Friday! Dec. 18
I love this ancient thing – a sign that winter is here again, as it has come to the building since time began. Or at least 1947:
A boot-scraper with the company name.
The urge to produce died today around 1 PM, and was surrounded by close friends: a computer, a monitor, a mouse, several hard drives, and six tiny USB thumb drives. Services will be held -
Hold on, it’s up and moving again. Dammit! I’m trying to wind down here. The day wasn’t trying, at all, but for some reason this week has felt like chewing through a wet pillow with loose dentures, whatever that means. It’s the getting up in the dark and the cold that does it. I go to sleep in the dark; I wake in the dark. I go downstairs to hear the emphysemic coffee pot struggle to produce the morning batch (I think it needs cleaning; it takes forever to make a pot, turns half the water into steam, makes noise like a sea otter with bronchitis).I get the paper, and like everyone else in this industry, judge my future by the weight of the product. There are few other businesses where you can pick up a direct indicator of your profession’s health on the frozen stoop each morn. No sausage this morning, because I’m down to the hideous stuff that tastes like maple wood chips soaked in a slaughterhouse drain and seasoned with benzine.
Drove to the office listening to the 80s channel, again. It’s the Police every fargin’ morning. Switched to the “Holiday Traditions” channel, and nodded along to Dean Martin. Always liked Dean. Never liked Frank. I’ll be honest: Frank was a jerk, and he’s overrated. Half the songs for which he’s beloved have more to do with orchestration and the fact that he was singing wistful songs at the uh-oh-my-prostate age. Dean just floated. Dean didn’t care. But he’s remarkably good at Christmas songs – both the crocked-on-nog breezy standards and the holy solemn numbers. There’s respect in the latter ones. Even if it’s false, it works. Elvis could probably sing convincingly about the pleasures of a vegetarian diet, too.
Christmas music is finally starting to have the desired effect. I know some people who crank up the jingle the moment the calendar tolls December First, but as years go on I find myself immune to its charms until the week of the event arrives. Everyone has their own pace. I’ve noticed Natalie is lagging as well; there’s nothing in the domestic zeitgeist that would muffle her enthusiasm, but perhaps the loss of belief in Santa leached much of the Wonder and Mystery from the event. Can’t be helped. I think Santa resonated for a few years in my generation, but we didn’t have as many competing fictional narratives to occupy our imagination. A kid’s world is overstuffed with creatures who can fly around in costumes.
On Friday’s NewsBreak we’ll be discussing the good and bad kid’s Christmas specials with one of our theater critics. I intend to explain why Yukon Cornelius licked his pick, so to speak. It surprises me how many people don’t know what was behind that peculiar habit.
I imagine I’ll end Christmas Eve as I usually do, stuffing the stocking, wrapping the last few gifts while listening to old radio shows – Christmas specials – then, after everyone’s asleep, watching “Scrooge,” the 1951 version. None finer. It was made in 1951, when the Victorian era still had living citizens, and it may have summed up the best of what they thought they were, just as “It’s a Wonderful Life”, with its preconceptions and archetypes, presents an American idea instantly recognizable to middle-aged people.
I still think Pottersville would have been a great place to visit if you had a three-day pass from the Army.
This Friday’s newspaper column might make no sense to outsiders – we’ve had three cougar sightings in suburbia this month. I interviewed the cougar. (It’s not up as I post this, but just scroll down to the columnist bar halfway down.
Today’s Comic Sins / Comic Ads site is devoted to the Magic Art Reproducer. Go HERE.
An experiment! I guess I’ll have to read the entire piece in context, but this just sounds odd:
“Christmas is a Christian holiday — if you’re not in the club, then buzz off. Celebrate Yule instead or dance around in druid robes for the solstice. Go light a big log, go wassailing and falalaing until you fall down, eat figgy pudding until you puke, but don’t mess with the Messiah.”
Some angry Christian exclusionist railing against secularism? Sounds like it. Happens to be Garrison Keillor, a fellow whose great gifts as a writer always seem to miss the plane when he writes newspaper columns. This line has people perturbed:
“And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write ‘Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah’? No, we didn’t.”
If someone told me these lines were by Keillor, I’d believe them, and suspect he was playing an old writer’s trick: parody your opponents by writing in their voice, stating with confidence and passion the things they believe. This is most effective when the people you’re parodying actually believe the things you’re suggesting they believe, and if Keillor is saying the religious nutgobs – i.e., anyone who’s to the right of him, religiously – are anti-Semitic, that’s A) regrettable, and B) typical.
Okay, let’s go read the entire column, and see if I’m right.
Update: I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about. Except that elitism is bad except when it’s not and Cambridge has smart people and Unitarians annoy him and he had a really bad Christmas in Norway once but he won’t this year so that’s good. So now he’s irritated by people who are “fundamentalist” and hence gynophobic gay-hating snake handlers, AND by people whose theology is looser, and hence errant and gaseous.
Well, I have my own Christmas column coming up on the Op-Ed page Christmas Eve, so you can compare and contrast, and if you think I’m unequal to his standard, let me have it.
Somewhere in my toolkit of web-design programs (no, I don’t hand-code this in a text editor in Monaco font, boiling it down until there’s no spare lines that disturb its elegant beauty; some of pages have bogus excess code in quantities that make me sad, but I’m not going back to clean them up. No sir. For a while I used a template for various pages, and an enormous hunk of code for an image map got carried along for the ride; it still exists, loading up htmls for columns I haven’t written in years) there’s got to be something for making password protected pages. I’ll need one next year.
DO NOT COMMENCE WORRYING. It’s just like this: to show my amazement and appreciation to all of you who contributed, I’ll have a special weekly page that’s above and beyond everything else here. I don’t know what it will be – advance previews of sites way off in the pipeline, perhaps. Stuff, more or less. Just . . . stuff. Anyone who sent anything can get access. There will be no diminution of the standard site updates, or shunting off of the real cream for the subscription site – it’ll just be . . . stuff. How’s that for a pitch?
So sign up and donate! You’ll also get, this weekend, a special certificate in email. Donate here!
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Darn, I wish I could comment on Garrison Keillor, but I know absolutely nothing about him. The bits I’m gleaning from this thread aren’t making me curious to know more. Even the name sort of has a yawny feeling to it.
OK, I read the linked column. It ain’t sharp enough to be called satire. I don’t know what is.
Correction: “I don’t know what IT IS.”
BTW, the words for which i will forever thank/love my father. He told me (age 3) … “Santa Claus is just make-believe. The gifts are from me and your Mother.”
Truth is always better than lies … even loving lies.
Re: GK. I enjoyed some of his pre-hiatus radio stories, though not all of them. Some are pretty touching, especially the ones about Christmas. He published some stories, but I never found a collection that I liked very much.
But ever since GK returned to NPR, the radio stories all seem to be nothing more than Time-Fillers. They’re all so inconsequential, like, “…and we all had pancakes the next morning. This Was The Week In Lake Woebegone, where the…” Meander, meander, meander, end with A Tedious Scenario Of Life In Small Town America – except it’s not small town America. And whoever wrote that he despises the small town characters in his stories is EXACTLY correct.
My Christmas wish to all: more elves, less trolls.
I think many of us are coming from a place where we remember being fans. It is sad to see someone get old and all gunched-up and lose their “funny”. @a reader
Here, now! Dean was every bit as jerky as Frank, I’ll have you know. I love listening to them both, but I’m certainly not standing up for the morals of either of them.
However, as far as Keillor goes, he’s not fit to lick your boots, Mr. Lileks. Even if you *are* completely wrongheaded about Sinatra.
Regarding GK, one of the funniest LW stories was about the hunter who discovered someone’s porn cache out in the woods, and through a bizarre set of circumstances accidently shot himself, and as he was dying, realized he’d be found in a compromising position and what that would mean for his reputation. That was memorably bizarre.
For the most part, his show is kind of comfort food, like Lawrence Welk must have been to my parent’s generation (although I recently came across a clip of some couple on the show singing “One Toke Over the Line,” which probably encapsulates the weirdness that was the ’60s.
And as a mystery reader, I loved his Guy Noir skits, and he could bring off some laugh-out-loud lines with Dusty and Lefty.
If you dip into one of his earlier Lake Woebegone books, there’s a page in which the young hero (a budding intellectual and full of himself, of course), writes a list of things he hated about LW. Keillor reproduces the list in a footnote, and “scathing indictment” just about describes it.
Now, during the late troubles, when many were eager to express their distaste for Bush, there were people whose work I continue to enjoy, even tho they be idiots (Johnny Depp) and people whose work I don’t care for anymore (John Cougar Mellencamp), but won’t miss.
I really miss the GK of old. It seems like he felt so sure of himself, and so bloated with Authority and Righteous Understanding, that he felt compelled to express it at all times, no matter whether it was appropriate or not. And now that I’ve read his column about the Jewish Songwriters Who Killed Christmas, I can only shake my head with regret over his decline. He’s really lost it.
a lot of bloated Authority and Righteous Understanding certainly comes from the other side too. There was a divergence and a heightening of political differences, it was not 9/11, it was the disastrous invasion of Iraq. GK is on the other side from you and Lileks, and so you don’t like him.
Once (probably sometime in the 80’s) we (my husband and I) read Lake Wobegone Days. Hilarious portrayal of the Norwegian bachelor farmer. The tone was somewhat similar to Jean Shepherd’s fond and absurd stories of the people he observed (if you have never read “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash” or “Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories: And Other Disasters” please try to find a copy). Somewhere Mr. Keillor started to write stories as though he thought himself as above the human condition, as though he never said or did anything absurd. Just as George Carlin went from poking fun at illogical behavior to bitter vindictiveness in the last show I saw.
Some of the most creative comedians are those that hold our absurdities up and tease us with them. When the voice changes from “don’t you think this is a bit silly?” to “you’re an idiot” is when I stop listening. The ability to see the absurd maybe springs from a desire for the world to be logical-some give up and retreat into the company of those who love them, accepting that humans will never be logical. Others descend into bitter or vindictive rants. I feel sorry for the latter, since they seem to be deprived of a loving support system. The smartest comedians quit at the top and leave us wishing for more (eg Monty Python, Calvin and Hobbes, The Far Side).
I started disliking some of GK’s work in the early 90s as he started selling out by displaying hostility to the values on which our civilization is founded. He just got farther afield with the leftists who try to blame everything on Colin Powell.
Also, the audience can’t clap properly — i.e., they can’t clap in time to music with any spontaneity. Show after show, PHC’s musical director does an excellent job of rounding up first-rate folk & roots musicians, and then, without fail, 2 seconds into any number that has any kind of cool country or bluegrass vibe whatsoever: Crack! Instantly, the dang PHC audience launches — as one! — into the exact same by-the-numbers mandatory uppercrust clap-along jive. Aint that old timey? Actually, no it aint.
I just noticed yesterday’s tweet about perfume for a lawyer. You have the name wrong for the O’Connor product, Mr. Lileks. Her fragrance is “Muddle: Concur in Part, Dissent in Part.”
You didn’t know what Keillor was talking about because he didn’t either.
Keillor was put off balance by the spectacle of people who are his real political allies, AND indisputably more intelligent than he is being pluperfect obnoxious jackasses, and it unnerved him badly.
I used to have this discussion every family event w/my father before he died. It’s comforting in an odd sort of way to rehash it with you, Genial Host: Sinatra may not be your cup of tea, but I don’t see how your position that he’s overrated can stand against the assessments of the many, many musicians that were in awe of his abilities(& I’m _not_ referring to the posers who infested those “Duets” embarrassments at the end of his career–I’m talking about all those A-list jazzers & sidemen who worked w/him, especially in his prime).