Presenting my 2013 yulemix, Children, Go Where I Send Thee!

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Annotated track list TK, but like James Brown says early in the set, Don't Be Hungry -- the latest and longest installment in my Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable series is live for your hall-decking pleasure now right here.

I've recontextualized a handful of old favorite tunes and clips from prior sets, but despite its formidable length -- a few minutes longer than Die Hard, but still a few minutes shorter than The Avengers -- the overwhelming majority of this one is stuff I've never compiled before. And as usual, I've already got a stockingload of outtakes I'll be mulling over again for possible inclusion next year. It was agony to lose the "Cowboy Santa Suite" from Side B, but take it from a guy who spends a lot of time seeing theatre: Act Two cannot be longer than Act One; that's just a gross violation of the social contract of art-making. Try it and the audience will turn on you.

My only real goal this year was to keep the mix short and tight. An hour seemed reasonable. Hey, Peace on Earth sounds reasonable, too. May this keep you in good company on your long road trips and flights and sleepless nights.

Thanks as always to the great Andy Cirzan for stirring my interest in "holiday obscura" with his annual appearances on the great WBEZ radio show and podcast Sound Opinions.

FURTHER READING: My 2012 Washington Post essay about my annual yulemix project. My Post piece from a few weeks ago about Nick Lowe's terrific new Christmas album, Quality Street. And my Slate essay from last week that ponders why it's been a generation since we admitted a new song into the classic yule-pop canon. That last one got me invited on CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper last week! They haven't posted video of the segment, unfortunately -- I put on a sport jacket and combed my hair and everything -- but you can read a transcript here if you want.

Merry Christmas!

Sounds of the 60s: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, reviewed.

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Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Bethany Anne Lind, Tess Malis Kincaid, and Tom Key in Arena's Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. (Teresa Wood) 

If you don't know what to get your playgoing (or at least not-theatre-averse) parents for Christmas, and you can afford the freight, Arena Stage's Malcolm-Jamal Warner-starring Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and the Shakespeare Theatre Company's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum are both good revivals of 1960s items that they're likely to enjoy.

I liked them, too. But then, I'm big on the music, movies, and TV of the 60s. I review both in today's Washington City Paper, available wherever finer alt-weeklies are given away for free.

Musical Advent Calendar: On Her Majesty's Secret Service Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, 1969

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The soundtrack album for On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the once-reviled 1969 James Bond film that's enjoyed a critical reappraisal among fans in recent decades, isn't a Christmas record, true. But the film, which starred George Lazenby -- a handsome and hardy but unengaging Australian model with no prior acting experience -- in his single appearance as 007, is set at Christmas. 

Its soundtrack features some of the best music in the entire 50-year franchise. You've got John Barry's kinetic opening title theme (reprised in Brad Bird's The Incredibles, among other places). You've got its elegiac love theme, "We Have All the Time in the World," with lyrics by Hal David, beautifully sung by Louis Armstrong.

And until a couple of weeks ago, I didn't realize that you've also got Nina's (whose?) "Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?"

With its crisply annunciated Julie Andrews-style lead vocal and creepy childrens' choir, it would seem more at home in, say, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (written by Bond creator Ian Fleming) than in a Bond joint. It's lack of suitability for its original context makes it a perfect fit my annual yulemix, which I have this year decided to call Children Go Where I Send Thee! Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable Hard Eight: The Desolation of Nog. I have my reasons.

Matt Mira and Matt Gorley just posted the OHMSS episode of their terrific James Bonding podcast last week. Highly recommended.

Musical Advent Calendar: Children, Go Where I Send Thee! Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable Hard Eight: The Desolation of Nog, 2013

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We're going in a radically different direction with today's Musical Advent Calendar selection, debuting the cover of a classic Christmas record yet-to-come.

That would be the eighth in my unstoppable series of holiday mixtapes, Children, Go Where I Send Thee! Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable Hard Eight: The Desolation of Nog. My only real goal for this to staunch the 2009-2012 trend of these things getting steadily longer -- last year's installment weighed in at a truly obnoxious 130 minutes, only two minutes shorter than the classic holiday movie Die Hard. Which is not to say I wasn't proud of the goddamned thing. I was.

Anyway, that grand ambition of brevity flowered only, uh, briefly. When it drops in a week or so, my new yulemix will be another feature-length epic to comfort and amuse you through your car trips, your long layovers, and your interminable sleepless nights of loathing and regret. I think you'll really dig it. Merry Christmas!

Musical Advent Calendar: Christmas with McGriff, 1964

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"Featuring the fantastic organ artistry of Jimmy McGriff"!

Mr. McGriff, whose career spanned another 46 years after he played on Ray Charles' "I've Got a Woman" in 1961, died in 2008. I regret that I did not pay tribute to him on that year's collection, Santa Claus and Popcorn.

Musical Advent Calendar: Christmas with Buck Owens and his Buckaroos, 1965

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My best find this year. The songs more than live up to the sleeve's considerable promise. How had I never heard this, or even heard of this, before? You mofos been holding out on me.

I'll be fighting the temptation to over-represent it on the yulemix. Better to ration out its treasures over the coming years. I'm playing the long game, yulemixwise. But this one goes so deep I can afford to throw away good tracks like "Santa Looked a Lot Like Daddy" here.

I Came Here to Chew Bubblegum and Review 1988's They Live for The Village Voice

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In They Live, special Wayfarers reveal the subtext of the industrialized world.

It's just a capsule review, but any excuse to revisit this terrific low-budget, high-concept sci-fi flick is a good one. I prefer this over more beloved John Carpenter flicks like The Thing and Escape from New York.