So this is Christmas?

I should be clear upfront: I hate that John Lennon song. In fact, I hate the vast majority of Christmas Carols written after 1950, and most genre covers of the ones written before (read: an R&B version of Baby it's Cold Outside, cough cough, Vanessa Williams, cough cough). In fact it was my dismay at the idea that my hatred for most Christmas music that inspired this blog.

I should also be clear: I am not one of those people that hates (or even merely tolerates) Christmas music generally. I love it. During December, my radio station is tuned to KOST, Los Angeles' own easy listening drivel factory which goes all out with Christmas jungles from Thanksgiving to New Years. I will defend the importance of Christmas music to the death. But it is in increasingly narrow band of it that I bother to listen to and it got me thinking about Christmas and it's personal meaning and whether or not I had tapped into something larger or was just recapitulating every meaning of Christmas cliche blah blah blah.

All Christmases are pastoral: mis-remembered, idealized versions of some distant, indistinct childhood Christmas, now longed for but unrepeatable. My own unachievable Christmas is a conglomeration of the celebrations between four and seven: old enough for me to remember my parents together, young enough to believe in Santa Claus, consistent enough to seem like an immutable tradition. 

It is probably all related to my dad's attachment to Santa Claus. My family is not at all religious (my sister and I were raised as secular humanists by ex-Catholic parents) and Santa was one of the few nods to any kind of spiritual understanding of the world. My father and mother went all out with the tradition of his visits: thethank you note for cookies and milk written in flowery script, jingling sleigh bells on our roof, presents from Santa wrapped exquisitely in rich, velvety paper with pine nettles and holly sprigs. This was supplemented by an obsession with Alden Perkes' The Santa Claus Book, a kids primer on Santa that included daily routines, floor plans for his North Pole Compound and (my personal favorite) a slightly terrifying anthropological record of the various sub-species of elves (the ancient Egyptian Cyclops Elf was particularly frightening to me).

We did not have a specific family mythology of Santa Claus. The Alden Perkes book made for a good foundation, but it did not map directly on to anything I knew from other media sources. Santa Claus was not St. Nicholas, nor was he the Archbishop of Spain, or even the Clement Clark Moore Santa who rode in a red sleigh, finger on his nose etc. He was, if anything, closest the Santa Claus envisioned by L. Frank Baum in his 1902 novella, The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. I never read the novella but I was enraptured by Rankin and Bass' 1985 claymation version. In it, Santa is raised by fictional pagan gods and faeries and sent into the world with the desire to improve the lot of his fellow mortals. He is rewarded by the gods with the mantle of immortality that transforms him into a woodland spirit who can deliver toys to children through the ages of eternity.

I haven't really ever settled on what vision of this Santa is. He is vaguely Germanic or Scandanavian, not un-related to Dickens' Ghost of Christmas Present, a feral spirit, living in the deep snowy woods, dressed in green, swaddled in furs, sometimes adorned with antlers or a wreath of candles and holly. He is not a fearful figure, but he is not entirely of this world. The toy-delivery thing often gets lost in the shuffle. He is a manifestation of my fantasy of woodland winters: of the space of light and homely hearths that is nestled in a cabin, snowed in by monstrous drifts. I suppose, in that way, it parallels the christian spirit of Christmas  out of dark times comes the brightest light etc etc. It's really an antler based thing for me, however.

Psychologically, I am sure that this somehow is a need for the safety  of my family, unbroken by divorce. I transplant the wholeness of the house to the image of a space of comfort holding out against the cold, snowy darkness without. But it exists, in a very real way, outside of that need. My parents, after all, spend Christmas together now. The need to create a fantasy space is gone. But the fantasy is too powerful not to endure.

Perhaps that is why I throw a yearly "Victorian Gothic Christmas." It's an attempt to aesthetically reconcile that childhood Christmas with an adult, non-saccharin celebration of the holiday. In bringing out the holiday's intrinsic darkness, perhaps we can summon an evening of light, even light phrased as drunken debauch.

My dad and I recently, independently heard a story on This American Life wherein a family takes this kind of care and concern for perpetuating the Santa myth to a somewhat distressing extreme. My dad apologized to me after listening, fearing he had done the same to me. I listened to it thinking "there is no way I won't turn into that father."  

Christmas isn't a religious conviction. It is not a space to reconnect with family. It is a set of aesthetic imperatives, to stand against the oncoming dark and live.

Scenes from Another World

I spent the other day walking around Downtown LA with my roommate. She's writing an article on the LA subway and the tourism possibilities therein. I lived in Downtown LA for my lost year between college and grad school, crashing on my dad's couch at the Brewery. I know my way around Downtown pretty well so I came along to navigate. The night before we talked about various ways in which we might tackle the trip; how we might balance well known monuments and attractions with more obscure delights. In mapping out the route, I realized we'd be passing pretty close to 7th and Broadway in the Jewelry district and its singularly bizarre local eatery: Clifton's Cafeteria.

Founded by a man named Clifford Clinton whose personal portmanteau lends the restaurant its name, Clifton's is the closest I have gotten to wandering into David Lynch film.

Imagine a world built in the same mode as Disneyland: 50's clean cut, white washed optimism with a stern but caring religious undertone, delighted by the endless possibilities of the human imagination. Only, instead of the expensive flagship of an entertainment empire, its a red-headed stepchild of a backwater, underfunded, unable to keep up with changing aesthetics and dilapidated. I'm sure at some point Clifton's was the place of wonder and hope it now mockingly reflects. Those days are long past, however.

What remains is a strange kind of shell. It's dilapidation is not so much haunting as pitiable. It I've been to run down amusement parks and off-brand Chuck E Cheese's where the failure of its animatronics and the general decay of its decor made the experience as eerie as a Diane Arbus photo. Clifton's real appeal however, is in the strange pathos it seems to generate. It's hollowed out interior is still remarkably earnest. And its this earnestness that makes it so very upsetting.

Supposedly modeled after the Brookdale Lodge, a family friendly vacation resort nestled deep in the Santa Cruz mountains, the interior seeks to present itself as a welcoming sylvan escape from the hectic world of wholesale jewelry just outside its doors. A poorly carved, faux-fur covered moose leers out of an awning just past the main entrance. The walls are covered in dark wood paneling, carved to look like tree trunks. A neon cross crackles atop a tiny "chapel" seemingly built into the impressive mountain rocks.

The upstairs is paneled with a series of yellowing, backlit, window-sized photos depicting the African Savannah, the Grand Canyon, Haight-Ashbury. Sitting by those lucigraphed pictures is meant to transport a diner to the faraway land it depicts. One really might be eating in the middle of the Madagascar Jungle or on Pennsylvania Avenue just down the street from the White House.

Entering the aforementioned chapel, a claustrophobic camera obscura-- too small to stand up in fully with a diorama of a woodland scene built into a glass tank set in one wall-- one can, with the push of a button hear the voice of a man long dead, with the slightest hint of a Tennessee Ernie Ford twang, read poetry praising both Jesus and the woods while canned birdsong plays, deafened by the whispering of ancient static. There's nothing sinister in the message, just the honest naivete that one could have a profound religious moment, not just by observing the majesty of the woods, but by observing its facsimile in the confines of a theme restaurant, while listening to the cheerful droning of sub par poetry being read aloud. A sign on the door cautions you to close and latch the door so that you can have more privacy in the chapel.

So it's not so much that Clifton's perverts and distorts its original intentions. It just falls magnificently short, while failing to appear hollow in the process. My mother, who first introduced me to Clifton's as a teenager, told me that her own mother used to bring her and her twin sister to the place after a day of shopping downtown. I can imagine that, in the mid 50s, as a seven or eight year old, one might be enchanted by it. But now, years past its heyday and nonetheless undaunted in its message it invokes the kind of nostalgia that is thoroughly painful: the return to a childhood favorite and realization that it would never again fulfill that same needful desire.

Clifton's was never my childhood joy. It was barely my mother's. It doesn't make me personally nostalgic. Instead it's a kind of nostalgia for the world at large. Here is a place that has fallen through the cracks of modernization. It's a portal into a world that the world has forgotten but still yearns for. It cannot fulfill the promise of its credo, but it makes one keenly aware of the lack.

Doubling Down

I promised trash culture. I deliver trash culture.

The other night, my friend and I went down to the KFC/Taco Bell near the University where I teach in order to participate in a cultural phenomenon: The Double Down.

The link I've provided here is a pretty decent explanation of the actual experience of eating it, and I would rather not paraphrase food critics more pithy and accurate than I, but I would like to talk about some of its existential horror and appeal.

My old roommate coined the term "intercourse meals" to describe food masquerading as other food. I am deeply entranced by this. Every year for my birthday I make "meatcake" a layered meatloaf glazed with Worcestershire-Ketchup and "frosted" with garlic mashed potatoes. Its surprisingly tasty if never precisely convincing as a desert. Similarly, I love making melba toasts topped with vanilla and orange creme in the shape of a fried egg. In short, I'm a sucker for visual ruses. So fried chicken pretending at bundom would seem to be right in culinary sweet spot.

On a bit of a side note, I think I can trace this obsession wit mimicry back to my dad's Time-Life nature books, one of which was devoted to clever ruses in nature. The cover showed a kind of aphid-like beastie masquerading as a thorn on a branch. It was both fascinating and terrifying. Creatures could be lurking in any everyday objects: a knot on a tree might be a spider, the broken capitol of an ionic column might be the shell of a hermit crab. It was a world that, more than deceptive, drew delightfully uneasy comparisons

In the culinary world, the gap between fried chicken and bun is not so very great as the gap between meat and cake (or stick and insect), but it nonetheless appeals to that part of me that thrives on indeterminacy. But that is ultimately my problem with the double down. Its not a real sandwich. The chicken is strangely mismatched. One would think that in this modern era of vacuu-formed meats, where McRibs can mimic the non-existent bones in their interior, that you could at least have a piece of fried chicken that resembles a bun, or at the very very rock bottom minimum resembles its sister piece so as to form a grippable, cohesive unit. The interior of this sandwich claims to be a bacon and cheese melt. Sadly it is a single piece of plastic cheese and two meager strips of bacon which would embarrass even a pauper sandwich artist. The chicken is far too thick, the interior is off center. Were it a traditional bread sandwich it would be mocked as an chaotically constructed, abstract joke on sandwichdom. It would be a DaDa sandwich, recognizable only in its obtuse mockery.

I guess what I'm driving at is that I don't need the Double Down to be a successful meal, I just need it to be a successful mimic. Content is irrelevant. Form is all. Let's gloss over the fact that the thing tasted terrible. Let us set aside that for all its weight in my hand, it was unsatisfying in my stomach. We shall not stoop to dwell on the fact that its greasy presence in my stomach gave me all manner of unsettling nightmares. It looked nothing like a sandwich.

I was promised mimicry, all I got was chicken.