I’ve been on a music nostalgia kick lately. A few weeks ago, we were out with the kids and, for some reason, the phrase “American Girls” worked its way into the conversation and I, of course, immediately needed to listen to the song of that name by a band named “HOMIE1”. Turns out, this song is not part of the available music on any of the three major streaming services. I know I had this song as part of my old iCloud Music Library uploaded via the old iTunes Match service at some point (my collection of random Weezer-adjacent B-sides was, for a few years from like 1999 through 2002 or so, immaculate), but it wasn’t showing up in my library of songs on Apple Music either. Needless to say, it became my personal mission to find and rip a copy of the Meet the Deedles: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack that included the only officially recorded version of this song. Luckily for me, a Goodwill in Racine, Wisc., had a copy of the CD for sale for less than three bucks, shipped, on eBay. It arrived and I’ve since ripped and uploaded it to my Apple Music library and my “American Girls and Boys” playlist is now complete.
Relatedly, sometime in the days between the inciting incident mentioned above and the arrival of my eBay purchase, another song from my Apple Music library uploads came on while I was driving around with my 3-year-old daughter. This song, as far as my records indicate, is named “Hello” by a band I have listed as Planet Janet. My daughter LOVES this song and we’ve listened to it probably six thousand times in the weeks since. I also love this song and remember downloading it from a Weezer message board some time around the turn of the century – it’s filed next to “Dr. Frank Was Right” by The Benjamins in my brain which leads me to believe I was introduced to both of these songs around the same time and probably had them on a cool mix CD together and that song is from an album that came out in 2001. Anyway, this is the only song that I remember ever hearing from this band and I can’t remember if the reason the song was shared on this message board was because they opened for Weezer or opened for Ozma or were just a band that one of the other commenters on the message board liked (or maybe even was in) or something. Weezerpedia does not list Planet Janet as a band that ever toured with or performed with Weezer and the rest of my internet searching has turned up absolutely nothing on this band or the song. It’s a little frustrating because it’s seriously a jam and my daughter and I would both love to hear any other songs they ever did. I’m going to transcribe the lyrics here to the best of my ability just so they exist somewhere on the internet.
40,000 ways to say “Hello”
And I forget how to walk - oh nevermind
How do thirty seconds pass and I give up
And figure “This’ll take another week”
But another week comes and another day
Another awkward silence trying to find a simple way to say
To say…“Won’t you stop and talk to me?”
Acknowledge my existence
I know I’ve been persistent
But won’t you stop and talk to me
…
Thirty times a day I’ve looked your way
Tongue-tied I fantasize about what I would say
If you were to waste your breath on me
But then I blink and I’m back suffering through my reality
But another week comes and another day
Another awkward silence trying to find a simple way to say
To say…“Won’t you stop and talk to me?”
Acknowledge my existence
I know I’ve been persistent
But won’t you stop and talk to me
[some words I can’t make out]
And I don’t know what to doAnd maybe I try too hard to make you notice me
So I’ll count my lucky stars and look distracted and sleepy
I’ll bet that Kara Beardsley never had to go to such great lengths
But as her bra size grew her brain seemed to shrink… do do di do do do do do do di do . . .
“Won’t you stop and talk to me?”
Acknowledge my existence
I know I’ve been persistent
But won’t you stop and talk to me
[some words I can’t make out]
And I don’t know what to do
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HOMIE (which I realized was stylized in call caps through the process described in this post) was a random, one-off (as far as I can tell) side project of three of the guys who were at that time in Weezer (Rivers, Matt and Pat) along with a couple of at-the-time members of Soul Coughing and Cake – a real supergroup for a certain type of music fan. ↩︎
Year in books, 2023 📚
Here are the books I finished reading this year.
This was a very good book year for me. Probably the best in a decade or so in terms of both quantity and quality. Here are a few themes and highlights.
- I got back into reading physical books this year and realized that this is my preferred medium. Of the 15 books that I finished in 2023, three were on my Kindle and the rest were all physical hard copies. I did not listen to any audiobooks this year.
- My favorite book I read this year was, without a doubt, The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. I cannot wait for the follow-up, The Tusks of Extinction, which I’ve already pre-ordered and is scheduled to ship on January 16th. I loved everything about this book.
- I also read several others that I would give a full five-stars to: Heat 2, Demon Copperhead, A Walk in the Woods, and This Census-Taker.
- Every book I finished this year was worth the time. One of the changes to my approach that I’d credit with this “good book year” was a new policy to give up on a book more easily than I’ve done in the past without any guilt. Sometimes, a book just doesn’t click for whatever reason and I think that’s OK. This has been a sticking point at times in the past where I’ve tried to keep making it happen and felt like I couldn’t' move on to something else until I’d finished what I’d started and then wound up reading nothing instead of just moving on. Life’s too short and there are way too many books for that. The one exception to this was Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock, which I did not like but read to the end anyway, even though it was also the longest book I read this year. Even though I didn’t like it, it had some really interesting ideas and at least one or two interesting characters that made it worth the slog.
- I read the two Narnia books with my six-year-old son. He really loved them and I loved experiencing them with him. I even enjoyed revisiting these books, despite some negative associations stemming from an undergraduate C. S. Lewis survey course. I expect that we’ll continue exploring this series together this year.
Looking forward to reading even more in 2024. Bring on the weird.
Quotes of the Year, Sports Edition
From Defector’s Ray Ratto’s December 4th article “The 49ers Are Big Dom Now”:
But in whomping the Eagles and briefly incapacitating quarterback Jalen Hurts in to [sic] process, they also invoked the wrath of the Eagles' security chief, Big Dom DiSandro, a a restaurant refrigerator with ears who looks like he gets a royalty check every time someone says, “Philadelphia.”
Also from Ratto, in his “100 Wins Doesn’t Buy What It Used To”:
All playoffs must have a theme, no matter how flimsy–at least until a champion is crowned and everyone involved is promoted to Super Genius (trademark Wile E. Coyote). This postseason has its theme already: Because division winners are dropping like flies, the regular season has been reduced to six months of garbage and the character of baseball is destroyed. . .
The regular season doesn’t matter when you’re looking to define enduring excellence. This year was just its logical extreme–when 404 regular-season victories (Atlanta, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Tampa Bay) translated into one total victory in October. . . The mighty have sucked and the modest have been running the vacuum.
No sport has changed itself in the last decade more than baseball, and it will continue to do so in search of a younger generation that is abandoning sports in general as a viewing vehicle because all sports suck when watched on a phone. Increasingly expanded playoffs are just part of the price that must be paid in search of that dollar that can never be obtained. If this helps, think of the new format as a plunging neckline as established most assuredly by those trollops in Philadelphia. This isn’t the regular season being diminished, it’s just sexing up a game that used to be played in flannel.
One more Ratto, from “All Glory To The Beam":
Your time-honored allegiances are destroyed, and you are now Children of the Incarnate Beam.
I think that last one really captures what I love so much about reading Ray Ratto. No other writer made my laugh as consistently in 2023. It’s just a throwaway line in an intro about the wonderful story that was the Sacramento Kings, but it’s awesome.
Now for some non-Ratto sports quotes.
Many, many excellent quotes in Cody Stavenhagen’s run-down of Jim Leyland stories at The Athletic, published on the eve of Leyland’s induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Forgive me for quoting extensively, but this was probably my favorite article of the year in terms of the amount sheer joy received from its reading.
The man who met [Kirk] Gibson at the airport was the mustachioed 33-year old manager of the Class A Lakeland Tigers. Almost as soon as Gibson settled into the passenger seat, the manager about half his size starting tearing into him. “Gibson, you’re not s—!” the skipper said, and he was just getting going. “I don’t care what you’ve done. I don’t care how much they’re f—- paying you. You’re gonna be at the park at 8 every morning. You’re gonna get to work.”
The guy to call [for Leyland stories], outfielder Andy Van Slyke told [writer David O’Brien], was bench player Gary Varsho. “That was Jim’s voodoo doll,” Van Slyke said. Varsho had stories, all right. The first one he told was of the day he was traded to the Pirates in 1991. He was sitting at his new locker in the clubhouse when Leyland ran out of the manager’s office in his underwear. The coaching staff’s March Madness pool had been decided. “He’s got $20 and $50 bills hanging on his jockstrap,” Varsho told O’Brien. “He’s bouncing around saying, ‘Who won the basketball pool? Who won the pool, Varsh?’ I said, ‘Oh my god, this is our manager.'”
Here’s how Leyland tells the story of the day the Tigers signed him in 1964. Their scout came to the door in Perrysburg. Leyland’s father answered. “Mr. Leyland, we would like to sign your sogn for $1,000,” the scout said. “Sir,” Leyland’s father replied, “we don’t have that kind of money.”
A good Leyland tirade, Brandon Inge once said, could go 10 minutes. “He’d walk down the hallway still yelling, but you could hear his voice fading out down the hall. And then you’d hear him coming back and his voice getting louder. Everybody would go, ‘Sit back down. Here he comes again.'” Ryan Dempster tells a version in which Leyland came and went five times, then said, “I’m going to go into my office and have a whiskey and a cigar. If I come out in this locker room and there’s anybody sitting here when I come out, I’m calling the cops and having you arrested for impersonating a major league f–ing baseball player.”
[Sean] Casey had been traded from the Pirates to the Tigers the previous year. His first day with Detroit, Leyland pulled Casey into his office with assistant coaches Gene Lamont and Lloyd McClendon. Leyland went over some basics, then Lamont gave Casey a crash course on the team’s signs. At one point, Leyland interjected. “If you get on base, I don’t want you looking to third at Gen-o,” he told the slow-footed veteran. “I want you looking in the dugout. I want you to look at me. If I come to the top step of the dugout and we catch eyes, as soon as we catch eyes, if I jump up and never come back down, that means I want you to steal.”
Another of my favorite articles of the year was Drew Magary’s “Now That I Think About It, The Unwritten Rules of Baseball Are Actually Cool”, also at Defector.
I have complained about umps for the majority of my lifetime, to the point where the idea of replacing them with computers genuinely excited me. But sometime this fall, I realized that it’s the stupidity of baseball that makes it fun. I love seeing managers bump chests with umps. I love ejections. I love seeing batters give the home plate ump a dirty look after a bullshit called third strike. I live for the DRAMA.
And you know what? I even like all of the unwritten rules shit, too. That’s right. When I saw Adolis Garcia get beaned by Bryan Abreu in Game 5 of the ALCS, I was fucking riveted. Abreu plunked Garcia for having the temerity to spike his bat–also way cool–after homering off of Justin Verlander in his previous at-bat. Did tempers flare? Buddy, you know they did. Benches cleared. Stocky relievers came pouring out of the bullpens. Everyone got all up in everyone else’s business. I had stood against MLB’s bro code for so long that my opinion on it had become automatic: it was bad. All of the written rules should be written down. No one player should feel slighted because, in his mind and perhaps his alone, some other player lacked proper ethics.
But do I really want, like, a fucking discipline committee to legislate all this shit? The NFL already makes rules for everything. Do I want another sport to be like that? I don’t. We can keep the pitch clock, but otherwise, I’m all for anything that, justified or not, stokes visceral hatred between two teams and encourages frontier justice. I want more fake fights, more real fights, more beanings, more imaginary strike zones, more arguments, and more bases pulled out of the ground and thrown in anger. All of that is fun. All of that is baseball.
This year’s award for “Article Written Specifically to Align with Brett’s Personal Tastes and Interests” goes to Grant Brisbee, Rustin Dodd and Stephen Nesbitt of The Athletic in their August 21 entry entitled “MLB Power Rankings: Mariners, Dodgers see some gains; We make a team-themed ’90s playlist”, which included the following gem from Dodd.
Chicago White Sox
Record: 49-75 Last Power Ranking: 27
Track: “Undone (The Sweater Song)” by Weezer
There’s a history of clothing coming to pieces in Chicago. Not only that, Rivers Cuomo’s lyrics from this classic on Weezer’s debut album feel especially apt: “Oh no, it go, it gone, bye-bye.” In fact, as I type those lyrics, I feel like those lines could be repurposed into the greatest home run call in baseball history.
Let’s set the scene: It’s September in Chicago. Royals are in town for a series on the South Side. Dylan Cease throws a fastball to Bobby Witt Jr., who demolishes it to deep left. “Oh no,” Jason Benetti says, solemnly. “It go. It gone. Bye-bye.”
Steven Goldman at Baseball Prospectus wrote a fantastic article about baseball’s Opening Day with “Opening Day is Your Last Chance”.
As one who has struggled to control his weight for much of his life, I understand the potentiality and the pressure of Opening Day. When I was a child, every summer my parents would load me, my younger sister, and up to three cats into a mid-sized sedan and drive across America for more than a month, arriving home the night before my personal Opening Day, the first day of school–except for those years when something went wrong and we didn’t make it back in time. . .
Opening Day is your last chance. The first day is the last day. Initial impressions are often final impressions, and once your season has begun it’s usually too late.
Finished reading: Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman 📚
Instead of (or in addition to) the referee expert to consult with for explanations during NFL games broadcasts, I’d like to see someone try a punting and kicking experts to explain what goes right or wrong. 🏈
Finished reading: Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff 📚
Finished reading: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler 📚
One of those books that I just want to climb inside of and live in (despite how unpleasant that would be in the kinds of books that I tend to feel this way about).
Humanity is still afraid the minds we make to do our dirty work for us—our killing, our tearing of minerals from the earth, our raking of the seas for more protein, our smelting of more metal, the collection of our trash, and the fighting of our wars—will rise up against us and take over. That is, humanity calls it fear. But it isn’t fear. It’s guilt (p 266).
Popular plant.
Finished reading: Blockade Billy by Stephen King 📚
Finished reading: A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin 📚
Finished reading: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver 📚
Huge thanks to @zioibi for choosing this for the sipped ink summer reading club. I’d had it on the list for a while and this proves to be excellent motivation. It was my first time participating in what I understanding is a long-running annual affair and I am already looking forward to next summer. Loved this book. So much hit so close to home (both figuratively and geographically) and it felt authentic in a way that I didn’t quite expect. I don’t know why, but I had not categorized Kingsolver as an “Appalachian” writer previously, despite knowing of her bonafides in terms of being from Kentucky, but this book is clearly written with a love and intimate knowledge for the region and its people. There’s more going on here, too. The social justice angle. The David Copperfield retelling. The language itself. All of it just got me thinking in all of the best ways, even if those ways are also painful.
For anyone who also loved this book who finds themselves interested in learning more about Appalachia or reading more Appalachian literature, Kingsolver put together a really nice reading list for The New York Times1.
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A couple fun, personal notes: Dr. Theresa Lloyd, one of the authors mentioned in Kingsolver’s reading list, was one of my professors years ago and probably did more than anyone else to turn me onto Appalachian Literature as a subject. While studying under Dr. Lloyd, I wrote a paper about the stories of Breece Pancake which remains my one and only academic publication. Thanks for everything, Dr. Lloyd, and congratulations on the big mention in The New York Times! ↩︎
This video about iridescent hot water that kottke shared today is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long while. 🤯
The 5 Best Weezer Songs Ever
Today, in his Welcome to Hell World newsletter, Luke O’Neil posted an impressive roundup of “musicians and music writers and other friends” takes on the top five Weezer songs of all time. I was not asked to participate because a) I am not a musician, b) I am not a music writer, and c) I am not a friend of Luke O’Neil’s (which, if this particular newsletter post is any indication, is a shame). But, never one to shy away from sharing my Weezer opinions with anyone who would listen (either willingly or unwillingly), I decided not to let that stop me from putting together my own contribution.
I started this list with about 20 songs that I consider my all-time favorites. From there, I tried to eliminate first the ones that I hold in such high esteem for purely or at least mostly sentimental reasons. I’ll write some of those up as honorable mentions later. So, in sticking to the prompt, here are what I consider to be the five best Weezer songs of all time.
5 - The Christmas Song This is kind of a stand-in for a whole mini-era of songs that Weezer released during their hiatus between Pinkerton and the Green album, but I think it’s the best of the bunch. I got super into Weezer at kind of an awkward time… I got extremely into the Blue album right after Pinkerton was released (I’d of course heard the singles but got the CD for Christmas ‘97 and fell completely in love. I got into Pinkerton then at some point maybe a year after, but by the time I was completely obsessed with Weezer, they’d already been through the failure of that sophomore album and Matt had already left the band and they had kind of disappeared. As it happens, this was also around the time that I had my first access to the internet at home. This opened up a whole world of lore building and mythologizing around my new (and first) favorite band. The message boards were on fire with speculation about whether they would return and discussions of what was so great about the first two albums, etc. Weezer included an amazing cover of Velouria on the Pixies tribute album in 1999, then, in the summer of 2000, some demos and live recordings (collectively known as the “Summer Songs of 2000” started showing up on those message boards (“Too Late to Try” is the first I remember hearing, which was in my original list of 20, but didn’t make the final cut). It was an extremely exciting time in Weezer fandom as we realized then that there would be more new music from Weezer, but the recordings weren’t the best quality, and while it was thrilling to have new music, none of these songs really hold up or stand out in the overall Weezer catalog. But The Christmas Song, released at the end of 2000 for KROQ’s annual Christmas compilation, does stand up against the very best of Weezer1.
4 - Jamie Incredible song. I picked it up on the DGC Rarities, Vol. 1 CD where I was first introduced to Teenage Fanclub. Like The Christmas Song, this is the chosen representative of a group of songs, in this case the Blue- and Pink-era B-sides. If this were a list of the 20 best Weezer songs, all of the B-sides from the Blue and Pink eras would be on the list, but since it’s just five, Jamie is my favorite of the bunch, at least today.
3 - My Name is Jonas I can’t think of an opener that’s better than this one. The perfect song to open my favorite album of all-time. The awesome finger-picked acoustic intro (shoutout to Jason Cropper for appearing in 2/5 songs on my top 5!), the build up to “THE WORKERS ARE GOING HOME” and the harmonica sneaking in there. What a song. And I don’t think there’s anything else quite like this one in the whole Weezer catalog.
2 - El Scorcho Lyrics are pretty uncomfortable in retrospect (Pinkerton, in general), but that chorus is just perfect and so so singable. This is driving in my first car – a powder blue 1986 Chevy Celebrity – singing at the top of my lungs.
1 - Holiday / Only in Dreams I cheated! BUT, it’s really the way these two fit together that I love so much. The end of Holiday–“Let’s go away, let’s go away in a heartbeat…"–into that bass line of Only In Dreams is probably my favorite minute-or-so stretch of music I’ve ever heard. Just as the blue album has a perfect opening, it’s got the perfect closing.
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And, in one of my favorite pop culture moments of 2023 so far, The Christmas Song is featured over the end credits of the incredible sixth episode (“Fishes”) of season 2 of The Bear. I raised my arms in triumph. ↩︎
Finished reading: Mooncalves: Strange Stories by John WM Thompson (editor) 📚
Finished reading: A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson 📚. Truly loved this book.
Whole family’s been sick this week, so, instead of going out and making new memories I’m going to relive our camping trip from a few weeks ago. Happy place.
🎵 I’m beginning to think that the theme song for H2O: Just Add Water has taken up permanent residence in my head. This is my life now.
📺 Silo finale definitely did not disappoint. Going to be a long wait for season 2.
Lovely tent overnight at the Rocky Bluff Recreational Area and Spring Creek Nature Trail in the Pisgah National Forest.
