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 ⇒

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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.

Isolation Report, Week #65

This week we had a new roof put on.  You know, when they tell you that contractors will be arriving at your house at the crack of dawn and making a lot of noise over your head, you say yourself “duh.” Of course there’s going to be a lot of noise.  But knowing it and experiencing it are entirely different things.  For 3 days, everyone in the house was woken up far before they were used to being conscious—even our middle child, who is the only true morning person in our family.  Lack of sleep was just the beginning though: the loud noise and massive amounts of dust coming in his window made our middle child (who was recently confirmed to be on the spectrum) fairly discombobulated,^* the indoor cats hid under the bed for 3 days, and the outdoor was scared to go out but not scared enough to be coerced into using the litterbox like a normal feline being.  We couldn’t let the dogs out in the yard because they think they’re vicious and want to “attack” the workmen.  We couldn’t run the air conditioner, because the roofers covered it in plastic to keep the dust from getting sucked into the vents, but we also couldn’t get in the pool, because stray pieces of shingle and once even a tool were raining down on it.  And the constant doorbell ringing: there are rotten beams, you should probably replace the gutters, we had to add new “fascia boards,”^** can you move your truck out of the driveway so we can park a porta potty there instead?  (It’s still there, by the way.)  It was a lot.

Next week they’re coming to turn the power off for up to 6 hours so they can replace our electrical panels (so that should be a load of fun), then the actual solar panels get installed.  As I say, it’s a lot, but at the end of the day we’ll have enough solar power to never have to pay the power company again, and a battery backup which should last indefinitely the next time said power company turns off our electricity for specious reasons.  Assuming the solar company isn’t full of shit.  We shall see, I suppose.

On the pandemic front, our humans are now 60% vaccinated, which is to say 2 of us have had 2 shots, 2 of us have had 1, and one of us hasn’t had any (but only because she’s too young).  Moving forward to a better future, hopefully.  Again, we shall see.

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* The technical term is “emotional dysregulation.”

** No, we didn’t know what that meant either.

5e vs Pathfinder: A Dance of D&Ds

On this blog, I’ve talked about leaving D&D for Pathfinder, and even a bit about leaving Pathfinder for D&D 5e.  The truth is, my feelings on these two actually mirror my feelings on my two favorite programming languages: C++ and Perl.  I learned C++ first, and I loved it.  Mostly.  But then I learned Perl and it was so much better than C++.  Except there were still parts of C++ that I missed.  And then sometimes I would go back to C++ and I would remember all the reasons I loved it ... and all the reasons I left it.  Back and forth, always missing whichever one I wasn’t using, always nostalgic for the other one.

Remember when I talked about game rotation?  Well, as I mentioned, most of our games are 5e (or variants thereof), but occasionally we dabble in other games.  And, recently, we finally decided to play a Pathfinder campaign, spurred by my eldest’s love of the Kingmaker adventure path.  And I was quite excited to get back to Pathfinder, because there were lots of things I missed about it.  Except now that I’m deep in it ...

You see, as I explained a bit when I originally talked about Pathfinder, it made a number of improvements on D&D 3e.  You may also remember from my discussion of multiclassing in 3e that 3e (and even moreso Pathfinder) has my favorite implementation of multiclassing, and that’s just one of the many ways that Pathfinder makes character creation a joy.  You have so many options ... many people would say too many.

But allow me a brief digression: I will always maintain that you can never have too many choices.  Now, people will inevitably respond with “but ... analysis paralysis!” Yes, indeed: analysis paralysis is all too real, and it can be very problematic, especially when people need to make a series of choices in a row.  And that’s all a roleplaying character is, you know—a series of choices.  Some big, most small, but just choice after choice after choice.  So analysis paralysis can really screw you over when you try to build a character.  But here’s my potentially—hell, probably—contentious opinion: analysis paralysis isn’t caused by having too many choices.  It’s caused by having those choices shittily organized.  Think of it this way:  If I asked you pick from a list of 256 options, there’s no way you could do it.  The analysis paralysis would be crippling.  On the other hand, if I asked you pick from a list of 4 options, that would be trivial.  If I asked you to pick from a list of 4 options 4 times ... still pretty easy.  But, see, 4 to the power of 4 is 256.  To make 1 choice from 256 options is next to impossible (without spending an inordinate amount of time, in any event); to make 4 choices from 4 options each still gives you 256 total options, but they’ve been organized in such a fashion that the chioces are pretty easy.

This is important in the context of TTRPG character creation because, as I said above: character building is just choosing a bunch of options.  Now, I’m not saying that Pathfinder is immune to crappy organization which can cause analysis paralysis.  For instance, the number of feats available in the game is ... overwhelming.  But, they’re all tagged with various tags.  For this campaign, I built a witch character.  We started at 4th level, so I needed to choose 2 feats.  There are (quite literally) hundreds of feats to choose from.  Except a lot of them (like, a whole lot of them) are combat feats.  My witch is not going to be doing a lot of melee combat: she’ll be casting spells, and using hexes (which are like special magic tricks only available to witches).  So I don’t need any of those combat-oriented feats.  A bunch more are “teamwork” feats, which are only useful if two or more characters take them, so I eliminated those as well.  “Metamagic” feats can change the way you cast spells; some of them might be useful for a witch character, but they’re far more useful for what’s called a “spontaneous caster” (as opposed to a “prepared caster,” which a witch is).  So I’ll skip those.  And so on, and so forth, until I’ve narrowed down the list of potential feats from hundreds to a dozen or two.  Still more options than I’d like, and Pathfinder could still stand to add a few more layers of organization for their feats, but it was doable.  And I did it.

So, now I’m playing a witch named Wilhemina Osterdale Bexxancourt—but please call her “Bexx,” everbody does—and she’s a custom race, which is another thing Pathfinder makes it very easy to do via its race builder rules, and she has an “archetype,” which is another thing Pathfinder has over 5e (although, to be fair, 5e has started dabbling in this arena lately: they refer to Pathfinder archetypes as “variants” and use “archetypes” to mean subclasses, which is very confusing for those of us who have to go back and forth).  My race and archetype are based on comic characters, actually: the talokka are based on the Legion of Superheroes’ Shadow Lass,¹ who hails from a planet called Talok VIII, and, while I can’t be sure that the creators of the “tatterdemalion” archetype specifically had Ragman in mind when they wrote it, the fact that he’s often referred to as “the Tattered Tatterdemalion” in the comics is surely suggestive.  So I’m a blue-skinned spellcaster who can manipulate shadows and whose clothes can reach out grab people, who talks to the stars, which grant her her powers, and also to her indigo and lavender fox, which is her companion and mentor.  Also, I’m traveling with a clone of Vexx and a little boy whose stuffed toy shaped like a demon can turn into an actual demon.  In Pathfinder, none of this was particularly difficult to build.  In 5e ... well, let’s just say there would have been a lot of reskinning, refluffing, and handwaving, and it still wouldn’t have been as satisfying as what we have currently.  In my humble opinion.

So, you may say to yourself, sounds like you’re happy to be playing Pathfinder then!  Yeah, you’d think that ...

See, the problem is that the character creation is only one part at the beginning at the campaign.  It’s a huge part, don’t get me wrong ... but still only one part, and it’s over before you even start playing.  Then you get to the actual gameplay, and that’s where 5e really shines.  Simple example: as a prepared spellcaster, I know a certain number of spells, and, out of the ones I know, I can “prepare” a certain number of those spells to have on hand on any given day.²  Now, in 5e, I would be able to prepare, let’s say, the spell cure wounds.  Once it was prepared, I could cast it as many times as I liked.  I could also cast it at either 1st level, or at 2nd level³ ... whichever the situation called for (i.e. depending on how bad the wounds I wished to cure actually were).  In Pathfinder, I have to have two entirely different spells: cure light wounds, and cure moderate wounds.  I need to know both of those, and, if I want to cast both of them, I need to prepare them both.  Worse, if I think I may need to cure some moderately severe wounds more than once, I have to prepare cure moderate more than once.  This felt perfectly normal back in the days when I played Pathfinder exclusively and 5e was just a rumour known as “D&D Next.” But, now that I’ve been playing 5e for, at this point, years—maybe even longer than I played Pathfinder, now that I think about it—this seems utterly insane.  And limiting.  And just ... annoying.

Of course, the obvious thing to do is to play some hybrid Frankenstein system where you would build your characters using Pathfinder rules and then play them using 5e rules.  Except that you can’t really do that, because everything is so intertwined.  Take my example of cure wounds above: that works in 5e because they revamped the entire magic system, collapsing similar spells into one, and adding “upcasting” effects for when you cast a lower level spell in a higher level spell slot.  That was a lot of work.  Pathfinder characters are all built on the assumption that you’re using Pathfinder spells; if you suddenly said, no, we’re using 5e spells instead, what would that do to the power levels? the spell slot progressions? the tables of spells known? class spell lists? what about domain spells for clerics and patron spells for witches? some of those are Pathfinder-only spells—what do we do then?

And the magic system is just one place where character creation and character play intersect: what about the alignment system? the skill system? the feat system? the differing methods of increasing ability scores, both as a racial feature and during level progression?  There are just two damn many moving parts here to successfully combine the two into any semblance of something that would actually work.  Well, without putting massive effort into it, and it seems foolish to devote that much time into something that you have no idea what the chance of success is, or how useful it would be even if you do succeed.  So I kind of feel like I’m stuck wishing I was using Pathfinder when I’m building characters for 5e, and wishing I was using 5e when I’m actually playing Pathfinder.  And it’s a bummer.

I don’t know if this tension will ever get resolved.  You may recall my talking about looking forward to Pathfinder 2nd edition (a.k.a. “P2”), but that turned out to be a bust.  They really blew it, in my opinion.  Not only did it devolve into each class being a huge list of powers like D&D 4e tried to do,⁴ but they also completely removed multiclassing (again, like 4e tried to do).  You know, for all the hate that 4e got (and I’m guilty of quite a lot of it myself), 4e did a lot of things right.  But it screwed up in (at least) two fundamental areas; the idea that Paizo (the makers of Pathfinder) would look at 4e and go “let’s only take the parts that really failed!” is just incomprehensible to me.  If I wanted something entirely different from the D&D lineage, I certainly have lots of great choices.  My eldest is particularly fond of the “Powered by the Apocalypse” sytem.⁵  But I don’t want something entirely different.  I don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak.  I love the D&D system and mythology and even some of its little weirdsies,⁶ like saving throws, or high-level characters being able to survive falls from orbit.⁷  I just want the thing I love to be better, not to abandon it entirely.  I’m not sure if there will ever be an answer here.  P2 didn’t do it, and, while “6e” is mere conjecture at this point, it seems a safe bet that, even if it does arrive one day, the amazing success of 5e taught its creators that “simpler is better.” Of course, I don’t believe that.  But simpler gets more people to try out the game, and (strictly from a business perspective) having a steady stream of new customers is way more important than catering to those few customers who have grown sophisticated enough to want more options.  So a future hypothetical 6e probably won’t address it either.  It may just be an insoluable problem.

And that makes me sad.  Not completely depressed, of course, but just a bit bummed out.  Maybe one day someone will solve this dilemma.  Until then, I’ll keep playing the one and missing the other, and swapping back and forth just to keep myself appreciating whichever one I’m not playing at the moment.  It’s still a lot of fun either way.

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1 Shadow Lass was later renamed “Umbra” when the naming convention of “So-and-So Boy” and “Such-and-Such Girl” fell out of style, but that was well after my time reading comics.

2 Yes, I know that, as a witch, I’m not constrained to a limited number of spells known, as a bard or sorcerer would be.  That’s not really relevant to my point here though.

3 For this campaign, our characters are starting at 3rd level, so I have access to 2nd level spells.

4 The fact that “powers” was spelled “feats” did nothing to alleviate that impression.

5 That’s the one that is used for Dungeon World, Monster of the Week, Masks, etc etc etc.

6 To steal a phrase from Judge John Hodgman.

7 For those who didn’t realize that, the issue arises because there’s a maximum amount of falling damage one can take.  The reason there’s a maximum is to represent (sort of) the concept of terminal velocity.  The problem comes in because maximum falling damage is anything but terminal for most characters once they get up around 15th level or so.