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Robot Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies. The only thing that would make it better is if they had used "Sugar Rum Cherry" (the Duke Ellington arrangement of same). Speaking of which, I just found out that Ellington arranged the entire Nutcracker, not just the Sugar Plum Fairies which we have on one of the Ultra-Lounge Christmas Cocktails comps. I haven't been able to track down the whole thing but I did find a CD with most of it. Which I will be buying in time for next year's Xmasville Lounge.

Thanks to Making Light for the link above. Merry Christmas everybody!

December 19 movie: Reunion in France. Joan Crawford and John Wayne star in this wartime thriller that seems to want to be Casablanca, but isn't. Really. The movie takes a while to get going, and then the plot veers between improbable and absurd. Still, I enjoyed it. Crawford and Wayne had good chemistry. She's a spoiled rich Frenchwoman who gets caught flat-footed by the war and discovers she's actually a patriot. Wayne is a downed RAF pilot she helps escape Paris. Philip Dorn is Crawford's boyfriend, a Nazi collaberator. Or is he? Lovey Howell has a small part as an addle-brained rich German woman. Basically the same character as Lovey Howell, except mean and a Nazi.

According to Tor.com, when first meeting a writer it's considered impolite to say "I have to tell you, I really hate your work." Those crazy science fiction people and their idiosyncratic social norms!

Georg, now with bacon!

I think the show went well! There were a couple of moments of confusion but nothing that was apparent on air, I think. The Hanukkah celebration was really fun. We waited until about 4:45 so that the sun went down and Hanukkah officially began during that part of the show. That Music from the Yiddish Radio Project album is fantastic. I really want to learn more about the Barry Sisters. The Irving Fields album is great too, but it's all instrumentals so it wouldn't be as easy to work into my show.

We got lots of great requests (one of which stumped us! That doesn't happen often) and a call from the King of Jingaling! He had commented on my blog here, so I wrote to him this morning and told him about Divaville Lounge. I had assumed he'd be too busy to listen now & told him about the "Wayback Machine" show on the 28th. But he had time to tune in today! When he called, he said he was listening while he prepared some music files to upload this afternoon. Speaking of which, I need to check and see what was uploaded today.

Georg and I are both exhausted. Four hours is a long time to be on the air, and then the next dj didn't show up! The guys who were supposed to be on at 7 were listening at 6 and heard us say so, so they came over early, and we got to leave about 6:25. Thank you, Eric and Myles! The funny thing is, if the 6-7 show had been listed as open I probably would have signed up to do it. But it wasn't on the sub list so I assumed that whoever does it normally was going to be there. Then as 6 pm approached it was difficult to plan the show, since we had no idea whether we were going to be on for a few more minutes or another hour. I find there's a big difference between knowing you're going to be on the air for X amount of time, versus having to do it on a moment's notice when you had planned to be on for a shorter length of time.

I'm going to write to the programming director and try to find out whether anyone is going to show up next week. Next week's show will have a preplanned flowsheet so it really would be a problem to have to unexpectedly fill 20 minutes (or an hour) at the end. I could easily plan the show to be longer, but having it happen without warning would be a mess.

A little late to announce this: Georg and I will be hosting the annual Divaville Lounge Christmas show today from 2-6pm. Today's will be not just Christmas, also the first day of Hanukkah and the Solstice. Happy Holidays indeed! 88.7 if you're local, wxdu.org if you're not.

The Christmas show has become a tradition I really cherish. I'm not sure when I started doing it every year. I have recordings going back to 2004 and I think I did the show at least once before I had the ability to digitally record shows, maybe more. So this is at least the 5th annual Xmasville Lounge, but I don't know for sure.

In any event it's going to be a fun one. We've got music for Hanukkah from Kenny Ellis, Irving Fields, the Barry Sisters and the Yiddish Radio Project; wintry seasonal music for the solstice; and more classic, weird and wacky Christmas than you can shake a stick at. I'm particularly looking forward to the set devoted to Santa's alternate means of transportation. We've got songs with Santa on a helicopter, in a canoe, on a train, and 2, count 'em 2 songs about Santa in outer space.

Not so nice thing: Going to sleep with a moderate headache and waking up with a bad one. Damn, I thought for sure I would sleep it off. I don't have time for this, I have to burn CDs for the Christmas show this afternoon.

[ETA: on the bright side, not being able to work on CDs meant I could relax and and spend an hour or so on today's crossword puzzle. Just figured out the gimmick. yay! The rest will fall into place now. And the Excedrin Migraine is starting to kick in. yay! Excedrin Migraine is the best thing on earth.]

[Well no, Georg is the best thing on earth. And then Janey. Excedrin Migraine is third.]

Nice things for a gloomy Saturday:

• The pie lady at the farmer's market.
• A husband who lets me sleep in and goes to the farmer's market to surprise me with a pie from the pie lady. And purple sweet potatoes, and sausages, and cupcakes!
• Going out and getting our last couple of presents and the store not being crazy.
• The Christmas music downloads from Ernie Not Bert, Music You Possibly Won't Hear Anyplace Else, FaLaLaLaLa.com, and The Christmas Yule Blog.

December 18 movie: How Star Wars Ruined Educational Films. A/V Geeks is back in Durham! It was a great episode too: Star Wars influenced educational films using science fiction as a muddled gimmick. As a bonus he showed Hardware Wars at the end. I can't remember the last time I saw that. It has to have been about twenty five years.

December 17 movie: The Interns. I watched this because I thought it was a remake of Not as a Stranger, a really good drama about interns starring Robert Mitchum. No, this was an unrelated, soapy melodrama about interns. I can't recommend it.

December 17 movie: Autumn Leaves. Joan Crawford and Cliff Robertson costar in this psychological melodrama which was much more affecting than I expected. Crawford is a lonely spinster who marries Robertson after a very brief relationship, then finds out he's crazy and a compulsive liar. And he has an, um, complicated family. Special bonus: Lorne Greene as Robertson's sleazy bastard of a father. A small part which Greene makes the most of.

The directing by Robert Aldrich is excellent, drawing top-notch performances out of both stars. My beef with the movie is an extremely negative message for women. [major spoilers ahead] When Robertson loses it he becomes violent, blackening Crawford's eye and crushing her hand. (in the movie it's depicted as a gash or sprain or something, but we see him try to bash in her head with a typewriter, she rolls out of the way and it lands on her hand. Which would have shattered the hand. Those old typewriters were heavy!)

A sane woman would call the ambulance, the cops and the locksmith. Crawford goes all "Stand By Your Man," comforting him after his attack on her. Lucky for her he switches to docile crazy after that, so she's able to care for him at home & lie to him about the source of her injuries. Eventually she takes him to a mental hospital, convinced that if they make him sane he won't need her anymore. Well they do, and he still does, and don't you love happy endings! Ugh.

It feels like there are two movies here: the one they think they're making and the one they're actually making. It's the story of two deeply disturbed people who feed each other's delusions. Neither one gets better: Crawford is just as fearful and dependent and Robertson just as much of a lunatic at the end as at the beginning. I felt like it was only a matter of time before the typewriters started flying again.

In the history of unlikely buddy picture teams, are there any as unlikely as Frank Sinatra and Groucho Marx? Their duet "It's Only Money" must be seen to be believed. Frank plays a squeaky-clean bank teller falsely suspected of embezzlement. Groucho plays a waiter who "helps" Frank. And Jane Russell plays Frank's best girl.

The weirdest part of the movie? Jane Russell got top billing.

December 16 movie: Christmas in Connecticut. My other favorite Christmas movie! Barbara Stanwyck plays the lifestyle queen of ladies magazines, whose publisher bullies her into inviting a war hero home to her farm in Connecticut for Christmas dinner. Only problem is, she's a fraud who isn't married, has no baby, no farm in Connecticut, and can't even cook. The movie is hilarious. I only have one problem with it: throughout the movie she seems largely unfamiliar with her own story. Her readers seem to know much more about the content of her columns than she does. The charitable explanation (which I try hard to believe while I'm watching the movie) is that she's so flustered by the situation and her growing infatuation with the war hero that she can't remember anything. The uncharitable explanation is that she wasn't creating a persona in all those columns; she was just making shit up and writing down whatever came to mind. Still, you'd think that knowing she was going to have to live out the character from her column, she would have spent a little time familiarizing herself with the material.

Speaking of Gene Krupa, did you know Downbeat magazine is still being published? I did not, until a few days ago when I saw a few issues at Santa Salsera's house. I remember reading about Downbeat in that really good biography of Nat King Cole. According to which Downbeat started complaining as early as the late forties that Cole had sold out, wasn't making real jazz anymore, had lost his edge, too pop, etc etc. All more or less true, but it's funny that the music press has not changed at all in sixty years.

Anyway, when I was at Sta. Salsera's I flipped through a couple issues of Downbeat. One had an article called "Unsung Heroes of Jazz Drumming," featuring luminaries Gene Krupa, Chick Webb, Jo Jones, Sonny Greer, Dave Tough and Sid Catlett. My first reaction on seeing the blurb was, cool, an article on all these great drummers. My second reaction was, wha? Unsung? No, sung! They are sung heroes!

I've played all of them many times on my show, and talked about most of them (I think Tough and Catlett are the two I haven't mentioned by name). I'm going to try and borrow that issue from Salsera. It would be fun to do a show about the (un)Sung Heroes of Jazz Drumming: one set for each of them.

December 15 movie: George White's Scandals. Joan Davis and Jack Haley (the Tin Man) play costars in the Broadway show George White's Scandals who are also having a romance. Except that Jack's sister (Margaret Hamilton, also from The Wizard of Oz) doesn't approve of the romance. Or the show.

This movie is very silly and not very good, and apparently something of a remake of an earlier, better film with Rudy Vallee and Alice Faye. There is a reason to watch this one though: Gene Krupa plays himself, leading the band for the show. And Ethel Smith has a specialty number. Accompanied by Krupa. I can honestly say I never thought I would see Ethel Smith and Gene Krupa perform together. The best number is one early on, where the camera swoops above the orchestra, following Krupa as he runs from one group of musicians to another, egging them on with the antic gestures Krupa did so well. That guy was a nut.

December 13 movie: The Man Who Came to Dinner. Now this is more like it. My favorite Christmas movie! It's so deliriously misanthropic. The perfect antidote to the schmaltz which overwhelms this season. Really, if Christmas makes you feel "bah humbug" you should watch this movie. They said in the intro that Bette Davis had wanted John Barrymore to play the lead. I'm sure he would have been good, but I can't imagine anyone but Monty Wooley in the part. He owns that character.

Dec 13 movie: Remember the Night. Melodrama set at Christmastime with Barbara Stanwyck as a shoplifter and Fred MacMurray as the prosecutor who feels sorry for, then falls for her. It was okay. Kind of a downer for a Christmas movie.

Just about done Christmas shopping. Are my feet tired! I don't much like shopping under any circumstances, and the Friday before Christmas is a particularly bad time for it. At least I was able to get done in the afternoon. I bet it will be really crazy tonight.

Last night we went to A/V Geeks, then I did some work while Georg decorated. Just the little tinsel tree this year, no big pine garland like we usually do. The decorations still look nice, even scaled back. Then we watched the Nutcracker on tv. Does it get any more festive? Well I guess if I hadn't been working. At least it was low-key work that I could do while watching the Nutcracker. It was a version costarring Macauley Culken. Which I must say, was not good for the production. Every time they showed his face it took me right out of the moment. All I could think was, "Macauley Culkin! What a strange looking child he was. I wonder whatever happened to him? Is he less annoying as an adult? Maybe he's as cool as Wil Wheaton. It could happen!"

Tonight we're going out for meat on swords, then tomorrow Georg and I will do prep work for Sunday's show. Sunday is four days before Christmas, also the first day of Hanukkah, also the winter solstice. And we'll be spinning four hours of tunes that celebrate all of the above. A holly-jolly-yuletide-dreidel-riffic afternoon!

So we have mice. We first discovered, ah, evidence of them a couple of days ago. We had left some crackers in a ziploc bag on the counter, and the mice got up there, chewed the bag open, ate the crackers and pooped all over the counter. So gross.

We cleaned out the pantry and discovered that they had been on the floor, and on the first shelf which had no food, but it doesn't look like they made it up to the higher shelves where the food is stored. To be safe we bought more canisters and made sure all food was secure. No more soft plastic containers that mice might chew through. And we put everything bread-like up high in those hanging baskets people store onions in.

We read online that mice are repelled by Bounce dryer sheets, so we bought a box and put them everywhere we thought the mice might be. The smell is certainly repellant -- why on earth would people pay to have their clothes smell like this? -- but I don't think it's doing much to the mice. I saw one up on the counter, after we put the Bounce sheets out. I was up late and I heard a noise in the kitchen. Tiptoed in and turned on the dining room light. There it was, an adorable little grey field mouse sitting on the edge of the counter. It saw me and dropped over the side. I think it used the power cable from the stove to climb up onto the counter.

We did a little more research after that, and found out that mice breed very fast; if you see one, you have many; and they like to chew up electrical insulation and can cause fires in older houses.

So, we called Critter Control and they're coming tomorrow. We also put out a couple of traps. I really hate killing mice. Especially now that I've seen how cute they are. When I thought we just had one or two, I even suggested we catch them and keep them as pets. (Yeah, Georg liked that idea about as much as you would expect.) But we can't have a mouse invasion living in the crawl space, stealing our food, contaminating our countertops and chewing on our wiring. I've read that a quick kill trap is kinder than releasing them in a field somewhere, where they'll either starve to death or a predator will kill them.

We put the traps out last night and a mouse got caught this afternoon. I heard the trap snap. Cree-pee. Georg had promised to deal with trap disposal and I held him to his word, staying out of the kitchen until he got home. Poor mousie.

Joe Biden hasn't made many public statements lately, but he has found time for a couple of small gaffes:

In the press conference where Hillary Clinton was announced for Secretary of State, he twice referred to Obama as "President" rather than "President Elect." He seemed to catch himself because later in his statement he said "President Elect" rather pointedly.

Then tonight in the energy/environment press conference he referred to Al Gore as "President Gore."

These are both pretty minor. Nothing compared to calling Obama "clean and articulate" or telling a man in a wheelchair to stand up. Still, I hope Biden will continue to do his part to keep these press conferences entertaining.

(by the way, the video of Biden telling the guy in the wheelchair to stand up is hilarious. "Oh! God love ya, what am I talking about?")