Extended Trumpet Solo

Writing about totally failing to get much painting done recently made me realise I've been very remiss in keeping my legion of loyal readers updated on what I have been doing: writing about TV! Over the last three years I've been in three more Outside In books. I wrote short essays on the Millennium episode "Wide Open" and the Twin Peaks episode "Slaves And Masters", and went off-piste with a fictional academic article written by a smug fascist to cover "The Sontaran Experiment".

Next year, I'll be in the Deep Space Nine book with a piece on "Business As Usual", assuming Stacey likes the smell of whatever I cook up!

Friday 40K: The Best I Can Do

The second half of this year has been absolutely miserable for painting, lads. I've averaged one miniature a month, all of them from my oldest two armies, meaning the colour schemes on them are extremely limited. Here, for the sake of contractual obligation, are two Dark Angels Tactical Marines.

Technically painted, I'm sure we can all agree. Fun fact, I only had these on my paint station because I needed them to make my army codex compliant for 9th Edition. By the time I'd finished them, we were on to 10th Ed, and a whole new set of ways in which what I have isn't fully usable. I've dutifully started a Dark Angels Ancient (current name: Old Steven), but I can't imagine being very far along with him at all before the new codex means another set of bullshit changes.

Also complete is the only unit I both started and finished this year: four bases of 'Nid Rippers.

So tiny! So bitey! They'll nom your world because there's, like, LOADS of them.

Two marines; twenty rippers. But which is best? There's only one way to tell! FIGHT!

(Ah, actually I'm being told you can also tell who's best through a series of "point scores" through which all models in Warhammer 40,000 can be compared. Ludicrous.)

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.18 - "F.O.D. " (Green Day)

Ah, quiet/loud/quiet/loud. Where have we heard me talk about hearing that before?

I can’t claim I planned it, but the one-two quiet-loud pinch-punch of these last two songs makes for a nice sign off to a playlist defined by the border between misery and anger. It’s a long border, of course, covering a wide range of terrain. “The Quiet Things…” is a multilayered mapping of cross-currents and riptides, swirling just between the surface. “F.O.D” is a man telling his about-to-be-ex to fuck off and die.

There’s a power in simplicity – “F.O.D.” doesn’t even bother to go quiet again. The sheer broadness makes the song feel like it belongs to you alone, and does the same for everyone. The steps may have been different for all of us, but we’ve almost all seen a long, juddering dance lead us here. The last thread snaps, and you're left with only the layers of Sellotape and rows of safety pins you'd put in place to hold everything together. Just the outline of what used to be there.

When that happens, there’s nothing to do but take that last snapped strand, that final frayed straw, and burn it to ash in front of your new/old enemy’s face. You can’t even explain why this time was different; it just completely, obviously, is. You want a justification? Justifications are for the people I can still respect. Just fuck off and die. 

One thing that I love about this song is how the chord progression actually gets more complicated as the narrator lets his fury slip its mooring. The obvious thing to do would be to go the other way; to lose complexity along with composure. Inverting this makes it clear how much this guy has been holding back. How careful he’s been to present only a part of himself. It's not so much a switch as an expansion, hence the repetition of the need to destroy the bridge between them past hope of repair. Besides, we often repeat ourselves, when we're that angry. When someone has made us that angry. Just fuck off and die. 

I listened to "F.O.D." while driving across an actual bridge once, belting out the words to myself, the river, and the night. I remember that every time I hear this song, even though I don’t remember which bridge it was, or which river. I can't even remember the car. The association remains, but not what lay on the other side of it. Just the outline of what used to be there. 

I can’t remember whose face was in my mind I as I sang along, either. Who was it I had so completely had enough of their daring to be in my life? Who was I so desperate to have gone, hat the memory of my exhausted, burning rage has so outlasted the name of whomever I'd directed it towards?

Just the outline of what used to be there. Just fuck off and DIE.

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2: Louder Now

B-Side:

I don't like to go negative with my music posts, but you just gotta stand back and marvel at how completely this cover misses the point of the original song, on every conceivable level.

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.17 - "The Quiet Things That No-one Ever Knows " (Brand New)

Ah, quiet/loud/quiet/loud. Where have we heard that before?

Brand New were an interesting band more than they were an enjoyable one. Or at least, they were after their delightfully unselfconscious debut Your Favorite Weapon. Twelve tracks of charismatic emo so strong, it felt like a capstone for the whole damn musical movement. Or maybe a gravestone is the better metaphor. Brand New had dealt a slow-bleeding but ultimately mortal wound, inflicted ironically yet surgically by a band being feted as the big (brand) new thing. So this is how emo dies; to thunderous applause. 

But when you've mounted the summit of the terrain you're exploring, there's nowhere (brand) new to go, except down. Not in terms of quality; in terms of geography. Deja Entendu goes subterranean, almost daring the listener to enjoy its dark, stagnant pools and echoing darkness. "Charismatic" was now entirely off the table.

The band's masterstroke was to pair this quest for the deepest recesses of their genre and their psyches with an attempt to find a (brand) new spin on the first post-fame album. If standard emo can be summed up as "You WILL recognise my pain!", Deja Entendu explores the pain of being recognised. The fear of it is a central theme, too, whether it be at the hands of a para-social fanbase ("I Will Play My Game Beneath The Spin Light"), a burned lover ("The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot"), or your own horrified conscience (the previously-covered "Me Vs Maradona Vs Elvis").

"The Quiet Things That No-One Ever Knows" is the central chamber in the cave system Brand New carved out here, with their teeth and nails and bile. The croon/yell formula is repurposed to brilliant effect, pressed into a parallel of the calm exterior of a man desperate to tell the truth to his partner, but knowing doing so will torpedo the relationship beyond hope of it staying afloat. "I lie for you, and I lie well". He knows they're doomed - indeed, he knows sooner or later she'll figure out he's been cheating on her - but he can't bring himself to pull the trigger. Their love is dying, but he doesn't want it to die just yet. He looks out at the glory of the Pacific, and all he can think about is the hospitals. The places we delay the inevitable.

Mixed in with all this is the stress of touring - so much sacrificed for the sake of empty hotels. "If today's the day it get's tired/today's the day we drop out". Sure, mate. His partner isn't the only one he's lying to. Which of course means he's even lying about who he's lying to. Meta-mendacity.

When this song dropped as the first single from the album, there were people who complained its traditional structure - quiet/loud/quiet/loud, where have we heard that before? - was a poor advertisement for the desperate sandpaper leers and expansive hollow dankness of the parent album. That after trying so hard to be brand new, Brand New had let themselves down here.

This was and is bullshit. "The Quiet Things..." was the final cut, the coup de grace for an entire genre they'd left bleeding on the floor. Having slammed the door, they came back to burn the building. You can't head somewhere (brand) new until you've left some other place behind, and the whole fucking point of the elevator into Hell is that it starts at the top (listen to that guitar shifting downward as we head into each verse; these lads knew what they were doing).

Where the elevator ended up is a tale for another time. All that matters here is the soundtrack on the way down. 

You'd struggle to do any better than this.

B-side

Bonus B-side (ignore the shaky first couple lines)

Five Things I Learned In British Columbia

1. Both Victoria and (especially) Vancouver feel very European as cities, compared to Anchorage, Winnipeg, and Churchill, which are more what forty-three years of consuming US/Canadian film and television suggested I should expect. If it weren't for the accents and the signs warning me not to feed coyotes, I'm not sure I would have been able to tell I wasn't in an English-speaking city east of the Atlantic.

I felt right at home, is what I'm saying, at least until I tried to scratch an itch for a decent cider, something Canada does not appear to possess.

2. Humpback whales! They're HUGE! They're elusive! They get under your boat and you think "OH SHIT I don't think we'll win if this turns into a wrestling match"! Seeing them out in the Pacific, I had no trouble at all understanding why Star Trek felt comfortable basing an entire film on the conceit that an alien species would travel dozens of light-years just to check in on these fifty-ton krillbois.

(All my pictures are rubbish, sorry. Have some of a buncha extremely stinky sea-lions in consolation.)

3. The Museum of Vancouver is well worth a trip. I'd wanted to visit the Anthropology Museum, actually, but it was shut for earthquake-proofing (another of those rare reminders of just how far from home I was). The colonial era of Vancouver is well-represented, nicely honest about the city's racist past, and clear-eyed about how its labour history is marred by rabid anti-Communism. In order to get to that section, though, you have to go through three large rooms dedicated to the First Nations peoples who own the land Vancouver stands on (having never ceded it). The result, delightfully, is to turn the entire history of the city of Vancouver into an afterthought, a bitter coda to the true story of the land. 

There's a lot here; artefacts, testimonials from today's First Nations communities. The highlight of an extremely strong experience though is the film Mia, which you can see here, and I cannot recommend enough. Just the soundtrack alone gives me the shivers - it feels like the music Angelo Badalamenti was reaching for his entire life.

4. Totem poles are not the cross-continental Native American practice I'd naively believed (I blame Asterix And The Great Crossing). They're a tradition among the peoples of the Pacific northwest, used to tell stories and mark historic events. Victoria is home to the tallest totem pole in the world; presented here with an F for scale.

5. Best food in Vancouver: Sablefish. Also called black cod and butterfish, the former because it tastes like cod (despite hailing from a different order), and the latter because it's so high in fat content, it tastes like its been fried in butter even when it hasn't. You can get it in the UK, for about three times the price of true cod. I haven't yet felt that I can justify the expense, but a couple of times I've come close.

Worst food in Vancouver: Dutch salted liquorice. If the Flying Dutchman were real, this "sweet" would perfectly replicate the taste and texture of the undead captain's curs'd ring-piece. 

Honorable mention: poutine, which, like pizza, varies tremendously in quality but is almost impossible to get completely wrong.

Five Things I Learned In Manitoba

In descending order of YAY.

1. Beluga whales are awesome, and they are everywhere in the south Hudson Bay. After spending almost two hours at sea off Vancouver Island before we had even our first possibility of seeing a whale (see my next post, because why would I do anything in chronological order), the belugas of Churchill were immediate and unmissable. The sea seethed with them; it boiled.

Terrible quality, I know. Still though: WHALES.

2. The mega-fauna of Churchill is surely its biggest draw (it's definitely why we were there), but if you find yourself there and at a loose end, the local Insanitaq Museum* is well worth a look. It's an extremely impressive collection of First Nations artefacts and stories, along with a few specimens of taxidermy which, while I've always found animal-stuffing a queasy proposition, give a sense of scale to the local wildlife that's hard to discern when jouncing in a dingy or being chased off a beach by a bear.

(Look at that lynx! It's like a rejected CGI model for a grimdark Tom and Jerry reboot.)

Of what I saw there, probably my favourite two things were a carved figurine of a Viking, strongly suggesting the First Nations had traded with them at some point, and the story about the giantess who tried to swallow a river. She'd been tricked into it by a man she was chasing, who claimed he crossed the river by drinking it dry and walking across the bed. Trying in vain to replicate the feat, the giantess drank so much she exploded in a cloud of blood and river-water. This, the legend tells us, is how fog came into the world.

Faultless. Superb. 11/10 would relate again. Just the most perfect theory about anything, ever.

* I kept having to bite my tongue to stop singing the name to the tune of Cypress Hill's "Insane In The Brain". I thought it might be insensitive.

3. The majestic polar bear, lads! Huge things. Mighty. Extremely lazy at this type of year, as they go into a kind of walking reverse-hibernation, but that just meant we got to check them out for longer. I saw so many of the white-furred carnage units that I lost count. Lost count! Of motherfucking polar bears! Ludicrous.

Obviously, they're lovely to look at from a distance, but they can cause problems when up close. Churchill has a polar bear jail, where the delightfully named "problem bears" are kept for a fortnight in the dark until they stop associating civilisation with an easy meal (usually they eat the contents of people's bins, rather than the contents of people's clothing). They're starved throughout their time in the hoosegow, which might seem cruel, but is born of necessity - the first year they ran the jail they kept the bears well-fed, with the consequence that, once released, the bears would immediately attempt to break back in for their regular round of seal-steaks.

Despite the apparent logic of keeping the bears hungry, environmental groups have in the past attempted the prisoners in order to offer a decent meal. This is considered a bad idea by the authorities, if for no other reason than the would-be liberators are liable to feed the bears much more directly than they had in mind. In our case, this led to the wonderful spectacle of our guide explaining that he wasn't allowed to tell us how many bears are in the prison at any time, but that he was sure it was currently empty any way, all to the soundtrack of the furious bellowing of famished bears from just inside the facility.

All of which is so delightful, I'd probably have put bears at the top of this post, had one of them not been so rude as to chase me off a beach when I was trying to take a dip. Dick move, ursus maritimus! 

4. Let's talk about the Prince Of Wales Fort on the Churchill River. Ordinarily, something like that wouldn't make it onto the blog. A symbol of British imperialism on First Nation land? Not the sort of thing that interests me at all.

I'm making an exception here, though, because it's a symbol of imperialist total fuck-ups, which are always worth sniggering about. The fort was supposed to take about thirty years to build, but it went operational early, with the people in charge thinking they'd found a way to cut a few unnecessary corners in the name of expedience. Specifically, the walls weren't as thick as whatever STC system the Royal Navy was making use of in the 18th century. Who cares, though? Who's going to be sending the really heavy ordnance so far north. Thinner walls were all that was needed to keep the fort safe from bears, locals, and bit of light cannon-fire; surely that would do the trick?

The first time they attempted to fire their own cannons, the recoil pushed them clear off the walls.

Presumably due to this false start, the fort ended up taking more time to build than had originally been planned. Not that it particularly seemed to matter. It didn't seem like anyone was in a hurry to challenge British interests in the Hudson. It was a long way north, and no-one else seemed quite so obsessed with the idea of finding the possibly-mythic North West Passage.

So the fort got finished, pointed its forty cannons in every direction, and everyone figured they were sitting pretty. The only small problem was that there weren't any troops. It took ten men to fire a cannon at maximum efficiency, so they needed four hundred trained men. They had one. Not one hundred; one, alongside three dozen civilian workers of various trades.

So everyone was super excited when, in 1782, three British ships sailed into view. It had been a while since the last re-supply, so the small fleet was a welcome sight in any case, but there was hope that the vessels might be carrying the military men needed to actually make the fort capable of combat.

This hope was rather dashed when the fort's governor took a close look at the ships with his telescope, and realised that under the billowing Union Jacks stood dozens of heavily-armed and angry Frenchmen.

Whilst the governor had discovered the ruse early enough to give battle, though, he still had the problem of lacking 99.75% of the men he needed to actually fight. Given this, he surrendered immediately - though not unconditionally - and the British left the fort. The French stuck around just long enough to eat all the food and sabotage all the cannons, then likewise fucked off.

So ends the pathetic story of the Prince Of Wales Fort. A monument twice over to almost getting something right, and then ruining it all in the very last step.

5. Clamato juice! It will not do! Have you ever cooked a tasty paella and realised to your horror you've over-salted it? What do you do? Bin it and start again? Bin it and order takeaway? Force yourself to eat it regardless?

No wrong answer there, surely. The only wrong answer - and PAY HEED, North America - would be to put the paella in the fridge, and drink the juice from the bottom of the bowl the following morning. 

No

Yeeuch.

Bonus anti-YAY:

Air Canada are goddamn evil. They were perfectly lovely when we travelled with them, I freely admit. But F and I were in a Winnipeg bar when the news came on that the entire city of Yellowknife was being evacuated due to encroaching wildfires. Air Canada's response to this was to take their ticket prices on the day of evacuation, and ratchet them up by a factor of ten.

Fuck Air Canada.

Five Things I Learned In Alaska

Five things! In just 96 hours! US speed run!

1. Alaskan schoolkids are extremely smart. Or at least, they are in Anchorage, or at least, they are in one school in Anchorage. Or at least, they are in one school in Anchorage, and in the past. The '71 graduating class of West Anchorage High School's - home of the fightin' Eagles - pooled their dollars for a huge mural on the side of the school. The principal at the time said "Fine, you can have an eagle, but NO REFERENCE to the year you're graduating!". They said "OK, sure!". Then the little dickheads commissioned this.

I love it. Legend has it that at their 10 year school reunion, they all got given detention.

2. The forests of Alaska are fucked. And it's not just the wildfires that are already consuming human civilisation. Someone let some European bark beetles loose, and they've been munching their way through the pine forests like they're Pac-Man, and ghosts have just been ruled unconstitutional. In a lot of places there are more dead trees than living ones. As a metaphor for how European immigrants showed up and ruined everything with their rampant consumption, it's... well, it's supremely depressing and fucked-up. Which at least tracks.

3. Grizzly bear cubs are absurdly cute, and surprisingly good climbers.  They also like to use road signs to scratch their backs. We'd all do it, if it were socially acceptable.

Sorry about the window-frame getting in on the action.

4.  There are five types of salmon in Alaska. We got taught a trick for remembering them, using the fingers on your hand. "Thumb" rhymes with "chum". Your pinkie is for pink salmon. You wear silver on your ring finger, so that's silver salmon sorted. Your middle finger is the largest one on your hand, reminding you of a "king", who traditionally were taller than most people due to having access to actual nutrition. All makes sense, right?

One more digit, one more fish: the sockeye. I know what you're thinking: 'Oh, OK. Index starts with "I", as in "sockeye", it must be that!'. That is because you are a REGULAR HUMAN PERSON. No such logic for the mushroom-added chancers who've inveigled their way onto the Alaskan Piscine Pneumonic Panel, though. No, for them, the link is "You wouldn't want to accidentally have your index finger sock someone in the eye". Rubbish. You sicken me. Zero starfish.

5. Moose are BIG. They're also more dangerous than bears. That makes sense, though. They're on a hair trigger, because they have to worry about bears. Bears only have to worry about picnic baskets, and where their next back-scratch is coming from. 

SO ENDS ALASKA.