Ahead on Differential

Boy oh boy, do I love needlessly involved pop-culture taxonomies. And, as stated before on this blog, I love remembering guys. Part of my affinity for these taxonomies is that they help me make sense of a vast and chaotic pool of information. Also, it's fun to talk about albums and bands (and movies and basically everything else) as if they were athletes. It helps create a meta-story about work I find interesting.

Credit where credit is due: this whole mess has been inspired by the twin remembering-guy behemoths of the MLB Hall of Pretty Good and the NHL Hall of Good. I like what these guys are doing because the superstars don't need further enshrining. What we want to commemorate are people that made us happy through their talent while committing the supposed of not being a world-dominant legend. You love Marian Gaborik and Hideki Matsui, I love the Beat (the American band, not the British one) and Matthew Good.

I do want to make a delineation between RRHoPG artists and albums. I think the former is the main draw, underappreciated artists that fall between the cracks of history. But I do want to make room for unheralded albums by bands that, while not S-tier legends, do have some cache in muso circles. So here are my criteria for induction into these hallowed halls:

MAIN HALL (aka the ARTIST WING)

• Artist must have at least three main releases (y'know, album albums)
• Artist must have no bolded main releases¹ on Rate Your Music.
• Artist's highest-rated album cannot exceed 3.60²
• Artist cannot be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as themselves (but can be in as part of a group; Paul McCartney is ineligible for the RRHoPG, but Phil Collins is)

ALBUM WING

• Album must be an officially-released album
• Album must be unbolded on Rate Your Music
• Album must have a rating under 3.60 on RateYourMusic
• Primary artist cannot be enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as themselves

So all of these albums are eligible for the Album Wing, but the artists themselves vary in their eligibility to the Hall. These albums have been selected because they are the albums I have listened to the most (according to my last.fm page) that qualify for the hall. None of these are shocking picks if you know me at all.

And now, onto our first crop of inductees into the Album Wing of my own personal Rock and Roll Hall of Pretty Good.

The Clientele, God Save the Clientele (2007) Well this is hardly surprising. I've written at length on this very blog about my love for the Clientele, but never about this album in particular. It's their first album as a quartet, with newly-hired utility player Mel Draisey providing violin, keys, and background vocals. This is also their Americana album, recorded in Nashville with producer Mark Nevers from Lambchop, and featuring an assist from Wilco's Pat Sansone. This album is classic Clientele, dreamy and autumnal and lightly psychedelic, augmented with winsome country trappings. The steel guitar is already the saddest and most beautiful sounding instrument on the planet; in a Clientele song, it makes the melancholy weapons-grade. Artist's Hall of Pretty Good eligibility status: Ineligible (Suburban Light is a bolded album)

FM-84, Atlas (2016) Are you a lo-fi girl or a synthwave boy? I know which one Colin Bennett is. The Scottish producer is firmly the latter, making music as sharp and alluring as the neon sunset on the cover of his sole full-length as FM-84. The knock against synthwave is that it can often feel like hollow nostalgia, a collection of 80s signifiers that coldly snap to grid. But Bennett is also a designer by trade; he knows how to infuse what could be empty pastiche with real warmth and soul. Enter featured player (and since 2018, official band member) Ollie Wride, an English singer who injects the vocal numbers here with real juice. I cannot adequately express to you how much I love “Don't Want to Change Your Mind.” It's one of the great songs of our young century. Artist's Hall of Pretty Good eligibility status: Ineligible (only one album released)

Kiwi Jr., Cooler Returns (2021) “Man, Derek is talking about Kiwi Jr. again?!” Yes, god dammit, and I'll keep talking about them until they replace the faces on the 5, the 10, the 20, and the 50 with those of the four dudes in this band. Head Kiwi Jeremy Gaudet is one of my favourite active lyricists, and not just because we seem to like a bunch of the same movies. I love the way these guys put songs together; I love the detail in the stories they tell, I love the way their guitars sound, I love the brightness and the tunefulness. If I ever make my ill-fated mumblecore comedy about a scene of local Letterboxd obsessives, you bet your ass I'm putting “Waiting in Line” under the closing credits. Artist's Hall of Pretty Good eligibility status: Eligible!

The Rural Alberta Advantage, Departing (2011) There's a lot of Pitchfork-core that's going to end up in this hall of fame. Most indie-rock sickos who were around during the aughts might point to the RAA's first album, 2008's Hometowns, as HoPG-worthy, but for my money, it's the wearier, less-heralded follow-up that merits inclusion here. This is a sad, spare, wintry album, Americana (Canadiana?) trudging through knee-deep snow, hoping no part of it will succumb to hypothermia. Paul Banwatt is a beast of a drummer, a one-man jungle wrecking crew propelling these aching tunes into uncharted rhythmic territory. This is what makes the Rural Alberta Advantage unique. Artist's Hall of Pretty Good eligibility status: Eligible!

Tycho, Awake (2011) This is the second electronica-ish album on this list whose main creative force is a designer by trade. Tycho is the nom de downtempo of Scott Hansen, who is better known in the kerning-and-CMYK spaces as ISO50 (here's some fun Derek lore: I was super into this thing called Layer Tennis, where designers would trade images back and forth and iterate on design ideas; Hansen participated in 2016, and other key Derek people who were involved include Aaron Draplin, Austin Kleon, and Jason Kottke). Hansen has a style he returns to—hazy, melodic downtempo—but other Tycho album has the effect on me that Awake does. This albums sounds like waking up too early and walking bleary-eyed on a beach as the Sun slowly makes its presence felt. Artist's Hall of Pretty Good eligibility status: Eligible!

Who are your first-ballot Rock and Roll Hall of Pretty Good artists and albums? I'm always on the lookout for cool stuff off the beaten path.

¹ In RYM-speak, this just means that an album can't be part of the X highest-rated albums on the website. At time of writing, I believe the threshold for a bold album is being in the top 7500 all-time. If all your albums are outside of that, you're eligible! And why this website? Well, it's got a big, passionate userbase and it's as good a sample of crowdsourced opinions as I can find.

² Why 3.60? I dunno, feels about right.

#music

According to the keepers of the world's most arcane knowledge over at This Might Be a Wiki, the most hardcore of hardcore They Might Be Giants fans (and I know they're hardcore because only the most hardcore fans edit wikis about the objects of their obsession) have collectively voted “Doctor Worm” as the eight-best song in the venerable Brooklyn band's vast, vast catalog. It is one of the non-live tracks on the group's 1998 mostly-live album Severe Tire Damage and appears on the first disc of the 2002 compilation Dial-A-Song: 20 Years of They Might Be Giants, a two-disc set that is one of the first pieces of music I bought with my own money, and thus is of great importance in Derek Lore (to give you a sense of where my head was at, I think I bought Ween's 2003 record Quebec during the same transaction). That's how long I've been in love with the work of the two Johns. I've loved this band almost as long as I've loved any band.

I was pleasantly surprised to see TMBG pop up in my YouTube feed playing live at Seattle's iconic KEXP, the Platonic ideal of an independent radio station. The set list was “short” (45 minutes is still a hell of a lot of music for one of these) but, naturally, eclectic, mixing recent songs with a pair of stone-cold classics: “Ana Ng” (from 1988's Lincoln, their finest hour, and according to the sickos of This Might Be a Wiki, the second-best song TMBG ever cut), and the aforementioned “Doctor Worm.” I love “Doctor Worm,” it's a near perfect introduction to They Might Be Giants' whole deal: punchy but askew indie pop, casually surreal in a way us lifers can take for granted sometimes. I have heard this song hundreds of times. Even I was not ready for how hard this version of the song goes. The first time I listened to it, the horns hit me like a Mack truck on fire. Those horns dropkicked me out of a tenth-storey window onto a plush bed of winning indie pop melodies. It's nice to be surprised by something we think is familiar to us.

#music

Prelude

“Do you think I can become an expert-level player by the time I turn 40?”

Josh and I are sitting at a picnic table in the park, where we're about to play a consultation game. I'm paying him for Scrabble lessons; maybe there are cooler or wiser ways to spend whatever meager dosh is left over from paying rent and student loans, but it's my money, so there. I ask because I'm already 37, and because I have convinced myself that I can be really good at this game, this game that I find not only fun, but challenging and beautiful in its strange little way. There are a ton of things I could be good at, but I already have all these god damn words rattling around in my head.

“Yeah. Why not?”

Scrabble isn't like chess. It's not the kind of thing where mastery is contingent upon an early start (though it obviously doesn't hurt, see people like Mack Meller or Joey Mallick or Jackson Smylie, or hell, even Josh). I've opted to take the 1999-2001 Stefan Fatsis road to experthood, though I don't have the benefit of PTO, a packed tournament schedule, or being single. I haven't even been able to attend the Montréal Scrabble Club since I've started my new job, on account of my late evening schedule. No, if I'm going to make the arduous trek from an ELO rating of ~900 to one of 1700 by the distant, far-flung year 2028, I'm going to have to grind, but not so much that I'll get sick of this game. So I've taken steps, which include the lessons in the park.

My “regimen,” as it were, is to study sevens and eights and fours and fives not until I'm blue in the face, but while commuting and zoning out in front of the YouTube video essay du jour. I'm also trying to play upwards of four 15-minute games against either BetterBot or STEEBot on Woogles.io. I try to play the right thing in the right spot, and mostly succeed; if I play in the right place but play the wrong word, I'll take it. If I don't know the bingo, it's okay. I'm not an expert (yet), so I'm not berating myself like one.

I. BEILKU?

Ah, the “-like” words. “Like” is one of those versatile suffixes that could conceivably get tacked on any noun in existence and make sense. “Ladderlike slats of light” is a nice little image that would be at home in a poem or essay, but LADDERLIKE* would get challenged off every tournament Scrabble board on the face of the planet. It's one of the perils of logophilic creativity in Scrabble: just because you see and use a word every days doesn't mean you get to play it, at least not yet.[1] The only thing more aggravating that words are the rules that govern them. The Scrabble dictionary is less a dictionary and more a rulebook, and the rules say there are only 88 words ending in “-like” that are playable in NWL, with an additional 24 fanciful “-like” word in the international Collins lexicon; my ORBLIKE# silhouette is not appreciated at home, you see.

I should note that the games I play against the Woogles bots are all void challenge, which is to say illegal words, or phonies, can't hit the board. If I try to play a word that isn't in the dictionary, I get an error message instead of a lost turn. This helps me be a little more creative with my plays.

Man, those back hooks on AD are pretty appetizing, that's where I'd score the most, especially if that K can hit that double-letter square. There's the obvious S hook, but I'm not finding anything. Like, like... BUsLIKE? “The lineman's frame was buslike.” Can't hurt to try, especially in void challenge.

No dice. BUSLIKE* is a phony.

I switch the S to a D. BUdLIKE? There are tons of offbeat botany words in the wild. Survey says?

Number one answer! 87 points. Thank you, Richard Dawkins.

I'm ahead by 77 with 19 tiles in the bag when the clock runs out. I don't feel too bad about it going down in the books as a loss.

II. AAEISZ??

Ask any Scrabble player and they will tell you that there can indeed be too much of a good thing when it comes to the beloved blanks. Players of all skill levels speak of “blank blindness,” where your cup runneth over so much you risk drowning. A rack with two blanks is where perception and time go to die.

The instant the second blank appears on my rack, I thing “man, I must have something.” The I in ANERGIAS (which I played earlier, thank you very much) looks like a good spot. I lay down ZES after it, hoping to find something that ends in “-izes.” I shuffle and shuffle and piss away nearly two minutes of clock. I chuck a Hail Mary: AgAt(I)ZES for 80 points.

It stays on the board. I am thrilled with myself. I end up losing this game on time too. The engine says it's only the seventh-best play in the position (it likes Zo(O)S at H12 for 66 points, keeping the juicy AAE? leave). I don't care about what the engine has to say. I am still thrilled with myself. I am getting better at this, and the feeling is intoxicating.

Though I could stand to get a little faster.

[1] To wit, in one of my first club games back in 2023, I played, with the confidence of a man who knew what he was doing, the online-brainrot pronoun WHOMST*.

#scrabble

Here's the recipe.

First, get a DAW, that's a digital audio workstation. If you're in the Mac ecosystem even a little bit, congratulations, GarageBand is right there; the iPhone you had three iPhones ago is as good a drum machine as you can get. If you're on a Windows machine, Reaper will probably get you where you need to be. What I'm saying is that you're going to need a way to manipulate sound. You're going to want to get cool sample libraries; you probably don't have the yearly income to have a jam room full of Moogs and Mellotrons and vintage Soviet synthesizers and Eastern European rhythm boxes, but you can buy their recordings and feed them into your DAW. There's a small archipelago of drum machines ready to be programmed in your browser window, some of them based on tech that's been the backbone of pop music for what I'm wagering has been your entire life. If you're really committed to this project, you can get a MIDI keyboard (your regular computer keyboard will do in a pinch), but all the gear in the world won't be able to replace the key element of your project. If you set out to create the next great eccojam, you need a golden flip. You need a worthy sample.

The backbone of vaporwave is the sample, the disfigurement and recontextualization of a pre-existing piece of music. This isn't a new idea. It didn't come out of nowhere; specifically, the germ of what would become vaporwave's core moveset likely comes out of Houston rap, thank you DJ Screw. There's a lot of literature about the headier side of vaporwave, about its use as a vector for anticapitalist critique (see the work of James Ferraro) and its progressive collapse into empty signifiers and aesthetic choices as the world burns to the ground around it. But in all its guises, vaporwave is, in a sense, about The Past, where the detritus that marked an amorphous Then gets twisted into oblong shapes in the Now, because memory and creativity are distortion fields. When something is powerful but loves shortcuts, like, say, one's memory, details get blurred, sounds start to smudge and smear. At its best, or at least its most effective, vaporwave captures the sound of trying and failing to remember something you've forgotten. You know that something used to occupy this space, and you can still see the shape of it, but the act of trying to remember sends your thinking into a labyrinth of locked grooves.

Fittingly, I can't remember where I first encountered “I Hope You Remember Me,” the sixth track from Heavy Systems, Inc.'s 2020 album Vape Sessions for Alexander. That's a hell of a sentence to read with no context, I apologize. Let me break that down. Just who is Heavy Systems Inc. (or HSI henceforth)? I couldn't tell you, really. Like the umpteen bedroom producers who post their experiments and otherwise for public consumption on YouTube and Soundcloud and such, I can't pinpoint exactly who HSI is. From what I can tell, they are American, but I don't know where they're from; some places say Tampa, some places say San Diego. That's just as well, because what is San Diego if not the Tampa of California, and what is Tampa if not the San Diego of Florida. They draw; their Blogspot is full of digital illustrations. Best I can tell, they've been making music for just over a decade, a lot of it I'd perhaps ignorantly file under drum & bass. There's a breakneck remix of the all-time Ginger Root banger “Loretta” on their Soundcloud nestled between a sprightly D&B number called “Pimp Tight” and a lurching space-disco number spliced with movie dialogue called “Guns Can't Help You Now.” They 100% know their way around a groove, around a flip, around a sample.

If I were the betting type, I'd wager it was the YouTube algorithm that served "I Hope You Remember Me" up to me. YouTube is probably the world's single-largest repository of vaporwave and post-vaporwave, and by post-vaporwave, I mean music that presents itself as its own found-object artifact from the aforementioned nebulous Then. Think Barbershop Simulator, the genre-codifying 2023 effort from producer slowerpace. I like slowerpace's work, especially the design element. I love the attention to detail and clear care taken in designing the album art, in the naming of the tracks. slowerpace's angle is, so far as I can tell, to fill the void left by objects we can't remember, a kind of ontological samizdat with cool grooves. It's a cool design project but I couldn't point to a single flip that stays lodged in my head the way the one in "I Hope You Remember Me" does. It's the difference between isolating a vibe for effect and isolating a hook for effect.

The sample “I Hope You Remember Me” is built around, the sliver of the thing we're trying to remember, is from a song called “Not Me,” the title track from the 1987 album by singer Glenn Medeiros. Wait, who? To be fair, only a very specific kind of music nerd remembers who Glenn Medeiros is, specifically the kind of chart-watching dorks who concern themselves with Billboard Number Ones. He did have his moment in the sun, so to speak, riding a new jack swing beat and a big assist from Bobby Brown to the top of the charts in 1990. He also knocked on the Top 10's door in 1987 with his first single, a cover of George Benson's “Nothing's Gonna Change My Love for You.” But unless you were a turbo-permed European housewife in the late 80s, you probably don't know who Glenn Medeiros is. He is an adult contemporary that-guy, a dependable soft rock bench player. If Richard Marx and Michael Bolton were the Bash Brothers of adult contemporary, Medeiros was, uh... Stan Javier? Rick Honeycutt? Why yes, I did look those up on Baseball Reference; I was barely alive when the Oakland A's were rocking the house. Point is, Glenn Medeiros was a working musician, and the uncut, unabridged story of American popular music can't be written without him, the same way erasing Javier or Honeycutt from those Athletics teams could butterfly-effect that 1989 World Series win away.

“Not Me” is 1987 as hell, built around synthesized chimes and oozing a very 1987 brand of mystique, the kind that wears a silk shirt in chiaroscuro lighting for the bordering-on-avant-garde music video. The parent album's credits are stacked floor to ceiling with session aces on shore leave from the Good Ship Yacht Rock, and the credited songwriters here specifically are Paul Anka (Canada's first pop star and an Ottawa legend, lest we forget) and Deke Rivers, aka Richard fucking Marx. There I go namedropping Richard Marx again. I need to impress upon you just how huge Richard Marx was in 1987: his self-titled debut album went triple-platinum and had four singles crack the top 3, including a Number One single, his first of three. He was the Jose Canseco of the most uncool genre of music on Earth, but the thing with professional songwriters, which Marx was prior to his breakthrough and still is to this day, is they have this shit down to a science. Pair that professionalism and craft with the looping, hypnotic structure of vaporwave, and you have a song (or two songs, I suppose) that I've thought about every day since I first heard it.

“I Hope You Remember Me” isn't a drastic reworking of “Not Me” in terms of sonic manipulation; HSI doesn't warp the track that much or make Medeiros sounds like he's a wailing, melting demon (cf the Chuck Person and death's dynamic shroud records embedded above). The effect is more akin to listening to a CD that has chosen to skip in a few very opportune places. Maybe it's the alchemy of the smooth groove, the deep-cut nature of the sample, the moody song title, and the sense that this was created with one specific person in mind that makes “I Hope You Remember Me” so memorable to me. I can't prove it, but I think the album title gives it away: I want to believe that HSI has a friend named Alexander who likes to chill out and hit the vape, and since it's 2020 and we're in the dog days of COVID, and since one latches onto the small pleasure we can still give ourselves, healthiness be damned, maybe HSI made this album for their friend. Maybe this was a gift, in the figurative sense if not the literal, since it isn't available on HSI's Bandcamp or Soundcloud (though it is on Spotify and YouTube). It feeds into this sense that creative types, like me, like you, like HSI, are all just trying to make something at least one other person likes, whether we're toiling in obscurity or playing arenas. And I guess, in a way, this whole essay is my way of letting one other person know that I like and cherish a thing they've created from the ashes of something else.

#music

1. This video of the Deadlock Podcast riffing on an old WCW show featuring Hulk Hogan's ill-fated pasta restaurant Pastamania made me laugh harder than I have in ages.
2. Sinners. See this on the biggest screen you can. Believe the hype.
3. The chicken cutlet sandwich from Bossa.
4. I've been thinking about the so-called “city boy” look (a Japanese riff on American prep/workwear/streetwear) ever since the algorithm fed me this video by Percia Verlin, which led me to buying this nautical stripe tee from Uniqlo. I have never looked as Gallic as I do when I wear this tee, and it kind of rules.
5. Budget Bytes has been feeding my household for a decade and they keep putting out great, quick, affordable meals for me to try out. This broccoli cheddar orzo is new fave.
6. Balatro has some competition for the Virtual Card Game Timesink Heavyweight Championship as of late in the form of the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection. The Sawayama variant is a novel twist on the moldy oldie we all love, and the kabufuda and tarot versions will melt your brain.
7. Daily five-kilometre walks first thing in the morning.
8. Scrabble is still an ongoing concern, and I've been playing more and more games on the awesome Woogles.io platform against far-flung friends.
9. Happy 20th birthday to Montréal's Grande Bibliothèque, the gift that keeps on giving. Having fun isn't hard, etc etc etc.
10. If you're in town on a first or third Sunday of a given month and are looking for a cool way to kill a couple of hours, swing by the Accent Open Mic and watch some local talent rip it up. If I'm not co-hosting, I'm in the audience.

#tenthings

Someday I'll be enough of a physical media die-hard that I'll start making tapes the old-fashioned way again. But for now, these will have to do. RIYL: loud trebly guitars, unexpected drum machines, unexpected saxophone, music to sit on your porch to.

A1 Ween, “Did You See Me?” (Shinola, Vol. 1, 2005) A2 Peter Cat Recording Co., “Memory Box” (Bismillah, 2019) A3 Cootie Catcher, “Friend of a Friend” (single, 2024) A4 Liquid Mike, “K2” (Paul Bunyan's Slingshot, 2024) A5 Double Dagger, “No Allies” (MORE, 2009) A6 Metallica, “Master of Puppets” (Master of Puppets, 1986) B1 The Decemberists, “January Hymn” (The King Is Dead, 2011) B2 Cake, “Italian Leather Sofa” (Fashion Nugget, 1996) B3 Pearl & the Oysters, “Side Quest” (Planet Pearl, 2024) B4 Dan Seals, “Bop” (Won't Be Blue Anymore, 1985) B5 Kiwi Jr., “Norma Jean's Jacket” (Cooler Returns, 2021) B6 MJ Lenderman, “You Don't Know the Shape I'm In” (Manning Fireworks, 2024) B7 Neil Young, “Down by the River” (Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, 1969)

#music

The Clientele. Hot off their sprawling comeback album I Am Not There Anymore and a opening slot for another pantheon band of mine (The War on Drugs—at Royal Albert Hall, no less! Of all the shows for me to miss!), these lads had another strong showing this year in my stats, bolstered by the fact that I made a sprawling playlist and accompanying zine for my dear friend Sarah. I leaned heavy on B-sides and assorted ephemera this time around.

Where should I start with them? If you aren't hooked within the first ten seconds of “Since K Got Over Me,” the leadoff track from the band's masterful third album Strange Geometry (2005), I fear this band might not be for you. But if you, like me, love swirling, reverbed-out fingerpicked Stratocaster in your swoony, literary English indie-pop, keep listening to Strange Geometry, then listen to their first two albums, Suburban Light (2000) and The Violet Hour (2002), then pick back up with their fourth album, God Save the Clientele (2006).

The Isley Brothers. Funk-rock godfathers, the ultimate R&B chameleons, Rock and Roll Hall of Famers. These dudes wrote “Shout” in 1959 (which would cement anyone's legendary status, so unkillable is that song) and got Beyoncé to feature on one of their songs in 2022. They have been sampled by Biggie Smalls, the Beastie Boys, and Kendrick Lamar. Ernie Isley's guitar tone is one of the greatest sounds I've ever heard, guitar or otherwise. These guys are legends in the field.

Where should I start with them? I'm partial to the sextet era of the group that starts proper with the totally awesome 3 + 3 (1973), also known as “the one with 'That Lady' on it.” It’s my favourite Isleys albums, but the one I gravitated towards in 2024 was The Heat Is On (1975), which is more groove-oriented. Another Isleys track I had on repeat was “It's Alright With Me,” from The Real Deal (1982), which sees the brothers bringing in an electro influence.

Kiwi Jr. Last year, my friend Ross, who works at a record store in Jolly Ol', sent me a wonderful care package consisting of Kiwi Jr's second and third albums on 12” vinyl. Sometimes my friend spoil me rotten. He sent me the records in part because I've been singing the praises of this band ever since I listened to “Leslie” over and over again in 2019. Jeremy Gaudet is one of my favourite active rock lyricists, and not just because he obviously likes some of the same movies I do.

Where do I start with them? Since the Kiwis only have three albums, I'd recommend just starting with Football Money (2019) and working your way forwards. If you miss college rock like they did it in the 1990s, you'll love Football Money, which is catchy, breezy (10 tracks, 28 minutes), and a total blast to list to. There's a lot of Pavement in their DNA, but they love Guided by Voices and the Kinks, too. Cooler Returns (2021), my favourite Kiwi Jr. album, introduces a broader sonic palette, while Chopper (2022) is stacked floor to ceiling with cool, moody synths.

Peter Cat Recording Co. The few, the proud, the contemporary sophisti-pop bands. I stumbled upon these guys while browsing the album art for 2024 releases on Rate Your Music, which I acknowledge is the most deranged way to find new music to listen to. But the experience isn't unlike browsing the stacks at a record store, where you have little to go on but a genre and a piece of album art. I can't claim this is the most effective way of finding cool music, but it worked this time, because I found a cool band that was able to answer the question “What if Prefab Sprout were from New Delhi?”

Where should I start with them? Beta (2024) is the record that hooked me. The cinematic atmosphere, the long, languid melodies, Suryakant Sawhney's weary croon: at the risk of sounding too abstract, this record has fantastic vibes. The opening avant-chamber waltz “Flowers R. Blooming” is kind of a fakeout, since the album twin centrepieces of “21c” and “Black and White” are brooding dancefloor bangers.

Ween. I've loved these bastards since I was in high school (I once did an oral presentation on “Push th' Little Daisies” in English class), which puts them in the hallowed company of bands like Rush and They Might Be Giants. And let's face facts, Ween is They Might Be Giants for edgelords (I know Ween bristles at being compared to TMBG, but how many prolific genre-hopping alt-rock duos from the Northeast founded in the 80s whose members met in high school can you name—I'm gonna dedicate a blog post to this one day) and now I'm at the point where I'm the kind of sicko who listens to bootlegs. Never mind that, I have preferred bootlegs (check out Central Park 2010/9/17, which closes with the best version of “Doctor Rock” I've ever heard).

Where should I start with them? I'd recommend non-heads start with the excellent White Pepper (2000), Ween's most approachable album in that it has the fewest voice filters and the least off-putting imagery. There's a lot of cool psychedelia and Beatles-y pop, and ends with a three-song run that wouldn't sound out of place on a 70s country rock record. That run includes “Stay Forever,” a song so lovely it fries your brain knowing that these are the same guys who less than a decade earlier recorded a song called “Touch My Tooter.”

#music #tenthings

Here are ten books I read and liked last year.

1. Roland Allen, The Notebook (nonfiction, 2024). I don’t think there was a book released this past year that was more my shit than this one, a wide-ranging and thoroughly researched history of the humble notebook, from its mercantile origins in 14th century Italy through the commonplace book era to the bujo boom of today. It’s heartening to see that for almost as long as we’ve been writing things down for ourselves, we’ve been using it as a place to figure out the world around us, including ourselves. Every Field Notes has the truth printed inside of it: “I'm not writing it down to remember it later, I'm writing it down to remember it now.”
2. Sarah Bakewell, How to Live (nonfiction, 2011). This overview of the life and work of French writer and statesman Michel de Montaigne has a very Montaingesque structure: twenty attempts to answer to the titular question. The root of “essay,” after all, is the French verb essayer, or “to try.” The Notebook was in part about the ways we came to exteriorize out thoughts and ideas on paper, and few people in recorded history did so with as much relish and as little regard for internal consistency as Montaigne. Of course, this was part of the process: Montaigne was demonstrating his trains of thought to better think through any given topic. This is a refreshing approach to decorticating something in an era of speed and instantaneity.
3. Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematograph (nonfiction, 1975). Oblique Strategies for the Letterboxd set. Something to be consulted, not necessarily read through. Fascinating insights about filmmaking from a legendary and idiosyncratic filmmaker.
4. Roy Peter Clark, How to Write Short (nonfiction, 2013). Writing long has its benefits; just ask Montaigne, who did so to tease out this thoughts about this topic or that. The benefit of writing short is when you know what you want to say, but want to maximize its punchiness. It is clear throughout that Clark (who I always confuse with Roy Thomas Baker, the guy who made Queen sound like Queen) has honed his writing advice over a lifetime in journalism, academia, and coaching. The advice itself isn’t particularly novel: keep it tight, pick strong words, be ruthless if need be. What makes this book interesting is the breadth of the examples Clark uses to make his point: tweets, dating profiles, baseball card copy, engagement-bait Facebook quizzes, poems, puns, T-shirts for sale on the boardwalk. It’s like J-school riff on that Jim Jarmusch quote about originality: “Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows,” it’s all good.
5. Kyle Chayka, Filterworld (nonfiction, 2024). The best thing I read all year, and also the book that made me do the Rick Dalton meme in recognition the most frequently, so specific were the observations and even the recommendations (I know Chayka is my brother because he too is a fan of Hiroshi Sato’s Awakening). Chayka, a writer for the New Yorker whose Infinite Scroll column is required reading, argues that the algorithm, and by extension Big Tech, flattens culture into a mushy flavourless middle, and that our various social media feeds kill our curiosity while fighting tooth and nail for our attention. What we take in is more and more imposed on us, and how we consume it has become more frictionless, passive, optimized. We must revel in the joyous friction of seeking things out for ourselves. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the best algorithm is the cool people you know, because cool people like cool things. (Further reading: I also read and liked Chayka’s book about the history of minimalism, The Longing for Less)
6. Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff (nonfiction, 2020). There’s something irresistible to me about a curious newcomer trying to break into a niche competitive domain, and the more niche the better. Consider my fondness for Stefan Fatsis’ Word Freak, a book that in no small part set me on my correct competitive Scrabble path, or the work of the Paper Lion himself, George Plimpton. I found Konnikova’s journey into the heart of competitive poker to be absorbing and alluring; there are through lines about the relationship between skill and luck, what you can and cannot control, and the overwhelming power of cognitive biases. “Less certainty, more inquiry” indeed. Pair it with Jon Bois’ Pretty Good video about poker.
7. Jason Kirk, Hell Is a World Without You (fiction, 2024). I didn’t grow up in the church. But I grew up in West Québec, which is still pretty church-adjacent, or church-adjacent enough for me to have had a high school girlfriend who signed one of my yearbooks with a screed against evolution (Rachel, if you ever see this, what’s up) and came to school armed with literature (I might be conflating two people here, cut me some slack, it’s been 20 years). But one thing I was for sure was a 14-year-old social outcast navigating friendships and romance and my own sense of guilt between sessions of Soul Calibur II and NHL Hitz 2003 with the homies. Kirk, a sports journalist and co-host of the venerable Shutdown Fullcast, writes with great humour and empathy about growing up Evangelical, and gleefully channels his inner puerile 14-year-old in the book’s funnier passage, which are legion.
8. Patrick O’Reilly, Demographics Report, November, 2023 (poetry, 2024). Full disclosure, Patrick is a friend, and Cactus Press put out my own chapbook back in 2021, but if I’m not going to rep my scene, who the hell will? Most of Demographics Report is a long, bleakly funny modernist poem attempting to catalogue, in the spirit of Georges Perec, the comings and goings of a city’s fauna, humans included. This slot could also have gone to Sahand Farivar’s beautiful Thirteen Sonnets or local legend Lou Vani’s Moon Rock Writes, which both feel classical in their own way.
9. Oliver Roeder, Seven Games (nonfiction, 2024). More than a pocket history of the titular seven games (checkers, chess, go, backgammon, poker, Scrabble, bridge), Roeder’s book is especially interesting when humans build machines that end up being so good at playing games that the best of us start playing like them (this is especially evident in the chapter about chess); the existential issue is, as Roeder puts it, the machines can’t explain themselves to us. There’s also the thorough line of computer scientists seemingly treating games as a problem to be solved rather than an elegant expression of human creativity.
10. Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars (poetry, 2011). The best poetry collection I read this year. Works in the same way as the best science fiction: ideas and feelings refracted through future tech and the sheer vastness of the Universe.

#tenthings

Thrust awake in the dead of morning, as one is when nursing a cold, I was struck by the kind of question that frequently afflicts the Scrabble-addled: is X word valid in Scrabble?

Because I'm me, I've had the Live in Chicago version of Ween's “The Blarney Stone” on the brain for most of the year (I've spent a lot of time with Ween this year, as a future post will attest to). During the final verse of this particular recording of “The Blarney Stone,” as is the case with the umpteen bootlegs I've inhaled this year, guitarist Dean Ween (aka Mickey Melchiondo) ad-libs various ailments befalling our salty-dog narrator, punctuated with mock disgust by the rest of the band. To wit: “I got zits on my back/I got cancer in my crack/I got tumours on my nutsack!”

And because my brain is broken in the specific way it is, on this congested morning after five-ish hours of fitful sleep, I ask myself: is NUTSACK good?

UNSTACK and UNTACKS are the only NWL words in that mess of letters, but NUTSACK# is good in CSW, and I can already hear select people I know chime in with “and that's why Collins is better.”

#scrabble

I don't use my personal YouTube account on my work-assigned computer. This has its drawbacks: nothing gets preserved, nothing gets saved, I’m the mercy of what the algorithm wants to throw my way. One odd advantage to this friction: when my browser decides it’s time for an IT-mandated upgrade or a surprise cookie deletion, my YouTube front page becomes a clean slate. This is when I do what I call “goosing the algorithm,” where I run as many videos I like in as many tabs as my poor work laptop can handle at one time (with the sound muted, obviously). The idea is that it keeps the recommendation engine on its toes; what will the oracle offer me after a steady diet of Jon Bois videos, live Ween bootlegs, stationary hauls, guitar rig rundowns, Criterion Closet videos, videos about spelling and fonts and decentralizing the role of your phone in your creative life? There are worse ways to pan for gold.

One of the nuggets this method has yielded is the channel of Evan Monsma, a young Midwestern maker with a flair for the junky, the janky, and the jury-rigged. He builds shelves out of scrap wood, camera rigs out of spare parts, and injection molders from drill presses. He’s also a videographer and scores his own videos. His mix of rolled-sleeve creativity, broad interests, and unpretentiousness reminds me of Wade Nixon aka Dankpods, the similarly down-to-earth Australian drummer/torturer of automobiles/chronicler of obsolete tech.

A week ago, Evan posted a video challenging his just-south-of-30,000 followers to do something creative every day in October. Hardly a novel idea (Kleon has also championed doing something to this effect several times), but something about the way Evan frames it—“nothing complex, nothing super high-pressure,” just something to keep the creative muscles loose—makes it approachable. Don’t drive yourself up the wall making a perfect thing; just make a thing. One small thing a day for a month.

It doesn’t even have to be thirty-one of the same thing. On the 1st, I wrote two verses of a song about the seasons going out of phase; it still sounds like three Mountain Goats songs spot-welded together. Yesterday, I wrote this very post. Today? Who knows. I don’t want to fence myself in. Like Wade and Evan, I have a few different things I’d like to do (though mine involve about 100% fewer sawblades and oil changes). I’ll try blogging a bit more. I want to restring my crappy beginner guitar and learn Leonard Cohen’s not-so-secret six chords. I want to take the Polaroid I got at Value Village for ten bucks out for a spin. I made a zine for a friend recently and was amazed at how invigorating it was to do. There’s a stack of postcards next to my desk begging to be sent. Scrabble, like every Scrabble player will tell you, can be as creative and beautiful as chess, but this specific kind of creativity and beauty falls outside the parameters of “something small every day.”

What I really want to work on is that long-gestating sci-fi poetry manuscript that I’ve been putting together piecemeal for the last few years. But I fear I’ve stalled out because I may have set the bar too high for myself in terms of emotional ambition; I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen that I think I’ve written myself into a corner I don’t have the skill or heart to escape.

Maybe I’ll feel more up to the task by the time Halloween comes around.

#blog