Perl blog post #44

Time for another Perl post in my ongoing series about my planned new date module.  Feel free to pop over to my Other Blog for full details.  Or, you know ... not.  Don’t let me pressure you.

It’s just that all the cool kids are doing it.  But, you know: whatever you want, man.  I’m just sayin’.

National Heroscape Day 2015

Well, it’s that time of year again: National Heroscape Day was yesterday, and we played our annual tournament for the SoCal league.  This year we managed 8 participants, but I brought 6 of them, so it’s not as impressive as it sounds.  (And, honestly, it doesn’t even sound that impressive.)  In case you don’t know what I’m on about:

• what is Heroscape
• what is C3V (part of the larger group called “VC”)
• NHSD 2012 (including a bit about what is NHSD)
• NHSD 2013
• NHSD 2014

And a reference that may only make sense if you actually play the game:

• forum thread for our tourney, the SoCal Slaughter (I’m Xotli on that forum)

This year the Smaller Animal reluctantly agreed to play solo, since otherwise we would have had only 7.  He really wanted to play with me as a team though.  I hope next year he feels comfortable enough to go solo as well.  My eldest brought his 3 inseperable pals (now officially referred to as the Skype Squad, for the thing that they stay up all night doing), so that made 6 out of the 8 total participants, which is my personal record for highest percentage of tournament entrants provided.  So my feeling last year that I was “almost single-handedly keeping the game alive in our area” has only intensified this year.  But I’m going to keep drumming up more people, not fewer.  So if it one day ends up being just me and my friends and relations, I’m okay with that.  Plus we can just have it at my house and I won’t have to drive anywhere.

For the second year in a row, the younger brother beat the older, and consequently finished ahead of him in the tourney.  We brought one complete newbie, and she managed to come in 3rd, due to an unusual set of circumstances.  As per my usual showing, I came in right around dead center (in this case, 5th of 8).  But we don’t go for the tourney placement.  We go to have a good time, and I think we achieved that.

After the tourney, there was an aftergame of ‘Scape very similar to the one last year: my eldest once again took the elf wizard pod, and his friend once again played her backup army, which she hadn’t gotten a chance to try out.  Then we sat around bullshitting for a while, ate some pizza, then launched directly into a marathon game of Zombie Munchkin.  We only played to 6 levels (a normal game is to 10, but we learned a long time ago to scale back from that).  Still, we went back and forth for quite a while, with nearly everyone hovering at 5th level for at least a brief period, until finally the demonspawn’s other friend pulled out a victory which no one could stop.

As always, we must thank our gracious host, and his apartment complex’s community rec room, which is the perfect space for us to spread out, play games, eat two meals, and just have cool chats.  I hope we can achieve a better turn out next year, because our number can’t go down much more than this before there just isn’t much point in carrying on.  But we also talked quite seriously about getting together again before next year’s NHSD.  Of course, we did that last year as well, and see how far that got us.  But somehow I feel like this year will be different.  Hope springs eternal and all that.  But the kids at least are excited enough to make it happen.  So hopefully it does.

Bleeding Salvador I

"The Night the Creature Came Ashore"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

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

I explained way back in the introduction that my mixes generally have one of 3 types of themes: emotional, musical, or lyrical.  Oh, sure, there’s a bit of crossover sometimes—Salsatic Vibrato, for instance, is primarily a musical theme, since it demands a certain type of instrumentation, but it also has a bit of an emotional component, in that all the tunes must be upbeat.  But for the most part mixes are one of those three.  Up until now, nearly every mix I’ve introduced you to has been either emotional or musical ... pretty much the only one that we can call lyrical is my Christmas mix.  Well, it’s time to change that right now.

When I first picked up Welcome to the Beautiful South, I was surprised at how much I liked it.  Oh, sure, I’d liked the Housemartins, Paul Heaton’s previous band, and London 0 Hull 4 is a nifty little album.  But Welcome to the Beautiful South is a marvel, a gem of unexpected beauty.  After listening to it once, I put it on repeat and listened to it over and over for hours.  Many of the songs on that album stick with me even now, a decade and a half later, but the one that wormed its way under my skin more than any other was “Woman in the Wall.” With its poppy air and casual demeanor belying its gruesome lyrics, it was an odd combination of creepy, poignant, and disturbing.  And above all unforgettable.  When I started pondering the modern mixes, I knew that one mix surely had to be centered around bizarrerie: songs with surreal lyrics and strange imagery, and that “Woman in the Wall” would be one of its centerpieces.

And here we have Bleeding Salvador.  By “Salvador” I mean Salvador Dali.  Picture any of his famous paintings—say, The Persistence of Memory, or Soft Watch at the Moment of Explosion—but picture all those melting clocks dripping blood instead.  We’re talking Dali at his most disturbing;¹ more like Burning Giraffes and Telephones or The Bleeding Roses.  Not all the songs here are that disturbing.  But they’re all at least a little ... odd.  Lyrically.

Once the mood had been established, a lot of songs immediately started suggesting themselves.  “Reptile” by the Church and “Killing Moon” by Echo and the Bunnymen have been the first two songs on this mix practically forever.  Likewise, “Mad World” by Tears for Fears, with its line “the dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had,” seemed an obvious choice.²  And the ultra-classic “Goo Goo Muck,” which is probably my all-time favorite Cramps song, was never in question.

And of course there are artists who are a no-brainer for this mix.  When it comes to Globe of Frogs by Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, you’d be hard-pressed to find a track that doesn’t belong here.  But eventually I settled on “Tropical Flesh Mandala,” which handily also provides our volume title.  In the same vein, Hooverphonic, whose tunes normally find their way to Smokelit Flashback, and the Dukes of Stratosphear (XTC’s alter ego), specialize in the strange and surreal.  Here we have “Have You Seen Jackie?” and “Frosted Flake Wood,” which butt up against each other so perfectly it’s difficult to tell where one ends and the next begins.

When it came time to work on finalizing this volume, I thought to look around for any other artists who would be perfect for it but that somehow I’d overlooked.  And two blazingly obvious candidates lept out at me: King Missile and They Might Be Giants.  Both of these groups can be so lyrically bizarre that it almost starts to sound normal while you’re listening to entire albums from them.  Once I started really looking for candidates from these two bands, I rapidly ended up with so many I didn’t know what to do with them all.  I finally settled on one from King Missile (“The Boy Who Ate Lasagna and Could Jump Over a Church”) and two from TMBG: “Cage & Aquarium” as a bridge from the first half to the second, and “Everything Right Is Wrong Again” to help us wind down.  I especially love how “Cage & Aquarium” is much funnier if you’ve ever heard “Aquarius.”

Then there are the bands who aren’t necessarily a shoe-in, but shouldn’t be that surprising either.  Although you may remember Naomi from Smokelit Flashback, a lot of their tunes I used for that mix were instrumental.  The ones that weren’t perhaps didn’t strike you as particularly surrealistic.  On the other hand, their track that I used for Rose-Coloured Brainpan³ gave a hint of their proclivities in that direction.  Here we have “King Kong Is Not Dead,” which is perhaps the pinnacle of “hunh?” for them.⁴  Suzanne Vega is another one, as equally well-known for her sweet ballads as her strange trips.  But “Fat Man and Dancing Girl” has always been one of my favorites of hers, and it fits beautifully here.

And of course we need a few representatives from the completely unexpected.  Pearl Jam, for instance, is generally a pretty straight-ahead grunge band, but, when they diverge from that, they diverge pretty hard.  “Bugs,” from their somewhat difficult album Vitalogy, is an excellent example.  It’s not just lyrically strange, but also musically odd, with an accordian providing nearly its complete accompaniment.  I was also surprised to run across “Heaven, Hell or Houston” fairly recently when I finally decided to explore ZZ Top’s back catalog.  It’s wonderfully bizarre and I knew immediately it had to wind up on this mix.

Now, just as Salsatic Vibrato has an emotional component as well as a musical one, so Bleeding Salvador is not just any old song with weird lyrics.  These tracks are pretty much all solidly mid-tempo, not music that makes you want to get up and dance, but not melodies that fade into the background either.  So there are genres, such as gothic or darkwave, that give us lots of great, surreal lyrics, but emotionally they’re going to end up more in Smokelit Flashback or other mixes.⁵  But “Gun,” Siouxsie and the Banshees’ cover of a John Cale tune from 1974, actually works wonderfully here.  Not as sonically difficult as Cale’s original, Siouxsie stays on-tempo, and her rich vocals are clearer than the muddy, echoey work from the Velvet Underground co-founder.  But the words retain all the disturbing imagery that Cale imbued them with, and the song has always fascinated me.  It’s one of my favorites off Siouxsie’s Through the Looking Glass.⁶  A sample view into Cale’s mindscape:

Blood on the windows and blood on the walls
Blood on the ceiling and down in the halls
And the papers keep downing on everything I burned
And the people getting restless but they’ll never learn

Although I’m not afraid to pick up the tempo as well.  Another cover, PJ Harvey doing Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” from way back in 1965, demonstrates that very well.  Like pretty much all of Rid of Me, it’s got a seething, not-quite-thrashy edge to it.  I decided to preface that with the Presidents of the United States of America, certainly no strangers to surrealism, and definitely not afraid to kick it up a notch.  “Lump” is my number one choice for best PotUSA song ever, and the lyrics certainly qualify it for this mix.

In the category of wacky recreation of bizarre childhood memories, there are two cinematic musical sequences from my own childhood which I clearly remember as being creepy and crazy and bizarre.  I didn’t understand the feeling at the time, but I would later recognize it as the mental disconnection that makes one feel as if they were on drugs even when they’re not.⁷  The first is “Wondrous Boat Ride” from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.  The second is “Pink Elephants on Parade” from Dumbo.  If anyone’s done a modern take on the former, I haven’t heard about it.⁸  But imagine how weirded out (and yet pleased) I was to find a version of “Pink Elephants” on El Bando en Fuego! by Lee Press-On and the Nails.  You may recall LPN from Salsatic Vibrato, and it’s true that this tune is brassy and upbeat.  But it’s just as weird as I remember, even without the trippy visuals. 

Bleeding Salvador I
[ The Night the Creature Came Ashore ]

“Reptile” by the Church, off Starfish
“The Killing Moon” by Echo & the Bunnymen, off Ocean Rain
“Tropical Flesh Mandala” by Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, off Globe of Frogs
“Woman in the Wall” by the Beautiful South, off Welcome to the Beautiful South
“King Kong Is Not Dead” by Naomi, off Pappelallee
“Have You Seen Jackie?” by the Dukes of Stratosphear, off Chips from the Chocolate Fireball [Compilation]
“Frosted Flake Wood” by Hooverphonic, off The Magnificent Tree
“Pink Elephants on Parade” by Lee Press-On and the Nails, off El Bando en Fuego!
“Heaven, Hell or Houston” by ZZ Top, off El Loco
“The Boy Who Ate Lasagna and Could Jump Over a Church” by King Missile, off The Way to Salvation
“Gun” by Siouxsie and the Banshees, off Through the Looking Glass [Covers]
“Bugs” by Pearl Jam, off Vitalogy
“Cage & Aquarium” by They Might Be Giants, off Lincoln
“Mad World” by Tears for Fears, off The Hurting
“Lump” by the Presidents of the United States of America, off The Presidents of the United States of America
“Highway '61 Revisited” by PJ Harvey, off Rid of Me
“Fat Man & Dancing Girl” by Suzanne Vega, off 99.9 F°
“Goo Goo Muck” by the Cramps, off Bad Music for Bad People [Compilation]
“Blood and Roses” by the Smithereens, off Especially for You
“Mad Hatter” by the Stranglers, off Aural Sculpture
“Everything Right Is Wrong Again” by They Might Be Giants, off They Might Be Giants
“Beautiful Freak” by EELS, off Beautiful Freak
“Earth to Doris” by Was (Not Was), off What Up, Dog?

Total:  23 tracks,  76:47

For the remainder, there’s nothing too surprising or too predictable.  The Smithereens’ “Blood and Roses” just barely qualifies for this mix, but it has some nice imagery and it’s just a great song.  “Mad Hatter” is uncharacteristcally a bit wacky for the Stranglers, while “Beautiful Freak” is fairly typical for the Eels.  Finally, to close out this volume, we have a very strange bit of sonic poetry: “Earth to Doris” by Was (Not Was).  You may recall that when last we encountered WNW⁹ I noted that they were “hard to pin down.” This track is one which exemplifies that perfectly.  The music is strange, the spoken-word vocals are even stranger, and overall it paints a picture that you can’t help but try to visualize even while your brain is telling you that you really don’t want to.  A fitting way to tie this up.

Next time, we’ll circle back around to another round of gaming inspiration.

Bleeding Salvador II ⇒

__________

1 And possibly NSFW.

2 Lately the version by Michael Andrews and Gary Jules from Donnie Darko gets more attention.  But I still prefer the original.

3 Which was “October.”

4 Although there’s also much to be said for “Butter Worker.” But we chall come to a mix for that in the fullness of time.

5 Which we shall also come to in the fullness of time.

6 Which is itself probably my favorite Siouxsie album, for all that it’s a cover album.

7 Simplest way to experience this for yourself: go watch David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch.

8 Actually, while researching this post, I discovered that Marilyn Manson did a version called “The Family Trip” for his first album.

9 Back on Moonside by Riverlight.

Perl blog post #43

This week I posted another installment in my new Perl series about a new date module I’m working on.  Pop on over to my Other Blog to read all about it.  As usual, if you’re not a techie like me, you may not give much of a shit.  Then again, you may not give two shits even if you are a techie.  Then you could be all like:

Again, it’s unlikely that I’ll do another Perl post next week.  I’m trying to alternate back and forth, but it also depends a lot on how much work I get done on the Perl module.  If I get on a hot streak, I may do a few Perl posts in a row.  More likely, if I hit a dry spell, I may do a few posts over here in a row.  This is one of the many ways that this blog is like a box of chocolates.  Other ways would include its creamy caramel center and being poisonous to dogs.

A Tale of Two Eggs

Growing up, I was very lucky to have all four of my grandparents throughout my entire childhood.¹  I was also lucky in that both my grandmothers cooked, although they had very different styles.  Which is not surprising, as they were very different people.

My father’s mother was born poor and seemed to have a fierce sort of pride in it.  She considered herself salt of the earth, and was very proud of being humble.  Her cooking came from her North Carolina farm upbringing.  There was lots of ham and chicken and corn and butterbeans and biscuits and collards and mashed potatoes and potato salad and boiled potatoes and, for special occasions, all of the above all at once.  Barbecue meant pulled pork, old hambones were dropped into anything boiling, be it potatoes, cabbage, or soup, and bacon grease was used to fry everything, from corn to cornbread to grilled cheese.

On the other hand, my mother’s mother was born poor and seemed determined to never be poor again.  She married for money (twice, I believe) and did her utmost to avoid work (at which she mostly succeeded).  The vast majority of her housework was done by the maid, but she did her own cooking.  She made steak and steak fries, spaghetti and meatballs,² and chicken tetrazzini.  When she wanted a snack she would spread soft bleu cheese or Braunschweiger on saltines.

As you can imagine, Sunday dinner was radically different depending on which set of grandparents we were visiting on any given week.  For the most part I gave the edge to the paternal side, not being impressed by fancy food, but honestly I was a very picky eater and didn’t eat that much of what I was served no matter who was cooking it.  Still, I had my favorites in either place, and, being the eldest grandchild on both sides, I often influenced them to emulate each other to some degree.³  But there wasn’t a huge amount of overlap in terms of dishes.

The one I remember most distinctly is scrambled eggs.

My maternal grandmother cracked her eggs in a bowl, added milk, whisked them to within an inch of their lives, then cooked them low and slow in a saucepan with butter and not much else in the way of seasoning.  When they were done, they were light, and fluffy, and buttery, and I hated them.  Breakfast at her house meant Fruit Loops.  After a while she wouldn’t even bother to make me eggs at all.

My paternal grandmother, on the other hand, took a gigantic cast iron skillet and cranked up the heat until a flicked drop of water would dance around the pan for a few seconds before vaporizing.  Then she fried up an entire pound of bacon.  Then she cracked a dozen eggs directly into the pan, with the bacon grease still in it (obviously), peppered them enough to make the devil’s eyes water, and then essentially fried them while beating them with a fork, till they were good and scrambled.  Her eggs were spotted with brown—often nearly black—crust, and greasy, and so firm you might call them rubbery ... and they were delicious.  I would eat the bacon because it seemed expected of me, but honestly I didn’t care anything about it.  Bacon existed to create grease, and bacon grease existed to scramble eggs in.  And bacon grease—and salt, and pepper—were all the eggs needed.  No butter, no namby-pamby milk ... just eggs: chewy, and tasting of bacon.

After I went away to college, I can’t remember my grandmother making eggs for me any more.  Of course, by the time I was a teenager, I was regularly sleeping through breakfast, especially on weekends.  For many years—probably over a decade—I never even ate breakfast.  I would get up late and proceed directly to lunch.

I lost my grandmother on my father’s side just before I turned 30 ... although she was the youngest of my four grandparents, she was the second to go.  She had always been overweight, but otherwise relatively healthy, so it was completely unexpected.  She died in her sleep, apparently peacefully.

Of course I missed a lot of things about my grandmother, as I did about all my grandparents after they passed away.  I didn’t even think about missing the eggs so much for another ten years or so.  This was about the time that eggs became healthy for you again,⁴ and eating breakfast had somehow become an essential part of losing weight.  And I suddenly began to develop a craving for my grandmother’s eggs.

Of course my first attempts were disastrous.  First of all, I was not going to cook a pound of bacon and a dozen eggs, and I rapidly discovered that even two strips of bacon could easily overwhelm 2, 3, or even 4 eggs.  Maybe I was getting old, but I just couldn’t handle the quantity of bacon grease my grandmother used to use, and it probably wasn’t very good for me anyway.  I also can’t scramble my eggs in the pan.  I’m just no good at it.  I need to pre-scramble them before pouring them in.  I’m also pretty sure I’m not using as much pepper as she used to.  But overall, after fiddling with my prepartion methodology for the past decade, I’ve gotten to a point where I’m happy with it.  It’s not “just like Grandma used to make,” but it retains enough of the character to satiate my nostalgia, and I probably couldn’t handle her eggs these days anyway.  I’m old and fat now, and less grease-resistant.

I eat eggs about 3 times a week.  I generally make 4 at a time, as I only get to eat them on those days when I can sleep in, so it’s sort of a brunch meal.⁵  Here’s how I make them, in case you ever want to try it yourself.

First, you need some bacon grease.  If you actually like eating bacon, then lucky you.  Otherwise perhaps you can do what I do, which is convince The Mother to cook a package of bacon, give me the grease, then put the cooked bacon in the fridge and make sandwiches out of it later.⁶  I put the grease in a small glass jar which we keep in the fridge.

You’ll also need ghee.  Using only bacon grease isn’t particularly good for you, and besides: the taste will overwhelm the eggs.  You can use butter—I did, for years—but it doesn’t stand up to the high heat as well as ghee.  Plus ghee is supposedly better for you.  Although butter also magically became good for you again recently.  So who can say.

Other than that, you just need salt, pepper, and eggs.  I like sea salt, peppercorns which I grind myself on the medium setting, and jumbo cage-free/organic eggs.  I buy brown, but honestly there’s no difference in taste between the egg colors.  You’ll also need a decent pan: it doesn’t have to be a cast-iron skillet, but that might be nice if you have one.  I just use a regular old small pan.  Other “hardware” (as Alton Brown would say) is a glass, a butter knife, and spatula or non-metal serving fork.

Put the pan on medium-high heat and add a dollop of ghee and a dollop of bacon grease.  “Dollop” here is an intentionally vague measurement; once melted, the grease shouldn’t even cover the bottom of the pan.  It doesn’t take much.  You’ll get a feel for how much is too much after a few tries.

Crack your eggs into the glass and add a large pinch of salt per two eggs (or a small pinch for one), and 3 grinds of pepper per egg.  You can put the salt in first if you like,⁷ but don’t add the pepper first, or you’ll end up with one giant clump of pepper somewhere in the middle of your eggs.⁸  I also like to let the pepper sit for a minute or so before stirring up the eggs (with the butter knife); if you stir it right away, it won’t clump as bad as it would if you had added it before the eggs, but it still isn’t pleasant.⁹  Take advantage of this time to spread your ghee and bacon grease around the pan with the spatula or fork.

Now just sit back and wait for a bit.  I generally use this time to make myself a glass of tea.  But whatever floats your boat.  What you’re waiting to see are the first barest wisps of smoke from the grease.  Once you see that, stir your eggs quickly but thoroughly, then pour them in.  Your pan should be plenty hot, and your eggs will start to bubble.  Rinse your glass out: that allows a few seconds for your eggs to firm up on the bottom.  Now use the spatula to stir the eggs.  (If you chose the serving fork route, you may find the tines can do a better job here.)  You want to pull the edges of the eggs toward the center, which keeps the edges from getting dried out and burnt.  And you just basically want to swirl everything around a lot.  As your eggs start to change from liquid to solid, start doing more of a flipping motion.  The goal here is to get the wet stuff to the bottom of the pan and the dry stuff on top.  Once you either see your first browning, or the eggs stop looking “wet” (whichever comes first), turn the heat off and grab a bowl from the cabinet, if you haven’t already.  Keep stirring and flipping, with the length of time being dependent on how done you like your eggs.  I’ve come to like mine a bit softer and less burnt than my grandmother did.  But they still taste like scrambled up fried eggs, which is what I’m shooting for.  Once you achieve the consistency you’re looking for, dump them in the bowl and hit that pan with some hot water to remove the bits of egg from it.  I don’t know about your dishwasher, but there’s only two things mine won’t get off dishes: rice, and dried egg.

And there you have it: the perfect scrambled eggs.  Well, my other grandmother wouldn’t say so, and I bet there’s a lot of you out there reading this that wouldn’t think so either.  But give it a try sometime: at the very least, they may be different from what you’re used to, and different is always good.  For me, they embody a little slice of my grandmother.  I think about her every time I make them.  And that’s a pretty fine breakfast.

__________

1 I lost the first a few months before my 18th birthday.

2 In fact, her recipe is what we still use today; when my kids ask for “spaghetti,” they mean they want my grandmother’s sauce, and for the most part could care less what you put it on.

3 By the end of my childhood, their mashed potatoes were indistinguishable.  At this point, I can’t even remember which of them changed to match the other.

4 This is still contested, of course.  As is all food wisdom.

5 Plus usually I have to share them with my daughter.  She can really put a hurting on some eggs, even though she’s only 3.

6 Also good for crumbling into bacon bits and putting on salad.

7 I always do, personally.  But that’s mainly because after I crack the eggs, I generally have egg on my hands.  So I either have to reach into the salt cellar with eggy hands, or with wet hands after rinsing them off.  Either way gets yucky.

8 Trust me on this.  I speak from experience.

9 I’m sure there’s some scientific explanation for why letting the pepper sit on top of the eggs for a bit makes it clump less, but I confess I have no idea what that is.

Perl blog post #42

Today I’m starting a new Perl series over on my Other Blog.  It’s about a date module I’m fiddling around with.  If you’re not a Perl person, it may not mean much to you, but then again you may find it somewhat entertaining even without speaking all the jargon.  Or maybe not.  But you’ll never know unless you try.

Unlike with my last long-ass Perl series, I do not plan to do an installment on this one every week.  So it’s entirely possible that there may be something worth reading here next week.  But you might not want to hold your breath.

Smooth as Whispercats I

"Copper and Snow"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

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

There was a roughly 5-year period—say, from the release of “Oh Girl” by Boy Meets Girl in 1985 until the release of “Driving” by Everything but the Girl in 1990—when alternative music was ... well, not dominated, really, but at least vigorously populated ... by an odd type of soft-focus pop that owed a large debt to smooth jazz.  To call it actual “smooth jazz” would be a misnomer, but then again many would argue that to call smooth jazz actual “jazz” is also a misnomer.  It’s hard to say exactly where this came from.  It’s certainly true that rock saxophone was undergoing a serious change, from the peppier fills such as Andy Hamilton’s on “Rio” by Duran Duran in 1982 to the more introspective lines such as those played by Michael Brecker in “Your Latest Trick” by Dire Straits in 1985.¹  But it’s not like smooth jazz was ever mega-popular, worthy of being emulated due to its legion of adoring fans.

And yet ... alternative grew a strong smooth jazz component in that 5-year period.  There was Sting’s breakout solo album, The Dream of the Blue Turtles, the astonishing success of Double’s “Captain of Her Heart,” which hit #16 in the US and rose all the way to #8 in the UK (which is pretty strong for a supposedly alternative track), and a seemingly endless procession of purveyors of the style: Boy Meets Girl, Scarlett & Black, Johnny Hates Jazz, the Go-Betweens, Everything but the Girl, Level 42, the Cutting Crew, Swing Out Sister, the Blow Monkeys, Hipsway, and Aztec Camera, and that’s not even including those who merely dabbled in the form, such as ABC and the aforementioned Dire Straits.²

Some of the folks I list above are identified as “sophisti-pop” by Wikipedia or AllMusic.  Honestly, I tend to think of sophisti-pop as being represented by the Style Council, or Spandau Ballet—neither of which I particularly care for—and indeed both those bands are listed on the Wikipedia page I just linked to.  But it also lists several bands that I don’t feel fit the smooth-jazz-inflected mold at all, such as Scritti Politti, whose strong reggae tinge makes me want to link them to the Escape Club; ABC, who is pure synth-pop; and the Blue Nile, who lean far more towards lounge than jazz.³  That page also leaves out what I consider to be two big names from my list: Boy Meets Girl and Everything But the Girl.  Still, there’s no denying that sophisti-pop is strongly tied to the particular sound I’m highlighting in this mix.

Some of these bands were essentially one-hit wonders: for instance, “You Don’t Know” by Scarlett & Black is a great song that we hear towards the end of this volume, but Scarlett and Black is a fairly crappy album overall.  Likewise, the insanely good “Captain of Her Heart,” which opens this volume, is a marvel; Blue, on the other hand, is barely adequate.  But then again, some of these albums are just amazing, such as Turn Back the Clock by Johnny Hates Jazz, in which nearly every song is a winner.  In fact, it was relistening to “Shattered Dreams”—which I’ve chosen for the closer here—at some point a few years ago which inspired me to start developing my own mix of these smooth-jazz-inspired tracks.  These songs are all on the slower side—sort of soft-focus, as I said up above—but not really downbeat.  They’re often romantic, but not generally sappy.⁴  They’re ... well, they’re smooth, and they do often whisper their messages in your ear.  Where the “cats” bit comes from I can’t rightly say, unless I was perhaps subconsciously inspired by “The Love Cats.”

That little 5-year stint from the late eighties is certainly well-represented here: besides the 3 tracks already mentioned, we have “Moon Over Bourbon Street” by Sting, my favorite Level 42 tune “Lessons in Love,” the best ever Go-Betweens track “Love Goes On!”, the Cutting Crew’s mostly unknown “Any Colour,” Aztec Camera’s “Stray,” from the album of the same name, and of course the big hit (for an alternative track, anyway) “Oh Girl” by Boy Meets Girl.  Great tunes all, but we’ll need to expand beyond that narrow timeslice to make a truly interesting mix.

The easiest direction to expand in is Norah Jones.  Despite being Ravi Shankar’s daughter,⁵ Jones is primarily known for a jazzy, soulful style that certainly blends beautifully into this mix.  I was mightily impressed with Come Away with Me, and we see two tracks off it here, and we can expect to hear more from Norah on future volumes.  Her voice is angelic, and fits perfectly here.

And let’s not forget Everything But the Girl, who give us “Missing,” kicking off our center stretch.  EBtG didn’t fade away like most of their smooth-jazz-inflected compatriots, and this track is from 1994, when they were still keeping it smooth.  And this is truly one of the great tracks of this subgenre: probably the second best EBtG track ever, in fact.⁶

And, as always, I like to see the good peeps over at Magnatune represented.  In this case, we’ll hear a vocal track from cellist Jami Sieber, off her 1998 album Second Sight, and then one from really obscure band⁷ the West Exit, from their really quite good debut, Nocturne.  Sieber’s track here is atypical of her normal work, which is often a bit darker.  Whereas the West Exit was made for this mix, straight up.  “Calico” is the soundtrack for being on a balcony at night, overlooking a city where the lights from traffic become pastel smears of color, and a gentle breeze blows by ...

Note that we close with our mix starter, “Shattered Dreams.” It was the big hit by Johnny Hates Jazz, who are often thought of as one-hit-wonders for this very song (if they’re thought of at all).  It’s a fantastic track and a great closer, but we’ll be seeing more from these English gents in future volumes.

Smooth as Whispercats I
[ Copper and Snow ]

“The Captain of Her Heart” by Double, off Blue
“Moon Over Bourbon Street” by Sting, off The Dream of the Blue Turtles
“Don't Know Why” by Norah Jones, off Come Away with Me
“Tree of Love” by Jami Sieber, off Second Sight
“The Key” by Kristin Hersh, off Strings [EP]
“Stray” by Aztec Camera, off Stray
“How You Kill Me” by KT Tunstall, off Invisible Empire // Crescent Moon
“Missing” by Everything but the Girl, off Amplified Heart
“Barely Breathing” by Duncan Sheik, off Duncan Sheik
“Lessons in Love” by Level 42, off Running in the Family
“Love Goes On!” by Go-Betweens, off 16 Lovers Lane
“Any Colour” by Cutting Crew, off Broadcast
“Come Away with Me” by Norah Jones, off Come Away with Me
“Violet” by Seal, off Seal
“Calico” by the West Exit, off Nocturne
“You Don't Know” by Scarlett & Black, off Scarlett and Black
“Oh Girl” by Boy Meets Girl, off Boy Meets Girl
“Shattered Dreams” by Johnny Hates Jazz, off Turn Back the Clock

Total:  18 tracks,  79:33

In terms of the less likely candidates that fill out this volume, we have the lovely tune “The Key” by Kristin Hersh.  Although Hersh is most well-known for being one of the driving forces behind Throwing Muses, she’s done some impressive solo work as well, and “The Key” (off her EP Strings) is my favorite.  It also provides the volume name: as I’m sure you know, copper and snow make a dusky blue boy.

Bookcasing “Missing” we have a pretty track from KT Tunstall (although not off Tiger Suit, which is usually my go-to source for Tunstall tunes), and the moderately popular “Barely Breathing,” the song that made Duncan Sheik a one-hit-wonder.  The former is a quiet, unassuming tune that you’ve likely never heard.  The latter is a breathy, smooth pop gem that you may have heard so much you got sick of it.  But give it another chance: it’s really quite lovely.

And, finally, I broke one of my own rules by including the 8-minute “Violet,” by Seal.  Rarely do I use such a long track, except perhaps on the instrumental mixes.  Also, I’m not actually a huge Seal fan.  But I own Seal, because it contains the awesome “Crazy,” and there are a few other tracks I also like, including this one.  It features some loungy piano work, some intriguing samples, and some mellow yet otherworldly synth programming.  It’s long, but it’s breezy and cool and very smooth, and that’s what this mix is all about.

Next time, we’ll get real.  Or, rather ... surreal.

Smooth as Whispercats II ⇒

__________

1 In fact, we’ll see “Your Latest Trick” on volume II.

2 And, yes, between this volume and the next, we’ll hear from all of those folks.

3 Which is to say, we’ll see the Blue Nile on Moonside by Riverlight before we see them here.

4 “Sappy” being in the eye of the beholder, of course.  Your mileage may vary.

5 I know, right?

6 You can bet we’ll be hearing the first best on the next volume.

7 Recall my definition of “really obscure band.”

Smokelit Flashback III

"Sniff Me Out Like I Was Tanqueray"

[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 mentioned at some point¹ that Smokelit Flashback was my longest mix.  Given that, it’s time to return to those waters and pick up where we left off after Smokelit Flashback I and Smokelit Flashback II.  Which, you may recall, featured a lot of cuts from 5 different albums.²

The primary problem with overfeaturing a few albums in a volume of a mix like this is the lack of variety.  But no less of a problem is that you can overmine your material.  I currently have 5 volumes of Smokelit Flashback, and enough material for at least two more, but the Lemon Jelly and the Naomi are all on the first two volumes, and only a single Portishead track remains.  It’s “Sour Times,” from their debut Dummy.³  And it’s a classic, don’t get me wrong.  I just wish I’d saved a bit more Portishead for these later volumes.

Also returning is Falling You.  They’re back again (of course) with a track off one of their later albums, Faith.  In general, the later Falling You albums aren’t as good as the earlier ones, but you still find gems on them, such as this one.  But, strangely, these two tracks—the one from Portishead and the one from Falling You—represent the only two returning artists.  By this point in the mix, I needed new blood.

Happily, my programmer friend⁴ had yet more wonders to introduce me to: in this case it was the first 3 albums⁵ from Belgian group Hooverphonic.  Hooverphonic is another of those bands that’s hard to classify: they’re a bit dream pop, and a bit ambient, but mostly trip-hop, and, like Portishead, a perfect fit for this mix.  I’ve managed to restrain myself though, so you’ll only find two tracks of theirs here.  But, like Falling You, expect to see them on just about every Smokelit volume from here on out.

My other big discovery is Thievery Corporation, who are mostly electro-world, somewhat like Transglobal Underground, but where TU is at the club end of that sub-subgenre, Thievery Corporation exists firmly at the trip-hop end.  They’re from DC, where I lived for many years, and my discovery of them is somewhat bizarre.  The Mother used to be the bookkeeper for the Capital Yacht Club, and some member there had a free copy of Thievery Corporation’s 2002 classic⁶ The Richest Man in Babylon.  Or maybe they had a bunch of free copies; I never got the full story.  Anyway, one way or another, someone offered The Mother a copy, she brought it home to me (she never said, but she probably listened to it once and said “here’s some weird shit he’ll enjoy”) and the rest is history.  Thievery Corp has a beautiful sound that works perfectly for this mix, as well as a few others.⁷  They’re giving us two tracks on this volume: one is our opener, and the other is right in our centerpiece, between the second Hooverphonic track and the Falling You track.

Other fairly obvious candidates include my discoveries of three male/female duos: Mono, a cool trip-hop London duo with only one album (but it’s a great one), Dahlia, a duo from Portland whose style is sort of half trip-hop, half darkwave, and Goldfrapp, another pair of Brits whose elcectic style encompasses dream, trip-hop, electronica, and even a bit of disco and downtempo.  Mono and Dahlia I think I discovered via some sort of “if you like that, you’ll like this” links; Goldfrapp I distinctly remember hearing on Morning Becomes Eclectic.  Each of the three contribute a track here, and you can be sure we’ll be hearing from each in future volumes.

For a slightly harder edge, I start to drift into a bit of acid house territory by closing out this volume with the Chemical Brothers followed by Massive Attack.  For the former, Dig Your Own Hole is probably one of the first electronica albums I ever bought, primarily on the strength of “Block Rockin’ Beats” (although that’s definitely not the best track on that album, as it turns out).  For the latter, I first heard “Paradise Circus” (the very track I use here) when I watched BBC show Luther, starring Idris Elba.

Our bridges come from Banyan, who we remember from Smokelit Flashback I, and one of the Ian Devaney instrumentals off the Swing soundtrack, which we saw on a few volumes of Salsatic Vibrato.

Smokelit Flashback III
[ Sniff Me Out Like I Was Tanqueray ]

“Until the Morning” by Thievery Corporation, off The Richest Man in Babylon
“Leave Me Alone” by Natalie Imbruglia, off Left of the Middle
“One Way Ride” by Hooverphonic, off Blue Wonder Power Milk
“Angel” by Artemis, off Gravity
“Lovely Head” by Goldfrapp, off Felt Mountain
“Sour Times” by Portishead, off Dummy
“You Know I'm No Good” by Amy Winehouse, off Back to Black
“Armageddon” by Dahlia, off Emotion Cycles
“Mad about You” by Hooverphonic, off The Magnificent Tree
“Omid (Hope)” by Thievery Corporation, off The Richest Man in Babylon
“Milk and Honey” by Falling You, off Faith
“Martin's Theme [reprise]” by Ian Devaney, off Swing [Soundtrack]
“Little Black Mess” by Shivaree, off Who's Got Trouble?
“Life in Mono” by Mono, off Formica Blues
“Cactus Soil” by Banyan, off Anytime at All
“Where Do I Begin” by The Chemical Brothers, off Dig Your Own Hole
“Paradise Circus” by Massive Attack, off Heligoland

Total:  17 tracks,  73:41

For the remainder, we have a few surprising and perhaps some not so surprising choices.  Natalie Imbruglia gives us the #2 track here; Imbruglia is perhaps best known for “Torn,” and that’s certainly the reason I first picked up the insanely good Left of the Middle.  But let me tell you a secret: “Torn” is the worst song on that album.  Which doesn’t mean “Torn” is bad; on the contrary, “Torn” is a pretty decent song, for what it is.  It’s just that the remainder of the album is so much better.  “Leave Me Alone” isn’t typical, but it works very well here.⁸  Then we have Artemis, another Magnatune artist.⁹  Generally when it comes to Artemis, I prefer Undone, but Gravity (whence cometh “Angel,” the track we use here) is nice too.

Our volume namer is the classic Amy Winehouse tune “You Know I’m No Good.” Most of Winehouse’s work doesn’t fit here at all, but there’s just something about this one track that works perfectly on this mix.  Finally we have a track from Shivaree, who’s been called everything from alt-country to “jazzy” to “torchy.” I currently have 5 of their songs in various mixes, and only two are slotted for the same mix (and one song is currently in two completely different mixes because I can’t decide where it goes).  I’m pretty sure I also discovered them through a “similar artists” type link, but exactly who they were similar to I can’t now imagine.  “Little Black Mess” is a loungy track that has some Moonside by Riverlight tendencies,¹⁰ but still retains enough of the smokey bar and slightly trippy combo that makes it a perfect fit here.

Next time, we’ll mix it till it’s smooth.

⇐ Smokelit Flashback II

Smokelit Flashback IV ⇒

__________

1 Specifically, when I was introducing Salsatic Vibrato.

2 Specifically, Portishead, LemonJelly.KY, Lost Horizons, Everyone Loves You, and Pappelallee.

3 Yes, Dummy precedes Portishead.  Go figure.

4 The same one who introduced me to Lemon Jelly, Naomi, and Transglobal Underground.

5 That is, A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular, Blue Wonder Power Milk, and The Magnificent Tree.

6 And, in my opinion, still their best.

7 For instance, we’ve seen them on Paradoxically Sized World, and we’ll see them figure prominently on another mix we’ll come to in the fullness of time.

8 And is slightly reminiscent somehow of “Pity” by the Creatures, which we used on volume I.  Perhaps it’s just the vibraphone.  Although I think the instrument on “Pity” is actually a xylophone.  But you know what I mean.

9 I told the story of how I discovered Magnatune in Rose-Coloured Brainpan.

10 For what it’s worth, that’s the mix currently containing two different Shivaree tracks.

decided lack of improvement

Believe it or not, this week’s shittiness is vying with last week’s shittiness for all-time shittiest shit.  Sickness (including a record-breaking barf incident in the 1AM hour), a melted down sandbox which kept me from catching up on the work I was behind on due to last week, which prompted a marathon stay-at-work-until-nearly-midnight session late in the week, followed promptly by a last-minute production bug on Friday, which was even further complicated by some boneheaded idiocy on my part stemming from the fact that I have two completely different co-workers named “Steve,” a pool pump which may or may not be on the fritz, and even that was further complicated by a running dispute with my home warranty company ... well, let’s just say I’ve had better weeks, and, as for two-week periods, I’d say I’ve had several hundred: almost certainly more than a thousand, even.  Add to that that we’re sliding into our Virgo birthday season, with this weekend being all about The Mother— I just finished putting a cake into the oven, and, if you know me, you know how extremely unlikely that is— as much as I hate to miss two weeks in a row, hopefully you can forgive me for making you wait one more week to get whatever bizarre fix you’re getting out of this blog.  I don’t promise anything awesome, of course ... but, then, I never do.