Preparation: Let a tea bag steep in 320ml of vodka for two hours. Meanwhile, heat120ml of honey and 120ml of water in a pan, stirring until the honey dissolves. Remove tea bag from vodka, and add in honey/water mixture. Add 6 to 8 thyme sprigs and muddle. Shake with ice, and serve.
General Comments: Whenever I got a cold as a kid, my mum would make me hot honey and lemon. That's what this reminds me of, despite the added taste of the thyme (sophisticated, elegant, stick your little finger out) and vodka (vodka). In fact, were I in charge of cocktail names, this would 100% be called a "Cheeky Lemsip", copyright laws be damned.
It's weird to drink something so reminiscent of medicine; not unpleasant so much as incongruous. I'm sure for those more used to ice tea, and less used to a Yorkshire woman's idea of how to shut a sick child up, the effect is more pleasing - particularly in the kind of sweltering heat we're currently cursed with - but this is my blog and so my subjective experience rules supreme.
Less idiosyncratically, I'm also not a fan of how much faff is required to make this. I could probably have steeped less vodka for less time, but the honey/water mixture won't scale down too well. You end up with quite a bit of this on your hands, then, and you have to plan ahead, which doesn't really match my chaotic approach to cocktail preparation. It's not without its charm, but I don't see myself making more.
A little while back, I read a Bluesky post from Mac Rogers
- creator and main writer of Gideon Media's Give Me Away - in which
he noted the general lack of critical engagement with podcast fiction. This is
a state of affairs which leaves a lot of creators firing audio drama into the
void, their comments sections all but empty, save the occasional review bomb
casually tossed by some right winger dedicated to harming whatever art he’s
been told he shouldn’t like.
The post reminded me of an exchange I had with Jonny Sims back
in 2020, about the mammoth series of tweet threads I’d written on the Magnus
Archives, which – before I nuked my Twitter account - had covered every
episode of his show. While he didn't always agree with my takes (a remarkably
charitable framing of the situation, I'm sure), he thanked me for critically
engaging with his work as a piece of art, something which, at least at the
time, he felt hadn't been happening as much as he'd like.
So I thought, hey. I love Give Me Away, I have a
lot of respect for Mac as a writer and a general human being; maybe putting
together an essay or three on his (thus far) only multi-season podcast might
constitute a solid. It'd also give me a break from focussing on Star
Trek, which is probably an extremely good thing in itself.
First, a disclaimer. I am mutuals with both the
creator/writer and director of Give Me Away on Bluesky. It
would be presumptuous of me to call either Mac or Jordana even casual
acquaintances, never mind friends, but I don't want to suggest, even
implicitly, that I am coming to the show from a position of pure neutrality. Caveat
lector, innit.
First, a summary of the show’s setup. This will necessitate
some spoilers, of course, but I'll keep them low-level, since one aim of this
post is to persuade newcomers that the show is worth their time. Give Me
Away centres, at least initially, on a four-person family; Graham and
Morgan Shapiro, and their two now-grown kids, Talia, and Jamie. Graham and
Morgan's marriage is on the rocks, at least in part because Graham always seems
to be distracted by something Morgan can't understand, and Graham himself
doesn't seem able to articulate. Early in the first episode, two things
happen at approximately the same time: Morgan finally gets sick of Graham's
endless refusal to do anything about their growing estrangement, and an alien
spacecraft lands in the Nevada desert.
Doing this almost literally last-minute because it took me until after half twelve today to finish watching last night's session. Man, them lads take time over those balls.
Anyway. This year's scientifically verifiable and utterly unimpeachable prediction:
And so, at very long last, we reach a major milestone. I'd be lying if I said I'd saved the best for last - as always I struggle with painting eyes. I'm happy with her dress and hair, though. The original artwork puts more into her staff, including making the skull and feathers "real", rather than carved/sculpted, but I ultimately decided I needed the warm gold to offset the coldness of the purple and pale flesh (the warm reddy-pink also helps there, but only really from the back.
Anyway, we're not here for a single Lass of Evil. We're here for the whole kit and kaboodle. Here is all is, sixteen and a half years after I first bought it: a fully painted set of Talisman 4th Edition (2008) minis.
Good to get that done. Just three expansions and Assault On Black Reach, and I'll be done with every box set I got in my 20s.
Today's toad - the fourth and last of the set - tickles me somewhat. After a few days of agonising over how to paint them, I was struck by revelation. Talisman is a fantasy game. I don't have to limit myself to the pathetic three hundred plus species of true toads. In the spirit of the hippogriff, the cockatrice, and the owlbear (HOOT GROWL), then, I present the strangest mix of animals yet imagined: a toad coloured as 'twere a frog.
I think I've done a good job here of at least nodding to the luminescence of the blue poison dart frog I've used as inspiration here. I got a bit annoyed about getting some Agrellan Earth on its legs, but even dusty earth is going to get on you a little if you're wondering around in it. Whether I not I decide to house rule this lad to make trying to attack him extremely dangerous decides to be seen. Like, in theory it should be fine, but you don't wanna be the first brave adventurer to kark it because you squished a lethally dangerous amphibian with a hand sporting a paper cut.
My small coterie of Ultramarines (all of thirteen dudes) just got a wholly unnecessary addition to their command structure with Lieutenant Calsius. I'm still trying where possible to maintain a bright line between my Firstborn and Primaris armies (such a stupidly confusing pair of names), but Calsius' sculpt would have made it very difficult to paint him as anything else but XIII Legion.
I'm fairly happy with him in the end - the freehand helmet stripe isn't quite straight, but having let my painting skills atrophy considerably in the last decade-plus, I can live with it. The power sword has my trademark gradation across the blade, but it's easy to miss it with so little of it showing. I thought about painting it a duller colour, given presumably one doesn't switch a power weapon on while it's still sheathed, but the need for the red as a spot colour eventually took me a different direction. Maybe the dude is just that good that he can slide a powered blade from its scabbard without anything catching fire at all.
I quite like the lad in all three angles here. The common denominator is they're all carefully chosen to not show how poorly his right leg fits to the rest of his body - that was a huge problem in assembly, and a reminder that I really need to get better at using green stuff to plug gaps.
The mission to paint the whole of my Talisman collection continues with a trip to the cemetery.
The Talisman ghoul is pleasingly craggy, so this was mostly just a basecoat and some dry-brushing. I thought about deviating from the colours the official art gives him, but having already done that with the Troll, and with the FF iteration not having any orcs or goblins, I decided this was probably my only chance to let the greenskins represent.
Just the Sorceress and one more Toad to go, and that'll be the base game I bought back in (fuck) 2009 fully painted.
No-one could accuse the Trio of not cleaving to the punk aesthetic. Matt Skiba himself has said every song on their debut album is just the same three chords in different orders. Their subject matter is similarly narrow - every song is about someone who is miserable, commonly due to either drugs, booze, heartbreak, or a combination of same (to be clear, none of this is a complaint).
But then there's the plane thing. Skiba doesn't sing about planes a lot, exactly, but they're certainly a recurring theme in his work. Planes can offer escape ("Trucks And Trains") or send you unknowing into disaster ("Dead On The Floor") (they can also be a metaphor for both love ("Nose Over Tail") and dickheads ("You're Dead")). Mostly, though, they're what tears you from the people and places you love.
"San Francisco", Alkaline Trio's first plane song, is a case in point. The narrator sits in an airport lounge, waiting for the flight which will take him from the city he has fallen in love with, back to "sour home Chicago", and spending his wait tracing a downward spiral of self-pity and solo drinking. It's a bleak, slightly morbid song, taking the titular metaphor from Tony Bennett's "(I Left My Heart) In San Francisco" and making it rather less warm and fuzzy a proposition. It's an early example of how perfect a vocalist Skiba is for these tales of death, dearth and drinking; his trademark bruised baritone for the verses, shifting into a howl of gravel and blood for each chorus. The last of these sees another shift, the melody both soaring and becoming more desperate as our hero flies upward and outward, leaving his beloved bay behind.
Douglas Adams once wrote "it can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "as pretty as an airport"." I've actually been to at least one pretty nicely done-up airport, but I take Adams' point. Airports are liminal spaces absolutely nobody wants to be in. Everybody surrounding you - and that's generally far, far too many people, either wants to be at their destination, or resents having to have left their point of departure. They're the closest thing to Purgatory most of us will ever know during our mortal span; it's no surprise it's tough to figure out how to make that look good. It's no surprise our narrator can't think of anything to do while he waits for his plane to Hell but start on the booze. Not so much drinking away his sorrows, but drinking to his sorrow of going away.
And keep drinking. Even at insane airport/aeroplane prices. It's not wholly clear in the song why the drinks get more expensive for our hero when he hits 5pm. One option is that it's because he's now on the plane, and the booze has become even more outrageously pricy. The other though is that he's drinking in an airport bar which has just upped the price, post-happy hour. I like this interpretation, because it gets to the other thing about airports, which is that they're not just awful places to be, there places you're forced to find it awful to be for hours. And that's even if things go well - there's always the chance your flight will be delayed, possibly for hours, and with you still having nothing to do but buy more pints and feel more sad. It's a peculiarly unique sensation to be stuck in a place you didn't want to be, but also not wanting to leave the only way you'll be able to leave, and to be annoyed because the trip you don't want to take is going to start later than you thought it would. All whilst increasingly drunk.
I guess that's just a way of noting a more general truth, that when we're stuck in statis, we'll eventually get to a point where we'll happily make things worse, if only so that something changes. I also guess that explains no small amount of why people drink themselves miserable in the first place. In any case, however much the song's themes can be generalised, it's the specifics that hit me hard. Every time a gigantic tube of metal, fuel and assholes is prepared to take me away, I find myself acting this song out in the least miserably crowded bar the relevant three-letter coded shithole has to offer. The only difference, when I'm doing it, I'm singing this song in my head all the while.
Or his armour, anyway. Pretty happy with this particular ginger axe-swinger. It's an unusual Talisman figure just because of its density, but that lent itself well to some blacklining, which I always like as a look.
Regularly voted one of 4th edition's worst characters, it's the one man brave enough to bring spectacles to a dragon fight: the Priest!
Just look at that bling! I guess being able to banish any spirit he stumbles across means he doesn't have to fret about the spectre of Communism. Sooner or later this lad's going to learn that Strength 2 ain't much use against a guillitone, but until then; respect to a lad willing to go questing in slippers.
We're back here again. The Pumpkins was where this ludicrous series of posts began, a hair over a decade ago.
The two tracks could hardly be more different. Imperial phase Smashing Pumpkins were nothing if not eclectic, or expansive. I don't know what's more notable - that this shift occurs within just four songs on Mellon Collie... or the fact that stretch constitutes just one seventh of the collection as a whole.
Anyway. Difference. I assume I don't have to justify why these tracks couldn't be much further apart. We slide from a lone piano with accompanying woodwind, and a synthesiser that's more haunting the piece than contributing to it, to a veritable orchestra of overdriven guitars and Jimmy Chamberlain drumming out the end of days. The Ragna-rock, if you will.
I want to talk about a much more important difference between the two tracks, though. "Zero" has words.
Billy Corgan is not a technically accomplished writer of verse. His poetry collection, Blinking With Fists, is something of a chore. About the best thing I can say about it is that occasionally, you'll read a entry and find your brain can almost hear the Pumpkins song it could have been the lyrics to.
And Corgan is a good lyricist. Or at least, he's a very effective one. Certainly, his work is an extremely strong demonstration of the difference between lyrics and poetry. On paper, Pumpkins lyrics are leaden doggerel. They're hardly shy of imagery, sure, but all the charcoal teeth and bumblebee mouths and machine-gun blues float unconnected; random adjective, random noun.
As part of a song, though, they shine; hidden diamonds suddenly sparkling in a new light. There's a theory - I forget where I saw it - that Corgan's genius is his ability to gift any song with a thematically perfect guitar solo. There's a huge amount of truth to that, not least demonstrated by the howling outbreaks of what loosely constitutes a "solo" here. I want to extend the idea, though. It's not just the solos that perfectly match the broader composition, it's the lyrics, too. Corgan's hyperbolic Rorschach bombs suddenly make total sense when they detonate against the music's emotional landscape. "Zero"'s central riff is an absolute avalanche of fissile material, collapsing again and again into harmonics that chop and buzz like the hornets of Hades. In that context, unmoored references to fashion victims, enchanted kingdoms, and sinking ships make more sense than making sense ever could.
There's another theory, that says "Zero" is a song about Corgan's reaction to fame after Siamese Dream started doing silly numbers. He feels like a fraud, a "zero", replaced as an actual human being by the millions of people who saw themselves reflected in his lyrics - the faces in our dreams of glass. And I don't think that reading is wrong, but I mean that in the exact same sense that no-one is wrong when they describe what they see in cloud formations, or tarot cards, or inkblots. "Corgan is terrified he's become a reflection of the listener", ultimately, is just another reflection of the listener. Which is to say, another route by which the music burrows into our souls, ultimately no different from Corgan's uncanny knack for a thematically appropriate solo.
If I wanted to summarise the Smashing Pumpkins project - if I wanted to tell you about the face in my dreams of glass - it would be about this synergy. This refusal to see it as a meaningful distinction when people say "music AND lyrics". To commit totally to what a song needs to say, without second-guessing or undercutting or, horror of horrors, a sense of irony. It always seemed ridiculous to me that Pumpkins were seen as a grunge band. Grunge, to me, is the idea that disaffection is the only sane response to the world. That feeling nothing is better than feeling the wrong thing. To put it in modern terms, grunge saw just about everything as cringe, and so defined cool as an almost total absence.
The Pumpkins took a different path. They saw what roamed the dead highways. They saw the face of the king of the horseflies. They saw where boys feared to tread. And they rejected it totally. Cringe is cool. What's better than feeling nothing? Feeling fucking everything.
"Zero" is about how being at zero is the worst thing a person can possibly be. At least, that's what I see in my reflection.
What do you see in yours?
B-Side
I went looking specifically for an acoustic cover, to see if it could be done. QUESTION ANSWERED.
Not super-sure how I feel about The Flaming Scimitar as a concept. I mean, it looks great, all the Dreadfleet ships do. I'm just keenly aware of how liberally it swipes from a culture neither mine nor the designer's.
Still, it is what it is. Trying to get the masts, sails and fire efreet to all coexist on the model was basically fucking impossible. The efreet's head should be higher, really, but having broken it off twice and the rear sail come loose three times just to get to the state you see below, I decided to abandon ship.
My ongoing attempt to paint every miniature I bought before 2010 continues, with this: the third of the four toads from Talisman 4th Edition. This time, I based my paint job on a Yosemite toad, using the picture below as a rough guide (image credit: Roger Hall at Science Photo Library).
Not a hue amount to say about this one, except that this is easily the most successful application of Agrellan Earth I've yet managed. I read a tip about giving the base an Ardcoat coat before trowelling the Agrellan Earth on, which seems to have worked.
With this wee bufonidian boy done, I'm down to just twelve Talisman figures from the noughties, including the aforementioned and truly feared fourth toad. For how long will he squirm away from my paintbrush? SOON WE SHALL KNOW.
The Vines had an oddly rocky introduction to the music world, given how desperate everyone was to talk about them. This is easily, if not happily, explained: the band owed an obvious (though ludicrously overstated) debt to one of the 90s better rock bands, and had was fronted by someone who was struggling to balance the stresses of touring with their neurodiversity. Back then, it simply wasn't possible for music journalisms to recognise that description, and to comport themselves accordingly.
They probably also didn't know what neurodiversity was.
Undervalued in all this was the fact that The Vines' first three singles, released between April and November 2002, are all indisputable bangers. "Get Free" might be the best; a snot-nosed ascending spiral of rejection-sensitive teenage apoplexy. A call-and-response bludgeon of a song, an opening number for a gig in hell.
All of which made the endless comparisons to That Other Band not just tiresome, but unconvincing. There's none of the too-cool-for-school exhaustingly cultivated air of disinterest here. Craig Nicholls might as well be screaming "Never mind? Are you shitting me, mate? Have you actually seen this fuckery we got right here?". Teenage confusion isn't disaffected, it's a white hot fury, quenchable only by the actual fucking sun. She doesn't love me; why should anyone? Nothing to do but charge towards the freedom of death, in the most extra way humanity has to offer.
It's massive, and it's dumb, and it's impossible to deny. It completely embraces the stupidity of one's teenage years without glamorising them. Can you believe we shits had to go through that shit?
Once a year or so, I get together with a bunch of old uni mates to play games, drink beers, and take stock of how far we've come. Oftentimes, we'll break out various iterations of Rock Band, for the concatenated nostalgia of both the songs themselves and the game that lets us pretend to play them. Sooner or later, we'll spool up "Get Free", and it's glorious, four men in their increasing years just devouring a song two decades old about being barely two decades old. And once we're done helping Nicholls scream and thrash and bark at the sun, we turn the game off to do something else.
Because how the fuck are you going to top this?
B-Side
I went through dozens of videos of covers of this song, and absolutely none of them stray far from the original. This is the most divergence I could find, by virtue of including a female vocalist. That to me is a mark of a brilliant song - there's just no other way to imagine it existing.
Continuing my habit of painting things that I've had lying around for a frankly embarrassing amount of time, I present the contents of Warhammer Conquest Issue (published Feb 2019). I've not really got any burning interest in the sons of Mortarion, but after some time poking around the internet, I found a colour scheme for Plague Marines I rather liked: The Purge.
This is my version of that scheme. The green was extremely difficult to even approximate - I eventually settled on a 5:1 mix of Death Guard Green and Sotek Green.
I assume that, as with my Primaris Interceptors, we're well past the point that a mere three Plague Marines are playable as a complete squad, but it's not like I've bought a Chaos codex in the last twenty years. These guys can just chill out with my Red Corsairs in my miniatures cabinet, grossing out visitors with their red-raw tentacles and copious pus-holes. Delightful.
I've decided to try and finish my remaining Talisman miniatures in order of release, as part of my broader effort to paint everything left that I acquired during my twenties*. The character art from the game is pretty different for this lad: a very green, slimy, Flubberesque vibe. I decided to go with something rockier, with the only green occasional outbreaks of moss/lichen.
I tried a new approach to shading red here, as well as a new recipe for wood. You can't really tell here, but I've given him somewhat catlike eyes, figuring they'd be helpful for making out any adventurers who've broken into his cave, what need a good clubbin'.
*Seventeen Talisman minis, a quarter of Assault On Black Reach, four Bretonnian knights, three Bonesingers, and a Chaos Sorcerer to go! Unless I've forgotten something! Which I almost certainly have!
You know what? I decline. We're not going to do this.
I mean, I know I do do this, all the time. Rating acts of cultural appropriation is all but unavoidable if you want to talk about music. Next up is Springsteen, for God's sake, an artist I love, but who I couldn't possibly doesn't owe a huge debt to the music Butterfield rifled through for this platter.
But an album which gets picked as important because of how wildly successful the thievery involved was - "Where American white kids got the notion they could play the blues", to quote the Rolling Stone article this series is based on - it becomes something different. The theft is no longer just some awkward, unavoidable fact about the "how". It becomes the "why", too. The applause isn't for something that has been stolen. It's for the act of stealing itself.
Are the songs good? Sure. They've taken from the best. Those lads who nicked the Mona Lisa from the Louvre knew what they were doing, too. And one can perhaps admire the competence, even the audacity of how they pulled it off.
I'm not going to be calling them painters, though, am I?
Tea Thyme
