Innocent diversion.

Hee hee hee. Funny. A little blasphemous, but funny.

Christmas (or at least december) in Korea, and a very narcissistic first half-post.

Aww nuts.

I tried to fix up the pictures on this one, and instead blogger just swallowed most of the former post.

If one of the pictures that got swallowed was really special to you, request it in the comments section and I'll put it up for you.



To recap what got eaten:

most Koreans (especially females) don't show too many teeth when they smile: almost nobody smiles like this:



or this
or this

instead, you see lots of this:



and this: it seems to convey an image of modesty here; Girlfriendoseyo says it's also physiological: the muscles that pull western people's upper lips back so far are less developed in many Korean and east asian races' mouths, and mouths are shaped differently, to boot.


given such a limited range of smiles available for flirting and the working of womanly wiles, and a lot of girls have expanded their toolkit in different directions, with faces like these:



and an alarming number of knowing smiles to go with the ubiquitous puppy-dog-eyes and pouts:

this is about as toothy as it usually gets, below.


and this was the model image that brought on this line of thought: I fondly call this her "duck smile", it's amazingly common here, and on principle, I don't date women who use it.



It's cold now. Bring your old blankets to the nearest shelter.

a student gave me a sprig of oranges. i've never received a sprig of anything before. the oranges were fresh from Jeju Island (the Florida of Korea), and delicious. I love that class.





Christmas is in Korea!

What's that in the distance?

Let's look a bit closer!

Hey! What's that christmas tree made of?


yep. heineken is toasting the world. I don't have the energy to re-type my rant from before. Plus, it looks pretty in the early morning:


(oh wait: here's that mini-rant.)

That's right. In the middle of the city center, we have a big merry christmas from Heineken. Nice that they're sharing the spirit.

Would this ever fly in north america? Wouldn't the parent groups get all up in arms and demand it be taken down faster than a billboard of Joe Camel dressed as Santa outside an elementary school?

(a christmas ad from 1946)



Made me laugh.


My friend Tamie is writing devotionals for every day of advent. I love advent. Girlfriendoseyo and I had a discussion where I explained how the feeling Christmas gives me is one of melancholy, of winter setting in, but also of anticipation and hope -- the Christmas songs that touch me the most are the sacred ones of course, and of them, especially the ones about light in the darkness. Listen to the melodies and words of songs like "The First Noel" "Silent Night" "Oh Little Town Of Bethlehem" -- I remember lighting the advent candles being my favourite Christmas tradition, and the mellow, quiet mood of reading the Christmas story, or the prophecies in Isaiah by candlelight with my family, are still what Christmas means to me. Even now, I prefer the Christmas music, and decorations that set a meditative tone instead of a festive tone. Girlfriendoseyo and I walked around downtown Seoul, where a lot of lights are going up, and she preferred the green, red, and yellow lights, while I preferred the silver, blue, and white lights, because she preferred the warmth, and I preferred the melancholy.


P.S.: this is horrible: http://www.uglychristmaslights.com/

Advent. Look back, look forward, both with hope.

To my friends and family in Canada:

miss you tons.

love: Roboseyo.

P.S.: roboseyoism of the day:

White turkey meat and cranberry sauce are like country music and pickup trucks: separate, they don't make a lot of sense to a lot of people, but taken together, they explain each other's existence perfectly.

Penance for that big ranty heaping pile of Roboseyo complainey

Just cause I don't want to be too negative and all:

Here is the playlist that I just created for a mix CD to be played at Matt's Christmas party. I think it's a pretty good mix of sacred Christmas music and . . . (what's the opposite? The Devil's Christmas music?) It's an attempt to find a good mix of classic tunes and not-overplayed versions, along with a few curveballs to keep things interesting. . . but not so odd to wreck the flow.

soundtrack: hit play, and then move on to. . .





The Playlist

1. Christmas Is All Around Bill Nighy as Billy Mack Love Actually OST. Always makes me smile.
2. Winter Wonderland - Phantom Planet (fun)
3. Greensleeves - Vince Guaraldi (Charlie Brown Christmas)
4. Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer - Jack Johnson yeah. That's what I said. Jack Johnson gets on my playlist.
5. Santa Claus Is Coming To Town - The Jackson 5 (overplayed, but pure joy. Sorry, Mel.)
6. Song For A Winter's Night - Sarah McLachlan
7. Lo! How A Rose E'er Blooming - Sufjan Stevens (I like his christmas stuff, quite a lot.)
8. Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis - Neko Case
9. At Last I'm Ready For Christmas - Stan Rogers
10. O Come All Ye Faithful - Nat King Cole
11. O Holy Night - Tracy Chapman (avoids the dreadful over-production and over-vocalisation Mariah Carey ad all the Popera stars bring to the poor song. -- This song is the Star Spangled Banner of Christmas songs: EVERY artist with pretensions of great vocal skill has tortured this song right up and down the scale.)
12. I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm - Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
13. Jingle Bell Rock - Brian Setzer Orchestra (specially requested by Matt: at least it's not the Brenda Lee version, or 'Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree')
14. Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) - Darlene Love
15. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen - Barenaked Ladies and Sarah McLachlan
16. Silent Night - Stevie Nicks
17. The Little Drummer Boy - The Temptations (the song's overdone, and one of my least favourite Christmas songs, but bud, the Temptations really bring it.)
18. Joy To The World - Brian Wilson (beach boy harmonies. Nice.)
19. Silver Bells - Stevie Wonder (the Dean Martin version's overdone, and young Stevie Wonder's voice is so fresh and full of vitality)
20. Hark! The Herald Angels Sing - Frank Sinatra - beat out three or four other Sinatra songs for a spot on the mix (His First Noel and Baby It's Cold Outside is also great.)
21. The First Noel - Emmylou Harris (a capella and gorgeous. Beat out five or six other versions of the song, by heavyweights like Aretha Franklin and Frank Sinatra and the Temptations to get on. The best discovery I made while searching for Christmas music to put on the mix).
22. Christmas Song - Aimee Mann (the Rat Pack and Nat King Cole versions are too overplayed)
23. White Christmas - Otis Redding (see previous post for my opinion on Bing's version).
24. A Fairytale of New York (aka Christmas in the Drunk Tank) by The Pogues and Kristy MacColl. (Energetic, funny, and full of joy.)
25. Away In A Manger - Bright Eyes (Most versions of this one were pretty similar, so I chose the one that was out in left field to finish off the mix.)


That's seventy-four minutes of Christmas Goodness for you.

Recommended purchases:
Christmas With The Rat Pack
Any "Best of Christmas with Ella Fitzgerald" collection.
A Motown Christmas - a bit overplayed, and no sacred songs on it (a serious handicap: the sacred songs are the most beautiful, by miles) but still great, because of the amazing performers.







Painful Omissions

because of song repeats, time constraints, too many songs by one artist, or other versions of the song being slightly better, I had to exclude these ones, but wish I didn't:

O Holy Night by Al Green
Baby It's Cold Outside by Tom Jones and Cerys (a singer from the band Catalonia)-- the funniest version of the song -wildly hilarious, in fact, but not as charming and sweet as Ella Fitzgerald and Louie Jordan, and didn't fit as well. Sinatra also had a good "Baby It's Cold Outside"
Jingle Bells or Christmas Song by Sammy Davis Jr.
At least something from Johnny Cash's Christmas album, and at least something from Aretha Franklin's Christmas recordings (her Joy to The World and O Christmas Tree almost made it, and Johnny's Blue Christmas was the last song I cut.
O Holy Night by Mariah Carey (overplayed, but sweet mercy, she can sing!)
something from Elvis (maybe O Little Town Of Bethlehem)
That Was The Worst Christmas Ever! - by Sufjan Stevens (and a handful more of his, including Holy Holy Holy and O Holy Night)
Christmas Day - Dido
Soon After Christmas - Stina Nordenstam - interesting, but too long and unfamiliar.
River - Joni Mitchell -- just didn't fit.
Winter Wonderland - Annie Lennox -- just didn't fit.
Let it Snow! - Ella Fitzgerald -- too much ella already.

Omission I don't regret:
Happy Christmas (War Is Over) - John Lennon and Yoko Ono. No regrets there. Too many na na na's and a cloying children's choir, along with the biggest guilt trip of any Christmas song.

If you download one song from this whole list, I recommend:
The First Noel - by Emmylou Harris

Enough uplifting stuff. . . time for a rant! (or Seasonal Music in December) with a Survey at the End!

First thing:

I like Christmas. I really do. Somehow Christmas makes me think of home, of where I'm from, of who I'm from, more than any other time of year. It's a beautifully spiritual time, if you can hit the right notes, and keep your mind in the right place.

(insert obligatory paragraph about over-commercialized Christmas here -- even the complaining about Christmas has been overdone and is now clicheed.)

I can avert my eyes from the "shop shop shop" ads, or at least simply enjoy the christmassy feeling that the combination of the colours red, white, and green bring to my emotional memory, and not read the words.

But what I can't do, guy-sensitive-to-music that I am, is shut my ears from hearing Christmas music every flippin' place I go.

And dear readers, some of that Christmas music has got to go.

Now, you will notice this post has many embedded videos. The one introduced as a Tom Waits video, and the very last one are the two best, so if you're impatient, watch them and skip the rest. Be warned, many of the others are there to serve as examples of terrible Christmas music. I put them up for the same reason people look at boogers after they pick them, and slow down for car crashes: some people just want to know, even (or especially) when somebody says, "You don't want to know. Really." And some of the music (I chose the videos for their music -- ignore the images if you can) is a musical car crash. I'll even put a car crash warning on them, just so you can skip them if you don't like the smell of putrescence. And if you DO like putrescence. . . this post should be a proper hall of masochistic wonders for you!

For the music overkill. . . as when I posted a bunch of poetry in a previous blog, if you don't like it, skip it!


(car wreck warning: worst. Christmas. song. ever. Wham!)


See, most mediocre, half-hearted pop-songs clutter up the airwaves for a little while, and then have the consideration to vanish, as their limited shelf/radio-life expires. Even if you REALLY hate the latest steaming pile of Black-Eyed-Peas, it'll go away in about three months. That's not to say it hasn't already overstayed its welcome, but at least it's gone now.

Not so Christmas music. EVERY DECEMBER, radio programmers dig up, and warm over all the crappy songs from Christmas past, trotting dead horses back out and into radio rotation, so that we're STILL listening to George Michael whine about "Last Christmas" when by now, it's been twenty-four Christmases since he gave you his heart, and you're still glad you gave it away, and it's been twenty-three Christmases since his mopey, sloppily written, limpidly sung song should have ceased forever to grate on shop customers' ears. Instead, here in Korea, modern pop bands are COVERING it, just so I hear it even MORE often!

Rain: the biggest male popstar in Korea. Put me out of my misery now! (SUPER MEGA TRAIN-WRECK WARNING)

whew! at least it was short.


Now to be fair, I recognize that it's hard to make a good Christmas song --

Your choices are these:

Option 1. write your own song.

(car wreck warning: bryan adams, riffing on the tired old "Christmas makes us better people" theme)


In which case, your own songwriting skills are on a playlist right before, or after, some Christmas classic, and bud, I don't care how underrated a songwriter Bryan Adams might be. . . his junky Christmas anthem pales next to the majesty of "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing."

From Paul McCartney, this is my submission for the worst track any Beatle ever recorded, and that INCLUDES the plastic ono band. . . but every Christmas, it comes back again.

(car wreck warning: wonderful christmas time)

The images in the video make me smile--"Hey everybody! Even though the Beatles broke up, I'm still using drugs. . . see?"


Making a Christmas song, option 2:

Do a version of a Christmas classic.

You have a better chance of success here, except that with all the good ones, somebody's already done it better.

Ella Fitzgerald sang "Baby, it's Cold Outside" with Louis Jordan . . . that means Avril Lavigne, Michael Buble, Jack Johnson, Fergie, and any band assembled by a producer rather than by the musicians finding each other, should leave it alone. Really. Why bother trying.

(listen to the words: it's the only song in the world that makes date-rape sound charming and nostalgic, if you listen to it cynically enough)



Annie Lennox did Winter Wonderland really well (there's a link to her version later). . . this version makes me want to cancel Christmas altogether, hide my head under a pillow, and hibernate until February.

(Big Car Wreck warning. This clip is like using a corkscrew instead of a q-tip. Really, don't watch more than the first fifteen seconds of this one. I'm ashamed of my culture right now. No Joke. this is the worst video clip in the entire post. in case you doubt me, let me just say: Ozzy Osbourne/Jessica Simpson duet. Still doubt me? I dare you to press play!)

(Warning: every time someone plays this clip in its entirety, an angel loses its wings.)

(As my sister's friend says, "You make baby Jesus cry.")


Making a Christmas Song: Option 3 (if you can pull it off): make an amazing Christmas song that gets overplayed until people hate it anyway.

Dear Mariah Carey:
Thanks for this one! It's AWESOME

Awesome!
(the first 435 times)


Dear radio programmers who play "All I Want For Christmas Is You" practically on repeat every December: please? stop? You all agreed to take "Crazy" off the air before people got sick of it -- can we now give Mariah the Gnarls Barkley treatment, before you start losing listeners through death by immolation? Yeah, it's rare that an actually talented artist makes a Christmas album at the top of her game. . . but every five minutes I'm hearing "All I Want For Christmas. . . " either the Mariah version, or the cover from the "Love Actually" soundtrack. At some point, thanks to the "shuffle" function on CD players, I'm going to hear them back-to-back, and I heard that if that's followed by back-to-back versions of "Last Christmas" by Wham! and then by the K-Popstar Rain, every Starbucks in Korea will implode.

The great Christmas songs get played more often than the crappy ones, so we even tire of them, sadly. (Sorry, Bing Crosby. The song's great, but I've just overdosed on it. All respect to you, but I never want to hear "White Christmas" again.)


So that's the quandary of Christmas music. Either there are a zillion other versions (probably by better musicians), or your song's not gonna hold water next to the other Christmas classics, or it's gonna get so overplayed we're sick of it anyway--it just takes us three years instead of one week.


At the root of the problem, or at least a major part of it, is this:

Most Christmas albums are basically Christmas-spending-spree cash-ins from artists who are either getting old and running out of fresh ideas, or whose appeal will fade quickly (often due to lack of true talent), and need to capitalize before they become irrelevant, or who were all about the money anyway, right from the start. For proof, go to a used CD shop and see how many "where are they now" bands have numerous copies of their Christmas Album on the shelves, where nobody's buying them.

These cynical money-grubbing artists are hilariously parodied here in "Love Actually" by the fictional artist "Billy Mack" -- THIS makes me laugh, because it's so true.

(Car wreck. . . no, train wreck. . . no, mid-air-plane collision. . . this is the Titanic of bad music videos. . . but it's funny, and a parody. . . does that make it ok? I especially like the interview clips before and after the actual song, and the naughty elves with stripper poles.)

help us all! at least they're not serious, like Ozzy Osbourne and Jessica Simpson up above.

And so it is that bad artists make most of the Christmas music out there.

Conversely, it is only rarely that a really great artist does a really interesting take on Christmas. The artists who could make a really interesting Christmas album are rarely the ones who actually DO make Christmas music, because actual artists aren't usually into cash-grabs. I've been hearing an Aimee Mann Christmas song lately at Starbucks (I can't find it to post it), and that's nice. . . I think Tom Waits would make the best Christmas album ever, but he's too much of an artist to make one, the same way I think Robert Redford is the Hollywood star who'd make the best U.S. President. . . for precisely the reasons he would never run for president.

Come on, Tom, give us some more. (Tom Waits: Christmas Card From a Hooker In Minneapolis) -- Neko Case sings a gorgeous version of this song, too, but it never gets on the radio, or on YouTube.

This, THIS is good. Sad, funny, tender, Tom Waits.


So my Christmas wish is that we could retire some of that Christmas dreck that's been recycled for too many years. Please? We could also make a rule that radio stations and shops can only play a Christmas song a maximum of three times (maximum four) per twenty-four hours, so that we don't get sick of Bing's White Christmas, and Annie Lennox's "Winter Wonderland," which I still like. . . barely.

(embedding disabled by request, so you have to follow the link to hear the song)

In a world of MP3 CD's, there's just no excuse anymore for playing "Merry Christmas" by Mariah Carey on repeat for eight hours a day in your coffee shop. Really, none. Radio programmers: It's OK to play just regular, nice music in December -- mix it up a bit! Then we can enjoy the Christmas music when it DOES come on, instead of sighing and gritting our teeth until January.

(It's a pretty poor reflection on the caliber of Christmas music that I'm actually GLAD no other holidays have special pop-songs for them -- but then again, that's not a bad business idea. Do you think there'd be a market for crappy Thanksgiving albums? What about crappy Valentine's Day music? I'm SURE if you made a bad Independence Day album, Americans would buy it. This might be my million-dollar idea!)

Before I go: here are some more Christmas songs I DO like if I don't hear them too often, and the last one is my favourite Christmas recording ever -- if you only listen to one of these songs, make it that one (if two, add the Tom Waits one above).

Joni Mitchell


Jackson 5 (and most of A Motown Christmas)


(Most of Christmas With the Rat Pack is pretty good, too -- Sinatra, Dean Martin, Davis Jr. and co. know how to handle a classic Christmas tune).

This, by Sarah McLachlan, is not about Christmas, but it's about Winter. I'd love to hear this at Starbucks as I sip my maquillado.


And I especially love this one. One of the most beautiful voices I know (Stevie Nicks: you've heard her before on this blog), matched with what I would argue to be the most beautiful melody ever penned. Shimmering! (As the Wizard of Oz would say, "Pay no attention to the early '80s hair! I am the great and powerful OZ!")



And now, it's survey time. . . which songs need to be retired, in your opinion? (see above: also, Boney M)

Which artists need to make a Christmas album? (I humbly submit Alicia Keys and Tom Waits)

(PS: Blood On The Tracks Era Bob Dylan would have made an absolute wonder of a Christmas album, too. Not anymore though.)

Which Christmas music needs to be played more? (did you know Sufjan Stevens has a Christmas Album or two out?)

And what are your favourite Christmas recordings (after Handel's Messiah)?

And my favourite Christmas songs:

Silent Night (the one melody I really never tire of)
Hark The Herald Angels Sing
The First Noel
O Holy Night (in moderation, and sung tastefully)
Angels We Have Heard on High
Joy To The World

Love'em.

Four Songs that meant a lot to me.

You may remember I went through a rough patch in late 2005/early 2006: losing your mom, and then breaking up with The Reason You Moved Across The Ocean can shake a person to the foundation, I've heard. Well, I'm happy to say I'm doing much better now. Here in Korea, they say Autumn is a melancholy time, the best time of the year for nostalgia and retrospection. I've been doing that, too, digging through my old diaries, poems, and e-mails to mull over the lowest low time I've had so far in my young life, to see what I picked up, like burrs from the brambles I walked through in the valley. So far, I like what I've found stuck to my clothes and hair: I walked out of that valley with some valuable stuff in my pockets.

Here are four songs that really, really helped me during that time. I sent them to some of my friends, listened to a few of them several times a day, during January, February, and March. And April.


This one is called Waiting For A Superman, by The Flaming Lips.

It's a really good song for when you feel sad, when you're ready to give up, when your ideals, principles, or heroes have let you down.

"It's a good time for Superman to lift the sun into the sky
is it getting heavy? Well I thought it was already as heavy as can be"

"Tell everybody waiting for Superman
that they should try to hold on best they can
he hasn't dropped them, forgot them, or anything
it's just too heavy for Superman to lift."



This one is from The Mountain Goats. Their album The Sunset Tree is a fairly autobiographical, and INCREDIBLY raw confessional about the songwriter's experience coping with an abusive father, and getting away from that situation, whatever the cost. The stubborn insistence on hope, both in the music and in the words, made this the song equivalent of my motto for a while. I'd hum it when I walked to work.

"I am gonna make it through this year
if it kills me"

Rage, sadness, hope, determination, desperation, revenge, grief -- this guy's lived it, and somehow got it all into this album. I still thank the Mountain Goats for it. I didn't listen to this one as much as some of the other ones on this page, but Good Lord, I needed this one.




Next, these are the two songs I'd listen to (along with the last two movements of Beethoven's Ninth, which I wrote about in the post linked above (and here again).

Thunder Road - follow the link and see what I wrote about it there.



This song was the surest, fastest pick-me-up in my collection. The Arcade Fire made an album called "Funeral", because during its recording, two or three band members lost parents or siblings. It was on most year-end top ten lists in 2005, and this, the opening track on that album, is like a revelation. The first twenty seconds (the musical intro), and then the chorus, are a filling-up with life in the face of partings, endings, and deaths, that can get you through a day. The song builds -- it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger, like a rolling boulder gathering speed.

I like that part, but the chorus went through my head for an entire month (and it was a good thing, unlike MOST times a song sticks in your head for a month).

"You change all the lead
sleepin' in my head to gold,
as the day grows dim,
I hear you sing a golden hymn,
the song I've been trying to sing."

And this is the coda the song ends on, a call out for a purity of purpose, of living, that I needed at the time. The singer howls them out like a drowning man calling for help, desperate for life, desperate for purity, desperate to be full of. . . something.

"Purify the colours, purify my mind.
Purify the colours, purify my mind,
and spread the ashes of the colours
in this heart of mine."

Listen to it.



I hope you like these songs. I sure needed them . . . maybe they'll do some good for you, too. Music is intensely personal, so if they don't move you, that's OK, but they sure plucked the right strings in my, at just the right time.