Santa’s Top Ten
Since this is the last Friday before Christmas, I’ve unleashed Santa Claws on the week’s top ten, with mostly predictable results:
- 1. “Blue Christmas”, Elvis Presley
- Pop Christmas songs begin for me with Elvis Presley, and while there are a wealth of selections from which to choose (he released three Christmas albums in his lifetime), “Blue Christmas” seems the definitive track.
- 2. “Silent Night/7 O’Clock News”, Simon & Garfunkel
- I first realized Christmas music could make a political statement with Paul Simon’s juxtaposition of “Silent Night” against an announcer’s flat reading of the day’s headlines. It was a stark reminder of just how far away we were from the carol’s idyllic vision.
- 3. “Wonderful Christmas Time”, Paul McCartney
- Nowhere is the difference between Sir Paul McCartney’s and John Lennon’s approach to writing more evident than in the Christmas songs they recorded following the demise of the Beatles. For McCartney, the season is an opportunity to party, and he expresses it with a catchy, upbeat melody that sticks in your head and won’t go away.
- 4. “Happy Christmas (War Is Over)”, John Lennon
- “War Is Over If You Want It” read billboards and newspaper advertisements the year John Lennon released this appeal for activism; though the melody is less memorable than McCartney’s, perhaps his message is a little more in keeping with the season.
- 5. “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis” Tom Waits
- No one combines humor and pathos in popular song better than Tom Waits, and this cut, from the album “Blue Valentine”, is both a classic example and a quiet reminder that not everyone’s Christmas comes out of a Hallmark greeting card.
- 6. “Fairy Tale of New York”, The Pogues
- Still my favorite contemporary Christmas song, made even more bittersweet by the alcohol-accelerated deterioration of Shane MacGowan and the tragic death of Kirsty MacColl.
- 7. “Rebel Jesus”, Jackson Browne
- The second (and final) repeat. Deservedly so.
- 8. “I Believe in Father Christmas”, Greg Lake
- Although this tune is featured on Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s “Works, Volume 2”, it is clearly Greg Lake’s show. Co-written with Pete Sinfield, who said in an interview, “I wanted it to be about the sadness of, as a child, discovering that everything isn’t quite what you think it to be.”
- 9. “Little Drummer Boy”, Bing Crosby and David Bowie
- At the time, pairing Bing Crosby with David Bowie was revolutionary, akin to coupling Tony Bennett and Marilyn Manson. Everyone was surprised when the network inspired duet not only worked, but worked brilliantly. Now a holiday classic.
- 10. “Same Old Lang Syne”, Dan Fogelberg
- A universal experience: “We tried to reach beyond the emptiness, but neither one knew how.” Like Jackson Browne, I had to brush away a tear or two the first time I heard this song.
- 11. “The Christians and the Pagans”, Dar Williams
- As a Christmas treat (and to stir the pot a little), Santa gets to crank it up to 11, just like Spinal Tap! This little tune from Dar Williams seems to have brought out those whose charity is best expressed in threats of hellfire and brimstone. I suppose that’s what they mean by tough love.
21 December 2007 | Comments [0]
India
Truth comes in at the eyes and ears; I sniff it out or feel it out or it lingers on the tongue. After orchestration, it rolls off my word processor like bad a Xerox copy. But sometimes, if I’m lucky, it has a photocopy’s immediacy. I am 47 generations away from the original, and now the story has the surreal nuance of a wanted poster hanging in the dusty far corner of the post office. It’s all noir, or hyper-saturated color, poster bleak, with none of the slick polish of “America’s Most Wanted”. No talking head introduces the next segment. It just happens, an approximation of reality.
None of this has anything to do with India, though my thinking led me there—and not the India of Gandhi or the India of the Ganges or even the India of dirt country roads with a barefoot man leading livestock toward home—but the India of a woman with hennaed feet and tinkling ankle bracelets and serpentine hips dancing across rice paper and leaving no mark.
And I am suddenly sad, realizing I have wasted most of my life pursuing women whose hips wouldn’t sway so if the finger of God Almighty came down from the sky and etched the commandment in tablets of stone.
21 December 2007 | Comments [0]
Craps
Because they had been drinking Wild Turkey into the night and because they had no dice, they used two sets of six fire ants, counting only those that landed on their backs, and letting the pot build on zeros and ones. Shooting craps with fire ants was a tedious, sometimes painful process. The ants refused to cooperate. Whenever possible, they’d dig into the men’s flesh with their mandibles and sting their hands, arching their abdomens at the petioles and plunging in the barbs. The men would inadvertently clap their hands and kill four or five ants; then they’d have to go out into the yard and dig up more. Finally Odo proposed they put a bunch in a Mason jar so they wouldn’t have to trek back and forth. Stingo thought it was a clever idea. He went out to the garage for the shovel, and then Anu held a flashlight on the anthill while Odo dug and Stingo held the jar. Of course the lid didn’t work very well, and when they got inside, the ants left the jar and clustered instead in the day-old donut holes and on the scraps of pizza crust in cardboard boxes on the table. The men didn’t care. They went back to shooting craps.
“Ow!” Anu complained, smacking his wrist. “Bitch.”
“Why you say that?” Stingo asked.
“All worker ants are girls,” Anu answered. “Everybody knows that.”
“Oh,” said Stingo. “Right. Bitch.”
When craps bored them, the men took a can of gasoline into the yard, doused the anthill, and set it afire. Their hands were swollen, lumpy and red in the flickering orange light.
20 December 2007 | Comments [0]
A Zombie’s Inventory
(anything can write haiku)
in between are hands;
on the bottom are his feet.
here are a man’s ... BRAINS!
19 December 2007 | Comments [0]
Solitary Confinement
The farther I slide into unbelief, the more I find myself literally needing to be creative. The problem is I’ve started dozens of projects without bringing any of them to fruition. Why? I’m overwhelmed by passion I simply cannot express. Words fail. Images fail. I can thrash about on the guitar, but other than primal screaming, songs fail. It makes me long for a Fender Telecaster, a huge Marshall stack and a great crunch chord.
Weirdest of all is the isolation I feel. Even with those who are, at best, marginal believers I have no common ground. Faith brings order to their world; unbelief throws it into chaos. Staunch believers fall into three categories: Those well-meaning folks (and I say this with no malice or sarcasm) who are concerned for the health of my soul, those who feel I have betrayed them in betraying the faith, and those who have simply written me off as one of the damned and can’t wait to see me fry. But with all three groups, any conversation that turns in that direction results in bristling backs and hard feelings. Not that I want to further alienate them, but suddenly nothing is off limits; I’m allowed to think freely and am not constrained by a certain mindset or worldview. To keep from hurting others I find myself making ludicrous small talk or saying nothing at all.
Those who have not lived in the Southern Bible Belt have no clue how deeply the rift alienates. As I am fond of quoting, Walker Percy calls the Deep South a “Christ-haunted place.” Never is it more apparent than when one steps out of the status quo and calls everything he once believed into question.
Some of this I release while listening to music, and right now I wish I could hear eerie circus music, but I don’t know where to find any.
I hope this doesn’t sound like whining.
18 December 2007 | Comments [0]
Fogelberg
A girlfriend introduced me to Dan Fogelberg in 1974; he had been around for a couple of years before then, but I hadn’t heard him. At the time I was locked into a different sort of sound, something louder and trippier, and I glossed over his work when it came up in rotation on my AOR station. It took Gwen, with her folk guitar and crystalline voice, to turn my hearing around.
I saw him on stage just before the release of “Nether Lands”. It wasn’t a big production, just Fogelberg, a couple of guitars and a grand piano. He was in great form, and the show was magnificent. I remember being astonished at how much stronger his voice was in person than the thin instrument captured on vinyl. That year he, James Taylor and Richie Havens showed me how a single person with a guitar could hold a room spellbound.
“Nether Lands”, with its cinematic scope, remains among my favorite albums, and I still argue with friends that “Captured Angel” never got an even shake critically.
Dan Fogelberg lost a long battle with prostate cancer on Sunday; he was 56.
Jackson Browne remembers Fogelberg at Rolling Stone.
18 December 2007 | Comments [0]
Mexican Country Stars Murdered
Just as I am discovering the contemporary music of Mexico, I stumble across “Songs of Love and Murder, Silenced by Killings” by New York Times writer James C. McKinley Jr. Thirteen Mexican country music stars have been killed in the last eighteen months, “in a trend that has gone hand in hand with the surge in violence between drug gangs....”
The musicians’ themes—glorifying drug dealers and hit men—and their tragic deaths have a familiar ring, though I can’t seem to place it in context.
18 December 2007 | Comments [0]
Ursa Minor
“Winter Solstice is only a heartbeat away. Then the days get longer. And things might become sane again.” This has been my mantra for the last ten days. Did the Druids dance naked around trees during Solstice? Is that where the phrase “blue balls” originated? Is it the reason blue ornaments look unnatural on a green tree, or is that just a trick of the spectrum? Is the ultimate act of holiday compromise dancing naked to African drums around a Christmas tree decorated in tiny Menorahs?
Someone needs a long winter’s nap.
17 December 2007 | Comments [0]
Ursa Major
Why shouldn’t I estivate? (Here’s where Wikipedia confuses: One article says bears estivate; another claims they do not. So which is true?) It’s winter. I’m a bear. I have more in common with the ursine beasts lumbering in the nearby Appalachians than with my reveling hominid peers. I could easily den right here, fall asleep on this sofa at the close of Saturnalia and awaken in time for the Moveable Feast. I’ll give up Christmas for Lent. (Yawn.)
I don’t mind being a bear. At least I’m not a creation of the plastic surgeon’s art, one of a new species of humans with cat’s eyes and lacertilian lips. If the practitioners of plastic arts (in concert with cosmetics corporations) have their way, eventually all humans inside the Green Zones of economic safety will look identical, while those of us still roaming the hills will be considered cousins of Tod Browning’s Freaks. Not entirely a bad fate, if you ask me. At least there will finally be a sense of community among those of us who are not perfect. “One of us! One of us! One of us!”
15 December 2007 | Comments [0]
The Antiblog
Not linear, but spherical. Neurons don’t fire in a straight line, but all over the place, one chain leading in 30 different directions at once. Imposing order on chaos limits creativity. Go with it.
No fear. (I hate the no fear clause, because it means I can’t be concerned about audience, fret that people won’t like me, scramble for numbers, be overly meticulous, check, re-check, re-check, re-chick, Chicken Little, the sky is falling! what?! no anal-retentive stuff? no way! I need that stuff, baby, like a junkie needs heroin. The sky is falling! The sky is falling! The sky is falling! SHUT UP!) No fear.
This is the big box of Crayolas with the sharpener built-in, an infinite roll of newsprint on which to smear finger paints: the ultimate blank page. Stop whining already. Revel in it.
Stop thinking “blog.” It’s a mud-ugly word anyway. Say it: blog. Like a combination blob and log, a blob on a log. Shapeless. Indistinguishable from every other blob in this forest of fallen logs. Blah-guh. Blah-blah-blah.
When all else fails, sing. Tap dance. Laugh. Eat pizza. Walk the dog, cat, hamster, iguana, capybara, python, zebra or earthworm. Wear a fake mustache. Buy a rubber nose. Put Groucho glasses on everyone in the family, including the animals. Dig. Spit. Hop on one foot.
14 December 2007 | Comments [0]
