Author: Larry Jones

I love Christmas.

I really do: the cold weather, the religious and pre-religious traditions, the Christmas trees, the lights on the houses, the early darkness each day, the way everyone seems a little friendlier and mellower (possibly related to the heavy drinking), and most of all, the music.

Hey, I know Jesus wasn’t born on December 25th, that somehow the early Christians managed to grab this ancient pagan celebration and make it their own. A magnificent scam, if you ask me, and I don’t hold it against them. It doesn’t take away from the fun and beauty of the music.

As usual, this year I am listening to a radio station here in L.A. (103.5 KOST-FM) that plays nothing but Christmas music 24 hours a day from Thanksgiving to Christmas Day, and I’ve also made my own compilation CD of Christmas music. The two pastimes have caused me to think about the type of Christmas music that I like, and the kind that makes me puke. Somewhat to my surprise, I find that I am a conservative Christmas music lover. Basically, I like the older, more traditional stuff — that which I’ve been hearing since I was about five years old. There are exceptions, naturally, and those are on my list below.

What makes me puke? Well, first of all, novelty songs. Please spare me “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer,” “Christmas At Ground Zero,” and the Mother of All Christmas Novelty Songs, “All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth,” sung by that obnoxious little shit back in the 1950’s — sorry, I can’t remember his name, but all of his “S’s” were whistled. Christmas is too beautiful and special to be despoiled by this kind of crap.

High on the “Makes Me Puke” list would also be Burl Ives’ “Holly Jolly Christmas,” with it’s arbitrary refrain and dumbass two-four pickin’ (and, presumably, idiotic grinnin’). I will not kiss her once for you, Burl. Also kind of pukey: Hyper-religious Christmas songs, especially if sung in Latin, like “Adeste Fidelis.” Come on, Catholics — Saturnalia is for everyone!

Here’s my list of Christmas Songs That Don’t Make Me Puke, in no particular order:

• Silent Night – Almost any version. I like the story of how this song came about. A priest in a parish too poor to afford the usual magnificent church organ wrote it and played it on his guitar, a shocking act of insolence for his day.
• The Christmas Song – Mel Torme wrote it, and sang it serviceably well, but the knockout version is by the honey-voiced Nat King Cole. Suh-weet!
• Baby, It’s Cold Outside – What says Christmas more than Dean Martin hustling the object of his late-night desire to stay with him just a little longer? Don’t we all want to keep someone warm on these cold December nights?
• The Little Drummer Boy – This instant classic by The Harry Simeone Chorale reminds us that we needn’t give gifts of gold and silver to be appreciated. Even the ox and lamb kept time.
• Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas – Judy Garland’s plaintive original rendering of this song from the 1944 movie “Meet Me In St. Louis” expresses all the heartbreak of all the unmet expectations of all my over-anticipated Christmases past.
• All I Want For Christmas Is You – Mariah Carey out-Spectors Phil on this BIG production number. It’s pure pop fluff, and it might not stay on the list for long, but Mariah manages to avoid her charcteristic note-torturing vocal style on this one, and she gets me boppin’ when I hear it these days.
• I’ll Be Home For Christmas – Lots of great recordings of this song of sweet longing, from Bing Crosby’s understated version to The Beach Boys’ thousand-part near-a capella rendition.
• Please Come Home For Christmas – The Eagles and Aaron Neville are the rock and soul opposite sides of this burnished Christmas coin, which itself is the flip side of “I’ll Be Home For Christmas.” How we pine for our missing loved ones at Christmas!
• White Christmas – The all-time Christmas classic. Bing Crosby, “…just like the ones I used to know.” Nuff said.
• Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree – Brenda Lee. This one and “Jingle Bell Rock” are the earliest rock Christmas songs I can think of, and they made it OK for generations of rockers to try their hands at a new holiday sound track. Thanks, Brenda (and Bobby Helms)!
• Jingle Bell Rock – Bobby Helms. See “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree,” above.
• Oh Holy Night – Al Green’s soaring, soulful vocal makes the sacred secular, and gives me chills. Testify, brother!
• Winter Wonderland – The song manages to be a Christmas song while making no reference to Christmas, and The Eurythmics’ Annie Lennox gives perhaps the single most original and powerful reinterpretation of any holiday tune.
• Sleigh Ride – The Carpenters. Holiday frivolity is the perfect theme for these lightweights, and almost any tune from their 1978 “Christmas Portrait” LP would do. I choose this one because, in addition to Karen’s warm and gorgeous voice you also get to hear some rare vocalizing (on the bridge) by her creepy brother Richard. (“It’ll be the perfect ending to a PER-fect day!”). You just know he told her she was too fat.
• There’s No Place Like Home For The Holidays – I remember the Kraft Music Hall Christmas specials on TV in the early 1960’s. Black and white, prime time evidence that Christmas really was just around the corner. I was in love with half of the June Taylor dancers, and Perry Como could have been singing any old song while they were on screen.
• Blue Christmas – By The King, of course. We return one last time to the theme of loss and loneliness for the holidays. Don’t worry, Elvis – I’ll meet you at Martini’s for some holiday cheer, OK?

I feel a lot better now, as it looks like there are actually quite a few Christmas Songs That Don’t Make Me Puke. I know I’ve left out some really important ones, but I think I should stop now before I include every holiday tune ever written. As I said, I love me some Christmas music.

You must have some favorites. This is the time of year to give up being too hip, too aloof, too cool and Above It All. Feel free to break down, join in and get sappy with me.

As always, every one of you warms my heart at Christmas.

I don’t pretend to understand The Way of The Persimmon.

In years past our little tree in the back yard has produced voluminous harvests of plump, delicious orange persimmons, starting in late October, more than we could eat, more than we could give away, enough to feed all the lazy Southern California birds in our neighborhood, who don’t actually fly south for the winter, because they already are south, but who gorge themselves on nature’s bounty anyway, as if planning a long flight to a warmer clime.

I’ve never known exactly how to prune a persimmon tree, but for years I’ve had the nagging felling that I should Do Something for the tree, as she does so much for us. So last year, after all the persimmons were gone, after all the leaves had changed to red and gold and fallen off and been raked and hauled away and nothing was left but the bare, forlorn branches, and dormancy had set in, I went out there with a couple of primitive, inadequate city-slicker tools and did the best I could, cutting off the “shooters” and shaping the branches the way a city boy imagined it should be done.

When I was finished and got off the ladder and stepped back to evaluate my work I was horrified with what I had done. I was sure I had cut too much, that I had somehow injured her. Various helpful friends and family assured me over the ensuing months that I had done a good job, that she probably liked the cutback, the excess of those little twigs was really a drain on her reproductive efforts, etc.

I wasn’t convinced until spring, when she started to get green again. In short order she was as lush and luxuriant as ever, sprouting a million shiny bright green leaves and looking as chipper as she did ten years ago when we first met her. Whew!

The crop this year is smaller than usual, but the fruit is, if such a thing is possible, even tastier than last year — I’m battling the piggy birds for every last persimmon, and I’m realizing that I should have figured out a way to lop off the highest branches when I was pruning last winter, because there are some pretty damned choice persimmons up there. I can see ’em, but they are too high to reach and the branches are still too new and flimsy for me to climb up there. The birds, outraged when they see me start to climb the tree, their tree, sneer and laugh derisively once they realize that I can’t touch them (or the persimmons) way up high.

We thought there wouldn’t be enough fruit this year to do any baking. Our friends have come to expect gifts of persimmons at this time of year, and with the diminished crop we were resigned to having a month or so of fruit-eating frenzy (and sharing), but no persimmon bread.

At first we made persimmon bread only because there were a hundred mushy persimmons left over after we had given away all we could unload and eaten all we could hold and we lived and still do by our depression-era parents’ dictum Don’t waste food. But there is not a lot of sweet-eating at revision99 World Headquarters, and after the first time we baked with persimmons (and copious amounts of pure white sugar) I was determined never to miss another opportunity. So it is with considerable relief that I report now that there will be persimmon bread again this year!

I have waxed as poetically as I am capable of on this subject here and here, so I won’t bother you with a rehash. If you love me you will go back and read those posts and mourn with me the loss of creativity I’ve undergone in the past few years. But yesterday I got a new comment on a persimmon post from last winter, from “rnmama” of Florida, who says

I’ve looked everywhere for the recipe, can you please advise how to get it? My sister/brother-n-law have the exact same story of their “American Persimmon”; the downside is that neither of them eat Persimmon-they inherited the tree when they bought the house, so we all go over and hoard the tree in Nov/Dec. I now am trying to grow a plant of our own from their seeds; we’re in FL so it shouldn’t be hard, right?

I’m sorry, rnmama, if you’re still reading. How rude of me not to post the recipe! I found it years ago online, and I’m sure you could do the same, since you are computer-literate enough to find my year-old post about this, but since you asked, please let me share it now:

Ingredients

*Â Â Â 2 cups flour, sifted (I, and kStyle, heartily recommend King Arthur Flour)
*Â Â Â 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
*Â Â Â 2 teaspoons baking soda
*   ½ teaspoon salt
*   1 ¼ cups sugar
*   ½ cup raisins
*   ½ cup chopped nuts (I use pecans or walnuts, but not both. And the more the merrier.)
*Â Â Â 2 eggs
*   ¾ cup oil
*Â Â Â 2 cups pureed ripe persimmon pulp (Don’t try this with firm, ripe fruit. Wait until the persimmons are pretty soft before you start. I’ve done this with a food processor and with a blender. Works either way.)
*Â Â Â 1 teaspoon lemon juice (Get a real lemon and squeeze it. No plastic lemons!)

Procedure

Note: You’re going to need a couple of big mixing bowls. If you never bake, like me, you’ll be scrambling in the middle of this project to find a second one. If you’re a novice, as I am, read the recipe before you start, and equip yourself as need be. Also, you will not be happy with just two loaves. Just sayin’.

Combine flour, cinnamon, baking soda, salt and sugar. Stir in raisins and nuts. Set aside.

Beat Eggs with oil. Add persimmon pulp and lemon juice. Add flour mixture. Mix until just blended.

Turn into 2 greased 8×4-inch loaf pans and bake at 350 degrees (325 degrees for glass pans) 1 hour* or until wood pick inserted in center comes out clean.

*NOTE: Check at 42 minutes! And use your head. Too moist is better than burned, okay?

Makes 2 loaves, 8 servings each. Bread will not have high volume. (This means it will not swell up like regular bread. It’s more like cake. Think of it that way.)

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If you don’t have any mushy persimmons or a tree, stop by the house around Christmas. As always, my dear bloggin’ buddies, my heart beats only for you.

I chopped all the meat off the Thanksgiving turkey on Saturday.

I always end up with this job, and I have to admit that once I get going on it, it’s kind of enjoyable. It has to be done anyway: Only rarely have I seen an entire turkey consumed down to the skeleton in a single meal, and this means that the carcass has to go into the refrigerator, and each time you want a turkey sandwich you have to get it out and hack away at it for a while, then put it back.

There’s just no efficient way to store a turkey in a refrigerator, what with the odd shape of the platter and the bulges here and there, and each time you make a sandwich it gets harder to find the meat, and you are tempted to take the whole mess and chuck it into the garbage can, but you hate to waste anything in these hard economic times, so eventually the time comes when you have to strip all the edible stuff from the bones, put it in some kind of tidy airtight container and discard the fat, the skin, the gristle and the sad, sad bones.

And so I did.

I started out with a carving knife, which I tried to hone to a razor’s edge but which nonetheless cut sort of like a butter knife. It was good enough for the larger pieces of meat that I could see, but soon it was too big and unwieldy to be of much use. There’s a lot of meat on a turkey that is not immediately apparent to the naked eye.

Tossing the knife in the sink, I flipped the bird over and began clawing at it with my bare hands. This part of the task is the most satisfying, in a primal sort of way. For about ten minutes it was just me and the turkey, a man and his prey, as I tore off the dimpled skin, exposing pockets of flesh and adding to my tasty Tupperware stash. At first, with the knife, I salvaged some pretty good sandwich-style slabs of white meat. As I delved deeper I got a lot of turkey soup kind of stuff, or maybe turkey a la king pieces, those things that are too small and would just fall right out of a sandwich.

I ate a lot of turkey during this, but I still ended up with a good-sized pile of Just the Good Stuff. And then, in the spirit of sharing and giving thanks, both Molly the Cat and Tigger, who had watched the whole process like junkies waiting for their man, each got their own special turkey platter.

Happy Thanksgiving, cool cats.

Here we all are so many years down the road,

all those burned up dreams and daydreams and nightmares past my blurred windows, pale faces entreating us. What was behind that door? I never tried the knob, did you? We live in Dallas and Las Vegas and Seattle and Minneapolis, but mostly in the South because it’s easier on the bones and the sinuses. We’ve been so young so long, so smug we think it’s the Natural Order and we haven’t noticed how everything has changed. That old sport coat, the grey and black checkered one that was too big when I got it for a high school dance — my first sport coat not counting the blue blazer for First Communion, and my first dance or was it the last? I went with my mother and Leon to pick it out at Robert Hall on the traffic circle. That coat still fits, or I should say it fits now for the first time. I must have looked stupid in it. Thank you, Irene, for not laughing. You didn’t think I was as hip as I thought I was, but you let me believe it, and that got me through high school. It wasn’t until years later, when you were fucking your professor in Italy that I saw myself as I really looked in that jacket, stumbling through the clumsy dance steps my friend John taught me in the days before that dance, the magical dance, where I learned my place. I must have known it somewhere deep inside even then, but how Youth blinds us! Now here we all are, at our jobs, with our kids, on our vacations, in our Chinese shoes and our clothes from Target and Nordstrom and Macy’s, all of it fitting pretty good, no more getting things a little big to allow for growth spurts, and most of us still think we are pretty hip, pretty cool. We drop obscure references to the Easybeats and the dbs as if anybody cares, and some of us are still wearing that jacket, only now it actually fits for real, so Mom was right, I did grow into it, and I think I look pretty sharp just like I thought back then. It fits good enough I could wear it to my funeral.

I’ve been posting in this space for four years now.

Sometime last month was the anniversary. I meant to make a big deal of it, but, like all the other years, I forgot. I suppose it’s actually not such a big deal, anyway.

I must be a lonely guy, to do this blogging thing. I mean, I don’t have a lot to say of great import, and I can’t scoop the real news organizations or even the Big Blogs, so in the end the whole endeavor is inconsequential, and what the heck am I doing? I started out just hoping to hook up — virtually — with people I didn’t already know. That part has worked out pretty well, and I’m grateful to the Precious Few who are my bloggin’ buddies. I read your blogs more than I write my own. I know you think I don’t, because your hit trackers aren’t tracking me, but that’s because I read your RSS feeds instead of logging on to your actual blogs. That way I get all of you in the same place, and it’s more like a party.

When I started, it was just weeks before the 2004 presidential election. Holy shit, did that turn out badly! I thought the aberration of George Bush in the White House would end that year, now that people had a chance to see what a dimwit he is. I won’t comment here on the technical validity of that election, but because of what transpired, the life of revision99 closely tracks Bush’s second term.

Thank God that’s almost over now, and let’s hope I’ll be able to continue writing here without paying so much attention to politics (or politix, as it’s categorized in my sidebar).

I think of a lot of things I’d like to write about here, but I can’t seem to get up the energy to do it. If you could all just come and sit in my kitchen I could tell you my thoughts as they occur, without having to get them organized and spell everything correctly. I could also interrupt you when you object to some faulty logic in my rant. That way I wouldn’t have to do any fact checking before I post. Let me know when you want to stop by, and who takes cream or sugar.

Seriously, I want to post less political stuff and more personal stuff, and I want to try to express true, honest thoughts, the better to look back some day and see what I was thinking when I was a young impetuous blogger. I’ll have to walk a careful line, because I know there are some readers who know me in meatspace, and I don’t want to alarm or offend anyone. I probably should have remained totally anonymous right from the start, but I guess it’s too late for that now.

Unless I start a new, totally anonymous blog someplace else. That would free me to be more honest about things, but at the cost of losing all my current bloggin’ buddies. Let me think about that.

I guess the thing that has depressed me the most about my blog has been the gradual realization that I’m not much of a writer. Seriously, there are such good writers out there, unpublished bloggers who are smart, inventive, funny, touching, insightful and compelling. You expect that level of professionalism in a book or a magazine, because there are editors and because the writers are getting paid to do a good job. But it still boggles me how many really great writers there are “out there,” just tossing off post after post after dynamite post, while I struggle just to make sense. I want so much to be good like that, but I’m just not.

I have thought about what I might be really good at, and I believe I can say with some assurance that I am great at driving on the Los Angeles freeway system. This may seem like a small thing to others, but I’m quite proud of it. I rarely bump into anyone, and I am never panicked into getting off at the wrong exit, or getting on in the wrong direction. In the 1960’s, back before Steve Allen became a pompous stuffed shirt, which was a few years before he died, he used to take questions from his studio audience. One tourist asked him what you should do if you miss your exit from a Los Angeles freeway, and without missing a beat his deadpan answer was “Find a girl, get married and settle down, because you’ll never get back to where you were going.”

He was right, and that is totally not me, because I got these freeways wired.