All About Christmas

I love Christmas, all of Christmas, even the consumer bits like crowded malls. Not that I go to the crowded malls very often, but when I go during Christmas, I let myself enjoy the experience--no "I'll just be a minute" thinking; you have to let yourself be pummeled by other shoppers; you have to be prepared to wait in lines for twenty minutes; you have to get used to feeling overheated and sweaty. It's all part of the experience.

The only Christmas experience I can't say I like is getting stuck overnight in an airport, which happened to me once. There was really nothing redemptive about the experience. It just stank. But otherwise, I really, really like Christmas.

So below is a list of Christmas books/movies/traditions for your perusal:

1. The Bishop's Wife with Cary Grant (Movie)

The movie, which is practically plotless, is about an angel who comes down and goes ice-skating with an (Episcopalian) Bishop's wife, which somehow ends up convincing the Bishop that he should concentrate on connecting with his flock instead of building his big cathedral.

Best moment in the film: Cary Grant, named Dudley, sits down with the Bishop and his wife at the dinner table. The Bishop's favorite dog gets up and moves from beside the Bishop's chair to beside Dudley's chair. The Bishop looks nonplussed, and Dudley grins at him. Cary Grant is such a goofball that Dudley's grin, far from looking angel-like, is more of the "devil-may-care/boy, aren't we having fun!" variety. And he just keeps grinning. It's very funny.

2. "Journey of the Magi" by T.S. Eliot (Poem)

I know T.S. Eliot is considered terribly politically incorrect these days, but he was a good poet. "Journey" is told from the point of view of one of the magi; it's a sad poem about the death of an age: a unique perspective.

3. Miracle and Other Christmas Stories by Connie Willis

Not one of her best short story collections, but fun anyway. She makes gentle mockery of things like It's a Wonderful Life and the Christmas card obsession. One story is about a woman realizing that people are being taken over by aliens; she figures it out because they've started being nice to each other during the holiday season--at the post office and the airport, etc. The best story is the last, "Epiphany" which is about the Second Coming of Christ and how all the imagery in Revelations, instead of referring to some cataclysmic event, refers to a Carnival. The Christ figure is the guy who drives the Carnival truck. (See below.)

Connie Willis has her own list at the end of Miracle. It includes, naturally, the Christmas story as it appears in the New Testament and, furtherly naturally, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson.

4. Fireside Book of Christmas Stories (Book)

I used to read from this all the time growing up. After I got older, I would get it out of the library every year until my mother got me my own copy through Amazon. My favorites are "The Pasteboard Star" and "The Husband of Mary." The latter is nice because Joseph doesn't get a lot of press, and he must have been a pretty cool guy.

5. Buffy (TV show)

Specifically "Amends" when Angel is saved from suicide by unprecedented snow in Sunnydale. Whedon willingly took on issues like sin and redemption--the natural outcome, I suppose, of creating a (sort of) consistent mythology. I think this creation of mythology may be one attraction fantasy/sci-fi holds for viewers/readers--the genre isn't afraid to tackle Joseph Campbell-like/religious ideas that, otherwise, get cloaked in sentimentality, angst or glib phrases. Touched By An Angel, for instance, was far less spiritual than either X-Files or Buffy.

6. Holmes for the Holidays (Book)

A collection of Sherlock Holmes stories written by admirers, not Arthur Conan Doyle. However, Doyle did write "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," a Christmas story, which justifies take-off Holmes Christmas stories, if such justification is necessary. My favorite from Holmes for the Holidays is "A Scandal in Winter" by Gillian Linscott. It is fantastic. It is not told from Dr. Watson's point of view, yet it captures Holmes perfectly.

7. Speaking of mysteries . . . (Books)

Tied Up in Tinsel by Ngaio Marsh
Hercules Poirot's Christmas by Agatha Christie
The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers (which actually begins at New Years)

8. Church Mice at Christmas by Graham Oakley (Book)

Not all in print anymore but The Church Mice series are incredibly funny picture books--one of those series where the illustrations coupled with the dry, tongue-in-cheek text provide a great deal of between the lines humor.

9. The Little Princess (Movie)

No! Not the Shirley Temple version (gag gag) but the BBC version which is now impossible to track down. It isn't really a Christmas movie, but the second half starts at Christmas time. There's some great scenes with the family next door, including discussions of going to the pantomime, as well as some very ironic scenes showing the disparity between the "Christian" values of Miss Minchin and the way she treats her staff.

10. Last but not least, some traditions from our family--

Weird fruit from California plus coffee table books.

Sweet cereal for Christmas (and only at Christmas).

Santa and his village set that had been played with so much all the reindeer had two or three legs. It was Santa and his specially challenged reindeer!

Star Wars' presents two years in a row, including a lightsaber that didn't look anything like a "real" lightsaber: I must have thought I could actually request and get a heavy metal object that produced a laser that slashed through people's bodies. Kids are very odd. Recently, I saw a lightsaber at Border's that actually looked more like the "real" thing. I even considered buying it but decided that shelling out $100 for sentimental reasons is not altogether a smart idea.

The Sears catalog--and I've just dated myself.

Woolworths crèche.

Weeble-wobbles & the parachute men in our stockings.

The mechanic peered over [Mel's] shoulder. "Oh, an ad for that crazy carnival," he said. "Yeah, I got a sign for it in the window."

A sign. "For behold, I give you a sign." And the sign was just was it said, a sign. Like the Siamese twins. Like the peace sign on the back of the kid's hand. "For unto us a son is given, and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Prince of Peace." On the kid's scarred hand.

It got very dark. They continued west, through Glorieta and Gilead and Beulah Center, searching for multicolored lights glimmering in a cold field, a spinning Ferris wheel and the smell of cotton candy, listening for the screams of the roller coaster and the music of a merry-go-round.

And the star went before them.

--Connie Willis

CATEGORY: FARES

Thoughts of Kate Rewind

I don't know if anyone remembers the (short-lived) show Century City, but here's what I wrote about it at the time:

I watched Century City this week, and it's pretty bad.

As in bleeech.

I usually stay away from law firm shows, mostly because I find them boring as in "this is less interesting than my job." [At the time I wrote this review, I was working at a law firm as a legal secretary.] Law firm shows are basically soap operas with court room scenes.

The exceptions have been Law & Order and The Guardian, the latter mostly because why pass up an opportunity to watch Simon Baker do anything? but The Guardian went soap two seasons ago, and I gave it up. [The Guardian is now off the air; I really did like it for its first couple of seasons; Dabney Coleman played the father--he also played the father in the Tom Hanks' movie You've Got Mail--and I thought the father-son dynamic was well-played. The downside was that the father-son dynamic was basically two emotionally stunted men trying to relate to each other, which meant lots of dead-end conversations, which I found amusing--rather like watching lots and lots of Spock & Sarek--but apparently, the powers-that-be decided the relationship needed more DRAMA. That's when the show went soap.]

[Back to Century City.]

However, the idea of Century City is so very cool, I thought I'd give it a try. It's set about sixty years in the future, and the legal debates are over things like human clones, etc. etc. Very cool and moreover, an interesting juxtaposition between sci-fi and contemporary culture, since sixty years isn't that long but long enough.

It was possibly the dumbest show I've seen on TV in a long time, and yes, I am including My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé (which had some interesting sidelights on human nature). Century City was mind-numbing in its stupidity. The "hero"-—the brash, young lawyer who is going to save the world—-was so annoying, I wanted to dropkick him through the plate glass window, and if it had been an Angel episode, he would have been. It makes me appreciate that however bad the shows I like get, there's bad and then there's REALLY bad.

The brash, young lawyer ends the trial sequence with this big, emotional argument that is completely groundless legally and instead of, well, dropkicking him through the court room's plate glass window, the judge lets him go on and on and on at the jury. His argument? It’s okay to break the law in this one case because it's, you know, really, really, really important.

So much for the law. I'd like to see my lawyer try that one in court: "Yes, he smashed into her car, resulting in permanent bodily impairment of 75%, but in this case, he really, really, really didn't mean it, so you should let him off."

They also used up something like fifteen of their ideas in one episode.

It's a failure waiting to be dropkicked into TVland's oblivion bag. [And it was!]

Unless this is par for the course on legal-eagle shows, and I just missed it up until now. If so, they're hideous! Ban them all!

[And, regarding my final statement, I don't appear to be wrong. Crime shows in general seem to do okay, but legal shows have a hard time treading the line between Boston Legal-what-do-we-care-we're-just-having-fun-besides-where-else-would-ex-Star-Trek-actors-go?-dom and accuracy. Perhaps because real law is kind of tedious and kind of dull and kind of mind-numbing and kind of goes on for hours and hours before anything remotely fascinating happens. This is also true of forensics, but, as the one CSI episode points out, you can always cut the time it takes to do a lab test to make it look more exciting. The end result IS still accurate. But if you try to cut a lawyer's argument to make it more exciting, you cut all the times the other lawyer said, "Objection! Objection!" while filing annoying documents with the judge, and the end result isn't accurate at all, at all.]

CATEGORY: TV

Mulder & Scully: True Romantic Friends

I'm a huge fan of Mulder and Scully. I think they fall into the "Friendship" category of romantic partners rather than the "Knight and Damsel in Distress" or "Instant Attraction" categories. (There are more categories, but the last two are the ones that popped to mind.)

For example, although Mulder does sacrifice himself for Scully, he also plays Mulder as rather remote. While Scully, however logical and scientific, is clearly (I think) enamored with Mulder by the time of the first movie (though being enamored never stops her doing her job), Mulder always seems to be holding Scully at a slight distance. He cannot live without her, and his enemies know that. But at the same time, he will never fully commit, never get too close, never (really) admit any consuming need for Scully (I'm referring specifically to Seasons 1-6). Duchovny often plays his feelings for Scully "off" or sideways.* I don't know if this is Chris Carter. I suspect not. I suspect it is Duchovny.

And I think this is fairly clever. The point, for me, of the Mulder-Scully relationship is that the final "I love you! I love you!" confrontation is unnecessary because they have already been living a "marriage" for most of the seasons. Their relationship is the relationship of people who are so far gone in terms of intimacy with another human being, Mulder's "Back off!" signs are completely pointless. Which will not, of course, stop Mulder from putting them up. And Scully is willing to put up with Mulder putting them up. Which consequently gives the relationship more edge, more reality, than most romantic TV relationships.*

*My favorite indication of this "offness" coupled with reality is in "Memento Mori" when Scully tells Mulder that she has cancer and instead of getting maudlin, he says, "I refuse to accept that." I LOVE that line: "I refuse to accept that." Somehow, it makes Mulder so much more real and more passionate than the usual romantic hero and yet, at the same time, gives you a sense of Mulder's remoteness. (Mind you, that sort of inaccessibility is great to watch on the screen but not so great to fall for in real life.)

This post originally addressed some other aspects of X-Files. The first comment below refers to my theory that Skinner is in love with Scully. I find the commenter's objections odd since Skinner, while obviously in love with his wife, can still be in love with Scully. "In love with" doesn't mean "will act on."  However, I am working through the remaining seasons (7-9) as the commenter suggests!