Friday, December 23, 2011

Top Christmas Albums


How about some holiday music? Hear too much already? Bah humbug, well you’ve simply heard too much of the same old crap that fills the space between your radio dials and the grand halls of your local shopping center. You have, most likely as I have, heard Jingle Bells and Little Saint Nick just one to many times while shopping, working, or driving. All the same I have a great fondness of Christmas music, contemporary or otherwise, and I’ve decided to put a short list of my favorites together. The thought came to me while digging through my iTunes library on a day off. My freshmen roommate has left me with a well loved bias against singles and love for the experience of a complete album; the sort of collections of songs that would be worthy of heavy pressed vinyl and cardboard sleeves exploding with colorful artwork. So, for now, on with the list:

1. A Very She & Him Christmas – Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward – 2011

Hopefully you’ll be having a few friends and acquaintances by this Christmas Eve. And no matter if they are the closet of friends, comfortably distant relatives, or even long lost lovers your going to want some music to fill that void of silence as coats are collected and guest made comfortable. How about A Very She & Him Christmas an album of mostly covers of classics and soon to be classics? Simple lyrics with just the right number of accompanying studio musicians to fill out the melody make for the perfect relaxing background to even the most awkward of reunions. This is a rather new album for me but maybe it’ll become part of your seasonal standbys too.

2. Holiday Sprits – Straight No Chaser – 2008

Now for an album with even less accompaniment, actually to be exact no accompaniment. Yes another a capella group, yes the most cliché of all a capella groups, yes they are main street sellouts. Guilty on all counts, but they’ve nailed that perfect sound. A mix of Boy Band pop like the backstreet boys and college glee clubs that just sounds right. If you don’t enjoy this album in the background of your next holiday get together then you are a truly jaded soul.

3. Barenaked for the Holidays – Barenaked Ladies – 2004

If you enjoy the goofy lyrics of Straight No Chaser’s 12 Days of Christmas then you’ll most likely love what has to be one of my all time favorites Barenaked Ladies’ Barenaked for the Holidays. You’ve probably heard their version of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, my favorite version of my favorite Christmas Carol. It is, just as SNC’s 12 Days the outlier of the album over all. This short carol is a small spot of seriousness within an otherwise fanciful and somewhat facetious album. Have no fear though, the album still captures a very real set of emotions truly unique to the holidays and all of us who have lived through a Christmas outside the confines of a Normand Rockefeller Portrait.

4. A Charlie Brown Christmas – Vince Guaraldi - 1965

Speaking of classics how about Saturday morning comics and network Christmas Specials. This album is the perfect family gathering album. No one in your family can play the piano? No worry Schroder has your back. Dad picks out a crummy tree? Charlie knows his pain. Family issues? Counseling is a nickel or two away. Sit back, embrace the chaos of the latest family drama and turn on this classic.

5. Christmas with the Rat Pack – The Rat Pack – 2002

After dinner is over don’t bother cleaning up, it can wait. Go mix your self a martini or pour yourself J&B and soda and sit back and tap your foot. Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr.; Game, Set, and Match. This is simply the perfect Christmas album. It has all the classics and more style then you can shake a stick at. Never in my life have I heard Jingle Bells or Rudolph while at work or shopping and not thought to my self I’d rather be lessoning to the Rat Pack.

Now this is the most cliché post I’ve written in long time, justly so because it is simply that time of year. For a moment we all get to be saps. We get to reminisce about Christmases past that in reality where never as grand as we remember. It is this time of year that we dive into the insanity of another shopping season, gather with love ones, or simply sit back and throw on another album while we sink into our chairs at night and remember what was and what could have been. The music is just the sound track. We make all the memories our selves. But what better way to capture existence, even if just for a moment, then with a few old Christmas Favorites? So put some records on while I pour…

~ Disclaimer! ~
These albums listed in no particular order! I guarantee I skipped you favorite. Feel free to discuses and argue among yourselves and post your own favorites in the comments. Merry Christmas!

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Silence


Sitting down with a bowl of tomato soup, and a grilled cheese sandwich I dip the golden buttered bread into a sea of red. I take a bite. I feel a spark. A connection is made to some long lost place in time and space. I feel the urge to climb onto the rough and scream out lines of prose while sitting fire to effigies of Allen and Jack. I want to get up and paint pop art icons of the can and lead protests across college campuses into the hills an’ dales to save tortured beasts of burden from their unhappy fates! But this to passes quietly. It is but one spark in one small corner of the universe. But all of the times, peoples, and places brought into consciousness are to nothing more then a glint in the universes endless seething darkness. Madness. I lift the bowl to my lips and drink the red liquid as if taking part in some ancient blood rite; the kind of ritual which Franz wrote about; whose residual presence drove the men in white coats to resort to insulin therapy and electro shock to chase away the demons of those very same savages of old. I stand up as if to take a step forward, in order to break the hold of that moment, only to fall back down. Scream I think. Why bother I mutter. The music cracks, silence, the needle raises and falls onto its resting place. Silence. Embrace it. Fill it. Destroy it. 

Silence


Sitting down with a bowl of tomato soup, and a grilled cheese sandwich I dip the golden buttered bread into a sea of red. I take a bite. I feel a spark. A connection is made to some long lost place in time and space. I feel the urge to climb onto the rough and scream out lines of prose while sitting fire to effigies of Allen and Jack. I want to get up and paint pop art icons of the can and lead protests across college campuses into the hills an’ dales to save tortured beasts of burden from their unhappy fates! But this to passes quietly. It is but one spark in one small corner of the universe. But all of the times, peoples, and places brought into consciousness are to nothing more then a glint in the universes endless seething darkness. Madness. I lift the bowl to my lips and drink the red liquid as if taking part in some ancient blood rite; the kind of ritual which Franz wrote about; whose residual presence drove the men in white coats to resort to insulin therapy and electro shock to chase away the demons of those very same savages of old. I stand up as if to take a step forward, in order to break the hold of that moment, only to fall back down. Scream I think. Why bother I mutter. The music cracks, silence, the needle raises and falls onto its resting place. Silence. Embrace it. Fill it. Destroy it. 

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Merry Christmas


Old women pass, as Christmas music floats within the stream of shuffling feet and crinkling shopping bags…  as old women meet and exchange greetings. Plastic cards and small pieces of paper switch hand. Fussing of children. Angry middle age women clench fists around handfuls of coupons. As old women swap only greetings and recycled bits of news…
They are the only ones to stop here in this moment…
Others busy them selves with the push and pull…
Old women stand and talk…

Simple observations. Observations which where interrupted by the reply a woman made to one of my collages upon receiving a hearty ‘Merry Christmas.’

“It so nice to hear that someone in retail still says Merry Christmas…”

Someone? Does someone include the dozen other workers? How about the throng of women wearing holiday buttons proclaiming the reason for the season… Or all of those old women exchanging just the same exact greeting. The war on Christmas is nothing more then an argument between pundits. Spend a few days, weeks, or months in retail being asked by old men if your really still allowed to say such thing as Merry Christmas and you to will observe the same. Seasonal greetings, from the perspective of anyone having passed such time in retail, become as cliché as hallmark greeting cards and soda commercials.  At times one feels the vein wish to avoid all such greetings in order to simply refuse to recognize the so-called reason for the season.

Many pundits would point to this emotional reaction as the apocalyptic conclusion to the so-called war on Christmas. Argue as you may about the purpose of the separation of church and state in the bill of rights, or the declarations made in the Treaty of Tripoli, or the morality of ‘blue’ laws, or even the history of how our first congress snubbed the Christmas Holiday altogether for some sixty odd years. Christmas is more alive then ever before. And in a season of holiday greetings and gift buying and other merry making I am much less concerned about the ‘War on Christmas,’ and more interested in why no one seems to have a problem with the Magi?

I am of course here being facetious. But do those old women, posed in conversation remember the Magi of old? The wise men, who after riding from Babylon, and coming to the town of Bethlehem,

“Saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.”

Those strangely ‘oriental’ figures, with the dark skin complications of Middle Eastern peoples. I have set here two in my nativity. Three small Fisherprice Little People wise men wearing Arab head dress. For some odd reason mine are distinctly Asian, African, and Anglo Saxon in respective complications… But maybe that’s just it. We don’t have real wise men anymore, just a collective group of sudo-multicultural individuals carrying non-descript presents for the son of some monotheistic God. Is this what we where supposed to be afraid of? That secularism and political corrective-ness might rob us of the fact that the first group of men to travel into the lands of Judea to recognize our lord in savor where a bunch of Middle Eastern guys?

           In a world where it is unacceptable to portray Muslims as ‘normal people,’ or to utilize them as the sort of people who make for compiling reality television characters it is also very much unacceptable to recognize their role in the nativity. Or to recognize that Muslims may not celebrate Christmas but that they have recognized Jesus in their own unique way. Just as so many ‘fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each others salvation…’ many more fall to their knees and proclaim those very places of worship besieged by legions of atheists and Muslims bent on their destruction!

           The rest of us keep shopping. A few of us stop to reflect and share what may be our last moments with a passing friend. I do my duty to the company and continue to pass out the appropriate greetings of my choosing. In the evening I will go home and put on an old record and pour a glass of whiskey. And in the quite of night I’ll meditate quietly, wondering to my self, where my missing Joseph figurine is…

Merry Christmas

A very quick poem...


She always came in the dead of night,
Bright light of day all but gone from her,
Spurring lust and shame,
Blame always laying with me,
Be it never the same,
Flame of love now long gone,
Spawning a new dark void,
Devoid of purpose, Devoid of hope,
Groping only to find soft soap and lies,
Chastised and compromised by her thighs,
Dies all love,
But the comes a shove from above,
Mourning dove undreamed of full of purrs,
Spurs thoughts of hers and drabs of affection,
Reflections of her complexion,
Rejection and shame,
Became comfort and fresh air,
Caring from a ball of fluff and fur. 
 
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