Where That Rank Smell Is Really Coming From

Here’s another topic I’ve been hearing a lot about and I have a strong opinion on.  We’re hearing this type of thing in lots of places, but I’ll just highlight one.  This is from the quite excellent podcast Election Profit Makers:^*

David: This New York City mayor election isn’t going to be over for months, by the way.  I just want to put that out there—with the ranked-choice voting and everything, it’s going to be such a mess.  They’re not going to know who the mayor is until, like, Christmas Eve, I bet.
Starlee: Really?
John: There’s going to be lots of ways.
David: I think it’s going to take at least a month.  That’s my prediction.
Starlee: I still don’t understand it, the ranked-choice voting stuff.

No, no one understands it apparently, and comedians are having a field day making fun of how crazy and messy and silly it all is.  The Daily Show did a whole segment on it, and that’s just the longest parade of jibes I’ve been subjected to in the past couple of months.  The message is constant and clear: this a terrible idea that we should all laugh at.  And I certainly listen to what my media overlords tell me to do.

Well, most of the time.  Because this happens to be an area that I have some personal knowledge of.  You see, I used to work on electronic voting systems.  Back in those days, we called it “instant-runoff voting,” but it’s the same system.  Not only is it trivial to understand, but it’s actually quite good for our democracy.  Hasan Minhaj puts it best in this episode of Patriot Act (I encourage you to watch the whole thing, but this quote occurs at around 13:12):

Winner-take-all creates two-party systems.  You can’t afford to waste your vote, so you stop voting for candidates who reflect your values, and you start voting for ones you think can win.  But when everybody does that, we end up with just two huge mega-parties, even though 57% of Americans want a third party.  Think about the way we treat people who vote third party.  You’d be like, “Dennis, who’d you vote for?” and he’s like “Gary Johnson.” And we’re like “Dennis! what the fuck are you doing, man?” We treat them like they just left a baby in a hot car.  We’re like “what were you thinking?!?”

In fact, I constantly vote for third-party candidates, but that’s primarily because I refuse to let the two-party system win.  “Doing the math” and avoidng third-party candidates is what allows the Democrats and the Republicans to maintain their stranglehold on our political system.  And you can call that a “conspiracy theory” if you like, as long as you acknowledge that this “conspiracy” is an open secret that is enabled every election by millions and millions of people.  So my innate stubborn streak demands that I give the middle finger to all that shit.  But, to be fair, I also have the luxury of living in a state where my second choice always wins, so it doesn’t matter who single-little-old-me votes for.  If I lived in a more contentious location—a “battleground” state, as the media likes to call them—would I still have the courage of my convictions?  I don’t know.  On the one hand, I can tell you that I have voted third-party before when I lived in Virginia, and the winner there was never a foregone conclusion.  But, on the other hand, I can also tell you that the thought of voting for anyone other than Biden in the last election anywhere other than a solidly-blue state makes me very anxious.  So, I honestly don’t know.

But IRV (or, going by its new name, “ranked-choice voting” or RCV) solves all that.  With this system, if your #1 choice doesn’t have a chance in hell, that’s fine: your vote for the #2 choice still matters.  So I really don’t get why the media heaps all this derision on the whole concept.  (Of course, I never understood why the media heaped all their derision on Bernie Sanders either.  I mean, I understood why the Democratic Party did, and certainly some of that bled over into the media coverage, but you would think at some point someone would have to have the guts to stand up and say “hey, the idea that no one should have to die because they can’t afford health insurance is not a crazy idea that we should be laughing at” ... but that never happened.  Colbert couldn’t do it, Poundstone couldn’t do it, Kimmel and Fallon and Meyers couldn’t do it, and they’re all pretty famously liberal icons.  Trevor Noah came the closest, but I suspect that he’s about as anti-Democrat as he is anti-Republican: presumably due to his South African perspective.  Of course, Minhaj posits that anti-Bernie sentiment is also due to the winner-take-all system—back that video above up to about 12:18.  In this view, the media is just desperately piling onto Bernie because plurality rule combined with, shall we say, creative redistricting means that Bernie can’t possibly win, and therefore we all need to get behind the blandest possible candidate.  But I digress.^**)

The concept that IRV/RCV is complex for the person voting is just mind-boggling to me.  What’s your favorite food?  Okay, now what’s your second-favorite?  In other words, if you couldn’t have your first favorite—it’s not on the menu, or maybe the restaurant just ran out of it that night—what do you pick then?  This is so intrinsic to our human existence that explaining it is belaboring the point.  It’s like if I were to try to “explain” to you how to walk.  I might have to go into a lot of details about how your joints move, and how the myriad of bones in your ankles fit together just so, and the flexing of the muscles in the soles of your feet, and how you maintain your balance, and meanwhile you’ve already walked across the room and back five or six times.  You just know how, because it’s a thing you’ve been doing since you were first able to communicate with your parents—most likely before you could even properly talk.  No, you can’t have that thing that you’re trying to grab with your cute little baby fist.  Take this instead.

We could make a stronger argument that it’s complex at the other end, the part where you figure out who won.  But, the first thing to note is, you the voter don’t have to understand that part.  You vote, and then the winner gets announced.  Forget any ranked-choice anything: how much do you understand about voting “the old way”?  Do you know how write-ins work?  Do you know what a contested ballot is?  Do you know the technical details of how the votes are tallied?  Sadly, these things are getting more and more media attention as voting becomes more and more contentious, but I’ll still posit that most of you don’t know those things, and even if you think you do because you saw a news story about it, you probably still don’t, because the news story was likely wrong.  Also, it doesn’t matter whether you know the things or not: the winner is who the winner is, and, unless you’re one of the few people who has a political or legal connection to those election results, your knowledge or lack thereof makes exactly zero difference.

But let’s say we want transparency in our democracy, because transparency is always good, and so we want to understand how the results work even though we don’t have to.  Okay, fine: here it is.  You count everyone’s #1 votes.  Their #2 choices and #3 and so forth mean absolute squat.  You only look at the #1’s.  Does the person with the most votes have a majority (that is, more than 50% of the vote)?  If so, you’re done.  If not, all votes for the person with the least votes are eliminated.  If anyone picked that person as their #1, then their #2 is now their #1, and so forth—every choice just moves up a slot.  Now start over: count all the #1’s, other picks don’t count, does the candidate with the most votes have a majority?  Keep doing that till someone wins.  The end.

This is not a complex process.  If I wanted to adopt a less conversational tone, I could have used fewer words, but, even so, it’s pretty short.  IRV/RCV is about as “complex” as a baking recipe: there may be a lot of steps, and you have to do every step just so, but there’s nothing particularly difficult to grasp here.  It’s not calculus, or physics, or computer science.  Hell, I would consider most sports to be more complex than this stuff: try explaining to someone how basketball works in as few words as I just used.  Can’t be done, unless you leave out a lot of relevant details (i.e. the difference between a two-point shot and a three-pointer, or how fouls work).  There’s no details left out of the above explanation.  That’s literally all there is to it.

So what about this question about how long it takes to figure out the winner?  Well, first we should note that that, despite David Rees’ dire predictions, it did not take “months” for the winner of the New York City mayoral primary to be announced.  In fact, it took exactly two weeks (the primary voting closed on June 22 and the final results were announced on July 6).  And I would argue that it only took that long because the board of elections had a pretty major fuck-up in that time.  But suppose you think that even two weeks is too long to have to wait.  After all, we live in a culture that demands everything be faster: we want it all and we want it now.  One of my favorite observations on our modern world comes from science populist James Gleick’s book Faster:

Federal Express sold its services for “when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” In the world before FedEx, when “it” could not absolutely, positively be there overnight, it rarely had to.  Now that it can, it must.

This is becoming more and more problematic with elections, because we’ve never known the results right away.  There’s a reason why “Dewey Defeats Truman” is one of the most famous photographs of the 20th century.  It’s supposed to be a cautionary tale about how our obsessive need for speed can lead us into false conclusions.  But somehow it’s become a meme about how newsapapers are stupid, and then we go back to throwing fits when we can’t find out who won the presidential election for a whopping 3½ days.  And the weird part is, most of this blowback is because of the rejection of electronic voting.  One of the major benefits of electronic voting was that we could get the results faster.  So most locations implmented that, and then people got used to getting results almost instantaneously.  And then there was this big backlash against electronic voting—and I’ll have to defer my opinions on how baffling that is for another post—so a lot of locations went back to counting things by hand, and now shit takes a long time again.  I think we just have to learn to deal with it.  Or else get over this completely overblown fear of electronic voting, because I can tell you from actual personal experience that a computer does not take months nor even days to calculate the winner of an IRV/RCV election: it takes seconds.  But, as I say, that’s a different post: the point is, if we want to believe that counting by hand is more secure, then we just have to accept that it’ll take longer, and that has little to do with whether we’re using ranked-choice systems or not.

I hope that more people will work to understand how easy ranked-choice voting is rather that just dismissing it with jokes and “commentary” that basically just boils down to “I know, right?” I think it really has the potential to change our political system for the better, and, quite honestly, it’s one of the few such things that I believe has any chance of actually being implemented.  It’s worth your time to look past the cheap shots and figure out what it can do for us as a country.

__________

* Specifically, from episode #95 (“All Hail the Harmonica Ripper”) which released on 5/25/2021 (starting at around 21:50).

** Or do I?

My 100th post about not posting ...

This week is another of those 3-day weekends my company is thoughtful enough to provide me.  In fact, I seem to have (accidentally or on purpose) managed to align my “short weeks” here on the blog with my “free Fridays” from $work.  A happy arrangement.  Anyhow, I’ve been working on catching up on a bunch of personal stuff, so no time for even a shorter post.  Tune in next week for something more substantial.  Probably.

Syncretism for the Masses

You know, sometimes you hear or see a discussion, and it makes you think about how you would respond if that topic were to come up in conversation.  Back in the old days, you would probably just wait for someone to bring it up at a party or somesuch.  Nowadays, you can write a blog post about it.

I was listening to Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown recently, and her guest was rabbi Steve Leder, who had some really fascinating things to say.  I particularly liked his point about not blaming all religious people for the actions of the religious extremists, which almost all of us tend to do (well, with all relgions except our own, of course).  I also enjoyed his rejection of biblical literalism and his explanation of the value of many religious practices that otherwise we might think of as frivolous or pointless.  It’s a great show, and you should probably listen to it (or watch it).

But naturally I didn’t agree with everything he had to say.  At one point, he opined:

... and in this business about “I don’t like organized religion,” I ask people: what would you prefer, disorganized religion?  Like, would you like your phone call never to be returned when you call the rabbi for your mother’s funeral?  Would you like your name to be wrong on everything?  ...  Come on, let’s think a little more deeply about these things.  I think that’s just a straw man.

What’s hilarious about this argument, of course, is that his argument is the true straw man.  The opposite of organized religion isn’t disorganized religion.  It’s individual religion, self-directed religion ... in other words, spirituality.  There’s quite a huge gulf between the pomp and cirumstance of the Catholic Church, for instance, and a Buddhist monk meditating alone for years on the nature of the universe.  Some people want to be a part of the large organization, and they’re willing to put up with the downsides—the bureaucracy, the potential for corruption, the chance that your problem might slip through the cracks, the ostracization of those who don’t fit the traditional ideas of how people should behave.  But other people—and I would argue more and more people in modern times—think that they don’t need the big organization to mediate between them and their higher power.

Thank goodness that show has Jonathan Cohen.  Listening to Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown is a bit like listening to Dead Can Dance.  (Yes, this is going to be a tortured metaphor, but bear with me.)  Most likely, you showed up because of Lisa Gerrard’s amazing voice, and sometimes it can be easy to forget about Brendan Perry, just because Gerrard’s vocals are so captivating.  You know he’s there in the background, doing stuff ... you’re just not thinking about it.  And then, all of a sudden, you stumble across “Black Sun” or “The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove” and you’re like: whoa ... I’m so glad that guy is there.

So Cohen had my perspective’s back, and he followed up with this:

I think that’s what people mean when they talk about “disorganized religion” or, you know, when they ... not that I think they want disorganized religion, but I think what they’re saying, or what some people say when they’re like, “oh, I’m spiritual not religious” is that they’re looking for the connection points between all these faiths, which are all paths towards the same road, and they’re like, “okay, but, you know, the specifics of any particular path or dogma I can leave, but what I want are those ...”

And here Leder cut Cohen off:

But that’s not how it works.  You cannot separate the values from the specific vehicles that transport those values through society.  You can’t do it that way.  You know, you just can’t do it that way.  What you can do is assign equal value to these different paths.  ...  And so to dismiss all religion, and say “I don’t want the particulars, I just want the outcome” ... that is impossible.  It doesn’t work.

Which misses the point yet again, I think.  Luckily, Cohen was still with me, and not willing to let it go just yet:

I don’t think they want the outcome as much as they say “look: Buddhism has a variety of practices that are very positive and very helpful, and Judaism also has that ...  Again, just playing that other role, is that why can’t I have some of the Buddhist, some of the Judaism, some of those aspects, and why can’t I mix them together, and why does [sic] all of these paths have to be separate?

Yeah, Jonathan: you tell him!  Now, this is followed by a bit of a digression from Mayim, which I won’t repeat here because I thought she made some good points, but I didn’t agree with everything she said, but mostly I don’t want to get off on any more tangents than I’m already prone to.  But the main thing is, both Mayim and the rabbi make some (in my opinion unflattering) assumptions about people who say they are spiritual-not-religious, and I think that my perspective (and, I suspect, Cohen’s) is quite different from how they view us.

Certainly, some people are indicating that they are still Christian, or Jewish, or Muslim, or Buddhist, just without the need for the church (or temple, or mosque).  But I think more often people are indicating that they are truly agnostic, which is certainly my perspective.  Way back in my discussion of balance and paradox (which is really the one post on this blog you probably should read), I (half-jokingly) referred to myself as a “Baladocian.” If you’ll allow me the indulgence of self-quotation:

Primarily I do this because it sounds cool and it gives them something to chew on.  The truth is that I believe that all the major religions are right ... and they’re all wrong.  Heck, that probably applies to most of the minor religions too.  When it comes to Truth, you take it where you can find it, be that the Bible, the Tanakh, the Qur’an, the Upanishads, the Analects, the Tao Te Ching, Stranger in a Strange Land, or Cat’s Cradle.

Now, I moved on from that opening to discuss the intricacies of believing that two extremes are simultaneiously neither true and both true, which was the point of that post, after all.  But what I was alluding to in that last sentence is really the main thrust of this post, and it’s an actual concept called religious syncretism.  Now, syncretism itself is neither good nor bad (which should be an entirely unsurprising statement coming from the Baladocian); in fact, it can be quite negative, such as how the Greeks mostly won the mythology war by absorbing the Roman pantheon, even though the Romans were the actual conquerors, or how the Christians absorbed the pagan and druidic celebrations, which is how we ended up with Christmas trees and Easter bunnies.  But, then again, it can also be quite positive, which is what I was getting at when I said you have to take Truth where you can find it.  As someone whose approach to religion is, paradoxically (go figure), very logical, it only makes sense that to say that the concept that ideas from other cultures, other religions, other scriptures, cannot be correct just because we hadn’t heard them yet ... well, that’s just nonsensical.  It’s a bit conceited to imagine that all the people in the world who don’t wholly embrace your faith can’t be right about something.

The fact of the matter is that even spending a very small amount of time reading different religious texts should convince you that there are a lot of good ideas—even a lot of Truths—spread around in quite disparate doctrines.  There are things in the Tao Te Ching which just blew me away, and I know, in my heart, that they are True ... but I would not say that I’m a Taoist.  Likewise, there things that Jesus Christ said which are so profound and meaningful that I cannot ever deny them ... but I do not describe myself as a Christian either.  Of course, I think there are some pretty big Truths in works of fiction too, from Stranger in a Strange Land to Quantum Psychology, but I’m not gonna claim to be a “Heinleinian” or a “Wilsonian” either.  All those texts have problems.  None of them are perfect.  But they all have something important, and it just doesn’t make any sense to me to not try to synthesize them all into a cohesive picture of the universe.

In my opinion, a “proper” agnostic is a person who believes that there is something ordering the universe—that is, someone who rejects the explicit “everything happens due to random chance” attitude of the true atheist—but that we just don’t know exactly what it is.  I’ll go even further: I personally believe that it’s entirely possible—probable, even—that we can’t know exactly what it is, and that it’s silly to imagine we can.  I think that part of what it means to be human is to accept that and learn to be okay with it.  Contrariwise, that doesn’t mean you don’t try.  It’s another paradox, I know, but think of it this way:  You know you can never be perfect, right?  But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t always strive to be better.  No matter how good you are, you could always be better, and you should shoot for that ... even while recognizing that ultimate perfection is out of your reach.  Likewise, I believe that we should continuously strive to understand the universe, even though we must accept that we can never understand it all.  Same principle.

And, so, in our attempts to know the unknowable, why in the world would we handicap ourselves by limiting ourselves to only one religion?  It’s just silliness.  Well, the rabbi Leder has an answer for that as well:

I also think it’s disrespectful to other religions in this sense, okay?  They are not the same.  There are very profound differences between Judaism and Christianity and Buddhism; they are not the same.  They have the same goal, they have their own structures and rules to achieve that goal, but they are not the same, and some of their beliefs—despite how much in America we want to make a big party out of everything—some of their beliefs are antithetical to each other.  Period.  End of story.  And we are being dishonest and disrespectful to those religions when we pretend otherwise.

You know, this reminds me a of a passage from Extreme Programming Explained.  I read this book about midway through my programming career, and it really changed the way I approached my craft.  There were a lot of really radical ideas in there, and it made me rethink concepts I hadn’t even realized were ingrained in me.  But it also contains a bit of dogma here and there.  Starting right in the section entitled “What Is XP?”:

XP is a discipline of software development.  It is a discipline because there are certain things that you have to do to be doing XP.  You don’t get to choose whether or not you will write tests—if you don’t, you aren’t extreme: end of discussion.

I remember reading this and immediately saying “I reject that premise.” Now, possibly a lot of that has to do with my innate repudiation of authority, or indeed absolute statements in general.  I probably have a touch of oppositional disorder in my psyche, if I’m being honest.  But, also, those types of statements just never turn out to be factual.  I’ll avoid the absolute statement by rephrasing it this way: perhaps someday I’ll read about something where you have to do All The Things in order to be getting anything out of it and it’ll turn out to be true, but so far that day hasn’t come.  It wasn’t true for XP, as it turned out, and I just don’t believe it’s true for religion either.  I don’t have to do all the Jewish things to derive some value from Judaism.  And, furthermore, considering that rabbi Leder is a practitioner of Reform Judaism, I think his actions and his words are providing a bit of cognitive dissonance on this particular front.

I think it’s also worth noting that this concept of religious exclusivity—that is, I am a Jew therefore I cannot be a Christian, I am a Christian so therefore I cannot be a Muslim, etc—is distinctly a concept of the Western religions.  Now, obviously I am no expert on theology, but one of my favorite courses in college was taught by Dr. Young-chan Ro, and he is an expert on theology.  And what he taught me (among many other things) was that the Eastern religions, for the most part, have absolutely no problem with you belonging to several of them.  If you want to be a Hindu and a Buddhist and a Taoist, that’s fine.  It’s a peculiarity of those religions which share an Old Testament (probably because of the whole “thou shalt have no other gods before me” thing).  It’s a bit of a bummer, though, because I think it leads to a lot of us-vs-them mentality, which doesn’t help anyone.  It’s also very strange to me that Jews and Christians and Muslims are so canonically disposed to disregard each others’ beliefs even though they’re all worshipping the same god.  Why can’t we all just get along indeed?

So I take from all the religions at the same time I reject all the religions, and I believe in evolution at the same time I find William Peter Blatty’s discussion of the impossibility of it (in Legion) fascinating, and I reject several of rabbi Leder’s premises at the same time I think he makes some excellent points, and seriously made Judaism sound more attractive than any of the other faiths out there (ironic, since Jews famously don’t proselytize).  I say the “profound differences” are just the surface bits: the bits we should be ignoring.  We should be digging past all that, looking for the deeper meaning ... for the deeper Truth.  And we don’t have to adopt all the practices in order to mine that Truth.  I’m not saying the practices are useless—again, I think rabbi Leder was quite eloquent in explaining the value of many of those practices—but I do think they are there as a way to get us to the underlying Truths.  It’s easy to get caught up in the ceremony, but that’s just the floor show.  The real treasure is what lies beneath the glitz and the glitter.  And we should dig for as much of that as we can.

Independence from blogging, apparently ...

Well, today I’m in the midst of a four-day weekend, because Friday was another “free Friday” that my company is giving us this summer to celebrate surviving the pandemic, and Monday is of course a holiday (even though technically Independence Day is today).  Given all that, and given that, despite my best intentions, I actually did manage to post a (nearly) full post last week, I think I’m taking the week entirely off.  See ya next time.

Short-Form ... Long-Form ... I'm the Content with the Shiny Object

Have you ever been listening to an interview with someone, and they are asked a question, and you think: hey! I have an answer for that.  No?  Maybe it’s just me.

In any event, I was watching an interview with some Twitch streamers, and the interviewer asked why they thought long-form content had become so popular lately.  Many Twitch streams last for hours, and have an audience for the whole time.  You can go to Twitch and watch people play videogames, board games, tabletop roleplaying games, and you can watch them do it for a long time.  Even interviews on Twitch are an hour or two long, compared to the 5 – 10 minutes that you might get on a primetime or late night talk show.  And Twitch is not alone: podcasts can focus on one game or interview for hours, or have limited series that go on for dozens of hours of content.  Turning novels into 2 hour movies is passé: nowadays they are turned into multi-season televsion shows.  Of course, movies themselves are getting longer and longer ... an NPR article puts it like so:

Seven of the year-end top grossers released during the 1980s ran under two hours. But from 1991 to 2000, only three of the top earners were that compact.

Only two year-end box office champs this century have had sub-two-hour run times, and both were animated: Shrek 2 (2004) and Toy Story 3 (2010).

That article decided that movies are getting longer (at least in part) because they’re competing with long streams and television shows, which seems to be begging the question.  More interesting was the answer of the streamers in the interview that prompted this whole meditation: they decided that, in today’s world of being increasingly disconnected from each other, sometimes you just want to experience personal interaction vicariously.  It’s an interesting theory, and probably not entirely wrong.  But I had a different thought.

I’m just old enough to remember movies with intermissions.  They weren’t common even then; a holdover from the intermissions in plays or operas, which could last for 3 – 4 hours.  (Sure, some were shorter, but then some were even longer.)  Long-form content isn’t new, by any means: it’s old.  Like so many things, it’s destined to come around again.  These types of trends tend to be reactionary, in my opinion.

Becuase I’m also old enough to remember, much more clearly, the advent of MTV in the 80s and the growing popularity of quick cuts.  This even has a formal name, apparently: post-classical editing.  It was a stylistic choice, but somehow it became a mandate.  According to Wikipedia, Lawrence Kasdan said in a documentary “that the generation of people who grew up on MTV and 30 second commercials can process information faster, and therefore demand it.” This assumption that the modern audience can’t handle anything long-form without getting bored was so prevalent by the 90s that the brand new “Comedy Channel” (which would eventually become Comedy Central) even anchored its programming with a “show” named “Short Attention Span Theater,” whose title was, so far as I could tell, completely non-ironic.  What it actually was was small snippets of stand-up routines, because obviously no one had the brainpower to sit through a whole stand-up show, right?

Except that I challenge all this conventional wisdom.  Short-form content wasn’t what the audiences demanded.  It was just a reactionary fad, a way for the modern consumer to differentiate themselves from their parents and grandparents, who had sat through Wagner’s Götterdämmerung and Shakespeare’s Hamlet and even It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and Lawrence of Arabia, both of which were 3½ hours or more long and written as recently as the 60s.  We were young and hip and cool, so we wanted more stuff packed into less time ... or at least that sounded cool, because it was different.  But you know what always happens: it’s only cool while it’s new, and once everyone is doing it, then it’s old hat and we want something different again.  The magic of “Short Attention Span Theater” (which I watched a lot of) was that you could experience a bunch of different comics in a short time.  The sheer quantity of people I was exposed to in that decade is completly unrivaled by any other time of my life.  But, the thing is, once I discovered someone I liked, I wanted to watch a whole show with them.  Five minutes of Bill Hicks is great, but two hours of Bill Hicks is fucking amazing.  So I thank SAST for all its contributions—not the least of which is introducing us to Jon Stewart—but it was never the endgame.  Just a vehicle to get us there.

And now the pendulum has swung back in the other direction.  Now people are just tired of little short snippets, and sound bites, and quick cuts.  We want substance, and nuance, and we’re perfectly willing to devote the time to get it.  So I think that is the truly the reason why long-form content is so popular now ... just as it was back in the “old” days.

Give it another couple of decades and there’ll be a hot new trend for watching everything at 1.5× speed, or watching two things at the same time, or somesuch.  Or maybe it’ll be simpler than that: maybe everything will go to Talk Soup style summary shows of the long-form content that no one wants to invest the time to actually watch themselves any more.  Who knows?  But time is a flat circle—although perhaps we don’t have to interpret that as pessimistically as True Detective’s Rust Cohle meant it—and everything will come ‘round again.  Eventually.

Paternal Indolence

Well, today is Father’s Day, and this past Friday was both a paid holidy (for Juneteenth) and one of the “free Fridays” that our company gave us off for surviving the pandemic, so I was instructed to relax twice as hard.  Sadly (for you), a double day off and Father’s Day in quick succession leaves little time for writing blog posts.  You’ll just have to try again next week.

Smooth as Whispercats II

"Looking So Bereaved and So Bereft"

[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.]

You know, I’ve often said that volume II of most of my mixes typically consist of the tracks that wouldn’t fit on volume I.  It continues to be true here.  Two of the tracks were mentioned by name in our last installment, 3 are from artists that we mentioned last time but didn’t feature tracks from, and there are a whopping 6 further returning artists.  I have to say “further” in this case, because the seventh returning artist is also one of the tracks that we talked about last time by name: “Driving,” by Everything But the Girl.  While “Missing”¹ is generally considered EBTG’s biggest hit—#3 in the UK, #2 in the US, #1 in Canada, Germany, and a bunch of other countries—I still say “Driving” is their best.  Peaking at #54 in the UK, #30 in Ireland, and not even cracking the top 100 anywhere else, the public apparently doesn’t agree with my assessment, but I don’t care.  This sublime track is not only the best EBTG tune in my opinion, but quite possibly the best representative of this subgenre of smooth-jazz-inflected alternapop.  From the intro, which appears to be a breathy Tracey Thorn exhalation sampled and turned into a repeated synth note, to the plaintive, evocative vocals, to the sophistipop arrangement (including a great solo from 15-time Grammy winning saxophonist Michael Brecker), to the lyrics which tell her “loverboy, if you call me home, I’ll come driving, fast as wheels can turn” ... this track is nearly pitch-perfect.  If you don’t like the style, I don’t know if this song could convert you, but if you have any interest at all, this track will make you want to close your eyes and make your insides stretch out for something just out of reach.  It’s amazing.

And, of course, the second track mentioned by name last time was “Your Latest Trick” by Dire Straits, which is yet another amazing performance by Brecker, not to mention a trumpet intro from his brother Randy.  While a lot of Dire Straits’ output is fairly straight-ahead rock such as “Sultans of Swing” or “Money for Nothing,” they’re no stranger to a softer track, and “Your Latest Trick” is an ode to loneliness that starts out by painting a poignant picture of a big city after the bustle of the day has wound down:

All the late night bargains have been struck
Between the satin beaus and their belles.
Prehistoric garbage trucks
Have the city to themselves.
Echoes and roars of dinosaurs—
They’re all doing the monster mash—
And most of the taxis and most of the whores
Are only taking calls for cash ...

It also provides our volume title.  Definitely a classic.

Of the other returning artists, there’s nothing too surprising: Sting is back with the title track from The Dream of the Blue Turtles, a bouncy little instrumental bridge that takes us into our centerpiece, Boy Meets Girl’s “I Wish You Were Here,” which is slightly more upbeat than last installment’s “Oh Girl” but still very typical of their sound: West Exit brings us another bass heavy, late night tune in “Take a Ride”; Norah Jones swings back around with another breathy torch song, “The Nearness of You”; and Johnny Hates Jazz brings us a much smaller hit than “Shattered Dreams,” but one which is every bit as good: “Turn Back the Clock.”²  And finally we have the inimitable Aztec Camera.  While “Stray” is possibly the best song off of the album of the same name,³ I still maintain that the crowning achievement of Roddy Frame (Aztec Camera is almost entirely Frame, in the same way that Nine Inch Nails is almost entirely Trent Reznor) is his first album, High Land, Hard Rain.  Some of its songs are slightly more upbeat, such as its very minor hit “Oblivious,” but it’s definitely an introspective album, and “We Could Send Letters” epitomizes that, with lyrics such as “you’re free to push me and I’m free to fall” and “I’ve been smothered in the sympathy you bleed.”  This album is one of my favorites, and this was the song I chose to represent it here.

I also mentioned 3 bands last time out without using any of their songs.  In the case of Swing Out Sister, it was primarily because “Breakout” is such an amazing tune that I knew it had to be a volume opener, and that spot was already filled for volume I.⁴  I love this song, partially because, unlike a lot of the other tunes on this mix, it is unabashedly upbeat, powered primarily by some great trumpet work from Johnny Thirkell, whose prolificness is summed up by this statement from Wikipedia: “Through the 1980s and early 1990s he was on at least one album in the UK Charts continuously, without a break, for over 13 years.”⁵  Wow.  He’s a big part of why “Breakout” is awesome, but a lot of props go to the Manchester band themselves: Andy Connell synths with the best of them, and Corinne Drewery’s vocals are just gorgeous.

Speaking of upbeat, I also mentioned Hipsway, whose track “The Honeythief” is almost slinky enough to make it to Slithy Toves.  It’s a bit goofy, and the rest of Hipsway’s œuvre is nothing to write home about, but I always secretly dug this one, and this mix is certainly the right place (the only place, really) to showcase it.  The other band mentioned previously was the Blow Monkeys, who are definitely back on the downbeat side of things.  But “Digging Your Scene” is pretty upbeat for them, so it still fits the theme.  Front man Dr. Robert has that smooth vocal quality that so many of the bands here have, and they even have their own sax player for a change: Neville Henry is not exactly a sax superstar, but his fills are quite lovely, and they work well in the context of the Monkeys’ jazz-adjacent sound.

Of course, every track discussed above save three live in that golden period I talked about last time, from 1985 to 1990, and, if we’re willing to back it up to 1983 to account for a few outliers, we can throw in the Aztec Camera as well.⁶  There are a few more tracks from that period too.  The most obvious (if obscure) is “One Simple Thing” by the Stabilizers.  This is a song I discovered by going through my dad’s record collection rejects,⁷ and I fell in love with it and later picked up the album, Tyranny.⁸  The Stabilizers were, sadly, a one-hit wonder who didn’t even get their one hit: “One Simple Thing” peaked at #93 in the US and #100 in Australia, and that was about it.  Unfairly, in my view: this track epitomizes the poppier side of this subgenre.  Like “Barely Breathing,” it’s both smooth and edgy, both mellow and impassioned, but the Stabilizers were doing it 9 years before Duncan Sheik came along.⁹

I also briefly mentioned ABC as “dabblers” in this style, so let’s hear them dabble.  The tremendous How to be a Zillionaire! is a cornerstone of 80s synthpop, with big hits “Be Near Me” and “How to be a Millionaire.”  But it has its more reflective moments too, and “Between You and Me” is the best of them.  Plus you gotta give mad respect to Martin Fry for not only rhyming “brutal” with “mutual,” but also “hyposcrisy” with “democracy” ... in a love song.  I also also briefly mentioned the Blue Nile, but mainly to say that we’d see them on Moonside by Riverlight before we saw them here.¹⁰  Which is not to say that we can’t ever see them here: the title track from their stunning A Walk Across the Rooftops has a lot going on, giving credence to the (possibly apocryphal) story that this album was used to demonstrate how the fancy new “compact disc” technology could make clear the most subtle of background sounds.  From its nearly inaudible fade-in which swells to its opening notes, from the lonely trumpet to the insistent strings to the poweful staccato bass riff, to Paul Buchanan’s soulful vocals, it’s just a gorgeous tune, with less of the Scottish band’s normal lounge vibe and more of a jazzy feel.  Plus it makes the perfect closer.

Smooth as Whispercats II
[ Girl Can Get Lonely Out Here on the Road ]

“Breakout” by Swing out Sister, off It's Better to Travel
“Driving” by Everything but the Girl, off The Language of Life
“A-kasseblues” by Movits!, off Äppelknyckarjazz
“Take a ride” by the West Exit, off Nocturne
“Your Latest Trick” by Dire Straits, off Brothers in Arms
“Love and you and I” by Lizzi, off Love and you and I
“Here's Looking at You” by Blondie, off Autoamerican
“No Ordinary Love” by Sade, off Love Deluxe
“The Nearness of You” by Norah Jones, off Come Away with Me
“The Dream of the Blue Turtles” by Sting, off The Dream of the Blue Turtles
“I Wish You Were Here” by Boy Meets Girl, off Boy Meets Girl
“One Simple Thing” by Stabilizers, off Tyranny ¹¹
“The Honeythief” by Hipsway, off Hipsway
“We Could Send Letters” by Aztec Camera, off High Land, Hard Rain
“Between You & Me” by ABC, off How to Be a Zillionaire!
“Turn Back the Clock” by Johnny Hates Jazz, off Turn Back the Clock
“Digging Your Scene” by Blow Monkeys, off Animal Magic
“A Walk Across the Rooftops” by the Blue Nile, off A Walk Across the Rooftops

Total:  18 tracks,  77:04

In newer fare, the West Exit is joined by fellow Magnatune artist Lizzi, whose style slots pretty perfectly in here.  “Love and you and I” is fairly layered and electronic compared to the late 80s fare, but it’s no less smooth-jazz-inspired.  For a tune just past the golden period, there can be no better exemplar than Sade.  “No Ordinary Love,” while it didn’t reach the peak of her megahits “Smooth Operator” or “The Sweetest Taboo,” was a pretty solid hit, and I will always maintain that Love Deluxe is a better album than Diamond Life.¹²  It’s another slinky one, with a bit of a loungy overtone, but it’s a solid smooth-jazz-like performance that leads beautifully into Norah Jones.

Which just leaves us with the two very unlikely candidates.  The earliest track on this volume is 1980’s “Here’s Looking at You” by the normally punky Blondie.  Of course, Blondie was famous for a style that ranged solidly across the musical map, from the disco-inflected “Call Me” to the reggae-infused “The Tide Is High” to the rap-adjacent “Rapture.”  Here they do a callback to the torchy jazz standards of the big band era which instantly make you imagine Deborah Harry lounging across a grand piano in front a full horn section, perhaps wrapped in a feather boa.  It’s not a remake, though: Harry and bandmate Chris Stein wrote it, and Jimmy Haskell, noted for the horn arrangement on Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now,” arranged the orchestral components, including the background strings and the foreground trumpets and clarinets.  It’s a gorgeous song that really sounds like it belongs in the 30s or 40s, but also has a surprisingly modern feel.  Plus I’ve always liked the lyric “if I ever had a million dollars (and if I didn’t give it all to you) ...”

Bookending us chronology-wise, the latest track on the volume is the surprisingly low-key “A-kasseblues” by Swedish swing-rappers Movits!.  I’m not entirely sure what the song means, although a Swedish-to-English translation site suggests the following chorus:

A-kasseblues
Who would have thought it would be something for me
Say where to live
Or put my shoe
Can I sleep with you?

Sure.  Why not.  But the point is that it’s a very pretty song, even if you have no clue what Johan (Jivin’) Rensfeldt is babbling about.  And it flows very smoothly into this mix, unlike the majority of their output (which you will find on various volumes of Salsatic Vibrato¹³).

Next time, I think we’ll cast our minds back to a more primitive radiophonic era.

⇐ Smooth as Whispercats

Smooth as Whispercats III ⇒

__________

1 Which we already heard back on volume I.

2 “Shattered Dreams” was #2 in the US and #5 in the UK, while “Turn Back the Clock” hit #12 the UK and failed to chart in the US at all.

3 Although “The Crying Scene” is damned fine as well.

4 By “Captain of Her Heart,” you may recall.

5 Amongst my mixes, you can also hear Thirkell on “Walking on Sunshine” from my Mother’s Day mix, “From Under the Covers” by the Beautiful South on Bleeding Salvador II, and the Swing soundtrack, which is featured heavily in Salsatic Vibrato (volumes II, V, VI, and VII) and occasionally in Smokelit Flashback (volumes III and IV).  He also played for Level 42, but not on the track of theirs we heard on volume I of this mix.

6 The other two tracks outside the golden period are the Norah Jones tune (2002) and the West Exit track (2004).

7 A story which really deserves its own blog post someday.

8 The title track is even better, and we’ll see it eventually on 80s My Way and possibly another mix, although that latter one is still in a very neotonous state.

9 In fact, Sheik would have been a junior or senior in high school at the time of the Stabilizers’ flash in the pan ... I wonder if young Duncan heard them and was inspired?

10 Which we did, on Moonside by Riverlight II.

11 This album is damnably hard to find, but apparently the whole thing is available on YouTube.  Hard to pull individual tracks from that, but I have faith in you.

12 In fact, I’ve already used 2 tracks from it: “Mermaid” on Numeric Driftwood II and “Pearls” on Tenderhearted Nightshade I.

13 Specifically, volumes I, II, and III.