Next Year: 2006

Here in Southern California, it looks like we will be rained out of the old year, and rained into the new.

I don't mind a bit. Last year's deluge made this Fall's persimmon-fest the most bountiful ever. And I'm not even going to get into the cherimoyas and the white zapotes. Yes, I have kinky fruit trees, but aside from that, I love the rain. I don't remember if I complained about it last year, but if I did I shouldn't have. Los Angeles, by rights, should be a desert. I read a report some years ago that said there was only enough water naturally here to support a community of 80,000 people. There are ten million of us just in LA County alone, and that's not counting those who choose not to be counted or the ones who live outside the county but are actually part of the county in one way or another.

So when it rains here, it is a special, sacred moment, a rare blessing. It's never enough, but while it's happening I feel like I am part of nature, at one with the universe, instead of a squatter in a foreign land that doesn't need or want me. Look, water from the sky! We're saved! I don't run outside and get all wet and twirl around in it, though. Not unless the cameras are rolling.

A lot of bloggers seem to think it's a good idea to recap the past year, because it's almost over and we're starting a new one. This is helpful to me because I can barely remember what time I went to bed last night, much less what crime against reason was committed by what administration official in March (oh, yeah, it was the Terry Schiavo fiasco). Even so, I don't pay much attention to these annual reviews. Life goes on, despite the numbers we put on the years. I haven't figured out if it's a circle or a straight line or maybe a downward spiral, but it does seem to be just one damned thing after another, and bundling the events of one arbitrary time period into a package to reflect on doesn't make much sense to me.

Still, I just want to take a moment on New Year's Eve to make a couple of observations:

• I am the only one (so far) among those I think of as my blogging buddies who is blogging today, the biggest party day of the year. So, no matter how I try to paint myself here, I guess I have no life.
• I am deeply grateful to those same blogging buddies for all you have written over the past year, the first full year of revision99, on your blogs and in my comments section. I feel like I have made friends here, and thanks in part to you Precious Few, I have learned something about my place in the world. It's not as exalted as I'd hoped it would be, but knowing where you stand is important if you're going to move on.
  
• I've made at least one enemy here, someone whom I thought I knew a little bit, and who surprised me with obnoxious personality quirks and bizarre attitudes about life. You're probably not still reading here, but if you are, may I say "fuck you?" (I have addressed my specific grievances in no uncertain terms directly to this person in private email. So if you didn't get the email, it's not you.) I haven't learned my lesson, though, and I continue to think all the rest of you are the charming and clever people you seem to be online.
  
• Some bloggers that I read have disappeared, and I miss them. I find myself checking for new posts on defunct blogs, hoping they'd come back. Some just stopped writing, some made announcements and stopped writing, some took down their sites and some left the old sites intact, like ghost towns, full of the past, but no life. I wish the rest of you wouldn't do this to me - have you no concern for your readers with no life? What, you got girlfriends, jobs, new homes, new hobbies and now you can't sit down occasionally and call your mother write a little note on your blog? I know we all hoped we'd have readers when we started doing this, but how many of us anticipated that we'd be setting up expectations, and things we do (or stop doing) actually affect people we don't even know? If I had a million readers I guess it would be easier to quit, but you Precious Few are really so few that I could totally afford to buy you all brunch if you came to my town on the same day. When the day comes that I have to say goodbye, I see now that it could be as tearful as any real life separation. And, sure, brunch will be on me.

That's it. I know you're all getting ready for tonight's parties. Chances are you won't see this until 2006, but just in case, when you're all smooching and toasting each other at midnight, raise a glass for me. I'll be sleeping in front of my television, and dreaming of you.

The Circle of Life

In the beginning there was dirt.

And the dirt was good. So good that a little tree sprouted out of it, God knows where the seed came from. Birds, probably.

Then came sun and water and after ten or fifteen years the little tree said "Now I will make some persimmons," and so it came to pass that in the fall three hundred big, fat, sweet, juicy persimmons hung from the little tree's branches, until the little tree cried out "Pick these things and eat of them, would you?

And so a harvest was mounted, and it was bountiful, and there was much climbing of ladders and plucking of ripe persimmons and fending off hungry mockingbirds, and there was joy and shouting in the back yard. Soon the bushels were filled with extravagant fuyus, enormous orbs of orange sweetness to rival the pear and yes, even the exalted papaya.

The harvest exceeded our ability to consume. Persimmons were eaten at every meal, pressed upon every friend, and all the relatives and every coworker until each person turned and walked briskly away when they saw us coming with our shopping bags full of fruit.

And still there were more persimmons. And they were starting to get very soft.

And so it came to pass that on that last Sunday in December, four days and four nights after the Solstice, the remaining persimmons were introduced to obscene amounts of sugar, butter, flour and many and varied spices - cinnamon, vanilla, nutmeg - as well as raisins, fresh lemon juice, chopped pecans, and the mixtures and batters were formed into loaves and dropped onto cookie sheets, and the baking, oh, the baking went on throughout that day and into the night, and when it was over and the kitchen was nearly as hot as the fires of hell, behold! The persimmons were transfigured into life-giving sweetbread, and verily I say to you...

cookies!!

New Year's Wish, 2006

I'm ready to give up on world peace.

It's a sweet sentiment, it's been dear to me for most of my life and you hear a lot about it this time of year, folks hoping for it, praying for it, wishing for it in the New Year. I've done all of that hoping, praying and wishing myself, and a little bit of working for it. But it's not ever going to happen, and here's why.

First, there are a lot of people who profit from war and the threat of war. Leaders of nations benefit because in time of war no one is likely to throw them out of office, so they get to hold on to power, or at least bolster their popularity. If it takes a war to hold on to power, that's fine with them. They will find an enemy and promote a jingoistic fervor so that they can be President or Prime Minister or Premier or Grand Hoo Ha a bit longer. You may be thinking "No, there are real enemies. They're not made up, and we must defend ourselves from them." If I'm right, and I think I am, in every case someone has cooked up a false pretense for going to war, or preparing for one. If we have a real enemy, perhaps it is because we are their imagined enemy. In any case, the regular people, not running the country, have to go along because they don't know if maybe the President knows something they don't.

Another group that profits, literally, are arms dealers. When you're in business you need to sell stuff, and the biggest sales have always been the guns to "defend" the country. These days the term "guns" means sophisticated weaponry like guided missiles, smart bombs and the elaborate technological infrastructure to make it all work. These are big ticket items, and most governments will pay literally any amount to get the best armament, no matter what sacrifices their people may have to make. Needless to say, this powerful and wealthy group can and will do whatever it takes to make wars inevitable. It's good for business.

Then there are those who actually fight the wars. There are two groups here: the generals, men who have grown up thinking about war, studying war, planning for war. They have been in uniform all their adult lives, and war is their business. They don't see diplomatic solutions - they see military ones. Some of them may simply be trying to stay "in business," but most are just doing their jobs, and following what they think is a "proud tradition."

The other group is the soldiers, the eighteen year old boys bursting with testosterone and eager to prove their manhood. It's easy for the other groups - the leaders, the arms dealers and the generals - to persuade these kids to become cannon fodder: Most of them are eager to go. They don't believe they can be hurt, they long for adventure and they are unable at their age to contemplate the brutality and futility of what they are ordered to do. If they waver in their ignorance and resolve, a patriotic speech or a good strong sermon will restore their urge to join the few.

We've been slaughtering, torturing and enslaving each other since the beginning of time. We've refined our weapons and our techniques until warmaking is nearly a science. In every war both opponents think God is on their side, that it is they who are righteous, that this is the way to solve the world's problems.

And yet we have not solved all the problems. The same ones keep cropping up: the need for more resources, the hatred of someone else's religion or skin color, economic crisis, the need to defend one's past arrogant and cruel behavior. Each time, war seems to be the best option, and our leaders, in cahoots with the gun sellers and the generals are forever sending our boys to fight and kill their boys, to come home dead, or maimed or crazy and believing that they have brought justice to "the enemy."

I'm sad to say that I don't think the habit can be broken. It's been going on too long. There's an establishment that benefits, and can't see any other way. There are eager boys who think it's fun, who will endlessly replace the worn-out veterans. So I really am giving up. I'm going to stop worrying about it so much. I'm going to stop wishing and hoping that, in my lifetime, humanity will come to it's senses.

And if I say another prayer, I won't ask for anything so foolish as world peace. I'll pray for something more realistic. Like cookies.

Winter

The first day of winter, 2005.

The longest night. Maybe I won't sleep. I haven't stayed up all night in years. The things that once kept me up all night have faded, the urgencies, the emergencies, the crazy buzz.

I'm afraid though.

I go outside on these long nights and walk in the streets and feel alone amid the parked cars and closed up houses decorated for the big holiday. It feels good to be alone, with no false heartiness, no empty bravado, no season's greetings. Peace on earth. Season of love, season of hope. Season of desperation.

Los Angeles is the coldest city, paved for a hundred miles. Even the rivers are made of concrete. The smiles are so hard and bright they have lost their meaning, and the brilliance of the lights hides the stars themselves.

We have defeated winter. We have put the storm windows in storage and moved to the coast and turned on all the lights and there will be no longest night, and this darkness will not seep into our souls. Winter, we have felt your chill, and we are not afraid. We will gather together with the ones we love and we will eat and sing and put lights on the roof, lights on the trees, we will light fires against the cold and dark.

Winter doesn't care. Winter says You have to deal with me. You think you've escaped, but you've only imprisoned yourself with your decorations and your lights and your pavement and your season's greetings. I am cold, I am darkness, and I am coming to your town, wherever you have built it, and one of these times I may decide to stay.

I'm almost alone on this longest night, just me and the silence and the parked cars. From under one of them, a small animal watches me, a cat. It is careful but not afraid, and I want to touch it, to pick it up and cradle it near my heart, feel it's heartbeat, talk to it of spring and life, feel it's warmth, learn it's bravery.

But the cat knows what I want, and it runs away.

Round and Round for the Holidays

Kids, when you grow up and buy radio stations, as I'm sure you will,

whatever you do don't let a computer program your Christmas music! I mean this, kids. Computers are have no clue how to do this right. They will play the same title back to back, several times a day, and they will think it's OK because the recordings are by two different artists. They will not, as a good human program director would, warn you when you have limited the play list to too few songs. For example, thirty songs. Or thirty tracks, because really there are only twenty songs but some of them are by two different artists. And because of their diligent adherence to your wrong-headed choice of only thirty tracks, they will cause your on-air talent to become surly on the telephone, knowing that, even though it is the holiday season, they cannot fulfill your innocent holiday music requests, unless you happen to be requesting one of the songs on the stupidly abbreviated playlist, but why would anyone do that, since those songs are already playing incessantly?

I've been listening to a radio station in Los Angeles (KOST 103.5 FM, if you must know) that is playing nothing but Christmas music throughout the holidays. At first the orgy of sentiment was satisfying and fun - cheerful, uplifting holiday songs playing in the background while I worked, picked persimmons, did the dishes, drove around in the car. Good times, really. Gradually, the music faded from my consciousness, and my life was simply imbued with the warmth of the holiday season, as if a chipper and loving Victorian angel were riding on my shoulder, whispering words of acceptance and good will in my ear.

But, as with all stories of this type, soon I detected trouble in paradise. A nagging irritation began bubbling to the surface of my mostly empty mind. It was Burl Ives singing Have a Holly, Jolly Christmas, like twenty times a day. Are there not enough Christmas songs? Do they have to play this one more than, say, once a year? Apparently, computer says "Yes!"

Not only that, but once I became aware of the repetition I started to hear a lot of it, and I mean a lot of it, including the maudlin Christmas Shoes by Newsong. I think the computer is fucking this up, for me and everyone who likes music. KOST is owned by Clear Channel, a corporation which owns 1200 radio stations around the country. You think it's a bit of a challenge to make a mix tape for your girlfriend/boyfriend? Try programming 1200 radio stations with 24/7 music. I'm not saying this is a good idea, I'm just saying that they couldn't do it without computers. Probably Steve Jobs should get involved and donate some of those super-creative Apple computers with i-Tunes connections and "golden ears," because those big Unix mainframes, the ones Clear Channel must be using, are just not hip enough.

So I'm back to my CD's. I have a friend with whom I have been exchanging cheap Christmas CD's for ten years now. The rules are: one CD per year, bought at a grocery store or a pharmacy, and costing less than five bucks. I give her one, she gives me one, every year. Sometimes we break the one-disk rule when we find some really cheap CD's, like in January (then we buy a few and hold them until the following Christmas - can't give Christmas music in Superbowl season).

In this way I have accumulated...

• Elvis' Christmas Album
• Nat "King Cole, The Christmas Song
• Tony Bennett, Snowfall
• Bing Crosby's White Christmas
• the ever-popular Drug Emporium Traditional Holiday Favorites Volume 1

and a stack of generic collections of original hits and remakes by Hall and Oates, Brenda Lee, Bobby Helms, Burl Ives, Judy Garland. Pat Boone, Amy Grant, Chicago, Mary Hart(!), Lou Rawls, Don McLean, Donna Summer and more, more, more! I'm on a thirty-day binge of musical holiday cheer!

I'm still looking for The Beach Boys Christmas Album and Phil Spector's Christmas (mono version). I have them on vinyl, and they're all scratched from frequent rum- and egg nog-fueled playings and shufflings, plus they don't work in the mp3 player. Not hearing these two classics is making me contemplate holiday self-mutilation, so please help. If you have one or both of these CD's, for God's sake burn me a copy! I'll swap you my Drug Emporium compilation.

As always at Christmas time, my heart throbs with holiday good will for you all.

Snowman On the Roof

I grew up in Minnesota.

There's still some debate as to whether I have actually "grown up" even at this late date, so let's just say that I spent my childhood there in the Northstar state. My earliest memories of the Winter Solstice were of snow and cold and the world hunkering down against the elements. The quintessential Christmas image for me is a house - more like a cottage, really - huddled at dusk amid snow-covered pine trees. Smoke from a fireplace curls from the chimney, a golden light flickers in the windows, and snow is falling. The roof and ground are already white with the stuff, the walkway only a vague wrinkle in the soft blanket. The picture is soundless, muffled by the snow. There's a pine wreath on the door. This image speaks peace and coziness to me. When I am inside this house, I have no concerns but to let the fire warm me and the love surround me.

Those who live in the upper midwest know what a sappy, unrealistic image this is, but I can't help it: I'm hostage to a nostalgia for something that never was, an idyllic world of peace and tranquility that exists only in my memory. But it's as real as any of the "real" things in my past.

I was a child when I left the north country, so what did I know of frozen crankcases, heating bills, shoveling sidewalks and the expense of acquiring a protective wardrobe for an entire family? These were worries for my parents, but not for me. All I knew was snowball fights, diving into snowbanks, sledding, skating on the lake and the crystalline beauty of the landscape after a snowfall.

Now that I live in Los Angeles I am haunted by my snowy past. Every year at Christmas I hear the snow songs: White Christmas, Let It Snow, Sleigh Ride, Jingle Bells, Baby It's Cold Outside, Frosty the Snowman, etc. ad infinitum, or so it seems. I hear them and the images flash in my head and I feel a disjointed melancholy as I make my way around sunny Southern California, shivering in the 50-degree evenings like some effete lotus-eating beach-dweller, which in some ways I guess I am.

But in other ways I'm still that skinny kid on a sled, racing down that steep, bumpy hill at the edge of the park again and again, oblivious to the cold, the snow that gets inside my coat and down my neck only a momentary distraction from the fun I am having, which is making me feel exactly as if I am in heaven. School is out, snow is on the ground, the sun is shining, the hill is steep and I am flying!

I can't go home again, of course. I won't go looking, not awake. I'll just enjoy the palm trees in the sunshine. We have Christmas lights that hang from the eaves of the houses. We think they look like icicles. And we have inflatable snowmen with lights inside them. Sometimes we put them on our roofs, because none of us knows for sure where snowmen come from, or where they belong.

Dreamer

Please don't wake me. No, don't shake me. I'm only sleeping.

Twenty-five years ago today in New York City,
a deranged and sad little man, whose name is of no importance,
shot and killed John Lennon, bringing to an end
a life of genius, joy and love,
and leaving millions bereaved. John was barely forty years old,
and we have no way of knowing what gifts he had left to give.
They may say he was a dreamer, but he's not the only one.

Coasting to Christmas

I started right after Thanksgiving listening 24/7 to KOST 103.5 FM in Los Angeles.

They call this "KOST-ing" (pronounced "coasting"). They are playing nothing but Christmas music 24 hours a day until December 26th. I can't believe I actually missed a couple days of this at the beginning, but I am on the Christmas train big time now, at work, in the car and during those otherwise introspective moments at home. I am Father Christmas, awash in good cheer.

But a byproduct of this total immersion is that one begins to realize how many Christmas songs have been remade by new, ever-younger performers, and each new generation seems (to me) to have gotten a little farther away from the original meaning of the song, until you end up with something like Whitney Houston's hideous, overwrought version of A Christmas Song. Hey, Whitney: Christmas is supposed to be a time of hope and joy. You don't have to torture every note until it cries for mercy.

Don't get me wrong - I think Whitney is a gifted artist, and once we get a little distance on the substance abuse and the general flakiness we'll no doubt begin to see her as a latter-day Billie Holliday, but I mean, I grew up with straight Christmas carols sung straight: Jingle Bells, Gene Autry singing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, choirs doing Silent Night, 101 Strings with classics like God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. Oh, sure, over the years there have been some less-than-antique songs that have squirmed into the lexicon of classics: Brenda Lee's Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree, Bobby Helms' Jingle Bell Rock, Mel Torme's original The Christmas Song.

Still, it always jars me when a new one comes along, and my natural inclination is to resist adding any new songs of the season. Like, I remember the first year I started hearing The Little Drummer Boy. It was by The Harry Simeone Chorale, and it arrived for Christmas, 1958. I was just a kid, but this song rubbed me the wrong way on several levels:

• The bible makes no mention of a drummer boy. So they are making up stuff that didn't happen. And don't throw Santa at me. This is my indignation. Go get your own.
• My own mother would have smacked me if I had beat on a drum around a newborn infant. I assumed the mother of God would do no less for her little savior.
• "The ox and lamb kept time?" Give me a break. Oxen and sheep have no rhythm.
• Who were those guys singing "Parumpa pum pum?" Couldn't they find a real drum? Grown men making funny noises = just embarrassing, for everybody.
• Finally, it is not a gift to play a drum for a baby. A gift would involve giving something. He could have given the drum, for example. Then there would have been no song. Fine with me.

But the song hung in there, in spite of my scorn. Soon there were 150 covers of it, and 25 million recordings sold. Twenty-five million. How could it not be a classic? I mean, Christmas is all about the bling. Twenty-five million sales brings a lot of bling. So, long story short, I hated it for about five years, but now The Little Drummer Boy is one of my beloved Christmas favorites, heavy with the emotional freight of many holiday seasons. Eventually David Bowie got on board, and I saw him singing it on television with Bing Crosby! Talk about cognitive dissonance. But we're not talking about that, are we?

But, in general, what do you think makes a young singer or band want to do a Christmas record (CD)? Is it because they just love Christmas, and want to share their excitement with the world? Or maybe they want to show the parents of their fans that they are not bad people, even though they have shaved their heads, injected pints of ink under their skin and wear safety pins as jewelry?

There's probably a commercial reason (ya think?). Many of these recordings sound like throwaways, and yet there is an automatic audience for them, and KOST will play them for sure. When you're looking for hundreds of hours of holiday programming you can't afford to leave any stone unturned. But, even this early in the season, and as full of holiday spirit as I am, there are a few I wish I didn't have to hear again:

• Barry Manilow, For All the Children. The children thank you, Barry. Now please go sit down.
• Rod Stewart and Dolly Parton, Baby It's Cold Outside. This may be the only version in which a conclusion to the seduction is tacked on. Of course Rod wins Dolly over. She stays, he chuckles, creepily. In my dream about this, he can't get it up, even to fuck her tits.
• The aforementioned Christmas Song, by Whitney Houston. This is done in the style of Mariah Carey, and Whitney should know better. Every note is drawn out with dips and trills until even a marathoner would be out of breath, and still the phrases go on and on. Just stop it!
• Barry Manilow again, for his almost-exact ripoff of an arrangement of Jingle Bells released in the 1940's by Bing Crosby with the Andrews Sisters. Did he think he wouldn't get caught at this?
• Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Santa Claus is Coming to Town. Bruce applies his own tortured growl to this happy little children's song. At least they try to have a little fun with it, but really all I get from this is "Gosh, maybe Phil Spector really is a genius after all." (Note: Springsteen's version is a direct rip of The Crystals' 1963 version on Phil Spector's "Christmas Gift" LP. Can't these guys think up their own arrangements?)
• Burl Ives, Have a Holly, Jolly Christmas. When this hayseed holiday classic hit the streets in 1965 I thought Burl Ives had been dead for at least ten years. Now it looks as if he'll never go away. (Composer Johnny Marks also wrote Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and, incredibly, Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree. I think if you are vocally flexible, you could sing Holly Jolly and Rockin' Around to the same accompaniment. But really, why would you want to?)

However, I am Jones, not Scrooge, and I like stuff, too:

• Judy Garland's lush, heartbreaking Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.
• Please Come Home For Christmas, by Aaron Neville, The Eagles, B.B. King, and more.
• Elvis' Blue Christmas. The King. 'Nuff said.
• I'll Be Home for Christmas by The Beach Boys. Has any boy's choir sounded more angelic?
• John Lennon, Happy Christmas (War is Over). Hopeful and useless. My kind of song.
• Eurythmics, Winter Wonderland. Take me with you, Annie.
• Oh, Holy Night, Al Green. Absolutely spine-tingling. Tell it, Reverend.
  

You've got more, of course. What are they? Come on: 'Tis the season for making lists.