Hark! "FOUR SEASONS TOTAL GREETINGS," my XVth fabulous #yulemix, hath arrived to delight your senses. One of them, anyway!

It’s the most puzzling tiiiiiiiiiiiiime of the year.

One knee operation, one global pandemic, three No Time to Die release dates, and one harrowing but un-fradulent presidential election later, your favorite foul-weather friend has returned to soundtrack (verb) your regrettably antisocial holidaze with another lovingly curated set of yulejams, yulehyms, and yulbrenners. Golly! HARK your herald angels and DECK whatever halls you’ve got, because this multidenominaltional multitrack is the funkiest yulestew in the multiverse. It’s got more hooks than Jan Hooks and more riffs than Ron Rifkin. Masked singers only, please.

Side B TK, OK?

ctklimek · FOUR SEASONS TOTAL GREETINGS—Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XV [Side A]

Just in time to save Christmas, it's the long-awaited second side of my 2020 yulemix! It's the perfectly imperfect soundtrack to your somber, shelter-in-place holiday.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Three Towering Sean Connery Performances

Connery kicks off what will become a Bond-flick tradition — the pre-title sequence — in Goldfinger, 1964.

Sean Connery, not the first screen James Bond but the first one that stuck, died at the age of 90 on Friday. His time in da moviesh spanned some 45 years, but to take stock of it in manageable fashion Pop Culture Happy Hour producer Jessica Reedy asked me to choose three of his performances to discuss. I did that with my pal Glen Weldon today. I tried to pick a trio that reflected the distinct phases of Connery’s career. Which means you’ll have to wait a little longer to hear Glen and I give 1974’s Zardoz the careful dissection it deserves.

Flowers (Postcards) For Harrison

This paen to handwritten correspondence is didactic and repetitive but whaddaya want from me, it's raining. At least it has a certified banger at the end. As of this morning the Cook Political Report had the South Carolina Senate race between three-term incumbent Lindsey Graham and challenger Jaime Harrison in the Toss-Up column.

Please make sure everyone you know votes... unless, you know.

Literature on Screen: "You" with Caroline Kepnes and Penn Badgley

I had roughly six weeks’ notice to prepare for the 90-minute discussion I moderated for the PEN/Faulkner Foundation on Sept. 23 between Caroline Kepnes, author of the bestselling thrillers You and Hidden Bodies, and Penn Badgley, who plays the homicidal narrator of those books on the Netflix series they spawned. Given that I had to read two 500ish-page novels and watch 20 hours of Netflix, that was a reasonable amount of time! But I was pleased with how the discussion turned out, and particularly that I managed to make my office/bedroom look enough like a recording booth to fool Mr. Badgley.

The PEN/Faulker people have now posted a video of the even, which you can watch here if you like.

IN EIGHT HOURS! It’s my first time conducting a live interview with the author of bestselling novels about a predator & the actor who plays that predator on TV so I left my keys in my door all night & did not discover this until a neighbor knocked at 8 AM to alert me. Good omen! https://t.co/iOn4iAvppB

— Chris Klimek (@ctklimek) September 23, 2020

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "American Utopia"

David Byrne and Spike Lee collaborated on a superb concert film of Byrne’s Broadway show American Utopia. (David Lee)

Unless I’m forgetting something the only band Pal-For-Life Glen Weldon and I have ever gone to see together was The Magnetic Fields a decade ago. Glen has declined invitations from me to performances by many other bands. Had we known one another in 2008, and had I known of his yen for Talking Heads, I certainly would’ve asked him to accompany me to Baltimore that September for the second night of ex-Heads frontman David Byrne’s tour promoting Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, his then-new album with longtime collaborator Brian Eno.

I wrote a brief review of that show for the Washington Post and then saw that tour two more times over the next year or so, at Wolf Trap and I at, I think, the Warner Theater. I loved the tour, devoted to Everything That Happens and the several other Byrne/Talking Heads albums on which Eno was a producer and/or a co-writer and performer. But I was frustrated, as I assume Byrne must have been, at the disparity in the audience’s reception of the superb new songs and the Heads classics: polite deference and ecstatic exuberance, respectively.

That’s a dynamic that repeats itself in American Utopia, Spike Lee’s superb concert film of Byrne’s latest show, which toured for a while before setting into a Broadway engagement at the Hudson Theater where Spike captured it last February, just before the Covid crisis struck NYC. Again Byrne has a strong album of recent material to work from, though only a quarter of American Utopia-the-show’s 20 songs come from Byrne’s 2018 album American Utopia. The rest are, with one unforgettable exception, mined from his 40-year catalog. I’m sure his fellow ex-Heads Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, and Jerry Harrison must think that by securing an audience for his new work by continuing to perform the most beloved material by a band that hasn’t toured since 1984, Byrne is having his cake and eating it, too. (Frantz says Byrne didn’t even invite him to see American Utopia during its Broadway run.)

I was honored to discuss most of this on a Pop Culture Happy Hour episode hosted by Glen and featuring the great Soraya Nadia McDonald, who blushed when I congratulated her on being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize this year. If I ever get that close to a Pulitzer, I won’t be nearly so gracious about it.

Call Me: The Telephonic Literary Union's "Human Resources," reviewed.

This is a panel from a David Mazzucchelli-drawn issue of Daredevil from the 80s, when phones were rotary and more suspenseful.

My first theater review—and The Telephonic Literary Union’s Human Resources is being presented by Woolly Mammoth Theater Company, its lack of resemblance to anything like a play notwithstanding—since I saw the Folger’s Merry Wives of Windsor back in January, when we all lived in another world and the population of the United States was more than 200,000 people larger than it is now, is in the Washington City Paper this week.

TL;DR: The show (or whatever it is) is an imperfect but worthy experiment in a form with a lot of possibility.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Enola Holmes"

Henry Cavill, Millie Bobbie Brown, and Sam Claflin as Sherlock, Enola, and Mycroft, respectively. (Netflix)

Wherein the alphabetical dream team of Klimek, Daisy Rosario, Glen Weldon, and Margaret H. Willison, LLP, breaks down Enola Holmes, the Millie Bobby Brown-shepherded Netflix movie adapted from Nancy Springer’s YA novels about Sherlock and Mycroft’s younger sister.

The only thing I have to add to what’s in the episode is that I wanted to smuggle in a second What’s Making Me Happy pick, one with resonances both to Sherlock Holmes and the Happy I cited, Stephen Baxter’s novel The Massacre of Mankind. It’s a new track from Elvis Costello called “Phonographic Memory,” a bizarre spoken-word account of an audience in some dark future listening to a speech mashed up from various recordings of the long-dead Orson Welles. “After the peace was negotiated, and the Internet switched off, knowledge returned to its medieval cloister,” Elvis intones over an open-tuned acoustic guitar.

The track, he has said is a digital B-side, so don’t look for it on Hey Clockface, the new album he’s dropping next month. In addition to creating the most famous adaptation of War of the Worlds — his Halloween 1938 Mercury Theatre radio play, ingeniously disguised as a series of news reports — Welles played Professor Moriarty in a 1954 radio adaptation of The Final Problem.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Star Trek: Lower Decks"

Lower Decks, the latest Star Trek spinoff, is meant to show us the crew members who work the shit jobs on a Federation starship. (CBS All Access)

It’s been nine months since last I joined a PCHH panel, and they’ve been dog months. In that span I’ve bought myself a pricey new microphone, had knee surgery, run zero point zero miles, and watched in impotent rage as a global pandemic has slain hundreds of thousands of Americans who might still be with us had responsible adults been in charge when the plague hit. Police officers murdered George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, millions took to the streets (I was still too weak to do that back in May and June) to protest police violence against persons of color, and my beloved hometown of Washington, DC was invaded by the U.S. military.

Dog months. And all without the outlets of running or boxing, the strategies I have relied upon to exorcize corrosive feelings since I was a kid. I got a bicycle at the end of June, and the increasingly long rides to which I’ve been treating myself have helped.

Anyway, Pop Culture Happy Hour! And a new Star Trek series, which is both animated and fluid-rich (blood, bile… alien vomit.)

Lower Decks is set in the Next Generation era, aboard the U.S.S. Cerritos, a California-class vessel. The first shuttlecraft we see parked in its shuttle bay is the Joshua Tree, a naked play for my affection. The shuttle Yosemite gets more airtime in the early episodes.

I was delighted to dissect the show with Stephen Thompson, Glen Weldon, and Petra Mayer.