→ February 17, 2015
→ By

Ancillary Justice.

My latest boardgame review for Paste magazine covers the 2014 engine-building game Evolution.

Ann Leckie’s debut novel Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch) ran the table of major sci-fi awards, winning the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke Awards for Best Novel (among other prizes) in 2014 and spawning two upcoming sequels to complete the “space opera” trilogy. Leckie devised a clever twist to give Ancillary Justice a different flavor from any novel I’ve seen before, but that didn’t infuse the story with the narrative greed I’d expect from an award-winning science-fiction book.

The protagonist of Ancillary Justice is an “ancillary,” a human body with an AI cognitive function, one recently separated from the ship that previously ruled its actions. In the world Leckie has created, spaceships run on powerful, all-seeing systems with their own artificial intelligences, and they extend their reach and powers via ancillaries – various prisoners who’ve been placed in cryogenic suspension, reanimated, and fitted with various technical implants, from armor to the system that connects them to the ship’s central nervous system. That means that each ancillary functions as a small part of a larger whole – Breq, the protagonist, can recall seeing with dozens of pairs of eyes when she was still part of the ship Justice of Toren. These ships and ancillaries are all under the command of the Radch, a mysterious authority that rules a large swath of its galaxy, adding to its dominion via ruthless “annexations” that tend to involve a lot of killing of innocents.

Breq’s ship is gone, described in one of the book’s many flashbacks, essential to understanding why Breq is trying to obtain a rare weapon and go kill one of the many bodies of the Radch’s monarch, Anaander Mianaai, even though such a move won’t actually destroy the ruler herself. The novel itself begins with a long tangent where Breq, arriving on the snowbound planet of Hilt (why is there always a frigid, snow-covered planet in these books?), comes across a dying woman named Seivarden lying face-down in the snow. Recognizing the former lieutenant, Breq chooses to save the woman’s life, further complicating her own mission yet giving Leckie more room to explain the Radch’s history.

That lengthy introductory section lasts maybe a third of the book, and while there may be a payoff later in the trilogy, it contributed to the novel’s lack of plot interest. I understood why Breq wants to kill one of the many Anaander Mianaais running around the galaxy; I just couldn’t bring myself to care all that much, at least not to the point where I was reading because I wanted to know what happened next. The plot is antiseptic, fully functional yet without color or emotion – befitting a story that is ultimately about a battle between artificial intelligences, I suppose.

Leckie’s use of an atypical protagonist likely contributed to the slew of awards she won for Ancillary Justice, and it allowed her to touch on a pair of themes that resonate quite strongly today, perhaps also boosting her stock with judges. One such theme is the question of privacy in an increasingly wired, digital era. Every ship and space station is “alive” via AI, and sees and knows everything that’s going on within, to the point of monitoring individuals’ heart rates and facial expressions, analyzing them for potential threats. The Radch continues to annex more territories, giving the targets no choice in the matter, forcing them to cede their land and any individual freedom they may have had prior to the Radch’s arrival.

Leckie also explores the question, although I suppose it’s settled within the novel, of how much control we’re willing to surrender to our computers. AIs rule every ship, station, or planet we encounter in the book, and there’s very little thought given to whether this is optimal because it’s been that way for at least a thousand years. The Radch is ruled according to a quasi-mystical (rather Confucian) set of principles, including Justice, that considers the Greater Good without giving any visible weight to the individual. On the one hand, that means personal freedom gets trampled by the Radch whenever there’s a conflict. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure everyone in the Radchaai empire is vaccinated.

Leckie gets too cute by half with her forays into language and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, never committing to it enough for a real exploration of its relevance, choosing instead to toy with questions of gender or Arabic/Korean-style questions of declensions that vary based on the level of respect due to whoever you’re talking to. It reads like an idea she had early in the novel’s development, then gradually abandoned as she became more enmeshed in the broader AI-focused plot.

Ancillary Justice reads more like a novel you’d analyze and discuss than one you might read for pleasure. The lack of any emotional connection between the reader and Breq, or even to the specific incident that triggered her rebellion against Anaander Mianaai, makes it a desultory read, failing to generate enough interest in getting to the book’s conclusion – a strong one, easily the book’s best segment, but not enough to make up for what came before. If you’re more invested in the backstory of why Breq ended up severed from her ship, and why she’s engaging on a seemingly futile one-ancillary mutiny against a ruler who can’t be killed – and as I type that I think that sounds like a pretty good story – you’ll likely enjoy the book more than I did.

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→ February 14, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 2/14/15.

The draft blog is live again, with my first post on Jacob Nix’s outing on Thursday and UC-SB’s mishandling of Dillon Tate; I’ll have another post up this evening on Kyle Funkhouser. I had a quick post earlier in the week on the James Shields signing. My chat with Colin Cowherd today on what WAR is and why we need it is available in mp3 form.

My review of the very good Days of Wonder boardgame Five Tribes is up at Paste.

saturdayfiveThis week’s links:

  • It’s time to stop using the r-word. A stunning piece on a word that should have died long ago, written by former NFL offensive guard Kasey Studdard, himself the target of that word when he was a kid due to a learning disability.
  • What Would Jesus Do About Measles? He’d tell you to vaccinate your children already, that’s what he’d do.
  • Via Kelly Oxford – one of my favorite follows on Twitter because I think she’s a riot – a piece from last year from Mother Jones that argues that you can’t change an anti-vaxxer’s mind. That piece makes vaccine deniers’ situations seem like a mental illness – a delusion from which they can’t escape.
  • Quantum equations say the universe has no beginning. Or no end, which is theoretically good news, except that all the stars will eventually wink out of existence. Anyway, the whole hypothesis depends on the existence of gravitons, massless quantum particles that may just be fictional. I just want to know when I get my jetpack.
  • The BBC’s World Book Club this month discussed William Gibson’s seminal debut novel Neuromancer, featuring a 55-minute Q&A with the author himself.
  • I tweeted this link earlier in the week, but now that I’ve posted my review of The Handmaid’s Tale it’s worth reposting – Salon‘s excellent story of Margaret Atwood’s visit to West Point, where she had lunch with first-year students and took many of their questions about the book.
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→ February 13, 2015
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The Handmaid’s Tale.

My draft blog post on Jacob Nix’s pitching and Dillon Tate’s role is up for Insiders.

Margaret Atwood’s award-winning dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale had been on my radar for years, both as a book recommended by others and something I knew I should read given its genre and critical acclaim. It is a remarkable, harrowing, often infuriating novel of a very specific type of dystopian society, one that goes beyond mere questions of personal freedom to probe issues of gender roles and identities, as well as the difficulty of regaining any sort of agency under severe repression designed to strip subjects of that very power.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, the United States has fallen somewhere in the late 1980s, replaced in a violent coup by a fundamentalist Christian state, one that imposes strict Biblical prohibitions on nearly all areas of life. Women are now second-class citizens by statute, deprived of the ability to work, to drive, to assemble, to read, even to think for themselves. Decisions about their reproductive lives are made largely by the state, which is entirely dominated by older white men. Think modern-day Saudi Arabia. Or Texas.

The narrator, known simply by her assigned name of Offred, is a handmaid, a role of a highly specific form of sexual slavery. Handmaids are assigned to older men in powerful positions whose wives, due to age or other conditions, can no longer bear children. Their role is to try to bear their masters – Atwood doesn’t use that term, but I don’t see a better one – a child, after weaning which they’ll be assigned to a new house and a new master, while the child will be reared by the master and his capital-W Wife. Women who refuse to subject to this new order are sent to the Colonies, an unspecified location where they engage in manual labor from farmwork to cleaning up environmental disasters, or are simply disappeared.

Offred’s story is made all the more uncomfortable because she’s one of the first generation of Handmaids, and was ripped out of her old life where she was married with a young daughter, both of whom are now gone – to where exactly I won’t say to avoid spoiling it, but there’s nothing comforting about any of it. The idea of a regime so repressive that it would break up families for religious/political reasons seems so far-fetched, and yet we still have elements in this country fighting federal orders that should force them to recognize same-sex marriages. (Atwood, herself an ardent humanist, places surprisingly little blame here at the feet of the unspecified sect in charge of the new nation, apparently called Gilead, instead showing the religion as the tool of the oppressors.) When Offred’s master, called the Commander, tries to initiate a relationship with her that’s more than their perfunctory monthly Ceremony of sex – one so bizarre the reader can only wonder how Atwood came up with it – it begins the unraveling of Offred’s little world, one that replaced happiness with a modicum of stability, bringing back actual emotions beyond her regular state of depression and thoughts of suicide.

While The Handmaid’s Tale has a superficial purpose as a warning to all of us about how easily a repressive element like this might take over a previously peaceful, democratic society, or simply to caution us that such groups always exist at the fringes and will try to pounce on any opening they might see to exert their will on others, Atwood’s primary purpose seems to be explore the plight of a woman in a hopeless condition of subjugation. Can such a subject find any reason for hope beyond impossible dreams of a reunion with her family (where there’s life, there’s hope)? How can she claim some sort of agency – here, a capacity to form a desire for action, then to act upon it of her own will – within the confines of a societal structure that deprives her of everything right down to her identity, reducing her to a mere vessel for the propagation of the species? When she even has limited ability to choose whether to live or die, can such a woman find any form of freedom, and are such forms – like illicit sex – worth pursuing simply because they represent a rebellion against oppression? Offred learns of other handmaids who’ve taken their own lives, an expression of their limited agency, and ultimately encounters other “fallen” women who’ve taken to using sex for the same purpose.

Where Atwood might have gone further is in exploring the reasons why victims of such repressive regimes are not more willing to resist. In her alternate history, many women are willing participants in the scheme that subjugates their compatriots, becoming instructor-disciplinarians in reeducation centers set up to turn formerly independent women into Handmaids, or snitching on subversive or illegal activities to try to curry small, temporary favor with their overlords. There is a resistance movement, but it appears to be small and weak, and the idea that women, who constitute just over half the population, would be demoted to the status of mere chattel without more of a fight seemed unlikely to me. Atwood does give us a secondary character, Janine, who seems to embody Shakespeare’s frailty-of-woman, with her excessive emotional displays and subservience to any authority, male or female, that seeks dominion over her. Janine’s character is alternately pitied and despised by Offred and the other Handmaids, but their tacit acceptance of their fate is no different than her explicit version.

Discussing the issue of non-resistance – which is a major philosophical question that arises when we examine real autocratic regimes, notably the Third Reich – further might have led Atwood into the trap that far too many science- or speculative-fiction novels fall, providing excessive detail about the world and its inception, which ruined both Rainbows End and The Diamond Age for me. I’m glad she provided less detail here rather than more if the cost was giving us a lengthy exposition on, say, the power structure of Gilead. It wasn’t until near the end of the book that it became clear that the former university converted for the use of the government’s secret police and for events like the “Salvaging” was actually Harvard, more evidence of Atwood’s willingness to forego irrelevant details to focus on the plot and her themes.

There is another dimension to this book that will always be beyond me, as a man, because I’ve experienced none of the discrimination or even condescension that women face in what is still a patriarchal society; as a white, straight male, I don’t even have a good analogue on which I can draw. The horror of having her daughter taken from her and given to another childless family is always present with Offred, and that was the point with which I had the hardest time because it was the one aspect of her de facto captivity that I could imagine. Nothing else would drive me to madness so quickly.

Next up: Ann Leckie’s debut novel Ancillary Justice, winner of the 2014 Hugo, Nebula, Clarke, and Locus Awards.

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→ February 12, 2015
→ By

Top Chef, S12 finale.

I’m in Florida for a little over 36 hours to see a few amateur players, including Louisville right-hander Kyle Funkhouser, who’ll pitch at the Phillies’ stadium on Friday afternoon. That killed my chat this week, although I’ll be back for one on Thursday. I’ll also have draft blog posts up on Friday and Saturday discussing what I saw in Florida. My chat with Colin Cowherd today on what WAR is and why we need it is available in mp3 form.

And now, the finale of Top Chef Season 12:

* Gregory says his end goal is to be the chef of “many different restaurant concepts.” Is that a typical goal? I guess it probably is now, the way the industry has changed over the last two decades, but I wonder if the previous generation of chefs had different goals when they entered the business. Mei’s comment is consistent with her statements the last few episodes – “I just want to show everybody that I chose the right career path” – as if she still needs some validation.

* The two chefs leave before dawn and end up getting in a hot air balloon. I hope the producers made sure neither was afraid of heights. They land in a field with Tom and Padma waiting. I’m not really sure what the point of this was other than some cool aerial shots of San Miguel de Allende.

* I don’t know what Padma was wearing around her neck there but they might want to check the pyramids to see if any of them were recently robbed.

* Elimination challenge: Make the best four-course meal of your life. In other words, it’s about the food, and only about the food.

* There’s a quick draft of sous-chefs. Gregory takes Doug, Mei takes Melissa, (her explanation: “duh!”), Gregory takes George, Mei takes Rebecca to help make a dessert. Five hours to cook. Mei serves first at Cent’Anni, after which Gregory will serve at the Restaurant at Sollano 16.

* Apropos of nothing, I do not understand Melissa’s personal style at all.

* Mei worked the pastry station at Bryan Voltaggio’s place to try to get some dessert experience. So she must have had some experience before, right? She couldn’t have dropped into that gig as a complete newbie.

* Gregory is (wisely, I think) trying to show he’s more than just a one-trick pony (I assume that’s a reference to his propensity to make curries), including a rather complex mole dish. Mei thinks he’s pushing himself in a different direction, so she says she has to show more flavor and technique to compete with him. I thought it was interesting that they shared their menus without any apparent reservations.

* Mei’s making duck. I’m shocked. But to be fair, she’s including huitlacoche and kimchi butter in this dish, so it’s not her usual duck dish.

* Did I hear this right from Mei to her sous-chefs when talking about making stock? “Drop them in the fryer – easiest way to roast bones.” Granted, that’s not something I’m about to try at home for fear of burning the house down, but the flavors must be incredible.

* She’s toasting yogurt and then using liquid nitrogen to create lime curd. I’d say she’s pushing herself just fine here. This dish almost sounds like she’s making it specifically to impress Richard Blais.

* Gregory is using green chorizo, which I admit I’d never heard of before this. Apparently it’s fatty pork mixed with chiles, spinach powder, and cilantro. That seems like the ideal sausage to use when play a practical joke on someone on St. Patrick’s Day. Bangers and mash with a surprise hit of capsaicin?

* He says mole isn’t traditionally served with (beef) short ribs. That seems like a pretty obvious combo though – and what he’s describing sounds a bit like a chile colorado, which can definitely be served with braised cuts of beef. His mole has 30 ingredients, so it’s a bit surprising he didn’t take Katsuji.

* The diners include Sean Brock, Traci des Jardins, Michael Cimarusti, and Gavin Kaysen, as well as Blais, Hugh, Gail, Tom, and Padma. Blais’ hair looks like he fell in a vat of Dippity Do. Not that that’s a bad thing, though.

* Gotta love the cover of Brock’s first cookbook, Heritage. You’re really not looking at what’s in his hands, are you?

* Mei’s first course is braised-then-fried octopus with fish sauce vinaigrette, avocado-coconut puree, and “some herbs.” She does love the fish sauce … I get it, it’s packed with umami, but if its flavor is too pronounced it goes all ice nine on the rest of the plate. Anyway, everyone loves this dish’s presentation and depth of flavors, including the basil-mint-cilantro herb combination, but the consensus is that the octopus was overcooked.

* Her second course is an allusion to the first dish she made on Top Chef, a congee, this one with carnitas, scallion purée, her own hot sauce, Japanese peanuts with lime spice, and an egg yolk. Everyone loves it. It’s a classic Asian comfort food item infused with Mexican flavors.

* Mei’s third course is the duck breast, which appears to be sear-roasted, with braised lettuce, kimchi jicama, and huitlacoche. Hugh loves the duck, but says he’s “not sold on the rendering of the fat,” which is kind of key given how awful a mouthful of solid duck fat feels. Tom says the dish has a “lot of interesting moments,” like the crunch of the jicama, but I think that’s a faint-praise comment from him. Blais says there’s too much kimchi relative to the more delicate flavor of the huitlacoche.

* We see her scramble to adjust her dessert at the last second after Rebecca informs her rather bluntly that it’s too sweet. There probably wasn’t room for subtlety at that point in the kitchen.

* That dessert is a strawberry-lime curd, with toasted yogurt, milk crumble with bee pollen, and a yogurt-lime ice. Blais and Hugh love the presentation. (Can we get a Vine of Hugh saying “Smoking!” in falsetto?) Tom, who’d earlier criticized Mei’s decision to make a dessert when she’s only a savory chef, says it’s the best dessert he’s ever had on Top Chef and happily retracts his earlier comments.

* So at this point it looks like Mei absolutely nailed two dishes (the congee and the dessert), did reasonably well on a third (the duck), and struggled with the fourth (the octopus). If Gregory nails three of four, he probably wins.

* Gregory’s first dish is a home run – he serves a grilled octopus with xoconostle, passion fruit, prickly pear, and cashew milk. Padma says it’s sublime. Tom says it’s a powerhouse. It certainly plays to the crowd here with the emphasis on local or traditional Mexican ingredients.

* His second course is a soup of shrimp broth with green chorizo, pickled nopales, and crispy shrimp heads. Sean Brock compares it (favorably, I think) to a bowl of gumbo. But the use of the whole shrimp heads, including their shells, gets a huge thumbs-down as Gail and Padma both end up saying the shell bits were too hard to swallow. I’ve had shrimp heads once, also fried, and wouldn’t go back for more for that exact reason. If he wanted to incorporate shrimp into the dish – he said he wanted to allude to the classic chorizo/shrimp pairing – this wasn’t the right way to do it.

* Now we see his own scramble, as Gregory realizes he forgot to add vinegar and sugar to carrot sauce in the beginning stages of cooking it. We didn’t see any of that part of the process, but how is that possible? Did someone take his eye off the dish? Did he have a checklist and miss that step, or lack any checklist at all? He tries to add some sugar and vinegar á la minute, then finds it’s too sweet, so he adds salt, which would just cover it all up.

* Third course: Striped bass with roasted carrots, radish, pineapple, tomatillo, and other vegetables. The sauce was indeed too sweet, exacerbated by the pineapple’s sweetness and insufficient acidity from other ingredients. Tomatillos don’t have much acid themselves; without lime to boost their flavor I find them really bland. Tom just crushes it, saying the dish was sweeter than Mei’s dessert.

* Gregory’s final course was his pièce de resistance: Braised short rib with red mole and agave sweet potato, with toasted pepitas on top of the beef. Everyone we hear praises how well the ribs are cooked. It’s a bit like pork belly – doing it well is hard, but if you do it well it’s automatic praise. Hugh says “this is spectacular, full- flavored, (with) long-lasting flavors.” Tom, who’s kind of the beef guru around these parts, is also raving about every bit, including the fried sweet potato skins.

* So that gives Gregory two home runs and two weak groundouts, I think. Just at this point, my gut impression was that Mei had won – each had two rousing successes, but her two lesser dishes were ahead of Gregory’s by a decent margin..

* Side note: How do the judges/diners eat all that in one night? I’d have been in “better get me a bucket” territory by the time the short rib showed up.

* Gregory says Top Chef was harder than getting sober. Okay, everyone, run to sign up for season thirteen!

* The Judges’ Table discussion goes pretty much as you’d expect given what we’ve already heard. Gregory’s soup didn’t come together, and he gets more criticism there than he or Mei receive for anything else. Mei executed much better across the board. Gregory’s fish dish was too sweet. Mei’s third dish (the duck) was good but her weakest, which was a mild surprise just given how much everyone killed her octopus. Gregory’s fourth dish gets 10s across the board, but Mei’s dessert does too. Blais says her dessert was “everything that was right in modern food,” while Tom ups his own grades on it by saying it was one of the best desserts he’s ever had in his life.

* Head to head: Tom gives dish one to Gregory; Blais says Mei’s octopus was the biggest technical flop of the night. Padma calls Gregory’s use of shrimp heads fatal mistake, Gail says the dish just did not work, while Mei’s congee was perfect, so dish two goes to Mei. The third course is the closest to a toss-up; Mei’s plate was too watery (which we didn’t hear earlier), but Tom still takes her duck over Gregory’s fish, saying the latter plate was just not about fish. The fourth was the strongest plate for each, but there’s a strong implication here that Mei’s was better. Padma says each had two flawless dishes, kind of a summary for anyone who just turned the show on with ten minutes to go, I guess.

* Blais says Gregory’s menu was more inspirational; Gail says Mei’s dishes were more successful. Inspirational – or aspirational – generally wins on Top Chef, including in the finale, but if you don’t execute enough of that vision you can’t win. Gregory might have fared better in some other seasons, or against other competitors, but Mei is one of the strongest technical chefs I can remember seeing on the show, so even a mediocre execution day for her is a great one for anyone else.

* Tom gives a little speech before Padma announces the winner, saying he “loves watching this young talent just emerging … you guys are the future.”

* The winner is … Mei, as expected. She did earn it with better execution, with only one flop (the overcooked octopus) of any sort. And she finally shows some emotion, crying and saying “holy shit” on repeat. But are her parents finally proud of her?

* Some final thoughts: Top Chef is kind of like the baseball draft; every year, we hear that it’s a down year, that the talent isn’t as good as last year’s, definitely not as good as five or ten years ago, and some years that turns out to be true – but not always. The 2015 MLB draft class is not a good one overall, for example. Top Chef’s season 11 crop was weak. But Season 12 turned out to be very strong. The final three chefs were all outstanding both in creativity and in execution, with a different balance for each of them but all seemingly capable of winning the competition. How many other seasons could Gregory have won, especially if he’d executed just a little bit better (e.g., cooking his carrot sauce right)? I think that despite some of the criticism lobbed at the show, some legitimate but more of it spurious, Top Chef continues to attract top-flight talent and to enjoy the support of a broad cross-section of the industry. This season was pleasantly light on drama, especially once Aaron, later arrested on a domestic violence charge, was eliminated, and I think the group as a whole, or at least the top half or so of them, was the strongest since the legendary season of the Voltaggios and Yukon Cornelius. As for how to “fix” the show, one I don’t think is broken in any significant way, the answer is quite simple: As long as they keep the focus on the food, there will be an audience eager to watch.

So, if you could change one thing about Top Chef for next season, what would it be? And do you think Mei was the right choice, even though Gregory outperformed her head to head for much of the season?

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→ February 10, 2015
→ By

The Diamond Age.

Neal Stephenson won the Hugo and Locus awards in 1996 for his novel The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, a postcyberpunk bildungsroman that can’t survive under the weight of its own self-importance. While Stephenson managed to create a credible Gibsonian universe in his earlier hit, Snow Crash, here his worldbuilding detracts from the story about the titular book that might be able to reprogram the future of humanity, and his hifalutin language doesn’t meld well with the story’s focus on a child protagonist.

The “primer” of the book’s title is a “ractive” book (short for “interactive” … I’m not a fan of this kind of conlang/argot shit, which ends up little more than an annoying distraction), designed by the engineer John Hackworth for Lord Gussie Fink-Nottle (close enough) using nanotechnology and I think what we’d now call a 3-D printer, designed to raise a young girl – the Lord’s granddaughter, and, via a pirated copy, Hackworth’s daughter – to be a hypereducated, worldly, creative young adult. The copy intended for Fiona Hackworth ends up in the hands of an impoverished, abused girl named Nell, brought to her by her scapegrace brother, Harv, setting in motion a great and possibly unintended sociological experiment pitting nature against nurture – not a mother’s nurture, but a surrogate in the form of the actress, Miranda, who performs nearly all of the “ractive” functions in the Primer for Nell.

The Primer itself is a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure hepped up on nanotech; in fact, Stephenson’s whole universe here revolves around nanotechnology, where static objects can be built in Matter Compilers, and nanosites – microscopic entities designed to perform specific functions in the air or within someone’s body – abound, including security infrastructures that must have the NSA seething with envy. (The book’s very title was coined by cryptography pioneer and nanotechnology researcher Ralph Merkle, whose great-uncle made a certain boner with which you, being a visitor to this particular blog, are likely familiar.) Stephenson’s vision of an age of nanotechnology, combined with a dark post-nationalistic viewpoint where communities are organized in “phyles” that called to mind the guilds of early RPGs, is so overly and unnecessarily complex that it overwhelmed the core storyline of Nell’s education and maturation through her experiences with the Primer. The “Drummers” hive-mind phyle is one of the novel’s bigger messes, ambiguously-described yet central to the operation of the Primers and, ultimately, to the resolution of the plot.

My other, secondary problem with The Diamond Age was the absurd vocabulary Stephenson used in it – perhaps a nod to its underpinnings in Victorian literature, but coming off as stilted and sometimes inappropriate to the characters in question. Nell is only about eleven or twelve years old when she has this thought:

It was just that the story was anfractuous; it developed more ramifications the more closely she read it.

Now, maybe all of you knew the word “anfractuous” from childhood, but I only encountered it sometime in the last two years, somewhere in The Recognitions or Gravity’s Rainbow or some classic from the 1800s that routinely sent me to the dictionary. It’s a valid English word, actually a pretty useful one, but you’re never going to hear that or “ramifications” in the internal monologue of a preteen. Stephenson’s either showing off or incapable of capturing the vernacular of someone that age – and the whole book is full of maddening word choices like these.

The shame of this incoherence is that Stephenson buried what might have been a remarkable novel of ideas, one that merely uses the platform of his nanotech universe to explore the roles of community, government, family, education, and religion in a world where we’re that much closer to the singularity. Even one of those topics would make the foundation for a good novel, although I can’t blame Stephenson – who’s not afraid to be prolix in his prose – for aiming high. Unfortunately, the resolution of the story is so muddled, both in plot and in philosophy, that by the end of the book it wasn’t even clear how we’d gotten there, much less whether there was a point to any of this.

Next up: As I mentioned on Twitter, I’m tackling Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and it is indeed an excruciating read.

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→ February 7, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 2/7/15.

The last bit of my top 100 prospects package, ranking the top ten prospects by position, went up on Wednesday. I didn’t chat this week, as I was in Bristol for ESPN’s annual baseball summit; the guest speaker was Rob Manfred, better known as the new Commissioner of Major League Baseball, and I was extremely impressed by his candor, his enthusiasm, and the intelligence evident in how quickly and thoughtfully he answered a broad number of questions posed to him by our writers, some on the record and some off. I won’t agree with all of his policies – at the end of the day, he’s still paid by the owners and has an obligation to them – but I do think the sport is great hands under him.

My Top Chef recap was a bit late for this week for the same reason, but I posted it on Friday evening. I should be on time, or closer to it, with my recap of the finale on Thursday morning.

saturdayfiveAnd now, this week’s links…

  • Let’s hit the vaccination stuff first. I agree with this Gizmodo piece that we should ridicule and shame the anti-vaccination movement, although I’m fine with a little humiliation thrown in, because the ends (wiping out diseases that kill infants, the elderly, and the immune-compromised) justify a lot of means here. Also, a British blog dedicated to autism science points out, via a CNN piece, that a huge chunk of vaccine denialism is paid for by the Dwoskin Family Foundation. In anti-science, as in politics, just follow the money – and, if you see where it’s going, try to stop it. If you know of sources taking ad money from the Dwoskins or their puppet groups like the NVIC (the most prominent vaccine denier organization in the U.S.), contact them and ask them to stop. I’ve done so with one company that has been running an ad from the NVIC, and am hopeful based on our early conversations that they’ll pull the ad now that their corporate headquarters is aware of it. All that is needed for the triumph of selfish, ignorant science deniers is for the rest of us sane people to do nothing. (Side note: The Dwoskin foundation’s offices are around the corner from my house. I’m not sure what, if anything, I can do based on that knowledge, though.)
  • If you’re here, you probably like baseball, so this Baseball Prospectus article on their new mixed-model approach to estimating catcher framing values is a must-read. I think most of us hate that catcher framing exists, but as long as it exists, we need to understand it, and BP continues to lead the way in showing us how to do so.
  • This half-hour audio program from the BBC is worth the time investment: An extensive interview with Vietnamese writer Le Ly Hayslip, who fought for the Viet Cong as a teenager, was captured three times, married an American man, moved to California, and has since started a foundation to help rebuild the village where she grew up. Her story was the basis for Oliver Stone’s 1993 film Heaven and Earth; he’s interviewed as well.
  • Meanwhile, in Oregon, a judge ruled that a man who took upskirt photos of a 13-year-old girl in a Target didn’t commit a crime. Not that we’d want to consider evidence that he’s a potential sexual predator or anything.
  • I went to Narcissa in Manhattan with a friend on Wednesday night, and we had their famous slow-roasted, crisped beets, which was easily the best beet dish I’ve ever had, one of the best vegetable dishes I’ve ever had, period. That link describes how the dish is made, with twenty photos, although I don’t think the picture of the interior of the beets does their texture justice.
  • NPR’s The Salt blog, normally about food, delves into the science of nitrate runoffs in Iowa agriculture, and why it’s not so simple as blaming too much nitrogen-rich fertilizer.
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→ February 6, 2015
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Top Chef, S12E14.

Sorry this is a bit late; ESPN’s annual baseball summit took place on Thursday, so I didn’t see the episode until last night.

Top Chef logo* Mei’s beating herself up for nearly getting eliminated in the last challenge … but the judges loved the dish, and it isn’t clear that she was that close to elimination. She’s all, “Shit just got real,” but hasn’t the shit been real at least since Doug got bounced?

* Gregory says to Doug, “Dude you’re on fire.” That’s like the GM giving the manager the vote of confidence.

* The chefs travel to an organic farm in the town of Jalpa, in the southern part of the state of Zacatecas. The chefs start acting like kids in a candy store … that’s full of vegetables. The farm provides vegetables to the best restaurants in the city of San Miguel de Allende, and I can see why. Given how immaculate the produce looks, you might think this stuff was grown in a lab.

* Quickfire: Chocolate! Can’t go to Mexico without dropping some Theobroma cacao on this. The chefs have to make two dishes, one sweet and one savory, both featuring chocolate in one of its forms. The chefs have access to chocolate in multiple percentages, from quite dark (I assume unsweetened/100% was there, but didn’t see it), all the way to white chocolate (more on that later), cocoa powder, and cocoa butter. The chefs harvest their own produce. The winner gets first choice of sous chef for the elimination challenge. They only have 45 minutes for the whole challenge, including pickin’ time, which doesn’t seem like much – and they’re cooking outside, so a lot of chocolate applications (soufflé?) are out.

* Doug doesn’t do desserts, but knew he’d have to at some point. So maybe he should have worked on that before coming on the show? There are certainly a lot of basic dessert techniques that wouldn’t be hard for an experienced chef to learn in a few weeks of practice.

* Gregory goes for carrots and spice and dark chocolate for his dessert. I’m already fascinated.

* Mei is making something with duck. I’d criticize her for always cooking duck, but I’m simultaneously thinking how attractive a woman who knows infinite ways to cook duck is.

* Doug can’t just make a ganache, maybe on some kind of crumbled tart crust? Well, that’s basically what he does, melting chocolate into a bowl and serving it with a spoon. He really can’t make any desserts at all.

* Gregory can’t get his white chocolate to melt … because he grabbed cocoa butter, not white chocolate. Cocoa butter is pure fat, solid at room temperature, melting just below body temperature for that mouth-feel that we associate with good chocolate. White chocolate, however, is an emulsion of cocoa butter and butterfat (“milk fat”), with sugar and usually vanilla or vanillin added. It may contain milk solids, but can’t contain any liquids or the emulsion would seize. You can see why Gregory may have had some trouble with this.

* To the food … Mei made duck with bitter greens and chocolate mezcal, cooking it in a mixture of cocoa butter and duck fat; and for dessert she made chocolate yogurt with cocoa nibs and nasturtium (for pepperiness). She used 80% chocolate for the savory dish and 66% for the sweet. Both Padma and Enrique, the head of the farm at which they’re cooking, seem to like both dishes. I’m not sure about chocolate and yogurt, but I generally don’t like applications that pair chocolate with sour elements like citrus.

* Doug’s savory dish is seared hen leg stew with onions, tomatoes, bitter chocolate, and ancho chili; his sweet dish is melted chocoalte with chocolate mezcal and white chocolate cream. He didn’t cook the alcohol all the way out, and also, he served them melted chocolate in a bowl.

* Gregory made a seared lamb with a white chocolate/ancho chili sauce and a green chorizo vinaigrette; his dessert is baby carrots with turmeric, dark chocolate, ginger, and a hint of rosemary. That looks so un-dessert, but you can tell immediately that he nailed it from the judges’ reactions – plus it’s the creative/clever angle that usually wins on this show.

* Doug’s chicken was well-cooked, but the dessert was not “well balanced.” Also, he served melted chocolate in a bowl. Mei’s duck went very well with chocolate; Padma liked the crushed cocoa nibs in her dessert, an idea that might have elevated Doug’s melted-chocolate-in-a-bowl dessert. Gregory’s lamb was well cooked – you almost get the sense that Enrique expected someone to screw up their proteins – and Enrique enjoyed the sauce; he called the ginger and rosemary the “final best touch” to Gregory’s dessert.

* Gregory wins, of course. His dishes had the best balance and he made the best use of the chocolate. Enrique asks to use the dessert recipe at Jalpa. He seems genuinely blown away by it, which (if true) says something given who he likely works with in the local market.

* Elimination challenge: They’ll all collaborate on a six-course meal, two courses per chef. They’ll be given six traditional Mexican ingredients and each must take two to feature (one course per ingredient).

* Gregory takes George as his sous. Mei takes Melissa. Doug takes Katsuji. Melissa seems like the best choice of any eliminated chef because if we know one thing about her, it’s that she has great knife skills. (And I think she makes pretty good pasta; Sarah Grueneberg made it to the finals a few years ago in large part because her pasta was consistently plus, and Nina did something similar last season because of her ability to make perfect gnocchi.)

* The Mexican ingredients are guava, avocado, poblanos, huitlacoche, Mexican cheese, and escamoles. The last one, if you’re not familiar with it (and I wasn’t) are ant eggs – technically the larvae and pupae of giant black ants, a very expensive treat, one that Katsuji says packs a lot of umami. It can run $35-100/kg, according to the Slow Food Foundation’s page on them. Somehow, Doug ends up getting the shaft here – he doesn’t claim any ingredients, Gregory and Mei claim two each, and he ends up with cheese and escamoles, the two he wanted least. He’s pissed, justifiably so, but eventually rolls over and takes those two while Gregory gets the guava and poblanos while Mei gets the avocados and huitlacoche.

* Katsuji says he and Doug are “both sarcastic assholes.” Doug says he really just chose him because he speaks Spanish. I’m not sure why Doug keeps picking him.

* Gregory says he went all in on researching Mexican cuisine after Boston, which seems rather sharp. His mom made lots of stews when he was growing up. He’s at least part Haitian, and about all I know about Haitian cuisine is that it includes a lot of stewed and braised dishes.

* So, huitlacoche, less appealingly known as “corn smut,” is a black or grey fuzzy fungus that can be bitter but has a smoky profile, like a mushroom although technically not one (mushrooms grow in soil or on decaying organic matter like wood). It’s kind of gross-looking on the corn itself, but is usually cooked and used to fill tortas, tortillas, enchiladas, etc. One thing I can’t find out, and would love to know, is if you can brown huitlacoche as you would mushrooms, exposing it to high heat to caramelize some of that glucose.

* (Warning: tangent ahead) One of the major flavor compounds in huitlacoche (and lovage and fenugreek seed) is sotolon, a lactone (a type of cyclic ester, formula C6H8O3) that is formed spontaneously in the bodies of people with “maple syrup urine disease,” an organic acidemia more properly known as branched-chain ketoaciduria that occurs in approximately 1 in 180,000 births. The urine of people with this disease smells, as you might have guessed, like maple syrup, because of the presence of sotolon. I know about this because it is in the same family of diseases as 3-MCC, which my daughter inherited from me and which occurs in somewhere north of 1 in 50,000 births. While 3-MCC can often be largely benign, with modest symptoms like below-average muscle tone or development, MSUD can be very serious and must be managed with a special low-protein diet. Both diseases can be diagnosed via a simple mass spectrometry test that is administered free to newborns in most states. If you’re expecting, when the hospital asks if you want those tests, say yes. It could save your child’s life. (/tangent)

* Mei’s parents are kinda sorta supportive … but not really. She says they’ve never said they’re proud of her, and she wants to win so she’ll hear that. I think it matters more to her than she admits. Gregory’s the opposite – he says his parents are so happy to see him doing well after “seven years” of a “rough road” of drug abuse.

* Mei is just making guacamole for her avocado course? She calls it “guacamole with a twist” … which is still just guacamole, right? Adding xoconostle for acidity or tartness just swaps one tart element (lime) for another.

* Doug says the escamoles have a nutty taste, and he’s trying to serve them a bunch of different ways. He actually seems to like the flavors. I’m not sure I could get over the mental hurdle, though.

* Mei’s got Melissa making huitlacoche agnolotti, which makes a ton of sense – use them as you’d use mushrooms, and play to one of Melissa’s particular strengths. It’s not exactly experimental or creative, though.

* Gregory’s whole mien has changed. Mos Chef is back.

* The judges’ table has several major Mexican chefs, which is great on multiple levels – giving publicity to folks who would never get it here, exposing the audience here to new names and faces, and getting some real authorities to judge the food. Zarela Martinez’s memoir/cookbook Food from my Heart: Cuisines of Mexico Remembered and Reimagined is $2.99 for Kindle so I bought it while watching the episode. (The recipes are long – this is some serious start on Sunday morning for the big family dinner stuff.)

* Meanwhile, Chef Eduardo Palazuelos looks like he should be starring in a telenovela.

* First course – Gregory serves a chilled guava soup with bay scallops, habanero, roasted guava (whoa), shaved fresh guava, and fresh mint. Tom likes the way the heat builds. Blais says there’s a high level of difficulty to make a fruit soup as good as Gregory did. It also made sense as the opener, waking up the judges’ palates with something bright, cold, and tangy.

* Mei served a guacamole roll with xoconostle inside, radish, serrano, and fresh tortilla chips along the top. Padma thinks it’s a little too simple, just a refined guacamole. Bricio Dominguez, another local chef (who only comments in Spanish) wishes he’d tasted more xoconostle. Tom says there’s a lot more things you can do with avocado, which seems like the understatement of the episode.

* Doug first course is a tortilla español with escamoles and escamol aioli, with the eggs stewed slow with garlic and chilies, toasted with garlic, and made into the aioli. Blais loves the aioli concept, calling it brilliant. Eduardo doesn’t taste the escamoles enough; Tom says their texture ended up too similar to that of the potato. Bricio said with fine-tuning it could be a spectacular dish, which is a way of saying it wasn’t spectacular.

* Mei’s very happy with the agnolotti, but wouldn’t pureeing the fungus destroy its texture?

* The agnolotti are filled with huitlacoche and served in a roasted corn brodo with purslane. Zarela likes the roasted corn flavor; Tom does too. Eduardo thinks the huitlacoche came out bitter, but calls it an original dish, saying the broth was very interesting. Bricio would order it again. I’m a little confused – the description and visuals don’t match these comments very well, as it looks like tortellini in brodo, a standard Italian preparation, that just swapped huitlacoche in for the pasta filling. Maybe the broth was really just that special.

* We see a glimpse of Gregory adding more spices and “layers” to his stew shortly before service. That’s the kind of step he took more early in the season than late. His dish: a pork and poblano stew with tomatillos, grilled onion purée, and an escabeche-style pickle of carrots, poblanos, and shallots. Bricio adores itand gets a little verklempt. Blais loves the char, saying it “opens up more flavors.” Tom talks up the complexity of the dish. Gregory is clearly two for two here.

* Doug’s cheese course is built around a mesquite-smoked goat queso fresco with spiced honey, crispy squash chips, charred pickles, and a little chimichurri. Blais says a cheese course could be boring, but this isn’t. Enrique loves the combination with tomatillo.

* I’m glad they included Bricio’s comments with subtitles instead of editing him out. Guy had something to say.

* Padma thought the top two dishes were Gregory’s. Tom said the stew was the star of the show. Blais/Tom/Eduardo all say he belongs in the finale. This seems fairly clearcut – it’s Mei versus Doug for the last spot. Mei’s uncreative dishes and flop on the avocado seem like she should be sent home, but we have the advantage of … foreshadowing.

* Blais says the guacamole dish was “beautiful and uninspired.” Tom keeps calling it a missed opportunity, and don’t they send chefs home for that? Eduardo liked it, and he crushes Doug’s tortilla, saying the key ingredient (the little maggots) was missing both in the final dish’s flavor and texture.

* Padma and Tom loved Mei’s broth. Padma rates Doug’s cheese dish over Mei’s agnolotti. Eduardo backs her up on this one, while Tom would go agnolotti. I think we all know now that she loses any direct battle with Tom.

* Judges’ table: Blais/Tom rave about the guava soup. Eduardo says the pork and poblano stew took him back to his childhood years, that the amount of intensity and flavors were just outstanding. Gregory is the winner, easily, and goes to the finale, so all that early promise he showed this season has been fulfilled.

* Mei is crying already, and the judges have barely started talking about their dishes. Tom says other chefs loved the guacamole, but he wasn’t impressed. Eduardo thought the combo of the broth with the smoky flavor of the corn in her agnolotti dish worked well. He tells Doug that he lost the flavor of the escamoles in the tortilla. Tom says the tortilla was a “very good dish” – he says that a lot, now that I think about it – but there was just too much going on on that plate. Padma praises Doug for what he did accomplish with an ingredient he didn’t know well at all, which is sort of the “it’s not you it’s me” of Top Chef judging. Tom raves about Doug’s cheese course, calling it exciting, saying he did a great job with the flavors, and at this point, if you saw nothing but judges’ table, you’d think Mei was toast, right?

* Tom tries to give a pep talk. Padma says before they announce who’s packing his or her knives, that she “want(s) you both to take ownership of where you are right now.” On the one hand, it’s compassion in an era where most reality shows try to play up hostility and immaturity among the contestants. On the other hand, it’s a competition. The Royals had an amazing season in 2014. I doubt that knowledge makes up for game 7.

* Doug is eliminated. Hard to see this as anything but a penalty for having to cook with an ingredient he didn’t know (although his sous-chef did) and didn’t want or choose. Given the difficulty of the ingredients each chef had to work with, Mei should have gone home.

* I’ll take Gregory over Mei in next week’s finale. You?

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→ February 4, 2015
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Rendezvous with Rama.

A brief Insider piece where I rank the top ten prospects by position went up this afternoon.

I’m gradually working my way through the list of winners of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, mostly concentrating on recent winners, but jumping back for a few of the classics I missed when I went through a heavy sci-fi phase as a teenager. Arthur Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama won the Hugo in 1974 (and the Nebula and a bunch of other significant awards in the genre) and remains highly-regarded four decades later, even though it’s extremely light on conventional plot elements, focusing instead on hard science and some philosophical questions around what an encounter with a superior alien intelligence might entail.

Rama itself is a giant alien vessel that enters our solar system on a parabolic trip around our sun in the year 2131, by which point humanity has colonized several other planets and bodies in the system (including, bizarrely, Mercury and the Neptunian moon Triton), and has also set up an early-warning system to detect possible threats to earth after a meteorite fell on northern Italy in 2077. This system identifies Rama first as a fast-moving asteroid or meteorite, but when it comes closer it becomes apparent that it’s some sort of extraterrestrial ship or device, larger than many asteroids, a giant cylinder spinning at a rate impossible for a natural object. The confederation of planets sets up a manned mission to Rama to explore it, assuming the world itself is dead, which sets up the bulk of the book as a description of what the mission finds once they reach Rama and make their way inside of it.

Clarke’s interests here seem to split into two areas – the internal construction of Rama as a self-sufficient entity with a sort of artificial intelligence powering it (Rama has been in transit for so long that no purely biological life remains, if it ever existed), and some of the moral and ethical dilemmas around the exploration of the world. Since its creators are not present, and could not have left any explanation of their intentions, how would the explorers balance scientific inquiry with the moral imperative to do minimal harm? At one point, the Mercury colonists (“Hermians”) – and let’s not even get started on the absurdity of that – decide to set up a preemptive strike, even though there’s no clear sign that Rama has been sent to attack anything in our system; again, where is the inflection point beyond which the proper response is self-defense?

Because Clarke moves everything so quickly, and sets up just the briefest tensions, there isn’t much discussion or even time for thought about these issues – he’s sort of throwing the questions out there for the reader, then moving on to whatever’s next. I’m not suggesting he had to go Full Tolstoy and give us 80 pages on the morality of space exploration, but a novel that wants to confront these philosophical questions probably should have a little more internal debate among the characters than Rama did. Clarke tries to include this by jumping from the actions of the crew on Rama to the conferences among the various emissaries from the various colonies across the solar system, but these focus as much on problem-solving as on ethical concerns.

I’ve read in a few places, including (but not limited to) Wikipedia, that filming Rendezvous with Rama is a longtime goal of Morgan Freeman, but I can’t imagine this book as a successful film without major script changes. There are no aliens, so there’s no antagonist. The explorers fight a little bit against time, a little against the “elements” within Rama (which is essentially a world turned inside out), but the standard sources of tension are simply absent here. Clarke creates narrative greed only by keeping the chapters short and the action quick, but once it becomes clear he’s not going to kill off a large section of the crew, we’re just watching the explorers peel back layers of the onion and racing a little bit against the clock. The purpose of Rama itself doesn’t become clear until near the very end of the novel, and the crew has little or nothing to do with the revelation. It would likely be a spectacular film visually, but it needs a stronger plot to be a commercial success, and I’m not sure that could happen without throwing the science out the window.

Next up: Another Hugo winner, Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.

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→ February 3, 2015
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Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance.

Is there anything quite so Belle & Sebastian as a song titled “Enter Sylvia Plath?” The veteran Scottish indie-folk-rock-whatever group, known as much for their low profile as for their music, have always enjoyed great critical acclaim but never much commercial success, which I believe is the result of their refusal to sound un-British and their use of song titles and lyrics that range from abstruse to sinister, too cerebral for mass appeal even though much of their music is blatantly pop in nature. They’ve had a few gold records in the UK, but have had very little sales traction outside of Britain, not even in Australia, often the most receptive market for distinctly British acts.

“Enter Sylvia Plath” encapsulates the paradox of B&S, as it’s a 131 bpm electronic dance song that name-drops a poet/author who produced depressing material that matched her tragic biography. It’s part of the soft middle of the band’s new album, Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, their first since 2010’s quiet, underappreciated Write About Love. The new album kicks off with a quartet of effusive pop songs that would fit as well on any pop/top 40 station as on independent or alternative radio, including the lead single “The Party Line” (#3 on my list of the top songs of 2014), enough to buoy almost any album on to a year-end best-of list. Beyond the initial promise the boys (and girl) can’t sustain the energy that drove the opening chapter, with music that’s more pleasant background listening rather than the hook-laden stuff that demands your full attention, more intriguing lyrically than musically.

Ah, but that opening tetrad is something else. “Nobody’s Empire” begins with a swirling piano riff and softly thumping bass drum before lead singer/songwriter Stuart Murdoch introduces a sunny melody that goes back to 1960s pop, belying the lyrics describing Murdoch’s own experiences with the debilitating chronic fatigue syndrome, along with the first of many wonderful quotes from the record – “Marching with the crowd singing dirty and loud/For the people’s emancipation” (Shouldn’t all protest songs be dirty and loud?) “Allie” plays like a sly, sinister detective story describing a woman fighting some kind of mental illness that puts her through delusions and desires for self-harm, over the album’s best hook, a shuffling minor-chord blues pattern that refuses to let you catch your balance any more than the song’s subject can. “The Party Line” might be the best pure pop song Belle & Sebastian have ever recorded, replete with Murdoch’s typical wordplay (he’s calling you to the dance floor more than to a partisan debate). “The Power of Three” at least starts to downshift the listener before the softer middle third of the album, moving towards a glammier ’70s vibe with the tinny synth riff that powers the bridges after each chorus, although by the end of its four minutes they’ve dissipated much of the energy that powered the first trio of tracks.

The middle of the album drags both due to the drop in tempo and the length of several of its songs, with “The Cat with the Cream” a sedative to bring everyone down from the high of the start of the album, leading into “Enter Sylvia Plath” almost with a whisper. “The Everlasting Muse” dips into a musical allusion to Russian folk dances for an incongruous middle movement, certainly true to the band’s roots in folk music but less subtle than their best work. The pace doesn’t pick back up until the seven-minute opus “Play for Today,” featuring Dum Dum Girls singer/songwriter Dee Dee Penny sharing vocal duties with Murdoch in a song laced with mid-80s new wave trappings that seems to run far shorter than its actual length thanks to the shared vocal duties. That song sets up “The Book of You,” with Sarah Martin taking over lead vocals on another banger that builds up to an old-fashioned rock guitar solo, but the newfound momentum collapses with the dirge-like closer “Today (This Army’s for Peace.”

For a band that’s been around for nearly twenty years now, releasing nine albums, Belle & Sebastian manage to sound new at several points on Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, never more so than when they live up the album’s title by producing songs that combine great hooks with beats and rhythms suited for the dance floor. The album is surprisingly incoherent for a group whose songwriting and production always feel so meticulous, almost like it’s two half-albums mashed together without a thought to sequencing. The portion that finds Belle & Sebastian feeling the urge to get up and dance is the revelation here, a new dimension from a group that, while talented, seemed to have fallen into its own set ways.

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→ February 1, 2015
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January 2015 music update.

The whole top 100 prospects package is now up for Insiders, including:

I got a complaint yesterday that one of the team reports wasn’t long enough. With over 48,000 words in the whole package, you can send any such criticisms to /dev/null.

January was a great month for new releases, especially tracks previewing albums coming in March or April. Here’s the Spotify playlist, with a note on each song coming up below:

Purity Ring – “Push Pull.” I didn’t love their first album, Shrines, but this lead single from their upcoming sophomore LP Another Eternity is a marvel, especially in Megan James’ lyrics, which seem to draw heavily from classical English poetry. “A fever billowed with the wind/And I bade the sky therein.” The music struggles to keep up with her vocals, at times sound like a weird remix the way the track doesn’t line up with her meter, but she could probably sing this a cappella and I’d still listen.

Wildhoney – “Molly.” This Baltimore shoegaze act, one of two Charm City bands on this playlist (along with Lower Dens), is signed to a Canadian punk label, but their music is more Curve, Swervedriver, and early Lush than Bad Religion or the Descendants. The tiny guitar line behind the vocals is the track’s separating factor, although I liked how the walls of guitars in the chorus referenced My Bloody Valentine without drowning out Lauren Shusterich’s vocals.

HOLYCHILD – “Running Behind.” The percussion lines remind me of tUnEyArDs’ “Water Fountain,” but with non-irritating vocals. My daughter loved this song on first listen, and I have a feeling it’ll be a quick crossover to pop radio, since it’s only “alternative” in the sense that it’s not popular yet.

The Districts – “Peaches.” Seems like my favorite fruit (especially for pie) is a popular topic for songs of late, including this new release that has some resemblances to the Hold Steady with its blues/roots-rock backing and sung-talked descending vocal lines. The whining guitar riff that parallels the vocals in the chorus strikes a fine balance between hooky and annoying.

Viet Cong – “Silhouettes.” I admit to being a little off from the consensus on this debut album featuring two of the three surviving members of Women, finding it very uneven, with lead single “Continental Shelf” missing my top 100 from last year. “Silhouettes” has a dark, Joy Division/Bauhaus kind of vibe but with harder guitar lines that made it the standout from their eponymous album, relased two weeks back on indie Super Tuesday.

Modest Mouse – “Lampshades On Fire.” It almost sounds like Johnny Marr never left. I never loved Modest Mouse before “Dashboard,” which I suppose means I’m not a True Fan or something, but also means I particularly like this new song’s rhythm – and as always there’s a lot of fun wordplay in the lyrics.

Coasts – “Oceans.” They’re going to be compared to Coldplay because their next single is called “A Rush of Blood,” but the similarity is just in the attempt to craft songs that feel anthemic with big climaxes of drums and shimmering guitars. Coldplay has its detractors, and I find their work frustratingly inconsistent, but they do write some pop hooks that prove indelible, something few imitators (save, perhaps, Bastille and Imagine Dragons) have been able to do. Coasts has a shot, though, based on these two singles, both of which came out last year in the UK.

Matt and Kim – “Get It.” Solid melody, weak lyrics, which unfortunately has been the duo’s formula for much of their careers.

Belle & Sebastian – “Nobody’s Empire.” I adore the first four tracks on this album, Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, but it tapers off into maudlin material that is probably more authentic B&S but just not my style. “The Party Line” was my #3 track of 2014; “Nobody’s Empire” will likely rank very high for me on this year’s list.

A. Sinclair – “Suit Up.” From this Austin band’s October album Pretty Girls, this single kicks the door down with the intense introductory riff. I imagine they’d be fantastic to see live given how much energy comes through in their studio recordings.

Young Ejecta – “Welcome to Love.” Formerly known as Ejecta, this side project of Neon Indian’s Leanne Macomber – who is once again au naturel on the album cover – put out their second short album of ethereal, quietly melodic synthpop that highlights Macomber’s breathy alto.

Sleater-Kinney – “Price Tag.” The opener from their amazing comeback record, No Cities to Love, which I reviewed in January.

Tobias Jesso Jr. – “How Could You Babe.” I’m still not sure how much I like this mournful piano ballad, which is driven primarily by Jesso – whose debut album comes out in March – crooning the song’s title repeatedly. It’s been stuck in my head a few times already, though.

The Mowgli’s – “Through The Dark.” They may never do anything I like as much as “San Francisco,” but I do love this septet’s sound when the entire group starts singing in unison, practically begging you to join in. Their second proper album is due this spring.

Death Cab for Cutie – “Black Sun.” It seems like 2015 is the big year for comeback records from some of the biggest alternative acts of the aughts – these guys have been gone for four years, Belle & Sebastian for five, the Decemberists for four, Modest Mouse for six, and Sleater-Kinney for nine. “Black Sun” is very promising, especially the guitar interlude, which brought back to mind my favorite track from 2011’s Codes and Keys, “You are a Tourist.”

Lower Dens – “To Die in L.A.” Did they steal that guitar sound from Robert Plant’s “Big Log?”

Courtney Barnett – “Pedestrian at Best.” When she plugs in and there’s some real music to back up her brilliantly twisted lyrics, she’s among the best voices in independent/alternative music today, contorting the language into whatever shapes she desires, with brilliant imagery and incisive wit. Here’s hoping her next album continues what she’s started here.

Twerps – “Back to You.” Twerps, an Australian quartet who remind me in many ways of the Go-Betweens, seem to specialize in understated, pleasantly annoying pop tracks, a formula that works about half the time on their debut album Range Anxiety. Everyone’s raving over “I Don’t Mind,” one of the two longest tracks on the album, but the off-key singing and twangy, repetitive guitar licks work much better on songs half that length, as with the syncopated riff that powers this sunny bit of indie-pop.

Voivod – “We Are Connected.” Voivod’s 1989 album Nothingface had a huge influence on my tastes in music; at a time when “metal” largely meant the glam-rock derivative of hair bands, with Metallica the edgy alternative to Poison and Cinderella, Voivod – who toured off this album with two similarly unknown acts, Faith No More and Soundgarden – produced intelligent, aggressive, intricate songs exploring dark themes with lyrics that, if nothing else, moved beyond what was available on the radio in those pre-satellite, pre-web days. The band’s sound changed in the mid-90s with Negatron, going more toward death-metal growls and “groove” riffs; withh the 2005 death of original guitarist Denis D’Amour they will probably never recover their original vibe, but “We Are Connected” at least restores the clean vocals and spaced-out thrash sound that made them one of metal’s first real innovators.

And while I’m not going to put anything from Napalm Death’s upcoming album on the playlist (I’ve never been a fan of their brand of extreme grindcore), this piece on the letter that lead screamer Barney Greenaway wrote to Indonesian President (and Napalm Death fan) Joko Widodo is worth a read. Here’s hoping it succeeds in convincing Widodo to commute those two criminals’ death sentences.

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