pretty close to the chest, so it’s always difficult to say for sure.  But I’m glad he gets the opportunity to be out from under the shadow of the eldest and the tyranny of the youngest for a week.  I’m sure he’ll have fun.

In the meantime, The Mother will take said youngest off to Lake Cachuma for some quality mother-daughter time, and I’ll take a few days off work for a bit of a staycation, and technically speaking the eldest will still be wandering around (they have work, as well as their second week of college), but I’ll barely notice that one.  So, a quiet week for me.  Hopefully I’ll have the opportunity to catch up on some pet projects.  We shall see.

Next week, something more substantial.  Probably.

D&D and Me: Part 4 (If I Could Talk to the Animals)

[This is the fourth 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 playing a lot of different games, including a lot of D&D.  More importantly, playing a lot of very different characters.]


One of the most awesome things about D&D—all tabletop roleplaying games, really—is that it’s open to a lot of different playstyles.  Different people can get different things out of it, and that’s great.  I’ve talked before about my personal goals: chiefly, that I believe that roleplaying is storytelling and, in any story, character is king.  So I’m one of those folks who puts a lot of effort in my character when I’m a player, and wants my players to do the same when I’m the GM.  D&D can feed a lot of needs for people: a need for tactical combat simulation with more flexibility than any computer game can provide, a need for an improv space where you’re not limited by even a rough story outline but can do (or at least attempt) literally anything that pops into your head ... or, for many, it’s even simpler than any of that.  It’s a chance to play make believe, like you used to do when you were a kid.  A chance to return to a time when you could be anything ... be anyone.  Don’t like your name? fine, pick a new one.  Frustrated by your family situation? no worries: recast yourself as the long-lost heir to a vast fortune, or an orphan who discovers their parents were superspies who had to give them up for their own safety.  Don’t like your age? poof! you’re a little kid, an old man, a middle-aged matron with a huge family, an aging oil baron, an alien intelligence trapped in the mind of an infant, a faerie changeling in a pre-adolescent body, a girl who falls down a rabbithole, an orphan boy who finds out he’s a wizard, a girl whose house is carried away by a tornado, one of a family of orphans whose parents were involved in a secret international organization.  Anything.

And that’s all D&D is, really.  It’s make-believe for grown-ups.  Well, and still for kids too, but for kids who are ready to stop fighting about whether your invincible forcefield actually stops my laser sword or if it’s really true that MY LASER SWORD CAN CUT THROUGH ANYTHING!!  It’s just a way to roll some funny dice and figure out who wins: unstoppable force, or immovable object.  And what you use that for is to relive those childhood fantasies about being anything you could imagine.  Or anything you could steal from popular culture.

When I was a kid, I was really into animals.¹  So a lot of who I wanted to be was wrapped up in Tarzan, and Mowgli, and Dr. Dolittle.  This is one of the very few concepts that D&D struggles with, actually ... the closest I ever came was playing a “beastmaster” bard (technically, the “meistersinger” kit from The Complete Bard’s Handbook).  You might ask: what do bards have to do with animals?  But apparently the theme was sort of a “pied piper” character.²  I really loved this character, although his name and stats haven’t survived, unfortunately.  But he was problematic in a fundamental way, because a beastmaster-style character “breaks the action economy.”  This is a phrase us D&D nerds use when we talk about characters who can do too much in a single turn.  How much you can do in a turn is limited in different ways for different versions and editions of D&D, but it’s always limited.  My beastmaster character had a weasel, a leopard, and a jaguar, which meant that when my fellow party members were taking one turn, I was taking four, because I was essentially four characters.  Sure, the weasel couldn’t do much, but even being three characters can monopolize a combat.  Eventually the GM put his foot down and I had to retire that character, and I’ve never seen anything approaching it ever since.³  But, you know, there are plenty of other ways to do animals in fantasy settings.

There are druids, for instance.  As a druid, you get to hang around with animals, talk to them, and even turn into them.  I played a druid for many months, possibly even years.  I have a vague recollection of doing so twice, although I may be misremembering ... certainly Sillarin is the only one whose name and character sheet has survived.  He was, according to the latest sheet I still have, an 8th level half-elven druid, with +1 leather armor, a ring of protection, a ring of invisibility, and a staff of the woodlands,⁴ who favored spells like entangle, faerie fire, dust devil, and spike growth.  He was left-handed, and the “flaw” he took was “tongue-tied.”  Back in those days, you could accept roleplaying disadvantages in exchange for mechanical advantages, which is overall a terrible system if your goal is to have roughly balanced characters.⁵  On the other hand, there are many cases in my own experience where those flavorful disadvantages are the main things I remember about the character.  And that’s never more true than in Sillarin’s case, where I decided that interpreting “tongue-tied” as “having a stutter” was just a cop-out.  Sillarin’s issue wasn’t with stuttering; in fact he spoke rather eloquently, and often at great length, and sometimes, if you got him started, he couldn’t really stop, and it was just that, sometimes, or even often, you might say, if you knew him, sometimes when he began a sentence, usually with the best of intentions, he would somehow get lost in the middle of it—through no fault of his own, mind you!—and you might never see him emerge from the other end, which could make conversational gambits with him somewhat ... tiring.  I loved playing Sillarin, who was endearingly annoying (as opposed to annoyingly annoying), and not exactly heroic, but not exactly not heroic either, and who believed that good could not exist without evil, which meant that, in the end, evil wasn’t all that bad, and that the preservation of nature was really the most important thing.

The next time I returned to the concept of a nature-loving (and, this being D&D, pretty much nature worshipping) character was with my first female character: Ellspeth, cleric of the nature domain.  My party wanted me to play a cleric for a change (druids can provide some healing, but not as much as a proper cleric can dish out), so I was doing something I’ve often done over the years: building a character to fill a gap, but trying to find a way to make it interesting for me.⁶  I’ve always thought of this as being somewhat akin to writing poetry using meter and rhyme: sure, free verse is fun and all, and you get to break the “rules,” but sometimes giving yourself constraints—even artificial constraints—will force you to get more creative than you otherwise would.  So how could I take the concept of “cleric” (which many, many people view as equivalent to “walking first-aid kit”) and make it actually fun?  My min-max-ing friend (who may well have been my GM at the time too) suggested I find a race with a bonus to wisdom, which is the primary ability score for clerics.  But racial wisdom bonuses are hard to come by; one of the few races that get it is the swanmay, which is just a refluffed human who can turn into a swan.  They make excellent rangers and druids, and, yes, clerics, but the one catch is: only women are inducted into the swanmay order.  No men allowed.  I wasn’t looking to play a female character, but I didn’t dismiss it out of hand either.  Could I take on that challenge?  Playing against type is one thing, but playing against gender is quite another, and I think it may be harder for heterosexual cisgendered males (especially younger ones) to do so than their female counterparts.  Intellectually, we all knew that playing a female character didn’t indicate any tendency towards being gay, but societal messaging can be insidious and doesn’t always respond to logic.  So playing that first woman was a bit daunting, I won’t lie.  But there were a lot of things to make up for it.  A swanmay is essentially a lycanthrope—a wereswan, in a weird way.  Where Sillarin worshipped Silvanus, Ellspeth worshipped Artemis, the huntress, and took the bow as her signature weapon.  Her flaw (still taking those to get the corresponding benefits, of course) was a phobia of the undead, which she acquired at a very young age when her family was wiped out by zombies or somesuch, leaving her as the sole survivor.  Raised by elves and then inducted into the swanmay order, she hated undead and vowed to kill them where she could find them, but she was also terrified of them, leaving her with difficult choices when confronted with them.  Since I had dumped charisma for her stats (most of us dumped charisma back in those days), she was blunt and plain-looking, totally unremarkable personality-wise.  But she was fiercely loyal to her friends, had a love for her horse Fiona, animal empathy, omen reading, and in addition to her bow could throw a mean chatkcha (which was just the closest D&D equivalent I could find to a glaive) and favored the hatchet for close-up work.  Unlike druids, when a swanmay transformed, her clothes and equipment just dropped to the ground and had to be retrieved later, which meant that, just as would an involuntarily transformed lycanthrope such as a werewolf, Ellspeth would come back to human form naked and vulnerable.⁷  This never bothered her; I decided that someone who had to go through that process with this much regularity had probably abandoned the quaint concept of modesty long ago.  She achieved 9th level, as near as I can tell from my old character sheets, and had an even more impressive array of magic items than Sillarin had amassed, including a staff of curing, a cloak of elvenkind, and a bow of accuracy.  She was often gruff and perhaps she sometimes complained about having to heal everyone all the time, but she was yet another character that I developed a sort of closeness to, and one which stretched my concept of what sort of character I could be if I pushed myself to explore parts of myself I hadn’t yet discovered.



Next time: even more characters that I played, and what they meant to me.

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1 As I’ve already mentioned a couple of times in this series.
2 That explains the German name, I guess?
3 Although I’m currently working on a way to import the concept into fifth edition.  If I can figure out a way to do it without breaking the action economy again, I’ll really have something.
4 For those who are familiar with newer versions of D&D but not the older ones, this was a pretty standard amount of magical loot for a 2e character of that level, although I agree it seems excessive by today’s standards.
5 Whether D&D characters of different classes—particularly when pitting fighters against wizards—are even remotely balanced in any edition of the game is an ongoing debate that will probably never die.
6 For a more recent example of me doing this, you could go back and review my character concept for Arkan.
7 It is probably worth wondering why the designers intentionally assigned this particular disadvantage to a race composed only of women.  The early days of D&D are not particularly enlightened in terms of feminism (or any other ism, for that matter).

Another fallow week

A bit of a hectic week this time, so I’ve got nothing for you, really.  Try again next week.

Mystical Memoriam I

"Behind the Purple Stars"

[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.]

Wikipedia tells us that a celesta is a “struck idiophone operated by a keyboard,” and that “the keys connect to hammers that strike a graduated set of metal (usually steel) plates or bars.” In other words: piano on the outside, glockenspiel on the inside.¹  It has a tinny sound that’s vaguely reminiscent of a child’s music box, but much richer and more complex.  This makes it ideal for imparting a magical, childlike quality to music, which you can hear in its most famous use prior to the 20th century, “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from The Nutcracker, or when it subsitutes for the keyboard glockenspiel in The Magic Flute or the glass harmonica in The Carnival of Animals, or in pop songs such as “Rhythm of the Rain” or “Novocaine for the Soul”, and of course in soundtracks.  For instance, that’s a celesta you hear in the opening bars of “Pure Imagination” from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, and it’s even more prominent in the opening of “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” from the classic Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.  But surely the most recognizable celesta strains in all of musicdom are found in John Williams’ recurring theme from the Harry Potter movies: “Hedwig’s Theme.” Just the first few notes are enough to transport the listener to a world of magic and child-like wonder.²

Of course I was familiar with this recurring theme through the movies, and I also felt it was pretty perfect.  Could there be other musical takes on the combination of magic and nostalgia that one gets from a re-viewing of the world through the eyes of a child?  Sure, but would they ever be as good?  Nah, probably not.

But, as I was perusing Jamendo one day several years back—I talked about Jamendo, and in particular their hosting of what seem to be soundtrack portfolios, back on Phantasma Chorale I—I ran across a track entitled “3 Minutes Later” that had a very ineffable Harry-Potter-like quality to it, despite not being in any way derivative of “Hedwig’s Theme” (actually, it’s more reminiscent of the scene from Goblet of Fire where the students from Beauxbatons arrive).  I thought, hell: put this together with some Harry Potter music, perhaps some of the lighter Coraline fare, and we could have a real mix on our hands.

So now we do.

The obvious choices here are our mix starter, the aforementioned track by (probably would-be-soundtrack-composer) artist Greendjohn, my Bruno Coulais pick “Exploration,” and “Prologue” from Harry Potter & the Sorcerer’s Stone.  I actually pored over all the instances of “Hedwig’s Theme,” both solo and buried in other tracks, and I think it just doesn’t get any better than this one, which is the original presentation.  To me, that’s the perfect opener, and the other two follow in quick succession, and then I only had about 70 more minutes to fill.  Where in the world was I going to find more candidates that would fit this theme?

Well, first off, back to Jamendo to scour the other “pseudo-soundtracks” for possibilities.  That led me to zero-project, a somewhat mysterious artist: I would guess they’re in Greece, from the TLD of their website’s domain, but other than that, I can’t tell you much.  But they do some great cinematic music, and there are two tracks here: “Princess of My Heart,” an almost romantic piece, and “Forest of the Unicorns,” from what could be a pretty decent fantasy gaming soundtrack, Fairytale.  Also on Jamendo I discovered Epic Soul Factory,³, an orchestral group from Spain that does some pretty great cinematic music as well.  Their simply-titled “Love” is probably more on the nostalgic side than the magical one, but it works well enough here, I think.

Real soundtracks work well, too.  There’s a short bridge here from Jon Brion’s score for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind⁴, and the “Love Theme” from Until the End of the World by Graeme Revell, which is a flute-filled little bridge between the first zero-project track and the Mannheim Steamroller.  “La Clé de la victoire” is also a fairly short track, this time from The City of Lost Children by Angelo Badalementi, which also gives us a longer piece, “Le prince de l’opium.”⁵  These two abandon the flute for some lower-register woodwinds, and the latter even layers on some harp and strings, but they still maintain the magical feel that this mix is all about.  Finally, “Memory,” by the Seatbelts off the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack, was too on-the-nose not to include (and plus I’m pretty sure it has some of that sweet celesta in it).

One very early track I picked for this volume is its longest, “Minitoka,” by DJ Food, originally a loose collaboration of various electronic artists and producers but now mostly a one-man operation.  Like many artists of this nature, I find a lot of the music to be repetitive and only vaguely interesting, but every once in a while you find a hidden gem.  I originally heard “Minitoka” on the “Zen” music channel,⁶ and I was immediately struck by its alternating harp-and-bell-like glissandoes with pan flute trills.  No doubt both are electronically enhanced—if not entirely electronically generated—but it still retains a lyric, magical quality that immediately put me in mind of this mix.

I figured other, similar downtempo (a.k.a. “chill”) electronica might work as well, so I went searching through some of those albums too.  This led me to “Zamami,” by Plaid,⁷ which uses some synthy subvocal undertones for the memoriam and what are probably tubular bells for the mystical.  I also found “Behind the Bamboo Curtain,” by the Karminsky Experience, which really leans more out of chill and into trip-hop.  I can’t remember how I discovered these guys, but they’re quite good; we saw them previously on Apparently World.  This track floats in on a shimmering curtain of chimes and then adds a sitar for a more subcontinental flavor of magical.

Of course, ambient is fairly adjacent to downtempo, so I went looking there as well.  Jeff Greinke is an artist I normally reserve for my Shadowfall Equinox mix, but, as I’ve mentioned, he’s an eclectic musician whose every album is a little bit different.  His Winter Light is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: mostly tunes that are brittle and a bit cold.  Overall more suited to a whole different mix.⁸  But “Orographic” is a little different: for some reason, it makes me envision a frozen lake, where the water has receded and then refrozen so that there’s an air pocket between the two layers of ice, and the sunlight filters through the surface layer and glitters off the stray ice columns, creating a sparkling alien landscape ... or maybe it’s just me.

But probably the richest musical vein to mine, outside of cinematic, is new age.  As I’ve said, there’s not a lot of new age that I really enjoy, but Anugama is right up there.  “Purple Dawn” is another track that doesn’t play coy in its title: it evokes day breaking over a quiet forest glade, which is certainly its own kind of magic.  David Arkenstone I’m a little less bullish on, but he does have a song every now and again that speaks to me, and “Stepping Stars” has that exact tinkling, mystical quality that I’m looking for here.  (Also, note that, due to pretty much every song here being instrumental, I employed my tactic from Classical Plasma and just glued words from different titles together, so “Puple Dawn” plus “Stepping Stars” gave me most of it, and the Karminsky tune provided the preposition.)  Finally from the new age genre, our closer here is from Peruvian-descended Australis.⁹  “Little Clockmaker” is indeed reminiscent of a timepiece, but more like the scenes you may have seen in movies or videogames where some small character is confronted by the grandeur of a clockwork mechanism that is giant to them, and they must navigate the turning gears and spinning oscillators in order to reach some goal.  It’s the perfect closer for this volume.

Mystical Memoriam I
[ Behind the Purple Stars ]

“Prologue” by John Williams, off Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone [Soundtrack]
“Exploration” by Bruno Coulais, off Coraline [Soundtrack]
“3 Minutes Later” by Greendjohn, off Loophole
“Minitoka” by DJ Food, off Kaleidoscope
“Behind the Bamboo Curtain” by the Karminsky Experience Inc., off The Power of Suggestion
“Postcard” by Jon Brion, off Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind [Soundtrack]
“Paradise Found” by Martin Denny, off The Exotic Sounds of Tiki Tribe [Compilation]
“Orographic” by Jeff Greinke, off Winter Light
“Princess of My Heart” by zero-project, off Autumn Prelude
“Love Theme” by Graeme Revell, off Until the End of the World [Soundtrack]
“Full Moon” by Mannheim Steamroller, off Halloween: Monster Mix
“La Clé de la victoire” by Angelo Badalamenti, off The City of Lost Children [Soundtrack]
“White Woodlands” by Nox Arcana, off Winter's Majesty
“Memory” by the Seatbelts, off Cowboy Bebop [Soundtrack]
“Love” by Epic Soul Factory, off Xpansion Edition
“Stepping Stars” by David Arkenstone, off Valley in the Clouds
“Zamami” by Plaid, off Double Figure
“Purple Dawn” by Anugama, off The Lightness of Being [Compilation]
“Le prince de l'opium” by Angelo Badalamenti, off The City of Lost Children [Soundtrack]
“Forest of the Unicorns” by zero-project, off Fairytale
“Little Clockmaker” by Australis, off The Gates of Reality

Total:  21 tracks,  71:50

For the rest, I had to get more creative.  I figured that gaming music would be a good source, but most of it turned out be way too dramatic for this mix.  There were mysterious creepy tracks, and sweeping tracks that evoked a wizards’ duel, but nothing that seemed to fit this much quieter theme.  The only thing I could really settle on was “White Woodlands” (which I suspect also has a bit of celesta in it) by gaming music mainstays Nox Arcana.  Normally NA focuses on the darker side of fantasy, but Winter’s Majesty, while still dark in some places, has a bit more light to it.  “White Woodlands” is probably the lightest track on that album, although I suspect it may be the darkest one here.  But the contrast of the sparkling (probably) celsta with the deeper (probably) tubular bells works well.

Similarly Mannheim Steamroller’s Halloween: Monster Mix was an unlikely place to find a quiet, mystical tune, but “Full Moon” really fits that bill.  The background crickets counterpoint the slow synth notes that seem to drop like water falling onto a quiet nighttime scene.  And, last but not least (although possibly most unlikely), we have “Paradise Found” by Martin Denny, the father of exotica.  While most exotica evokes (quite deliberately) the sound of the Pacific Islands (and Hawaii in particular), there are deeper jungle tracks, and the occasional quiet track such as this one.  I can’t say for sure, but I strongly suspect that’s a vibraphone that’s giving the this great track its mystical, nostalgic feel.

Next time, we’ll go back to some smooth loungin’ around.

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1 Some people would say “xylophone,” but the bars on a xylophone are made of wood, not metal.  Yes, all your toy “xylophones” are actually glockenspiels.

2 For a pretty good breakdown of what makes this music so perfect for a story about wizards, professor of music theory Mark Richards has a fascinating discussion.

3 Although they’ve moved to Bandcamp nowadays.

4 We’ve seen that soundtrack in this series before, on Paradoxically Sized World II.

5 We’ve also seen this soundtrack before, on Darkling Embrace and Phantasma Chorale.

6 I talked about my cable/satellite provider’s “Zen” channel back on Paradoxically Sized World I.  Although it’s also fair to note that a) that provider doesn’t have that channel any more, and b) I don’t have that provider any more.

7 Another artist I discovered via LittleBigPlanet.  We’ve seen them, naturally enough, on Paradoxically Sized World II.

8 Which we shall (probably) come to in the fullness of time.

9 Whom you may remember from their turn on Shadowfall Equinox IV.

Quiet week, just a few demons to deal with ...

This week The Mother took the sprite off camping for the latter part of the week, while I stayed home with the other two.  I took a couple days off from work and mainly just hung around the house, catching up on a few things, enjoying the pool for a change, having a little peach bellini during the day and just generally relaxing.  One of the things that we decided to do with our newfound free time was to build out a giant-ass Heroscape map—you remember our love of Heroscape, right?—and have one of our crazy 2-vs-1 games, thus monopolizing the dining room table for days, if not weeks.  Here’s the map:

And here’s the pitched battle betwixt the demon horde that my eldest brought to bear (complete with custom demonlord that they’re testing out) and the righteous warriors that the Smaller Animal and I put together to combat it.  The demons have taken out most of us, but you can see one remaining templar cavalryman and his knight leader Sir Gilbert (from my middle child’s army) right in the demonlord’s face, while the only two guys I have left are that awesome angel Raelin at the top of the hill, providing her divine blessings from a safe distance, and you can just make out the back of Van Nessing, the monster hunter, helping the rest of the templars take on those death knights and mezzodemons.

It was a pretty epic battle, and it still ain’t over yet, but I think the forces of good, though having incurred serious losses, will eventually carry the day.  That giant-ass demon guy is down to one life left.


Anyways, that’s all for now.  More exciting stuff next week.  Probably.

D&D and Me: Part 3 (Playing the Roles)

[This is the third 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.]

[When we left off last time, I had sort of kind of played D&D, but not really knowing what the hell I was doing.  Still, many characteristics of those early games still hold true today (or perhaps are true again): I was the GM, I homebrewed a lot of stuff, I made sure my PC didn’t die, and I played a GMPC.]

To understand my D&D experience in college, we first have to understand a bit about my overall college experience.  I went to college right out of high school, as many folks do nowadays, but back then I was the first person in my family to do so.¹  I went somewhat aimlessly for two years: I did well in a bunch of classes, did horribly in others, and dropped more than a few.  After two years, I had neither a major nor enough credits to technically qualify as a junior.  I decided that college was too hard and dropped out to go work in the Real World™.  Well, after 3 years of that, I decided that working in the Real World was even harder (most of my readers no doubt just said “duh” under their breaths) so I decided to go back to get my degree.  Long story short, I ended up spending my last 3 years of college about 3 years older than everyone else.  Being in most cases the only person around old enough to buy beer certainly has its uses in terms of popularity, and I found myself with a much larger friend pool in this second college stint.

I was also attending college with one of my best friends from late high school and the period just afterwards.  He was 4 years younger than I, not even a freshman when I was a senior, but his mom had been my Spanish teacher, so I’d known him forever.  And he was always much more gregarious than I was, so I inherited this large group of people who were predisposed to think kindly of me because we had this great friend in common.  And, at some point, my friend says to me, “hey, you used to play that Dungeons & Dragons thing, right?” D&D was never his thing, but some of those other folks were into it, so maybe I could hook up with them?  I was a bit hesitant, because remember: I still didn’t really have a clue what I was doing when it came to playing the game.  But at least I had played before, and that counted for something, and soon I was inducted into my first real gaming group.

I first joined that group in about 1990, and played in it very regularly until I moved to Maryland in 2004.  (And my very last game with the group was on the occasion of my going away party when I moved to California in 2007.)  Of course, people came and went continuously throughout that 14 years, and, much like the paradox of Theseus’ ship, it could be argued that it wasn’t really the same group at all by the time we got to the end of that period, with only 2 of us original members remaining.²  By the time it was over, we had not only played every version of D&D up to that point (1e, 2e, 2e + Skills and Powers, 3e, and 3.5e), but dozens of other games besides: Vampire, Call of Cthulhu, Star Wars (two different versions), Traveller, GURPS, Wheel of Time, Mage, Trinity, and In Nomine.  We further rolled up characters for but never played (or only played an introductory session of) Shadowrun, Hero, and BESM.  Games which I bought but never played included Palladium, 7th Sea, Earthdawn, EverQuest, and Jorune.  I don’t reel off this long list to impress you, but rather to impress on you what a huge part of my life this was.  It didn’t consume all my spare time, of course—there were videogames, and books, and TV and movies, and beaches and skiing, and a little bit of dancing and a lot of drinking—but I doubt there was a single month in that 10-to-14-year period when I didn’t play at least once, and, outside of Novemeber and December when the holidays would invariably bork our schedules, not even that many weeks where we didn’t play.

At first, it was all one insane, connected campaign.  If we got bored with one setting or plotline, we just planehopped somewhere else: from Ravenloft to Athas to Sigil, from White Plume Mountain to Castle Amber to a strange land laid out like a chessboard.  Some of us would keep the same characters, some of us would roll up new ones, and I have a lot of difficulty remembering which characters adventured with which and where one adventure ended and the next began.  I remember we decided to play an “evil campaign” once and, instead of rolling up new characters, we just turned all our old characters evil.  It had rather dire consequences for the ranger and the cleric, but I was a druid at the time (and therefore true neutral, whether I liked it or not), so I just sort of shrugged and said “whatever.”³  Occasionally our characters would die, but more often we’d just get bored with them and “retire” them ... you know, just in case we ever needed them again.⁴  Later, we adopted a rotation system, where we would take turns being the GM so that each person had more time to prepare for their campaign, and we would play a different game—often a whole different game system—every week.  Thus, even when we were playing Vampire or Star Wars or Call of Cthulhu, we were still playing D&D concurrently.

My history as a player was both weird and predictable.  Just like with comic book characters, I liked the oddballs.  Fighters were boring: all they could really do (at least pre-third-edition) was swing their swords and repeat.  Wizards were both diametrically opposed and exactly the same: they had this huge plethora of spells (which came with a massive amount of bookkeeping work), but, at the end of the day, all they could really do was cast their spells and repeat.  I was drawn to the classes that nobody else wanted to play because they were strange or “underpowered,” classes that couldn’t do any one thing better than anyone else but could do a little bit of everything.  I favored druids and bards,⁵ once a nature cleric (who was almost a druid, really), and later on a psionicist and then a monk (who also had a few psionic levels).  I also experimented with hybrid characters, using the Skills & Powers system, trying to create the perfect blend of thief and wizard.  The two times I was reluctantly talked into playing a straight fighter, I chose a half-ogre the first time and an alaghi (pseudo-yeti) the second time.  For yet another evil campaign, I played a wannabe necromancer who was so low-level that he could only reanimate zombie chickens.⁶  Basically, any excuse to do something different.

Again, it’s an interesting exercise to analyze my behavior in hindsight.  Could I say I was embracing diversity, even back so far as when I was trying to “collect” all the monsters and let them all have an equal place in my fantasy world?  Well, somewhat ... but I don’t want to hyperidealize my younger self.  Absolutely I was always happy to go around slaughtering orcs and goblins just because that’s what you were “supposed” to do in the game, and I will admit it never really occurred to me to question that until I started hearing about other people doing it first.  So please don’t imagine that I’m claiming more social consciousness than I deserve.  But I do want to give credit to D&D for a little of that type of thing.  For instance, the first time I ever imagined myself as a woman was because I wanted to play a swanmay, and there are no male swanmays.  At that time, I wasn’t yet comfortable enough in my identity and sexuality that this was a no-brainer for me: I struggled with that decision for quite a while before I took the plunge.  And I no doubt didn’t do a very good job portraying a woman—just putting on someone else’s shoes doesn’t automatically make you understand their journey.  But it’s a start, and, as they say, every journey starts with a single step.  Since that first female character (Ellspeth, my nature priest), I’ve played straight women on at least two other occasions, and once a shapeshifter character who was very gender fluid.⁷  And while I might not be ready to give roleplaying credit for broadening anyone’s horizons to the point of epiphany, I can certainly say that it helped me avoid the trap of having all my imagined characters default to white / male / cis / etc—in other words, exactly like me.  And that’s definitely a good thing.

Next time: I’ll take a little closer look at what playing all these different roles meant to me.

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1 Except for possibly my grandfather on my mother’s side, who was the only other person before me to even attend.  But I think even then there was some delay between high school graduation and college matriculation.

2 Actually, technically speaking, I wasn’t an original member myself, so there was really only one.

3 What I actually said had more to do with maintaining balance in the universe and how we’d probably done enough good in the world that we could afford to do a little evil for a while without tipping the scales too much.  But it certainly meant “whatever.”

4 My absolute favorite was my friend Tim’s dwarf (fighter? cleric?), who took his helm of underwater breathing (or somesuch; I’m probably misremembering the exact name of the item) and retired to the ocean floor to become a kelp farmer.

5 Prior to second edtion, bards were notoriously impossible to play; my first bard character was drawn from the Dragon magazine article “Singing a new tune: A different bard, not quite so hard”.

6 I mean, theoretically, he would have been able to raise proper zombies at some point.  But we didn’t stick with that campaign very long.

7 That would be in the Trinity game.  For some reason, I was very attracted to the biokinetics in the game, who could change their body shapes and facial features pretty much at will, and I decided I was actually 3 or 4 different people living in one body, with different races and genders.

SoCal 'Scapers Summer Gameday, 2019

This weekend we had a Heroscape gameday.  Now, you probably remember that every year we do a Heroscape tournament, and this year will no doubt be no exception.  But, at the end of the tourney, when we’re saying our farewells, we always promise that we’ll get together more than once a year, and maybe have just a casual gameday or two some other time during the year.  We always say that ... but we (almost) never do.  In fact, I would say that, in the decade or so that I’ve been going to SoCal Heroscape tournaments, we’ve managed to get together for a non-tourney event about twice.  We just suck at getting organized.

But we finally managed it, yesterday at a local game store called Paper Hero’s Games.  I and all three of my children, plus the middle one’s best friend, made the (moderately short) trek down and met up with 2 other regular tourney-goers, and we just happened to run into a new person who used to play but hadn’t in a long time.  Brave soul that he was, he came up to us and asked if he could join, so we set him up with an army (I have a tendency to overdo when it comes to bringing ready-to-play armies, so I had 25 or so) and threw him into the mix.  It was a great time, and I personally loved the venue more than other places we’ve tried, although I do admit that it was a tad crowded.  Squeezing into your seat was tricky, and finding a place to put all our stuff was a logistical puzzle, and it certainly was loud.  But the tables were free, the store management was friendly, they didn’t care that we brought outside food and drinks, didn’t give me crap when I finally ditched my shoes, and even asked if it was okay if they took back the table we had unceremoniously absconded with to put our overflow crap on—he asked us if it was okay to use his table that we weren’t even supposed to be using!  I was super-impressed with the friendly staff and hope to go back sometime.

The games were good too.  We only got in about 3 games a piece, but it was a lot of fun, and I think the kids had a good time.  We bought some stuff we really didn’t need (more to support the store than anything else), palled around with our fellow ‘Scapers, and one of our oldest Heroscape friends agreed to trade me a beautifully painted Gothlok for an unpainted one and few bucks.  I wish I’d had a chance to try out even more of my weird army ideas, but my littlest one and I did get to play a bizarre army consisting of Harley Quinn (because that’s her favorite comic book character), Scarecrow and Creeper (who, with their insane personalities, bond with Harley), a passel of Nottingham Brigands for range, and good ol’ Marcu Esenwein to fill out the last 20 points.  (This army, by the way, is not a particularly good one, but it was super-fun to play.)  All in all, a great time, and I hope we get to do it more often.

Next week, something more substantial.