Obliquely Christmas III: Final Christmas Music Thoughts (I Promise)

Editor's Note: This is the third and final part of a series (Part One, Part Two)

I was in Times Square on the night that Michael Phelps won his fifth gold medal in Beijing. The city was hectic as usual before the race began, but everything stopped as soon as Phelps strode up to the pool. People on the sidewalk stopped walking. Cars pulled over and the passengers got out and joined the pedestrian onlookers. Every eye in Times Square was fixed on the huge screen overhead. When Phelps touched the wall at the end of the race, the place just erupted. The square was filled with an amazing energy - for four straight minutes, thousands of individuals forgot about whatever was happening in their own lives and celebrated something that everyone could relate to.


(Footage not taken by me, but similar to my experience)

This year I've done a lot of thinking about Christmas music (in case you haven't noticed). A few days before Christmas I awoke to the sound of Burl Ives' "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" leaking faintly through my bedroom wall. Later that day I was at the mall and heard the likes of Brenda Lee singing "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree," Dean Martin singing "Let It Snow," and of course, Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas." You know, the exact same recordings of the exact same Christmas songs that you hear everywhere year after year during the holidays. Against that musical backdrop I suddenly felt something akin to what I felt in Times Square during the Olympics.

I feel like the world has become a very niche-y place. I am reminded of some remarks that President Obama offered at my graduation ceremony at the University of Michigan earlier this year:

Whereas most of America used to get their news from the same three networks over dinner or a few influential papers on Sunday morning, we now have the option to get our information from any number of blogs or websites or cable news shows... If we choose only to expose ourselves to opinions and viewpoints that are in line with our own, studies suggest that we will become more polarized and set in our ways.

He was referring mostly to political insulation, but his comments could also apply to musical insulation. Two of my nephews have little MP3 players and they recently asked me, "What's on your iPod?" I had to think for a minute - hmm, they're not gonna know Regina Spektor or Caetano Veloso or Arcade Fire. Talk about musical insulation. The most universal band I could think of was the Beatles. They said that they thought they had heard of them, but they probably hadn't heard their music.

As universal as the Beatles may be, they can't touch the universality* of something like "Silent Night." So just like I love the way that the Olympics make me feel connected to the whole world, I have come to the realization that underneath the music I have formerly described as "cheesy" there is something very powerful: a spirit of mutual understanding and shared experience seems right in line with the Spirit of Christmas.

*Yes, I'm aware that not everyone in the whole world celebrates Christmas or is fluent in its traditions. Pardon my overgeneralization, but this is an overgeneralizing kind of post.

Obliquely Christmas II: Embracing Wham!

Editor's note: This post is a follow-up to a previous post about Christmas music.

I recently listened to a holiday installment of one of my favorite podcasts, All Songs Considered, where each guest brought in a few favorite Christmas songs to play for each other and the listeners. All Songs Considered usually traffics in the kind of elitist and esoteric music that appeals to overeducated hipsters like myself, and the initial Christmas selections on the podcast reflected that bias. However, fairly early on in the proceedings one of the guests on the show made a most unexpected selection:



This song was greeted by huge groans from all the other guests on the podcast*, and from me too, listening in my car. But after we all suffered through the song, the guy who chose it offered an interesting apology for his selection. He said that oftentimes during the holidays we often find ourselves at gatherings where we're fully expecting to have awkward meetings with certain acquaintances or family members, but we attend just the same because it just wouldn't be Christmas if we didn't see them. Likewise, he argued, there may be a lot of Christmas music that bugs us, but it just wouldn't feel like Christmas without it.

That reasoning really resonated for me, and I feel like since then I've had more of an open mind towards mainstream Christmas music. Yes, Wham! or Mannheim Steamroller, for example, drive me crazy, but it just wouldn't seem like Christmas without them.

* I liked their dissection of the lyrics of "Last Christmas" - George Michael gave his heart to someone and then the recipient gave George Michael's heart away to someone else? That's awkward - does George Michael even know who has his heart anymore? Does the new owner of the heart realize that it originally belonged to George Michael**?

** All this talk of George Michael makes me think of Arrested Development.

P.S. - Congratulations to Cookie Monster for breaking onto SNL last week. There was a much bigger cheer for him than there was when real host Jeff Bridges came out (not that there's anything wrong with Jeff Bridges - I'm looking forward to the Coen Brothers remake of True Grit), so let's hope Cookie Monster can parlay this appearance into a full hosting gig.

A Tale of Two Nights

Last week I lost my house key, so whenever no one was home/awake I had to enter the house through the garage. Last Friday night I was out watching movies with friends and didn't get home until about 1:00 a.m., so when I got home I clicked the garage door opener to get inside the garage. I then turned the handle on the door leading from the garage into the house. Locked. Uh-oh.

After a failed brainstorming session, the only way I could think of for getting inside the house was to get on my cell phone and call my sister's land line and have her come down and open the door. I was really reluctant to wake her up but made the call anyways. No answer. Huh.

There was one door in the garage that wasn't locked - the Hacking's Honda Odyssey. So I climbed inside, rolled my coat into a pillow, and scrunched my body across the back seat. I fell asleep pretty quickly, but at 3:30 I woke up because I was a little cold. I remembered that I had a big blanket in the trunk of my car, so I fetched it and went back to sleep in the back of the minivan. My cell phone's alarm clock went off at 7:30, at which time I called my brother-in-law and asked him to unlock the door for me. "Have you been out here all night?" he asked. Yep, I had. I went upstairs, brushed my teeth and changed into my pajamas, and slept for a few more hours in my bed.

This may sound like it was really irritating, but as the whole saga was playing out I thought it was incredibly funny. After all, it was my fault for losing my key and I knew it would be a funny story to tell afterward. It really wasn't that uncomfortable sleeping in the van (although my knees were a little sore since I had to fold my legs up to fit across the tight seat). As I drifted off to sleep in the van I fondly recalled a night I spent curled up in a similar fashion but under very different circumstances.

*****

When I returned to Brazil in 2008 my flight to São Paulo was delayed for about two hours, so by the time I got through immigration and customs it was already about midnight, and then the bus ride to Campinas took another hour and a half. Although I had arranged for a place to stay in Campinas for the rest of the week, I hadn´t been able to find a definite place to stay that first night. I had a guide book that mentioned several hotels close to the bus station in Campinas, so I figured I could just check into a room as soon as I arrived. However, the "hotels" it listed were actually just houses with the word "Hotel" painted on the outside wall where one could rent a vacant bedroom for a night, and they were all dark and gated up for the night.

So I followed the lead of the many homeless people inside the bus terminal and curled up across three hard plastic seats with my head resting on top of my small bag and my arms wrapped tightly around my large backpack. The building had no doors so it was no warmer in there than it was out on the street, but at least inside there were a few security guards wandering around.

The combination of the hard seats jutting into my back, the anxiety that my bags might disappear, and my shivering from the cold night air kept me from getting any real sleep. I just lay there for hours thinking, "Is this the craziest thing I have ever done in my life?" I scrolled through my brain looking at memories from every era of my life and concluded that if this wasn´t the craziest thing I´d ever done, it was definitely near the top.

*****

So, sleeping on the cushy backseat of a minivan inside of a safe garage wasn't bad at all.

SST: Mysterious Theater

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

If the Three Young Sleuths ever need a mentor, they need look no further than Sherlock Hemlock, the World's Greatest Detective. He and his trusted companion Watson would prove invaluable to them should it turn out that the ever-elusive True Meaning of Christmas is housed inside of a circle, square, or triangle.

Star of the East

Last night was my ward's Christmas dinner and two weeks in advance I was asked to perform a musical number. No prob - I just recycled my Soirée number from two years ago:



However, just two days in advance I was asked to do a second number because someone else on the program dropped out. So I spent an afternoon flipping through my sister's easy piano Christmas songbooks looking for a suitable selection, but most of it was the same old cheesy stuff that drives me crazy. However, one of the books yielded an unexpected surprise: "Star of the East."

This performance is dedicated to the only two people I have ever heard play "Star of the East," my Grandma Tanner and my dad:



P.S. - On the subject of Christmas music, my friend Jess sent me a copy of Sufjan Stevens' "Songs for Christmas" (42 songs in all!) and I absolutely love it. The holiday-themed originals are fun and ambitious, the arrangements of even the most overdone Christmas standards are as fresh and layered as anything on his "Michigan" or "Illinois" albums, and the whole vibe of the collection is joyous and warm. Or as Jess put it in the comments on my "Obliquely Christmas" post, "Sufjan Steven's album=amazing, brilliant and redemptive. redemptive in the sense that it upholds the sanctity of christmas music, while reinventing it and is not as you put it 'schmaltzy'." I highly recommend it and I can envision myself putting it on at Christmastime for years and years to come. I bet even the Three Young Sleuths would love it.

The True Meaning of Christmas

About seven or eight years ago I was invited to a party where I only knew one other person out of a tight-knit group of friends. On that night they indoctrinated me into a game they invented and played at every get-together. The game went like this:

1) One person in the group made up a fake movie title.
2) Everyone in the group wrote a short plot synopsis of the fake movie.
3) Each synopsis was read aloud and the group tried to guess which member of the group had written which synopsis.

It was a fun game and the group of friends all thought of some wildly imaginative fake movie plots, but since I had just met them it was hard for me to guess who had written what, with one exception - this one guy who ended every single synopsis with the phrase "... and three young sleuths discover The True Meaning of Christmas." Without fail. Every round.

A team of rogue botanists race to thwart a deadly race of mutant ferns that threatens to wipe out the entire population of French Guiana, and three young sleuths discover The True Meaning of Christmas.

A world-famous concert violinist suddenly becomes the target of a ruthless gang of pirates when he inherits a priceless Fabergé egg collection, and three young sleuths discover The True Meaning of Christmas.

Ever since then I can't hear the phrase "The True Meaning of Christmas" without chuckling and thinking of those three poor, eternally youthful sleuths (in Sherlock Holmes attire, naturally) who must walk the earth in an everlasting quest for The True Meaning of Christmas. I hope that someday in their travels they cross paths with Linus van Pelt, that they may finally rest from their labors.

New Glasses(es)

Once upon a time, I solicited your help in picking out a new pair of glasses. Remember? The problem with glasses is that, like many goods and services, they cost money, which is in short supply when you're unemployed. So I held out until I found a good deal, courtesy of JC Penney. Said deal actually allowed me to get two pairs for less than the price of one pair of glasses/lenses at other places. For a guy who felt like he wasn't capable of picking out a suitable pair, getting two pairs took a lot of the pressure off. It allowed me to hedge my bets and get a more conservative pair to offset a bolder pair, and to get two different colors. Here are the results:

The first pair is roughly analogous to 'A' from the former post (but silver), which fared well in the poll. The second pair is nearly identical to 'C', which was by far the most divisive pair in the mix (scroll down to the comments section for that post - it's a battleground between the 'C' lovers and haters). Like the haters, I had some reservations about them - that they were too trendy, that they're a very different look for me - but when I tried them on again I just liked them. I slept on it and later took friends to the store with me who supported my decision (I liked the sentiment of my friend Nichole*, who said that they sent a message like "I'm wearing glasses, dangit!")

In case you have forgotten how my previous pair of glasses looked, here is a reminder for comparison's sake:

One thing that both of my new pairs of glasses have going for them is that they lack that "got flattened by a car" quality possessed by my former pair. But maybe the "flattened by a car" look will be hot in the future, so maybe I'll hang on to them.

After wearing naught but contacts every day for over three months, my exhausted eyes were more than ready for a break. However, I've had to adjust to wearing glasses again. When I first put them on they made the world look so flat. I got used to my whole field of vision being sharply in focus and suddenly my peripheral vision was blurry. For the first few days I get a little dizzy every time I turned my head sharply to the left or right. Fortunately, I have gotten over that and I am happily bespectacled once again.

*Happy birthday, Nichole!