Saladosity, Part 16: Mexican

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

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

This is one of my all-time favorite salads.  It’s a little more of a pain to make, and I hadn’t made it in quite a while for that reason, but I returned to it recently and I fell in love all over again.  Admittedly I took a little shortcut this last time around, but I’ll point that out to you when we get there so that you can take it too, if you like.

The Protein

You have all sorts of options for protein here.  If you really want meat, your all-time best choice is whatever leftover taco meat you have from last night.  If you’re not prone to having any leftovers in that area, you might try taking a leftover chicken breast, dicing up part of it, applying a bit of taco seasoning (or chili powder, in a pinch), and heating it up for just a few seconds in the microwave.  If you’re really desperate and you simply must have meat, substitute canned chicken for the leftover chicken breast.

But you know what I’ve discovered?  It’s perfectly lovely without any meat at all.  Just use pistachios.  Now, you may say “but wait! pistachios aren’t Mexican!” No, in fact, pistachios are from the Middle East.  But they really do work here.  I don’t know that I can tell you why ... you’re just going to have to trust me on this one.  I will use leftover taco meat if it’s handy, and I’ve done the chicken thing a couple of times, but, honestly: pistachios are pretty damned good.  Sometimes better than meat.

Plus, you know, if you happen to subscribe to a vegetarian flavor of nutritional tribes, you don’t want the meat anyhow.  For paleo flavors, cashews are perfect.  I think the only reason to avoid the cashews would be if you’re allergic to them.  If so, first of all my condolences, but secondly, try the chicken.  It’s also a good call.

The Cheese

Obviously you want the shredded Mexican cheese blend that we talked about when we went shopping for meat and cheese.  If you’re being strict about the paleo and avoiding the dairy, you can omit the cheese and you won’t miss too much.  But I think it’s better with.

The Crunch

The go-to here would of course be crushed up tortilla chips.  But, whether Atkins or Whole30 or even Weight Watchers, corn chips are not considered an ideal choice for a healthy diet.  They’re grains, they’re carbs, and they add a decent chunk of calories.  So here’s where the plantain chips that we picked up when we went shopping for nuts come in.  Plantain chips are crappy for just eating straight out of the bag, but that should be considered a feature, not a bug.  What they’re great for is substituting:

• They make excellent “crackers”: have them with some cheese, or dip them in guacamole or hummus.
• They’re imperfect but surprisingly yummy nonetheless at playing the role of oats in granola.
• They’re not too shoddy at faking as potato chips, at least for culinary purposes.  Like on top of casseroles that called for crushed chips.
• They do a damned fine job as faux tortilla chips, if you crumble them up and put them on salads.

Just take a bag of plantain chips and beat it up a bit, then toss it into a zip-loc bag for maximum freshness.

The Dressing

What really gives this salad its kick is the guacamole dressing, and it is in fact the only salad where I’m going to recommend you use a “heavy” amount of dressing (which, remember, is defined as “more than you normally would”).  This dressing is so damn good, you’re just going to want a lot of it.

Now, the rough ingredients of the dressing are pretty basic: you need guacamole, sour cream, and some cilantro dressing.  The first two are pretty simple.

Remember that guacamole is one of the things we talked about when we went shopping for cold goods.  In our house, we’ve settled into a rhythm of buying those big boxes of Wholly Guacamole at Costco, tossing most of ’em into the freezer, and just rotating into the fridge as needed.  One container of that is the perfect amount for this dressing.  You could make guac fresh every time you wanted this salad ... but then you wouldn’t eat this salad that often, and that would be a shame.

Sour cream is sour cream.  One big spoonful should do it.  If you’re looking to avoid dairy, you could skip this part and it might be okay ... never tried it, personally.

The cilantro dressing is the only complicated part.  What I like to do when I’m feeling industrious is make my own.  Unlike having to make the guacamole part, this would something you do once a month or whatever, and then you just have it on hand every time.  I originally concocted my recipe (below) because my friendly neighborhood Trader Joe’s brand of cilantro dressing is heavy on the soybean oil, and I don’t like that.  Now, I’m going to be honest with you here: we’ve since discovered Primal, and they make a super yummy cilantro lime dressing—it’s not strictly Whole30 safe, but only because it contains (organic) honey, which ... c’mon: that’s a very small concession to make.  So use that if you don’t want to make your own.  But if you do want to try making it from scratch, just follow the directions below, and you won’t be disappointed.

Once you have the cilantro dressing, all you want to do is mix your guac and sour cream together in a bowl; it will be super-thick, so just drizzle in some cilantro dressing and stir, repeating until you get the consistency of a fairly thick dressing.  In my experience, if you get the consistency right, the taste will just automatically be perfect.

Cilantro Dressing

You’re going to need a food processor or blender for this one.  Pour in ⅓ of a cup of pepitas (those’re the roasted pumpkin seeds we bought when we went shopping for nuts), 2/3 of a cup of milk, ⅓ of a cup of oil (more on that in a sec), 2/4 of a cup of grated parmesan cheese, and ¼ of a cup of white wine vinegar.  (If you do it in the order I’ve suggested, and you do 2 ¼ cups for the parmesan instead of ½ cup, you’ll get by with only using 2 measuring cups and minimal mess.)

Which oil to use?  Well, use what you like, but I would try to avoid the “bad” oils like soybean, peanut, canola, or palm.  Avocado is amazing (that’s what Primal uses in theirs, for what it’s worth).  Grapeseed is also not bad.  I don’t think olive works well, taste-wise, but perhaps you feel differently.

Now add some chopped jalapeños.  I used to get them pre-chopped and canned from TJ’s, but then I started buying packages of fresh ones.  The fresh ones are more of pain, because you have to chop them yourself, and it is very easy to burn the crap out of yourself when learning to cut jalapeños, but eventually you get the hang of it, and one of those little packages of jalapeños is enough for 4 batches of this dressing (divie your choppped bits into 4 roughly equal piles, toss one in the blender, and freeze the other 3 for later).  But the canned is fine too.

Now you’re going to want to add about 5 cloves of garlic.  Feel free to substitute minced if you like; it’ll all end up that way in just a bit.

The last task of any complexity at all is to take a big bunch of cilantro (I typically use however much is in a Trader Joe’s pack of organic cilantro), separate out the stems, and toss the leaves in the blender.  We don’t need the stems for this recipe, but you can compost them, or perhaps you have an animal that might like them (our guinea pig always did).  Or, you know: just toss ’em.

Two heavy pinches of salt, 12 or so grinds of black pepper, and turn all that into a liquid.  Finally, remember that homemade mayo we made for our autumnal salad?  Make another batch, then immediately dump it into the blender.  This time, just pulse it a few times to mix it all together.  The resulting consistency should be a nice, viscous-but-not-thick liquid, which is perfect for some salads all on its own.  Also perfect for thinning out guacamole dressing while adding a whole bunch of flavor.

Mexican salad

Once again, you’re ready, and it’s just assembly.

• base veggies
• pistachios (or seasoned meat, if you prefer; slightly warm)
• crushed plantain chips
• shredded Mexican cheese
• guacamole dressing (heavy)

This one is a very hearty salad.  It’s got a nice crunch, but it’s really the smooth, creamy goodness of that guacamole dressing that makes it all come together.  For me, this is my entire meal, and I can’t get enough, so I typically make a huge one.  Try this once or twice and you will never look at a “taco salad” from a chain restaurant in the same way ever again.

Next time, we’ll get meaty.

Could have been Mark Twain ... or Confucius ...

I’m not feeling particularly well today, and it’s an off-week, so I think I’ll take the supposed advice of Voltaire (though Wikiquote refuses to confirm) and remain silent rather than to increase the quantity of bad blog posts.  He was ahead of his time, that Voltaire.  Or whoever actually said it.  Whatever they actually said.

Rotating Through the Gaming

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

During the heyday of my old gaming group, there were always at least 3 or 4 of us who were willing to be GMs, but none of us who wanted to be the GM all the time.  For a while, we “solved” this apparent dilemma by just having one person GM until they got sick of it, then someone else would step up.  Everyone else would typically keep the same characters, even.  (The problem of what to do with the new GM’s old PC was, partially, what led to our policy on “GMPCs,” which will one day be its own blog post.)  But, eventually, we came up with a new idea: game rotation.

The idea was fairly simple: everyone who was willing to be a GM, and who had a good idea for a campaign, would go into the rotation, and we’d do a different campaign every week (we typically gamed once every week).  Being the nerds we were, we managed to complicate it a bit more than that by instituting a voting system.  Basically, at the end of each session, the GM for that session would say either “okay, that’s all I had prepared,” or they could say “I could go again, if you guys want to.” If they said the former, the next person in the rotation was up, the end.  If, however, they said the latter, then the other players would vote: were we actually interested in continuing this particular campaign for another week, or were we ready to move on?  Simple majority made the decision.  I would guess that maybe half the time that the GM indicated they were amenable to continuing, we voted to do so.  The other half, we would just move on, and that GM had a leg-up on their next turn at bat.  No one ever took offense, that I recall, for saying they could go on but being voted down to do so.  And I would guess that, over the nearly ten years we employed this system, the number of times we voted to play the same game a third week in a row could be counted in the fingers of one hand.

Short version: we switched campaigns a lot.

And I’ve been really excited to talk about this system for a while now, because there were a lot of great things about it.  Here are the primary reasons this was a fantastic system:

• No one ever got sick of being the GM: you were only doing it once a month or so.
• No one ever got sick of their characters: you were only playing that person once a month or so.  The rest of the time, you got be someone entirely different.
• Being exposed to different GMs with different styles is good for players, and in turn it makes them better GMs.
• It relieved a lot of the pressure for those who wanted to try being the GM for the first time.  You only had to worry about doing it for one week, and then, best case, you’d have 3 or 4 weeks to work up the courage to go again, and, worst case, you could say “man, I really didn’t like doing that!” and everyone had 3 or 4 other games to enjoy, so: no big deal.
• Assuming you were sticking with it, instead of having only a week to prepare some elaborate adventure, you basically had a month.  As we all got older and busier, this particular advantage cannot be overestimated.
• Since you did have the option of bowing out if things got too complex or too overwhelming, everyone felt more freedom to be experimental.  Try something new!  What the hell: worse come to worst, we can just toss out that campaign and you can come up with a better idea next time.
• Perhaps the best of all, we tried new things.  New settings for D&D, sure, but whole new systems.  We played Vampire (the Masquerade) and Mage (the Ascension), we played Star Wars (both the d6 and d20 versions), we played GURPS and Traveller and Call of Cthulhu.  We played weird shit, like the Wheel of Time RPG and In Nomine and homebrew shit we made up ourselves.  Because, again: why not try something new?  Could be fun for a while, you might discover a new love, and, as always, the worst case was we’d just fallback on our several other campaigns.

So it was an awesome system that we employed, as I say, for what I’m pretty sure was close to a decade.  But, you know, it wasn’t perfect.  There are a few downsides to this system:

• Even though you’re gaming every week, it’s often the case that it’s been a month since you played the character you’re picking up on any given night.  It’s sometimes hard to remember where you were in the story and sometimes even who your character actually is, especially for newer campaigns.
• Being experimental is awesome, but it does mean there are failed experiments.  I only got in a few sessions of my awesome gender-fluid Trinity character, only one of my Shadowrun character (who I can’t ever remember now), and none for my Hero or BESM characters.  I also don’t remember what I came up with for BESM, but my Hero character was a decently interesting Jekyll-and-Hyde type who I was kind of looking forward to.  (Hero is one of the few systems where that kind of character is actually buildable without jumping through a million hoops and bending a billion rules.)  Better that we tried and failed than never to have tried at all, I suppose, but they were bittersweet experiences, for sure.

These are all important considerations.  Still, I feel the good outweighed the bad, and I would definitely recommend this system to any gaming group looking to solve some of the same issues we had.  When I decided to make playing D&D with my kids a weekly thing—effectively replacing my old gaming group with one that I grew myself—I knew that I would have to institute game rotation again.  Primarily because being the sole GM in a serious, weekly game at this point in my life would probably kill me.  I already stress myself out constantly over how little time I have to do all the things I want to accomplish.  This should be a fun thing with my kids, not something that makes me feel like I’m failing to get shit done in my life.

Of course, my youngest 2 children aren’t ready to GM yet (okay, that’s what I thought ... originally).  So what we came up with was a system of 4 campaigns to rotate through:

• The Family Campaign, which I run, is our long-term, serious one where everyone has put the most work into their characters.  It’s the one where I spend the majority of my prep time.
• The Clown Campaign is another one I run, but this one we run straight “out of the book,” so to speak (that means that we use a pre-published adventure where most of the work is done for you).  For this one, we chose Waterdeep: Dragon Heist (which is, weirdly, neither about a dragon nor a heist), which is a fun, somewhat open but somewhat constrained, flexible adventure that I can have fun with at the same time that I don’t have to put too much effort into.  The campaign derives its name from the fact that the 3 characters are former clowns who came to Waterdeep with the circus and then wandered off to have other adventures.
• The Freak Campaign is being run by my eldest.  It’s also D&D, but it’s even less serious than the Clown Campaign: it’s specifically where a bunch of wacky characters (I play a unicorn, my middlest plays a nothic, and my youngest plays a homebrewed half-elf-half-changeling staff master) meet in Sigil and then get kidnapped by crazy lich who just wants to send them off on adventures while they watch, because they’re bored of having been alive for so long.  Our first mission was to raid a black dragon’s hoard (we started at 7th level for this one), and now we’re running through an updated version of Expedition to the Barrier Peaks.
• The Lizard Campaign, also run by my eldest, is our primary non-D&D campaign.  It’s ostensibly a Shadowrun campaign (meaning it uses the standard Shadowrun setting), but we started out doing a Powered by the Apocalypse version called Sixth World.  Lately, the kid has been playing around with a homebrewed conversion to mostly-5e rules.  But, either way, it’s a very not-fantasy, cyberpunk-y sort of campaign where the 3 of us are all reptilian based mutant siblings: I play the oldest sibling, a crocodile man with some spirit powers, my middle child plays the middle sibiling, a chameleon ninja; and my youngest is the youngest, a lizard hacker.  Tone-wise, it’s somewhere slightly more serious than the Clown Campaign but less so than the Family Campaign.

Additionally, my youngest—remember, she’s still only 8 at the moment—has already jumped in to to try GMing, running a Dungeon World game (with my eldest as assistant GM) which we sometimes call the Red/Blue Campaign, due to its setting in a divided city where, on one side, everyone dresses in red, and, on the other ... well, you get the picture.  The city is ruled by a king and queen (one on each side), who have two twin daughters, tragically separated by their parents’ division.  I play a dhampir (that’s a half-vampire, for those unfamiliar with the term) and my middle child plays an otter-kin (that’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like), and our goal seems to be to reunite the city.  Once we can figure out why it was spearated in the first place.  Did I mention that this kid is 8?  It’s a fairly complex plot, overall.  But she doesn’t always have the patience to be in charge.

My middle child has zero interest in being in charge of anything.

Now, we have a tendency to play these games 2 or 3 weeks in a row way more often than my old group did, but that’s partially due to my kids not having the stubbornness to stay up all night like we used to when I was young.  Many times after a few hours, they start to run out of steam, so we just call it and say “let’s play this again next week!” We’re about 2 months away from our one-year anniversary since we started this system, and this is what our rotation has worked out to so far:

• 12/11/19: Family Campaign (flashbackstories)
• 12/18/19: Clown Campaign
• 12/26/19: Family Campaign (flashbackstories)
• 1/1/20: Clown Campaign
• 1/8/20: Lizard Campaign
• 1/15/20: Family Campaign (flashbackstories)
• 1/20/20: Family Campaign (flashbackstories)
• 2/7/20: Clown Campaign
• 2/12/20: Lizard Campaign
• 2/19/20: Family Campaign (flashbackstories)
• 2/22/20: Family Campaign (flashbackstories)
• 2/26/20: Lizard Campaign
• 3/4/20: Family Campaign
• 3/13/20: Lizard Campaign
• 3/18/20: Lizard Campaign
• 3/25/20: Clown Campaign
• 4/1/20: Clown Campaign
• 4/8/20: Family Campaign
• 4/15/20: Family Campaign
• 4/22/20: Family Campaign
• 4/29/20: Family Campaign (finish up), Freak Campaign (intro)
• 5/6/20: Freak Campaign
• 5/13/20: Freak Campaign
• 5/27/20: Clown Campaign
• 6/3/20: Red/Blue Campaign
• 6/10/20: Freak Campaign
• 6/17/20: Freak Campaign
• 6/24/20: Family Campaign
• 7/1/20: Family Campaign
• 7/8/20: Family Campaign
• 7/15/20: Red/Blue Campaign
• 8/6/20: Family Campaign
• 8/26/20: Family Campaign
• 9/9/20: Family Campaign
• 9/16/20: Freak Campaign
• 9/23/20: Freak Campaign
• 9/30/20: Freak Campaign
• 10/7/20: Clown Campaign (proposed)

There have been a few weeks when we skipped roleplaying (often on those nights we would play other games, like Munchkin or Stuffed Fables or whatnot), and that one night where we played half a session of one campaign and then half a session of the next one, but overall we’re not doing too badly keeping to the schedule, if with a lot more contiguous runs than we used to have in my old group.  But that’s not necessarily a bad thing if people are keeping interested and not getting bored.  Which so far seems to be the case.

Maybe this is a system that your gaming group wants to explore, especially if you have a “one person GMs all the time” style group currently.  Give your GM a chance to shine as a player for a change!  Let your players experiment in the GM’s chair without the pressure of “this is what we’re doing now” looming over them.  Try out some new games as a change of pace.  Variety is the spice of life, so they say.  Why not extend that metaphor to your tabletop gaming?

Isolation Report, Week #29

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

Another two weeks, another 14 days spent marveling at how much worse “worse” can get.  The fact that none of it is even surprising—not that no police officers will be charged in the murder of Breonna Taylor, not that our president will not agree to leave office peacefully if defeated in the election, not that the Republicans are completely comfortable with their hypocrisy regarding Supreme Court appointments, not that the Democrats are toothless in their response and blustering pointlessly, not that the number of deaths from the pandemic continues to rise while the rest of the world is handling their shit and revoking our passports, not that the president knew how bad it was in Feburary and did nothing—is possibly the most depressing thing.  Literally the only thing that surprises me any more is that anyone else is surprised by any of these things.

The fact that Ruth Bader Ginsburg died was not so much surprising—this is 2020, after all—as it was a punch in the gut.  Someone that I watch (probably Stephen Colbert) said that they had been getting texts all weekend with various expressions of sadness and profanity; this was reflected perfectly in our online chat at $work where the NPR story reporting her death was followed nearly immediately by two messages: “NOOOOOOOOOOOOO” and ”FUCK!!” ... I’ll leave it to you to guess which one of those was from me.  Besides the terror at what damage Trump and the Senate Republicans (who have already pledged to confirm Trump’s nominee, without even finding out who it’s going to be) can do, it’s also worth reflecting on the fact that it’s just a massive loss for democracy.  I’ve watched several tributes to her life and legacy, but I highly recommend Trevor Noah’s, which touched me the most.

There isn’t a lot of other news to report: there’s been a bit (more) family drama, a guinea pig funeral, a colonoscopy appointment made, a broken dishwasher.  There’s a new D&D book coming out that I’m quite looking forward to.  The smallies and I finished season 2 of Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, which is just a beautiful, funny, touching animated series; if you have both Netflix and children and you haven’t watched this yet, you really must do.  My sleep schedule is nearly completely random at this point, but $work is still going moderately well.  Well, as well as can be expected, I suppose.  The humans in the house have mostly committed to not killing each other.  At least for now.

I understand that many folks (including my own parents) are starting to go out more, even eating in restaurants.  So far we’ve held off on that.  I pointed out to my mother this weekend that she couldn’t really be wearing her mask while she was eating.  She said, no, you just wear it to the table and then you take it off to eat.  I said that was like wearing your hazmat suit to get to the radiation and then taking it off once you arrived.  Call us overabundantly cautious if you like.  We’re fine with that.

Oh, and I did actually take a COVID test recently.  I had no fever, but there was a sore throat, and just a touch of labored breathing, so I figured better safe than sorry.  There’s a drive-through place near us where they basically hand you the giant Q-tip and tell you what to do and then you give yourself the test.  Then they text you the results; they told me to give it 3 – 5 day, but I got a text within 24 hours.  Negative, if you were concerned.  Which, as I say, I figured, but one doesn’t want to mess around.  I still believe we’re all going to get it eventually, but I really want to know when I’ve got it.  I don’t think I’m in any particular danger once I get it, but of course we have the kid with the heart condition, so one has to be careful.

I think that’s all there is to report.  I hope the world gets better soon.  I’d certainly like to start having lunch with my coworkers again, and I know The Mother would just like me to leave the house, lunch or no lunch.  And my children wouldn’t mind getting back to a semi-regular field trip schedule.  But we wait, and we watch, and we hope that the election gives the country a chance at recovery.  If not, then ... then I don’t know.  Other than being able to predict that Trump and his family will be enriched by the continued deaths of the American people, I can’t guess what that dystopian future would hold.

Hopefully it doesn’t come to finding out.

Wisty Mysteria II

"Smoke a Cigarette and Lie Some More"

[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.]

The second volumes of any of my modern mixes are almost always the same: they consist of all the tracks that didn’t fit on the first volume, either in terms of style, or because I just plain ran out of room.  The pre-modern mixes¹  are different: at the time they were developed, there was no concept of a “second volume.” I thought I was putting together the definitive statement on mood X, and that would be an end to it.  Of course, being older and wiser (and continuously discovering newer and newer music), I now know that you can never really exhaustively describe a mood.  There’s always something new to say, and some new tunes to say it for you.

This the first second volume of a pre-modern mix that I’ve managed to finish, and I’m pretty happy with it.  I think every track here still retains that slightly sad (wistful), slightly creepy (mysterious) vibe that I was originally going for, but it’s expanded in nearly every way.  Where the original volume was mostly stuck in a narrow band of time (1986 – 1991), this volume spans three and a half decades (1982 – 2016).  And whereas volume I hewed very close to what “alternative” meant in the late 80s and early 90s, this volume ranges far and wide, from early 80s synthpop, to the power ska of the aughts, to downtempo electroncia, and even into some alt-country territory.  Let’s dive in, shall we?

On the sadder side of the spectrum, we have strong contenders from Richmond duo House of Freaks, British phenoms the Beautiful South, and one of my favorite 80s bands, Yazoo.  House of Freaks is one of those bands you can’t believe is only two people; they exist in a musical spectrum that I have yet to describe but starts on the slow end with Toad the Wet Sprocket, continues through the Goo Goo Dolls and the Replacements, and ends up with the metal-leaning Candlebox.  House of Freaks is on the solidly folk-leaning side of the spectrum, perhaps where the Gin Blossoms hang out, but oh so much better than those Arizona gentlemen.  No stranger to writing melancholy songs about historical events,² this one is about slave ships coming to America.  The Beautfiul South, far more popular in their native UK than they ever managed to achieve on my side of the pond, is also singing about dark times in history; in their case, it’s a condemnation of politicians who send young men off to die in wars while they stay safe at home.  Moving from the historical to the personal, Yazoo’s “Midnight” uses Alison Moyet’s powerful voice to tell a quiet story of loneliness and regret.

But the one that personally touches me the most is Chris Isaak’s “Nothing’s Changed.” A taste:

Kisses you gave me,
The vows you made me,
None of these things have changed ...
Nothing’s changed.

And yet, in the song, of course everything’s changed.  The palpable longing in this tune feels very real and raw, and Isaak’s use of dynamics and pauses really drive it home.

Switching to the other side of Wisty Mysteria’s continuum, there’s the weirdly psychedelic “We Are So Small”—weird in the sense that the Red Sea Pedestrians are far more known for klezmer-tinged Americana³—that touches on “the vastness of unbounded space,” and there’s “The Shining Path,” in which Shriekback opines that “if we were different some other time, we don’t remember”: both seem to touch on all the things we don’t know about the universe.  Still, I would probably give the award to “Lost Boys and Girls Club” by LA’s own Dum Dum Girls.⁴  This is female-fronted shoegaze-adjacent power dreampop, similar in style to Mazzy Star or fellow Angelenos Tashaki Miyaki,⁵  and it’s an excellent example of their style: there are fuzzy guitar chords, and echoey vocals, and fantastic lyrics like “your eyes are black X’s of hate and of hexes.”

But, as always, most songs are in between the extremes.  For sheer isolation, it’s tough to beat the howling wind in the background of Bronski Beat’s “Memories,” which fades directly into the howling wind of the Smiths’ “Asleep.” There’s also the figurative winds of Cutting Crew’s “Sahara,” and the winds in the title of “Sarah When the Wind Blows” by emmet swimming.⁶  I’m not sure there are any winds in “Trophy” by Bat for Lashes, but there’s certainly desolation and defiance.  And “Gold and Rose” by Myles Cochran⁷ has that echoey emptiness that only country-adjacent tunes can seem to capture.

As for Keren Ann, an anti-folk artist squarely in the mold of Regina Spektor and Feist,⁸ she often puts out gentle, shimmery pop gems such as “Not Going Anywhere,” the title track from her 2003 album.  They’re often hopeful, as this selection is, but in this case there’s a touch of wistful sadness (mostly provided by the backing violin) which makes it fit perfectly on this mix.

For this volume’s injection of songs which seem upbeat until you actually listen to them, my favorite is certainly “Happy Birthday” by Concrete Blonde.  Actually, when I arranged the original mix, I was torn between this track and the one I eventually chose, but in the end “Little Conversations” captures that wistful feeling more than this track.  But “Happy Birthday” describes a peculiar sense of loneliness where you’re not exactly sad about it, but it certainly ain’t happy either.  And I’ve always loved the temporally contemporary Voice of the Beehive, an alternative band fronted by two sisters from California and backed by former members of Madness, who are excellent at producing midtempo or even upbeat songs that have deceptively downbeat messages.  “Sorrow Floats” provides such lyrical gems as:

You can’t drown your sorrows,
Or on you will be the joke.
Because the only thing that you will drown is yourself,
‘Cause you see my dear, sorrow floats.

I always wanted to get this track onto a mix somewhere, and this was the obvious place for it.

Wisty Mysteria II
[ Smoke a Cigarette and Lie Some More ]

“Option” by Naomi, off Pappelallee
“Gold and rose” by Myles Cochran, off Marginal Street
“Big Empty” by Stone Temple Pilots, off Purple
“Nothing's Changed” by Chris Isaak, off Heart Shaped World
“Sahara” by Cutting Crew, off Broadcast
“State of Mind” by Mad Caddies, off Keep It Going
“Sarah When the Wind Blows” by emmet swimming, off Big Night Without You
“Sorrow Floats” by Voice of the Beehive, off Let It Bee
“Bottom of the Ocean” by House of Freaks, off Monkey on a Chain Gang
“Happy Birthday” by Concrete Blonde, off Free
“Not Going Anywhere” by Keren Ann, off Not Going Anywhere
“We Are So Small” by the Red Sea Pedestrians, off See Through the Eyes of Osiris!
“Trophy” by Bat for Lashes, off Fur and Gold
“Lost Boys and Girls Club” by Dum Dum Girls, off Too True
“The Shining Path” by Shriekback, off Big Night Music
“Have You Ever Been Away” by the Beautiful South, off Welcome to the Beautiful South
“Memories” by Bronski Beat, off The Age of Consent
“Asleep” by the Smiths, off Louder Than Bombs [Compilation]
“Midnight” by Yazoo, off Upstairs at Eric's
“Crescent Moon” by KT Tunstall, off Invisible Empire // Crescent Moon

Total:  20 tracks,  79:49

I’m not sure there are any truly surprising choices here, but perhaps the Mad Caddies qualify.  The power ska group from just up the California coast from me is more known for upbeat tunes such as you might find on Salsatic Vibrato.⁹  But “State of Mind,” while not exactly downbeat, is certainly really happy-making either.  The bridge proclaims “I feel the weight of the world sometimes, hanging on my head, ... look for the light at the end of this tunnel once again,” and that sums it up nicely: the singer wants to find some hope, but isn’t really succeeding.

Which only leaves us with our opener, closer, and volume namer.  The last of which may also be a surprising choice: grunge masters Stone Temple Pilots at first seem an odd pick for a volume of reflective tunes, but “Big Empty” is just that.  Full of surreal imagery (such as “her dizzy head is conscience-laden”), it’s another example of using dynamics to build an amazing song structure.  There are the quiet moments when Scott Weiland says he’s done “too much walking; shoes worn thin” as well as “too much tripping and my soul’s worn thin” (which, as thinly veiled drug references in rock anthems go, is one of the better ones), then the song bursts into guitars and drums and Scott wails that it’s “time to take her home.” It’s always been one of my favorites, even though I generally prefer Core to Purple.

As for the opener, it’s another appearance from one of my favorite obscure bands, Naomi, who were so instrumental in forging the first two volumes of Smokelit Flashback.  Given my definition of “obscure band,” many bands are obscure when I first write about them, but become far better known in the years afterwards.  But, considering that the Berlin masters of downtempo released their first album in 2002, it’s somewhat amazing to me that AllMusic barely acknowledges them, with a discography but no biograpy, and Wikipedia continues to be blissfully unaware that they exist at all.  But exist they do, and they are amazingly versatile, as you might guess from the dizzying number of mixes they’ve appeared on.¹⁰  This track, from their sophomore album Pappelallee,¹¹ is tinged with just enough regret to make it slot beautifully here:

I can’t say “no,” and I can’t say “yes,”
Just another way of saying “no,” I guess ...
When you can’t say “no,” and you can’t say “yes,”
You leave a mess.

Given that I’d discovered this song about 15 years too late for it to make onto the first volume, it was actually one of the earliest tracks I slotted for this follow-up, and it was nearly always in the anchor slot.

As for “Crescent Moon,” it has a bit of a strange tale.  I first discovered KT Tunstall via one of those “if you like that, you’ll like this!” music discovery services.  I’ve no doubt that the “that” in this case was Liz Phair; if you like Liz Phair, I find it difficult to believe that you could possibly fail to like KT Tunstall.  So I knew I wanted to check her music out, but where to start?  AllMusic convinced me that Invisible Empire // Crescent Moon—not exactly a double album, but one with two very distinct halves¹²—was her best, so I tried it.  And didn’t immediately take to it.  Not willing to give up, I went back and tried Tiger Suit and fell in love.  Most of what we’ve heard from Tunstall (on Sirenexiv Cola and Porchwell Firetime) has been from Tiger Suit, which I still feel is her best.  But Invisble Empire // Crescent Moon has its own charms; it’s far more delicate and ethereal than the upbeat, peppy Tiger Suit, so it takes a few more listens to fully appreciate.  I did use one track (“How You Kill Me” on Smooth as Whispercats) from the Invisible Empire half, but that’s been it so far.  However, when I first put this volume together, it originally ended with “Midnight,” and it just didn’t feel right as as closer.  Oh, it’s a brilliant song, sure, but not exactly the right note to go out on.  I wanted something quieter, softer, that faded into a not-uncomfortable silence.  And I rediscovered “Crescent Moon,” which is all that, and more.  With some beautfiul strings in the mix and some great lyrics sung from the point of view of the moon itself, such as “pulling all your oceans up around my body” and “never found a refuge up there in the sky,” this is a darkly pretty, beautifully poignant note to close out the volume.

Next time, we’ll drift into more surreal terroritory.  Again.

⇐ Wisty Mysteria I

__________

1 Easiest to just read volume I‘s post for what that means, if you don’t know yet.

2 We last saw them singing about the development of the atomic bomb on Rose-Coloured Brainpan II.

3 Such as their amazing cover of “Sugar in My Coffin” that we saw on Porchwell Firetime.

4 Introduced to me by a former coworker, who knew or had met one of the members.  Or former members.  I don’t recall exactly.

5 Who we’ve seen in this series many times: twice in Paradoxically Sized World (volumes III and IV) and once for the inaugural Darkling Embrace.

6 I’ve talked about my discovery of and connections to emmet swimming on Salsatic Vibrato I and Tenderhearted Nightshade I.

7 Who we first saw on Rose-Coloured Brainpan, where I mentioned that he’s another Magnatune discovery.

8 And in fact the place we’ve seen her before is right where you’d expect: Sirenexiv Cola.

9 And you will find them there, on volumes III and IV.

10 To wit: Smokelit Flashback I, Smokelit Flashback II, Shadowfall Equinox V, Bleeding Salvador I, Rose-Coloured Brainpan I, and Cantosphere Eversion I.

11 Which, the Internet just informed me, is apparently German for “Poplar Avenue.” Go figure.

12 Much like the two halves of Concrete Blonde’s Free are commonly marked “Day Side” and “Night Side.”

Isolation Report, Week #27

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

Well, it’s been a few more weeks, and the world doesn’t seem to be getting any better.  Police officers keep killing innocent black people, Trump continues to do whatever the fuck he wants, and the only people who claim to have any chance at a vaccine any time soon are so unreliable as to make the prospect of taking a vaccine even scarier than not having one at all.

The only plus side whatsoever about the political situation is that Trump is apparently too stupid to stop doing skeevy shit for even a few days, so there are constant reminders about his unfitness for the presidency.  Of course, a majority of people voting against Trump is by no means a guarantee that he won’t win, as we all know from painful experience.  Nonetheless, it’s probably the best shot we have.

On the personal front, our guinea pig died a little over a week ago, despite an emergency trip to the vet, antibiotics, and feeding a liquid diet twice a day for several days.  The kids went to their first birthday party in months, although it was understandably small (i.e. attended by only the 3 families in our “social bubble”).  The PS/4 is still on the fritz, so it’s difficult to watch DVDs.  Work is going well, I suppose ... I mean, as well as one can expect given the prolonged lack of contact with my coworkers.  On the plus side, our work hired a comedian to do a Zoom show for us.  It ain’t the same as going out to a club with the folks from work, but it’s certainly better than nothing.  (And Adam was pretty funny, I thought.)

But we’re hanging in there, and certainly it could be worse.  And, you know ... only 3½ more months till this horrible, fucked up mess of a year is finally over.

Perl blog post #61

Recently, I discovered what “literate programming” was, so I wrote a post about it.  Obviously, I posted that on my Other Blog.