Christmas Cartoons from the Third Reich

I searched far and wide, long and hard for this special Xmas video. Took maybe 2 minutes. There are numerous weird, antiquated cartoons out there that express, supposedly, the spirit of the season, but this is the strangest: it's a Santa's Workshop kind-of-thing with a decidedly military flavour. This was from the early '30s and I don't think the Nazis had really happened yet, so this must have been a kind of foreshadowing.

From that disturbingly hearty beer-hall anthem at the beginning to the precision-march of the toys at the end, the whole thing is an exercise in conformity and obedience.  I was completely squicked out by Santa's final song, which reminds me of nothing more than that festive Yuletide carol, Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles. As with most cartoons and  film portrayals of Santa, he is terrifying, with an evil whiskey-voice that sounds like the guy who did Peg Leg Pete or whoever he was,  that big ugly guy with the villainous laugh.

No wonder little kids' first encounter with Santa Claus seems to uniformly inspire terror and screams, until their parents force them to sit on this bizarre character's bum-hot lap and listen through a synthetic beard to his wet flabby lips pronouncing lies about what they'll get this year.  All that "well, we'll see" bullshit.

Who IS this monster who envelops them in the scent of sweaty polyester? As with almost all childhood mysteries, no one explains it to them. They have no idea who or what Santa is. It's a kind of initiation, almost a Christmas circumcision in which the cost of entry into the Spirit of the Season is bleeding and pain.

Kids want to believe, they really do, though it must really fly in the face of logic in these days of high technology. It was hard enough when I was a kid and technology had reached its apogee with our giant Webcor reel-to-reel tape recorder in which the tapes constantly broke and had to be spliced with scotch tape. We could at least record the sound tracks of our favorite  cartoons and movies and play them over, and over, and over again until our parents screamed, the tape snapped and the reel went flap-flap-flap-flap-flapping around.

So now how do they do it? How do they maintain such a transparent fiction? Aren't they frightened by some strange man dressed in a red fur costume breaking into their house? At some point, don't they realize that their parents have been lying to them?

 

My daughter, a TV news reporter who at 8 years old already had a gift for getting to the real story, one day asked me in a sort of "come on, tell me" voice, "There isn't really a Santa Claus, is there?"

So what was I to say? At eight, she wasn't even disillusioned. She just wanted to wring the truth out of me.

"Well. . . ummm. . . Christmas is a lot more magical and fun if you pretend there's a. . . "

"I thought so." She looked more satisfied than dismayed, her suspicions confirmed. Then she looked at me again with that let's-get-the-real-story expression.

"What about the Easter Bunny?"

Ye gods! Was there anything left of childhood? Were there no harmless illusions we could maintain? Not in the face of an 8-year-old future TV news reporter.  It wasn't long until I overheard her talking to one of her little friends, sharing her newfound knowledge about how they'd all been blatantly deceived for years.

"Uh, Shannon. .. "

"WHAT? I'm just setting her straight here. I'm doing her a favor."

We never got to the Tooth Fairy, but I am sure by then she had figured it out on her own.

A spider went up my nose (a Festive Tale)

 

 

 

 

 

 

All I wuz trying to do, see, was get out some Xmas wrap on those long tubes, I mean really really long ones so I had them in the corner of the closet all kind-of standing up on their ends sort-of? and took a lint roller - never mind why a lint roller, OK, because I took out pompoms I'd made last year, Xmas pompoms because I'm too cheap and lazy to make MORE pompoms to put on my Xmas presents as decorations insteada bows, like? I don't use bows. So I take out the old pompoms and shake them and a whole buncha stuff comes out so's I have to get out the lint roller which goes "zzzzzzzzzzzzt!" when I try to pull off the old stickamy-thingie, you know, so 97 pieces of stickamy come off of the roll and I have to try to put them all back on. But that is the unimportant part.  When I began to try to find the rolls of Xmas wrap - God - God - So I see this - GOD its legs were so long it just - . I screamed and started fencing with it and jabbing it with the lint roller which was all covered with lint from the pompoms? so nothing would stick to it anyway so I jabbed and jabbed and jabbed and after a while it started to become clear that the spider wouldn't die cuzzadafact it was GONE somewhere in some freaking CRACK or crevice or maybe up inside my favorite sweater where it would just hunker down and lie in wait. Its legs were At Least 4 Inches Long or More, and they wiggled around because it sort of clambered except real fast like a hundredyard dash inside my closet. And I could not BELIEVE I could have a huge spider inside my very own closet which I share with no one, no not even a fucking arachnid from hell, because about a week and a half ago we took everything out of that closet to paint inside it and lay new carpet, and I'd thrown away all my gross old sweaters and old boxes of stuff and everything, yet still, here was this HONKIN' HUGE thing like from some rainforest, and to be perfectly honest I DO live in a rainforest which is part of Vancouver. Oh god but at least it didn't have any egg sacs throbbing on its body, its body was really teeny but its LEGS were like half a mile long and EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH! My husband heard me screaming my guts out and came in with a good-natured look on his face and said, "What?" and I asked him HOW a spider cudda got into my newly-painted, freshly-carpeted wonderfully clean bedroom closet, and he says "hmmm, what about that cardboard box?" and I say "WHAT about that cardboard box?" and he says "that cardboard box you brought in" and I say "WHAT cardboard box I brought in?" and he says "that cardboard box you brought in from the garage" and I say, "ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh." THAT cardboard box. That. I Brought. In. From. The. Garage, to put some sort-of-a gift in, in fact I think it was a snowman or some-such thing that I made for my grandgirl, she likes snowmen and I almost SEALED A SPIDER INSIDE THE BOX with the little cute little snowman in it so that when she opened it up on Xmas morning, all excited about what could be inside, an EVIL poisonous multi-legged throbbing iggidy-wiggidy-piggly-wiggly-legged spider would've popped out at her and ruined her Christmas, so maybe things weren't so bad after all except I still haven't stopped screaming and feeling cold waves of shuddering all over my skin, involuntary shudders of disgust and revulsion at the sight of that MONSTER spider just scurrying along, just scurrying along the wall of my freshly-painted, newly-carpeted closet, hunkering down in the corner where all my neat little rolls of gift wrap are stored, not even in the plastic but already OUT OF THE PLASTIC so the spider could easily just zip down inside any of the rolls he wanted so that when I finally do wrap my presents, SURPRISE, out will pop the Spider from Hell to terrorize me and ruin my Xmas, except that at this very moment I think that the spider must be crawling around my scalp inside my hair which is why it is now standing on end and which is now why I cannot stop screaming and perhaps will never stop screaming until the life cycle of this particular spider finally ends.

DARWIN, THE IKEA MONKEY: best cash-grab of the season!

Maybe it's because it's Christmas, with all the feverish fund-raising that goes on. I don't know. But I am plenty pissed by the following story.

A lot of you already know about Darwin, the cute little baby rhesus monkey (or whatever kind he is: it's a little unclear now) found leaping around an Ikea store in Toronto, wearing a baby-sized shearling winter coat.

It was the kind of story that makese a great kicker on the news: "And, finally. . . ", with chuckling anchors making droll little monkey jokes with absolutely no awareness or concern for what is really going on. It's YouTube, folks, so it can't be real and no one can be hurt by it. Harmless entertainment.

That is, until the public was made joltingly aware of the fact that there were more "issues" involved here than a displaced monkey in an adorable coat.

We saw video clips of Yasmin Nakhuda, the kind of person who anthrop - anthropo - oh well, screw it, treats pet monkeys like people, with a human need for close nurture. One of those eccentric people who dress their pets in all the latest styles, haul them around with them, brush their teeth with them, and shit like that.

While Nakhuda was off shopping, presumably in Ikea, the cleverly-named Darwin escaped from her car and - weird or what? - bolted into the store, where it ran around frantically "trying to find the cafeteria" (chortled all the news people) "because it wanted a cheap hot dog or some meat balls." More likely, it wanted to get out of a typical frigid Toronto winter before it froze to death.

One would have thought that would have been the end of the story. The eccentric lady takes her exotic pet home with her to celebrate Christmas. But wait, all of a sudden, unlike in the US where you can own a Bengal tiger or a deadly cobra or whatever-you-fancy and keep it in the back yard while your toddlers roam around and throw stones at it, this monkey has been confiscated. It's been snatched away by a strange-looking "sanctuary" called Story Book Farm.

Just the name is weird. It just doesn't suit a primate sanctuary. There used to be a Story Book Gardens in London, Ontario, a must-see for kids everywhere (and I was dragged there at least 14 times). Did it have animals in it? I think so, in those wretched, suffocating barred cages that reeked of ammonia and dung. As a child, I thought it was natural for animals to pace back and forth all day.

So now little Darwin, obviously capable of making decisions for himself and his own well-being, has finally seen the light.

Though his former owner has been lambasted for the horrible sin of treating him like a human being, suddenly Darwin (renamed like a religious convert, a kid adopted from the Ukraine or someone in the witness protection program) is talking, just like a human!

Yes, talking! And you wouldn't believe the things he is saying. This is a direct quote from the Story Book Farm fundraising web site:

I was found wandering the parking lot scared and confused on Sunday Dec 9th.

I am only a baby and had no idea where I was.

The kind people at Story Book Farm Primate Sanctuary took me in and are providing me with a permanent, loving home where I can learn from other monkey's and I am told may have a surrogate mother!!!

I am so happy to finally be able to live and act like a real monkey!

Story Book farm did not expect to get me for Christmas and we could desperately use funds to help pay for my care as well as the other amazing monkey friends I have made.

I will eat A LOT of food. I would also love to be able to play with toys and other enrichment items and all of this costs money.

Please consider makng a donation towards my care, this is my Christmas wish.
No donation amount is too small, every little bit helps! :)

Other Ways You Can Help

Even if you can't contribute, you can help me and my other new monkey friends by sharing this campaign with everyone you know.
Thank you for your support, and for helping me have a very well deserved Happy Holiday.

Plese feel free to visit our website to learn more about us:
www.storybookfarmprimatesanctuary.com

Does this somehow speak to you of "cash grab"? It makes me plenty uneasy, along with the pictures and videos of monkeys in Story Book Farm bouncing off the walls of wire mesh cages. This is not my idea of a sanctuary, where animals can roam free in some semblance of the wild. And maybe even interact with each other in some way that's more natural than sticking their fingers through the mesh.

Even the "parking lot" reference is bent to make it all seem more cruel. He was found in the store, not outside. And notice how they've suddenly, magically changed his name back to Darwin for the sake of public recognition (though only for the purposes of the campaign).

Wouldn't Darwin be better off in Yasmin Nakhuda's bathroom brushing his little simian teeth? Maybe not. Lots of people treat their dogs like babies, but that's apparently beside the point. This Storybook shit is deeply suspicious to me. It seems to me it's just another form of abuse, and certainly exploitation.

Do they really think they're going to squeeze money out of people by yanking Darwin's string and making him "talk" so people will feel guilty if they DON'T donate?

I got one of these things in the mail the other day. Don't even remember which charity, but it said something like, "We were about to present our usual gut-wrenching, guilt-inducing end-of-the-year pitch to to help suffering children, but suddenly had to put it all aside when an urgent crisis arose which will result in a horrible, agonizing death if you personally don't do something about it!! Little Hildegard is a sweet innocent toddler who is now suffering from Stage 4 cancer and will surely die in horrible agony if you don't pony up and empty out your wallets NOW. Don't you want to save her? What in hell's name is the matter with you?" (And so on, blah, blah, blah.)

I know charities are suffering. But I also know that you have to pick and choose, you can't give to all of them, and such extreme guilt tactics are inexcusable. It all reeks of manipulation and laying a staggering load of guilt on the public. I can just see their PR people saying, "Well, you know, we could always keep this story until Christmas, that is, if the little girl is still alive. You know how people are at Christmas. They always give more." I happen to know that these people have been hired to do this, to "spin" their issues for maximum manipulative effect, justified by the fact that charities must now be run like businesses, no matter how crooked and mercenary their tactics.

This time it's about a displaced monkey - not just any monkey, but the IKEA MONKEY, now just as famous as Justin Bieber for his cute little YouTube antics. Even better: there's now an "Ikea Monkey Controversy" that will spawn still more news items to tack on to the end of the TV news broadcast, inspiring still more chuckling, bantering and not-very-clever "monkey custody jokes". Or else sober-faced, cheek-biting items while the anchors try to pretend this story means shit.

Meantime, the most important issue has been totally buried in hype. This isn't a "thing", but an alive, sensate being that is more intelligent than your beloved Rover or Hissy the Cat. It's being thrown back and forth like a football in the name of "animal rights", and it is totally disgusting to watch.

Not just thrown back and forth, but shoved into the public's face in a breathtaking campaign known (literally) as Dollars for Darwin (even though his name isn't even Darwin any more! This is nothing but brand recognition served up with a side order of cute alliteration.)

Why do I feel as if my wallet is being forcefully squeezed? Why do I feel that no matter how much I donate to every cause, worthy or not, I will still feel like a guilty wretch for not giving even more? Why do I feel a sort of nausea about this whole story, knowing it can't possibly have a good ending for anyone? For the only thing more heartlessly mercenary than squeezing out donations for the plight of a sick human being is exploiting the innocence of a vulnerable, helpless baby animal.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

NOT a Child's Christmas in Wales: really bad Dylan Thomas

Not too many people know this, but I'll tell you right now: Dylan Thomas was a really bad writer. He crammed adjectives together in a way that made everyone gasp, "Ohhhhh!" and "Wheeeee," as if they were watching fireworks. But that's not good writing. That is what is referred to in literary terms as a "cheap trick".

He wrote about Wales as if it were the dark side of the moon, some exotic or even erotic place where the sea sang its siren song: but the truth is he hated Wales. Hated its narrow religion and suffocating parochialism and "the museum that should have been in a museum" (and I've seen a few of those). He must have hated where he came from, or he wouldn't have gone to America to read poetry to melting young girls and get so soused his head exploded. He had to have a shtick of some sort, a shtick that other writers hadn't quite thought about, a Yeats-ian, Joyce-ean thing, except not Irish.

You HAVE to love Dylan Thomas. You HAVE to admire the solid blocks of poetry or the yammering sing-songy short stories. The only one I really liked was about the guy in the bar, soused, who meets the love of his life, goes to the men's room and never finds his way back. Ever. Reminds me a bit of This is Spinal Tap and how they can't find the stage. You can't say you hate Dylan Thomas and hold your head up in literary circles. Oh, but look at this image! Oh, but look how he does this, how he does that. Though there are some interesting images in And Death Shall Have No Dominion, it seems to have been written for Richard Burton (soused) to read on the Ed Sullivan Show, which in fact I think he did.

Reading A Child's Christmas in Wales used to be de rigueur in classrooms and around the fireplace on Christmas Eve. Today it all feels dated somehow, dense Christmas pudding or a fruitcake passed back and forth in the family until it turns into the sort of igneous rock that was used to build the ancient Pyramids.

This is only a small fragment of one of Thomas' more interminable short stories, called Quite Early one Morning. It was written to pad out the selections on a Caedmon recording he did in the '40s - I know because I have a copy of it rattling around somewhere. Dylan Thomas was famous for his "Welsh-singing" voice and his magnificent readings. OK, if you like Richard Burton with a headcold and a hangover. There is a definite wobble. And then there was the mess of his personal life, which I will not get into.

This story (the fragment I have shared here: it's about a zillion pages long and I thought you'd get bored) is precious and atrocious at the same time. Pretrocious? It's cute. Those little Welsh people in the town, goddamn! they were funny to write about. It drips with the sort of entitlement that announces to the world, "I have arrived. And you have not." It may or may not be a forerunner of Under Milk Wood: Under Skim Milk Wood, perhaps.

I used to love A Child's Christmas in Wales until I actually read it and saw all sorts of cheap verbal tricks going on. If you really want a good Christmas story, make like Linus in the Peanuts story, hit the lights and open the gospel of Luke. In the meantime, this ISN'T from A Child's Christmas in Wales, so it can't be all bad.

I walked on to the cliff path again, the town behind and below waking up now so very slowly; I stopped and turned and looked. Smoke from one chimney - the cobbler's, I thought, but from that distance it may have been the chimney of the retired male nurse who had come to live in Wales after many years' successful wrestling with the mad rich of Southern England. (He was not liked. He measured you for a strait-jacket carefully with his eye; he saw you bounce from rubber walls like a sorbo ball. No behaviour surprised him. Many people of the town found it hard to resist leering at him suddenly around the corner, or convulsively dancing, or pointing with laughter and devilish good humour at invisible dog-fights merely to prove to him that they were normal.)

Smoke from another chimney now. They were burning their last night's dreams. Up from a chimney came a long-haired wraith like an old politician. Someone had been dreaming of the Liberal Party. But no, the smoky figure wove, attenuated, into a refined and precise grey comma. Someone had been dreaming of reading Charles Morgan. Oh! the town was waking now and I heard distinctly, insistent over the slow-speaking sea, the voices of the town blown up to me. And some of the voices said:

I am Miss May Hughes 'The Cosy', a lonely lady,
Waiting in her house by the nasty sea,
Waiting for her husband and pretty baby
To come home at last from wherever they may be.

I am Captain Tiny Evans, my ship was the 'Kidwelly'
And Mrs Tiny Evans has been dead for many a year.
'Poor Captain Tiny all alone', the neighbours whisper,
But I like it all alone, and I hated her.

Clara Tawe Jenkins, 'Madam' they call me,
An old contralto with her dressing-gown on,
And I sit at the window and I sing to the sea,
For the sea does not notice that my voice has gone.

Parchedig Thomas Evans making morning tea,
Very weak tea, too, you mustn't waste a leaf,
Every morning making tea in my house by the sea
I am troubled by one thing only, and that, belief.

Open the curtains, light the fire, what are servants for?
I am Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard and I want another snooze.
Dust the china, feed the canary, sweep the drawing-room door;
And before you let the sun in, mind he wipes his shoes.

I am only Mr Griffiths, very short-sighted, B.A., Aber.
As soon as I finish my egg I must shuffle off to school.
O patron saint of teachers, teach me to keep order,
And forget those words on the blackboard - 'Griffiths Bat is a fool.'

Do you hear that whistling?- It's me, I am Phoebe,
The maid at the King's Head, and I am whistling like a bird.
Someone spilt a tin of pepper in the tea.
There's twenty for breakfast and I'm not going to say a word.

I can see the Atlantic from my bed where I always lie,
Night and day, night and day, eating my bread and slops.
The quiet cripple staring at the sea and the sky.
I shall lie here till the sky goes out and the sea stops.

Thus some of the voices of a cliff-perched town at the far end of Wales moved out of sleep and darkness into the new-born, ancient and ageless morning, moved and were lost.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

FOUND: a lost masterpiece!

THE ELEPHANT SONG

Tong, tong, tong-a-tong, a-tong!

That is thc rhythm of the elephant song,

As the big grey elephants shuffle along.

To the sing, song, singing of tho old brass bell,

To the shrill, harsh stridence of the mahoot's yell,

To the shuff-shuff-shuffle of the great round feet,

The elephants are swinging down the village street.

A priest peers out from his while-washed cell,

As he hears the ringing of the elephant bell.

A wild-eyed fakir flings a mumbled curse,

A baby peers from thc arms of its nurse,

A cobra dances to a charmer's tune,

The incense wavers in the shrine of the moon,

The street dogs scamper, the children scurry,

A woman hum-hums as she fixes curry,

While the bells keep ringing, like a. distant gong,

Tong, tong, tong-a-tong. a-tong,

The swing-along rhythm of the elephant song.
 

This is one of those things with a long story attached to it. I remember this poem from about Grade 3/4 (which I took in one year, with Miss Wray, one of those spinster teachers that used to be so common back then). I remember her reading this out loud, and loving it: the swinging rhythm of it, the vivid imagery.

A couple of lines stayed with me: "The elephants are swinging down the village street," and "A wild-eyed fakir flings a mumbled curse". Typical of the times, nothing was explained to us, so we had no idea what a "fakir" was (our teacher pronounced it "faker"), and none of us asked.

Then the poem simply disappeared.

Over the years, I've done searches, tried to scare it up. A few years would pass, and I would try again. I was beating the bushes and not finding it. I googled the lines I could remember. (For some reason, in my head I heard the poem rhythmically chanted by a choir of people: perhaps a reflection of a 78 rpm Babar recording in which there was a Greek chorus in the background).

I decided it was dead and unreachable, somehow deemed no longer important. I didn't wonder if I had imagined it, because I remembered more than one line. I knew it was real. But I had no idea of the author's name.

I still don't. I finally found it, incredibly, in a newspaper archive from 1946. It had won the Weekly Poetry Prize in The Advocate, a newspaper that appeared to be Australian (I couldn't read the original at all: it was just a distorted jumble of flyspeck type that made no sense no matter how much it was blown up). The headlines mentioned sheepdog contests called "cooees". Strange.

But beside the yellowed archive was a transcript of the poem - or at least I thought it was the poem - though every line had 5 or 6 errors in it, in syntax, spelling. . . so I had to piece it together from the faulty fragments, using my memory and imagination.

I think this is the poem. There are two names after it, all garbled up: Dan Mantlin and Audrey Cullen, but it's not clear if either of them wrote it.

Is it the stereotypical portrayal of India (where I assume it is set)? Surely there are far more racist poems out there that haven't dropped so far out of sight. Personally, I love the imagery, the rhythm, the pounding of the great round feet and the hypnotic tinkling of those bells. It would never be taught to children now, and it's a little too childish for adults to be exposed to. It belongs to another time, which is maybe what I love about it the most.

A Song for Found Elephants

This piece has become cornball over the years, kind of like Flight of the Bumblebee (which I hate: the only version I have ever liked is the one in The Big Bang Theory where Sheldon was dressed up as - who WAS he dressed up as? - anyway, he ran real fast to it and it was funny).

I remember hearing it on Mad Men when Betty Draper, in all her 1960s splendour, came down the staircase in a restaurant called (I think) Lutece. Don looked at her in admiration and even awe. But like most of the music in Mad Men, it was really effective.

GOD, when will Mad Men be back? I die inside, I can't wait any longer.

Speaking of things Indian, ever since Slumdog Millionaire, every comedy has to have a funny Indian guy with an accent. The Big Bang Theory is only one example (a GAY Indian guy with an accent). I can't figure out why this is considered OK. They wouldn't have a black guy named Rastus shuffling his feet, would they? Yet these characters talk incessantly about elephants and cobras and arranged marriages, like something out of a Kipling story.

(This is sung by Bjoerling - I won't try to spell his first name - and his silvery voice, vibrating with layer upon layer of overtones, seems to catch slant rays of sunlight. Indian sunlight.)

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

Kate, the pregnancy, the prank. . . the disaster

I'm just like anybody.  I have no interest in the Royals at all and at best find Harry's exploits - dressing like a Nazi, getting drunk and flailing around like a veritable Prince Phillip - juvenile and boring. (At least we know now that he wasn't sired by Diana's "riding instructor": his eyes are too close together, like all the rest of them). And the things they wear on their heads, the women I mean, look like those weapons the Klingons throw on Star Trek.

So I'm not really a Royal watcher, but I honestly did like the Royal wedding, the excitement and magic of it, such a departure from the suffocating,  elephantine bumph of Charles and Diana and the train that went all the way to Bristol. I like Kate, like her self-assurance and her dimples and her way of wearing clothes: stylish, but with none of the narcissistic preening and fluttering of Diana at her worst. Kate seems like the real deal to me.

And then she's pregnant - more excitement - but things aren't going the way they are supposed to, she's throwing up all the time (and do I know what that is like). So the rather overly-slender Kate has to be hospitalized before she dehydrates completely.

Then it happens: the "punk" that "punk'd" the world.

These idiot Australian radio people, whoever they are, I can't even be bothered to look up their glutinous little names, decide to try to get through to the nursing staff at the hospital. And what they do is so patently ludicrous that I can barely describe it.

Putting on the worst phony accent since - since - I don't know! I can't remember ANYONE else with an accent that bad! - the she-part of this poisonous duo called the hospital assuming the identity of some drunken drag queen who likes to impersonate Her Majesty at gay biker orgies. In other words, she was trying to sound like the Queen.

She used the word "please" twice in one sentence, for one thing. She sounded more "Strayne" than anyone I've ever heard. And the poor nurse, the naive nurse, put her through! If she says she's the Queen, she must BE the Queen. The nurse who actually reported on Kate's bouts of retching must have been equally taken in - perhaps more so, to give out so many details we really needn't have heard about.

But no one could predict what happened next. I was in the car with my husband driving home from Staples or something, he had been away for a while, and I started recounting the stupid "punk'd" story in case he hadn't heard it.

He had.  "She died, you know."

"KATE??"

"No, the nurse. She was found dead."

"What - the Royals hired a hit man? That's insane!"

""No, they think it was suicide."

It was one of those odd the-world-slips-sideways moments. It just didn't add up. This woman didn't even give out those medical details that should have been kept confidential. She just handed the phone over. What happened?

Nobody is sure what happened. But someone died. So with its usual crystalline logic, the entire human race decided to MURDER those two Australian DJs for plotting to deliberately assassinate a poor innocent nurse. Looking at it backwards, the insane logic is: they punk'd her, she died, they killed her!

I have a few points to make. Maybe I've already made them, but I'm so sick of Twit, Tweet and Twat and the Gospel of Facebook screaming "those murderers should be hanged!" and stuff like that,  I'll make them again.

One. Those punksters NEVER thought they would get through. It was one of those sleepover gigglefest type-things where little girls call someone at random and say, "Is your refrigerator running?" The worst that could happen, they probably thought, was, "Get off the phone, you wretched impostor!", or perhaps (even better!) the threat of arrest.

Two. If there had been ANY level of security at all in that hospital, the "punk" never would have happened. It would've been shot down before any information could have been given out at all.

Three. It's only one small step from freely giving out confidential medical information on the phone to carelessly letting some drag queen dressed as Liz in the door for a nice little visit. The hospital administration made a grave, even horrific mistake, far worse than mere carelessness, in maintaining such a lax system.

What the fuck were they thinking? Did they have their heads shoved up their blowholes? But though there obviously was no special policy in place to protect Kate, meaning that anyone in the world could just phone and ask  for information and get it,  the whole shameful episode got shunted on to this poor nurse. Even though nothing really bad came of her actions, she must have had such agonizing pangs of conscience that she decided she should not exist any more.

The nurse no longer exists, but someone still has to be blamed. Someone's head has to be paraded around town impaled on a stick. The villagers with flaming torches are about to close in. So it has to be those two heartless, murderous, bloodthirsty, demonic Aussie DJs!

To be honest, I feel sorry for them. I think they're just idiotic assholes who were seeing how far they could push it. Pretty far, as it turns out. Whole Facebook pages are being set up even as we speak to bring them to justice, i. e. life imprisonment, if not the gallows.

This whole thing was completely bizarre, one of the strangest stories I've ever heard, but where does the blame ultimately lie? Isn't it obvious? If the Royals trusted this place enough to put one of the most admired and influential women in the world in it, shouldn't they have known a little something about their security system, if indeed they had one? (As it turned out, they didn't.)

This isn't B-list royalty: Prince Edward's dumpy wife Whatsername, or Sarah Ferguson and her horrific fanged daughters. THIS IS KATE MIDDLETON. She is far too valuable to be trusted to a place where they might allow an IRA member dressed as Prince Phillip in for a nice little visit.

(A very sad postscript: I just had the thought that a lot of good might have come from this asinine prank. Policies might have been changed, security tightened, awareness of danger increased.  Maybe Kate might have been a lot safer next time, i. e. when she gives birth. But instead, the whole thing tumbled down into disaster.)

Bob Dylan: here comes your worst Chrismas nightmare

To quote a well-known literary phrase: This is just WRONG.

I leafed through most of the tracks, now posted on YouTube, on this strange album/artifact. It sounds like an old man choking on Liquid Draino. I was hard-pressed to find the worst track, or even the most representative track, so I just took a stab. The religious ones might be worse, but the elevator-music/Walmart p.a. system arrangement in this one won by a Santa Claus whisker.

What's this Jew doing, anyway - what's this born-again, died-again, reborn, dead for a while, then all-of-a-sudden-gets-nominated-for the-Nobel-Prize fella doing recording a whole buncha Christmas carols with a backup chorus of chicks and someone playing one-o-dem little ting-a-lingie things?

I don't know, me and Bob Dylan. I will admit to a crush, nay, an obsession in my youth, back when he was the most enigmatic thing since Russian black bread and writing things like:

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying
Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece the hollow horn
Plays wasted words, proves to warn
That he not busy being born is busy dying

Every once in a while Dylan moves himself, and in a recent interview he quoted the above lines and said something like, "I can hardly believe I wrote that, man. It's fantastic."

Well, it is. But how did he end up here, on the slippery slope to poor album sales and for-God's-sake-let's-hide-this-from-the-kids? How did he become a Christmas abomination, standing on a street corner bleating old carols strained through too many layers of cigarette phlegm?

I still look at Bob Dylan as an enigma, ever-changing, always leaving us guessing as to what he'll do next. I think I know him, then he'll turn around and reveal himself as much more intact and articulate than his current downtrodden-old-bum image would suggest. I saw him just last night on a rather dull documentary about Pete Seeger, who has the dubious distinction of having the worst teeth in folk music. The cuddly old Commie was praised to the skies by Springsteen, Baez, a totally adorable Arlo Guthrie (I want to take Arlo Guthrie home with me - he is a beautiful man), and - Bob Dylan.

When I see interviews with him, it startles me: he has a diamond-flash way of speaking, quick, ferociously articulate, and way ahead of the game, always - in fact, reinventing the game as he goes along so that no one can get ahead of him. And then there are those eyes: not "bluer than robin's eggs," as Joan Baez wrote in her tortured ballad Diamonds and Rust, but flourescent blue, lit from behind by - something - but it sure is something the rest of us don't have, and certainly never will.

So, fine, all this is in the positives, isn't it, and then there were all those early albums I listened to half-to-death (even though I had no idea who Medgar Evers was) until my parents were ready to scream. The last Dylan albums I truly enjoyed were Desire and Blood on the Tracks. Like Rubber Soul and Revolver (which I liked to call Rubber Revolver), these two would have made a nice double album, maybe called Desire on the Tracks. Here Dylan was still playful and soulful and sometimes heartbreaking, even in the simplest of songs (One More Cup of Coffee being my favorite: I always preface it in my mind with the mournful slow movement of the Rodrigo guitar concerto.)

Long before Desire on the Tracks and this Christmas thingie, Dylan got into beeeeeeg trobble  when he cut a very strange album called Self Portrait, which had a picture of a smeared cookie on the cover and virtually no original material. Almost all of them were "covers", and bad ones too, such as his version of Take a Message to Mary in which a female chorus intones, "These are the words of a frontier lad/Who lost his love when he turned bad. .  ."

As they say down in old Jerusalem town: oy vey.

Self Portrait, a (gulp) double album that would have made a nice no-album, inspired one of the best-known opening lines of any music review: "What is this shit?" The Rolling Stone guy didn't know what to make of it, and I didn't either. Sounded like something he recorded in the basement of Big Pink, whatever-the-fuck Big Pink is anyway, when the guys in the band were all drunk and falling down.

Bob tries, he really does, but the best Bob Dylan performance I have ever seen isn't by Bob Dylan. It isn't even by a man, but by Cate Blanchett, who nails His Bobness like no other actor ever could. I don't think anyone could play the older Bob because the older Bob sounds like he has shredded his vocal chords (cords? Either way looks wrong) with a StarFrit all-purpose flesh grater. Everyone complained about his singing THEN. They should hear his singing NOW. But the people who really objected back then, the teachers and parents and Great-Aunt Matilda, have all died of old age anyway.
 

The only thing I heard more often than "I don't mind long hair as long as it's clean" in the '60s was, "I like Bob Dylan's songs, but not when he sings them." They preferred somebody else, like Peter, Paul and Mary or The Byrds or Sonny and Cher.

Bob has apparently lifted all of Bing Crosby's arrangements in this album, and superimposed the vomitous horror of what is left of his voice. Somebody else has already sung these songs, Bob, in goopy syrupy voices and stuff, but still. They're a little more palatable to listen to than the garburator growl of an old man still trying to hang on to something, some sense of youthful glory.

The legacy of Dylan's earliest creations, that glittering Krypton ice palace that can still illuminate like a great spill of diamonds, slowly, somehow, turned back into coal (the thing you find in your stocking if you're bad). Or maybe it's rust, flakes of russet-colored, degenerated iron, the leavings of a man who couldn't stop singing even when his voice was gone.