A Day No Lasagna Would Die

On his first day in office, Trump changed the name of North America’s highest peak from Denali back to Mount McKinley.

Then he famously became obsessed with putting his own name on the Kennedy Center.

And now he apparently wants to do the same with Ford's Theater, aka where Lincoln was shot.

Sooooooooooo...what's up with Trump's obsession with presidents who were assassinated? Is it because of his own attempt in 2024, and should a certain somebody start to worry he’s next? 

Questions. I Have Them.

Has the "hey guys could you give us the room?" thing ever happened in real life? It's constantly happening on my tv screen & yet I've never heard of anybody knowing anybody who ever heard of anybody doing this in real life, so?

A Day in the So-Called Life

I got on the elevator earlier (as opposed to in the future, I suppose? 🤔) & there was an older gentleman on crutches; throughout the ride I patted myself on the back for confirming to myself that of COURSE I'll let this guy get off first, I'll do a juuuuuuust-slightly-below-what-could-be-plausibly-accused-of-being-dramatic sweep of the hand towards the door for him. later on he'd tell his wife about the amazing guy on the elevator; he'd write a goddam country-western song about me if he was Townes Van Zandt. You'll always have this connection, this connection where common decency and goodness won the day, the first of what would hopefully be many days. My thoughtlessness & consideration for this gentlemen made me humbly accept my own greatness.

"You," I shook my head in wonder at myself, "you really are the greatest, you really are."

"What a fucking prick" I said to myself 10 seconds later when he had no problem sprinting out of the elevator ahead of me without even looking in my direction.

Art Great Googly Moogly! du Jour

I'm no expert on art - I don't even think I took an art class in college, which is strange for me I think? - but I've looked at & loved a lot of paintings in my life (as opposed to anytime else, I suppose?) & I think this is the first time I've ever seen some sort of see-through technique like this? With oils? 😲🤯🤯

The Absinthe Drinker
by Viktor Oliva circa 1901

Insta Mukluks: darkgloomyart

 

Incredible du Jour

I hate hate hate the Diamondbacks but this is easily the best thing you'll read all day. 🤣😭🥲 

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Mood in Car Shifts After Dad Botches Keyboard Intro to Baba O'Reilly

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.