Blog Diggity Dawg
Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind... Samuel Beckett
I'm a sap for Christmas. Every year I flounder following the conclusion of the baseball season and settle into a seasonal affective funk that is beyond the reach of the best pharmaceuticals. And then come Thanksgiving I get a weird inexplicable rush of Christmas spirit. The collection of holiday albums comes out and stays in aggressive rotation until the new year, when the dark January funk rolls in and drags me behind a sand truck all the way to spring training.
The music of Christmas is nostalgia's heroin, a potent distillation of all the melancholy and sentimentality associated with the holiday --sitting around the Christmas tree, reading Walter Benjamin by the glittering lights and listening to Jackie Gleason deconstruct the songs of the season is one of the most pleasantly bruising experiences imaginable, a quiet, uncomplicated tradition that is utterly free of all the usual hubbub and heartbreak of the Yuletide ramble.
I don't care for all the cheesy pop updates on seasonal standards, the shit that gets dumped on the marketplace by the truckload every year. No, I like my cheese properly aged, my sacred cows cornfed and wobbly with brandy. Robert Goulet. Steve and Edie. Der Bingle. Perry Como. And Jackie Gleason. Gleason was the great renaissance man of bachelor pad swank, and his ridiculously bloated excursions into the mists of mood music are some of the most intoxicating --and intoxicated-- documents of fuzzed art damage ever recorded. His 1956 Merry Christmas album on Capital is the ultimate Prozac sleighride. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I've probably listened to that record more than any other record in my collection. Every year I try to figure out its strange appeal, to explain the odd grip it has on me. It's power lies in its narcotic distillation of all the romantic desolation of winter and the holidays, the way it plunges all the way through to the reserves of melancholy that are buried deep in the sentimental heart of Christmas past and present.
Some nights I put that record on and have no problem imagining that it's 1956 and snow is falling and I'm sitting around a big fire blasted out of my warm body on cocktails, listening to Jackie and his orchestra deconstruct the songs of Christmas, recasting them as a swoon-inducing elixer that's equal parts Spanish Fly and Jaggermeister. Depending on the circumstances this is music that could either get you laid or drive you to suicide. Jackie does "Jingle Bells" as a blindfolded death march through a dark woods, headed for a meeting with the bottom of a black river. The whole record is like that; it sounds alternately like Christmas with a gun in your mouth or a broad in your arms. Take your pick. A quart of whiskey, a hideously flocked Christmas tree, smashola in Lonelyville. You go to bed and wake up only to put your head back in your hands. Jackie, you had the soul of a poet. Stop, you're breaking my heart.
Subject: Jackie Gleason's Neighbor
Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 00:23:17 -0400
Around 1965, my parents purchased a home in an area out side Miami Beach called the Country Club of Miami. I went to school with a friend named Johnny Philbin whose father Jack, unbeknownst to me at the time, was the producer of 'The Honeymooners." About a year later after we moved into our house, Gleason built a huge home at the country club overlooking the 18th hole that took up three lots!
Being a friend of Johnny's offered me numerous opportunities to see Gleason.Johnny was Gleason's legal 'God-Son' as I was told, so we had access to Gleason's house, primarily the billiard room which was a located though a walkway off to the side of the house. We played pool and pinball while in the room after school and the 'Great One' himself would usually stop by to join us for a game of billiards and say hello.
One day Johnny asked me to join him and his Dad for a short round of golf with Gleason and Art Carney. As a nine year old, I was on cloud nine knowing I would get to spend an afternoon with two of the most famous
celebrities in the world. Gleason had a customized golf cart with tassels that trimmed the top, an on-board bar, and the most amazing thing I had ever seen, a built in black and white TV set which he watched regularly when playing on the links.
On another occasion while we were at the pool at the club, Gleason came out of the bar to go for a swim. It was obvious that he had had a few drinks too many that afternoon. He jumped into the pool and removed his trunks and waved them above his head shouting a joke or two. After getting out of the pool he proceeded to pick on a small dog that one of the guests had brought. The dog bit him on the ankle. Needless to say, that was the last time dogs were ever allowed around the pool area again.
I have a lot of fond memories of Jackie as a kid. He always treated us well and spent many hours with us. But the most cherished item I have is one of the many Christmas cards he sent us while we lived there. It's a crushed red velvet card. On the front is say's "Merry Christmas" and on the inside it say's, "Jackie Gleason". But the most notable thing about the card was the postage mark on it. It's dated December 1967 and right next to it was a little stick man, in Gleason's famous form that says, "And Away We Go!" I'm proud to say I still have it.
One more thing I'd like to mention, if you remember during his shows in Miami Beach, he always came out at the end with a cup of coffee. It wasn't coffee folks, it was always scotch!
I miss him dearly.
Bill F.
"Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories...For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accomodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?...Of no one has less been expected, and no one has had a greater sense of well-being than the man who has been able to carry on his disreputable existence in the mask of Spitzweg's 'Bookworm,' For inside him there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector --and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be-- ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have with objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them."
--Walter Benjamin, Unpacking My Library
My Year In Music
1) The Streets, Original Pirate Material (Vice)
2) Solomon Burke, Don’t Give Up On Me (Fat Possum)
3) James Luther Dickinson, Dixie Fried (Sepia Tone) [Reissue]
4) Spoon, Kill the Moonlight (Merge)
5) Interpol, Turn On The Bright Lights (Matador)
6) Orchestra Baobab, Pirate’s Choice (Nonesuch)
7) Neil Halstead, Sleeping On Roads (4ad)
8) Kronos Quartet, Nuevo (Nonesuch)
9) Henri Salvador, Room With A View (Chambre Avec Vue) (Blue Note)
10) Sun Ra and His Arkestra, Music For Tomorrow’s World (Atavistic)
11) Henry Flynt, Back Porch Hillbilly Blues, Volumes 1 & 2 (Locust)
12) Sleater Kinney, One Beat (Kill Rock Stars)
13) Mr. Lif, I Phantom (Definite Jux)
14) Lambchop, Is A Woman (Merge)
15) Atmosphere, God Loves Ugly (Fatbeats)
16) Damon Albarn et al, Mali Music (Astralwerks)
17) Radar Brothers, Surrounding Mountains (Merge)
18) Jason Moran, Modernistic (Blue Note)
19) Don Covay and the Jefferson Lemon Blues Band, House of Blue Lights (Sepia Tone) [reissue]
20) Fennesz, Field Recordings (Touch)
21) Nicola Conte, Jet Sounds Revisited (ESL).
22) Kahil El' Zabar Trio, Love Outside of Dreams (Delmark)
23) Los Lobos, Good Morning Aztlan (Hollywood)
24) Future Bible Heroes, Eternal Youth (Instinct)
25) Super Furry Animals, Rings Around the World (Beggars XI)
7:25:11 PM 
|
