Things I Learnt This Christmas

So here are some loosely assembled thoughts I have had and observations I made over this Yuletide season, my friends.

I like Christmas. I’m an Atheist, but I still enjoy the celebration. (Stay your keyboards, all those who would explain that Christmas was originally a pagan festival that Christians appropriated. Fine. And while we’re at it, English was a very different language before the Norman Conquest. And Neanderthals were once more successful than Homo Sapiens. There’s even evidence to suggest they invented line dancing to while away the cold nights of the Ice Age.)

On the evening before Christmas Eve, I went up to the very unbusy Garden City, Booragoon, to buy a few things. I ran into several people I knew through my last job. One was a friend who was employed by the City of Perth to be one of the Santa Clauses to ride The Santa Train. Whether you were on The Joondalup line, the Armadale line or out at Mandurah; if you were on the train in the fortnight before Christmas, you could meet Santa.

My friend, the part-time Father Christmas, has two kids, the oldest, a son, is 11 and the youngest, a daughter, is 5. I asked how he had dealt with keeping his identity secret from her. He said in previous years that whenever the job was mentioned in front his daughter, the codename he and his wife would use was “Fat X”. Because there was simply too much Kris Kringling going on this year, with the suit having to be hung out frequently when it was cleaned, they decided to explain to their daughter that there are some people who have to dress up as Santa, as a job, during Christmas.  “So you blew the whistle on yourself,” I said, “Did she get it?” “Not really,” he said.

I asked how he was received on the train. He said that he would shake hands with anyone–children or adults–and that some adults were very awkward about his being there and would refuse to make eye contact. One guy did shake his hand, but said, “This isn’t a hand, it’s a fist.” Weird!

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On Christmas Eve, the plan was to have dinner with friends. One of my tasks was to supply some Christmas music, so over several days I previewed as many secular Yuletide beats as possible. The anomaly of my Godless world is that I love Christmas carols which are–unsurprisingly–mostly religious in nature. Your modern, non-religious Christmas songs all pretty much bite; seriously, White Christmas is terrible no matter who sings it (obviously I don’t mean you Nat King Cole, you could sing the instruction booklet from an Ikea bunk bed and make it swing). O Come All Ye Faithful is my favourite. When the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sings Carol of the Bells et al. it is awe-inspiring and gives one a glimpse at the Great Mystery. (Sounding a little Agnosticky here, I know).

But as I found out in my aforementioned former job, whenever I played one of my CDs of choirs singing carols, the response was overwhelmingly negative.  And yes, it was at Christmas. “Stop playing those damned carols” was a sentence uttered on more than one occasion. So I knew better than to dig up any of those. My selection was from the “better” Christmas songs (so the pervy I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus was out) and the end result was a tuneful Christmas cake of tasteful jazz lite hits frosted with some lite rock standards. It was the kind of playlist one might hear in your better municipal waiting rooms.

A friend explained to me that this category of easy-listening Yule sounds is dominated by two people; Mariah Carey is the Queen of Christmas and Michael Bublé is the King. Mariah’s Merry Christmas album was recorded in 1994 and has sold 15 million copies. Just let that sink in. It’s the biggest selling Christmas album ever. A little known side effect of hearing her All I Want For Christmas Is You less than half a dozen times in 24 hours, is that you’ll play it over and over in your head hundreds of times for the next three days. Trust me on this.

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Other random things I learnt in the last few days.

• You can build a Jenga Tower at least 35 rows high.
• There is such a thing as too much ham.
• WHO’S THE BOSS is a terrible, terrible show.
• When people aren’t at work, their Facebook posts get even weirder.
• There is no such thing as too many prawns.
• It’s worth buying bed linen at the Boxing Day sales.
• THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR is a fine gloomy Christmas film

And speaking of films. During the day of the 24th, I channel-flicked and ended up on IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE the 1946 Frank Capra classic. It was just as George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) was going to college after putting it off to work in the family’s Building and Loan business. And despite having seen the film a dozen times and even owing a DVD copy, I watched it from there until the rousing end when George discovers because he has friends, he is the richest man in the town.

So I learnt that I still feel teary at the end of a corny old movie made 65 years ago and I’m okay with that.

Season’s Greetings

Phil Jeng Kane

Tumblr Fail

I've been trying to create some of those things you see on Tumblr and elsewhere on the Web where someone has gets a photograph and puts some beautiful and moving text to the image and together they say a really powerful and moving thing, that will then go viral with 16 year old hipsters. But it's harder than it looks. Here are my first three attempts. And sadly they're not even close.

PJK

Visceral and Raw

I was reading a story about the making of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 launch video (released in November 2011) last night and was struck by the article's gushing tone and high level of corporate BS. The story was in FAST COMPANY a trade site for advertising, so really, what did I expect?

This was the set up:

The launch campaign centers on a 90-second trailer based on the veteran/newbie premise, starring Sam Worthington and Jonah Hill and directed by Peter Berg. The film begins with Hill (Get Him to The Greek, Superbad, Moneyball) bumbling through a burned-out New York war zone, with Worthington (Avatar, Clash of the Titans) as the battle-hardened foil.

Inoffensive enough, but I was particularly taken by these paragraphs:

Berg, whose action credits include Hancock, The Kingdom, and the upcoming Battleship, was the immediate choice for director, and he joined the production before the actors came on board. “We selected him first and foremost for his way of telling stories--his action is visceral and raw. We were dealing with very in-depth understanding of weapons and explosions. He’s comfortable with all of that. He’s also great with talent--that was icing.”

After going through gun training, Hill handled the action sequences like a pro, says Cole. "He had to bring the moments of levity to it; it’s tough to get that right tonally while there’s smoke and things blowing up around you.”

Yeah, there's a whole bunch of smoke here and guess where they're blowing it? 

This style of reporting on movie-making has been a standard in "entertainment journalism" for the last thirty years. It's a rigid formula that all but cancels out any extraneous non-awesome, off-brand blabber; the director has vision; the cast is amazing; the crew is the most professional ever assembled. But seriously, they're bigging up the fact that Jonah Hill learnt how to handle action and fight choreography on the green-screen set of the 90 second trailer for the latest iteration of Call Of Duty?

The last time I experienced this feeling was watching Baz Luhrmann explain the story behind the making of his 2004 Chanel No. 5 commercial with Nicole Kidman and Rodrigo Santoro

"She finds herself in this very serene place. She feels she has has escaped from the responsibility–from the mythical fortress of the metropolis we see in the distance, beyond this huge bridge..."

Mr Trivia

Retrophonic

Zeitgeisters,

There's something like two week's of music on this computer. I can't do anything with such an absurd profusion of choices. Unlike most of you–who seem to be more than ready to exit this corporeal plane for some kind of Johnny Mnemonic or Tron existence where you are nowt but electrons dancing amongst the light particles–I come from the 1980s.

I thought the audio cassette was the height of sound reproduction and convenience. An album was somewhere around 12 songs lasting about 40 minutes that one had to turn over after the end of side 1 in order to facilitate the listening of side 2.

Truth be told, I don't think I'm quite over the introduction of that seductive, mirrored coaster, the Compact Disc. But you're over it, aren't you, my friend? Even as we speak, you're downloading millions upon millions of MP3s a.k.a The Western World's Compleat Pop Music Back Catalogue (1900-2011)–minus Rod Stewart Destroys The Great American Songbook (Volumes I-V).

For the sake of my sanity and to solve this First World problem, I must travel in the opposite direction. My need is for a petite and manageable musical experience, so I have just downloaded a paltry 743 songs from the 'puter and onto my 5th Generation iPod Classic from 2005. I've docked the 'pod into some portable speakers and I am currently listening to "Dinner Jacket" from They Might Be Giants 1992 album Apollo 18.

Yeah, album. I keep using that archaic terminology. A collection of songs speciously linked and sold to music lovers in an attractive package with liner notes. Don't worry Woman or Man of the Future, Today, there isn't a quiz at the end of this post, you don't need to remember any of this cultural detritus, this minutiae of yesteryear.

That's my job.

Mr Trivia
(Just a guy made of dots and lines...)

Never Go Against The Family

Every now and then I like to Google Clip Art with various subject titles in mind. This evening I Googled the word "family" and found these two gems.

Sure the Silhouette Family look a little retro. They're out for a stroll all holding hands–which people used to do before the progressives and the communists and Dr Benjamin Spock introduced doubt and perversion into the Western Mind. And don't get me started on Jung and/or Freud. So sure, some of you will see a group of peaceful folk, hands linked and you'll want to douse them with pepper spray a la Lietenant John Pike (Pepper Spray Cop), but you're just all riled up and twisted by crazy modern values. Or hopped up on goof balls. Whatevs.

The Silhouettes are decent God-Fearing folk who are happy that their money is in a savings account with a 9 per cent interest rate. Yeah - THEY HAVE SAVINGS. Sure they're freaks. But perhaps not so much as these next folk.

Meet the Traced-Overs. Flippin' 'eck. Bloody Nora. That boy on the left is as creepy as anything out of the movie Polar Express. The Robert Zemeckis masterpiece that I suspect is funded by Atheists. Have you seen the film? Clearly the Polar Express weirdos live in a Godless, Santa-less Universe. "But Mr Trivia," I hear you say, "Santa is in Polar Express." Yeah - Zombie Santa. Undead Father Christmas. Animated Korpse Kringel.

And the boy in the above picture is every bit as wrong as any o' that. And what about his sister? A cross between a Cabbage Patch Kid and a Zapf Baby Born? Horrifying.

But let none of this discourage your using more Clip Art in the future. My greatest concern is that some whiz kid in Zagreb or Kuala Lumpur will come up with some algorithmic app tech thingy that will be able to make excellent clip art 100% of the time. Good corporate imaging that no one can sneer at or write snarky blog posts about.  And wouldn't we be all the poorer if that happened?