World Cup 2006

I went on a losing streak. In the space of one month, I took a rooting interest in a number of sports teams. My hockey team lost the Stanley Cup final, the basketball team I rooted for lost the NBA final, the first team I picked to root for in the World Cup (Korea) lost, then my second team (Netherlands) then my third team (Argentina), then my fourth choice (England), and then my fifth choice (Brazil) were all eliminated. Finally, in the final, the team I liked won, but it was looking pretty ugly for a little while. I'd almost like to test this out -- if any of you are into sports betting, send me an e-mail and ask which team I like, and I'll tell you. Bet against my team, and see if my bad luck continues for your benefit.

As most of you know, Korea qualified for the world cup this year, and the world cup ran from June until about a week ago. There are few things which bring Koreans together like the success of Korea's people, worldwide, whether it's a half-Korean NFL player winning the Superbowl MVP (Hines Ward), or a Korean actress scoring a major role on an American TV series (Kim Yun Jin on "Lost") or even a major Hollywood star marrying a Korean (Nicholas Cage and Wesley Snipes movies are inexplicably, disproportionately popular here, because both men have Korean wives -- you can count on their films staying on screens in Korea for about triple the time other movies of similar quality would survive in cinemas). All this considered, when team Korea qualifies for the biggest sporting event in the world, bar none, especially on the heels of their most improbable success at the the last world cup, well, let's just say everybody was on board, starting about four months before the first world cup game.

On the Tuesday night of Korea's first game, I went to a restaurant right near the city center (where literally millions gathered to watch the game on mega-screens) about four hours before the game began, and staked out a table with my best friend Matt. Then, as time went by, our friends arrived, and we watched the game (all dressed in red) in a packed restaurant of rabid fans, on a projector screen. The energy there was fantastic, but at halftime, I took a stroll with three friends, down to City Hall, one of the two largest open-air plazas in central Seoul, so see the crowd, if only because I'd never seen a million people in one place at one time before, and was likely never to have the chance again without getting mauled in a riot. We walked down, took some pictures, angled around (pushing through crowds all the while), until we finally had a spot where we could see, if not the projector screens, a good large part of the crowd. Just as we got to that spot, and looked over the absolute OCEAN of people wearing red, Korea scored, and we were treated to the absolute insanity of a million people celebrating. I spent about five minutes just jumping up and down, caught up and pulled away in the pure excitement as surely as if it were a riptide pulling me out to sea. Then we went back to the restaurant and watched the rest of the game there. Korea won (its only win in the tournament) so the microbrewery where we saw the game served free beer until the wee hours. We were tired the next day at work, but all the students were exhausted too, from watching the game, so we just wrote off most of our classes and talked about soccer instead.

I didn't watch the game Korea tied with France, because it started at 4am on a weeknight. However, at 6am I was woken from my sleep by shouts bursting from a large percentage of the windows in my neighbourhood, when Korea scored.

The third game in the group play part of the tournament, vs. Sweden, was at 4am on a Saturday morning. I'm sure it was at a much better time for viewers in Germany, but that's life. I went back to City Hall, to catch the energy for a second time, just because, buddy, why on earth are you living if you don't go out for an experience like that? I arrived there (after a soiree with my coworkers) at about 1230am, and already there were probably 6-800000 people bunched in for the all night party which had already begun at about 7pm, including Korean pop stars, dancing girls, traditional Korean music performers, and a lot of battle-cry chants (one of which I learned. It went "You are my champion, if we sing together, we will have victory!" and I learned that if you mispronounced one consonant, you sang instead "You are my champion, if we die together, we will have victory!", to the great amusement of my Korean friends). It was an all-out shoving match to find a place to sit (on the pavement) and watch the game. Long lines of people were standing, trying to move around, and getting shoved and crowded back and forth, so that it felt about the way I'd imagine it would feel to get stuck inside a washing machine. I got lucky: there was a sudden shift in the crowd for unknown reasons, a scramble, and suddenly I found myself seated (almost folded into thirds) in a spot where I could watch the game. The people around me were silly, fun and young, and enjoyed my trying to get in on the chanting and shouting (which was all in Korean, of course), asking me where I was from and telling me to sit my @$$ down when I stood to take pictures of the crowd on my cellphone. (Check out this picture: it was like this in every direction.)



The only problem was that Korea lost. And didn't even score, so I never got a chance to join the "we scored a goal" dance in the middle of the crowd. However, I've never had so much fun people watching while folded into thirds with aching knees and a sore bottom, in my entire life. The brawl for seating was entertainment enough, just on its own, to make it worth the all-nighter, and the bummer of still needing 30 minutes to pick through a crowd of dispirited red-dressed "Red Devils" freaks (that's the team's name) shuffling their ways to the nearest bus/subway/wherever two million people go when their team loses.

Here it is! Multimedioseyo.

Here's that Tom Waits song I thought I couldn't find. I like his version better than Norah Jones.








This comic, from Copper Comics, (click on it to see it large, and read the words) reminds me of an old story, possibly (but I'm not sure) Talmudic in origin, or at least (possibly) rabbinical.

(I love the transmission of wisdom through stories -- what a perfect medium for moral lessons, and what a flexible one!)

An old man sat by the gates of his city. Each traveler who came to the city gate would ask him, "Tell me, old man, what are the people like in this city?"
And the old man would answer, "What were the people like in the last city you visited?"

If the traveler said, "In the last city I visited, people were selfish and inconsiderate, greedy and disloyal and unpleasant," the old man would answer, "Keep traveling, friend, for people here are the same."

But, if the traveller said, "In the last city, people were kind and helpful, honest and compassionate and hospitable," then the old man would answer "Well come in, friend and enjoy my city, for people here are the same."

Part two: The Advent of Meaning. . . at least for one guy.

This is the second part of a two-part post. Please read the first part first, here.

Rilke again, 'cause dammit, he deserves to be read twice. (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

"How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end. Though they are really
our winter-enduring foliage. . .
place and settlement, foundation and soil and home"
(still elegy number 10)

Another pitfall:

I am surprised and amazed at how impatient people who grieve can be, for their own wholeness (myself included). I am dismayed, but not quite as surprised, at how impatient OTHER people can be with mourners, dispensing Bible verses like medical prescriptions and declaring the issue done with. "Why are you still sad? I told you to give your grief to God a month ago!"

When Bruce Lee injured his back in 1970, he spent six months in bed, reading, because if he took a short-cut or rushed his recovery process, he would have put a ceiling on his own post-recovery ability, or worse, re-injured himself. The human body needs recovery time for injuries. That's just how it works. (Bonus points: I just compared myself to Bruce Lee! I kick ass!) Seriously, though, why do I think my heart would work any other way than the rest of me? The only part of me that can change quickly is my mind, and even then, the mind often has to wait for the heart to catch up -- that's why it was so hard to break up with exgirlfriendoseyo, even when I could see that we had no future.

I finally realized it's OK to say "actually, my life is pretty shitty right now," instead of "God is teaching me patience", when my friend wrote "I think God honours honesty more than anything else we try to give him" in an e-mail. I'll buy that. Isn't that what the entire book of Job is about: finding an honest answer instead of a quick answer? Also: thanks for that, Mel.

I believe an honest doubt honours God more than a blind faith, and waiting for real meaning is more beautiful, and more consecrated, than skipping to a rote, ready-made meaning, even if the quick answer comes in the form of a bible verse. I think an afternoon volunteering at an orphanage or a soup kitchen honours God more than either of those. (And helping others can do wonders for one's own hurt.)

During the dark, disappointed, meaningless parts, I found comfort remembering that during the wait for a messiah, God made Israel the nation it needed to be, not through a series of growing successes, but through a string of spectacular failures. (Don't believe me? Go read Numbers, Judges, and Chronicles.) Ditto for Saint Peter. The word Israel does not mean "He Who Has All His Shit Together" or "He Who's Squared Things Up With God". Israel means, "He Who WRESTLES with God," and what a wonderful name for a chosen people!

So after all that grief, after avoiding those false trails, where am I now? What meaning HAVE I found? Well, my ideas about God are very different than they used to be, and I think that's a good thing. There's a lot more honesty in the mix now, and a lot more knowledge of my weaknesses.

I no longer think of faith as a helicopter, lowering a ladder from the sky, to rescue me from my griefs -- I think now that faith is more like a walking companion, someone with well-worn shoes and holes in the knees, who doesn't always know the way, and certainly doesn't have all the answers, but who'll point out a root across the path, or pick me up after I trip on it, who makes interesting observations about the trail, who'd have my back in a pinch, and who's always good company. No, he doesn't make the path shorter, but at least he makes the time pass faster, and maybe from time to time, he just happens to have an umbrella when I really need one, or a pocketknife, or a joke that helps me laugh through a windstorm. In my diary, four months before my mom died, I wrote "I want a faith like a steel cable: tough, flexible, and useful." Maybe I'm closer to that now than I was before, but I'm not out of the woods yet.

I'm beginning to think it's OK not to be out of the woods, maybe that's not a statement of despair, but a statement of hope, hope that there's still more to be learned, if I keep myself open to learning. Maybe admitting "I'm not out of the woods yet" authentically IS the best thing I can come away with, and maybe The Lesson I've Learned is that life doesn't fit in boxes, nor needs to: Things I've Figured Out quickly become Prejudices, if I decide I don't have to keep thinking about them. Maybe some honest stumbling about in the woods IS an act of worship, and by being OK with that, or even celebrating that, it might even become a celebration of the fact we need never cease our search for meaning, that every part of our life can continue being deepened and enriched, long after we stop feeling sad.

"Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight,
let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels.
Let not even one of the clearly-struck hammers of my heart
fail to sound because of a slack, a doubtful,
or a broken string. . . .
How dear you will be to me then, you nights
of anguish. Why didn't I kneel more deeply to accept you."

(Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, Tenth Elegy, Opening)

I wrote this for Tamie's Advent blog, but I'll post it here in two parts.

Without advent, Christmas arrives through the side door, and startles me while I'm brushing my teeth for bed. With advent, it enters with fanfare, as the culmination and final satisfaction of a month-long buildup. Opening presents is the fun of Christmas, but lighting candles and reading Isaiah, looking forward to something just beyond my fingertips, is the feeling of Christmas.

Waiting is the most underrated, quickly-forgotten experience-enhancer: nothing improves a food's taste more than hunger, yet nobody thinks fondly back on hovering by the oven door, sniffing for the smell of roast turkey: caroling, presents, stuffing and snowball fights monopolize our nostalgia. Advent, though, is soaked in waiting, it drips with anticipation.

So many of us live our lives between our reach and our grasp, waiting for. . . something, and the thing between my reach and my grasp for the last two years was another very human thing: meaning.

Meaning is the rope that lashes us to the pier. It's the string wound out, that will lead me back out of the maze after battling the minotaur. "Man's Search For Meaning," (highly recommended) by Victor Frankl (a concentration camp survivor), says that meaning has the power to make any ordeal bearable, as long as we can firmly believe that our trial brings us closer to a greater goal.

Losing meaning is a scary thing - people lash out and lose rationality when their lives' meaning is merely DISPARAGED (when somebody says, "You should quit your job and raise kids" or "Just a house-mom? I thought you'd amount to more than that" hackles rise, fast. As for religious debate -- well, nobody ever strapped a bomb on his body to prove "Pet Sounds" is better than "Sergeant Pepper"). To actually lose meaning is downright terrifying -- how do you measure anything when you don't trust your own reference points anymore? Friedrich Nietzsche described it this way:

"We have left the land and have embarked! We have burned our bridges behind us - indeed, we have gone further and destroyed the land behind us! Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean. . . but. . . you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. . . and there is no longer any 'land'!"

In the space of six months from late 2005 to early 2006, I lost my mother, the woman I'd intended to marry, and several other things that were crucial to the person I believed myself to be. When my mom died of stomach cancer at age 53, I was at her deathbed. Being right there to hear her stop breathing was like being at ground zero of a meaning-grenade blast. Later, breaking up with the girl I loved was another such blast. By April 2006, every mooring was loose - I had the rope in my hand, but the other end wasn't tied anywhere! I was like a cat in zero gravity.



(hee hee hee)

The layers of meaning that had kept me warm were torn off like shrapnel shredding a winter coat, and nobody can survive winter, naked in the snow. But, I also didn't want to drape myself about with the nearest rags, overestimate my preparedness, head into the storm, and freeze anyway.

When it comes to searching for meaning, "Any port in a storm," is not enough, and I didn't want to short-circuit my own search for meaning. The German poet Rilke (one of my best friends), says, in his tenth Duino Elegy,

"How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end. Though they are really
our winter-enduring foliage. . .
place and settlement, foundation and soil and home"

Sure, things were going badly, but I didn't want to squander my hours of pain, to short-cut through them and thus waste them, if I could instead come through them richer, deep green with tough foliage, rooted with place, foundation and home.

See, sometimes it seems like the world takes a perverse pleasure in poking our softest spots (it actually doesn't: sometimes life sucks, but it's nothing personal. Just trust me on this one). Faced with disillusionments that are sometimes sudden and forceful, like a nuclear bomb, and other times slow and soul-sapping, like a trench war, short cuts are easier than gritting teeth and gutting through life's challenges. Bad ports are rife in the storm, and inviting.

To boot. . .

I used to say things like, "God is teaching me patience." There's nothing wrong with saying that, and sometimes there's deep truth there. Sometimes, though, skipping to the lesson one wants to learn from a situation is a way of hijacking any true learning that might have happened.

Consider this analogy: in university, I studied literature, and discovered that there's a huge difference between reading The Great Gatsby for its colour imagery, and actually reading the Great Gatsby, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote it. Sure, if colour imagery (or Freudian symbolism, or power and gender relations: pick your essay topic from those listed on the handout) is what I'm looking for, I'll find it -- but if that's all I'm looking for, a lot of other things might pass me by.

I didn't want to be like Prince Humperdink (skip to 1:58 in the clip if you can), bellowing "Skip to the end!" instead of bearing through the full marriage ritual.



So, instead of "squandering my hours of pain", instead of just saying, "Skip to the end. . . say Man and Wife!" I wanted to dig in deep, and commit to every step of the journey through the dark valley -- because you never know which patch of mud in that valley has diamonds in it, especially if you're only scanning the tree-branches for silver apples, or thinking about the beef stew at the hostel on the other side.


Another shoddy port for the storm:

One Sunday, I heard a pastor tell a story about his brother-in-law being senselessly murdered in a parking lot by street thugs. The shock-power of the story silenced everyone, and the pastor intoned, "That story just proves that life is war. . . spiritual war," the theme of his sermon.

If that really was all he learned from his brother's death, what a narrow, embittering grief he must have had! And if it wasn't, I thought with outrage, how dare he exploit his brother-in-law's murder, using it as a prop for his own message, to shock people into listening! I wondered how many other themes he'd tacked onto that tragedy, and whether he realized his lurid tactics left such a sour taste.

It is wrong, and it trivializes a tragedy, to put a false meaning in, where one is waiting for a true meaning. The pastor who blamed the 9/11 attacks on the US Government's tolerance of gays ought to be. . .what's the religious leader's equivalent of disbarred? Publicly and loudly reproached, at least. Ditto for the pastors who blame the Colombine shootings on politicians' taking prayer out of school (did any of you get that e-mail forward, too?).

There are some situations in life where, when faced with such difficult realities, the only appropriate response is deep, sad, and searching silence. No parent who has lost a child deserves to have her child's death used as a political platform, and it dishonours my mother's death, and cheapens the entire rest of my journey, if I twist that tragedy to reinforce my own prejudices. I'd rather wait for something true. The meaning will come, but meaning can be like a shy cat: sometimes we have to stop yapping, clicking and beckoning, before it'll approach.


(part two. . .)

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.

Bud, holy cow!

I just went to the Seoul Museum of Art, and saw Vincent Van Gogh. This guy...

you know the difference between looking at pictures of your friend, and actually sitting down and chatting -- you know the way NOBODY gets your vacation photos the way you do, just because bud, the food looks great in the picture, but they didn't get to eat it, and you did.

Well, dear readers, art is like that too. I didn't actually see Vincent VanGogh. He died. Quite a while ago, now. But if you think these pictures are impressive -- wow! You really gotta see them in person. The paint on the canvas, the little knots of colour, the texture that jumps out at you -- it's like the difference between a photo album and a person (which makes sense, but still didn't really click until I saw these in person).


This one was there. Girlfriendoseyo disagrees with me, but I think Van Gogh was overwhelmed by the sun. The sun seems so close here -- it strikes me even as being accusing. The sun almost totally dominates just about every painting where it appears in Van Gogh's work. The field is so mundane next to that glaring eye. You can barely even see the birds eating the sower's seeds -- they're totally irrelevant next to that sun.

I stared at this one for about three minutes without blinking. I don't know how, but Vincent got to me, like a fisher with his hook, he got a hold of something in me.


This next one wasn't in the exhibit, but you can see here, too, Van Gogh's feeling about the sky. I said to Girlfriendoseyo today -- Raphael's or Vermeer's paintings are so perfect, so realistic, it's like they're just seeing. Picasso's paintings are so intuitive, so emotional, it's like they're just feeling. Van Gogh sees and feels. It's amazing how raw and visceral these paintings are in person.


This one WAS in the exhibit, and Girlfriendoseyo and I were both totally gobsmacked. I just can not convey to you how powerful this painting is in person. I really can't. Even if you eat the computer screen where the painting is displayed, you won't be as deeply impressed by it as we were. Go, seek it out, and see it yourself.


This next painting was there too, the only of his self portraits (I think).

This one broke my heart, and also caught hold of me for several minutes: every line said, "dude, I've lived a f***ing rough life." He died at age 37, but this, one of his early paintings, already looks about fifty.


Everybody loves these next three. . . they weren't at the exhibit, but they might have been too much for me if they were. My old roomie Anthony once told me the story of his buddy, the self-proclaimed "biggest Bjork fan in the world", who, when he got the chance to see Bjork perform live, ended up having to leave the auditorium after the first few songs, completely overwhelmed with the power of his experience. I scoffed at the story then, and called dude an idiot for flinching away from a potential high-point in his life. . . but now I think I might understand a bit.

Considering how these three are still amazing, gorgeous, and fresh to me, even though they pop up of every tea room wall, on every Starbucks mug, in every poster-shop window. . . to actually see them in person, to have their impact amplified that much -- I might have to look away for a while, too, before staring into the sun like that.



Dear Lord, the man's night skies were breathtaking!

This one WAS there. In person, it's almost a different painting entirely.

And I wish I could explain what he does with flowers. . . but there's just no way. (This is why people write poems, I suppose.)


This wasn't at the exhibit, but again, look how he just lays his soul bare in the skies. The indoor still life paintings' backgrounds were totally flat and dull, but this Vincent fellow, he had some kind of a thing about skies.

Thanks to him, now I do, too.


Wasn't at the exhibit, but just -- wow. Just wow.


I love painters.
The German poet Rilke (my personal poetry hero) wrote, in the First Duino Elegy

"already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in our interpreted world"

And this is why artists draw -- because there doesn't have to be a story, or a meaning, or anything but a field and a sky. . . but that field, and that sky -- WOW!

Here it is! Be amazed!

We're right back to that again, aren't we? Can't that sometimes be enough? Can't that sometimes be the entire end and purpose of some art? As John Keats said,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

But with words, Keats had to say beauty is truth. These painters just show something beautiful, and they don't even have to add a single layer of interpretation if they don't want to, and they can just leave it at "here it is. be amazed."

(Girl With a Pearl Earring, by another Dutch guy who was pretty good: Vermeer. Here it is. It's beautiful. Be amazed.)

Yeah, sometimes there's other stuff in there, too. . . but there doesn't have to be. With writing, it's almost impossible not to add in a little pontification, a little theme or interpretation or explanation -- it's why I get bummed every time I read Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey -- he starts off with a "here it is. be amazed" and then starts adding other stuff. Sometimes in other poems, he got it right, got it pure, but often he was so busy explaining the perfection of his moments, or describing his own feelings, that he clouds the beauty with too many traces of his own voice -- kind of like an amazing photograph with a text line across the middle of the composition saying, "taken on a fuji finepix E550"

For your benefit, I've created a visual representation of what I mean. Which of these pictures would you rather have on your wall?




Here's a Picasso painting I talked about in a previous post.

I love about Picasso that he stripped away everything in his paintings except the things he decided were important for that particular painting.

Form? Not needed.
Proportion? Why?
Perspective? Does it serve the painting's main theme?
Conventional Placement Of Body Parts? Let's talk about that again later.

But what he DID keep in his painting, distorted, exaggerated, or rearranged for proper emphasis, maintained the exact emotional content of his subject, even when the recognizable form was long gone, and so, even though you wouldn't recognize her to pass her on the street, you FEEL this woman crying (the painting is named "La Femme Qui Pleure" - the woman who cries), more (or at least as) clearly and authentically than/as a hundred photos of women actually crying.


The other thing I love love love about Picasso is his face. Look at his eyes. Those are eyes that have been trained, for an entire lifetime, to see into the heart of things, and find wonder there. "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child." That he not only learned how to SEE the world that way, but was also skilled or intuitive enough to translate what he saw onto canvas is as much a miracle as the way Mozart heard the music perfectly in his head, or the way Beethoven composed the Ninth Symphony while stone-deaf, or the way John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison managed to be born in the same city, in the same era, and meet each other.

Even when he's very old, you still see a child in his eyes. You see a mind still open. Still dancing.

That kind of wise simplicity appears from time to time, in somebody's eyes. . . not even in every artist, though. My favourite poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, has a sharper edge in his eyes.

but it doesn't surprise me that someone who uses words (which are basically boxes, categories, and judgements impressed upon the things that actually reach one's senses) would have a sharper edge than someone who uses colours and shapes to lay bare his soul.



Would you believe that behind those eyes lies one of the finest religious-scholarly minds on the planet?

I hope, when I'm an old man, I have eyes as encompassing, innocent, and simple, as that.

But more than that, I hope they look that way because I've worked my whole life to see the world simply and wonderfully (wonderful meaning full of wonder, of course), and maybe even that I've been clever enough to transmit some of that tight-packed wonder into some books that other people can read.

How long does it take to write a poem like Rilke, or paint a painting like Picasso, or a story like JD Salinger?

A few hours, or a few days, or a few months. . . and an entire lifetime, of course.