Silent meow: must be the Jingle Cats!

A montage of my favorite moments from The Jingle Cats. Please provide your own meows.

Jingle cats: UNPLUGGED!

I was amazed to find actual videos to go with my all-time-favorite cheesy Christmas album, The Jingle Cats. Predictably, the videos are just as lame as the CD, which I haul out every year and play. No one wants to hear it. Since my brain has turned to jello in recent weeks, and I am capable of writing nothing except doomsday predictions since the election, here are some mercifully-mute Jingle Cat gifs!

Believe me when I say, this is a lot better with the sound off. The high-pitched, irritating, autotuned, synthesized meows on the album are excruciating. They bother cats, too. Cats normally leave when the Jingle Cats are on.

There are touches of surrealism in these things that elevate them beyond the level of total cheese. But not much. 

The Jingle Cats videos have an '80s mentality to them - if it can be said that they HAVE a mentality. I keep thinking about MTV when my kids were in high school. Weird Al Cat-ovic, or whatever.

It's kind of sad to think that this kitten has probably died of old age by now. Kind of like watching It's a Wonderful Life, or thinking about your old high school teachers.

Aren't they pretty cats, though? I've always liked that blinky thing they do.

This isn't really a Jingle Cat, but it's too cool not to put in here. 

Somebody spiked the catnip.

Do you meow what I meow?

Aren't you glad you only have to watch ten seconds of this?

A mood piece. Cat is obviously chewing something.

I have to assume the videographer filmed hours and hours of footage of cats yawning, eating, horking up furballs, etc. and then edited it all together into these minor masterpieces.

Noel: music and images for Christmas

 

 

Whom we call Mary, will we ever know?

We have turned the girl bearing down in a freezing barn

hiding her bastard child in terror of death

to someone carved of soap, made cloud or heaven.

Poor Mary. We have robbed you of you.

 

 

 

 

This edifice, this war! This junkyard of faith!

Like molten lead in water

this phosphorescent upflash

of livid flame

 

 

 

 

 

We have this idea we're married to

that men came,

three, though we don't know that,

that they had money and power, though we don't know that,

That they knelt and adored

but we don't know that either

the story has hung itself around us

like crepe paper

 

 

 

 

 

This is Jesus, though hidden.

Jesu ben Yusef

circumcized, a Jew.

We cannot look at him, do not look upon him,

You will burn your eyes.

We know no good has ever come from Nazareth.

 

 

 

 

This is what we find on the sidewalk

Don't go there   don't go outside

Go inside the church and stay there

 

 

 

 

 

 

Portal: walk along the street

where Jesus was, where Jesus was.

Who was Jesus, what, an idea?

A reigning prince, a pretender?
I think he was a dream

a wish, a desire, a scramble for meaning

in the small square hole of our lives.

 

 

 

 

 

For all that, there lives a desperate sort of grace

and we must reach for it

or not go on.

Stay out of our church, go in this one,

be run out of that one,

find the True Church, the one true religion

 inside your own brain.

 

 

 

 

 

For all that, there is this repeating, not endless, just seeming so,

for surely it will end

before we know it.

Will the end be the same,

faith or unfaith,

knowing or not knowing?

Why must hope be born again

at the very desolation of the year

and customs dragged out

dusted off

as if they make a difference to the world?

 

 

 

 

Like chess-pieces, we hold and handle

the smooth turquoise, the cracked cool finish

in a need to comprehend the vast mystery

in

the dailiness and boredom

 

the ascendance

the rhapsody of light

the scent of winter trees

sounds of owls

we live for this, die for it

this stubborn insistence of wonder

this god with a human heart

Baby, it's not your sleigh ride

Don't know what it is, but me likes.

Used in an ad for, I think, Sear's, a few years back.

Don't say there's no original Xmas music.