Last night, while running the tour, I got "The Little Drummer Boy" stuck in my head somehow. I'm not a big fan of Christmas music to begin with, honeslty, but the drummer boy songs ranks up there among those that I especially don't like. Not just for the general dullness of the song, but for the fact that the kid in the song is nuts.

I mean, really? Drumming? For a BABY? Mary must have been ready to hit the roof.

"Oh, you're drumming to honor him? Well, that's very honorable. I mean, I just got the baby to go to sleep, and I'm recovering from having given birth in a barn, and the animals aren't fond of loud noises, but the honor! Do, keep drumming, I'll just be over here, trying to get the baby to go back to sleep over the all the honor. It's lovely. Really. Don't mind me. I'm just a poor young mother. What do I need with quiet? Sure, you could honor him by kneeling, or something quiet like that, but what do I need with peace, when I have the prince of peace right here in the manger, where I've laid my baby, because these three kings couldn't flex their kingly muscles for us over at the inn - but that's okay! We need frankincense and myhrr. We wouldn't need the myhrr so much if we were INdoors, of course, but I'm not complaining. I'm just rocking the baby and listening to the pa-rum-pum-pum-pumming, which doesn't bother me at all. Just go ahead."


It is far from being my LEAST favorite Christmas song, though. "12 Days of Christmas" wins for pure tedium, but my LEAST favorite is probably "Mary's Boychild." "Long ago in Bethlehem / so the Holy Bible say / Mary's boy-child Jesus Christ / was born on Christmas day." I don't even know where to begin saying what's wrong with that. "Say" rather than "Says" just to get the rhyme. The awkward term "boychild" is used just to fit the meter, when "first child" would have been fine (or "one child" if the suggestion that Mary had more of them later offends your sensibilities). Then there's the fact that what day Jesus was born on is NOT something the holy bible "says." Don't get me started. Really.

So many lyricists just aren't putting much thought into their carols. The Oak Ridge Boys "Christmas in Dixie" says "In Atlanta, Georgia, there's peace on earth tonight." The geography here bugs me. Does Atlanta get ALL the Earth's peace? Is there something particularly "earthly" about the peace in Atlanta, versus the peace elsewhere in Dixie? Why not use "perfect peace tonight," which makes more sense and fits the meter just as well? Far too many famous christmas songs have lyrics that were clearly phoned in - "Here comes Santa Claus / right down Santa Claus lane" probably leads the field there.

There ARE some carols that I like, though. I like "Silver Bells." I like the "sad" versions of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (the ones that have the Meet Me In St. Louis version of the lyrics with the line, "but for now we'll have to muddle through somehow" - so much more narrative in that version!) And I dig the old fashioned ones, like "Sing We Now of Christmas," "Here We Come a Wassailing," and "God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman" (I don't much care for the hellfire lyrics in that one, but the tune is lovely, and the opening line and chorus are first-rate). Among the modern stuff, "The Christians and the Pagans" by Dar Williams ought to be a standard, and "Merry Xmas (I Don't Want to Fight Tonight)" isn't much cop as far as spreading cheer, but it's a great song.

Now, I'm trying trying to be Scrooge, here. This is all a leftover from my retails days, when I had Christmas music, most of which was REALLY bad, pumped into my head over the speakers JUST quietly enough to qualify as muzack for two full months a year. Even the GOOD ones tend to get played entirely too many times per year.

Today the cafe is blasting the 90s alternative classics station - I suppose that listening to songs that you loved as a kid in an oldies context is sort of a rite of passage. Since I'm not working on anything in particular this morning, I'm taking the time simply to reflect a bit on the music that was so, so important to me when I was a teenager, now that I can sort out which songs from the era are going to be the "oldies" and which I'll never hear again:

(edited to fix typos, etc.)

( appetite for deconstruction )

I was listening to "I'll Be There" by the Jackson 5 in the cafe just now. I know the song, of course, but something about it always seemed strange to me - and I think I just figured it out.

Let's take a look at line 2:

We must bring salvation back

Now, as I understand it, the Jacksons were Jehovah's witnesses. According to their believes, wasn't salvation a power vested only in Jesus? In saying that salvation must be brought back, are they implying that Jesus has been stripped of this power? Towards the end of the song, a strong clue emerges, as Michael says

Just look over your shoulders, honey!.

Now, in the Jacksons: An American Dream mini-series, this line was presented as a studio flub on Michael's part which MoTown honcho Barry Gordy insisted should stay in the song. But could Michael REALLY be implying that the girl can look over both of her shoulders at once? You know what this means: The girl is capable of spinning her head 360 degrees around her neck!.

Make no mistake - when Michael tells the girl that they must make a pact in the first line, he doesn't mean a pact with each other. He's reffering to making a pact with Satan.

This explains what went wrong with the Invincible album pretty neatly.

So I'm getting caught up on what's happening in the comic book world, starting with a stack of recent Spider-Man issues.

Now, I'm not one to complain about absurdity in a comic book. I mean, even to pick these things up, one has to be ready to read about a world in which guys in long underwear have underground lairs and plot to take over the world. Absurd things must be taken in stride. Hell, a good comic writer can even make me take a guy like The Silver Surfer seriously.

But did you ever notice that every time a hero gets a new power or a suit with a new feature, they have to show a scene three pages later where they would have been killed if not for that power? Every single time. If Spidey gets a new suit with some bullet-deflecting capabilities, it's a sure bet he'll be shot at point blank range inside of five pages.

Knowing about this cliche may come in handy some day. If you're ever hanging around a bunch of super heros, and one of them tells you he just got a suit with the power to defeat giant poop monsters, you'll know to leave immediately, because you KNOW that one of them must be on its way.

Other things you don't want a superhero to say:

"I just made some adjustments to my costume, including some cool new accessories. I don't know when it'll come in handy, but now I can.....

...determine the source of mysterious, overpowering odors!
...summon a legion of naked insurance salesman instantly!
...figure out how much blood a person has lost in quarts OR litres!
...remember every single verse of the national anthem, and sing it in falsetto!
...provide first aid to bystanders who get really painful snakebites!
...survive even when the poison in the punch kills everyone else present!
...beat K-Fed in a 24 hour dance-off!

Why, yes, I do have too much time on my hands today.

So I was just wandering through the grocery store and singing along with "Eternal Flame" by the Bangles. It's a catchy song, I like the vocals. But the lyrics really disturb me nowadays. Let's deconstruct 'em, shall we?

Close your eyes, give me your hand, darling
Do you feel my heart beating
Do you understand
Do you feel the same
Am I only dreaming
Is this burning an eternal flame?

It's a bit corny and all that. I just hope to goodness for whoever she's singing to's sake that he DOES feel the same, or this is some pretty serious pressure, especially considering that nothing about this song makes me feel like they've been a couple very long. This is jumping the gun. What if he closes his eyes, gives her his hand, and says something snotty, like "no, I don't feel your heart beating. Do you think maybe I'd have better look if I put my hand on your left boob instead of your hand?"

I believe it's meant to be, darling
I watch you when you are sleeping
You belong with me

Do you feel the same
Am I only dreaming
Is this burning an eternal flame?



That's either really sweet or more than a little bit freaky. Not quite as frightening as that "love you forever" book, but sort of on those same grounds. Does she mean "when you sleep in my bed, I enjoy watching you sleep when you fall asleep before I do," or "I watch you when you are sleeping using some high powered binoculars and a carefully arranged system of mirrors?"




Say my name...

my favorite line, though I wish she'd added something like "bitch" at the end :) There's space for it in the meter


sun shines through the rain
A whole life so lonely
And then you come and ease the pain
I don't want to lose this feeling

Well, here's where the trouble really comes in. Much as I like the way she sings "a whole life - so lonely" (for reasons unexplained), here we have the singer staking her whole mental well-being on a guy who apparently came around fairly recently. She was lonely without him her whole life - what's going to happen when she finds that she's still lonely WITH him after a while? Because it's going to happen sooner or later. The pain, some of it, at least, will be back. She's leaving herself vulnerable by repeatedly asking "is this burning an eternal flame," practically daring him to say "no, probably not."

Funnily enough, it's just now that it occured to me that she might be saying "is this burning, the one I feel inside me, emnating from an eternal flame, not just lust?" I'd always imagined it as "is this, what we have between us, setting an eternal flame alight?" I suppose my original thoughts came fromt he fact that the song was a hit when I was a kid. Plenty of songs about sex went right over my head. Now, I'm conflicted as to the meaning. Certainly she's got the burning within, or she wouldn't be watching him sleep. Then again, she's quite intent on the notion that he's totally reciprocating, so perhaps she DOES mean that they're burning a flame together - though I guess she would have saigh "lighting" rather than "burning" if that were the case.

-"The Ghost Of John" - you've probably heard this. "Have you seen the ghost of John / long white bones with the skin all gone." We sang it in first grade music class.

-"The Old Woman All Skin and Bones" Raffi's arrangement of this old folk song about the woman who lives down by the old graveyard ("oooh ooh ooh ooooh") scared me a bit, and scared the crap out of one of my friends. I remember we made up a parody of it called "The Old Woman Who Drank Old Milk" that went on for several verses, each more disgusting than the last. I wish I remembered more than a few verses.

-"Little Lies" by Fleetwood Mac. The organ part was a bit spooky, but Stevie Nicks' backing vocals made me think she was a witch a long time before I knew who she was or heard any such rumors about her.

-"Scarborough Fair" - this was playing on the radio one morning when I woke up at about the age of 9. It spooked me good. Sounded very ghostly to me.

-"some song" - another song that I heard in the middle of the night was some song about a ghost ship. One line, I think rhymed "the captain felt a chill" with "the tomb grew closer still." I might have misheard. I've never found out what song that was, and googling the lyrics doesn't help.

-"karma chameleon" by Boy George (though I just knew the Kids Inc version) - I misheard some lyrics in this one and thought it was about death (listening to it now, I suppose it's as good a guess as any). It disturbed me in the same way that scene in A Boy Named Charlie Brown where Schoeder plays the second movement of the Pathetique Sonata and the screen is filled with images of gravestones, cathedrals, and Warholesque Popes disturbed me (and if there's a stranger scene in all of mainstream animation, I haven't seen it).

- "The Age of Not Believing" from Bedknobs and Broomsticks - I can't remember, exactly, whether this actually scared me or just depressed me. Maybe a little of both. After all, it's a song about puberty, so it should have done both.

I can find a lot of songs in my playlist now that would have scared me then if I'd heard them - I can imagine that Long Black Veil would have scared me out of my wits if I'd ever heard it as a kid.

Browsing through my new copy of "The Annotated 'A Christmas Carol'" (Dickens' original novella is about as good as prose gets, for my money. Haunting, hilariously snarky, socially consious, and not really religous at all), I came up on the idea of compiling a list of...


CHRISTMAS CAROLS THAT I CAN SING WITHOUT WONDERING WHAT MY RABBI WOULD THINK:

After all, a great deal of the non-hymn Christmas carols were written by Jews, anyway, and many famous Jewish singers have Christmas albums.

1. "Frosty The Snowman." No real mention of any holiday, just a song about a gang of kids who build a snow-golem. Kabbalah for the holidays! Sing it proudly.

2. "Jingle Bells." Again - no Christmas here, just a song about reckless driving. Should be safe for all.

3. "Deck The Halls" - sure, it's trying to be a Christmas song, but all of the Pagan elements make it at least as Jewish as it is Christian.

4. "Sleigh Ride" - not a religious song at all, unless your religion is Norman Rockwell. Until that religion becomes mainstream (which I doubt will take much longer), this one's fair game.

5. "Let It Snow" is just about enjoying the works of the creator. In many ways.

6. "Winter Wonderland," sure, they pretend that the snow-golem is a Parson, but they also blow him off, so it can't be THAT religious.

7. "I Am Just a Misfit" (from that Rudolph show). Yeah, what is this toy/elf, anyway? Chopped liver?

Anyone have any to add?

Been watching a LOT of Scooby Doo this October - something I haven't really done since the movie came out, which sort of marked the burnout point.

While the first series, "Scooby Doo Where Are You" was excellent (and only 25 episodes over two seasons!), the series fluctuated a lot after this. There were the "New Scooby Doo Movies," which teamed the gang up with such A-list stars as Laurel and Hardy, Tim Conway, and Sandy Duncan, and then a slow move away from being remotely spooky and towards comedy. For some reason, the good folks at Hanna Barbera thought that people were tuning in for the comedy.

A few new characters came up over time. Let's look at them, shall we?


"Scooby Dumb" - the grey dog in the red hat from the mid-70's "The Scooby Doo Show." The monsters in this series were generally less spooky than the ones in the first series, but the series certainly had its moments. Scooby Dumb was, for the most part, a space filler. He didn't do much besides chuckle like and idiot from time to time. Had he been a major player, he would have been horribly disliked, and is still not at all popular. But he only actually appeared in four episodes, and I can only recall two offhand - a vampire one, and the one with the headless horseman, both of which are actually excellent episodes. So it's hard to get too upset over the guy.

"Flim Flam" - from the 1985 series "The 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo," which was a good idea that didn't really work out. Vincent Price was in it as the guy sending them on a quest to get 13 ghosts back into a chest over the course of 13 episodes - not a bad premise. However, they revamped the mystery machine, put Daphne in an ugly jumpsuit, and introduced a kid called Flim Flam - similarities to Short Round from "Temple of Doom" were purely intentional. Again, he didn't stick arond long enough to be that offensive, but also wasn't that interesting. I don't think anyone particularly misses him.

"Scrappy Doo" - The most notorious of them all - and almost universally hated. They say he has his defenders, but I've only met one or two in my entire life. Unlike Scooby Dumb and Flim Flam, Scrappy wasn't just a space filler - he was the new star of the show, and was almost constantly annoying. It wasn't all his fault; most of the episodes he was in over his stint (from 79-85, plus the 1988 tv movie "scooby doo and the reluctant werewolf") would have been pretty bad with or without him, but his presence certainly didn't help. While not necessarily the problem itself, he represented everything that went wrong with Scooby Doo in the 80's - more comedy than mystery, poorer plotting, a breakup of the original chemistry, etc. His appearance as the villain at the end of the live action movie was probably the best part of the movie, which says more about the movie than the character.

"Googie" - Shaggy's girlfriend in "Scooby Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf," the 1988 movie in which Shaggy (the only original member of the gang present) is a race car driver for some reason. She's about as forgetable as the movie itself, but at least takes up space that could have otherwise been filled by Scrappy, who made his last appearance here in a pleasantly benign manner.

"Vincent VanGhoul" - Vincent Price's character in "the 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo," who looked about like Price himself and functioned about like Charlie from Charlie's angels. This guy actually had possibilities, and was, in fact, the highlight of the series. If Price were still alive, he could have been an interesting character to have turn up now and then - why Price was never a guest star in the early 70's series is beyond me.

btw - my favorite guest star from the early 70s penchant for such things was "Mama" Cass Elliot, who, at one point, says something like "I think we may be up against something that's bigger than all of us. Well, bigger than you kids, anyway."

Okay, that article I linked earlier interested me so much that I went looking for similar stuff, and I came upon a thing about the story "The Golden Arm." This story always bugged me.

You've probably heard this basic ghost story: a woman with a golden arm dies and asks to be buried with it. Her husband steals it before she can be buried, and is haunted by her voice saying "who's got my golden arm" over and over, closer and closer, until it's right at his bed and she shouts "you got it!" Mark Twain used to tell it a lot. I heard him, using a "negro dialect" that would seem horribly offensive today, but was progressive (in a weird way) at the time.

Anyway, how this woman came to need a golden arm, and how she came to die, never seem to come up. But I'll bet she lost her arm doing something stupid and she probably deserved to die.

What kind of person gets a golden arm? It would be expensive as all get out, and likely useless as a prosthetic device. Also, it would probably be really heavy. Maybe she died from having her spine twisted all out of wack by carrying around such a heavy appendage.

Then, in light of the expense, asking to be buried with it, when her husband could surely use the money, is just plain greedy. HERE we have a woman who was probably all for abolishing the estate tax! Why does a dead person need an expensive prosthetic device? Would it make her the envy of all the other zombies?

Further, what's so scary about being shouted at? Is that all the ghost was going to do? Once the shock wears off, you could just say "yes, I have got it. Piss off!"

I have a recording of a version of the story by Vincent Price that gets around this - in it, the husband (some sort of nobility) sends his valet to get and winds up being eaten by the dead woman. There's no "jump up and scream" moment - Price just says, matter of factly, that she "ate him up," and that's that. You can practically see the grin on his face.

Still, this story scared me when I was a kid, and I'm not ashamed. If you ask Bloody Mary to come out of the mirror, you just get what you ask for. But the sort of woman who would buy a golden arm and then be buried with it is certainly the kind of person of whom one should be afraid. Very afraid.