DEC 2K5

Great Day Today

The title comes from a song Madlib and Doom put out last year:

It never really mattered too much to me
That I was too damn old to MC...
....Last wish, I wish I had two more wishes.
I wish they'd fix the door to the Matrix, it's mad glitches.
Spit so many verses sometimes my jaw twitches.
One thing this party could use is more...
booze.

Doom's newest joint, Dangerdoom, cut with Dangermouse on the boards, is nice product, but next to last year's Madvillain y, it's garbage. Great Day Today is track 21 on a dense jazzy, profane and profound album. It's the best that either Madlib or Doom ever put together, better than Operation: Doomsday and The Unseen put together. Madvillainy worked well today as I was trying to put the wraps on my Christmas toon and box all my gear for moving purposes. No matter how I try to keep my material clusters in check, every time I pack up to move from one burg to the next, and I'm well versed at this, there's always about a 1,000 pounds of crap I don't want or need...yet there it is, existing, and now the garbagemen will earn their keep next Wednesday morning. Wear back-support belts, fellas, cause I ain't gonna haul but about half the stuff I have and I refuse to hold a yard sale, especially when there's a foot-plus of snow on the ground.

Already had about 8 inches on the ground before this latest batch, and now it's well over a foot. Last time I checked, winter hasn't even officially hit yet, but the temp hasn't been over freezing since Thanksgiving. I mean, really, wtf? If cosmic justice existed, harsh winters and horrible Lion's teams would never pair up in the same year. Never mind, I'm not even going to go there.

The snow, because it's thick and wet, has stuck to the trees and sidings and automobiles everywhere. With the Christmas lights thrown in, the visual splendor makes a man soft in heart. A small gaggle of neighborhood children are building a snowman, and I felt a twinge of jealousy, wanting to build one myself...make a competition out of it. Last time I built a snowman, last year, I wrenched my back. Since I need to be loading heavy boxes and furniture into the U-Haul, and dragging others chunks of furniture and goodies to the curbside, in a few days, I must guard the health of my trick back like Joe Dumars guard's Sheed's bong.

Hopefully many Iraqis are passing the hookah pipes in celebration of a successful election, where the majorities of every segment of Iraq went to the polls. That, combined with President Bush agreeing to support the McCain amendment against torture gave added emotional ballast to the splendid pre-Christmas scene outside my front window. I like the idea that the neighborhood kids will grow up in a nation wanting to improve itself, and definitely in a nation that has outgrown the barbaric notion of state-sponsored torture. Optimism. Why the hell not?

Looks like it's gonna be a great day today, to get some fresh Air like a stray on a straight-away.

- k

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06dec05

Donde esta Santa Claus, the dude with the hair on his jaws....

Been doing more animation stuff than moving stuff, and I've been doing more moving stuff than writing stuff. Not to make excuses or apologies, cause when it's near zero outside during the jolly holly Christmas Rush, there's always a metric ton of good and lame tales to push on out into the public space. I haven't been on an airplane in a few months, and prolly won't fly anywhere till late January, but damn, one thing I remember about flying from Frisco to the D every Christmas, always at night, was seeing how the Midwest did it up. From Nebraska to Detroit Metro, little Christian Vegases dotted the land. Lights, Funny thing. When National Lampoon set their Christmas Vacation movie in Chicago, it was of course perfect. This is not to say that the rest of the country, or the world for that matter, does not have its share of gaudy displays, but if we're talking ratios of gaudy displays per human settlement, then the Midwest has the belt and the title...undisputed.

The Christmas toon will be up either late this week or next week, and there will be lights, and music. My favorite Christmas songs of all time do not exist on a single collection, and I'd like to address that someday. My four favorites have been set in stone for years. They are, in no particular order: Santa and His Old Lady by Cheech and Chong; Happy Christmas (the war is over)by John and Yoko-- btw, this is maybe the only song that Yoko sings where she doesn't leave with me the urge to saw out her vocals chords, though she sings like someone has already done just that; Holly Jolly Christmas by Burl Ives, seriously, reminds me of my Grandparents and big Christmas parties back when the adults in my life seemed wiser, though I understand that's a perspective thing; and finally, Christmas Time Is Here by the wondrous Vince Guaraldi.

Christmas is about and for the children, as the late Ol' Dirty Bastard might say, and so it is with my favorite Christmas songs...one and all favorites going back to when I was a wee tot. The Charlie Brown specials resonate as much with me now as they did when I was a kid, and Guaraldi's music is just as fresh, though the lenses of adulthood somehow makes even Vince's holiday music sound a bit darker. I hope that broadcast companies show A Charlie Brown Christmas till and past the end of time. Do that, and this weird experiment called humanity has a shot at bearing sweet fruit.

My maternal Grandfather was a Free Mason. In fact he was somewhat of honcho, so the story goes, but obviously it wasn't the kind of thing he talked about. The Masonic Lodge that my Grandfather belonged to held a very nice Christmas party every year, and some of my earliest childhood memories are fastened to these parties. There was a Santa, and he was a genuinely old, fat, clean, and jolly Santa, which made the whole magic of the situation that much brighter. I feel sorry for kids who have to glean their Christmas experiences through ghetto mall Santa's because it's not the same. These Masonic Lodge parties were the bomb. The kids had a blast with a realistic Santa and endless sweets, and the adults got tanked while bellowing out Holly Jolly Christmas. Good Times.

I have no idea how I'll fit Santa Claus and His Old Lady into the cartoon, but I'm brainstorming. When I was a kid, Flint had one decent rock station-- WWCK, Flint's Best Rock, and they played Santa Claus and His Old Lady late at night from Thanksgiving through Christmas Eve. The first time I heard that track I thought it was the coolest thing. Had I been exposed to it for the first time, say, last year, I'd think it to be silly sophomoric slop. Or not. There's a place in my heart for chronic stoner humor.

There was a period during my early 20s when I purposefully tortured myself every holiday season by reading a brutally long and dark book. They were:

1992 Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich
1993 War And Peace
1994 Lenin's Tomb

By time I cracked open Lenin's Tomb, my girlfriend at the time was ready to leave me. My favorite Christmas song during this period, of course, was a protest song, John and Yoko's Happy Christmas. Obviously I knew it was a protest song, and looking back at my early 90s Christmas season reading list, I was prolly a bummer to be around, unless I was wasted, but maybe still then. I first came across Happy Christmas when I was a little kid, again listening to WWCK, Flint's Best Rock (btw Flint's Best Rock turned into Flint's shittiest lowest common denominator top 40 swill about 6 months after I went away into the Navy. I came home on my first leave many months later, turned on the radio expecting to hear classic Rush and instead heard disposable Richard Marx telling us to hold on to the night or some silly shit. It was jarring. That was 1987, and I knew for sure, at that moment, that Flint was f**ked.)

The new WWCK never played Happy Christmas, or anything else worth listening to, besides, I'd long before scored the 45 at a flea market and copied it to cassette. Despite the political dark overtones, Happy Christmas, if you just listen to the tone of it, is a very uplifting song, positively euphoric. I can't really say that for War and Peace. Thankfully, I am better now.

- k

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