Christmas makes me depressed. I would like it not to make me depressed. I want to have kids, and I want them to at least have the option to enjoy this time of year. In order for that to happen, I need to learn to enjoy it. I remember enjoying it when I was little. I can’t exactly pinpoint when I soured on it, but by late adolescence, it was mostly an occasion for dread, and in my adult life it’s mostly been an occasion for sadness. I’m hoping that some autobiographical writing will help me get a grip on the whole thing.
A big part of my sadness is due to the early death of my dad, who loved Christmas and celebrated it with a total and unironic enthusiasm. Among his fellow investment bankers he presented a Frasier-like highbrow persona, opera-going and cosmopolitan. But he showed his midwestern roots in his lifelong devotion to Garrison Keillor, his love of fireworks and especially his fondness for Christmas kitsch. We stopped going to church after Grandma died. Dad didn’t inherit any of her religious fervor. Or did he? He took Santa Claus and the tree seriously. He loved to play Santa at office Christmas parties and signed half the cards on gifts to us “from Santa” into my college years and the one December past them that he lived. As a little kid I thought it was terrific, but the older I got, the more difficult it got. The holiday ritual I liked the best was the Elvis Christmas Album.
Is lip-synching to a recording a form of music? It’s definitely dance, of a specific kind. But is it music, or just mime? I feel instinctively that Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” routine on the Motown 25th Anniversary is a musical performance, one of the all-time great ones. So I guess I consider lip-synching to be music.
Listen to that crowd. Lip-synching might be fake, but Michael’s audience knows they’re witnessing something real. The band in the back is just sitting there, since all the music is pre-recorded. But they’re feeling it, you can see dudes clapping. What makes this music, even though no one is singing or playing any instruments?
Spoiler alert: don’t read until you’ve watched to the end of season three.
Mad Men is well-made television, but so is plenty of other television. Why is this particular show so compelling to me and so many of my buddies? I think it’s that watching Mad Men is like watching a documentary about our parents and grandparents. In particular, Don Draper is a window into our emotionally inaccessible fathers. For me, the generations don’t line up exactly right – in 1963 my dad was only 21 – but it’s close enough for some intense emotional resonances. I feel like I’m looking through a magic window into events that the old photo albums only hint at.
My dad and Don. There’s so much overlap. Both were authority-resistant guys disguised by suits and corporate jobs. Both underwent name changes and had complex parentage. Both earned a lot more money in New York City as adults than they grew up with in middle America. Both were divorced parents of young kids. Here’s a more detailed rundown of the similarities and differences.
Kramer is the name my mom’s father’s parents gave at Ellis Island because they thought it they might have an easier time with it assimilation-wise than Garfinkel. In Eastern Europe, if you want a WASP-y sounding name, you usually choose something German rather than British. My mom’s wing of her extended family calls itself the Kramer clan.
For most of you reading, the name Kramer will have a different association.
I have a similar build to Michael Richards and some of his birdlike awkwardness. I’ve been here:
In my early twenties I felt like I wanted to start dressing cool but wasn’t sure how to get started. Kramer is a goofy dude but he always looks sharp. He has some of the same fashion sensibilities as my grandfathers. Papa Kramer was tall like me, not a flamboyant dresser but he liked bright colors and patterns. Grandpa Hein had even more adventurous ideas about colors and patterns. Once I started intentionally modeling my wardrobe on Kramer, my personal look completely came together.
The Gregory Brothers (including a sister-in-law) are musicians here in Brooklyn who have a series of videos called Auto-tune The News. Here are a selection of their better episodes as of this writing.
When I was in third grade, my mom and stepfather went on academic sabbatical to London for six months, taking my sister and me with them. I guess I’m grateful for the chance to experience another culture and everything, but it was a rough six months. I missed my dad, school, New York, the Muppet Show. British third graders are manic xenophobes of Eric Cartman proportions. It was the first time I had ever experienced genuine alien-ness, and I didn’t like it. The best thing about being there was Doctor Who.
Why do computers crash? What can you do about it? It’s very rare for your computer to physically break. Most of the routine glitches you experience happen at the software level, as different running programs compete for your computer’s finite memory resources. To understand and hopefully avoid crashes, it first helps to know a little something more about how memory works, and how it differs from storage. Imagine your computer as the Dunder Mifflin paper company. Think of memory as the office, and storage devices like the hard disk as the filing cabinets, storage closets and warehouse. (more…)
