Let's Do the Numbers! Talkin' Yuletunes on Marketplace

My face betrays the intense concentration required to form sentences in real time.

I'm not allowed to post the video of my Dec. 10 appearance on CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper, (here's its blog accompaniment) and I don't have a photo from my appearance on Marketplace yesterday. So here's a screen cap from the CNN bit and a link to the Marketplace segment, wherein host Kai Ryssdal asks me a question for which I am completely unprepared.

Is there hope for a new classic Christmas song? | Marketplace.org.

I'll be wrapping up my talking-about-Christmas-songs tour with a segment on KPCC's AirTalk this afternoon at 3:30 Eastern. I heard that show a lot when I lived in Southern California circa 2000-2005, so I'm excited for that. UPDATE: Hear that segment here.

And of course, if you haven't grabbed my latest yulemix, Children, Go Where I Send Thee!, that awaits your loving attention here.

Merry Christmas!

Our Pottymouthed Year: 2013 on the DC Stage, Assessed.

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Drew Cortese and Quentin Maré in Studio's The Motherfucker with the Hat. (Teddy Wolff)

We're wrapping up a highly rewarding and admirably trend-resistant year on DC's stages, as I aver in this week's Washington City Paper.

Talkin' Yulejams on Word of Mouth

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Thanks to Virgina Prescott and Word of Mouth for having me back on yesterday to talk about the dearth of new Christmas songs and make a few recommendations of less-familiar old ones. They were awfully nice about it when the battery in the borrowed phone I was using died mid-interview.

You can listen to the segment here.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: More Hobbits, and Christmas Music

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1973's Magnum Force inverted the premise of its prequel, Dirty Harry.

Thanks to Pop Culture Happy Hour full-timers Stephen Thompson, Glen Weldon, and host Linda Holmes for inviting me back on the podcast this week to talk about The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, and a subject closer to my heart than that one, Christmas music. Have I mentioned that I'm very interested in Christmas music?

Our dissection of that enervating Hobbit movie feeds into a discussion of second installments, and some of the ones that really work. If you haven't seen Magnum Force in a while, there's no time like the present, Christmas T-minus five.

You can listen here or download the podcast from iTunes here. 

One element of our Hobbit talk that got cut for time was when I mentioned that I'd sought out a "High Frame Rate" presentation of this movie, because I'm interested in where action pictures might be headed. I remember James Cameron mentioning HFR as a potential new frontier in interviews from more than ten years ago, well before Avatar. (He has announced that Avatar's four sequels, coming in 2016, 2017, and 2018, will be released in HFR.)

I've read that director Peter Jackson messed with the color grading of the HFR version of Smaug in response to complaints that the prior Hobbit movie had a cheap, daytime-soap look. I love the irony that the newest, priciest filmmaking technology has the effect of making this megafranchise look like a shot-on-video-for-peanuts Dr. Who episode.

Anyway, whatever Jackson did seemed to my eyes to be for naught. Smaug has a distracting, video-gamey look that conspired with its pointlessly roaming camerawork to make everything in the frame feel weightless. I had a tougher time suspending my disbelief watching The Desolation of Smaug than I do watching the original 1933 King Kong, or a Ray Harryhausen joint. The illusion of weight, not size, is what makes impossible visions seem real.

Mourning Edition: Edgar and Annabel, reviewed.

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Maboud Ebrahimzadeh & Emily Kester. (Igor Dmitry) 

The short version of my Washington City Paper review of Sam Holcroft's Edgar and Annabel, now getting its U.S. premiere in a Studio Theatre production directed by the great actor Holly Twyford, is that you have to see it. It synthesizes about a half dozen well-chosen curated cinematic influences while remaining resolutely its own thing.

Talking Christmas Songs on HuffPost Live

The impromptu talking tour that has grown, to my surprise, out of my Slate piece from last week asking why it's been a generation since we admitted any new songs to the Christmas pop canon, marches on. I was on HuffPost Live earlier today for about 20 minutes, part of a webcam panel hosted by Nancy Redd that included Huffington Post social media fellow Ryan Kristobak and -- this was exciting -- Walter Afanasieff, the man who co-wrote "All I Want for Christmas Is You" with Mariah Carey.

The video doesn't seem to be embeddable, but you can watch the segment here. You'll see my head bobbing around distractingly -- useful in boxing, less so in on-camera interviews. You'll also get a nice look at my girlfriend's mom's spoon collection in the background. 

Webcam conferences are always a little dicey. You're contending with wildly variable video and audio quality, unpredictable transmission delays that create awkward pauses in the conversation and make it difficult to tell when the other party or parties have finished speaking, and frequently, unsynchronized sound and image. Allowing for all that, I think this went reasonably well.

Walter had just finished a point about the incongruity of sunny Los Angeles Christmases when Nancy called the segment to a close. Bad timing! I'd read only yesterday in Jody Rosen's terrific book White Christmas about how Irving Berlin's eponymous Christmas song, the most popular of all time, has originally opened with a verse about that very thing -- Christmas in Beverly Hills -- that Berlin ordered removed from the sheet music after Bing Crosby's chorus-only version in the 1942 film Holiday Inn proved to be definitive. Walter teed up the perfect opportunity for me to share this fascinating story, but the bit ended before I could.

I've got another handful of radio and podcast appearances coming up between now and Christmas Eve. I'm grateful for all the practice I'm getting forming sentences in real time. I'll try not to repeat myself too much.

Concerning the Death of Ray Price

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"Well, if I’m going to go out, I’ll go out singing." Ray Price, 1926-2013.

I was waiting to board a plane at Reagan National Airport this morning, operating on about two hours’ sleep, when the Washington Post‘s J. Freedom du Lac, who used to assign me music reviews back when he was the paper’s pop music critic, Tweeted me the WashPo’s obit of country legend Ray Price.

Price’s death had been falsely reported by his son over the weekend, but as I read Terence McArdle‘s thoughtful summing up of Price’s extraordinary life, it quickly became clear he really had left us this time.

I'm quoted briefly in the story, from my review of a 2007 concert that featured Price, Willie Nelson, and Merle Haggard, touring together as The Last of the Breed. It was a great show. I brought my dad along as my plus-one. "I'm 81 and I ain't quit yet!" Price told us on that evening six years ago.

Anyway, I was honored. R.I.P, Ray.

The Washington Post, Sept. 8, 2007

Presenting my 2013 yulemix, Children, Go Where I Send Thee!

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Annotated track list TK, but like James Brown says early in the set, Don't Be Hungry -- the latest and longest installment in my Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable series is live for your hall-decking pleasure now right here.

I've recontextualized a handful of old favorite tunes and clips from prior sets, but despite its formidable length -- a few minutes longer than Die Hard, but still a few minutes shorter than The Avengers -- the overwhelming majority of this one is stuff I've never compiled before. And as usual, I've already got a stockingload of outtakes I'll be mulling over again for possible inclusion next year. It was agony to lose the "Cowboy Santa Suite" from Side B, but take it from a guy who spends a lot of time seeing theatre: Act Two cannot be longer than Act One; that's just a gross violation of the social contract of art-making. Try it and the audience will turn on you.

My only real goal this year was to keep the mix short and tight. An hour seemed reasonable. Hey, Peace on Earth sounds reasonable, too. May this keep you in good company on your long road trips and flights and sleepless nights.

Thanks as always to the great Andy Cirzan for stirring my interest in "holiday obscura" with his annual appearances on the great WBEZ radio show and podcast Sound Opinions.

FURTHER READING: My 2012 Washington Post essay about my annual yulemix project. My Post piece from a few weeks ago about Nick Lowe's terrific new Christmas album, Quality Street. And my Slate essay from last week that ponders why it's been a generation since we admitted a new song into the classic yule-pop canon. That last one got me invited on CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper last week! They haven't posted video of the segment, unfortunately -- I put on a sport jacket and combed my hair and everything -- but you can read a transcript here if you want.

Merry Christmas!