Nunfoolery.

King Kong Kristmas

Greetings, Faithful Reader-type Folk.

Starting tomorrow, I’m going to be on vacation until January 2nd. Every time I say that, I hear a tiny "halle-freakin-lujah" go off in my head. I’ve always maintained that not having to take the train into and out of the city is pretty much a vacation in itself, and everything else is just gravy. I don’t really have anything special planned other than catching up on some serious quality time with my lady fair and taking in a couple movies. At the top of the list are Syriana and Munich.

As I’ve professed to just about anyone who’ll listen, it seems now that the phase of Summer Blockbusters has ceased and the good stuff is finally being rolled out. And thank God, because by August I was pretty much convinced that the future of cinema was, in a word, dead. The fact that Wedding Crashers had the theatrical lifespan it did speaks volumes. Mind you, I’m not a movie snob who can list off 27 obscure independent movie directors or who debuted what at Sundance this year. And, to be fair, every now and then I do like a big, stupid, star-studded, spoon-fed action flick. Hell, I actually paid full admission price to see The Day After Tomorrow. Why? Because sometimes I just need it. There wasn’t a great deal of hype involved in that movie, and that certainly helped a lot in my decision. Most everyone knows by now what my feelings are on hype, so I won’t dabble in the repetitive.

The latest movie to be hyped to the nth degree is King Kong. It's a remake of a remake, for cryin' out loud. However, A Christmas Carol has been made a thousand different ways, so disputing the relevance or integrity of a remake is a moot point. When I first heard about the new King Kong, I have to admit that I was intrigued. Then I heard Jack Black was going to be in it, so I pretty much figured what I’d be in for if I saw it. The 70s version of King Kong I actually liked. Jeff Bridges was great, and it had seriousness and credibility (as credible as a 50-foot gorilla could be) to it. Now I like Jack Black. I do. But add him to a movie and the precedent is automatically set. It’s won’t be King Kong. It’ll be the Jack Black Show. Then there’s the matter of CGI. It most definitely has its place, and I suspect it’ll be gratuitous in this one. Surprise, surprise, I have some strong feelings on that, too, but I’ll save it for another day.

I’m pretty sure I won’t be posting while I’m on vacation (no internet connection at home), so I would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a Happy/Merry Chanukah/Christmas/Kwanzaa/Boxing Day, and a Happy New Year, y’all. Be good to each other.

Love and Peace to you.

~SP



(The Infographic at the top is courtesy of The Onion).

Lego My Ego.

Here’s a little Christmas story for ya. It doesn’t involve an official Red Ryder air carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle, however. No, it's about…

Legos.

Now, I’ve made my point abundantly clear on just how vital Legos were to me as a youth. Even beyond kiddom, actually. I’m not sure exactly what the understood age limit is on Legos, but I’m pretty sure a kid was supposed to have outgrown them by age 12. I've never believed that, and I know for a fact that some engineers at MIT still pla…er, use them for designing purposes. Regardless of the age, Legos were often seen as nerdy. Not Dungeons and Dragons-level nerdiness, but nerdy enough that if you played with them, chances are you probably weren’t at all interested in the fairer sex. Well, I most certainly was. But I also loved me some Legos and would resort to purt near anything to get them.

When I lived in Pennsylvania, a local newspaper called The Daily Intelligencer held a competition, asking kids to write a letter to Santa and send it to the newspaper. I believe the prize was a gift certificate to Kay Bee Toys or something. I was eight, and I didn’t believe in Santa Claus at that point. But I was willing to throw integrity to the wind in order to score a gift certificate so I could buy—you guessed it—Legos.

I drafted a letter, extolling the greatness of Legos and how over the moon I’d be if “You, Santa, would bring me some.” I may have even used “beseech” in there somewhere. I exercised my best penmanship and paid particular attention to articulation--no sense risking receiving something erroneously:.

“What? The kid asked for Eggos! Says so right here! Not my problem!”

I and three other kids won the competition. I thought it would be a quiet victory (more like I hoped it would be) and they’d just send me a gift certificate.

Oh, no. Not for you, little boy. We have something much more sinister and embarrassing in store.

What they did was publish the shameless pleas on the front page of the newspaper. Christ. Talk about bittersweet. I wasn’t aware of the whole front-page bit until one of the girls I had a severe crush on brought in the newspaper and showed everyone in the whole class (thanks a million, Kristin). Not only was it now public knowledge that I was just goofy for Legos, it was now also public knowledge that I, a fourth grader, actually still believed in Santa Claus. I didn’t, but try explaining that to a class full of your peers who already had their minds made up.

I prayed that Christmas vacation week would be enough time for everyone to forget about it and move on, already.

It, um, wasn’t.

Now Playing: THE LORD

My lady fair and I have noticed that churches as of late have gotten rather, uh, “artistic” with their marquees (marquii?). Some of them are witty, and others are pretty liberal with the fire and brimstone bit. I’m beginning to wonder if there’s some special secret phrase book that congregations go by to come up with these; a random theme generator, perhaps.

Some examples:

1. GOD ACCEPTS KNEE MAIL

2. GOD IS LIKE HALLMARK-- HE ONLY CARES ENOUGH TO SEND THE VERY BEST

3. EXPOSURE TO THE SON WILL PREVENT BURNING

4. got jesus?

5. HIS BLOOD’S FOR YOU

…and my personal favorite:

6. GIVE SATAN AN INCH AND HE’LL BE A RULER

Ahhhhh. That’s good stuff.

Oh, and the picture? I took that from a bag of firewood. I suspect it's supposed to look like a friendly, cute little chimenea. Personally, I think it looks like a mascot for some weird type of condom. Or pacifier.

Barnstorming

Something else that makes me kind of wistful this time of year? Thoughts of my very first real band: Until the End.

We had started in the fall, but by this point in the year, things were really starting to pick up musically and socially. We were a trio, with a female vocalist/guitarist with great pipes and strong songwriting, her powerhouse brother on drums, and me: a huge-maned, bashful 17-year-old on bass.

At fifteen, I bought a cheap bass to play along with my guitarist older brother. We played twelve-bar blues and the odd Zeppelin song, but beyond that, I’d never really ventured outside of the safety of the family room. That would change forever one day at lunch in high school. I got a tip from an acquaintance of mine that he was living with a band that was looking for a bassist. I had met the drummer before; but I was merely an accessory to my older brother at that point. You see, the drummer was legendary in his drumming and personality, and that legend was rivaled only by the parties he threw. He moved to my town around the same time I did, and he wasted no time making a name for himself. His new living space was a dream come true, I would imagine, as adjacent to the house was a very large barn. A drummer’s Valhalla. Almost immediately, he started jamming with whomever would drop by, and eventually my brother who had aspirations of singing started hanging around there as well. Naturally, as a 15-year-old, my conduit to the outside world was my older brother, so I got to tag along to some of these epic events.

The barn was very, very old. The upper floor would bounce precariously all night long as the crowds grew and grew, and the wiring in there was pretty sketchy with the old-fashioned exposed porcelain insulators. Its inner walls had exposed beams, and there were thousands of nails poking through from the outside. I vividly remember watching a guy at one of these legendary parties, completely polluted; falling into one of the walls, and a nail poked him right in the forehead. I pulled him back from the wall, took a good look at him to assess the damage, and watched a rivulet of blood leak from the puncture. I threw him over my shoulder and my brother and I drove him home. We ultimately left him on his lawn because we just weren’t sure what else to do about him. He lived.

I learned a lot that summer.

Fast forward a couple years to the lunch room conversation. I had seen the drummer play before, and in short, he was a god. Today he’d tell me what a silly bastard I am for thinking such a thing, but when you’re fifteen and you see a guy play drums with that kind of aptitude, he’s a god. End of story.

So here I am at seventeen, having really only noodled semi-seriously at home, playing to AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath records (yes, VINYL), with an opportunity to join an actual, honest-to-God band. In a move that still surprises me to this day, I accepted the invitation to audition. The surprise I’m speaking of is because I was SO green and hadn’t really ever played in a band before, and I was pretty sure I would get steamrolled and laughed out of the audition. I was quite convinced I had no business entertaining such an idea, but something pushed me along.

The acid test came, and there was neither any anxiety nor embarrassment. On the contrary, the brother and sister were totally patient and cool, even though they had credentials that outclassed me twenty fold. It seemingly ended as quickly as it started, and I was in. I was flying from that for a week. Right away we got down to rehearsing, and though we had a decent work ethic, the rehearsals were pretty loose. People were always coming and going to either listen, or more likely illegally quaff their beer in peace. The idea of a “closed practice” was bandied about from time to time, but it just never panned out. The bottom line was that the barn was just a great place to be. Loud, free rock and roll and a great vibe. At this point, I’m still the shy new kid and would remain that way for a long time. But I sure loved to people watch. And the cops. Man, the cops. They would show up because the lady across the street would call them every time. She was a music teacher, strangely enough.

The other beauty of the barn was that it wasn’t insulated. Snow would come in on occasion. We rehearsed upstairs, the most open part of the barn. It had a large drum riser, tapestries, spray-painted walls, lights, a million bottles and cigarette butts, and some shag-nasty couches. Frankly, it was heaven. However, heaven was also the same temperature inside as it was outside. We tried many methods of keeping the place warm, like using kerosene heaters and hanging The World’s Largest Afghan as a curtain to hold in the heat, but they were just decorations more than anything else. Playing gigs was exciting as hell for me, but moving our gear in and out of the barn most certainly was not, as it had insanely narrow and steep stairs that had claimed its fair share of victims over the years.

Now, am I wistful for hours of freezing my ass off? Hardly. But thanks to the passage of time, I can easily romanticize the whole thing and glaze over how difficult it was to muster up the motivation to essentially play music in a walk-in freezer for a couple hours, and trying to shake off the chill for the four hours after that. It was around Christmas that I finally started loosening up, and some very important friendships were forged that I still hold dear to this day. I distinctly remember the electric feeling, that I was part of something that would stick with me for the rest of my life. And it sure did. I had the foresight to record our rehearsals all the time. Without even realizing when I'm doing it, I usually revisit those rehearsals this time of year.

WHOA.

Incidentally, the post about Christmas music started out altogether differently. The strip you see to the left (click to enlarge)? That's what my post was going to be, virtually word for word. Thing is, I couldn't get it out coherently and went with a different theme instead.

Five hours later, I saw this strip for the first time in the new Weekly Dig, and the coincidence really freaked me out.

Anyway, I love this guy's strips. The commentaries really hit home, and I happen to think he's a great artist as well. Check it out.

http://www.thinkingapeblues.com/home.html

Santa, Baby.

Everyone has their traditions that they follow year after year, without question. As I got older and realized that even though I still had a pretty unrelenting image of what Christmas should look and feel like (to me), I’m just not a kid anymore and knew my excitement surrounding this particular holiday would start to wane eventually. As my father said, the best you can do is create your own traditions.

For the sake of general definition, sure, it could be said that I celebrate Christmas. Do I attend midnight mass? No. Am I out singing carols? Nah. Do I follow any of the religious practices of Christmas? Am I even a Christian? Nope. More accurately, I celebrate the spirit of it. One thing I do love about this time of year is the electricity in the air, and it's not from my stocking'd feet. The love and warmth seems to get bumped up a notch. How could a super-lovey dude like myself not like something like that. Mind you, it’s difficult to find even a trace of that warmth when you’re anywhere near a place that has something to sell. Bah. I’ll refrain from the commercialism diatribe. We all know what commercialism has done to the holiday and it’s a tired subject.

I feel sorry my Jewish friends because man, they just get pummeled with the whole Christmas thing. They have no choice because there’s simply no escape. When was the last time you were in a mall and heard klezmer music played over and over? Or 83 different versions of "Maoz Tzur" (6 jazz, 19 R&B, 47 country, 3 punk, 7 Mannheim Steamroller)? Neither have I.

Music is a HUGE part of it all.

1. It's all about the Vince Guaraldi Peanuts Christmas album for me. It somehow brings it all together and takes me away.

2. The Nutcracker. What can I tell ya. I grew up with it and have fond memories associated with it. Whether its original intent had anything to do with Christmas or not is irrelevant to me. It’s just a great piece, period.

3. Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Mormons, Episcopalians, Catholics, Trekkies, Lutherans, Scientologists, whatever. All I know is choral music is chilling and I dig it.

4. Sure, I have the obligatory Time-Life Treasury, and Time-Life reeeeeeeeally wants me to buy more stuff from them. Ain’t gonna happen. More and more I’m finding myself fast-forwarding through it. At some point in the past couple years, Roger Whittaker is getting harder to listen to. I just have visions of a large, singing beard/sweater combination when I hear that guy.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MI HERMANO.

Definition

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"'God Bless America' shouldn't mean 'God Damn Everybody Else'".