December snowflakes

Well, the Christmas tree is up; my partner's birthday was December 6th (which, he would want everyone to know, is also Santa Claus's birthday--or at least the feast day of the real Saint Nicholas, who died on that date, and who, so says Wikipedia, was never officially canonized as a Saint by the Catholic Chuch, though he became one by popular acclaim, so to speak--you learn something new every day!); we had our "Christmas" with my brother's family this weekend; and there is snow on the ground, so I guess for all intents and purposes, the Christmas season is officially in full swing, which means guilt-free Christmas media indulgence!

So the other night, we watched "A Charlie Brown Christmas," my favorite seasonal TV program of all. I remember seeing it when it was first broadcast in 1965 (I would have been 9). My mom was making bourbon balls for a school bake sale (and she tells me that they all sold before they made it to the sales floor), my dad was reading American Rifleman or Argosy or some other kind of manly magazine, and my kid brother of 4 was probably getting ready for bed. We were living in Arizona at the time and temperature was in the 60s with no promise of snow (though it did snow at least one Christmas day while we lived there), but the show had such a warm Christmassy feel to it that the weather didn't matter. Obviously, the fact that I remember so much about the circumstances of my first viewing shows the program made an impact on me (I also remember a TV Guide cover that week with Charlie Brown and Lucy), and I continued watching it most years even when I was in high school (and too cool to watch cartoons). It's become a must-see every December; even in the years when I'm feeling Scroogish, I still watch this and the Pee-Herman Christmas special.

The show is now lionized in some circles for its "bravery" in being a kids Christmas show that dares to include a Biblical reading referencing the Nativity, but I think the real reasons it's remained popular are the same reasons that the Peanuts strip ran so long: its dry humor, its self-deprecating satire. and its use of children as portrayers of adult foibles. We've all been Charlie Brown at one time or another, the kid who champions the scrawny Christmas tree even though he knows he'll get laughed at by the crowd. What's kind of odd here is that Charlie is actually redeemed at the end, something that rarely happened in the comic strip, and maybe for that reason, its an ending that still makes me tear up just a little. I always identified more with Linus (yes, I had a favorite blue blanket as a kid, and my partner Don might be persuaded to tell people about my continuing connection with a worn and nubbly brown blanket I still wrap myself up in on cold nights) and I imagine that he grew up into a bookish and somewhat shy but nerdishly charming gay guy (not at all like me). The music is also fabulous--even though the jazzy score by Vince Guaraldi feels so right to us now, I bet it was a daring choice back then for what was marketed primarily as a kids cartoon show. And one last bit of identification with Charlie Brown: I think most of us have, at one time or another, felt that free-floating anxiety which Lucy diagnoses as pantophobia: the fear of everything!

Good, better, and best humbugs

A blogger named Woolgatherer has rated the Scrooge performances he's seen over the years, inspiring me to do the same. One of the pleasures of watching the movie and TV versions of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" is seeing how each one differs. Each actor who plays Scrooge has to play a mean and stingy villain in the beginning and then undergo a credible redeeming change into a life-embracing, Christmas-loving softie by the end. But each actor usually finds some small way to make the part his or her own. My own favorite is the 1951 British film with Alistair Sim, officially titled Scrooge, but called A Christmas Carol in America; almost "film noirish" in tone, it's dark and creepy as befits a ghost story, and Sim makes a wonderful Scrooge, not melodramatically wicked but hard and cold and greedy, and his backstory gets fleshed out a bit more here than in other versions. He is equally fine as the transformed do-gooder, leaping and singing to himself with abandon. Mervyn Johns and Hermione Baddley are excellent Cratchits. The spirits are OK, and, as with most versions, the less said about Tiny Tim, the better. (It's not usually the fault of child actors--it's basically an impossible role to do well.)

My second favorite is the 1984 TV version with George C. Scott. The visual production is outstanding, not so much dark, but snowy and misty. Scott throws more of his actorly weight into the role, which leads to his almost (but not quite) going over the top on occasion. He is better as the mean Scrooge, but still does a nicely nuanced turn after he turns warm-hearted, and is especially good in the final scene with Bob Cratchit (well played by David Warner). I don't care much for Angela Pleasance as the Ghost of Christmas Past, but Edward Woodward makes the best Christmas Present ever: realistically larger-than-life, jolly yet able to scold Scrooge when needed (all the more impressive when you realize he's scolding George C. Scott and holding his own).

Third is the 1938 MGM production with Reginald Owen, a reliable supporting actor who specialized in stiff-upper-lip Brits in American films of the 30's and 40's--toward the end of his career, he was Admiral Boom in Mary Poppins. This version is the shortest and has the lightest touch and probably the biggest budget, leading to a nice glossy look which is pleasing even if it works against the gloomy ghostly aspects of the story. Owen is fine, even if he doesn't truly make the part his own. What makes this version a little different is that Bob Cratchit seems to get almost as much screen time as Scrooge. Gene Lockhart shines in the role (pictured above), especially in a long scene in the beginning in which, while horsing around with some children in the streets, he knocks Scrooge's hat off his head with a snowball.

Those are my top 3. I also like the 70's TV movie An American Christmas Carol with Henry Winkler as a mean landlord foreclosing on a handful of families during a Depression-era Christmas. The animated Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol, in which the nearly blind actor Magoo plays Scrooge in a theatrical production, is surprisingly serious for much of its running time, confining the humor to the bits of Magoo crashing into things offstage. Like Woolgatherer, I am not a fan of the Bill Murray Scrooged, a modern updating of the story--nice idea, but it falls flat, and Murray's final improvised speech is the most cringe-worthy moment in mainstream Hollywood cinema, bar none. There's a 1935 British version with Seymour Hicks who made a specialty of playing Scrooge on stage for most of his career, but the public domain versions I've seen of it are incomplete and murky. The Muppet and Mickey Mouse versions have not stayed with me, so I guess they are ripe for rediscovery.

Cable TV versions really should get their own entry, as there seem to be at least one or two new ones popping up every year. The only ones that stand out to me are Ebbie and A Diva's Christmas Carol, with Susan Lucci and Vanessa Williams respectively as female Scrooge figures, and a cute variation called Karroll's Christmas with Tom Everett Scott as a man to whom the three Christmas ghosts appear by accident--they were supposed to visit his cranky neighbor, Wallace Shawn. Robert Zemeckis is working on an animated version for 2009, but if it winds up anything like the dreadful Polar Express, I won't be in line to see it.

More Christmas Music

I mentioned earlier that the Leroy Anderson Christmas Album was my favorite recently-released Christmas album. But I would probably rank it only in the top 10 overall among my all-time favorites. (I love making lists; I'm trying not to make yet another "all-time" list, but I don't have much will power!) My absolute favorite would be The Carpenters' Christmas Portrait, first released in 1978. It's got glossy production values, old-fashioned but creative musical arrangements, creamy choral backgrounds, and of course Karen Carpenter's lovely lead vocals. For many years, this album was only available in a truncated version combined with cuts from their second (and inferior) Christmas album, but a few years ago, A&M Records released a 2-disc Christmas Collection with both albums in their entireties, so that's the way to go. The album is best listened to as a whole, as most of the cuts (some of which are medleys of 2 or 3 songs) segue into one another. Whenever I hear any version of "Sleigh Ride," I always expect to hear it slide right into a rollicking piano figure followed by the lines, "It's Christmas time and time for a carol, time to sing about the little King..." The songs are mostly 40's and 50's secular holiday songs, though Karen sings a lovely version of the Bach/Gounod "Ave Maria" and the album opens with a nice instrumental medley of traditional carols.


#2 would have to be Carols for Christmas, a 2-disc collection by David Willcocks and the Royal College of Music Chamber Choir with some occasional embellishment by organ or brass. These are all traditional carols, in traditional arrangements, sounding like they were sung in a giant old cathedral; when I listen to this in the car, I imagine I'm in that cathedral singing right along. Practically all my favorite carols are here: "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," "O Come O Come Emmanuel," "Lo How a Rose E'er Blooming," "Good King Wenceslas," It Came Upon a Midnight Clear," "Patapan," and a few I was less familiar with, like "O Little One Sweet" and "Whence Comes this Rush of Wings." The album was originally released in 1983 and was marketed as a tie-in with a book of Christmas art from the Metropolitan Museum. Sadly, both the book and the CD are out of print, but both are worth looking for, especially the album.

Three wise men

I've started the Christmas viewing onslaught with three films. First was It's a Wonderful Life, which is one of my top 3 movies of all time. There's nothing much to say about it now, though I enjoyed it more this year than I have in the past few years. Some years, the dark, almost noirish overtones are overwhelming, but this year it felt lighter. Next was a quirky one called The Ref, which I hadn't seen in a few years. This comedy from 1994 is about a quarreling yuppie couple (Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis) who are held up by a small-time crook (Denis Leary) who has just bungled a burglary and wants to get out of town. He makes the couple take him back to their house while he waits for his incompetent partner-in-crime to make getaway arrangements, and winds up serving as a marriage counselor during a very funny dysfunctional family Christmas Eve dinner. Wonderful Christmassy sets, a funny script, and strong performances from Spacey, Davis, and Glynis Johns as a horrible matriarch make this a holiday treat. The ritual watching of It's a Wonderful Life on TV even provides an important plot point.

The third wise man movie (after wise George Bailey and the wise burglar) is The Fourth Wise Man, an 80's TV-movie based on a classic novella. Martin Sheen is a Magi who wants to go off with the other Three Magi to find the Messiah, but keeps missing them, mostly because he stops to help others. Years later, old and sick, he is present in Jerusalem for the Crucifixion and finally has his moment with the resurrected Christ. Between the TV-movie feel and an broadly comic performance by Alan Arkin as Sheen's faithful slave, this was hard to get into, but it gains in power by the end. It looked like it was shot on location, but apparently it was all made in California. Not bad; worth a rental if not a purchase. (Apparently it's still shown on television occasionally, but trimmed from its original 75-minute length by about 10 minutes.)

Cosmic Cowboy

I just finished "Twenty Thousand Roads," a new biography of fabled country-rock singer Gram Parsons by David N. Meyer. The author, while not making Parsons into a saint (he died of a drug overdose in 1973 at the age of 26), clearly feels it's his mission to set Parsons up as one of the most influential musicians of the rock era. I gotta say that based on the evidence of the book and his few extant recordings, he seems more like an interesting footnote, though he was undeniably an influence on the 70's country-rock and 90's alt-country movements. Parsons was a rich kid from a dysfunctional family living off a trust fund. He played in bands as a teenager, hooked up with The Byrds, hung out with The Rolling Stones, was the lead singer with The Flying Burrito Brothers (which included Byrd Chris Hillman and future Eagle Bernie Leadon), cut a couple of solo albums, and helped Emmylou Harris get her career going. He tried to bring "authentic" country music (an early idol was Buck Owens) together with rock, R&B, and gospel to create what he called "Cosmic American Music."

Meyer has done his research well and is honest about Parsons' prodigious drug and alcohol use; he makes it clear that Parsons was not the "tormented junkie" type, but someone who liked drugs and what they did to him. But I'm not convinced that Parsons had a strong enough work ethic or a coherent enough aesthetic to have done much more than he did before he died. The author is also very opinionated which at times is refreshing but also leads me to question the objectivity of his reportage. For example, he hates The Eagles for bastardizing Parsons' "cosmic" music into pop bubblegum, and every time the band is mentioned, it is with disdain and nasty adjectives. I'm not exactly an Eagles fan (though I do like their On the Border album a lot), but to be fair, the Eagles were after something different than Parsons was; it feels like Meyer is blaming the Eagles for Parsons' failure to stay alive and bring his amorphous musical vision to fruition. The author also tries to include all voices when there is a difference of opinion about some aspect of Parsons' life, but he also plays favorites without letting us know why.

Overall, I enjoyed the book--it's a fast read and contains just enough lurid gossip to keep the pruriently-inclined reader interested. It also sent me back to Parsons' music, which I'm sure would make Meyer happy. He states that Parsons' Burrito Brothers albums are among the worst-produced "influential" albums ever, but I don't know that a glossier, crystal-clear production would have suited Parsons. I just heard a few cuts off of a "new" Burrito album of a live concert from the Avalon Ballroom in 1969--the sound quality is pretty bad, and Parsons is not in strong voice (according to Meyer, most of the Burrito live shows were total drug-fueled messes), but there is a good version of "Hot Burrito #2" and a great studio demo of "Thousand Dollar Wedding." And I also revisited Emmylou Harris' Elite Hotel album; I think that her version of "Sin City" is a masterpiece of creepy, apocalyptic beauty.

Which reminds me: though Meyer does a decent job discussing the music, he never touches on any of Parsons' spiritual beliefs, which might have provided some more insight into a guy who wrote a lot of songs about sin and death.

It's beginning to look a lot like...

Yes, I admit it, I'm a big Christmas fan. I love Christmas about as much as I love summer. If I had to choose between living in Eternal August and Eternal December, August would probably win out, but only by a smidgen because as I get older, cold makes me crankier. My first point to get out of the way: Christmas is really a secular holiday, or more precisely a pagan holiday in Christian clothing. Sorry, but Jesus is not the reason for the season: the reason is cold and snow and darkness and agrarian seasonal cycles, and the need for a little magic and partying and kindness and reassurance in the middle of the darkest and coldest days of the year. We've made room for Jesus and Santa, and both fit in fine, I guess (and frankly, Santa, as the impulse to give to others, is probably closer to the "reason").

My second point: Now that Halloween is over, the Christmas season can begin and anyone who complains is just not facing reality, because it's beginning whether we like it or not. Granted, I've always had a strong appreciation for the season (mostly because of my mother who always makes Christmas a wonderful season) so I don't mind seeing fully decorated Christmas trees in the local Kroger at 9 p.m. on October 31st, though I do understand the complaints of people who don't like hearing the music or seeing the decorations (or, in the case of my sweet partner, watching the "Santa riding the razor" TV ads) for 8 or 9 or 10 weeks. But because the structure of our economy has come to depend on the longer Christmas season, it's not going away--unless of course we get a nationalized health care system and therefore fall under the sway of godless communists.

I'll be writing about Christmas media over the next few weeks, so bear with me. I'll start with my new favorite Christmas album: A Leroy Anderson Christmas. Issued on CD in 2004, it's a compilation of recordings made some years ago (the woefully inadequate liner notes don't say when, but Internet sources indicate the 50's and 60's). I don't need another version of Anderson's most popular song, "Sleigh Ride"--my favorite version is the Roches' on their Christmas album We Three Kings--but the rest of the album is a gem. There's "A Christmas Festival," a long medley of several popular Christmas carols, followed by three "Suites" of carols, one for brass, one for strings, and one for woodwinds. The sound is cleaned-up 50's high-fidelity, which is just fine for this nostalgic album. Along with my absolute favorite seasonal album, The Carpenters' Christmas Portrait, this album plunks you down in the middle of a past Christmas that really only existed in fantasy, or fiction, or memories made perfect by their distance.

A documockery?

If a mockumentary is a postmodern form which satirizes the documentary, what is a mockumentry which actually does some real "documenting" along with its mocking, further blurring the lines of fiction and non-fiction film? In the satirical film genre pioneered by Christopher Guest (This is Spinal Tap, A Mighty Wind), seemingly real situations are documented on film, but the people are all actors playing characters. Pittsburgh, a film directed by Chris Bradley and Kyle LeBrache, purports to be a filmed record of real events (the production by a local Pittsbugh theatrical group of "The Music Man" with Jeff Goldblum and his girlfriend Catherine Wreford in the lead roles), and does indeed follow real people, including Goldblum, Ed Begley Jr., and Illeana Douglas, around, but these real people are, at least to some degree, not "being themselves," but playing fictionalized personae. It all leads to some befuddled head-scratching for the viewer, but it's a pleasant befuddlement.

According to the film, Goldblum, who was born in Pittsburgh, goes home to take the lead in this musical so that Wreford, a Canadian citizen and musical actress, can get a visa to stay in America. He talks his buddies Begley and Douglas into going along for the ride, to play Mayor Shinn and his wife. However, it turns out that the director of the show doesn't necessarily think Goldblum is a perfect fit for the part--and indeed he doesn't seem to be, though to be fair we don't get a chance to see much footage of Goldblum on stage as Harold Hill. As Goldblum deals with his growing insecurity, we also see Douglas's dating relationship with singer Moby fall apart (he's too much into groupies and amateur porn) and we see Begley dealing with the problems of trying to market his "Solarman 2000" solar cell invention, with some somewhat reluctant help from Goldblum.

What's definitely real: The "Music Man" production in Pittsburgh, with Goldblum, Wreford, Begley, and Douglas (you can call up online reviews of it on Google). What's definitely made up for the movie: Douglas's relationship with Moby, who is perhaps the best sport in the film, making himself look like an insensitive jackass, breaking up with Douglas in public during a Mardi Gras parade. Everything else seems to be up for grabs. My own suspicion is that virtually everything else is fictional (go ahead and Google Solarman 2000; Begley is the next-best good sport in the film). The DVD contains deleted scenes including a couple of very funny moments with Scott Caan (inspired by mushrooms to produce a sprawling sci-fi trilogy in which he is cloned into a million-man army) and Bob Odenkirk (ranting that musical theater is dead and has been for hundreds of years). There is audio commentary by the directors and I am tempted to give it a whirl, but I don't know if I really want everything explained away. Little of the film is really laugh-out-loud funny like the Guest films, but it is consistently amusing and compelling.