Episode 343 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
In this week’s episode, I talk with Vanessa Blakeslee about the new story anthology, A Very Italian Christmas, from New Vessel Press.
In our discussion, we manage to talk about yuletide loneliness, poverty, despair, prostitution, elk herds, Christmas, fascism, prostitution, friendship, Paul Auster’s screenplay for Smoke, and David Sedaris’s classic essay, “Dinah the Christmas Whore.”
Episode 343 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
I’m still reeling from last week’s column on Raw, a French/Belgium production about the trials and tribulations of two sisters who happen to be cannibals. Sometimes you gaze into the abyss and it gazes right back. Other times you gaze into the abyss and the abyss jumps down your throat, claws its way out of your stomach, and then feasts on your organs right in front of you as you bleed out. No more. The Museum of Schlock will only be featuring Hallmark Christmas movies for the foreseeable future.
Tonight’s movie is 2015’s A Christmas Melody, from director Mariah Carey. That’s right. This is singer Mariah Carey’s directorial debut, proving her not only the master of the stage, but of the screen as well. But she is not the star of this motion picture. Not that I’m saying Mariah Carey isn’t a star. Not that I’m saying anything negative about Mariah Carey in any way considering she’s worth 520 million and maybe she’ll read my humble blog and give me some money to pay the exterminator to deal with the cockroaches on the fifth floor.
A Christmas Melody begins with a saleswoman by the name of Kristen (Lacey Chabert) who recently got fired. A homeless man with a suspicious-looking long white beard asks her for money. She gives him the first five dollars she ever made which she framed for some inexplicable reason. You don’t frame money. You spend it. You can even spend it on pretty pictures to stick in that frame. Kristen is also a single mom. Her husband died when their daughter was only two years-old. Kristen had big dreams of becoming a fashion designer in Los Angeles, but now she and her daughter must move back to her hometown of Silver Falls to live with her Aunt Sarah (Kathy Najimy) who runs the town diner.
Out of despair, Kristen makes a Christmas wish to Santa Claus that she and her daughter Emily (Fina Strazza) will find happiness or something to that effect.
What else happens? I think I nodded off at some point. Must have been due to all those turkey leftovers, not this zany romp of a holiday movie. Mariah Carey plays Melissa, the head of the PTA and Kristen’s old high school rival.
She won’t let Kristen’s daughter audition for the Christmas pageant, and she won’t let Kristen design the costumes for the pageant despite Kristen’s fashion expertise. Melissa is a bit of a diva. I’m just saying.
Romance is also in the air. A music teacher by the name of Danny (Brennan Elliott) likes Kristen and by like, I mean he really likes her as in he’s had a crush on her since high school. Danny is super nice. By super nice, I mean really bland and really inoffensive, the sort of guy women in Hallmark World really go for. There’s also a school janitor with a suspiciously long white beard that looks just like the homeless guy Kristen ran into earlier. I’d say more, but I’m past my 500-word minimum and Weird Science is streaming on Prime right now. Why are they wearing bras on their heads?
Episode 291 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
In this week’s episode, I talk with Vanessa Blakeslee about the new fiction anthology, A Very French Christmas, from New Vessel Press.
NOTES
Some context for the dubious Dutch tradition of Black Pete.
Be sure to check out the music of David Rego, whose song “Harp” appears on this episode.
Dave Rego
Episode 291 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
Did you know that the English used to tell ghost stories around Christmas time?
No?
Neither did I.
Apparently, this was a thing back in Victorian England. As a proud American, I feel a bit funny about this. In fact, I kind of put a moratorium around this sort of thing around Christmas time. This is supposed to be the feel good season. May our days be merry and bright and all that? Still, our illustrious editor John King pleaded with your curator to supply some Christmas horror movies this year. The post 1980 ban limits my choices, but there is one that’s been on the back burner for a while now: Black Christmas.
Some of you out there don’t like slasher movies, and that’s okay. Some of you out there don’t like horror movies, and that’s okay. Some of you out there would be rude to a middle-aged hostess at an Italian restaurant run by Rocky Balboa, and that’s–no! Nope. That’s not okay. Rocky will give you a talking to. Where was I?
Black Christmas.
Black Christmas is a 1974 slasher movie from director Bob Clark, famous for such horror movies as Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things and Dead of Night. It stars Margot Kidder and John Saxon. Margot Kidder guest starred on Smallville. John Saxon did not. He needs to have serious talk with his agent. Yes, I’m talking about Smallville again! When you waste ten years of your life waiting for Clark Kent to put the damn suit on, your regrets are many.
Olivia Hussey also stars in Black Christmas. She played Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. We had to watch that one back in my freshman English class. The boys from the first period English class had informed me that I’d be seeing Juliet’s bare breasts and Romeo’s bare butt. I seem to recall a conversation that’s too crude to mention here. Speaking of too crude, Black Christmas starts out with a sorority receiving obscene phone calls from a deranged man talking about his private parts and what he’d like members of the sorority to do to his private parts. The mysterious caller also goes on about his tongue and what he plans to do with it. A member of the sorority named Barbara Courd (Margot Kidder) tells him off. He says that he will kill her.
It turns out the guy is living in the attic of the sorority house. No one notices he’s there until he’s about to murder them. Like their lush of housemother, Mrs. Mac. She has bottles of whiskey hidden all over the house, even in the toilet tank. When one of the sorority girls goes missing, the police mount a search and rescue to no avail. The police finally get around to tracing where the obscene phone calls are coming from and, brace yourself, they’re coming from inside the house!
By the way, it would seem that Bob Clark directed another Christmas classic: A Christmas Story, based on the book by Jean Shepherd. I know TNT runs those A Christmas Story marathons each Christmas. They should switch out Black Christmas for A Christmas Story this year, mix things up a bit. We should start a petition.
Less Than Stellar Christmas Gifts That Actually Exist
1. Don’t “feed” Peanut Big Top water, please. Is this how Zayles creates its merchandise?
2. Compete with your friends to clean this dog’s feces. It’s just like real life.
3. According to child psychologists, one thing every matching game for young children needs is more vomit-play.
4. Do you remember the guilty fun you had watching Ahhhnold and Sinbad goof it up in Jingle All the Way? Obviously, this 18-year-old film with the slenderest of premises needs to be a franchise anchored by someone who’ll getter done.
5. Ahem.
6. I am trying to make up my mind if this vintage 1995 collector’s item is less or more disturbing than a normal Barbie. Is there a saw in that medical bag? Ask the seller this question on Ebay.
7.What is a way to tarnish a beloved Joss Whedon work? Convert it into Yahtzee.
Never, ever scream yahtzee.
8. When considering these clunky, four-foot tall Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, you should first ask yourself this question: Is my child fourteen feet tall? If the answer is no, then this present simply tells the recipient, “I know you’ll never have any real friends, so here you go.”
9. While I am a fan of both reading and Star Wars, The Drunken Odyssey must advise against giving this (or any, really) headlamp to a child.
Incidentally, Vader’s helmet comes off to reveal the wrinkled, diseased, gray face of Anakin Skywalker, which only makes this $20 accessory even sadder.
10. The existence of full-body superhero costume-pajamas for men happens to be a disturbing declaration of Everlasting Celibacy.
Seeing the green PJs makes me think of a an immense (and immensely sad) man playing with his four four-foot tall Ninja Turtles, wondering when someone will make him a plastic April O’Neil figure, so his family will be complete.
Will his Christmas wish come true?
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John King (Episode, well, all of them) is a podcaster, writer, and ferret wrangler.
Mickey and Donald: The Tragic Heroes of Christmas Cartoons
After trimming the Christmas tree to a soundtrack of Andy Williams, watching Disney holiday cartoons was an annual tradition for my siblings and me when we were growing up in Indiana. “Pluto’s Christmas Tree” always made me wonder what kind of winter wonderland our own tree might be from the inside were I able to explore its decorated branches like Chip and Dale, and “Donald’s Snow Fight” made our own snowball battles, on the rare occasion we were lucky enough to have a white Christmas, seem paltry by comparison. Both of these animated shorts are visually stunning, full of hilarious gags, and despite Disney’s squeaky clean reputation, at times oddly violent. While my family continues to carry out these traditions, texting me pictures of our favorite ornaments as they do so, I am mournfully absent from the festivities, transplanted down south as I am. Nevertheless, I keep one foot in the magic of my childhood and continue to watch my favorite cartoons on youtube. Among them I find two particularly subversive. Whether or not “The Clock Watcher” and “Mickey’s Good Deed” purposely meant to challenge viewers by criticizing greed and consumer capitalism, one cannot help but notice these themes in the scathing satire of the former and the downright heart-wrenching pathos of the latter.
“The Clock Watcher” finds Donald Duck at his very best. He appears in this 1945 cartoon as a gift wrapper for an unnamed department store. Whether attempting to wrap a football in a package that is much too small for it or trying to keep a jack ‘n the box from bursting from its lid, both frustrating circumstances and his own attempts at laziness ensure that Donald’s misadventures go from bad to worse. Furthermore, his every move is being monitored by an unseen manager who is personified by an intercom that begins to take on dystopic qualities by the end of the short. While the sexless manager can’t exactly see Donald, its constant goading commentary on his performance smacks of Orwellian malevolence. The intercom’s technology might be unfamiliar and out of date to today’s viewer, but its maneuvers take on an almost android-like quality resembling the Martian probe from War of the Worlds. Though self-defeating as always, Donald is more sympathetic than ever in the role of the hyperbolically enraged everyman fruitlessly rebelling against a totalitarian system through explosions of wrath, exhibiting every negative emotion Winston Smith attempts to hide from Big Brother.
1932’s “Mickey’s Good Deed,” on the other hand, is a dramatically different, but equally challenging take on Christmas. Though it is less than fifteen years older than “The Clock Watcher,” this cartoon is the product of a radically different time. All the way down to the primitive animation, it is a masterpiece of depression era social commentary, and even its conclusion, though positive on the surface, is not without a bitter pang. The short opens on Mickey the street musician playing a melancholy rendition of “O Come All Ye Faithful” on his cello while Pluto howls. Their world is hopelessly desolate; Mickey suffers stroke after stroke of bad luck, and the worst aspects of human nature thrive. Despite being mistreated by passersby, Mickey, ever the perfect boy-scout, makes the ultimate sacrifice and sells Pluto, his one friend, to the father of a spoiled child in order to purchase Christmas gifts for a poor family whose patriarch is in prison. While Mickey doesn’t hesitate to offer up his only source of comfort or companionship in order to help the family who, with a ramshackle roof over their head, have that much more than he does, his loss is no less painful for that reason. The use of humor and the fact that Mickey’s misfortunes and Pluto’s torture at the hands of the pig child all take the form of slapstick only help to make the cartoon that much more tragic and disturbing. If the climax finds circumstances rising one step above the status quo, we are reminded that these characters’ world is so bleak that the improvement barely qualifies as a happy ending. Though the pig child is finally disciplined, his cries at being spanked are so pathetic, one can’t help but feel saddened at the empty joylessness of his wealth. While Mickey and Pluto are reunited and even get to enjoy a Christmas turkey that was tied onto Pluto’s tail to torment him, they remain impoverished, homeless vagabonds. Far from being rewarded for his good deed, Mickey’s modicum of good luck seems to occur in spite of it.
What could Disney have been trying to convey through these cartoons? Could a corporate empire that has come to represent excessive consumerism actually be criticizing its own modus operandi? I seriously doubt it. Was Disney suggesting that, like Mickey, we ought to be charitable to the point of near self-annihilation during the Christmas season? I have trouble believing this as well. While drinking at the Disney World resorts, John King and I discussed the archetypal role of trickster in a place that attempts to control every detail down to the smallest molecule. Despite the enormous manpower and billions of dollars spent to create the illusion of perfection, something will inevitably go wrong. Perhaps it is this same trickster spirit alive in Disney’s cartoons, tragedy and self satire inadvertently working their ways into animation that was intended to be merely entertaining. On the other hand, I might not be giving an organization that has shaped popular culture in some of its most fundamental and recognizable aspects enough credit. It is entirely possible that Disney is as capable of being self-reflective as it is as at making huge amounts of money. I’m sure John, the walking Disney encyclopedia, could add incredible insight and historical footnotes to the discussion. Maybe if I listen to episode 77 of The Drunken Odyssey one more time I’ll find the answers hiding within its three hour runtime, but it’s the day before Christmas Eve, I have a million chores to do, and desperately need a nap, so as always I’ll ask more questions than I’m capable of answering. Merry Christmas. God bless us, everyone.
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Teege Braune(episode 72, episode 75, episode 77) is a writer of literary fiction, horror, essays, and poetry. Recently he has discovered the joys of drinking responsibly. He may or may not be a werewolf.