Christmas Music

Despite my hatred towards the meaning of Christmas in our culture, I am actually a big fan of well done Christmas music. Given the tendency towards cheap sentimentality and lyrics so cheesy they should come with a cholesterol warning, this means that most of my favorite songs are traditional pieces. Things like "O Holy Night" or "God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman" and my favorite arrangements tend to involve proper full choirs rather than the dip with a guitar theme that my church seems fond of. However, The Killers have been making original Christmas music for the last few years and I actually like what they've done, so I wanted to share it with all of you out there.

The first is "Don't Shoot Me Santa", which I love for the dark humor and for the fact that the video is directed by crush object Matthew Gray Gubler of Criminal Minds:


Then there's "Great Big Sled" which probably my least favorite of the three, which doesn't mean much because I still really like it. But it's the one that sticks closest to a lot of "Christmas song" tropes, still it's fun and upbeat.


And then there's finally "Joseph, Better You Than Me" featuring Elton John and Neil Tennant. And while it's a slower piece, it's my favorite out of the three. I think it's a lovely and heartbreaking song about what faith means and how it can test a person, and it focuses on a figure in the Christmas story who's frequently overlooked. Even as an extraordinarily lapsed Catholic, I'll admit that the room seems to get a little dusty when I hear this one and listen to Flower's piercing voice asking "When the Holy Night is upon you, will you do what's right?"

Distractions

Not only have I removed myself from my house to campus to work on the two remaining assignments I have to finish this semester, both of which are due tomorrow, but I'm doing them by hand because my biggest distraction is actually the computer. This has it's advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that because I am on campus, I got two free slices of pizza, an apple, and a vitamin water* so I didn't have to buy lunch. Yay! The disadvantage is that handwriting anything really starts to suck after the first hour and it's only going to get worse since I have to type it all up later. I will be going home with useless little claw hands. At the moment I'm on a study break, but in about ten minutes I have to turn the computer off and get back to work. Ugh.

On the one hand, I'm proud of myself for being adult enough to recognize that the computer serves as more of a distraction than a help in certain phases of completing assignments. On the other hand, working for long stretches of time without allowing myself to dick around online is HARD. Like, harder than it should be. I may have a problem with the internet. But how can something that brings me so much happiness be bad? These are all questions which can be answered on Wednesday, when all of this will be over and done with. Hopefully.

*Which is pineapple flavored and I am not a pineapple fan but hey! Free!

CBII: Book #9 - The Death of Bunny Munro

I can't really say I liked this book. I respect Nick Cave's abilities as a writer. He's extremely good at painting vivid images and characters using a few deft descriptions. However, I hate Bunny Munro. I think these day's he'd be classified as a sex addict, but the man borders on sociopathic and I can't find a single redeeming quality within the character. He allegedly loved his wife, yet fails to grasp how his drive to fuck anything with a vagina in his job as a door to door salesman might have contributed to her depression. He allegedly loves his son, but refuses to take a few minutes out from his endless pussy hunt to buy the eyedrops that will keep the boy from going blind. Perhaps I'm missing some larger point here, but I hated Bunny Munro and while I liked the book it was more in spite of the character than because of him.

The Death of Bunny Munro follows the titular character through the day leading up to and the week after his wife's death by suicide. After the funeral, he loads his son, Bunny Junior, into the car with samples for the beauty products he sells door to door and hits the road seemingly in an effort to lose himself rather than deal with the aftermath of his wife's death. Bunny becomes more and more unhinged the longer he's on the road, and the story culminates with (spoiler, only not really because it's the f-ing title of the book) his death.

As I said before I basically hated Bunny himself. I found his son to be an extremely sympathetic character though, and felt so sorry that this sweet, kind and bright boy was growing up with a father who didn't care about anyone but himself and a mother so damaged by the man that she killed herself. The best news of the ending is that since Bunny Junior was only 9 when his father died, there may yet be hope for him to find a path to adulthood that does not mimic the one his father was trying to teach him. I can sympathize to a certain extent with people making poor decisions in the face of grief, like loading your 9 year old son into the car so you can get some ass rather than dealing with his medical issues and providing a stable home life, but Bunny never seemed to make a single adult decision in the entire book. His character is almost entirely infantile, he does whatever he wants to make himself happy or feel better. Sometimes other people get in the way, and Bunny does whatever he can to remove them purely as obstacles rather than relating to them as humans in any fashion. Also he's obsessed with Avril Lavigne's twat.

The Death of Bunny Munro is an interesting book, but probably one you shouldn't leave lying around where small and precocious children (like I used to be) could get their hands on it. Nick Cave is obviously a talented writer, despite his obscenely unlikeable main character, and people who are fans of Palahniuk*, Bukowski, or Easton Ellis would probably like this book a lot more than I did.

*Side note: I am a fan of Palahniuk but I read him as a kind of grand satirist. If you started your own Fight Club after seeing the movie… you kind of missed the point. Or maybe I did. I'm not sure, which is why I have to keep reading his stuff.

CBII: Book #8 - Little Bee

Little Bee is one of those stories that can either have an ending that rings true, or a happy ending. To his credit, author Chris Cleave goes for true, but it means that the end of the novel is something of a punch to the gut since we live in a culture that loves it's happy endings.

Little Bee tells the story of a 16 year old Nigerian girl who has spent the last two years of her life at an Immigration Removal Center in England. During that time, she dedicated herself to learning perfect english with no accent, in hopes that doing so would be the key to avoiding deportation. After an intentional clerical error releases her from the center, but does not actually grant her legal status, she seeks out a husband and wife that she met in Nigeria right before making her escape to England.

Sarah O'Rourke lives in Kingston-upon-Thames and is the editor of an edgy fashion magazine. The day that Little Bee arrives at her house is the day of her husband's funeral after he commits suicide. His suicide comes only days after Little Bee phoned them from the removal center to let them know that she would be coming to see them. Sarah, in her grief, allows Little Bee to stay at her house and look after her son, despite protests from Sarah's lover who works at the home office and thinks Little Bee should be turned over to the authorities immediately.

The story revolves around and moves towards an event that happened on a beach in Nigeria while Sarah and her husband Andrew were vacationing there, and encountered Little Bee and her sister. What happened on that beach is not revealed until well into the novel, but it irrevocably tied the women together and led to Andrew's suicide.

I'm not trying to be deliberately obtuse about what happens in the novel, but I'd rather not give away the major plot points. Little Bee is a lovely and heartbreaking book about trauma; how it ties us together and pushes us apart. It's also about responsibility, and touches on a political message related to how developed countries deal with asylum seekers. There's no question in Little Bee's mind that she will be killed if she is sent back to Nigeria, but because Britain doesn't acknowledge the conflict that sent her running in the first place and considers Nigeria "relatively safe" her asylum claim is nearly hopeless. The peripheral characters in the story echo familiar first world complaints about asylum seekers; that there's too many of them, that there's not enough resources to help everyone who needs it, and what difference does it make to help just one person. Cleave never directly refutes any of these points, because they're all true. The point he does make is that for that one person you can help, it makes all the difference in the world.

Little Bee is a beautiful but depressing read. For those looking for an inspiring story of the underdog overcoming adversity, don't pick up this book. If you're looking for a harsh examination of the kinds of events that lead individuals to seek asylum and how they are generally treated, give it a shot.

CBII: Book #7 - The Sanctuary

(I'm apologizing to Nicole in advance as I finished three books this week with all the time I spent on public transportation and waiting for things. And since I was busy yesterday, I'm posting all my reviews today. Sorry!)

I'm not surprised that people are trying to write the next The DaVinci Code. Despite my personal feelings on Dan Brown and that novel in particular, I'll admit that it was an enormously successful novel and spawned a sequel in both the literary world and in the movies. Raymond Khoury's The Sanctuary tries to capture that same DaVinci Code concept and thrust, but sets his story within a secret society/conspiracy involving something far less inflammatory than the Catholic Church. And while I appreciate the effort, I don't think anyone doubts that it's just that inflammatory subject matter that caused a lot of the buzz surrounding The DaVinci Code and made it a mega hit. The Sanctuary, while better written (not hard to do), does not manage to hook the reader in quite the same way.

The Sanctuary bounces back and forth between past and present, but is mostly concerned with some secret that's being sought by evil and persistent men in both settings. In the past, we know the secret keeper but not what he's protecting*, and watch the secret keeper escape time and time again to avoid revealing his apparently earth-shattering knowledge. In the present, we start off following an archeologist named Evelyn Bishop who lives in Beirut and who once discovered a mysterious chamber bearing an ouroboros carved into the wall. When someone who worked with her on that dig shows up out of the blue saying that a book with that same inscription has been found, Evelyn (and eventually her daughter) are dragged into a battle with men who will stop at nothing to obtain the secret hidden in those pages. There's a few double crosses, a couple "surprise" reveals, and an ending where all the bad or even just morally questionable characters die and good firmly triumphs over evil. Hooray!

Overall I found The Sanctuary to be a bit preachy at times and would often discover that I'd zoned out over a full page worth of characters ruminating on the implications of aging or whatever and it didn't really affect my understanding of the story. I think there's a couple "conflicts" Khoury threw in just to keep the plot going, and that most of the characters were two dimensional at best. Still, it's an uncomplicated read for anyone looking for a book to distract them on the subway or bus, and it's not badly written; it's biggest sin is that it's extremely predictable but not everyone is looking for surprises in their reading.

*Or we're not supposed to. I figured out the twist(s) kind of early on, but to avoid spoilers I won't mention it here.

Study Break

I'm totally working on my take home final for movie production. I swear I am. There's a Word document open and it's even got something written on it and everything. BUT, I wanted to share this with all of you and it clearly could not wait another minute.

I've written about my live for OK Go before here, when I got to meet Damian and Tim after a show in Towson, MD. And I mentioned in that post that I've basically wanted to marry Damian Kulash since I was 16. However, someone beat me to the punch, and as I'm not a homewrecker, I do my best to forget that or come as close as I can to forgetting it. And mostly that's easy. And then they put out a new video for their single "WTF?" which is apparently non-embeddable because the universe hates me. BUT, you should watch it because it makes the video I AM about to embed make a lot more sense, which is a video featuring Tim and Damian explaining the making of the video "WTF?" which only makes me want to marry Damian MORE.

Several things about this video:
- No one is better than these guys at making awesome music videos on a budget of like, $20. I love it.
- They made me not hate Tim and Eric from adultswim's "Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job" briefly, which is stunning because generally I hate everyone associated with adultswim who is not making "The Venture Brothers".
- If you pause the video at 5:21, Damian's got his shirt off.
- I may have a problem.

And now, back to my paper. Blah.

Final Days*

A week from now I'm going to be packing (or at least thinking about packing) for my flight back to Maryland which leaves at noon on the 16th. Between now and then I have two three hour tutoring sessions for test prep, an hour tutoring session for music theory, a take home final due, a conference to attend, a three day concert event at which I'm stage managing two nights, a book review and synopsis due, and at least one other final. (I have a third final, but I don't have to take it if I got a certain grade on the last test, a grade which has not yet been posted. I'm planning on e-mailing the teacher later.) At least I don't run the risk of being bored.

So far I haven't gotten to stressed about all of it. I am, at this point, confident that everything above will get done and done at least well enough that I can live with it. At this point, I'm more thinking about how to get to see people again before I leave, since classes aren't going on anymore and while I'm only going home for two and a half weeks, I know some people are going to be gone for a whole month. So for the next week, between getting all of what I mentioned in the first paragraph done, I'm going to need to sit on that social anxiety that keeps me from calling or texting people on a more regular basis and trying to make contact with everyone I want to see before I leave. Wish me luck.

*See, it's a play on words because not only am I working on finals right now, I'm counting down until when I leave Miami. Get it? …I'm lame.