Sometimes I Scare Myself with My Own Genius

Should-be Hold Steady song lyric:

“And she said man I’m glad we heeded Joe Strummer’s every word,
But maybe we shoulda focused more on what Peter Buck had to say,
And then she puked blue Big Gulp ice all over my Keds."

PREVIOUS HOLD STEADY GENIUS FROM XMASTIME HERE

Line by Xmastime that Would Have Been Much Funnier

"I said porpoise, idiot."

I Won't Tell Anybody When I Win the Lottery...

...but there will be signs.

 

Television Wins

I can’t believe I'm saying this but besides being known as The Year of Cheap Pork, it looks like 2026 is going down as the year I finally fell in love with Marquee Moon after decades of fighting it. 😲🤯🎸❤️ #cbgb #nyc 

 

Brilliant Ideas. I have Them.

I'm sure there's a lot of weird things about living at The White House but I’ve always thought this by far has to be the weirdest:

The president must pay for all personal meals, groceries, and family food expenses consumed at the White House.

Like, what's the purpose of this? Some stubborn arcane leftover meant to prove a point? Isn’t this just more of a hassle than it's worth? And yes I am now starting a band called The Stubborn Arcane Leftovers, rock you very much. 

"But Xmastime", you say in the voice of Craig “Ironhead” Heyward from those soap commercials (RIP), "do you possibly have a BRILLIANT idea for a movie or tv show about this?" 

Sigh. Yes I do, faithful readers, YES I do: 

The new president discovers this little factoid about living at The White House and it really sucks for him because he has 12 kids so he has to get a second job, and hilarity ensues. And yes that second job is probably driving an Uber. 

LOOKING FOR INVESTORS PEOPLE, LET'S MAKE SOME REAL MONEY, PEOPLE!! 💰💰💰💰

Xmastime Putting Words in People's Mouths

Here's something Phil Spector should have said:

"When you hear the gold, stop."

This has been an Xmastime production of Xmastime Putting Words in People's Mouths

 

VU What If?

I’ve always enjoyed Chuck Klosterman, first for his books & then as a podcast guest.
I’ve loved the Velvet Underground for almost 40 years.
Over the last week I’ve been in a big VU mood, even more than usual.
See HERE.
And HERE.
And suddenly this pops up - Klosterman’s got a brand new book that seems to have been written just for me:

What if everything we understood about mainstream American music exploded from a single identifiable Big Bang moment and, setting aside other juicy potential candidates for it, that moment was Beatlemania? Or what if things had gone … another way?

Chuck Klosterman’s Rock*: A Mainstream Alternative History of Alternative Mainstream Music uses that premise to get history boomeranging in another direction. The book beams in from a world where the culture overlooks the professionalism and earnestness of the Beatles because Velvetmania took off in its place. It all starts, in Klosterman’s alternate history, when 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico becomes a a massive influence on rock, drone, and punk music rather than (as in our reality) a commercial slow burn that led Brian Eno to claim that the few people who bought the album each started their own bands.

Rock* extrapolates wild timelines from this notion, fleshing out a late 20th century where gender experimentation, enthused simplicity, occasional inscrutability, and biting apathy become prominent after Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, & Co. log the best-selling album of all time. Suddenly, papers report rashes of women lapsing into monotone “Nico Speak.” The brutalist thump of drummer Moe Tucker renders the showmen in Led Zeppelin and the Who irrelevant. The clout and moxie of unionized rock critics exceeds that of the Teamsters in the 1970s.

Of course it's already in the mail, winging its way to me on flights of drone rock fancy.

Maybe Baby

Over the last decade or so there’s been a flurry of rock biopics and while I usually dismiss them after screaming at the screen for the first 10 minutes as not being true, for some reason I’m always soft on The Buddy Holly Story. They don’t get the Crickets right, completely ignore the existence of Norman Petty and on and on; I wonder if I can watch The Buddy Holly Story on a loop because the first time I watched it in 1992 was before the Internet, when every single fact ever was laid out for anyone to see at any time.

Meanwhile when the Dylan movie came out with Chalamet I shut it off after about 15 minutes because I couldn’t stomach the inaccuracies I saw. But I love Buddy Holly 100x more than I give a shit about Dylan, so my question is am I easy on The Buddy Holly Story BECAUSE I saw it before the internet hit all of us, and at that point I hadn’t even found a book about Holly so who knows what I knew/though I knew about him at the time? I’d surely read enough to know right away that a few things were wrong about the movie the first time I watched, but I was fine forgiving the producers for them.

Are some movies like this grandfathered into some sort of blanket of forgiveness, while anything that comes out after the Internet et al will be judged against the infinite amount of information we have about the subject already?

Anyway, what I really should be telling you is to watch The Buddy Holly Story now!!

Well This Was Quite a Wild Ride I Was On. 🤣

BOO!

Why yes my Halloween-inspired lamps/fake candles are coming along nicely, thank you very much for asking.

 

Know Thyself.

Nobody's ever accused me of acting like a grown-ass adult but I just caught myself thinking (as opposed to catching anyone else thinking, I suppose?) “I honestly believe that how cheap pork is right now will be of the things I’ll always remember about 2026", so.

More Sizzlin' Room Temperature Takes with Xmastime

I love R.EM. but they may be the all-time Useless Album Cover Art Liner Notes Kings; while Dylan was always gloriously unintelligible with his liner notes Columbia Records still made sure you knew the sequence of the songs on the record, R.E.M. was always like "hey wanna know what order the songs are in or who plays what on any of them well guess what tough shit fuckface!"

FAIR PLAY: they do however get full marks for Dead Letter Office's Hall of Fame liner notes (which only makes their resistance to doing them more that much more frustrating).

ALSO: take a walk down Xmastime Memory Lane with my Petty Album Liner Notes! series!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Barely Luke-Warm Hot Take, with Xmastime

Nobody’s ever cried about Lou Reed or Andy Warhol not getting enough credit or attention for their respective careers but to be honest I don't know if either of them actually get enough credit for doing the Mozart Golden Mean thing; each of them were trying to bring more “higher concept” art to the masses – literature for Reed, visual art for Warhol - through the most populist art form at the time, popular rock music.

New Xmastime Playlist for You People, You're Welcome Very Much

THE BEST OF THE OHIO EXPRESS AND OTHER BUBBLEGUM SMASHES

From my much-too-thoughtful-for-you-people description notes on Spotify:

Recreating an all-time favorite compilation album I’ve loved since 1994. DO SOMETHING TO ME on the album is by The British Road Runners. BEG BORROW & STEAL on the album is listed as The Rare Breed, but it’s The Ohio Express. The exact same thing had happened with DOWN AT LULU’S but in reverse.

Another Country Western Song Title in Search of a Song

To All the Big Girls Out There Looking for Love: I Was Wrong

SEE PREVIOUS SONGS HERE

Xmastime Films

SNOWFLAKE IN CHIEF, #3

Watch Previous SNOWFLAKE IN CHIEF Films Here

Turkey's Nest Memories, No Big Whoop...

...just me in my Aunt Pat wig checking out a Polaroid with a 2-time U.S. Poet Laureate (AND Watty!).

 

WE LOVE YOU GLEN MATLOCK! 🎸🕺❤️🇬🇧

The Glen Matlock documentary is out on Apple & it’s great, both as a (brisk!) rock doc and as redemption for the unsung hero of the band who was always treated like a punk rock Pete Best, but if Pete Best had written She Loves You and I Want to Hold Your Hand.

And now, a quote from Gary Kemp:

I never bought into Malcolm’s sort of PR that, you know, “Oh, we’ve kicked him out because he likes the Beatles.”I think what Malcolm was really saying is, “We kicked him out because he’s too musical.”

It proved to me then, at that point, that this was not a band that Malcolm had any interest in having longevity, musical development of any kind, or even staying together. He wanted to destroy it, and he destroyed it by putting this crazy guy in on bass who couldn’t even play bass.

"But Xmastime", you say in the voice of Craig “Ironhead” Heyward from those soap commercials (RIP), "didn't you rather brilliantly say this exact same thing four years ago?"

Sigh. Yes I did, faithful readers, YES I did: 

What if Malcolm McLaran had taken a minute from being obsessed with endless media stunts passing off the band as a bunch of untalented puppets of which he was the puppetmaster and instead realized holy crap, this is an incredible band with an amazing album?

The most blatant moment of course is him pushing the rest of the band to fire bass player Glen Matlock....WHO HAD ONLY WRITTEN ALL THE SONGS FOR THEM!

Underrated Scene from ONLY FOOLS AND HORSES

Del Boy lets Rodney sit in the chair Uncle Albert just pissed on. 🤣 

SPOILER ALERT: I'm Fucking Right Again.

Well gee whaddya know, check out how one company's doing after telling Trump to go fuck himself:

The boss of vintage navigation company MapQuest has revealed the stunning spike in downloads and usage its seen since defying Donald Trump.

Trump signed an executive order to change Lake Ontario to “Lake America” on Aug. 27. The same day, MapQuest posted a map on X with the lake’s original name, and the caption “We’re not changing it.”

MapQuest’s stance saw them rewarded with a major spike in downloads, now more than 1.5 million in under a week. They remain the No.1 app overall on the U.S. and Canadian Apple App Store on Wednesday.

It's amazing how everybody love to lecture everybody that if you just stand up to a bully they'll back down because they’re cowards but seem to forget it almost every time when it comes to this piece of shit.

"But Xmastime", you say in the voice of Craig “Ironhead” Heyward from those soap commercials (RIP), "didn't you fucking try to explain this to people over 20 years ago???!!"

Sigh. Yes I did, faithful readers, YES I did: 

6) I’ve always said that if I was on The Apprentice, let’s face of it, the odds of you actually winning are fairly slim. BUT when you get fired, instead of genuflecting “Thank you King Trump, thank you!” and slinking off, I’ve always thought you should fucking flip out, cause a scene. “WHAT? YOU’RE firing me? FUCK THAT, I’M firing YOU, motherfucker!!!” and try to flip that table over. Because you KNOW there’s a million hotshots around the world that HATE Trump and when they see the clip of you telling T-rump to go fuck himself, they’ll hire you for $200,000/year just to hang out, smoke cigars and tell everyone how you told Trump to go fuck himself.