Oddments of High Unimportance

We have a strict rule: no playing of Christmas music until we're driving back from my Aunt Carolyn's Thanksgiving dinner. From then until the evening of December 25th, Christmas music plays pretty non-stop at home. The music we listen to may be good only to our ears; we've had some of these CDs for so long that they're old friends. It's hard to hear them anew. Still -- Christmas is a time for familiar, cozy comforts, and the music we enjoy reflects that. (Although streaming tons of new-to-us music off of Amazon Prime is tilting the balance these days...)

A Charlie Brown Christmas (Vince Guaraldi Trio, 1988) How can you not have this CD? A classic, of course, that stays listenable, always fresh, and with a children's chorus that sound like real children. Love that. "Christmas is Coming" always gets my attention. This is one of the few CDs Liz and I both had in our collections when we merged households.

Nomad Christmas (Various Artists, 1997) I remember buying this as a cassette from a music store on Ninth Street in the late '90s, I think. (Local bassist Robbie Link appears on it.) I love the more exotic and jazzy versions of some well-known carols, along with songs and melodies from other countries I'd not heard before. All instrumental, a great low-key sound when you're decorating the tree. This was one of our first forays into "world music" for the holidays.

A Very Reggae Christmas (Kofi, 1994) I remember we bought this from the gone but not forgotten Carrboro branch of Nice Price Books (secondhand books and records). He surrounds familiar old melodies with heavy beats and exciting arrangements so that I hear them fresh every year. Kofi transforms two of my most hated Christmas songs -- "The Little Drummer Boy" and "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" -- into music that I actually enjoy. And, God, he makes "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" sound like a true celebration of joy and not a prim, tasteful dirge.

Holiday Songs and Lullabies (Shawn Colvin, 1998) This was an impulse purchase while I waited in line at the gone but not forgotten CD Superstore at Brightleaf Square, and one of the best I ever made. There are familiar Christmas songs alongside ballads, folk songs, and lullabies -- the cold night, the child in its crib -- plus several carols that were unfamiliar to me, such as "Little Road to Bethlehem" and "Love Came Down at Christmas". It's a record for winter that makes you want to sit in a dark room, watch the lights glint on the tree, and listen to the understated arrangements and Colvin's gentle voice.

Christmas Caravan (Squirrel Nut Zippers, 1998) The Zippers were a local band who flared brightly for a few years before burning out and disbanding. But not before making this CD, which we did not like at first, but that has grown on us over the years. (And isn't Christmas music all about familiarity?) More than any other CD on this list, Christmas Caravan is an acquired taste -- many of the songs are originals or tunes little known to me, Katherine Whalen's vocals take getting used to, and Jimbo Mathus' arrangements make each song so different the album as a whole lacks a unity. But tucked into this CD are some great one-of-a-kinds: "Christmas in Carolina," "I'm Coming Home for Christmas," "Hanging Up My Stockings,"  and a kick-ass "Sleigh Ride."

American Folk Songs for Christmas (Mike, Peggy, and Penny Seeger, 1989) We usually wait until we start our annual drive to Florida before listening to this 2-CD set. This is a respectful, lovely collection of folk and Appalachian hymns, carols, spirituals, shape-note, and songs clumped together to tell the Christmas story: the stars, the shepherds, the birth, the joy of Christmas day, and too the excitement the day brings to a poor household: jokey songs, counting songs, high spirits. The sound is of a family gathered with their instruments around the hearth -- almost painfully spare and austere, and beautiful in its directness to the ear and heart.

The Bells of Dublin (The Chieftains, 1991) A great smorgasbord of traditional and British Christmas tunes, with really great guest turns: the McGarrigle Sisters on "Il Est Ne/Ca Berger" and Nanci Griffith on "The Wexford Carol." But as comforting and charm-laden as Celtic-flavored Christmas music could be, the Chieftains keep their eyes on today and so the album layers in some tartness: Elvis Costello on "St. Stephen's Day Murders" and my favorite, Jackson Browne's "The Rebel Jesus."

Christmas Night: Carols of the Nativity (John Rutter, The Cambridge Singers, The London Sinfonia, 1987) -- We have several of Rutter's Christmas CDs, but this is the first I bought (thank you, CD Superstore) and the one I like best. As with all his productions, the sound is crystal clear, the choral singing full and lush, and Rutter's arrangements restrained yet full of emotion. I like the selection of carols here, and the mood of it all -- faithful, in all senses of that word.

In the Christmas Spirit (Booker T. & the MG's, 2011) -- If you are of an age to have heard the first airings of David Sedaris' Santaland Diaries on NPR back in the late '80s-early '90s (produced by a young Ira Glass), then this music is what you heard in the background. Low-key, funky, and could have been recorded yesterday. It can play in eternal rotation.

A Putumayo World Christmas (Various Artists, 2000). As time goes by, I find myself favoring international holiday music over the American pop holiday standards. Part of it is the attraction of new sounds and songs, part of it the aliveness of other traditions. I always enjoy the Putumayo collections and this one is hot; I love every track on it. (The Putumayo's Cajun Christmas CD? Not so much. Hardly at all, in fact.) I cite the year for this CD, as a later reissue removed some of the tracks that were my favorites. Amazon has several Putumayo Christmas collections, but this one looks to be out of print.

A String Quartet Christmas (Arturo Delmoni, et al., 2010) When I'm making sausage balls or Liz is decorating the tree, then what's needed is some instrumental background music that sets a mood. This set of 3 CDs fits the bill. (They were originally released as individual CDs in the late '90s under the title Rejoice!) These short string quartet arrangements of carols, hymns, and traditional melodies stick to the classic selections; no secular guff like "Frosty" or "Rudolph" here, thank Festivus.

(via What can people do better than machines? The view from 1951 – Clive Thompson)

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice-versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

In iTunes, I have assigned the genre “Christmas” to all my Yuletide music, albums and singletons alike. This makes it relatively easy to add them to my iPod or remove them at once with the click of a button. (Some sequester their Christmas music to a different iTunes library, but I haven’t gone that far yet.)

I have a few static playlists that group a series of albums together, for example, all of the Windham Hill Winter Solstice albums. My friend Bob has a static playlist containing only instrumental songs, for when he just wants background music.

My own quixotic contribution to the world of Christmas playlists is a smart playlist that collects and sorts all of my Christmas songs in alphabetical order.

Liz prefers hearing her Christmas music by album; each album has its own personality, sound, and emotion that she enjoys. For myself, I rather like the randomness and juxtaposition of so many different songs one after another or so many differently styled versions of the same song in one place.

I get a kick out of hearing nine different arrangements of “Joy to the World” – community chorale, solo vocal, piano instrumental, surf guitar – one after another. Or picking a letter of the alphabet and starting my listening there, just to see what comes next.

The settings for this playlist are in the screenshot, but here’s the recipe:

• Match "music" for "all" of the following rules:
• Genre contains "Christmas"
• Rating is not [one star]
• Live updating is enabled

As you can surmise, all the songs are tagged with the genre “Christmas.” I flag songs I want to delete from my library with a single star. I periodically display all one-star songs in a smart playlist and delete them.

When iTunes creates the playlist, click the Name column header so the songs are sorted alphabetically. Then sync the playlist to your iDevice. This will preserve the song order on your iDevice.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.

No compromises. No accommodation. No surrender. Be everything that Donald Trump and his supporters want to destroy. Embody the very soul of what they hate. And then make them fucking choke on you.

Wearing a bolo tie and his trademark fedora, Mr. Cohen dryly made light in his acceptance speech of the fact that none of his records had ever been honored at the Grammys. “As we make our way toward the finish line that some of us have already crossed, I never thought I’d get a Grammy Award,” he said. “In fact, I was always touched by the modesty of their interest.”

It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.

We saw the theatrical streaming of the Globe Theatre's The Merchant of Venice recently, as that's Liz's favorite Shakespeare play. It's a play that always raises more questions than it answers. There is no catharsis. The tragedies may be littered with bodies by their bloody ends, but there is the sense of an ending, of finality. Momentous things have happened, the world has changed. But in Merchant -- a play where no one dies -- the story stops, the world remains frustratingly unchanged, and the emotions that have been churned up have nowhere to settle. Jonathan Munby's direction was swift and vigorous, the comic stuff was energetic and well-sold by sharp actors, the romantic moments well-paced. But we watch it for Shylock's story, don't we? To see what this production adds to the discussion, to see that tremendous courtroom scene, those glorious speeches.

Shylock is only in five scenes, but for modern viewers the character dominates The Merchant of Venice and its afterlife. There are damn few ways you can jazz up or reconceive the casket scenes, usually the most turgid scenes for me. Lancelot is Lancelot -- what can be done? But there are seemingly endless variations on showing Shylock's humiliation, and the hateful behavior of the Christians to the Jews.

On this viewing, Merchant struck me as a lumpy stew. Individual bits were strong but they didn't blend well into a balanced whole. I view it as a characteristic of the play rather than the production. The play isn't as poetic and language drunk as Romeo and Juliet, it doesn't have the piercing personality of a Richard III. Merchant seems instead a mash-up by Shakespeare of old stories designed to give his repertory actors some good scenes to play -- romance, comedy, high melodrama -- while giving the audience something to keep their interest.

But Shakespeare being Shakespeare, I think that as he started working the plots to motivate the characters' decisions, he could not help but introduce nuance, colors, and character details that likely had nothing to do with the original stories.

He also found motifs and themes that provide interesting rhyme and counterpoint throughout and help bond these disparate stories. There is the theme of fathers and daughters. Portia is as trapped by her father's will as Jessica is physically by hers; Portia adheres to her father's rules while Jessica doesn't; both are rescued and rewarded by true love (perhaps); but Munby's sharp view of wealth and Christian society make the point that Jessica dwells on the island at Portia's pleasure.

Then, of course, the outsider theme. Shylock, obviously, but Antonio also. The young men buzz and fawn around Antonio, but it's clear he has people who are indebted to him rather than friends. He begins the play melancholy (so he says) and ends it alive (yay) but melancholy still, one feels. He enabled Bassanio's happiness at the potential cost of his life, but Bassanio's happiness is for his life with Portia -- Antonio remains on the outside.

Antonio is gracious and forgiving whenever Bassanio or his friends are around, but an arrogant SOB when dealing with Shylock. Antonio's self-loathing finds release when he must deal with those lower on the social scale -- someone to whom he is now indebted.

Shylock, of course, is the play's ultimate outsider. John Barton, in the "Playing Shakespeare" episode where Patrick Stewart and David Suchet discuss their takes on Shylock, reminds us that -- had Portia not intervened -- Shylock would in fact have murdered Antonio. Even given what he's suffered, can we excuse or sympathize with a murderer? Barton's opinion is that Shylock is a bad human being and a bad Jew. I will add to this my unsupported theory, which is that Shakespeare by chance created a more human character whose actions and attitudes could not transcend a melodramatic and highly theatrical plot constructed to contain the two-dimensional characters that populate the rest of the play.

Shakespeare's dialogue does not refer to any other Jews in the courtroom, so Shylock appears to be on his own. That interested me. The practical-theatre side of me says this is because all the members of the company are on stage for the Big Scene and so no one else was left to don the costume and makeup. So why not make a virtue of that absence? The in-play answer to this situation could then be that Shylock's fellow Jews wanted no part of his bloody bargain and so left him to fend for himself. Their absence from the courtroom could emphasize just how far outside the pale Shylock has placed himself, even by the standards of his own community. (Tubal, depending on how he's played, does not encourage or join in with Shylock on his tirades against the Christians.)

[Aside: when I saw the courtroom scene where the Christians turn the tables on Shylock, my mind flashed to the scene in "Oklahoma" where Judd bids on Laurie's picnic basket. All the other cowboys come to Curly's aid to help him outbid Judd. Even though Judd is playing by their rules, the community excludes him and refuses to let him win. Shylock had too much faith in the law to look after his interests when he sought revenge on Antonio, and didn't calculate just how far the community would go to protect itself from him.]

Shakespeare and this production don't make it easy to sympathize with any character. Shylock may see himself as protecting his daughter, yet he treats her shabbily. One is sympathetic to Jessica's plight, but she also steals her father's money and the ring given to him by Jessica's mother -- a keepsake and memory he appears to hold dear. What makes Portia think she's a better lawyer than a lawyer? Portia puts Bassanio through the ethical wringer -- why? Does she think he loves Antonio more than her? He reasoned his way to the correct casket -- why does he need to be tested again? Bassanio wins Portia's hand fair and square with his humble perspective, yet he is always in debt, changeable, and tries the patience of those who love him. Will Portia be covering his debts in future?

Patrick Stewart said that Barton's first words to him about Shylock were, "Think of how you'll get off stage." Shylock's exit can be slow, fast, defeated, dignified -- it's a way actors can stamp the part as theirs. Olivier's offstage scream was said to be chilling. Stewart's demonstration of his exit showed a scarily manic figure who has lost his mind. Pryce leaves the courtroom humiliated, yet Munby adds a final scene of Shylock's baptism, with Jessica off to the side singing a Jewish lament. It's thrillingly theatrical while its formal restraint makes the emotions underneath threaten to burst and overflow the stage. The pomp and spectacle, the Latin ritual, Pryce's devastation  -- can the play really support this? I respect the scene's power, but it is so unlike any other scene or moment in this play it seems to belong elsewhere. I think this play, hobbled by its melodramatic roots, cannot help an audience process the emotion that the director and cast fan into a righteous flame.

But...Liz and I left the screening staggered and could not stop talking about it for hours. Show me the last movie where we were able to do that.

Miscellaneous links, because it's what I do

• NPR: Man Booker Prize Awardee Recasts Complex 'Merchant of Venice' Character
• The Curious Disposition | Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review
• The American Scholar: Shylock, My Students, and Me - Paula Marantz Cohen
• Of the Globe's production, a positive and negative review, though the latter is more "Why is this offensive play still being produced?"
• Playing Shakespeare is available for rent or purchase via Amazon Streaming Video or on DVD from Netflix

She once said Picasso gave her the “best lesson in composition” she ever received when he told her to “constantly renew yourself; avoid using the recipes that you have already found.” This counsel she took to heart.