Nine Christmas Movies

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Ralphie (with Glasses) and the Kids from A Christmas Story

Following is a list of the nine Christmas movies I am committed to seeing again and again during the Yule season. It is highly individual and does not contain many of the usual “heartwarming” titles that clog so many lists like atherosclerosis.

They are listed in order of preference:

A Christmas Story (1983)

It is as if this film were deliberately made with me in mind. The opening scenes shot on Cleveland’s Public Square, featuring the toy display at Higbee’s Department Store, were part of my past. And Ralphie’s school resembles Harvey Rice Elementary School, where I spent kindergarten and part of first grade trying to come to terms with the English language.

A Christmas Carol (1951)

This is by far my favorite version, starring Alastair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge. I never tire of the story, and this is the most complete telling of Dickens’s tale.

Lady in the Lake (1947)

Robert Montgomery as detective Phillip Marlowe attempting to track down the missing wife of a magazine publisher during Christmas. The love story between Marlowe and Publishing Exec Adrienne Fromsett (played by Audrey Totter) is actually believable.

The remaining titles are in random order and are, to my mind, not quite so good as the top three above:

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) with Jimmy Stewart
The Shop Around the Corner (1940) also with Jimmy Stewart
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) – Stop motion animation from Tim Burton
The March of the Wooden Soldiers (1934) with Laurel & Hardy, a childhood favorite
The Curse of the Cat People (1944) by Val Lewton with Simone Simon singing a lovely French carol
The Bishop’s Wife (1947) with Cary Grant

I’m sure that most people’s reaction to this list is, “What about X, Y, and Z?” They might be on your list, but didn’t make it to mine.

Christmas Cheer

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Christmas Display at the Grier Musser Museum

This afternoon, Martine and I visited our friends Rey and Susan Tejada at the Grier Musser Museum near downtown L.A. The Victorian house is being dwarfed by a four-story apartment building under construction just north of them, but the Spirit of Christmas is very much evident in the holiday-related antiques on display.

I forgot to bring my camera along, so the picture above is from our 2019 visit at Christmas time.

As Christmas Day gets closer, I have pretty much surrendered to the good feelings that supposedly prevail at this time. Martine is listening to the Classic Christmas Music channel on Music Choice, and I no longer grit my teeth—unless they decide to play “The Little Drummer Boy,” in which case I feel it incumbent on me to leave the room. Pah-RUP-pup-PUM.

I just want to make Martine happy this time of year. On Monday, I will cook up one of her favorite dishes, a beef stew from a recipe in the New York Times. And we already have a couple of bottles of her favorite wine, Egri Bikavér (Bull’s Blood of Eger) from Hungary.

If Martine is happy, I will be happy.

DMV

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Time to Renew My Drivers License

As my drivers license expires in three weeks, I thought it would be a good idea to renew it before it was too late. I used to go to the Santa Monica DMV on Colorado Avenue. The last few times I went there, however, I felt as if I were in a Soviet bread line. Last time, I renewed my license in Torrance, which wasn’t bad. This time, I went to Culver City, which is much closer.

Everything went like clockwork. I was delighted that I no longer had to take the multiple choice “Knowledge Test” with its gotcha questions about blood alcohol, child seats, and obscure legal penalties—none of which is relevant to my driving experience. I was in and out in less than thirty minutes—a record for me. And I walked out with an Interim Driver License until the permanent one with my photo arrives after the holidays.

People tend to be very negative about the Department of Motor Vehicles. Probably, they all went to the Santa Monica branch.

Eluding the Trumpster Dumpster

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Notes for Those Attempting to Flee the U.S. of A.

After the November 5th election, many voters are considering the possibilities of becoming an expatriate in a country where the next President (hopefully) could not touch them. After the recent threats to Mexico and Canada, this may not work.

There are two possibilities for a safe passage away from the Trumpster Dumpster. First, choose a country that the next President does not know exists. Here are a number of possibilities:

  1. Azerbaijan*
  2. Belize
  3. Benin
  4. Bosnia and Herzegovina*
  5. Burkina Faso*
  6. Burundi
  7. Cabo Verde
  8. Comoros
  9. Djibouti*
  10. Eritrea*
  11. Eswatini*
  12. Guinea-Bissau*
  13. Kiribati
  14. Kyrgyzstan*
  15. Lesotho*
  16. Liechtenstein*
  17. Malawi
  18. Nauru
  19. Niue*
  20. Sao Tome and Principe*
  21. Tajikistan*
  22. Timor-Leste
  23. Tuvalu
  24. Vanuatu*

To provide an extra level of safety from MAGA-hatted provocateurs, select one of the above countries marked with an asterisk (*). These are countries it is not likely the next President would be able to pronounce correctly enough to be understood.

Kigumi

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The Art and Tradition of Japanese Carpentry

Today, I met my brother at the Japan House in Hollywood. He drove in from Palm Desert, where he is a builder whose specialty over the years has been working with wood. On display at the Japan House through January 22, 2025 is an exhibit entitled “Masters of Carpentry: Melding Forest, Skill and Spirit.” It was an awesome display of the beauty and intricate detail that is the art of Japanese carpentry.

According to the handout describing the exhibit:

The exhibit is structured around 5 pillars of daiku [Japanese woodworking masters] culture: a reverence for nature and the Japanese forest, the master carpenters’ refined tools, the practice of dōmiya daiku—the temple and shrine carpenters, kigumi— the strength and beauty of Japanese joinery, and the work of the sukiya daiku—the skillful carpenters employing natural materials to detail and finish teahouses.

What impressed me the most were the exhibits of the intricate joinery linking the boards, posts, and beams using careful measurement and relying as little as possible on nails and other iron and steel fasteners. The result is aesthetically pleasing and built to last. And because it is carefully selected from a large variety of native woods, it even smells beautiful.

According to the exhibit, the islands that constitute Japan are 67% forested. Even such exotic woods as persimmon fruit trees are used because of the striated grain of the wood.

Intricate and Ultimately Pleasing

Although, unlike my brother, I have no skill in woodworking, I quickly became aware that this was high art and a labor of love. This is an exhibit with broad appeal to anyone with an artistic frame of mind. The two hours we spent at the Japan House Masters of Carpentry Exhibit was well worth it.

Japan House Los Angeles
Gallery Level 2
6801 Hollywood Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90028

https://www.japanhousela.com/

A Dream Within a Dream

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Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

I think we underestimate the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Here’s one of his best, on the subject of life being but a dream. “Deceptively simple?” you might ask. Perhaps, but that is their strength.

A Dream Within a Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone? 
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Malibu in My Lungs

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The Franklin Wildfire in Nearby Malibu

When the dry Santa Ana winds blow in from the desert, every tree, every cactus, every bush is at risk of being involved in a wild conflagration that eats up vast tracts of land. Such is the Franklin Fire in Malibu, which, after a week of rampant destruction, is only 54% contained.

Alas, a good part of the ash from that fire is contained in my lungs. It causes my nose to run, punctuated by mammoth sneezes that shake the walls of my abode. As the crow flies, I am only a few miles from Malibu Canyon, ground zero for the worst damage.

I have driven Malibu Canyon Road many times en route to Malibu Creek State Park, which is where the M*A*S*H television show was filmed.

After I was on crutches for two years, I had a crutch-burning party at Tapia Park around 1969. Unfortunately, the flames have destroyed Tapia Park where I celebrated being able to walk again without sticks.

If we get some rain soon, I will be able to go through the day without forcibly expelling ash from my lungs every few hours.

Psychological Experiments

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John Cleese on Lawyers

I just finished reading John Cleese’s Professor at Large, which reprises a number of talks he gave at Cornell University while he was a visiting Professor-at-Large there over a period of some eighteen years. I broke out laughing when I read the following:

CLEESE: I had to switch to law [at Cambridge University] because there was almost nothing else I could switch to:

INTERVIEWER: So, you’re saying law is easier?

CLEESE: Well, law was kind of easier for me because I am fairly precise with my use of words and I can think in terms of categories, which is all law is—until you start practicing, and then it’s about villainy and low cunning.

I’ll tell you my favorite joke about lawyers because it actually involves universities. The psychological departments of universities are using lawyers now, instead of rats, in their experiments. There are three reasons for this. One is that there are more lawyers than rats. Second, there are some things that rats just won’t do. And thev third is is that there was a bit of a problem because sometimes the experimenters got fond of the rats. And I want you to know that joke has nothing to do with the fact that I am going through an expensive divorce at the moment.

A Bulletin from the Ministry of Silly Walks

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John Cleese of Monty Python Shows You How

He’s not just one of the funniest men who have ever lived. He also has a brain, a very good one, in fact. For a number of years, he served as a Professor-at-Large at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. During that time, he showed up occasionally and delivered some fascinating talks, which were collected and published in a book entitled Professor at Large: The Cornell Years.

His first talk was about his reactions to a book by Guy Claxton about creativity. It was called Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind:

It’s a book that addresses a danger that has been developing in our society for several years. This danger is based on three separate wrong beliefs. The first is the belief that being decisive means taking decisions quickly. The second is the belief that fast is always better. The third is the belief that we should think of our minds as computers.

Now, of course, there are situations where you have to think fast, like how to avoid a car driving on the wrong side of the freeway. It seems, however, that many American businessmen have made something of a fetish out being articulate and quick on the draw.

Creativity just cannot be made to order:

The point is, we just don’t know where we get our ideas from, but it certainly isn’t from our laptops. They just pop into our heads. The greatest poets and scientists freely admit that they have no control over the creative process. They all know that they cannot create to order. They can only put themselves in favorable—usually quiet—circumstances, bear the problem in mind, and … wait. Indeed, the whole creative process is so mysterious that academic psychologists who studied creativity in depth in the ’60s and ’70s eventually just gave up because they couldn’t get any further—they literally couldn’t explain it.

Seeing as how John Cleese and his five Monty Python associates are among the most creative comics of the last half century, I can only assume that the man knows what he is talking about. Even if he walks silly.

Don’t Toque to Me About Chefs!

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Making a $45.00 Tower of Exotic Foodstuffs

The following is a repost from December 20, 2014.

The problem with American restaurants is that there are too many chefs and not enough cooks. Ever since the Food Network went on the air, people started paying too much attention to people with large white toques who like to mess around with food, forming little towers of quinoa with raspberry sauce and maybe a small amount of meat or fish. The less the foods appear to go together, the more renown the chef is likely to earn for his or her daring.

It’s become an epidemic. The tutsi-fruitsie is king. The ice tea is contaminated with passion fruit or other petrochemical waste. Side dishes avoid the usual rice or potatoes and provide instead broccolini with mashed yeast and ground Murano glass and Galena lead pellets.

Whenever I see some Culinary Institute of America (CIA) chef wearing a towering white toque, I know I’m in for a pretentious soaking. On the other hand, when I see what Hungarians call a szakács or szakácsnő (cook, masculine or feminine gender respectively), I know I am likely to have an excellent meal. There must be no toque or other sartorial trimmings. I want a good, honest cook who knows how to prepare food. And no little towers!

As for the Food Network, I hope they switch over to running “Antiques Roadshow” or “Pawn Stars.” Or maybe they can talk about Kim Kardashian or some other celebrity twinkie. They certainly have not done anything to improve the quality of food in this country.