December will be magic, and tragic, again
Two Xmas Day watches, whether or not you're feeling the spirit
Now years have gone by and we’re all so much older
The winters got warmer, then last year's got colder
And we’ve all learned some things about how the time goes
That we’d rather not know
That’s from Tracey Thorn’s “Tinsel and Lights,” a seasonal song that also features the protagonists listening to Mary Margaret O’Hara’s “Miss America over and over,” a practice this newsletter heartily commends. While it’s ultimately a sweet love song, Thorn acknowledges that a real grownup holiday will usually be bittersweet at best, intertwined with loss and memories, loneliness and doubt. This year alone I’ve had two close friends lose their beloved fathers in the past week, while my own family is gathering for our first xmas dinner since the death of my mother’s late partner Jim last winter.
So while I’m a booster of sentimental holiday fare, especially the vintage kind (see the Shop Around the Corner section of last week’s Crritic!), today I thought I’d offer a dash of counterprogramming. One pick is gritty, the other escapist, neither too obscure, but each easy to miss and a touch absurd. Whether or not you celebrate, I hope they provide some diversion, especially if the occasion is feeling less like candy and more like coal.
“The Junky’s Christmas,” 1993
This short film produced by Francis Ford Coppola features William S. Burroughs reading his Interzone short story, a bleak scenario that builds to a perversely heartwarming conclusion. Bookended by short live sequences with Burroughs himself, the story is rendered by director Nick Donkin as Claymation animation like the old Rudolph and Frosty specials, to much less cute effect. The background music is a collaboration between the late great impresario Hal Willner and the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, the Michael Franti project in-between the Beatnigs and Spearhead. In a sense the film is an extended spoken-word music video (produced, improbably, for VH1), from that brief window when Burroughs was kind of an honorary alternative-rock star. But it holds up—might even merit an annual viewing if you have the stomach.
Some out there have been watching. I’m sharing the more recently posted version of “The Junky’s Christmas” for its visual and sound quality (still imperfect). But the action is in the YouTube comments on the one that’s been up for a dozen-plus years—many of them from people who have been in the title character’s position. The most recent, from “@thundercheeks1989,” can represent the group:
Its a few days after Thanksgiving and the Christmas music has already started. Pure Hell, except that it reminds me to watch this again and to think about some very dear friends. Where have all the old junkies gone? Before Fentanyl, I knew many. Some that got clean, some that never even tried, all with stories to tell. Different dope now. Eats the young. Eats everybody. Real bad business. The fear was enough to keep me away for nearly a decade, but a ruined relationship took me back this year. Very unexpected. Off it now and doing better. Thinking about all of you and about the old timers we've lost. Keep breathing.
A very Kate Bush Xmas on the BBC, 1979
I just lately found out about this British broadcast from 1979, the year of the young Kate Bush’s triumphant first live tour, which would also turn out to be her last. In high school, I was lucky to tape the video of her Hammersmith Odeon concert from that tour from some rare Canadian TV showing and watched it dozens of times (alas, only some very poor copies seem to be online). I also recently saw a short but extremely fun BBC archival doc about Bush’s relentlessly perfectionist preparation for that tour, not just for the performances but technically speaking. I believe she was the first pop star to use a wireless headset microphone so she could sing and dance unencumbered—for years people called it the “Madonna mic” because the gear became so associated with her, but Kate beat Madge to it.
This holiday special features some of the same kooky costumed mime-dance routines, but also some kitschy back-projected quasi-music-videos, none of which have much to do with Christmas. They’re more about anthropomorphized violins, or saucer-eyed widows taking up shotguns to avenge their husbands’ murders. However there is a fantastic performance of “December Will Be Magic Again,” Bush’s ravishing holiday song that should be a standard, but was never on an album and even now isn’t on the audio streaming platforms.
Plus it includes her first duet with Peter Gabriel, long before “Don’t Give Up,” on the Roy Harper-written domestic drama “Another Day.” Gabriel also does a solo turn (after a fetchingly silly choral intro to “the angel Gabriel” from Kate and company) on “Here Comes the Flood,” which as a seasonal number leans much more to pagan sacrifice than to Christian salvation.
A good Yule to y’all.
Upon the black soot icicled roofs
Ooh, see how I fall
See how I fall
See how I fall
Like the snow
— “December Will Be Magic Again”