Pop Culture Happy Hour: Silly Questions Live, For Special Guests

Three weeks later, my souvenir pint glasses remain fully intact.

I have a little unplanned cameo at the end of the episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour that posted today, the second of a two-parter recorded at the PCHH live show at NPR HQ on Dec. 10, 2013. That was the day my Slate story about the paucity of new songs in the yuletide canon posted, and the show was only a few hours after I'd been down the street at CNN taping a segment about that piece for The Lead with Jake Tapper. Someone in the audience asked for recommendations of new Christmas songs, and host Linda Holmes was kind enough to invite me up to suggest a few.

As I had been at the first PCHH live show a year earlier, at the old NPR bulding that's since been torn down, I was fighting a cold on this evening. I hope I didn't pass it on to you if we happened to shake hands. I did warn everyone who so much as made eye contact with me to wash their hands immediately. It's how I convey warmth and sincerity, you guys.

You can hear the episode here. Happy New Year.

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!

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.

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.

Musical Advent Calendar: On Her Majesty's Secret Service Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, 1969

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The soundtrack album for On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the once-reviled 1969 James Bond film that's enjoyed a critical reappraisal among fans in recent decades, isn't a Christmas record, true. But the film, which starred George Lazenby -- a handsome and hardy but unengaging Australian model with no prior acting experience -- in his single appearance as 007, is set at Christmas. 

Its soundtrack features some of the best music in the entire 50-year franchise. You've got John Barry's kinetic opening title theme (reprised in Brad Bird's The Incredibles, among other places). You've got its elegiac love theme, "We Have All the Time in the World," with lyrics by Hal David, beautifully sung by Louis Armstrong.

And until a couple of weeks ago, I didn't realize that you've also got Nina's (whose?) "Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?"

With its crisply annunciated Julie Andrews-style lead vocal and creepy childrens' choir, it would seem more at home in, say, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (written by Bond creator Ian Fleming) than in a Bond joint. It's lack of suitability for its original context makes it a perfect fit my annual yulemix, which I have this year decided to call Children Go Where I Send Thee! Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable Hard Eight: The Desolation of Nog. I have my reasons.

Matt Mira and Matt Gorley just posted the OHMSS episode of their terrific James Bonding podcast last week. Highly recommended.

Musical Advent Calendar: Children, Go Where I Send Thee! Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable Hard Eight: The Desolation of Nog, 2013

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We're going in a radically different direction with today's Musical Advent Calendar selection, debuting the cover of a classic Christmas record yet-to-come.

That would be the eighth in my unstoppable series of holiday mixtapes, Children, Go Where I Send Thee! Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable Hard Eight: The Desolation of Nog. My only real goal for this to staunch the 2009-2012 trend of these things getting steadily longer -- last year's installment weighed in at a truly obnoxious 130 minutes, only two minutes shorter than the classic holiday movie Die Hard. Which is not to say I wasn't proud of the goddamned thing. I was.

Anyway, that grand ambition of brevity flowered only, uh, briefly. When it drops in a week or so, my new yulemix will be another feature-length epic to comfort and amuse you through your car trips, your long layovers, and your interminable sleepless nights of loathing and regret. I think you'll really dig it. Merry Christmas!