holiday specials, 2006

Okay, folks. It’s time. Say what you will about the rest of the holiday, I really love animated Christmas specials. Let’s let down our critical guard for a moment and look at what we might enjoy this season. Just for you (and for me, so that I can just check back here when I want to know what’s on in a give week), I distill the Post-Gazette’s list of holiday specials down to what’s crucial:

• Tuesday, November 28: “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” ABC, 8:00. I’ve said it in this spot before and I’ll say it again: that moment when Linus gives the lecture on what Christmas is really about, Charlie Brown, is the moment of the year when I kinda almost wish I still believed heartily in all that. This is a must-watch yearly. We don’t get WTAE very well, but I’ll rig up the rabbit ears and/or go to someone else’s house and make this happen.
• Tuesday, December 5: “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town,” ABC, 8:00. A classic Rankin-Bass with some wonderful songs: “Put One Foot in Front of the Other” gets stuck in my head in a sort of awful way, but that’s okay. The Burgomeister Meisterberger’s number about banning toys and there being no more toymakers to the king is my fave, though. I don’t think this one has been on network TV the past few years — good to see they’ve brought it back.
• Friday, December 8: This is a big night; I hope there’s nothing exciting going on outside of my house because I don’t plan on leaving. CBS’s animated holiday special tour de force: “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Frosty the Snowman,” and “Frosty Returns.” It seems like a bit of overkill to put these all on one night, but I guess desperate times call for desperate measures, and it takes a lot of firepower to beat out Stossel AND “To Catch a Predator” in the ratings. “Rudolph” is the king of the holiday specials. Frosty says inane stuff like “You wouldn’t be sneezing if you weren’t cold!” and “Frosty Returns” features such mid-’90s stalwarts as John Goodman. ‘Nuff said.
• Saturday, December 9: “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” ABC, 8:00. If you don’t catch it on network TV, turn on TBS anytime between now and Christmas Eve. If “A Christmas Story” is on, you waited too long.
• Sunday, December 10: “It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie,” WBGN, 11 a.m. This was apparently made for NBC in 2002 and features cameos from Yoda and Triumph. I don’t remember if I watched it then, but it sounds decently funny, or at least campy. Apparently not a keeper, though, since in four years’ time it managed to slide from a prime time spot on NBC to a Sunday morning slot on that channel that’s, like, not really public access, but still shows “The Beverly Hillbillies” several times a night.
• Monday, December 11: “The Year Without a Santa Claus,” NBC, 9:00. Kudos to NBC for bringing this one back to network TV. Why the hell is it on at 9:00? Little kids go to bed at 9:00, guys. The Snowmiser isn’t THAT scary.
• Tuesday, December 12: “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” ABC, 8:00. Since TBS showing it daily for a month AND ABC showing it once in prime time wasn’t enough.

I’ve left off all the shows on cable because, hey, I don’t have cable. Also, as I may have noted above (below?), Garfield is notably absent from this year’s crop of specials. My righteous indignance knows no bounds with respect to this. Perhaps I will fire off an ugly email in the direction of Rob Owen.

te party

Last night — went to that “Te Cafe” place on Murray Ave in Squirrel Hill. The folks there were friendly, the tea selection quite satisfying. When pressed on the subject of their “Cherry Almond Cheesecake” flavor, they conceded that really, it’s just cherry almond, and they’re not even sure who put the “cheesecake” part on the tea list, and it doesn’t really taste like cheesecake at all.

It was a pretty quiet joint, and now and then I felt slightly conspicuous, as Friend of Andy and I were carrying on a somewhat (good-naturedly) (absurdly) argumentative conversation, and I felt like perhaps everyone around us was probably listening instead of doing their homework, and thinking that we really must hate each other. At least that’s what I would have been doing.

Anyway, sure, thumbs up. Kind of lame name, and WYEP on the radio, but that’s sort of to be expected. Why does Squirrel Hill get the neat chill places like this, and I’m stuck with Crazysexycool Mocha, home to lots of insane people and really loud music, in my neighborhood? I guess that could easily be explained, but I won’t bother.

Also, this gem from the “Everyone’s a Critic” feature in this week’s City Paper, reviewing the circus, needs to be remembered:

“I love elephants — they’re big, they’re huge, they’re larger than life.”

I’m nearly certain those were the exact words of Christopher Columbus when he got back after first discovering elephants. Perhaps she could have worked in something like, “they’re gray,” or “they have wrinkly skin,” but I guess that really essentially summed up the elephant in a good concise sentence.

nu-discs

Methinks it’s about time for some brief reviews of things that are new to me lately.

• Rhys Chatham: Die Donnergötter. Double LP, released this year by Table of the Elements, whose website has not been working right for the past week or two. This includes some classic Chatham guitar pieces — pre-Branca drones with consistent pounding drums (”Die Donnergötter,” “Guitar Trio”) — and some pieces with different instrumentation and slightly more insane and “punk” sounding rhythms. The packaging is beautiful, though I’m a sucker for the Chatham aesthetic in general so that’s no surprise. There are some sweet photos inside and a lot of interesting historical writing. Highly reccommended if you’re interested in Rhys.
• The Red Crayola: malefactor, ade. The only other Red Crayola I own is God Bless the Red Crayola and All Who Sail On It, which predates this disc by a good twenty years. malefactor, ade has some wonderful lines and a few songs that are definitely mixtape worthy, but seems to position itself opposite of God Bless the Red Crayola in that GBtRC was a bit tough to digest on first listen but grew on me a lot, and this album was tasty at first (and had me laughing out loud at points) but grew a little boring after a few listens. I like it, and it’s worth listening to, but perhaps if you don’t have God Bless, get that first?
• Animaniacs Volume One DVD: An exceedingly clever friend gave me this for my birthday and I have, at points when I’ve had time, been working my way through it. My concerns about it not holding up were unfounded; parts, in fact, are funnier at this point than they were for me in 1994. I never really dug Rita & Runt and that holds true, but Slappy the Squirrel has a lot more going on than I realized as an eleven-year-old and most of the features with the Warners themselves are still pretty riotous. Big thumbs up.

moovies

So the other night, I watched The Assasination of Trotsky, as noted in that post down below somewhere. I don’t know why I was counting on a film that I knew would culminate in an ice pick to the skull to go down easy, but it ended up much more psychological than I expected. The first half hour or so was slow and/or confusing, and made me mad, but I stuck with it and it ended up just unsettling. Also, the assasin himself reminded me a lot of this kinda sleazy dude who hangs around the 61C Cafe all the time.

A couple nights ago I checked out Born In Flames, made by Lizzie Borden in 1983, about America post-”second American revolution.” It’s all about factions of women fighting oppression by men in a “peaceful, socialist” society. Dystopian, kinda campy, kinda poorly acted (they weren’t professionals, by choice), good soundtrack. The closing scene (***SPOILER ALERT***) was what fascinated and amused me: one of the women, more and more of whom are resorting to violent direct action after the apparent assassination of one of their own by the police, PLANTS A BOMB IN THE TALLER OF THE TWIN TOWERS AND BLOWS THE TOP OFF OF THE BUILDING.

As she prepared for this, and it became clear what was imminent, I said something like: “OH NO SHE DIDN’T.” Then when it actually happened — the dramatic final scene — I laughed because of how unaffecting it was. Surely at the time it was subversive, speculative, frightening. Now it seems like a weak blow. Is that the best they can bring? Back to the drawing board, Lizzie.

paint a different color on your front door

Promise I’ll get back to Capote eventually. First things first, however: last night I watched Fallen Angel, the new-ish (new to DVD, at least; I guess it was originally released in 2004) documentary about Gram Parsons. The cinematography and general putting-together of the film at times made me laugh — it had some of the trappings of your run-of-the-mill rock documentary, but shared just as many features with, say, a Rick Sebak joint. For a while I wasn’t sold on it, but the content is enough to make it worth seeing. I wasn’t particularly familiar with the bizarre events surrounding his death, and the way the filmmakers chose to handle it is slightly jarring, and makes the last 15 or so minutes of the film fairly riveting.

Throughout the film, his remaining family members are slowly pitted against his musician friends, and especially Phil Kaufman, but not in a dramatic way: their remarks about one another are simply slotted next to one another in quick succession, and I was a sucker for it — I felt really nervous at points, like a fight was about to break out in the middle of the movie. It was actually quite clever, as narrative structure is concerned, and made up for a lot of the amateurish feel of the actual shots and montages.

The other major weakness was that I didn’t feel like it explored some important parts of his life a lot — the way certain relationships were affecting others (there was plenty of talk about Keith Richards, but not so much about the ladies in his life, other than oblique references here and there), and the real importance of what he did musically and how it affected future musicians (this part almost felt as if it was assumed knowledge).

Reccommended? Sure. Nothing comprehensive, but worth checking out.