Stratovania

Christmas is over now, so I should probably write something about it. We were at Beth's mom's house again, and the cats came with us. It was the first Christmas Felix spent with us, and he seemed to enjoy it, except when he hit his head on the coffee table because Nellie popped out of some wrapping paper and surprised him.

They were also playing with one of the bags.

Not all of our presents had arrived by Christmas Day, but between then and now, I received the Dragon Quest III HD remake, Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime, a book publication of the Super Mario Adventures comic that ran in Nintendo Power, The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth, Volume 2 of Kirby Manga Mania, Andy Partridge's My Failed Songwriting Career Volume 2 (I don't have the first one yet, but I don't think you have to be familiar with that to listen to the second) and My Failed Christmas Career, a movie-style Cat Mario figure, a T-shirt with Bowser from a series where I already have the Luigi and Yoshi ones, a soft Koopa shell, a Ruby Slippers mug, and some Marvin the Martian socks.

I was trying to make a Bowser face, but I suck at imitating facial expressions.
I also gave Beth a similar big, soft Mario-related thing.

I ended up getting some duplicates, but I supposed that's likely to happen when you send the same list to different people who aren't coordinating with each other. I feel like there was a lot of stuff I wanted to do but didn't, and I know it's the same way with Beth. It seems like a lot of my holiday memories, even dating back to childhood, are of things I thought of but never did. I'm a procrastinator in general, and it's hard to get in the mood to prepare for Christmas when both of our birthdays are in November. Aside from the new Ben Folds Christmas album, I didn't even listen to holiday music from my own collection (as opposed to the stuff on the radio and in stores; I heard plenty of that). We did do our annual rewatch of Home Alone, as well as seeing the original Grinch, Frosty, and Garfield Christmas. A lot of the latter is the Arbuckle family doing the same stuff they do every year, even if it's silly and doesn't make sense, because that's just what they do. I can relate to that to an extent. It's not like Home Alone is even that great of a movie, but it's become what we do.

In other news, we bought a new car, as our old one seemed to be on its last legs. The new one is a Hyundai Venue in a color called green apple (not to be confused with candy apple red with a ski for a wheel), and we had to wait extra time to get it. Next year's green is a different color that looks more like gray, so there weren't a lot for sale. It's technically an SUV, and I've generally been kind of against those, but it seemed the most practical choice. It's not much wider than the Honda Fit, and our parking space in the garage is pretty narrow. It wasn't a Christmas present and didn't have one of those giant bows from the commercials, but I did want to buy one before I had to get another emissions inspection on the Fit. We'd had the Honda since 2009, so the Venue has features that are new to me but probably pretty standard now, like a backup camera. It also has a moonroof, which Beth is excited about.

Anything else I should mention? We did go to the Nintendo store in Rockefeller Center and saw the tree there, although we planned it poorly and had to go around the block to get from one to the other.

It's now that weird period between Christmas and New Year's that doesn't entirely feel like it should exist. It was one thing back when I was in school and had the whole week (and change, depending on when the holidays fell) off, but working over this period makes me more aware of it.

I haven't written here in a while, but I have a few things I wanted to mention that I didn't think would fit into my WordPress format. I doubt anyone else cares, but I still try to keep those posts topic-specific, while this entry will likely be all over the place. My last temporary job ended a month ago, but it looks like I'm going to be starting another one in the middle of August. I've also been volunteering, but I'm not sure I'll be able to keep that up while doing the other job. The volunteer work has involved organizing Rube Goldberg cartoons, so far his comic strip Boob McNutt, which ran from 1915 (although it wasn't syndicated until 1918) through 1934. The title character is a well-meaning idiot who routinely fails at various tasks. Goldberg is best known for his elaborate machines that perform simple tasks in overly complicated ways, and the early Boob strips always began and ended with the character in bizarre death traps.

Perhaps feeling bad for his creation, who did generally TRY to do the right thing, Goldberg later gave him a love interest, and one who actually loved him and was pretty in a Gibson Girl kind of way.

Also featured in the strip were Bernice the Siberian Cheesehound and the identical twins Mike and Ike from an earlier Goldberg project. For two years in the early 1930s, Boob joined two professors in collecting and transporting exotic animals, many of them in the style Dr. Seuss would later popularize.


Thanks to Tavie's promotion, Beth and I saw Kevin McDonald twice in the past few days. On Thursday, he did a show that was recorded for a podcast, featuring interviews with Wallace Shawn and Brad Roberts.

Shawn talked quite a bit about My Dinner with Andre (which I haven't seen), and mentioned that he didn't really get the humor in The Princess Bride.

He also played Sherlock Holmes in a sketch about Kevin really awkwardly trying to cover up the fact that he'd murdered his wife. Roberts, the lead singer for Crash Test Dummies, performed "Superman's Song" (which he said was the first real song he wrote) and "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm."

My dad actually had CTD albums when I was growing up. In the interview, they brought up Andy Partridge, whom Roberts said was the most nervous person he'd ever met. I know the Dummies covered at least two XTC songs, "The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead" and "All You Pretty Girls." Last night, we saw a sketch show that Kevin wasn't in, but he had taught the class that performed them, and did the introduction. He actually told the same story at both shows, about an ill-fated show that he and Scott Thompson did for a fraternity benefit at the University of Toronto back in 1985.

We had considered going to the New York Botanical Garden to see (and presumably smell) their corpse flower, but we never got the chance. When will we ever be able to experience the scent of rotting flesh? The Oz Club Convention in Philadelphia is coming up this weekend, and Monster-Mania the weekend after that, so we'll be pretty busy. I'm also seeing Cracker do an acoustic show at City Winery next Friday.

I've been a little more active on Instagram as of late. My account is nathandehoff, and I'm not really sure why I decided to go with my name instead of one of my usual user names. I've noticed the somewhat odd phenomenon there of people following my account, but if I follow them back, they'll unfollow me. What's the point? Is it just ego, or is there some way to make money by having a lot of followers? I read something last night about Donald Trump buying fake followers on Twitter, apparently to make his account look more popular. I'm not running for president, though, and I'd rather spambots NOT follow me on social media. I have almost 2000 followers on Tumblr, but maybe twenty of them ever like or reblog more than a single post. Most of the others appear to be either spammers or people who last updated over a year ago. It probably helps my follower count on Tumblr that most of what I post is not my original work. My Instagram is just pictures I've taken, which means mostly cats in awkward positions and stuff I saw lying on the sidewalk. So while I like people to follow me, I can fully understand why they don't. Just stop it with the bait-and-switch game. There are better ways to get my attention if you really want me to check out your page. Also, with so many social media outlets, I sometimes wonder where to post any one particular thing.

I don't know how bethje does it. She hardly sleeps at all on weekdays, then makes up for it by sleeping pretty much all day on weekends. If I don't get enough sleep on any one day, that results in my basically walking around in a daze. Sure, I can do things if I've been up long enough, but all I really want to do is go back to bed.

Anyway, I suppose I should talk about the Halloween activity we did on Saturday, which was a ghost walk in Ocean City. When we told Beth's family about it, they were asking whether anyone would jump out at us, but ghost walks aren't like that. What actually happens is that a guide takes the visitors around town and tells ghost stories related to particular places. We'd been on one in Philadelphia some years ago, and I seem to remember that one covering more distance. The Ocean City one really didn't involve that much walking, and occasionally the guide would tell a story about a landmark we weren't even that near, as with the Flanders Hotel. She said we could stop by the hotel after the tour to see a portrait of Emily, the girl who supposedly now haunts the building, but when we tried it there was a wedding going on. The walk was fun, even though we didn't believe any of it. I mean, come on, it's all anecdotal evidence! What's amusing is that there was one couple on the walk that apparently DID believe it all, or at least wanted everyone else to think they did. The guy said they were "paranormal researchers," and put in his own comments at pretty much every stop.

Something I found interesting recently (even though it was actually posted two weeks ago; I'm way behind on my LiveJournal and blog reading) was this entry on the They Might Be Giants community about an upcoming memoir by Brian Doherty, the band's drummer from 1993 to 1996.

The linked excerpt has a mention of how, at a 1993 show, John Flansburgh told the band that Weird Al was coming to the show, and that no one should interact with him, because it would be bad for their image. As someone who actually became interested in TMBG through Weird Al (there's a fair amount of fan overlap online), I was always a little bothered by how the Johns would try to avoid any connection with the weird one. The general consensus (which Brian confirms) is that they don't want to be seen as geeky novelty musicians any more than they already are. Or at least that was the case back in the day. Now that they're making most of their income through children's albums released by Disney, and Al has come to be more accepted by fellow celebrities (I follow him on Twitter, and just about every other famous person on there seems really excited when they get to meet him), perhaps that's not as important these days.

I really couldn't say. I guess I've gotten to the point where I don't really care so much about whether my favorite musicians like each other. I've heard that the Johns like XTC, but Andy Partridge has gone on record of saying he didn't care for any of their songs other than "Birdhouse in Your Soul." (For what it's worth, I don't believe I've seen anything about what Andy thinks of Weird Al.) I guess another part of the issue from a fan's point of view is that I don't want to think of a band as a business. After all, music is fun, and business boring and depressing. On the other hand, if nobody looked at the business end of things, I never would have even heard of the band, so it's kind of a necessary evil. And since most of what I've seen suggests John Linnell has no business acumen whatsoever, it pretty much falls on Flans to be the hard-edged businessman of the group.

Speaking of Weird Al, I had a dream last night that I was walking around singing "Amish Paradise," but I have no clue WHY I was doing that. My mind might also be suffering from the lack of new Simpsons episodes, because I also dreamed about one of them. Bart teamed up with Nelson to get revenge on someone, but that someone turned out to be Bart. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but it made even less once Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs showed up.

I haven't been listening to much holiday music on my own this month. Honestly, I haven't really been in the mood. I can't help hearing some of it on the radio and in businesses, however. In fact, at Chili's today, they played XTC's "Thanks for Christmas," one of the few XTC songs I've heard in public. Actually, it gets played quite a bit around the winter holidays. Anyway, I've been thinking a bit about it, and it seems like there are four basic categories of typical holiday songs:

1. Religious songs about the birth of Jesus. Most of these are the oldest and grandest ones you'll hear, but there are some that have been written in more recent years.

2. Songs about Santa Claus and related mythology.

3. Secular numbers about Christmas (or other holidays, but most often Christmas) as a time for goodwill, celebration, and togetherness. I think this category would also include songs about NOT enjoying the holidays for whatever reason, like "Blue Christmas," "I'll Be Home for Christmas," and the Carpenters' "Merry Christmas Darling."

4. Winter songs that don't actually mention Christmas or any other holiday, but for some reason get lumped in with the holiday music anyway. When you think about it, it would presumably make just as much sense to play "Jingle Bells" or "Winter Wonderland" in January (well, in the Northern Hemisphere, anyway), but does that ever happen?

There is some overlap between these categories. "The Christmas Song" (you know, "chestnuts roasting on an open fire" and all that) is mostly a Category 3 song, but Santa gets a verse. On the face of it, "Frosty the Snowman" is Category 4, but the animated special featured Santa and Christmas heavily (and even changed the last line of the song so that it DID mention Christmas), so you could argue that it's a Category 2. You probably wouldn't argue this, though, because I doubt anyone but me has a desire to categorize Christmas carols.

Happy Independence Day to my fellow residents of the United States! In honor of today, I'm going to cover a nationalistic sort of mythology, that of the national personification. The most famous one for the States is, of course, Uncle Sam, the bearded guy in star-spangled clothes who points rudely at you until you agree to go die in Iraq.



The common origin story for Uncle Sam is that he's based on Samuel Wilson, a meat inspector during the War of 1812. He used the initials "U.S." on the meat barrels, and one of the troops who received the meat joked that it stood for Wilson's own name, hence "Uncle Sam." By the end of the Civil War, he had become the most prominent personification of the nation. His popular image was, not surprisingly, largely influenced by Thomas Nast, the same guy who brought us our modern depictions of Santa Claus and Jack Frost, not to mention the animal symbols of our two main political parties. But Sam has not been the only human symbol of the States. There was also Columbia, a female figure who dates back to the beginnings of the country, and can still be seen in the logo for Columbia Pictures. Another was Brother Jonathan, whose height of popularity occurred before the Uncle Sam character was created, but who stuck around in some form until the Civil War.



Many other countries have their own personifications. England has John Bull, who was used for the same purpose, but still looks less like he wants you to join the military than that he wants you to have some tea and crumpets with him. A popular French personification is a woman who originated during the French Revolution, often dressed in tricolor and Phrygian cap as in XTC's "Then She Appeared." Interestingly enough, she shares the name of Andy Partridge's then wife, Marianne. Apparently Marianne is one of the trampier national symbols, as she is occasionally depicted exposing one or both breasts.



In a link to classical mythology, many of the female personifications are actually versions of Athena, as can be seen in this picture depicting the Triple Entente. From left to right, these patriotic ladies are Marianne, Mother Russia, and Britannia.



If you're at all interested in this topic, I'd recommend this Wikipedia page as a good starting point. Johnny Canuck, Italia Turrita, the Irish Kathleen Ni Houlihan, the Indian Bharat Mata, and the Icelandic Lady of the Mountain are all there.

My original plan for today was a post on Theseus, but listening to the song "Green Man" tempted me to find out a little about...well, I think you can figure it out. What's harder to figure out, however, is exactly who the Green Man figures were supposed to represent. The name "Green Man" wasn't coined until 1939, and refers to various stone faces with vegetation either surrounding them or as actual facial features. They might not all be depictions of the same guy, but the general consensus seems to be that they were fertility and woodland deities. The presence of such presumably pagan figures on English churches might be traced to the early Christian traditions of incorporating rather than eradicating pagan traditions, although this page suggests that they might have been regarded as demons by Christians in the Middle Ages. That's the case for a lot of pagan deities, though, so it's certainly possible that both are true.

The Green Man has been linked to any number of mythological figures related to plants and forests, including Odin, the horned god Cernunnos (note to self: do a post on horned gods at some point), the Roman Sylvanus, leaf-clad forest fairies, and even Robin Hood and Father Christmas. And with May coming up pretty soon, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the English May Day figure known as Jack in the Green. I'll probably have a little more to say about him once May Day actually rolls around.

So, what's next for my mythological post series? Well, I'm running out of more obvious ideas, but Theseus is definitely going to be the subject of one of them. And since St. George's Day is on Thursday, I might well have something to say about the dragon-slaying saint next week. I'd like to do an entire post on Ragnarok, and there's always the horned god idea I mentioned earlier in this entry. Any other ideas?

The next step in our tour of XTC albums is Nonsuch, which has a special place in my heart, as it's the first XTC album I heard all the way through.



( Ain't nothing in the world like a green-skinned girl, but that don't mean to say you can't look. )

Looks like I still have the Apple Venus albums to cover, after which I'll probably take a break from this album-reviewing for a while. As much as I like the opportunity to listen to these albums again, trying to come up with something for every single song can get a bit tedious. Until next time, at the very least, you can stand up naked and grin.

I'm getting a bit tired of doing these album reviews, but I might as well finish out the XTC catalog. Besides, the next album on my list is my personal favorite, Skylarking.



When this album was released in the States, "Dear God" (the B-side to the Grass single) was already a hit, so it was added to the album, with "Mermaid Smiled" cut out to make room. That's the version of the album I have. More recent CD releases have restored "Mermaid" to its original place and stuck "Dear God" at the end, but I'm not entirely comfortable with that decision. After all, the original American version has "Dear God" transition directly into "Dying," so why not just keep that AND "Mermaid"? I've made a playlist that includes both songs, so that's how I'm going to review this record.

( Please don't pull me out, this is how I would want to go. )

While this record covers different seasons, I usually think of it as a summer album. I think that's due to a combination of the mood of the album and the fact that I bought it in the summer. That doesn't mean I can't listen to it and enjoy it at other times of the year, but I try to play it at least once every summer.

At one point in their long, illustrious careers, the members of XTC decided to come up with an EP of pastiches of the psychedelic rock they grew up listening to. For this, they transformed into the Dukes of Stratosphear, made up of Sir John Johns (Andy Partridge), The Red Curtain (Colin Moulding), Lord Cornelius Plum (Dave Gregory), and E.I.E.I. Owen (Dave's brother Ian, who played drums for this project). The initial result was the 25 O'Clock EP, which was later followed up by the Psonic Psunspot LP. Both are available on the same CD, which is sold under the title Chips from the Chocolate Fireball. And, really, the whole thing is awesome. There's quite a bit to like in psychedelic rock in general, from the overblown vocals to the dreamlike tunes to the lyrics reminiscent of nonsense verse. And the Dukes bring out the best of it in their own work.



( If you doze much longer, then life turns to dreaming. )

Next week, we'll take a look at my favorite regular XTC album (and possibly my favorite overall album by anyone), Skylarking.

Several variations of that title were considered as titles for XTC's sixth studio album. The possibility of the band wearing fruit costumes for the liners was also discussed, but we ended up not seeing the lads dressed up like the Fruit of the Loom mascots. In fact, the cover we got for the album, which ended up being called Mummer, was this fairly nondescript one:



As a whole, the album has kind of a pastoral sound, which the band would later develop even further on Skylarking and Apple Venus Volume 1. It's not one of my favorite albums of theirs, but it's still enjoyable.

( Shilling for the fellow who brings the sheep in, shilling for the fellow who milks the herd )

Next week (probably), we'll start riding The Big Express.