#advent blogging

[kateracculia]

It is a truth universally acknowledged that my dear friend and former roomie LJQM makes a hell of a mix CD. For many years we traveled together from Boston to the wilds of upstate New York for the holidays, and I don't remember when, exactly, we made it, but we compiled the holiday driving mix to end all holiday driving mixes. It is titled, appropriately, Nut-Ass Christmas. This is not a complete replication of the experience of listening to Nut-Ass Christmas, because that would be ridiculous, and maybe too much awesome for you to handle on a Monday. But it is a taste, annotated.

[kateracculia]

I gravitate toward sad / pensive / nostalgic / melancholy ("I'll Be Home for Christmas," "White Christmas," "Fairytale of New York," "The Christmas Song," "Silver Bells," etc.) / GUT-GRABBING ("O Holy Night" aka FAAAAAAAALLLL on your KNEEEEEEES) Christmas music, and this song is about the myriad frustrations of the holiday season, but it's also about the season's potential to surprise and connect us. And jazzy horns!

[kateracculia]

My Fair Lady was on TCM the other night, and of course I watched it (is there an old lady Transformer? Did she change from a robot into like a shawl? Because I am her) - ANYWAY.

I was a little worried, because it's been so long since I've seen it, and sometimes the things we love uncritically and wholeheartedly when we're young that, in retrospect, may have warped our conceptions of healthy relationships (CALL ME A SQUASHED CABBAGE LEAF AND I WILL FOLLOW YOU ANYWHERE), don't exactly age well.

But you know what? It's witty and gorgeous and the music is phenomenal, and Henry Higgins is epically full of shit and always was, and Eliza is worth two of everyone and always was. I will still find you charming as hell if you're an arrogant British bastard but I no longer believe Higgins and drippy Freddy Eynsford-Hill represent one's only options in life. One can be simultaneously classy as hell and deliciously low. One can choose to show up at the end yet still leave that ending ambiguous. Eliza Doolittle gets to be both. 

[kateracculia]

Muppet bloopers are the greatest things in all of human history. I won't cheapen this moment by saying anything else. Just watch it.

[kateracculia]

There's no snow here in Pennsylvania; it has snowed, but didn't stick. It's a little weird. I mean, it's nice that I don't have to clean it off my car or drive in it, but I'm not not looking forward to visiting the winter wonderland that is Syracuse next week.

[kateracculia]

This is a picture of the card catalog I made for my childhood library. Yes: Fantasy and Magic are two separate categories (I mean, clearly), as are Suspense and Mystery, and Animal Stories should really be "Anthropomorphic Rodent Stories" (A Cricket in Times Square, The Great Mouse Detective, Ralph S. Mouse). I'm sure I made my friends check out rather than simply borrow my books, though those records no longer exist; mostly, I remember this ur-nerd move, in a CHILDHOOD OF UR-NERDERY, inspiring gentle mockery. They were just so important to me. They were all doorways to places I wanted to be able to go back, and to go back I had to keep tabs on them, know where they were, find them again.

[kateracculia]

If I weren't micro-advent-blogging my way through December, I could go on at some length about what watching (and playing) Clue as a child (I swear I saw it for the first time on video when I was about 7) did to my brain. It introduced me to Tim Curry and Madeline Kahn, for one, and the pleasures of an epic foley SLAP. Because of Clue, not solely but largely, I love ridiculousness and camp and dead bodies and multiple mysteries and multiple characters all acting like lunatics dialing it up to 11.

(Which is...a pretty accurate description of Bellweather Rhapsody.)

[kateracculia]

Things I have a soft spot for:

Ingrid Michaelson. Because her music is equally lovely and loud, smart and whole-hearted and catchy as hell, and because I was friends with her older brother in college. I think I met her only once, and I don't remember much other than that she was very nice, but hearing her songs in TV shows and coffee shops never fails to make me a little giddy, in a "You GO, person I once had lunch with but don't actually know!" way.

Songs that start slow and tentative and build to some kind of wondrous wordless wall of sound.

So basically, this song.