A friend and I have taken to watching The Santa Clarita Diet on Netflix. If you haven’t seen the show, it is a horror/comedy/satire about a “power couple” of realtors, taken straight from the lineup of HGTV. Their high pressure shallow life is interrupted when the wife (admittedly played very poorly by Drew Barrymore) becomes violently ill during a showing of a house (a house they were already having difficulty selling) and vomits gallons of yellow liquid in every direction, collapses, and dies. As the potential buyers race from the house, her husband rushes in anguish to the side of his dead wife, and while he mourns, suddenly she sits up, feeling much better.
Better, however, is probably not exactly the right term, for they soon determine that she has no heartbeat. Though she remains her bubbly self (even more so), she is a different person with new interests and new needs…namely consuming human flesh. The hilarious social commentary ensues as the couple work to maintain their high power lifestyle while accommodating the needs of an undead consumer of her fellow humans.
In the first “kill” scene, the woman is frustrated by a sleazy competitor realtor who has just stolen a listing from her. Without thinking she grabs his hand and bites off his fingers moving on to kill and eat a significant portion of his carcass. It was equal parts gruesome and funny.
However, my reaction was not horror or laughter. Instead I texted my friend, “Remember those times when we could get close enough to people to bite their fingers off!”
I may have been in quarantine too long.
Be safe, be strong. Keep your fingers away from her mouth!
To tell the truth, I don’t remember much about it. Only two moments stay in my memory, but forty years have passed, and I still recall those two moments.
I was 21, and I was working at Brentano’s Bookstore in South Coast Plaza (maybe the best job I ever had, but that’s another story). It was a fairly busy evening. Fortunes had not yet turned on bookstores (or malls, for that matter), and the holiday season was chaotic. People would be standing outside the gate when we opened it in the morning, and we had to put on Bruckner’s 9th to get people to leave at closing.
I was walking past the jewelry counter, in retrospect it is very odd that a bookstore had a jewelry counter, but it seemed to make sense at the time. As I passed, the woman working behind the counter called me over.
“My father just called, John Lennon was shot, he’s dead.”
I remember distinctly that my first response was, “Oh, that’s nonsense. Where did he hear that?” This person had a touch of the dramatic (as we all did) and occasionally said things that did not turn out to be true. Broader than this, though, it couldn’t be true. Such an iconic, seemingly immortal figure couldn’t be gone in such a matter of fact manner. And who in their right mind would shoot John Lennon?
As I think back forty years ago, it’s surprising that there was essentially no way to discover whether this was true or not. There were no TV sets nearby, and there wasn’t even a radio in the store since we played classical records all day. It’s hard to Imagine how many things we simply had to leave unknown, how many mysteries never were solved. We worked the next few hours of the shift with no knowledge of what had happened, and no one came by who told us any more. It was Christmas and we were busy.
Until I got to my car to go home. As I turned on the engine, the radio came on and a John Lennon song was playing. I knew.
Someone asked me tonight as I was reminiscing whether John Lennon was really important to me, and I had to say no. I appreciated the Beatles and I liked some of his music, but I couldn’t claim to be a fan. But still, there was something about that death, unexpected death out of nowhere that struck me differently than other famous deaths before. I felt the utter transience of life, and that anyone (not me, because I still assumed that I was immortal) could be taken away without reason or notice.
I sent my Christmas cards today, so I thought it would be a good day to reflect on weird Victorian Christmas cards. I’ve posted several through the years, but this may be one of the best.
The card portrays an embodiment of Christmas, whether it is St. Nicholas, or just the spirit of Christmas personified, holding court amidst animals often associated with Christmas dinner. However, these animals are clothed, and appear unconcerned as they look on. Even the bottles of alcohol appear to be watching the proceedings. One can tell that they are the feasters, and not the feastee of the evening
The Christmas king appears to be knighting a piece of beef kneeling before him. One would assume that this roast is the feature player of the evening’s feast. In a few short hours, each of these creatures will be gluttonously tearing into the honored guest in order to celebrate the baby Jesus. This is the essence of the Victorian Christmas greeting, weird personifications and bizarre situations, framed with the staid greeting “A Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year.”
This crazy juxtaposition of celebration and horror would have been enough to rank it among my favorites of the genre. However, as I looked through the notes on the card, I found a caption that added another layer of fun, like the joke inside a Christmas cracker. The caption read, “Rise, Sir Loin!”
A dad joke, in the middle of a Victorian Christmas. God bless us, every one!
During the least two years, my friend Andrea and I have have played “anything you can do, I can do better,” with a couple of the blogposts. The topic for this “post-off” is Free Shipping, as reflected in the title. You can find Andera’s post on this title here
With apologies to The Rolling Stones, sometimes the universe gives you what you need, even if it isn’t what you want. When I received the topic “free shipping,” I wasn’t sure what I would do with it, and my ideas about shopping indirectly all seemed ground I had plowed before. However, last night I was given a gift that I would have written about even if I didn’t have an assigned topic.
I was going for my evening walk, one of my few daily excursions beyond the walls of my home. As I stepped outside, I saw a package at my door. I didn’t know what it was or look at it carefully. Not to be distracted, I headed out and planned to pick it up on my way back in about 15 minutes later.
But I didn’t bring it in, because when I returned IT WAS GONE.
This shouldn’t have surprised me. If one spends any time reading the news, “Porch Pirates” are so much of a thing that they even have a name. I’ve watched the scary videos of bold marauders making the rounds of the neighborhood going from door to door and enjoying the ultimate free shipping experience. I was stupid not to bring the package in, but I wasn’t going to be gone long, and I would have had to open the door again, for goodness sake!
The games the mind plays in such a moment are one of the most entertaining elements of this experience. I didn’t want to believe that something so simple as a theft that happens thousands of times a day happened to me. There must be another explanation.
First, I doubted myself. I have gone out to the porch three times this morning to look again, as if I could somehow miss a package in a 5×6 porch area. I have also searched my house, thinking that maybe I did bring it inside and just forgot (more likely than one would think). Finally, I also wondered whether I didn’t see a package at all or that I confused this package with another one at another time. As disturbing as it would be to have such mental lapses, I preferred them to the obvious explanation.
Next I started thinking up a way that the perceived reality could have a non-sinister explanation. I didn’t look at the package at all, so I didn’t see that it was addressed to me. Perhaps whoever delivered it discovered a mistake and picked it up to deliver to the rightful owner. My perceived loss was merely correction of an error and I didn’t really lose anything because the package didn’t belong to me.
My best mental leap, however, came after I accepted that the package had been taken. One of the challenges at a moment like this is to try and figure out what the package might have been. Thanks to free shipping, I order quite a few things from different vendors, some of whom have less dependable tracking methods. I have yet to discover definitively what (if anything) was delivered yesterday. And of course this assumes that the package was something I ordered and not something sent to me by someone else. In this uncertainty I thought to myself, “Maybe whoever will see that it’s something they can’t use and will bring it back.” This “honor among thieves” explanation was laughingly refuted by a friend! “That’s not how stealing works, Greg.”
Today I took down the few fall decorations I have and replaced them with Christmas regalia. This is one of so many firsts I have enjoyed in my new home, decorating for Christmas for the first time. I had hoped that I would be holding a party about this time, which obviously didn’t happen, but I decided if I am going to be locked up in this place by myself through most of December, it might as well look nice. I also baked my first batch of Christmas cookies. I don’t know how previous owners have celebrated, but for me, I feel like I brought my Christmas into the house for the first time.
It is hard to explain to someone who doesn’t celebrate (or barely celebrates) why I am so intent on decorating and cooking and creating year after year. It’s not for religious reasons, though I love the music and art connected to the Christian celebration. Whatever my own beliefs are, my Christmas commemoration is not in unity with any church. I don’t have children (or grandchildren) visiting me whom I can entertain like my grandfather and my dad did with the “magical” turning tree. And certainly this year it isn’t for friends. When I purchased this house, I had visions of a Christmas cocktail party, but that isn’t happening. And with recent stiffening of lockdown regulations, don’t think many (maybe only one) person will see these decorations beside myself.
I suppose it’s more primitive and more ancient than Christian tradition. I put up lights because it is dark and cold and lights make me feel better and more hopeful. The shortening days as the restrictions (and the toll) of the virus grow must feel like the shortening of days to primitive human who feared that things were coming to an end and only by building up the fire can belief in another spring remain.
For someone who has dithered (with various degrees of success) in identifying trends and directions of contemporary education, 2020 has been a blessing and a nightmare. All the times I have spoken about true disruptive change have found their test in greatest disruption of my lifetime, and schools have by necessity embraced (well, embraced might be a strong term, perhaps held hands with) tools of digital distribution and new models of student instruction and attendance. On the other hand, the combination of poor preparation, inadequate resources, and surrounding conditions both uncertain and terrifying have hog-tied the path of innovation. the great digital experiment has taken place (and continues to take place) in a mobile lab strapped to the back of a javelina in a stampede, in the rain, with a leaky roof.
Like every other aspect of this pandemic, various academics will be figuring this out for decades to come. However, I received a call this morning for a school that wants me to conduct a workshop examining what was learned and where we go from here on January 4, 2021! While I admire this focus on examination of data and using past experiences to inform future planning, I don’t think the javelinas have yet finished trampling the prairie. That being said, I immediately started to thinking about what the new norm….no, I can’t bring myself to say it, what the future might be and how this year will serve as a gateway to whatever is coming next. How will classroom instruction be changed forever by this experience?
Well, I suspect at least initially, it won’t. There is a collective perception in the minds of teachers, parents, and students that online instruction and blended learning models are a failure. There won’t be much remembrance of the fact that teachers were poorly prepared (partially because there has been a resistance to these models for some time) or that students were in high stress conditions or even that parent frustration was in part caused by having to watch kids while they were learning to work remotely. No, this was a failure and the best thing will be for kids to be back in “traditional” school, and I suspect the more traditional the better. When I talk to schools about marketing for 20-21, I’ve been telling them that this is not the year to promote new programs, because all most parents want to hear is that education is back to what they remember. Pandemic has put its stink on distance learning, and it won’t wear off overnight.
However, as much as we might cling to the comfortable, it is also a inveterate law of human nature that we don’t put innovation back in a box. Even though many of the methods and distribution systems were clunky, as distribution systems they did work. I’ve been interested in the number of schools that have installed cameras in classrooms to facilitate distance learning for some or all of the students. It’s hard for me to imagine that these cameras are going to go fallow after “regular” school resumes. Like a Chekhovian gun on the wall, if you put a camera in a classroom at the beginning of the semester, it will be used by Christmas break.
There are several modest ideas for integration of this new ability into traditional school. An obvious use might be to allow students with long term (or even short term) illnesses to continue to participate in class from home. Some of this implementation was already taking place in pockets using jobbed together systems. How much easier it will be when a teacher only has to flip a switch. The camera could also be used by administrators and mentors to observe classes without the disruption of being in the classroom. I realize that there are some challenging aspects to this, and I’m not suggesting spying, but there are positive opportunities here. Or, much to students’ disappointment, maybe this means the end of traditional snow days. teachers can teach and students can learn from home on days when the roads are covered with snow (a month ago I learned about a public school in Gallup that was 100% distance learning and yet they still has a snow day! Don’t know what to make of that). Theses are small incremental changes that are now possible to make education better for individual students or all the students.
I believe over time some schools will embrace more radical approaches to this. The introduction of friction free distance learning, especially as it improves over time, presents possibilities for enrollment of different tracks of students. Though the majority of students will attend traditional day school, some will break from this pattern from necessity or desire. A school might enroll students who come to campus full time, part time, or no time. Such a system will also flex the bounds of distance, and students from other parts of the city, state, country, or world can enroll in a high quality school. This is a simplistic explanation, and I’ve yet to explore many of the challenges and opportunities. There a million questions of effectiveness and equity. However, once technology is available, it is highly unlikely that creative people (to put the best face on it, greedy people will also be at the front of the line) won’t find a way to use it. Parents in turn , particularly parents with means, will in time refuse to settle for the limited location when infinity is available online.
This is one part of a speculation on one aspect of what has transpired during the past year. Similar attention will be given to all parts of this great experiment in the midst of a Javelina stampede.
I’m a sucker for the sentimental, and goodness knows this time of year is coated in schmaltz. One of the things I have been recently looking forward to every year if the John Lewis and Associates Christmas commercial. This British department store, partnered with the grocery store Waitrose, makes a yearly Christmas commercial that one could argue is as much a work of art as a dozen Nutcrackers.
I first discovered these commercials in 2018, when there was a spectacular ad commemorating the announced retirement of Elton John. The mini drama started with Sir Elton sitting at his piano as he begins to play “Your Song.” For the next two and half minutes, the commercial traces him back through the years singing the song with amazing recreations of key moments of his life, ending up at the Christmas morning when as a child he first received the same piano. In the final scene, the child touches the keys for the first time and the picture reverts backs to present day as the mature singer closes the keyboard, as if for the last time. After seeing this ad, I realized that is it possible of commercials to be works of art that transcend their underlying purpose. You can find this commercial here.
Last year’s offering featured a little girl and her friendly dragon who is continually causing trouble with his unbridled enthusiasm, manifesting itself in bursts of flame. These misguided efforts at friendship cause the dragon to be shunned by the entire town, and it is only through the continued friendship of the little girl that he finds a place and acceptance. I must admit that this one did not move me in the same way, though I suspect I identify with a retiring senior more than a children’s fable. However, the level of animation and beauty of the cinematography outdid anything made by Kentucky Fried Chicken. You can find that one here
This year’s commercial is a true work of animation genius. The story consists of a group of linked incidents of people and animals reaching out to each other in acts of kindness and love (an appropriate theme for the year we have just had). The true magic of the commercial, however, is that with every act of kindness, the style of animation changes. I count six shifts within a two minute commercial, though there might be some subtle changes that I missed. While the message is simple, the importance of generosity and love, tying the commercial message to traditional heartstrings at this untraditional time, the beauty and detail of the artistry transcends the cloying manipulation.
Is it ok to admire a commercial of a large corporation designed to encourage the ruthless commerce of the season? I don’t know. However, I think this year that we have to give ourselves an break and take enjoyment where we find it. As Jackson Browne says in his own challenging Christmas song “The Rebel Jesus!” “In a life of hardship and of earthly toil, There’s a need for anything that frees us.” So watch the videos, and if you enjoy them, well, there’s that,
I’ve always said that these posts every year serve as a “digital Advent calendar,” counting down the days before Christmas. Counting down to an anticipated result is somehow ingrained into all of us. We light the Advent candles to mark the passing days before Christmas, as the time grows shorter as the candles do. A week after Christmas we count down to midnight on New Year’s Eve, sending away the old and greeting the new. We count down the days toward birthdays and anniversaries, vacations and milestones, and we count down the years until adulthood, until middle age, until retirement. Life may always move forward, but we also experience it as a shrinking number of units until the next big thing.
This year we are experiencing a countdown that, with all due respect, dwarfs Christmas, and Santa, and all things Yule. Today we wait, counting the days for an effective vaccine to reduce and ultimately rid our world of this scourge and bring us back in touch with one another. Most believe that this relief is coming, but unlike waiting for the predictable joys of Christmas, this is a countdown fraught with uncertainty and fear that hope can barely overshadow.
One of the great uncertainties of this new advent is time. Though the favorable reports on vaccines are encouraging, and we are told that progress is “ahead of schedule,” no one is saying with any authority when this “soon” may be. Obviously distribution won’t happen in 2020 (why would we expect something so good in this cursed year?) but when in 2021 remains a mystery. The problem with a countdown to a moving point is that there can be no relaxing into the monotony of the wait. Advent is a reassuring time because twenty-three days before Christmas is always twenty-three days. There is no sudden shift when we discover that Christmas will be another week, another month, not this year. We are waiting for a good day, but few dare to suggest when it will be. So our wait is indeterminate and therefore edgy. I wonder if people would be more likely to adhere to protocols if the vaccine date were concrete. Most would gladly “sacrifice” a few weeks for a promised ending, but we started giving up a few weeks nine month ago, and our advent calendar keeps having days stapled on to the bottom.
Not only is the duration of the wait uncertain, the outcome of the journey is equally tenuous. We live recognizing that nothing is guaranteed, but we trust that Christmas Day will come with its accompanying joys and insanity. However, the vaccine and its accompanying relief is far from guaranteed. The coming savior may not prove as effective as hoped. The distribution patterns may not truly address the need. There may be unexpected side effects. Now, I must be very clear. I absolutely support vaccine therapy. I will be vaccinated on the first day I am able, but blind optimism makes no more sense than irrational fear.
Finally there is the fear of the cost of the passing days. Most of us believe that the vaccines will bring some relief, but what is the bill to be paid in the meantime? As numbers of cases and deaths climb, one can’t help but wonder who will not make it though this ghastly calendar. What Moseses will see, but not make it to the promised land? What will be the economic costs, and in what ways will we and our world not recover from ills that no vaccine can cure?
It’s a different type of calendar, the COVID calendar, but like with Advent we have no choice but to wait with uncertainty, but with expectation and hope.
Well, this is an inauspicious start. Here is is 8:00 on December 1, and suddenly I remembered, “You’ve got a blog post to write!”
For, my friends, it’s that time again. For those who followed the quarantine trail of posts earlier this year (my goal was to write every day of the quarantine, a pledge that sounded so easy when it felt that it would last a couple of weeks, and of course I cried ‘Uncle’ after 50 days), this period between now and Christmas is my traditional blogging slog of 24 posts, each written on the day with no prior planning, reacting only to the thoughts of the day.
As usual, I started this year by looking over previous years’ posts, and I was surprised to find that this year marks the tenth year that I’ve done this. This is a good lesson that you should never do something more than once, because then you are stuck with it for life. Looking through the years of posts (240 if you count them) is like a yearbook of a very senior senior, each year feeling like it was somehow different from any of the years before.
This year is different, though, more different than any of us could have imagined when I started last December 1. Appropriately, I think that the chaos of the broader world though 2020 mirrors a lot of what has gone on with me. It’s a different world, a different country, and I’m a different person, happier in some ways, sadder in others, definitely not wiser.
As usual there will be no theme to the posts this year. I suspect there will be weird Christmas traditions (if I can find any that I haven’t talked about already), Victorian Christmas cards, Christmas carols, and A Christmas Carol…the same stuff. But I’m not the same person I was a year ago. There are new people in my life, and I’ve grown closer to the old people. I have been at my best and at my very worst. I’m a year further in life and I’m closer to death, older, but definitely no wiser (or have I said that?)
So I thank you for walking this road one more time with me. I can’t promise brilliance, but I can promise you me every jingle jangle day.
One of the benefits of having a Spotify account is that I receive recommendation lists based on songs I play revert Monday and Friday. I enjoy these and have often discovered new artists and new songs. In the last few weeks, however, I have discovered a new trend, the COVID/quarantine anthem. Artists are recording songs about social distancing and staying at home. Here are a few examples:
So, I’m sending you this message
With a heavy heart to say
“I miss you, but I can’t be there today
I love you, and that’s why I’m gonna stay away
Billy Bragg “I Can’t Be There Today”
Remember it’s okay to stop
To look around and appreciate what you’ve got
Take a breath, take a breath
You can stop, and still be unstoppable
You can’t control the past or what lies ahead
So take the chance to start living in this moment instead
Don’t be scared, don’t be scared
You can stop, and still be unstoppable
You’re unstoppable
Stiff and Kitsch & James Taylor “Unstoppable”
Two very different styles and artists, but both songs talking directly or in code about quarantine restrictions and the bizarre world in which we have been living for the past two and a half months. Each week a few more appear. Some are overtly fund-raising efforts, others don’t show any connection. Some are individual artists, others are “We Are the World” type compilations. Some are nice, others are dreadful.
I think that this phenomenon is really interesting and illustrates much of the confusion of these days. The quarantine is not a blip, and there will be a sense of before and after that artists will need to acknowledge. One of my habits in reading is to watch for references to 9/11 in novels that aren’t about the incident itself. However, one cannot write about characters in that time without mentioning this event that affected everyone in the United States and much of the world. How will artists talk about this time?
These early efforts are true ephemera, they are of their time and will have little lasting value after this time has past. I can’t see the audience at a concert in a year or two clamoring for singers to trot out their COVID material, at least not the songs I have seen so far. To call them novelty songs is perhaps a bit harsh, but they won’t be entering the Great American Songbook any time soon.
Another characteristic of the songs I have seen so far is that they are message heavy and not particularly philosophical. Songs talk about the difficulty of being apart, but the challenge is undermined by the message to stay at home for the good of all. In this area these songs feel a lot like songs done by many of the stars of the day during the First and Second World War encouraging people to buy War Bonds. Philosophy and true reflection is traded for salesmanship.
Finally, there is a tentativeness to the lyrics to match the uncertainty of the times. No one knows how long these current conditions will remain (by the looks of Orange County, not much longer). Even more frightening, no one knows whether the efforts that have been made will be effective, as the progress of the disease remains a mystery. So there is hope that following quarantine guidelines will save us, but the costs have yet to be tallied, and the true narrative of this time is yet to be written.
I suspect that when there is some distance between the present and whatever the future may be that there will be more significant artistic works written about this time than, “There’s a war we’re fighting. It’s breaking all over hearts, and that’s the reason why we have to stay six feet apart.” (“Stay at Home, Stay Alive”). Rereading some of my earlier posts from this time I have been embarrassed by how many things I got wrong while writing in the storm. But writing while in a hurricane, probably the best that any artist can do is to sing “Hold on.”
One of the benefits of having a Spotify account is that I receive recommendation lists based on songs I play revert Monday and Friday. I enjoy these and have often discovered new artists and new songs. In the last few weeks, however, I have discovered a new trend, the COVID/quarantine anthem. Artists are recording songs about social distancing and staying at home. Here are a few examples: