A Month Of Christmas

Louis Armstrong (with Velma Middleton)--"Baby, It's Cold Outside" (mp3)

For the next 25 days, imagine that we have given you one of those wooden box Advent calendards with all of the little doors with the days of the month on them, except that each day when you open one, it will be a Christmas song. Oh, we'll be doing our regular posting each week, but expect a little aural gift from us each day as well.

Come Thanksgiving, it's hard to get anything but Christmas music on a public cd player in my household. We're often slow to decorate, but we get the music going pretty darn early. There's a pecking order, too.

1. A Charlie Brown Christmas--Vince Guaraldi. I do claim with some pride that long before this became ubiquitous holiday listening, this was a favorite. We even own this baby on vinyl. The beauty of it is that you can listen to it a billion times and it never gets old, so you never care that you hear it in the grocery store.

2. The Bells of Dublin--The Chieftans. John introduced us to this one, and it has been a key to the playlist ever since. Brilliant guest contributions from Jackson Browne, Burgess Meredith, Nancy Griffith, Rickie Lee Jones and others. All of the songs run together and create an old world Christmas vibe that feels timeless. In my humble opinion, it is the best Christmas cd to play at night in front of a fire, though it is also the soundtrack to any present-opening festivities.

Beyond that, it's pretty hard to break through. Shawn Colvin has had some success, as has a compilation called Have Yourself A Jazzy Little Christmas. Also, a cd of a full choir doing traditional classics like "In The Deep Mid-Winter."

A guy who made big inroads into the playlist last year is Sufjan Stevens. His "homemade" cds, Songs For Christmas, that he made his family over the course of several years are guaranteed to become family favorites for us, too. As you would expect from Stevens, he not only touches on or reinterprets some classics, but he also writes several soon-to-be classics of his own.

And that's the point, isn't it? I don't think the world needs a new version of "Blue Christmas" at this point. Try if you must, but Elvis pretty much owns that one. Same with many of the other classics. So the challenge becomes to offer either 1) a stunningly-different reinterpretation, 2) a traditional Christmas song that no one else has been recording, or 3) a new song. I'm partial to all three and find that the most successful Christmas cds contain at least two of the three types of songs. As group like Brooks and Dunn have proven, though, you can do all three on a cd and still put out pure crap.

Good Christmas music is tougher to create than you might think.

Based on the last week down here in Florida, there is a chestnut that has been roasting on the open fire for decades and is now ready to be shared once again. Everywhere we have gone, it seems we have heard someone's version of "Baby, It's Cold Outside." I can't believe how many times I've heard it in the last 5 days. Of course, Florida does have its share of senior citizens, so that may skew the TJMaxx playlist, who knows? But maybe that's a good place to start--with a light, sexy, funny, and fun holiday song to get everyone in the mood.

I promise you, though, from here it goes to the weird to the wonderful to the obscure to the slacker versions of that ultimate commercial endeavor--the Christmas song.

"Chinese Democracy": The 17 Year Itch

Today's post does not contain a song, as any posted G n' R song would undoubtedly result in the shut-down of our blog, not to mention the repossession of our homes and children.

I bought Chinese Democracy, but my motive for doing so is elusive.

Sure, I was one of the millions who owned (and still owns) a copy of "Appetite for Destruction." I listened to friends' copies of Lies but never bought it. I hardly even sniffed in the direction of their legitimate follow-ups, Use Your Illusion (Parts I and II!).

So it's not like I'm much of a G n' R fan. "November Rain" was overrated, and the only thing Axl's involvement with supermodel Stephanie Seymour managed to accomplish was to totally kill her hotness. She was part of the Sports Illustrated "Big Three" in the '80s, along with Cindy Crawford and Elle Macpherson, but she jumped the supermodel shark with Axl. (And don't kid yourself; without Seymour in that video, it's not nearly as popular.)

My judgment on the album after the first listen: Not bad. This call still holds, more or less.

My immediate thoughts after a third and fourth listen: I had no idea Axl Rose was such a big Rush fan. Seriously, each listen brings our more Prog Rock and less Hard Rock. None of these songs have the masterful touch of Neil Peart's lyricism or his drumming, but Axl's voice is four notches away from Geddy Lee's -- some would say that's an improvement -- and the guitar work in places is impressive enough.

Understood that Rush holds no monopoly on progressive rock, or whatever the hell that particular genre of rock is called, but they're the band I know that does it best.

What made Appetite such a huge success was not its high IQ nor its layers of experimental sound. G n' R rocked the late '80s because they dumped a huge vat of make-up remover on the increasing glam-ification of the hard rock scene. They made hard rock ugly again. Ugly, raw, and catchy as hell.

Well, that version of G n' R might be somewhere in Chinese Democracy, but it's on life support and barely breathing. In its stead is stuff that, while not bad, ain't what I personally was looking for in an album by Axl and whoever else he could get to play on it.

As I close out Day Five of owning this CD, what keeps coming back is this: Why did this take 17 years? Peter Gabriel is infamous for taking eons between albums. Eons in his case being five or six years, which is how long he was going between albums until Up, in 2002, was a decade in the making. To me, Up was a colossal disappointment, in part because you can't help but ask what the hell took so long to make songs that feel less than inspired.

My expectations for G n' R's 17-year itch weren't nearly so unreasonable, so their output isn't nearly so disappointing. But is it really enough for such a wait for my conclusion on Chinese Democracy to be: "It's not bad"?

Thanksgiving 2008

Simon and Garfunkel--"Hazy Shade of Winter" (mp3)
Leo Kottke--"In Christ There Is No East Or West" (mp3)

It may be a personal stereotype of mine, but I find elementary school music teachers to be a wacky sort. I'm basing that on my own experience, and that of my children. Music teachers for the young tend to be the kind who accentuate emotions, expressions, and enunciations beyond what even a child would find acceptable. Kids know these women are odd, too, though they probably can't articulate exactly why. The woman at my children's elementary took it one step beyond, as we found out every year at the Thanksgiving program.

"I don't know why," she would say, "but Thanksgiving always makes me think of war." And she would launch the children into a program of patriotic battle songs--"Battle Hymn of the Republic" and the like. Maybe a couple of "gobble, gobble, gobble" songs thrown in for show.

For years, I made fun of her. Now, I think she was on to something.

Thanksgiving is the strangest holiday we have, and her inexplicable connection to war helps to capture the essence of it. It is, arguably the most important family meal of the year, since it is a holiday that is only about that meal. There is no event, no church, no particular visiting for the most part (unless your family is blended, for one reason or another) for the simple reason that most of your family is likely already with you, if at all possible.

And yet, it is also a holiday of loss and longing. If it were a French holiday, they would call it Remembrances Of Things Past. Maybe it's because there is such a focus on family and nothing but a meal and a few half-interesting football games to occupy our minds that the palpable nostalgia tends towards loved ones who are no longer there. Maybe it's the weather. While Christmas always holds the promise of snow, and even if it doesn't come, all of the music will allude to a kind of virtual snowfall, Thanksgiving, more often than not, holds the promise of a bleak day--leaves off the trees, possible rain, likely cold, empty streets, a grey day where night comes early and there's little to do after darkness falls but lie around wishing you had eaten just a little bit less.

That description would lead you to believe that I dislike Thanksgiving. Au contraire. I've never much minded opening old wounds to take another look at them, and having a day with not much going on that invites revisting childhood and ancestors and even lost parents is an opportunity that our fast lives don't afford us very often.

So enjoy the gray day and the chance to think deeply about someone(s) you haven't thought about for awhile, and if the chance comes to head outside with the cousins or their children to throw the football around, either in anticipation of the meal or to try to work some of it off, by all means go for it. For just like soldiers in a war, our own love of comrades and family keep us focused on our tasks at hand and sane during the times between.

FOOTNOTE: I am in Florida for Thanksgiving this year. Florida sucks for Christmas; it feels all wrong. But for Thanksgiving, somehow it feels perfect. The bright sunny days and cool evenings, the bustle of activity, the plethora of old people, the joy of being outside as much as possible, it's all so alive. No complaints.



"Hazy Shade of Winter" first appeared on Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends; Kottke's version of "In Christ There Is No East Or West" is from his out-of-print Greenhouse cd.

Thanksgiving: "Too Big To Fail"

Everyday I Think of Money - Stereophonics (mp3)
Bright Future in Sales - Fountains of Wayne (mp3)

Would someone please explain to me what the hell the phrase "too big to fail" actually means? Is "too big to fail" something akin to calling a huge ocean liner "unsinkable"? If so, then America seems to have sailed right into one hellacious iceberg.

If CitiGroup is "too big to fail," then why the hell is it failing? If Detroit's carmakers aren't "too big to fail," why does it feel like losing those companies would be pretty darn catastrophic? More importantly, why are we allowing companies to get so large that they can be declared "too big to fail"? Isn't this a problem we should chew on going forward?

To me, a mere serf who couldn't even manage his Columbia House membership, I honestly don't get it. To me, it seems like our government is picking -- somewhat arbitrarily -- which companies are really important, which ones are only kinda important, and which ones are "too big to fail." Am I s'posed to just trust them that they know what the hell they're doing? Like I trusted 'em that there were WMDs? (OK, so I didn't trust 'em then, either.)

I don't mean to sound like an ignorant conservative, but it really feels like our government is handing out welfare checks with NINE ZEROES on them to a bunch of idiots who just proved they can't manage their own affairs. Conservatives get upset that we hand out teensy tiny checks to poor mothers who are "too lazy" to find employment, but this one bailout could probably put our entire country's welfare roll into houses for a year or two.

If people get pissed off that our government creates an entitlement mentality in the hearts and minds of the extremely poor by giving them a teensy pittance of cash and food stamps, what are we telling corporations by handing them the equivalent of a bajillion welfare checks?

Hey, I've got a plan! Why not kill two birds with one stone? The government can buy up a whole bunch of houses (thus helping the housing market) at reduced cost and place homeless welfare recipients in them for a year. [Yes, this is mere random conjecture, but it's no more idiotic-seeming that trusting the greedy Wall Street bastards who captained these Titanics to make the right decisions going forward.]

Here's what I'm thankful for in this holiday season:

1. That I'm too poor to be all that terribly affected by this collective stupidity... so far, anyway.
2. That all I've lost so far is half of my retirement.
3. That I never promised anyone a rose garden, or even much of a weed garden.
4. That I can criticize and mock our elected leaders no matter which decisions they make, because either way we're probably screwed for a while as a nation.
5. That even if Obama does a lot of stupid things, he'll seriously deliberate them first, try his hardest to ingest the opinions of the highly-educated experts around him, and sound intelligent about it when he explains it all to the American public. (And he'll probably say the phrase "Now look..." about a million times in four years.)
   

I raise a big ol' chunk of cranberry sauce and a big ol' glass o' chardonnay to you on this severely recessed Thanksgiving! Here's to being sincerely grateful that, no matter how crappy it is, it's all still pretty damn good.

The Stereophonics song is off their least-impressive album of all time, Just Enough Education to Perform. The Fountains of Wayne song is from Welcome Interstate Managers, their best album. Both can be purchased on iTunes and Amazon.com's mp3 site.

"I Walked Right Out Of The Machinery"

Peter Gabriel--"Solsbury Hill" (mp3)

There are a small handful of songs that matter so much to me that I'll stop what I'm doing and try to listen, anytime, anywhere if I hear one of them start up.

"Solsbury Hill" is one of those songs. For me, maybe not for you. Some songs can be the soundtracks of our lives, songs like Springsteen's "Glory Days," that can churn along in the background as part of the collective consciousness of this country. It's almost an impossible song not to like because it captures such a shock of recognition for all of us, either we've been there or we know someone who has.

But when I hear "Solsbury Hill," I'm never content to have it play in the background. I always want to lean in and hear it.

Now, I'm not the greatest Peter Gabriel fan in the world. I like some of that creepy-voiced, artsy stuff he did with early Genesis. I like a fair number of his earlier songs, ending sometime around "Sledgehammer." I like the song that John Cusack plays on his boombox in Say Anything, trying to reconnect with Ione Skye (I've never really know the name of it consistently, and it isn't on his greatest hits, surprisingly). I like the song he does with Afro-Celt Soundsystem that Billy put on a New Orleans mix a couple of years ago.

So we're not talking about Gabriel here so much as we are talking about the song. It's got that great opening riff, those overdubbed acoustic guitars capoed up a few frets, and the repetition of that riff enough times that it really gets into your head before Gabriel ever starts singing. And, since he's coming from a "prog rock" background, the orchestra, but muted this time, mimicing what the guitar is doing.

It's kind of a story song, since the narrator goes to a specific place and, chronologically, things happen to him--the appearance of an eagle, the voice talking to him, his return to society at the end--but the details are so generalized that it's impossible to nail down the situation. That doesn't always work in a song, but I think it works here.

I guess, more than anything, it's one part of the lyrics that really get to me:

When Illusion spin her net,
I'm never where I want to be.
And Liberty, she pirouette[s],
When I think that I am free.

We all like to think that songs speak to us. Unfortunately, when they speak to me, they are usually songs that focus on isolation, various failures, or forced confrontations with truths that I'd probably rather not confront. But having a good melody and a cohort, of sorts, who seems like he or she is right there, well, as Mary Poppins says, that's the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down.

Poetically, "Solsbury Hill" feels like it is Gabriel's "Tinturn Abbey," his on-the- spot, head back to nature manifesto that charts a fresh or revised belief system, even though he's not satisfied or reassured by what he sees in those around him.

His ambiguous plight that sends him hiking away from society in order to get a fresh perspective on things has a hopeful outcome: not only does some otherworldly voice speak to him and provide him with a cohort, of sorts, but he also resolves by the end to head back down the mountain. Maybe. That whole notion of "you can keep my things/They've come to take me home" has an ominous feel as well, but that's probably just me.

Though it's a classic song now, "Solsbury Hill" always sounds to me like it was written yesterday. Liberty, she pirouettes when I think that I am free. Exactly.

Peter Gabriel's first solo album/cd is available at Itunes.

Safe Havens?

Bastards of Young - The Replacements (mp3)
Leave - Glen Hansard (mp3)

I stumbled on this item on the news wire today. The world's definitely gettin' weirder.

Safe Haven Divorce Law Backfires on Las Vegas

LAS VEGAS (AP) - Nevada state lawmakers are discussing the possibility of convening an emergency session after a well-intended law has reaped serious negative consequences on the state.

Since early November, disgruntled wives have been abandoning their husbands by the truckloads, deserting them in casinos with a few hundred dollars and the clothes on their backs, leaving them to the care of the cruel and heartless Las Vegas rules of evolution.

The law allows wives to leave their husbands inside any casino in the city limits and sign a simple divorce decree on their way out. The divorce requires a straight payment of $2,000, although many wives have tipped the judge and others in excess of another $1,000 for allowing them such a brilliant plan.

"Divorce is a staple of American life," explained Joey "Two Exes" Campanini (R - Dist.34), who sponsored the legislation. "We figured Vegas was the pioneer in fly-by-night weddings, so we should be the ones to invent the fly-by-night divorce."

By signing the "Express Divorce" settlement, wives agree to ask for no more than half the marital assets, with child support to be determined later by an arbitrator of the state's choosing.

Since the law went into effect on November 4, more than 40,000 husbands have been kicked to the casino curb, many losing every penny of their possessions within hours of arriving and being placed into the care of the state, causing an unexpected burden on the government and the casino industry, a redundancy in Nevada.

"We didn't expect quite this many men left on our doorstep," admitted Timmy "Gonads" Lipnicki, a junior vice president at the Luxor. "We were told to expect around 500 each day, but we've had almost ten times that number.

"To be honest, we passed this law because we thought it would increase traffic in the poker rooms and the strip clubs, but these bozos are goin' broke so fast they're not helping us. No wonder the wives dropped 'em like a bad habit," added Lipnicki, who has been married to the same woman since he was 16, although he proudly boasts of five mistresses.

Nevada's problems come on the heels of a similar recent problem in Nebraska, where that state's Safe Haven law, intended to allow parents to drop unwanted infants off at hospitals without fear of criminal charges, led to chaotic results. Before that state could change the letter of the law, more than 35 children -- most over the age of 10, and many from states beyond Nebraska -- had been abandoned in cornhusker hospitals.

Likewise, women are flying in with their ne'er-do-well husbands from every state in the Union and can't find a casino quickly enough.

"It's rekindled my lfaith in God," said Roberta Sanders, who left her husband Willie in the Rio on November 6. "I'd been praying to Jesus for a decade to give me the perfect way out of this miserable shithole of a marriage, and on Halloween I read about this law passing. It's true that God answers prayers in His time, not ours. Praise His name!"

Other wives shared similar sentiments. Said Sheila Gunderson of Duluth, Minn., "That fucknut didn't even notice I'd left him there until three days later." The fucknut in question was her husband Ralph, who blew his 2-day winnings at craps on an overnighter at one of the brothels out of town. "I dropped him off on Thursday and signed that bill with tears of joy in my eyes. Ralph called me on Sunday morning wondering why I hadn't shown up to meet him for breakfast. What a moron. What further explanation do I need for why I left him?"

When contacted by cell phone, Mr. Gunderson was perplexed. "I was wondering why she was being so sweet, why she seemed so excited about going to watch me play the slots for a long weekend. I shoulda known. She hasn't smiled like that since before we had our first kid back in '85."

He declined to answer further questions because he felt he was due to rebound at the roulette tables, but his numbers would only be hot for the next 20-30 minutes.

Alas, the above story proves (a) how often I fantasize about writing for The Onion, and (b) why they haven't knocked on my door to hire me.

But the insanity surrounding Nebraska's problems with their well-intentioned Safe Haven law bothers me so much I think I'm losing sleep over it. My only defense mechanism is to make light of what is a truly horrifying statement about our society.

Some want to dismiss this as bad parenting and leave it at that. Others want to explore how a society as advanced as ours could leave so many parents without any decent support system. I only hope that the unintended consequences in Nebraska might be enough caffeine in the system to force people with power and influence to start asking deeper questions and trying to address deeper problems about parenting in the 21st Century.

God only knows what must be going on inside those households to drive parents to such an extreme and irreversible decision. We're not talking about spouses here, grown adults whose screw-ups and foibles can be cut off from us with a couple of lawyers and a lot of asperin. We're talking kids. Kids who must have problems at a level I can only imagine.

When I try to imagine what kind of problems lead to such an end, it leaves me exhausted from sadness. It's so sad I have trouble writing about it. So I make Las Vegas divorce jokes! Ha!

Why do we romanticize the notion of having children when parenting is more like raw oysters than chocolate? Why do so many people continue to believe having a child is no harder than having a puppy? Why do some parents, who perhaps began as dedicated and involved and loving, find ways to numb themselves and create a distance when their children become less-cuddly teens? Why do some parents hate their children and express it from the earliest days on? Why are some children born with wiring so screwed up that even the most patient and loving of parents can't manage? Why why why why why? So many questions, all of them ugly and unintentionally judgmental, all of them begging for answers that might prevent the words "Safe Haven" from ever again having to be used in this horrifying context.

Both songs can be found on iTunes and Amazon.com's mp3 site. The Replacements kick heavily-intoxicated butt.

Ever Walk These Streets?

The Streets--"Turn The Page" (mp3)

The Streets--"Has It Come To This?" (mp3)
The Streets--"Weak Become Heroes" (mp3)

There's probably no good reason why I should like The Streets. A 51 year old man living in Chattanooga, Tennessee listening to a young British guy with a thick accent and an idiom I don't really understand (rapping is called "spittin'") who, when he isn't telling autobiographical stories of pill-popping and club-hopping in London, is trying to rap with the same bluster as inner-city African-American rapper. Except that his taunts are things like, "My crew laughs at your rhubarb-encrusted verses."

On top of the that, the instrumentation can be repetitive and amateurish, so that everything doesn't quite add up, almost but not quite, like a homemade cake that didn't come out like the picture in the recipe but still tastes pretty good.

Thus is the transformative power of music. Even if we can't quite figure out the context or the meaning, if there's something engaging about the songs, we'll hang with them.

Welcome to The Streets. If you've never heard them (him, it's one guy, Mike Skinner, who drags in various friends when he needs them), and you're willing to listen to a couple of introductory tracks I've posted, then you're about to enter a world where (again, imagine an American rapper doing this) our protagonist starts over swelling, synthesized strings and declares himself "45th generation Roman." I love that.

It's a world where if you can't feel the effects of the first pill, you take another, and maybe another, and then deal with the consequences. It's a world where when you're out in the city, eyes are on you because you are young and wild, and the only thing that enables you to feel impervious to the "geezer stares" is the love of a good, or not so good, woman.

There's poetry here, don't doubt that, and bravado and vulnerability of a kind you've likely not experienced. Who else do you know that would close a song like this: "Stand by me, my apprentice. Be brave. Clenched fists." Who else would, in the middle of a song ("Weak Become Heroes") where he's painted a thorough picture of an ongoing nightlife over a repetive keyboard, stop, and have the sudden realization that 5 years have passed and he's been doing the same thing over and over every night during all that time.

The Streets are not afraid to make fun of himself (pronoun disagreement intentional) at the same time he is spouting a manifesto for a new kind of music that he is creating. You've got to love a guy who can admit that "[w]e both saw things from the same point of view/ She loved me and I did, too."

It's a superficial world where men worry about their hair, where rolling papers and Playstations and Mickey D's are cornerstones of a lifestyle, and I can't necessarily tell what it is he's musically rebelling against (although he says things like "This is not a club track," so it probably English pop music he despises), but, ultimately, that doesn't matter. As a listener, I get caught up in the drama of it all and, not surprisingly, end up on his side in whatever war he's fighting.

All of these songs come from The Streets' first cd, Original Pirate Material, available at Itunes.