This week: passportals; talk Turkish; we saw delight; suffer little children; Cherry Blossom clinic; glitter balm; choc offs; chocolate barf; polite force; super Trooper; rules of a tractor; hell of a record; batty; studio band; drums and whiners; ad-Myers-ers; Railway stop; theme sequence; woods man; dental as anything; roast beef; let’s remember Norm; clean money; house money; crisis? what crisis?; get rich quick; party people; honest injured; cancer bored; leper interest; pay walls; what a dic
tator; Dave recommends 30 Day Princess; Sylvia says; Question of the Week – Sneakers respond; Lynch mob; team ups and downs; clown time; Peaking; level best; meh time; and, finally, information, please.
Question of the Week: What is the best way to get rich?
Sub-question of the Week: Is there something that you loved, but was discontinued?
Thanks for listening.
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I don’t think thirding is a thing, but I’m thirding an Alpha Flight movie, regardless. Ian, I feel you left out an important piece of info on the Invaders when explaining them to Dave: That they were active during World War II. Also, I recall a couple of other members from when I read the book in the eighties: A lady named Spitfire and a gentleman with possibly the best superhero name of all time, Whizzer. And, Dave. his costume was bright yellow. And he whizzed all over the place. ‘Nuff said.
YES! Bring on the Invaders, 1944. ‘Whiz said.
I guess I didn’t say ’nuff after all. Pretty much everything I’ve ever liked has been discontinued, including many people. But here are some specifics from my childhood: A potato chip called O’Grady’s that was like Ruffles, but noticeably thicker; some wonderful just-add-water garbage food called Mug-o-Lunch; Max Headroom (not a food); and a ton of comics including The Omega Men (a great space opera with really fun art by Shawn McManus ); Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children; and Andy Helfer’s The Shadow with art by Bill Sienkiewicz and Kyle Baker. Done. For now.
BSfUC was terrific. I’ve kept the few I own through subsequent culling & consolidations. Also, I *thought* your name looked familiar, so I went to your site and the light bulb glowed. I know it goes back a ways, but “Beauty Belongs to the Flowers” is a story that sticks. It’s beautifully written, evocative of Roger Zelazny’s more poetic stuff. Powerful.
Sienkiewicz and Kyle Baker kicked ass with the Shadow but did you ever take a look at Mike Kaluta’s art?
I don’t think you’re likely to get rich by saving your money diligently, but it can give you security. I think the best way to get rich is to inherit the money, at least it stays in the family that way. Or make sound investments. I’ve never known anyone who won a lottery, like a huge one but I’ve known others who inherited their money then invested it to live comfortably.
A college roommate of mine worked for the government as a border patrol agent, parole officer and an air marshall for 25 years, now he trains others on how to do it and he’s loaded…so there’s that too.
You what’s been discontinued for me?
Insulin.
I loved the days when my body could produce a surplus of it and I could eat Cinnamon Sugar Pop Tarts and Bluebell Tin Roof ice cream. Maybe it’s the Pop Tarts and ice cream I miss? Or maybe it’s unrefined sugar?
No, but seriously, what I miss at least around here, are REAL art stores. The kind with all the different kinds of drawing papers and a million kinds of markers and colored pencils. The good stuff. We have one store like that and it’s quite a hike into Dallas for me to get to. Otherwise all the art stores like that have closed their doors around here and I have no idea who or what to blame. Online commerce? That’s sad because one of the best things about being in an art store is the community of being around other artists which was always fun.
Maybe one day they’ll return like record stores did.
Okay Gentlemen and Sneakers around the globe, go forward and sneak admirably!
I find Pitchfork’s best-of lists useful, but mainly to check if there’s something I missed that hit the Zeitgeist. When I first started paying attention to the reviews, they were often VERY harsh and unfailingly snobbish. As a fellow musician/cow-orker put it, “a 9.0? Wow, must be good, those guys don’t like anything.” Over the years they have (IMO) become less stingy with both ratings and praise, but I don’t take them with as many grains of salt as I did early on. One of the benefits of getting old, maybe: I put far less importance on any specific opinion, despite how haughtily thesauric it might get.
I’m going to put in a good word for The Big Express, here. I’ve always liked it, every song, but it was a significant departure from XTC’s move towards more acoustic-based songs with pastoral subjects and more open production, beginning a couple of years earlier on English Settlement (and to which they then returned, adding in more psychedelia). TBE sounds like a metaphor for Swindon itself: mechanical, brick & steel, complicated interpersonal relationships, often dense. To my ear, it fits the metaphor that much of it is skewed to the upper midrange frequencies, but that means it’s got a harsh edge that can be uncomfortable at any significant volume.
Dave Gregory and Todd Rundgren have both commented that it lacks dynamics, but I don’t see how that holds when you have softer, more spare songs like “I Bought Myself a Liarbird” and “This World Over.” I listened to it again to see if I could put myself in those (and David’s) shoes and noticed that it IS harsh on my ears *when I have the AirPods in*. It’s not a record to be blasted through headphones, in my opinion. It benefits a lot from speakers in an open room; a concentration of sound is too much for the heavy songs, they need some breathing space. That said, I also highly recommend Steven Wilson’s remix as he’s taken some of the sharper edges off and rebalanced it. As always, he improved the original mix.
David, I’m sorry to hear about your troublesome PSA result. I had the same thing pop up late last year, and the worst part was having to wait 6 weeks to be retested. The measurement is mostly still best guesses whether you do or don’t have prostate cancer, but being well into Fif**cough cough**s age, better to have a baseline or to get treatment early. I’m pulling for you, and glad you’re in B.C.’s health care system and not down here in North America’s underpants.
Also, I apologize on behalf of my country for foisting this vortex of chaos on everyone else…AGAIN. We’ll get through this, the ambitions of the head blob in charge don’t rise much higher than a bigger pile of cash and sycophancy.
PEDANT’S LOG, SUPPLEMENTAL:
Questions of the Week! 1. The best way to get rich is also the easiest: be born into a wealthy family. Beyond that it’s mostly luck, despite what billionaires and libertarians would have us believe.
2. I really loved original plain Doritos. You can get any of a dozen or more odd and/or spicy flavors, but nothing was better than the original. I’ve been told several times that plain Doritos are Tostitos now, and uh, no. Just no. Philistines!
Further XTC ramblings: Andy seems to have thought it was just the stage fright at the time of his breakdown, but now attributes it more so to cold turkey withdrawal from valium addiction, which is understandable. If he has ADHD—as diagnosed at age 12—the prescribed valium would have just been treating his anxiety, leaving the underlying cause to make everything harder. From personal experience, I was able to quickly get off GAD medication once I was diagnosed and started Adderall. It was literally a whole new world [pause for the singing]. Anyway, after a while Andy was probably just used to not having to face unresolved trauma and kept to one-off performances here and there.
I neglected to mention the role of the Linn Drum on The Big Express, which is another element making it sound more mechanical. In fact, if not for such a penchant for wordplay and big arrangements TBE might have been an industrial album. Surely they were aware of that scene, with debuts from Einstürzende Neubauten, Nitzer Ebb, Front 242, etc. There *is* a distinct lack of dynamics in the drum tracks, and I’d say they’re overprogrammed. XTC benefited most from a real drummer crafting beats, and Terry was their best fit. Prairie Prince is fine, but I think not the right puzzle piece.
And (last thing, I promise, guys) I know you don’t much care about lyrics, Dave, but they imbue such intensity of meaning to those songs I think they shouldn’t go disregarded. XTC lyrics are almost always clever and finely crafted, and I think both Andy and Colin stepped up their game for TBE.