Category: Nostalgia

SO THERE

March 3, 2010 /

I love Nathan Rabin. I’m just going to quote this whole thing, from his ongoing retrospective on the endless NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC series of chart-topper compilations:

Like The New Radicals, Semisonic will forever be tarnished with the one-hit-wonder tag. That’s a shame, because it was a fantastic power-pop group, a trio of eggheads with a gift for monster hooks, passionate vocals, and sincerity that never lapsed into sentimentality. Their 1996 album debut Great Divide is a minor power-pop masterpiece, but the trio’s follow-up birthed “Closing Time,” the group’s unlikely contribution to the NOW pantheon.

At a time when much of what passed for alternative music was steeped in rage, angst, and sneering irony, Semisonic frontman Dan Wilson was refreshingly willing to be romantic and sincere. He wrote great love songs like “Secret Smile” and “Singing In My Sleep,” and songs that weren’t what they appeared to be, like “Closing Time.”

On the surface, the song finds the romance in barflies scrambling for a closing-time hookup, but according to So You Wanna Be A Rock & Roll Star, the likeable memoir of Semisonic drummer Jacob Slichter, it was written about the birth of Wilson’s first child. The song’s key line is purloined from the Roman philosopher Seneca, who originally wrote, “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” It’s a line with multiple meanings; there’s the end of life in the womb and the beginning of life outside, but also a father and mother forsaking the pleasures of youth for the responsibilities of parenthood.

Dear everyone who has mocked my Semisonic completism: YEAH, FUCKERS.

In which scrolling through Google Reader gives me a mild heart attack

January 14, 2010 /

Rian Johnson is posting like twenty pictures a day to the just-created Brick tumblr, for some reason. Happily, today he included this DVD-cover fan art that I did back in 2005. I always meant to clean that up and redo it; I had a couple other ideas for doing similar treatments of different scenes, but I don’t remember what they were now.

I’ve been thinking about Brick a lot the last couple of days, actually, because it’s occurred to me that I have pretty simple tastes in terms of plot. Give me any of the following and I will squeal with delight (double points for setting it in high school):

  • Emotionally crippled badass tries to get to the bottom of things (Brick, Neuromancer, Veronica Mars)
  • Young woman comes into her own and learns how dangerous she can be (Howl’s Moving Castle, The Privilege of the Sword, Bone, everything by Robin McKinley)
  • Tenuous network of friends and lovers collapses under the simple pressure of human desire (Lovebot Conquers All, Battlestar Galactica, Magic for Beginners)

And, of course, the latter is why I love Scott Pilgrim. Take away the video-game trappings and the fight scenes and the hipster music references and the fourth-wall humor and… okay, don’t take any of those, they’re great. But the real reason I have such an aching priapism for those comics (which I didn’t pick up until 2008! GAH) is the way O’Malley spends so much care and attention setting up what we in the Indie RPG Club call a relationship map. He gets you to like everybody in it, gives them each their own petty little wants, and then lets them tear each other apart.

Not that I would know anything about what that’s like.

White pepper is awesome. Also, this is sort of about faith

July 30, 2008 /

I’ve reached the point, in my autoeducation as a cook, where I no longer really measure spices or indeed many liquids. This is great for saving time and for not having to rinse a measuring cup every time I need a quarter-unit of something. It is less great when something I make turns out well and I want to write down the recipe for the future. “A bunch of white pepper,” I find myself writing. “Like, as much as a good cook would put in but then also some more.”

If I could always trust myself to make the same judgments based on words like that I wouldn’t have any problems, but I have no faith in Locke and therefore I am not even sure I’m the same person who started this post, much less the one who cooked a pretty good spaghetti nonbolognese earlier tonight. Also it is probably going to be unhelpful in my inevitable cooking blog.

The (thoroughly hidden) point I wanted to record here is that I’m kind of a good cook now? I’m still working in a very small range, but I keep trying new things and they keep turning out pretty okay. I think cooking is, like kissing and biking, essentially a matter of confidence. The food will believe you’re in charge if you act like it.

I learned to cook spaghetti in ten-gallon vats, almost exactly ten years ago, when Jeremy Sissle got me a job at Fazoli’s. He was also the one who trained me on pasta-cooking rotation. We got to the end, and he hauled out the hose, sponges and soap. “Turn on the hot water,” he said, “and fill the bucket, add about this much soap, and… I mean, you know how to clean stuff.”

I still recite that sentence to myself in scary and uncertain places. It sounds stupid, but I did know how to clean stuff, and remembering that snapped me out of the standard lost-and-seasick feeling that everybody gets from new jobs. (At least, I assume everybody else gets it too.)

The other half of my cook-with-confidence mantra was posted by Kevan, years ago, in a comment on Leonard’s site: “I’ve only recently stopped… expecting food to be an inedible, inert, black lump of Syntax Error if I get something slightly wrong.” It’s so true, and such a perfect encapsulation of the way programmers approach other disciplines: raised by severe machines and math problems with one answer, we expect frustration as a punishment for the smallest mistakes (and indeed, with computers, that often remains the case). But once you realize that the notion of discrete measurement is a consensual hallucination, you find the world a more interesting place. Screw Locke. I’m glad I’m not the same person I used to be.

December 21, 2001 /

I’m trying to figure out how to do some sort of Xorph special, since Tuesday (ie Newcomicday) is also, um, Christmas.It’s going to be difficult without the ability to draw anything. Maybe I should do it in ASCII art.

You can’t buy real Christmas lights anymore. You go to Wal-Mart, you find the seasonal aisle in the back corner by the gardening supplies, you expect massive stacks of light boxes. Not so! You can, technically, still buy the traditional tiny-white-bulb strings–but that’s about it. No C9s or 7.5s, not even multicolored small bulbs. Instead we have–yes!–the stupid light extravanganza!

You have your net lights, which are a cheap and stupid way to get out of wading into the bushes. You have your rope lights, which are not only ugly but unwieldy. You have your bubble lights, which are fine, in limited qualities, indoors. And you have truckloads of curtain / icicle lights, which are–I firmly believe this–the will of Satan manifest on Earth.

All of this is meant, essentially, to explain the slightly odd configuration of this year’s Second House on the Left light display. We had a nice multi-colored theme going on, up until I ran out of working colored strings and still had three trees (the big ones, naturally) to go. The aforementioned trip to Wal-Mart produced the aforementioned results, and only by scavenging the clearance rack at Big Lots did we come up with five strings of C9s. Unfortunately, all of them were entirely white.

I got two of the big trees with said white lights, which at least makes for a symmetrical design. The problem was this: the enormously fat tree by the basketball goal (which I have privately nicknamed “Brendan’s Self-Image”) was mostly strung with colored lights already, and needed maybe one more string to top it off. A white string would have to be distributed evenly or look like whipped cream atop a cherry-and-lime jello mold.

This is why I sat on the driveway for twenty minutes today, unscrewing and switching bulbs between one white string and six colored ones.

Experts estimate that I have spent at least six months of my life doing menial, pointless work like that.

in through my veins
without brains