I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: UMPHREY’S McGEE-“Santa Oddity” (2018)

This is a ridiculous and somewhat forced Christmas version of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.”  It’s pretty funny and would have been a treat to see live, but really you don;t need to hear it more than once.

It opens with an acoustic guitar and the lyric:

Ground control to Santa Claus… eat your cookies and put your suit on.”

I wish the voice worked a little better–it doesn’t have the Bowie feel at all.

The middle section has this fun twist: “Planet earth is white and its Christmas time tonight”

Midway through the song, since they’re Umphrey’s McGee, they throw in a mash up of The Marshall Tucker Band’s “Can;t You See.”  It feels like it’s supposed to be Santa-related, but they forgot, although they do change the one lyric: “Santa please, can’t you see what that woman been giving to me.”

Then its back to the end: “Here I am sitting on a rooftop…”  It ends, the crowd goes nuts and you hear them say: That worked, That was fun.  Thank you.  That’ll only happen once.  But here it is to enjoy over and over.

[READ: December 16, 2018] “Two Stories Containing a Mouse”

Once again, I have ordered The Short Story Advent Calendar.  This is my third time reading the Calendar (thanks S.).  I never knew about the first one until it was long out of print (sigh).  Here’s what they say this year

Fourth time’s the charm.

After a restful spring, rowdy summer, and pretty reasonable fall, we are officially back at it again with another deluxe box set of 24 individually bound short stories to get you into the yuletide spirit.

The fourth annual Short Story Advent Calendar might be our most ambitious yet, with a range of stories hailing from eight different countries and three different originating languages (don’t worry, we got the English versions). This year’s edition features a special diecut lid and textured case. We also set a new personal best for material that has never before appeared in print.

Want a copy?  Order one here.

Like last year I’m pairing each story with a holiday disc from our personal collection.  Although this weekend, I’m pairing them with recently released songs from bands I like.

These stories feel connected and maybe they are, but “Rubies” was written four years earlier.  It has a very different style as well.

Mutch explains:

A rumination on difficult love. It’s really two stories, one that is very short and acts a bit like a poem, and the other is longer. They were written a few years apart, but the bad (ruinous!) love at the center of both links them, as well as the quick appearance of a mouse, and it’s possible to imagine that the narrator is the same person at different points in her (or his) life.

Rubies opens:

Two things I have noticed.  If you place a bowl on a shelf, even high up and what you imagine to be out of the way, it will eventually contain something: a desiccated side, a moth, a bleached ladybug.

There’s a section about the sharpness of cat claws and the sharpness of knives and then it gets to the dead mouse which died in a bowl like the desiccated insects.

The second story is more substantial and it’s called “The Beginning of Time.”

It is set in a time before cell phones–when people had to wait in diners not knowing if their rendezvous would happen or not.  People would wait helplessly, possibly in the wrong location. “The whole world was in a suspense that couldn’t be relieved by an apology text.”

The narrator says “I” was waiting for someone else when “you” walked in.  They hadn’t seen each other in six months, but waiting for the other person “must have caused a rip in the indifference I’d been cultivating.”  They decided then and there to take a road trip which included a stop in a motel.  During the night “I” grew bored and restless and considered rifling through “your” things.

But instead the narrator remembers to when they were half-asleep listening to “what we thought was a rainstorm” but the sound turned out to be a mouse on the dresser munching a box of crackers.”

You said sleepily, A mouse and a rainstorm are the same.  In the morning you remembered nothing about it and denied the entire episode. How could it have sounded like rain? you said.  A mouse in not a cloud.

The last section of the story details the love gone bad both then and now and ends with the narrator taking cover in a phone booth, when phone booths were common and something of a haven.

I didn’t really enjoy this story all that much, it drifted around a lot.  But the last line: “Lady take your own advice” is genius.

Here’s more of the Q&A with Maria Mutch