Monthly Archives: December 2010

Holiday Triumphs 2010

Holiday Triumphs: Jean Shepherd, “Earliest Christmas”

Continuing the fabled tradition begun all the way back in 2009, Scratchbomb presents Holiday Horrors and Holiday Triumphs: an advent calendar of some of the more hideous aspects of this most stressful time of year–with a few bits of awesomeness sprinkled in.

Thumbnail image for shep2.GIFOnce again, I present a holiday tale from Jean Shepherd to warm your hackles this Christmas. It is very typical Shep show, which is to say, all over the map and yet one cohesive unit.

In this episode from Christmas Eve 1971, Shep starts out by relating the eerie beauty of seeing power lines go down in a snowstorm. Then, he relates his earliest Christmas memory: seeing an insanely melodramatic adaptation of an extremely melodramatic seasonal poem, “The Bootblack’s Christmas.” He proceeds to recite some more examples of Yuletide melodrama, which he finds both ridiculous and amazing. This was a frequent topic of his: How humanity’s true nature was revealed in what he called Slob Art, the kind of junk that ordinary folks like. He was saying this literally decades before pop culture was seriously studied by anyone.

The show closes with a tale from Shep’s army days, when he got a two-day pass and hitchhiked from his base in New Jersey to visit Manhattan for the first time. There, he took in the wartime phenomenon called The Stagedoor Canteen, resulting in a chance encounter with a volunteer waiter who would go on to fame and fortune years later.

Mixed in, you’ll hear Shep do some holiday-related commercials, including a flying bird toy that used to advertise frequently on his show, and appeals from charity. He also shills for his own recently released album, The Declassified Jean Shepherd.

I snagged a copy of this album up years ago when I saw a copy in the used LPs section at the Amoeba Records in Berkeley (the only good memory of my sole trip to California thus far, a tale for another time), and it is an odd artifact. It’s comprised of clips from his radio show and a live performance at Carnegie Hall (which I’m pretty sure both of my parents attended), intercut with odd snippets of very early 70s rock music. A strange choice, since Shep was resolutely anti-rock. He was more at home with jazz; check out Charles Mingus’s “The Clown” to hear him collaborate with the legendary bassist/bandleader on an improvised spoken word piece that is amazingly prescient (and creepy) considering it was recorded in 1957.

But I digress. Please enjoy this collection of Chritsmas tales from the master of the monologue.

[audio:http://66.147.244.95/~scratci7/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/shep_earliest_xmas1.mp3|titles=Jean Shepherd: Earliest Christmas (December 24, 1971)]
Holiday Horrors 2010

Holiday Horrors: We Wish You a Turtle Christmas

Continuing the fabled tradition begun all the way back in 2009, Scratchbomb presents Holiday Horrors and Holiday Triumphs: an advent calendar of some of the more hideous aspects of this most stressful time of year–with a few bits of awesomeness sprinkled in.

tmnt_xmas.jpgWhile perusing through some digitzed VHS tapes, I ran across an ad for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ooze on home video. I contemplated using it as a Holiday Horror entry, mostly for shameful nostalgia reasons.

See, I used to love TMNT, even though I was a little too old to be into it during its heyday. It was probably the last gasp of my “I will watch anything on TV aimed at kids” phase. In retrospect, two things baffle me: 1) Why the cartoon was so insanely different from the original comic book, and 2) Why I kept watching this show well after I got into said comic books. In its original form, TMNT was weird, dark, and vaguely reminiscent of Japanese martial arts movies. The cartoon was goofy and centered around pizza and surfer lingo–and of course was a monster hit among kids during the First Bush administration years.

Unfortunately, the tape that had this commercial was not in the best shape. It looked pretty bad on my computer and even worse when exported to a YouTube-able form. So on a whim, I searched around the interwebs for some TMNT-Christmas stuff. Surely something that was once so huge had tried to cash in on the holidays.

As it turns out, they did. In 1994–well after the height of their popularity–TMNT was responsible a straight-to-video special called We Wish You a Turtle Christmas. That is not a promising title, but the special somehow manages to crawl under even this low bar, with plenty of room to spare. I agree with the sentiments expressed at X-Entertainment*: “You could put my dick in one of those vices they screw on to the tables in middle school woodshop…I still won’t watch it again.”

* I used to read X-Entertainment religiously, yet somehow had never read their takedown of this monstrosity until now. Don’t ask me how that happened.

Continue reading Holiday Horrors: We Wish You a Turtle Christmas →

Holiday Horrors 2010

Holiday Horrors: Egg Nog = BRUTAL

Continuing the fabled tradition begun all the way back in 2009, Scratchbomb presents Holiday Horrors and Holiday Triumphs: an advent calendar of some of the more hideous aspects of this most stressful time of year–with a few bits of awesomeness sprinkled in.

As stated earlier this week, I am a big fan of egg nog. I am not a big fan of metal. But a metal song about egg nog? I think I can get behind that.

Courtesy of Videogum, what we have here is a video from Winnipeg public access circa 1991. In it, a group called Box Lunch–comprised exclusively of 15-year-olds–sings a metal peaon to the frothy seasonal brew. I can’t exactly tell if they’re for or against it, but the point is they’re singing about it.

While I think this is awesome, I am putting it in the Holiday Horrors category because I think any self-respecting metal band would prefer to be known as horrible. Also, check out the hat on the bassist. Remember when it was okay to wear hats like that? Oh lord, the 90s sucked.

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