December has not been a good month for photography. The weather has been incredibly reliable this month: on any day when I have time to get outside someplace and walk about and take photos, the weather has been absolute garbage. And unfortunately, as much as I love my Lumix FZ1000ii, my biggest knock on it is that it has no weather-sealing.
But on Christmas Eve I did finally get out to Knox Farm even though it was misty and damp. Here are a few results:
This is a slightly-modified repost of something I first wrote years ago, back in the Byzantium’s Shores days. It’s fresh on my mind because The Wife and I rewatched Love Actually last night, and it’s the first time I’ve seen it in seven or either years, after a period during which I watched it every year. I don’t know why it fell out of rotation; I certainly didn’t stop loving the movie, even though hating on it seems to have become a fashionable viewpoint in recent years, judging by the think-pieces that circulate social media about how bad Love Actually is. I did feel a small amount of trepidation as I sat down to watch it last night: what if it has been visited by the Suck Fairy? What if I ended up hating it now?
Like many of the stories in Love Actually (but not all, which I think is part of the movie’s genius), this one ends happily. I still love the film. Sure, a few aspects of it haven’t aged well, which I think happens to any creative work over time. (In this case, all the fat jokes directed at Martine McCutcheon’s character fall to the ground with a dull, wet thud.) But as a somewhat fantastical depiction of the weirdness and messiness of human relations where love is concerned, I still think Love Actually is simply terrific. The movie still leaves me in something of a daze as I exit the world it has created and try to re-enter the real one.
It’s also interesting to me how timeless Love Actually manages to be; the only dated aspects are the cell-phones in use, particularly in one of the storylines where a cell phone’s constant ringing at terrible times plays an important and sad role. Also, though I’ve never been to London (yet! It’s on my list!), I am familiar enough with it via photography and film to see that just 20 years ago, when Love Actually was being made, London looked very different! In some long shots you can see that the famous “Gherkin” building, the one that looks like a giant pickle stuck on end in the middle of London’s skyline, was still in construction at the time.
As for ongoing reactions to Love Actually, many remain the same, and I don’t bother reading many of the thinkpieces anymore. I have noted that some people still miss various points along the way: they think that Andrew Lincoln’s character, in the “silent placard” scene, is somehow hitting on Keira Knightley, or they somehow get offended by the supreme silliness of the guy who deduces that while in England he’s just a gangly weirdo, in America he’ll be an exotic sexual being.
I still love this movie and I find it perfectly suited to all the emotions that swirl around at Christmastime.
So. Love Actually. This is one of my favorite movies, so I’m going to wax poetic about it for a while (with spoilers, by the way). Some people watch A Christmas Story and It’s a Wonderful Life at Christmastime; for me it’s My Fair Lady (which I haven’t watched yet this season) and Love Actually (which I have). The other day Mrs. M-Mv (link dead) posted her own appreciation of the movie:
I know that many folks dislike this film — too long, too sentimental, too… something. Everyone has a suggestion for a storyline that needs to go or a character that could be deleted. Even Roger Ebert: “I once had ballpoints printed up with the message, No good movie is too long. No bad movie is short enough. ‘Love Actually’ is too long. But don’t let that stop you.” [Emphasis added.]
I, on the other hand, think the pace, the narrative, and the characters are practically perfect in every way. Moreover, I think the film wears well: I’ve seen it at least six times since it was first released — more, if you count all of the partial viewings — and it’s funny, sweet, and effective each time.
That’s true, isn’t it? I have yet to read a critique of this film that fails to mention the “fact” that it is just too long of a movie. Heck, even the movie’s director, Richard Curtis, seems to feel that it’s too long; in his filmed introductions to the deleted scenes on the DVD, he says something along the lines of “Well, the original cut was three-and-a-half hours long, so if you think the two-and-a-quarter-hour version is too long, it could have been worse.” But I heard that and thought, paraphrasing the movie’s Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, “Who do I have to screw around here to get to see the original cut?” I’ve never found Love Actually too long; in fact, it’s one of the rare films that leaves me wishing I could spend more time with these characters, in their world.
I want to know if Harry and Karen repair the damage to their marriage that Harry caused with his near-miss of an affair.
I want to know if Sarah ever gets another chance with Karl, or if she ever manages to find love in a way that still allows her to care for her brother.
I want to know how the PM’s relationship with a staffer turns out.
I want to know if Mark ever finds love after his impossible crush on Juliet plays out.
I want to know how Sam and Joanna fare as kid loves, and how Daniel and Carol make out as a potential couple.
I want to know if Colin ever matures beyond his need for impressive sex with American girls.
And I’d love to see a biopic of aged, battered old rocker Billy Mack, who late in the movie admits that his life, though lonely, has been a wonderful life.
Few movies seem as full of real people, to me, as Love Actually. That’s a testament, really, not just to the writing, but the entire production, because the movie by its nature has to rely on its actors and editors to make the whole thing really come to life. Since each story in the movie is basically told in miniature, each cast member is put in the position of having to knock each scene out of the park. Luckily for the movie, they accomplish this.
So no, I don’t think Love Actually is too long; not even close. And I think that beneath its exterior, which makes it look like the schmaltziest, mushiest romantic comedy ever made, the film is surprisingly insightful about how some relationships work when they’re based on love.
The film’s masterstroke is this: not everybody gets a happy ending. And, thinking about it, you realize that the movie is aware of an even deeper truth: that nobody gets an ending at all, save one, and that’s the big ending, the one that really ends everything.
When we first meet Daniel (Liam Neeson) and Sam (Thomas Sangster), they are at the funeral for Sam’s mother (and Daniel’s wife). [Daniel is actually Sam’s step-father, which raises other questions about Sam’s life: has he already lost one parent, or were his parents divorced with his mother then marrying Daniel? We never learn, and for the purposes of the story in Love Actually, it really doesn’t much matter.] Daniel is devastated, as is Sam, but it soon turns out that Sam’s got another problem of his own: he’s in love, probably for the first time in his life, with an American girl in his school who doesn’t know he exists. When Daniel finally gets this out of Sam, shortly after the funeral, it’s in a scene where the two are sitting on a bench, and Daniel finally appeals for Sam to tell him what the problem is, even if he can’t help the boy. We’re as surprised as Daniel is when Sam bluntly states, “Well, the truth is, I’m in love.” Daniel and Sam spend much of the rest of the film, when they’re onscreen, working out the details of how Sam can win Joanna’s heart. It’s a beginning that only comes out of a horrible moment of ending.
Harry (Alan Rickman) and Karen (Emma Thompson) are middle-aged married folks. Harry is the boss of what appears to be a non-profit or something like that; Karen is the housewife who basically keeps everything at home going, doing the cooking and cleaning and making the lobster costume for their daughter who has just been cast as First Lobster in the school’s Nativity play. (“There was more than one lobster present at the birth of Jesus?”) Their marriage seems staid and dull, but not unfeeling; even so, Harry finds himself responding to the advances of his new administrative assistant, a comely young woman named Mia. They never have a physical affair, but Harry indulges the attraction to the point of buying Mia a gold necklace for Christmas, which Karen finds out about. When the film reaches its last scene, Harry and Karen greet each other somewhat warmly but cautiously, and nothing really is said of what is going on with them: are they divorcing? Was Harry away on business, or were they separated? Are they working on it, or is it ending? We don’t know.
And then there’s Mark, who serves as his best friend’s best man in a wedding at the beginning of the movie. His problem is that he is himself desperately in love with Juliet, the bride who is marrying his best friend. This is hard for him to cope with, so his way of compensating is to treat Juliet very coldly, to the point where she thinks he hates her – until she visits him one day, hoping to find some good footage in the videotapes he’d made of the wedding, and realizes that all he taped that day was her. Late in the movie this plays out in a fairly charming scene that could give pause, as Mark admits to Juliet his love for her. Was this the right thing to do? It’s tempting, I suppose, to say that he should never tell the wife of his best friend that he loves her, but I don’t see it that way (at least, not in this specific context). Mark knows that he owes Juliet an explanation, and he knows that he has to find a way to be around her and not act like an arse, and he further knows that there’s no danger that he’s going to be coming between his friend and his friend’s wife by doing so, because he knows them. Mark knows that Juliet is not going to love her husband one bit less, so he knows that what he’s doing is not a potential act of abetting adultery. His is an act of reconciliation, and as he walks away, he says to himself: “Enough. Enough now.” He’s put himself in a position to move on, and it’s a totally right thing for him to do, even though if someone else were to try the same type of thing, it might well be disastrous for all concerned.
The most notable unhappy ending, though, belongs to Sarah (Laura Linney), who works for Harry and has been in love with their office’s graphic designer, Karl, for “two years, seven months, three days, one hour and thirty minutes” (half an hour less than the time she’s actually worked in that office). Harry finally sits her down and tells her to do something about her crush on Karl, since it’s Christmas and apparently everybody in the office knows already. Sarah’s eyes light up briefly with the sense of possibility. The problem, though, comes in the person of Sarah’s brother, who is institutionalized with some unspecified mental illness. Sarah is the only one to take care of him, and she does, out of an intense sense of duty (their parents are apparently long deceased). Her brother calls her on her cell phone constantly, usually to talk about problems that she really can’t help him with, but she takes each call anyway – including two that come the very night she is finally trying to seize her chance with Karl. It’s an awful moment that she faces: the two are in bed, beginning foreplay, when the phone rings; Karl says, “Can you help him right now?”, and when she shakes her head, he says, “Then maybe you don’t answer it.” But she can’t bring herself to do this, and she answers, telling her brother that she’s not busy at all. The moment passes, and as far as this film goes, Sarah and Karl never get together.
Sometimes in our lives, our various loves come into conflict. The love people have for one another can’t be exercised because of the love they have for their children; or, as with poor Sarah, her love and desire for Karl – her desire for a life of her own, even – is pushed back because of her love and duty to her brother. One friend of mine hated the movie, mainly for this particular plot point, but I found it entirely realistic. I’ve known people who have made these kinds of choices in their lives.
Of course, I wouldn’t be so enchanted with Love Actually if the movie wasn’t so wickedly funny. There isn’t a scene with Billy Mack (Bill Nighy), the aging rocker, that doesn’t leave me grinning at the very least. There’s the wonderful moment when the Prime Minister has to literally go door-to-door looking for someone, at one point being exhorted by a trio of little girls who have no idea who he is to sing Christmas carols (the look on Hugh Grant’s face when the PM discovers that his own bodyguard has an amazing singing voice is priceless). There is one hilarious moment after another.
Lastly, Love Actually is a beautiful film. So much of the movie seems to actually sparkle, and the music is, for a typical selection of romantic-comedy music, mostly wonderful stuff, including two gorgeous love themes by composer Craig Armstrong.
As a conclusion, here’s the opening scene to Love Actually, with a brief monologue by Hugh Grant as the PM. Love actually is all around.
I don’t know of a scene that better sets the tone for what’s to come in a movie than this one — so much so that I almost want to turn off the computer and watch the movie again right now.
The day is here!
Merry Christmas, and may the day be full of joy and warmth in whatever form is best for you!
This is a repost that first appeared three years ago, on the old blog. I’m reposting it now, because of the season and because I’ve been thinking today, prompted by discussions elsewhere, about problematic people and what to do with their work. I also have the subject of food and memory on my mind, particularly this year, as this will be the first Christmas of my life without my mother’s “cheesy potatoes”, which are basically potatoes au gratin. Yes, I’ve looked around at some recipes, and yes, I’ve found some that sound good that will probably be pretty close. But will they be close enough? Of course not. Mom’s not making them.
As I write this, it’s 4:45pm and the light is fading. The long darkness is settling, and even for someone like me for whom “belief” is deeply difficult, it’s hard not to think of that darkness being pierced by the most unlikely of births….
Back when I was in college, I decided that I needed to start learning to cook. One of the cornerstones of that effort was to buy all the cookbooks by Jeff Smith, also known by his PBS brand name “The Frugal Gourmet”, and read them cover to cover while also cooking quite a few of the recipes. I learned a hell of a lot about cooking in that way (“Hot wok, cold oil, foods won’t stick!”), and while I think Smith’s notions about food and peacekeeping were a bit out there (one of his last cookbooks has a very odd passage in which he envisions Bill Clinton and Saddam Hussein cooking together), I very much agree with his insights about food and memory. There’s a reason why, when a beloved elder dies, a lot of times those left behind despair over being able to replicate their best dishes. “It’s good,” we say. “I’ve got it pretty close, but there was something she did that I can’t quite get my finger on.”
I still own most of Smith’s output to this day, and a few of his recipes are in my permanent rotation. I have never stopped reading them or even watching some of his shows which have shown up on YouTube, even though…
Smith, it turned out, was really not the kindly pastoral gentleman he portrayed on his shows. I don’t really want to get into that here, but suffice it to say that there were accusations of sexual improprieties in the late 90s that brought his career to a slamming, screeching halt. If you search around the Internet, you can find other testimonials about Smith that are, shall we say, less than flattering. He may have spent many years not even living with his wife (speculations as to why that may have been abound), and he seems to have been an unpleasant fixture in the Seattle food scene toward the end of his life. Again, I don’t want to get into that.
It all comes back as we have discussions in society today, quite repeatedly, about what we do when people we admire, especially the creative folks whose works have touched and shaped us, turn out to not only be very human, but very disappointingly human, at that. JK Rowling turns out to be transphobic to a deeply creepy degree. Isaac Asimov…well, rumors abounded about his conduct at science fiction conventions for years, and they don’t seem to have gone away despite his being dead for nearly thirty years. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s private life was appalling, and Orson Scott Card turns out to be deeply homophobic. Michael Jackson.
We all have to struggle with to what degree our artistic heroes were real people who committed acts ranging from missteps to simply awful deeds. I’ve known this for years, since I obsessively read about music history as a kid. My favorite composer, Hector Berlioz, was an addict and a manipulative stalker weirdo. Robert Schumann obsessively pursued a girl who today would be a minor and basically forced her to give up almost all of her own musical career outside of helping to perform and advance his works. (Clara Schumann was, by all accounts, an amazingly talented woman who might well have become a beloved composer in her own right, had husband Robert not dominated her so completely.) Richard Wagner? Well, as David Dubal writes in The Essential Canon of Classical Music, in reference to Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll”, a gorgeous piece he wrote as a wedding gift for his wife, “That this man, capable of such emotion, was enraged at Bismarck for not burning Paris to the ground will always tantalize and disturb.”
So…back to Jeff Smith, among whose cookbooks is the one pictured above, a quite wonderful volume of Christmas recipes and ruminations about our modern Christmas. (Well, not quite our modern Christmas! This book is almost thirty years old.) Smith presents an entire Christmas menu, based on those present at the Nativity: dishes for Joseph, for Mary, for the Innkeeper (whom Smith believed has gotten kind of a bum rap over the years) and the tax collector. There are dishes for the Wise Men, for the angels, and even for the donkey (who gets “Straw and Hay”, which is now one of my best pasta dishes). The book has cookie recipes, recipes for mincemeat pie and two kinds of fruitcake–I want to like fruitcake but I can never get there!–and more. He finally presents several complete Christmas dinner menus…and the photographs throughout are wonderfully colorful, as well. There’s a reason I love this cookbook: it’s the kind of cookbook you can thumb through with pleasure, in addition to having good insights on food.
In the middle of the book comes this section, about Christmas traditions. This has been one of my favorite pieces of Christmas writing ever since I bought this book in the 90s, and if it is coming from someone who would later turn out to be quite a lot less than the sum of his parts, well…that’s frankly the case with most art, isn’t it? It’s up to us to decide how much these things bother us, and which things are our personal dealbreakers.
Our Family Christmas
From THE FRUGAL GOURMET CELEBRATES CHRISTMAS
Our family traditions came about in much the same way as did your family traditions…they just sort of happened.
Patty and I originally made a prime rib of beef for Christmas, and then the boys came along. Somehow Patty got into the roast goose routine, and we enjoyed that for years. As the boys grew, we began to celebrate one of the Christmas menus that follow, and then on Christmas Day I would prepare a full Norwegian smorgasbord with baked beans, potato salad, several different kinds of herring, luncheon meats, special breads, fish balls in cream sauce, cold salmon or lox, lefse, Christmas bread, and, of course, the leftover roast beef or goose from the night before. We still do that.
Last year I did a Swedish meal of pickled pork. The Paulina Market in Chicago makes a Swedish pickled fresh ham that is just terrific. So, now we all have a new favorite dinner. The boys side with the goose, Patty with the roast beef, and I go for the pickled ham. Now what do we do?
One year I suggested to Jason that we make some changes in our Christmas dinners. Try something new. He was quite young at the time, but his response meant that we had established some family traditions that he wanted to maintain. I was so touched by his insight that I wrote the following letter to him, a letter that was circulated by the Roman Catholic parish in Chicago. You will probably recognize your own family in this letter.
My dear Jason,
I probably came very close to violating the meaning of tradition when I suggested that we try something a bit different this year. You are happily bound up in memories of Christmases past, and I expect that I will hear you say, “Dad, can’t we have real dressing? I mean the old kind. After all, it is Christmas!”
You are right, son, it is Christmas. And on the day of the Mass, the feast of Christ, I should not go around breaking family traditions.
But I must consider anew the meaning of the Feast of the Christmas, and I think you and I should think about it together.
The term feast is very much involved with the meaning of memory. We feast because we remember certain events in our lives; sometimes wonderful events, sometimes painful events. That seems to be the way it has been with man- and womankind for a long time.
Christmas for me as a child was very different from our Christmas now. We would travel to greet my father’s family at his mother’s house, your great-grandmother, Nettie Smith. Oh how sad I feel that you did not know this tough old girl. She was a member of the state legislature and she was a left-winger from the start. But in the kitchen she was just terrible. She cooked turkey in the Old Testament style, burning the poor thing on the altar until smoke drifted up to heaven. Then, to the table it would come, though it was so dessicated, so dried out, so tasteless, that I could not understand why someone else in the family did not cook the bird instead. You know why they did not? Because it was job traditionally reserved for Gramma. To this day, when I eat dried-out turkey, I think of her…and how much I miss her.
Christmas morning in my family was wonderful. World War II was in the midst of every event, and candy and sugar were hard to find. One Yule morning my mother, your Grandma Smith, brought us to the table and presented us with marzipan candy shaped like eggs and bacon. My brother, Greg, sister, Judy, and I were amazed that Mom could find such things.
Some of our Christmas traditions are a bit strange, I will admit. But they are our traditions, our family. Each year we carefully unpack the papier-mache manger figures we made together when you and Channing were tiny children. And each year we spend precious time gluing the poor shepherd boy back together. Would it not be much more practical simply to go out and buy a new creche, a new king, a new Christ child? Ah, now, my boy, we are speaking of utter heresy, of violations against the meaning of our past…and I suppose therefore, our future.
A true feast actually has nothing to do with what you eat…but with what you remember. Many families in this nation have no traditions at all, few roots, and thus, few feasts. I am for feasting and celebrating in such a way that we will always remember we are a family. Sometimes I know that it is tough having me for a father, since I always want to add sherry to a gravy that you find perfectly in order already. Or I want to put mushrooms in a dressing, and you claim that they taste like dirt.
So, now, back to the kitchen. We have much to prepare before the star grows bright over the manger and you and I come to the creche, dazed by what we find, but carrying two gravies. One with mushrooms, and one without.
I love you,
Dad
Christmas is as much a time of memory as it is of anything else, and food is memory.
Today it’s a Grab Bag of Christmas Music! In other words, stuff I usually feature and didn’t get to yet, and stuff I want to feature but don’t have a ton to say about it for now.
This next is an entire album!
Courtesy my Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra:
And finally, as the lights dim this night:
I used to feature Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite here yearly, but a few years ago I added the entire ballet. And here it is, featuring the ballet and orchestra of the National Opera of the Ukraine.
This is an utterly gorgeous performance.
This performance of the Suite omits the Miniature Overture but includes the number that follows the Waltz of the Flowers, which is an interesting choice.
And as always, The Nutcracker makes me think of Dr. Janice Wade.
Today, some Christmas-based classical music! We’ll start with an older favorite, the “Carol Symphony” by Victor Hely-Hutchinson:
Next is Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Christmas Overture”. This is one of those “performances while distancing” that abounded in the high days of the COVID pandemic. For some reason I find a lot of these kinds of performances highly effective.
Here is “Song for Snow” by Florence Price, that wonderful Black American composer whose work has been undergoing a massive rediscovery over the last few years.
This next work, Stella Natalis by Sir Karl Jenkins, is new to me. (The entire work is in a playlist as opposed to a single video, so hopefully this embeds correctly.) I found this information on this work:
Karl Jenkins, the classically trained master of global ‘crossover,’ has composed a new work for choir and orchestra, Stella Natalis, as a gift to music lovers of all stylistic and spiritual backgrounds for the 2009 holiday season. Its coupling, Joy to the world, features arrangements by Jenkins of carols from around the globe in keeping with the composer’s inclusive and universal approach to the message of music.
Enjoy! It’s pretty cool.
(Blame SamuraiFrog for this one, folks — he gave me the title! I deny all accountability. Except for the part where I write the following tale. Which I’m doing stream-of-conscious, right off the top of my head. No editing.)
Lore has it that there is one, and only one, substance that can stop Superman dead in his tracks.
Kryptonite.
Irradiated fragments of rock hurled into the deep dark of space when his planet exploded, Kryptonite’s radiation and other qualities unique to its place of origin make it near-lethal whenever Superman comes in contact with it. So, of course, every one of Superman’s antagonists knows of this weakness, and they all try, at one point or another, to use Kryptonite to get the drop on him.
What they don’t know is that there is another substance that can significantly weaken Superman. This one is not so lethal; in fact, it’s not lethal to Superman at all. He survives a brush with this substance within a day, and he’s back to normal. But he finds its effects extremely unpleasant, both because of what they do to him, and what he has to do to keep those effects from being lethal to those around him, because his body magnifies those effects over what they would do to a normal human being.
What is that substance, you ask?
Beans.
Whether out in public as Superman or as Clark Kent, the fact remains…Kal-el cannot eat beans.
He was never able to figure it out, but as a kid, the first time Ma Kent put beans on the table — of any kind, except for jelly — he became very, and explosively, gassy. Imagine Kal-el’s digestive tract, super-charged as was every other aspect of his body over the normal human version. Gas, for him, was survivable — but disastrous for anybody nearby. So, no beans.
This was pretty easy to deal with, as he got older. Nobody really ever tried to give him beans to eat as Superman, and as Clark Kent, he could just claim either allergy or that he didn’t like them. Problem was, he said the latter to the wrong person.
Enter Lois Lane.
Now, Lois Lane is a great reporter. One of the best. She fearlessly charges in to get stories that no one else can get, and she reports them with snappy writing that defines her newspaper, the Daily Planet. But to anyone who isn’t remotely as strong-willed as she is, or possessed of super-patience (like Mr. Kent), Lois Lane is basically a giant pain in the ass. It’s true. She has to have the last word on everything, she has to be right, and if you disagree with a single position she takes, she will make it her mission in life to show you how wrong you are. So when Clark Kent told her one night when they went out to dinner at a Mexican place that he didn’t care for beans, she said a polite “Mm-hmm” as she filed that away in her head.
I’ll change your mind about beans, Clark. Oh yes. I will change your mind about beans!
Lois Lane could be a little bit creepy and weird, come to think of it.
So there was Lois one day, hatching a plan to convert Clark Kent to liking beans. Her scheme involved getting him to eat some without him knowing that they were beans, and when he said how much he liked the dish, she’d be able to spring on him the fact that he’d just eaten beans and liked them so he could now see how silly he was being with that whole bean thing.
Yeah. As plans go, that’s about as complex as Lois Lane could muster. Lex Luthor, she wasn’t.
Which brings us to: Lex Luthor.
See, Lex Luthor was pissed off that year as Christmas rolled near, same way he was every year when Christmas rolled near. He was angry because his schemes had been thwarted. He was also angry because the snowmobile he was on kept wanting to tilt over to the right, because of the weight of the rocket launcher they had with them.
“I can’t believe it,” said Lex. “How hard can it be to figure out where Superman goes all the time! It’s not that big a planet! There’s only so much ‘north’!”
“Maybe he starts out north and then turns left,” his henchman offered. This henchman was fat and portly and looked something like that guy from the movie Network.
“Shut up, you nitwit. Let me think.”
He pulled the snowmobile over — who knows why, they weren’t even on a road — and looked at his map. “I’ve triangulated every course Superman’s ever taken when he flew north from Metropolis. I can’t believe he’d fly in anything other than a straight line, but the lines never converge on anything. And yet, I swear he must have a Fortress up here somewhere!”
“Maybe he just likes his solitude?”
“Oh shut up.” Lex fired up the snowmobile again, and off they went. (How did they have enough gas to snowmobile all the way that far north? Why are you asking me?!)
Meanwhile, some hundred miles south in the city of Metropolis, someplace in the eastern United States but totally not New York City even though it really looks like NYC and all, Clark Kent arrived at Lois Lane’s apartment. He awkwardly knocked on her door, and she opened it and let him in.
“Hi, Clark! Merry Christmas! I’m glad you could make it.”
“Oh, well, gosh, Ms. Lane, thanks for inviting me! You know, I was really surprised that you invited me to your Christmas party. I just figured I’d stay home and read some more Reader’s Digest.”
“Don’t be silly, Clark! It’s Christmas! Look everybody, Clark’s here!”
The other guests all just kind of nodded in Clark’s direction. Anyone other than Clark Kent would have thought the whole lot of them a bunch of assholes, but not Clark Kent. He was nice, that way.
“Want something to drink, Clark? Bar’s over there. You know where it is.”
“Oh thanks, Lois. I just thought I’d have some water.”
“Uhh…sure. Water. Well, there’s that, too, I guess. I have to go check the food!”
And with that, Lois disappeared into her kitchen, where wonderful smells were wafting out. That piqued Clark’s curiosity, so he wandered toward the kitchen door and peaked in. Jimmy Olsen was in there, doing all the cooking, while Lois buzzed around him. That explained it. Lois could barely boil water without burning it.
“I don’t know about this plan, Miss Lane,” Jimmy said.
“Just do it, Jimmy. I have to find out the truth about what Clark says.”
“This seems kind of mean though!”
“Just get it done!”
Clark turned away, alarmed. So that was it: another one of Lois’s hare-brained schemes to see if he was really Superman or not. Why wouldn’t she just give it up! Clark sipped his water, wondering what it was going to be this time.
Meanwhile, way up north, Lex Luthor was getting more and more angry. He pulled the snowmobile over again, shut it off, got off, and kicked it.
“Careful Mr Luthor!” his henchman said. “You broke your foot doing that once!”
“Then maybe I’ll kick something soft and fleshy!” Lex shouted. “Like…your ass!”
His henchman shook his head in amazement at the way Mr. Luthor’s voice in such moments always managed to sound like a blend of Gene Hackman and Kurtwood Smith.
“I can’t believe I can’t find Superman’s fortress! It has to be up here somewhere! He can’t just break laws of physics like that!”
“He can fly,” the henchman offered.
“Shut up!” Lex began to pace. “All right, think. He’s always up here. He always goes north. Why north? What is up here? Polar bears? Inuit natives? Frozen white men from Europe who thought they’d find the North Passage? What could possibly be up here?”
“Maybe that train can tell us,” the henchman said.
“Train? What the hell are you babbling about now?”
“Look,” the henchman said. “A train.”
He pointed. Sure enough, there in the distance was…a train. Six passenger cars, pulled by a locomotive whose headlight cast a golden sheen across the ice in front of it.
“A train? Up here? Where could that be going?”
“Maybe Superman doesn’t have a fortress!” the henchman offered. “Maybe he flies up here and catches a train!”
Lex stopped and slowly turned toward his henchman as his brain tried to process what it had just heard.
“You think…that Superman…flies thousands of miles to catch a train?”
“Er…well…maybe he likes trains. Maybe they’re his hobby. Kind of like you and those magazines you collect, the ones with the pictures of pretty–”
“Shut it!”
“Sorry, Mr. Luthor.”
Lex turned his attention back to the train. Where could it be going…and then, in a flash…he knew. A grin spread across his face.
“Come on,” he said to his henchman. “We’re going to need that rocket launcher after all!”
“Oh! Did you find Superman’s fortress, Mr. Luthor?”
“No,” Lex said. “But there is a fortress up here. And it belongs to another superhero with whom I have a score to settle.” He got the snowmobile running and gunned it, almost before his henchman could jump on board again. He needed to get there. Oh yes, he needed to get there, indeed. And a certain other superhero, this one whose suit was red, had some answering to do for a broken model ship Lex had got for Christmas when he was ten.
Oh yes.
Meanwhile, at that moment, Lois started putting out the food that Jimmy had made. And he’d done a great job of it, too: crab puffs, lobster dainties, shrimp shrimp and more shrimp, Buffalo chicken wings, authentic Metropolis-style pizza (indistinguishable from New York thin crust, but let’s not go there right now, shall we), and chips with the most creamy, luscious, cheese dip you ever saw, cut with just the right amount of hot sauce and spices. Everyone tucked in, and Jimmy headed for the bar to make himself a reward drink when Lois slapped his wrist and sent him back to the kitchen to wash dishes.
“Aren’t you going to eat, Clark?”
“Uhhh…sure, Lois.” What was the trick here? How was she using food to test him? What was this all about? Best just to go along with it, he thought. So he made himself a little plate of food, returned to his corner where he resumed his conversation with the potted plant, and ate. It was all really good, but Oh my God, the cheese dip was fantastic! He’d never tasted anything so wonderful in his life. The creaminess, the smoothness, and the blend of cheese and heat from the sauce! Clark made a mental note to take Jimmy aside next week and ask him why he was doing photography for the Planet when he could be cooking in a restaurant.
Clark didn’t notice Lois’s smug expression of victory when he went back for more cheese dip.
Meanwhile, Lex Luthor guided his snowmobile to the edge of the icy sea, where the train rumbled across a series of bridges made of brick toward a gleaming city of brick. “The North Pole,” he said.
“Why doesn’t it look like it did in National Geographic?”
“That’s the geographic North Pole,” Lex said. “This is the mythic North Pole.”
He could practically hear his henchman’s brain gears a-grinding away on that one.
“All right.” He checked his watch. Fifteen minutes to midnight. “Help me get this rocket launcher ready. It’s almost time.”
“Time for what?”
Lex couldn’t keep it in any longer. He laughed and laughed and laughed.
“We’re going to shoot down Santa Claus!”
“Awwww!” His henchman began to cry as Lex got the rocket launcher ready.
Meanwhile, in Lois Lane’s apartment, Clark Kent’s super digestive system began to go…awry.
It started with a simple little gurgling feeling, but that gurgling became stronger and stronger. Clark leaned into the corner, behind the potted plant, and emitted a belch as stealthily as he could. It made no sound, but the plant’s leaves rustled and then wilted a bit. When he stood back up, he felt worse. A lot worse.
“Oh my,” he said. “Uh, Lois?”
“Yes, Clark?” Lois said sweetly.
“I don’t mean to accuse you of doing anything nasty,” Clark said, “but were there, by any chance, beans in any of the food you made tonight?”
“Just in the cheese dip,” Lois said, with triumph in her voice. Sweet, sweet triumph. “And you always say you hate beans! Now how do you feel about them, Mister Kent!” She put her hands on her hips. “How about that, folks! Clark Kent likes beans now!”
Oh God, Clark thought. His stomach was starting to churn like something that churns a lot. An old-school butter making thing, perhaps. “Lois, was this just…” he pushed down a burp — “…a scheme to get me to eat beans?”
“Not the whole party,” Lois said. “I do like to have people over. You’re just icing on the cake!”
The silence in the room was pretty awkward at this point — not the least for Clark, who desperately wished for loud music and loud conversation to drown out what he needed to do.
“Well gosh Lois I really wish you hadn’t done that,” Clark said in one big rush. His stomach felt like he’d eaten Kryptonite, and the feeling was already spreading…down. Lower. Farther into the tract. “I…I need to go. Sorry!” And with that he grabbed his hat and his coat and ran out the door.
Lois frowned. “Now where do you think he’s off to?” she asked.
“Hey listen!” someone shouted. “Sirens! There’s a fire down the street! Maybe we’ll see Superman!”
Lois’s eyes narrowed. Funny how Clark and Superman were never in the same place….
Superman did make an appearance at the fire. He stopped in the air long enough to blow it out with one super-gust of air. Then he tore off. He was going to explode, and it was going to be ugly. He had to get away from the city, away from everybody.
He had to get north.
Lex Luthor checked his watch. One minute to midnight. “All right, here we go.”
“Awww gee, Mr. Luthor. Thinka the children!”
“Children? I’m doing them a favor! Now they’ll all be equally disappointed. That’s a good lesson to learn. You want something in this life, you gotta go get it! Oh look! There he is!”
And in fact, something was arising from the glittering city. Lex Luthor lifted the rocket launcher to his shoulder and put his eye to the scope. There it was: the great sleigh, powered by whatever magic impelled it into the air. There were the nine stubby beasts flying it, the one in front with that mutant nose of his. And there, in the driver’s seat, was that fat bastard who had broken Lex’s heart so many years before when he’d put the wrong toy, that stupid doll in his stocking. Meanwhile someone else played with his toy ship.
“I’m gonna get you,” he said. “Ho ho ho!”
He squeezed the trigger, and the rocket launched. Right toward Santa Claus and his sleigh.
Meanwhile, Superman whipped through the air. He knew he was going north, but he wasn’t paying total attention to where he was going. He wasn’t even going to the Fortress; he just needed to be someplace where nobody lived. He used almost every ounce of superstrength he could spare from his flying effort to hold shut his…well, it’s not a muscle that Superman tended to give a lot of thought to. But now, it had his undivided attention. Finally he reached a spot where he could do the deed. No one around for hundreds of miles. The only thing in sight was a shooting star, up ahead.
Superman turned around, bent over, and then a BRRRAAAMMMMMPPP! sound echoed across the entire Arctic circle. It sounded like the most righteous guitar chord ever struck by a guy in a metal hair band. Just like that, all the pressure in his body, from Lois’s damned beans, exploded out of his…well look, there’s not really any polite way to say it.
Seconds after midnight on Christmas night, Superman hovered in the air near the North Pole and ripped a super fart.
If such things were written in the history books, this one would lead the way. Surely someplace, in some time, there is a being who chronicles all the greatest farts of all the ages of man and beast. If you could look in those books, there you would find Superman’s fart from that night, on Page One.
“What was that?” Lex’s henchman screamed.
“GET DOWN!!!” Lex shouted. He and his henchman threw themselves to the ground as a breeze with the force of Dorothy Gale’s tornado ripped across their exposed spot. Following that wind was the most awful smell anyone could ever remember, anywhere. It was the smell of every questionable casserole ever served at a church potluck, combined with the scent of every moldering corpse and every rotting carcass on the planet. It was the foulest-smelling thing ever, and Lex and his henchman were in the middle of it.
The super fart had one other effect: it knocked the rocket off its trajectory, sending it careening wildly through the air until it landed and detonated, about thirty feet from where Lex and his henchman stood. The explosion caused the ice on which they stood to break free, and in that moment, they stood atop an iceberg as it calved and started floating away, into the currents of the Arctic Ocean.
In the sleigh, Santa reached down and made a note on his Naughty List. Clearly, one of his elves had fed Rudolph a can of that Beef-a-rino stuff again. Just like in the Seinfeld episode. “On boys!” he shouted as he took out a can of spray deodorizer that emitted scents of pine, baking cookies, and old bookstores.
Superman, for his part, just hung there in the air, letting the sweat drip from his face. Thinking no one was nearby, he let out a Super Sigh of Super Relief. Santa heard it, though, and laughed. Superman’s cheeks turned red. “Sorry, Santa,” he said.
“Think nothing of it, Kal-el!” Santa shouted back. “And to you, a good night!”
Superman gathered his wits and flew away again, back toward Metropolis. Stupid beans! He’d have to talk with Lois about that.
Meanwhile, Lex Luthor paced back and forth on the iceberg as the henchman tried to get a cell phone signal. “How long until we get to a cell tower, Mr. Luthor?”
Lex Luthor shook his head.
And that is how Superman’s butt saved Christmas.
It’s always interesting to see what loves we carry forward that our parents gave us, and which we don’t share with them. My mother loved musicals; she grew up with the great musicals of 1950s and 1960s Hollywood (my father loved them too), and she passed that love on to me. So today we have three selections that come from musical films.
First, Bing Crosby. This is the version from the movie itself; I don’t think this is the recording that has gone on to become the greatest selling single of all time, but I could be wrong.
Now, this next one…I don’t have any idea of Mom ever saw Mame, or if she liked it if she did. Somehow it never came up. And this isn’t the film version of the song, either! I’m going with this one because, well, I like the stage version more than I do the film version. Here is Angela Lansbury.
And finally, we have this. I’ve made no secret over the years that I have very little room in my life or my heart for any version of this song beside this one, and I continue to be vexed by the lyric change that Frank Sinatra, as much as I love him, imposed on this song that has become the standard, even though for me that lyric change completely upends the meaning and emotion of the song. Enough of that, though: Mom loved Judy Garland, and that’s enough for today.
Et tu, Ken???
You may remember several months ago when I was irate that a really good player on Jeopardy! lost because he misspelled the Final Jeopardy answer by one letter?
A refresher:
Well, tonight it happened again! Only this time, they let the misspelling stand. I don’t recall the Final Jeopardy clue, but the answer as “Antony and Cleopatra”. One of the contestants spelled it Anthony and Cleopatra, though. There’s no ‘H’ there: He’s Mark Antony, not Mark Anthony. Ken Jennings actually said something like, “There’s no H in there, but we’ll give it to you anyway.”
WHAT???!!!
Why did spelling count for Ben back in May but not for some other guy tonight? Now, the answer didn’t end up mattering this time: he still came in second, so the game would not have been decided had his answer been correct or incorrect, but back then I was told that the rules are the rules! Spelling counts in Final Jeopardy! One imagines Mr. Goodman from The Big Lebowski: