The Media of a Merry Christmas

Posted on December 22, 2009 by lisafindley

My love for the Christmas season runs deep. I’m lucky in that our family Christmases were fun and full of people I love. I know a lot of people have to struggle through a Christmas dinner of intoxicated relatives, inquisitions on their personal lives, and a replay of every fight they ever had with their siblings. I’m fortunate; we all get along and we’re happy to see each other. Especially now that we’re grown and living in various places across the country, we appreciate having the one time of year when we get together and celebrate in much the same way we have since I was little.

Welcome to my home -- currently a winter wonderland

So I’m off to Michigan in a couple days for a little church, a little eggnog, and a lot of contented lounging about the house. In the meantime, I get in the holiday spirit with a bunch of Christmas media — music and movies that make me smile every year. What kinds of things do you listen to and watch each December?

For movies, the list goes something like this (in no particular order):

A Charlie Brown Christmas
While You Were Sleeping
A Christmas Story
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
Scrooged
It’s a Wonderful Life
Miracle on 34th Street
Home Alone
How the Grinch Stole Christmas

There’s a little more pleasure in others’ pain there than you’d think/hope for a Christmas list, but ah well. I said we were a happy family, not a particularly kind one.

The music! Of course there are the hours of angelic choirs singing hymns from across the centuries, and there are also the old standards from the last 60 years. And the entirety of the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack. But there’s the other category — the dance party Christmas music. Seeing as how I just threw a wildly successful Christmas party, I take it upon myself to give you a playlist of excellent, non-cheesy tunes that’ll keep everyone grooving long after Santa shimmies back up that chimney.

Run, Run Rudolph–Chuck Berry
This Christmas–Donny Hathaway
Purple Snowflakes–Marvin Gaye
Father Christmas–The Kinks
Everything’s Gonna Be Cool This Christmas–The Eels
Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree–Brenda Lee
Merry Christmas, I Don’t Want to Fight–The Ramones
Jingle Bell Rock–Bobby Helms
Blue Christmas–Elvis Presley
Santa Claus is Coming to Town–The Jackson 5
Soulful Christmas–James Brown
I Want a Beatle for Christmas–Becky Lee Beck
Merry Christmas–The Ramones
Boogie Woogie Santa Claus–Patti Page
Santa, Teach Me to Dance–Debbie & the Darnels
Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)–Darlene Love
Just Like Christmas–Low
Baby It’s Cold Outside–just about anyone, but I like the new one from Marah
I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus–The Ronettes
All I Want for Christmas Is You–Mariah Carey
Jingle Bells–Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters
Merry, Merry Christmas–Koko Taylor
White Christmas–The Drifters
Feliz Navidad–Jose Feliciano
Christmas Wrapping–The Waitresses
Santa’s Beard–The Beach Boys
A Fairytale of New York–The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl
What Christmas Means to Me–Stevie Wonder

Under no circumstances should you ever play Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime.” Your guests will immediately feel transported to the blue light sales on the night after Thanksgiving, and nothing spells the end of a party quite like a claustrophobic feeling of synthesizers and commercialism. If you want to have a Beatle on your playlist, go with John Lennon’s “Happy Christmas (War is Over),” which is a lovely tune and sentiment all in one.

What’s on rotation at your house?

Merry Christmas, a belated Happy Hanukkah, joyful solstice, and happy holidays. I’ll be back with further adventures in travel, music, and the like after the New Year. Safe travels to you all!

And family — little full, lotta sap. See you soon.

The Travails of Holiday Travel

Posted on December 15, 2009 by lisafindley

Dearest fellow travelers, in the next week many of you will be literal travelers, bundling up against the winter cold (or winter heat, as the case may be *cough*Tucson*cough*) and wending your way to a loved one’s home for the holidays. Right around now, in addition to the panicked press releases-glossed-into-news-articles about how we as a nation are not spending enough money on blood diamonds and plastic toys produced in sweatshops to keep this troubled economy afloat, AAA sends out handy guides to the travel habits of Americans during this busy month of holiday cheer. This year, Thanksgiving travel was up, as people were feeling slightly more optimistic about the economy turning around, and a little more willing to spend on gas money or air fare. Early estimates are that Christmas will show a similar trend.

How are you traveling? By car, by train, by plane? Are you traveling on your own or with friends? Will you be in an airport for hours or are you a hop, skip, and a jump from home? And most importantly, how on earth do you survive the journey?

Oh the weather outside is frightful... (image from http://www.ehow.com/how_2183752_survive-winter-storm.html)

Many people wax poetic about the romance of the journey itself — it’s more important than the destination, etc., etc. But really, who are they kidding? The journey as its own highlight is true of some sorts of travel, but when you’re just trying to squeeze in as much family time as possible on your last remaining vacation days off of work, the trip is a trial to be endured.

Travel by car: sudden blizzards or freak fog attacks; miles of tail lights inching their way along the interstate like an ominous red caterpillar; ten bathroom breaks in a 100-mile stretch because you said “yes” when they asked if you wanted to upgrade to a double extra large for just 25 cents more; hours of silence and intermittent static as you search desperately for a radio station that won’t tell you how to get right with God for the low, low price of $20 a month; and the creeping sensation that you are driving in a Twilight Zone that makes you more tired, the trip more lengthy, and the road more icy with every passing minute.

Travel by air: hours staring glassy-eyed at the CNN news ticker in the terminal while clutching your carry-on close, lest a bored security guard declare that luggage suspect and delay your flight even more in order to call in the SWAT team to search it; airplane seats slightly larger than the womb you were grown in and not nearly as comfortable; kids shrieking in an off-key rehearsal for a banshee reunion in the row behind you; an in-flight entertainment choice between a movie about an MPDG saving a young man from his post-collegiate malaise and a frigid middle-aged woman discovering love via consumerist makeover and lowered standards; and after it all, mounting anxiety at the baggage carousel as you realize that the gaping yaw before you is only spitting out luggage from PanAm flights of the ’80s and your suitcase is somewhere over the Pacific with Amelia Earhart.

Almost makes you want to buy out the canned goods section of your grocery store and spend the next couple months at home, doesn’t it?

Probably the worst holiday-related trip I’ve been on was when I was about 8 years old. My mom’s brother was getting married in England on December 28th, and we thought we’d fly on the 25th, have the plane pretty much to ourselves, and show up for late presents at my grandparents’ house. Instead, we found a plane packed with people on their way to India who were taking advantage of the same supposedly low-travel day we were. As soon as the plane was in the air, I was screaming with pain — my ears were clogged up and I couldn’t seem to pop them. The twins were fighting with each other, and we were all exhausted from services the night before and waking up too early to open stockings and presents. My poor parents must have been completely miserable. One of the flight attendants, who wore a Santa hat and a tie with a blinking Rudolph nose, noticed their plight. He brought me a hot water bottle to ease the earache, and he brought my mom a bottle of champagne. I still hurt for the rest of the eight-hour flight, and my parents didn’t catch up on any sleep, but that man made the worst plane ride of our family’s collective existence about ten times more bearable. Wherever you are, I wish you a lifetime of smooth flights and grateful passengers, good sir.

So how about you? Let’s get it all out before we have to do the dreaded deed itself. What are your worst holiday travel horror stories? What are your best? Got any blinking Rudolph tie angels to celebrate? Comments ahoy!

an angel in the skies

Surf’s Up

Posted on December 8, 2009 by lisafindley

Everybody knows the basic advice: Don’t go out in the cold without a hat and mittens. Don’t swim right after eating. And don’t sleep with strangers. Generally that’s all pretty sound, but I suggest we reconsider the last one. Now before you think this blog is about to turn into something it’s not, dearest fellow travelers, let me reassure you I’m talking about sharing someone’s home while on the road — couch surfing.

the map on my wall showing where all my couch surfers are from

The idea behind surfing is that you get to know a place much better from seeing it through the eyes of locals than you do from staying in hotels and sticking to your guidebooks, and that everyone benefits from cultural exchange and sharing a meal. It’s free to sign up for and use CouchSurfing.org, but I must emphasize that this is not a site to visit if you are just looking for a free place to stay. Obviously, we all prefer cheap options, but you are inviting yourself into someone’s home, not crashing on your friend’s friend’s dorm room floor.

And now, for the Safety Talk. Most everyone I talk to about couch surfing says, “But how do you know it’s safe?!” Well, you can’t know for sure, any more than you can know most things for sure. However, the organizers of the site put in several safeguards — there’s a vouching system, in which only people who have met surfers in person can vouch for them, and on your profile page, other surfers can leave recommendations or bad reviews for all other surfers to see. You can verify that you are who you say you are by using the verification process; you fill out your address on the site, they send you a postcard to that address, and you mail it back to them, confirming that you live where you say you live. Finally, you use your own good judgment. You’re not signing a contract when you agree to host or request to surf, and your safety is paramount, so if you arrive at your host’s house and get a bad vibe, or your surfer shows up three sheets to the wind, by all means arrange alternate plans.

I’ve hosted about a dozen times, and almost all of those times were really great. I’ve met people from Albuquerque, Singapore, Rio de Janeiro, Minneapolis, England, and Germany, and we’ve spent long nights over bottles of wine and bowls of pasta, chatting about our lives and our homes. I like being able to properly host my surfers. I like to show them some favorite restaurants and music venues, and one day I even did totally touristy stuff like pose by Buckingham Fountain, go to a festival in Grant Park, and stand in line for the Sears Tower.

Couch surfers, as you can imagine, tend to be open-minded folks, laid back, and pretty young. Sometimes I feel very old as I watch people barely out of their teens showing worldly bravura, when really, they’ve still seen and experienced so little. But we all have to start somewhere, don’t we?

I’ve surfed just once so far, with my sister E, in Munich. Our host was fantastic; she made us dinner one night and took us out to a beer hall another night, and she took us to many major tourist sites and negotiated all the German for us. She’s a really interesting person, a surgeon who uses all her time off to do extreme adventuring like dogsledding in the Yukon or horseback riding across the Rockies. We spent hours talking about balancing work and play, living on your own, and American/German differences. Before we surfed with N, I was signed up on CouchSurfing but unsure if I would feel comfortable hosting, but after staying with N, I knew for certain that I wanted to be someone providing this kind of experience — this kind of friendliness and curiosity — to people from all over the world.

In short, if you couch surf, you may end up like this:

E dressed in N's traditional Munich leder hosen, on our very first CouchSurfing adventure

UPDATE: There is video. Oh yes, there is video. For some reason, it’s on its side, but here it is. Please note that we were playing Tom Jones’s “Sex Bomb” in the background for this fashion show. Cultural exchange, what!

Best Music of 2009

Posted on December 2, 2009 by lisafindley

Dearest fellow travelers, what say we get a head start on all those end-of-year lists. Music critics, the genuine article, are currently hunched over their laptops in tiny coffee shops all over Brooklyn, carefully crafting their annual odes to the best tunes coming out of the British and American scenes. I am not one of those critics, but I am hunched over my laptop in my Chicago bedroom, throwing together an inaugural celebration of some of my favorite music from this year.

Let me tell you how cool I am: I’m so cool I don’t care what’s cool. I live in an oppressively hipster neighborhood, and I’ve attended the Pitchfork Music Festival for the last three years running, but that doesn’t mean I love Beyonce ironically. In fact, it bothers me when kids too cool for school profess to love something ironically. I love that woman’s music wholeheartedly, and I bet you do too.

I grew up completely saturated in music — my grandfather composed hymns, my parents hold up the church choir, my sister writes songs that play to standing ovations. We probably had one of the first CD players in the country (don’t worry, purists, Dad’s still got his turntable) and I spent much of the summer of eighth grade categorizing the over 1,000 CDs in my father’s collection. I can read music, play piano, and sing harmony (as well as a soprano can force herself to sing harmony). (I can even make choral singer jokes!) I love music for how it moves me and how it makes me move. I don’t love everything that comes along (ask anyone who’s ever tried to play me a Foreigner song); one of the best parts about being a music lover is figuring out what combinations of beats, tunes, and often words get you excited and what combinations don’t. I don’t trust people who say they like everything, or who lay claim to eclectic tastes. Almost every time, that’s code for not listening to enough music to figure out what they care about. Being a discerning listener is the first step to being culturally conversant, and BONUS, it’s fun!

Sessily (she of the fantastic guest post) recommended this book and book review to me: Matthew Cheney’s review of Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, and if you are looking for my Christmas present, here it is. From what I can tell, Wilson’s book is all about how we make our cultural tastes and how we can move away from negatively exclusionary to positively discerning, from a hierarchy of art to an appreciation of arts, and that’s increasingly becoming my aim in my own life and my conversations with others.

Which is all to say: I titled this Best Music of 2009, but really, it’s my Favorite Music of the Year. What follows is not comprehensive by any means, but it is enthusiastic. Nothing is in any particular order, and I didn’t try to have a certain number of albums or songs for any category, as that seems limiting and arbitrary. Enjoy, and definitely leave your own favorite music/links in the comments!

FAVORITE ALBUMS

These are the albums I’ve been listening to over and over again, with no sign of getting bored.

Passion Pit – Manners
dance, dance, DANCE!

Sparklehorse and Danger Mouse — Dark Night of the Soul
It’s about time these two got together, and the guest list is quite impressive.

Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest
Probably the best candidate for this year’s “it really works well as an ALBUM, not just a collection of songs, y’know albums used to mean something” piece from the critics of the land.

Black Moth Super Rainbow — Eating Us
Triiiiiiiiippy. And less expensive than actual drug trips. (So I hear. Not that I’d know, Mom.)

Bat for Lashes — Two Suns
I never really listened to much Tori Amos, but this sounds like what Tori Amos sounds like in my head, only less awesomely political and more awesomely sweeping.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy – Beware
I have yet to hear anything by this man that I dislike, and this album is no exception. It’s a relaxed, generally happy album, with lots of twangy guitar.

Antony and the Johnsons — The Crying Light
Gorgeous.

Yo La Tengo — Popular Songs
They have yet to go wrong, and you gotta love the audacity of that title.

Speck Mountain — Some Sweet Relief
A local band my friend played in for awhile, Speck Mountain sounds like Mazzy Star for the new century.

Phoenix — Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
All those hipster assholes are hailing this as the album of the year and probably the decade, and while I quibble with those who call it straight-up rock (it’s a bit polished and electronic for that), I can’t argue with the appeal of those guitars and hummable melodies.

FAVORITE TRACKS

Hmm, so many fuzzy, feedback-y, atmospheric albums, and then a whole bunch of danceable tunes right here.

Yeasayer – “Ambling Alp”
Give us a new album already!

Kid Sister—“Right Hand Hi”
I never heard it the first time ‘round, and the album only just came out, so it’s an ’09 tune to me.

The National — “So Far Around the Bend”
New album next year, which is pretty exciting. Also, I am dating the band as a whole, which is pretty exciting.

Bell X1 — “The Great Defector”
I heard it on the radio and thought it was a Talking Heads tune.

BBU — “Chi Don’t Dance”
Don’t stop, can’t stop, won’t stop the beat.

Jay-Z featuring Kid Cudi – “Already Home”
I much prefer this to the New York song (and no, it’s not because of New York!); it’s that gently driving beat and the muted horns, I think

Cascada – “Evacuate the Dancefloor”
Let the music take me underground, indeed.

FAVORITE HALF-ALBUMS

I love about half the songs on this album pretty fiercely (examples included), but can’t get into the album as a whole. That might change on repeated listens.

St. Vincent — Actor (“Actor Out of Work,” “Save Me From What I Want”)
The Dirty Projectors — Bitte Orca (“Stillness is the Move,” “No Intention”)
Neko Case — Middle Cyclone (“Prison Girls,” her cover of “Don’t Forget Me”)
Girlyman — Everything’s Easy (title track, “Storms Were Mine,” “Tell Me There’s a Reason”)
Andrew Bird — Noble Beast (“Fitz and Dizzyspells,” “Natural Disaster”)

POSSIBLE FUTURE FAVORITES

I haven’t listened to these enough to make an informed decision, but I’m really liking them so far.

The Clientele — Bonfires on the Heath
Girls — Album (“Hellhole Ratrace” is so great!)
The Twilight Sad — Forget the Night Ahead

MUSIC I SHOULD HAVE LOVED LAST YEAR BUT JUST DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT
Santogold – Santogold and especially the mix album she does with Diplo – Top Ranking

If you’re an imeem user, you can listen to my playlist here: http://www.imeem.com/people/81Xsn-2/playlist/4QPTbGOm/best-music-of-2009-music-playlist/

It’s free and simple to sign up, and I have yet to receive any spam from them, if that helps in your decision. I wanted to embed a playlist, but it turns out imeem isn’t supported on WordPress, and I don’t have everything on Lala yet to get a playlist there. Sorry to delay the post just to not deliver on my promise, but these technologies can be tricky. I’m pretty proud of the imeem playlist, so please enjoy!

New Post Soon!

Posted on December 1, 2009 by lisafindley

I know my three devoted followers were disappointed to find no new post this week. I have a post written up on the best music of the year, but I want you to be able to hear those lovely songs, and I can’t get the imeem embedded player to work. So until I get that up and running, please enjoy this video from Sesame Street. You will never, ever forget that “q” is always followed by “u.”

Thanks for your patience, fellow travelers.