It Already Began Last Month

It's official: you've missed your chance to complain about how early Holiday Shopping Season starts. Back in October you would have been well within your rights to complain, especially since there's so much great Halloween schwag to be purchased before clearing the shelves for plastic elves. In early November it would have been naive to assume the decorating wouldn't have started, or the catalogs from mail-order companies you patronized -- online -- once two years ago. But now it's after Thanksgiving, and whether you like it or not, you're in for the long haul now, and the next holiday song you hear will be cheerily crossfaded into another. Welcome to The Christmas Soundtrack.

If there's one thing I've been thankful for this year, it's that my local coffeeshop/Barnes & Nobles (where I routinely escape from my office) held off on the Neverending Christmas Shuffle until after Thanksgiving. Long after the adjoining stores had blasted fake frost onto their windows like a car wash waiting for the rinse cycle, B&N still had secular music and Pumpkin Spice Lattes. I haven't been down there yet since Thanksgiving, and I'm a little sad to take my first coffee run right now. Not for the Pumpkin Lattes -- those tasted like Lysol spray -- but for a public soundtrack that, 11 months out of the year, doesn't just blend indistinctively from one store to the next. Even Muzak has a broader repertoire.

And So: Pitchfork offers some advice on how to avoid The Soundtrack at home. Turn to Sufjan Stevens, who has released a five-CD set of Christmas music. (!) Stevens' propensity for large orchestral arrangements, according to the review, "...may be sufficient for the box to sneak into the parents' Christmas music rotation, allowing Stevens to give the greatest gift of all: momentary relief from Mannheim Steamroller."

There's No Music On My Radio

I'm glad to see that someone is finally cracking down on NPR. No, I'm not being sarcastic.

Don't get me wrong; I'm easily pegged as "an NPR person" daily when I refuse the morning Metro because, really, NPR covered all of the news in it between 8:00 and 8:05. But recently, as I read over at one of the Chicago Reader's blogs, the NEA has criticized NPR for decreasing its musical programming in favor of its news resources. If you live in Boston it may be hard to imagine a world where NPR has a diminished music schedule, what with WGBH's award-winning jazz programming and unadventurous-though-tolerable daytime classical music. In other cities, the non-commercial radio frontier has more limited resources.

If you care about good radio -- including how we should or shouldn't be using our public radio stations -- check out the thread of debate on the post linked above. Any reader of this blog should already know about (IMO) the model public music station, KEXPin Seattle, but it is the exception, not the rule, in the sonic landscape. You may begin to realize that both Chicago and Boston have major features missing from that landscape -- musical niche genres that aren't necessarily finding new audiences via the internet radio and podcasting channels that currently keep them alive.

So Hard to Tell If It's Homophobia or Racism

I suppose if you were a marketing agent doing a demographic profile of me and my cinematic interests, you might lump me into the category of ex-fans of the short-lived "Mr. Show with Bob and David." It's the only explanation for why I have seen internet banner after banner promoing Bob Odenkirk's new film, "Let's Go to Prison." Because I shudder to think that there is some untargeted, widespread public campaign to promote a film that relies on a single gag -- the ol' "dropping the soap" bit. I actually had to turn Pandora off today because it was only giving me ads for this film.

I need help understanding how anyone can still think this joke is funny, and I don't mean that sarcastically, I really feel like I need to bridge this particular gap between the world of the Straight White Male and Everyone Else. Am I just too wrapped up in my own queerness to see how someone could find the idea of prison rape funny? I mean, which part of the typical gag is funny? Is it the idea of a criminal having justice served upon him through sexual assault? Or is it the emasculization of the assailant, through characitures of big, black inmates making goofy-lovey-eyes at a small white guy? Or is it just the hilarious idea that if you're naked and near another naked guy, if you bend over, the other guy's penis will accidentally slip into your butt and turn both of you gay?

...Where I Have Been

Oh blog readers! Come back! I'm sorry I left for so long! What will it take, post-election coverage? The Republicans got what was coming to them - there you go! You want celebrity gossip? The Ryan Phillippe update? Local tidbits? Every time I see the Ita Software ads on the Red Line, it makes me despise the practice of selling entire subway cars to a single advertiser even more, because no one wants to stare at the same four programmers who are playing with some sort of airplane and look like they're coming down off of a Mountain Dew binge. That's all the blog you need right there!

OK... OK I admit I'm straying from the pomo/homo ethos of the blog. I'm refueling my pomo batteries right now, so to speak, reading one of the landmarks in the critical canon: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. It's confusing, it's bleak, it's funny, it has lots of song lyrics in it -- it's really going to do me some good once I come up for air. It's just very long.

I'd like to know, though, how it is that people can commit themselves to long, serial television shows. While TV shows and movies aren't exactly the same medium, I would argue that a movie is typically a little over 2 hours, so watching a serial TV show in sequence is committing to a work that is usually ten times the size of the genre's standard. Novels like Infinite Jest and Gravity's Rainbow that are notorious not only for their complexity but size (the former being 768, the latter being 1088) are a mere 2-3 times the size of your typical 300 page novel. Readers should not feel like they're being asked too much to commit to this much text.

Well that's how I feel anyways. I will be back on the blog more often now, and hopefully out on yours, too.

Gay Patrick

Hello, blog! Did you miss me? Panama was fantastic, but lacking in any queer or postmodern material for blogging, so I'll try to intermix some stories at my upcoming gig on Wednesday. Please come and celebrate the fact that we will no longer have to listen to Kerry Healy's boring, desperate attacks on Deval Patrick. Hey, speaking of people with Patrick in their names, Neil Patrick Harris finally came out. In my head, he did this because Ryan Phillippe is available again. In reality, he probably did this because most anyone who's been following his career since Doogie Howser either saw him as Mark in Rent or the Emcee in Cabaret. Nobody gets all the fun male lead roles on Broadway without having the gay genes; I just don't think it's possible.