Ohio University used to break from Thanksgiving to New Year’s leaving those of us without anywhere better to go at home, with or without a job. Home for the holidays my freshman year my girlfriend broke up with me and that was particularly devastating because no one had ever broken up with me before.
She is still the only person who ever has. Yeah, I said it.
Sophomore year, for better or worse, I was much more self-possessed and relaxed into the holidays in a manner I never had before. They were big fun. I was taken by the spirit, the spirit of Christmas, if not of Christ. There were three albums I listened to a lot that season, driving my mother to distraction: George Winston’s December, Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas, and the new compilation to benefit the Special Olympics, A Very Special Christmas.
Since then I have become something of a holiday music nut. I look forward to that time after Thanksgiving when I have permission (in my house) to begin playing holiday music. The house is decorated, I want my mind decorated.
But I don’t like all Christmas music, not just any will do. In the early 90s I made a cassette of my very favorite Christmas songs, C-90 minutes of tunes and that was the soundtrack for me. It was called The Pudding Mix, after the name of the extended version of Wham’s “Last Christmas.”
In 2004 I made a new Pudding Mix CD to share with my colleagues, another in 2007, and again in 2009. But I wasn’t happy with these, because in an effort to fill them out I added songs I didn’t really care about.
I made this fan video of the Firesign Theatre bit "Toad Away" ten years ago. Unsolicited YouTube comment: "NOT YOUR TYPICAL ALBUM HACK WITH A BACKGROUND!"
But anyway, who listens to cassettes or CDs anymore? A few years ago some folks who worked on Bad Epitaph’s production of The Santaland Diaries asked for a playlist of the songs we used, and so I obliged. It is a great collection of songs. And it’s only an hour, perfect length.
When I played "Crumpet the Elf" three years ago I was inspired to make a collection of songs that I think of as holiday records, but really aren’t.
This year I received a passing request for a new "Pudding Mix" (it was from Daniel) and I was torn. Was I just going to throw together more Christmas songs, without a theme? Just to do it? I decided if I had an hour’s worth of music I could listen to more than once, by December 1, then I would share it. And surprise, I did.
I don’t need to explain too deeply just how to make a mixtape or playlist, Nick Horby has already done this much better than I. It’s not just about clustering a bunch of songs together, they need to sound like they belong together. And there are a number that I have been enjoying listening to recently -- and a few surprise covers I want to point up, cover versions of strange holiday favorites I’d never heard before.
The Closing of the Year: First performed by Wendy & Lisa (formerly of The Revolution) for the holiday bomb Toys, starring Robin Williams. Written by producer Trevor Horn, in its original version it is appropriately sentimental late 80s pop, but in the late 1990s he created a totally bonkers orchestral version featuring Plácido Domingo and Sarah Brightman.
Christmastime in Painesville: In the early 90s this novelty song by the band Slack Jaw was a favorite on WENZ. More recently the song’s composer John Koury joined former deadboys bassist Frank Secich to form The Deadbeat Poets, and it’s their version which is available for streaming. It’s more polished than the original, but then, they are older. And aren’t we all?
Even a Miracle Needs a Hand: In 1974 the Rankin Bass factory produced the cartoon (not stopmotion) special Twas the Night Before Christmas, in which an inventor has created a special clock to welcome Santa on Christmas Eve. However, when it is broken (we don’t need to get into this) a family of mice work to repair the damage. That explains this song’s lyrics … but I must tell you, I did not actually expect to find it when I searched on Spotify. Imagine my utter Christmas joy to discover this beautiful, retrofuturistic rendition, recorded only last year by soundcape hipster Sonntag (Zach Johnston).
When I was in college, I used to make a mixtape every summer. I referred to it (to myself) as a “junk tape.” It was intended to be a document of the season, because I love summer so much, even when I hate it.
If there was a song I was listening to a lot, I’d add it to the tape. A movie I discovered at the video store, I put a snatch of great dialogue or music on the tape. Or moaning. You get what I’m saying.
Bumpers from Sunday Progressions, maybe I would record myself reading one sentence from a novel or a comic book. I still have them somewhere, from 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990 …
The 1991 mixtape was the absolute best. It was a complicated summer, the tape begins from when I left Los Angeles, and chronicles my being single in my new apartment, trying to rekindle a relationship, meeting people on Coventry, getting kittens, waiting tables, having troublesome one-night stands.
The following summer I was partway through creating my Summer 1992 mixtape when it, the 1991 tape, and my car, were stolen in New York City. I made summer tapes for a couple years to follow, but it was always with a sense of sadness for their lost brethren.
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern (1991)
The summer of 1991 still exists, of course, in my memory. Not many photographs, not much documentation, but I was there. Out there, on the street. Performing at open mics in the yard, handing change to addicts, listening to my roommate have sex, meeting characters. Laying the groundwork for my adulthood. But there is still an emotional gap, and it is recorded onto that lost cassette.
Now, unlike then, I have documentation. Gigabytes of documentation. But will this summer be absent in other ways? Because of everything that did not happen, or happened at a technological remove.
Will we hold memories of good times when our senses are not entirely engaged? All the cocktail parties, trivia nights, play readings and performances, did they actually happen if the people we interacted with were not in three dimensions? Have no odor? No observable feet?
CAMP THEATER
Trying the think back even two months is taxing. Each Friday I think, again? And yet, I will retain fond memories of this year's virtual Camp Theater!
However, though we all have made fascinating and in some cases groundbreaking discoveries in online and distanced performance, nothing compares to the energy of young people brought together to play and work, to act, dance, sing and combat, to dress up and stage work together, and I hope we never have to do it this way again.
Chase Kneuven & Alexis Long (Culver City Public Theatre)
THE WAY I DANCED WITH YOU
Our friends at the Culver City Public Theatre were forced to suspend their spring production of Romeo & Juliet -- and also their free, summer production of About a Ghoul, my children’s play adapted from Moroccan folk tales.
In lieu of these events they have hosted a series of virtual play readings, and I was very happy to witness their reading of my play The Way I Danced With You, directed by Lauren Bruniges and performed by Alex Long and Chase Kneuven.
Even better, they are currently in the process of creating a full, virtual production of Sherlock Holmes Meets the Bully of Baker Street, which will be presented on select dates next month.
Topsail Island, North Carolina
NORTH CAROLINA
Okay, I don’t want to get defensive about this but, okay? We went on vacation, and not just anywhere, but we went to the beach. I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking, “what the fuck were you thinking?”
Look, it’s not like we went to Florida. I wasn’t soaking in a hot tub with two hundred strangers, I wasn’t soaking in coronavirus soup. My mother-in-law had rented a beach house before it all came down and we weighed our options and thought, well. We know this place. The beach is not crowded, we will social distance, be together as a family. No hugs, no handshakes. We’ll dine-in and enjoy the sun and try to create some sense of sanity.
I am reminded of freshman year at school. First years were not permitted to do acting work. As an extracurricular I volunteered to be a DJ for the green radio station, and one of my classmates mused that I had found a way to still be vocal and creative, even if I couldn’t do so onstage. It felt like that, almost like getting away with something.
Brian Pedaci & Zyrece Montgomery (Cleveland Public Theatre)
The fact that I conducted the final rehearsals and all of the performances from a beach house felt even more transgressive. This is how I get my kicks, I guess.
We had barely been home before driving off again, this time to Flood’s Cove. Heading out, I thought it was an unwise decision, and not for the obvious reasons. I have never arrived at the Barnstable without my mother there waiting for me. Stepping into that empty, unprepared cabin, was a challenge but I held it together. We closed the door to the first floor room she used to share with father, and just last year with Jacques.
My wife, my son, and I (the girl has a job and stayed at home) only this trio dined each night at the table which was traditionally full of Hansens and Bakers, Thayers, Kosboths and Tanskis. I wondered why I was there, was I there for me, or was I merely holding a place?
But as the week progressed, I felt my own place. The boy and I would fish, or he would fish and I would read and we went out on the water and I began to feel my own sense of ownership. And I knew I would return.
Many grateful thanks.
ESTATE SALE
Settling my mother’s estate has been a multi-level process, one which should have been resolved months ago but for the virus. Every time I go there I feel as though it will be my last, first to assess the estate sale team, bringing everything she has ever owned (she has owned, but also what he parents owned, eight decades of belongings) to be sorted, priced, and sold.
It was overwhelming. This is why you pay people to do things you don’t have the heart to do.
The sale was successful, ask me for a reference. I was out of town for the weekend itself, I was glad to be literally removed from town. But I still needed to return to haul out the garbage, the useless leftovers, the junk. The unwanted artifacts.
Waiting for the guys to come, the junk men. Lying on the floor of the dining room, the same space mom occupied in her hospice bed as she died. I hoped it would be poignant, that there might be some epiphany but mostly I just looked at my phone and dozed. CENTER FOR ARTS-INSPIRED LEARNING
As the summer was drawing to a close, I was contacted by Giorgiana Lascu at the Center for Arts-Inspired Learning (formerly Young Audiences of Northeast Ohio) to provide some short play scripts for her teenage interns as part of their end-of-season program of events. We spent a crazy morning pitching out scripts and her charges were very excited about getting to work on them.
In the past five months, folks have created nearly seventy-five short films from these scripts. I have actually backed away from writing as many, recently I have been playing with dialogue between a mother and daughter and I am not sure where that is going to go yet, but it is an exciting new journey.
Meantime, it does my heart glad to look back over the summer, to see it book-ended by Camp Theater, and by this project, enjoying the work of hopeful young people.
THE DECK
Five years ago we had our deck rebuilt and since that time I have taken loving care of it. We have expanded the furniture to include shelves and a small table, found on someone’s curb.
Houseplants and candles and twinkle lights and now it is as though we have added an entire new room to our modest abode. And we write and we read and we drink (we’ve recently cut the drinking) and relax and create and do our best to enjoy what we have and to make our way through.
I am anxious about the time we all have to go back indoors.
Thank you for listening to my Summer 2020 junk tape.
“I should go out and honk the horn,
It’s Independence Day.
Instead I just pour myself a drink.” - This One’s From the Heart, Tom Waits & Crystal Gayle
Twenty-five years ago and shortly after I got married (the first time) I craft myself a mixtape. I do not need to explain what a mixtape is, Nick Hornby did so most eloquently in High Fidelity. Needless to say, there are the tapes you made for yourself, and those you made for others. This one was for me.
Mixtapes took time in a way playlists do not, because they needed to be edited in real time. You had to play the song all the way through to get it on tape. You had to listen to it that way, too. There was also a mystery to the duration of the side, and how many songs you could get on it … unless your new bride was a programmer and made you a special time calculator, which she was and which she had.
My urge for this particular mixtape was to create a melancholy mix of every song that hurt. If it was not a song which in the playing humiliated me, and deeply, then it had no place on the cassette. The cover art is made of lines of handwriting, photocopied from some of the most painful letters I had ever received from lovers or friends. The tape was titled, “pathetic.”
I made this tape for myself in January 1993. I had been married for less than two months.
“I can’t tell, is that a siren or a saxophone?” - This One’s From the Heart, Tom Waits & Crystal Gayle
July 4, 1981. Not yet thirteen, crazy about girls since I was at least ten, at the annual Independence Day carnival celebration in my hometown I made a connection with the one who would soon become my first true girlfriend. Soon, but not yet.
Emboldened by my first kiss, I spent the summer flirting with other girls, too. I decided I wasn’t exactly the creep I always thought I was, and it was a new world, writing letters, straining to express desire and interest without knowing the words.
I had my own soundtrack then, too. A cassette of singles I had purchased over the months from Kmart. They were the songs of the corporate radio machine, so even though my memory of the summer of ‘81 includes masculine pop classics like Hall & Oates “You Make My Dreams” and “Jessie’s Girl” the tunes on my playlist were prefab nonsense like “Hooked On Classics” and “Stars on 45.”
As with so many things, I was never very good at knowing exactly what good taste in music was. This was always something I relied on girls to teach me.
"Don't sit home and cry
On the Fourth of July."
- Little Boy Blue, Tom Waits
One woman I knew had a term for when you tell a story so many times you put yourself into the story and believe that you had actually been there; she called it an “in vitro experience.” And so it is with the music that means so much to the people that I get close to, and my love for them imprints this music on my heart so deeply that even when they are gone, and my connection between them and the music in question has faded deeply into the background, my own affection for the music remains as though I had discovered it myself.
First she played me “Nothing Looks the Same in the Light.” Later, she taught me what it means.
He played the soundtrack to The Moderns so often, I had created an entire screenplay in my head years before I had ever seen it. My version was darker.
Then there was the one with whom I often shred a bed, but no kisses. At bedtime, they would often play One From the Heart, a collection of songs by Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle written for a film by Francis Ford Coppola. It was in joining them in this practice (more than once) that this entire record became one I still need to listen to all the way through, that it doesn’t even exist to me as individual songs, only endless night whispers and thwarted fumbling.
Never seen the movie. Most people haven't.
Sometimes I feel as though I have absolutely no personality of my own, that I am merely a hollow vessel, devoid of spirit, emotion, or understanding, filled to overflowing with the memories, thoughts, ideas and passions of others. My great hope is that my interpretation and redirection of all of these compelling and competing narratives has somehow held within them any spark of originality.
Happy Independence Day.
UPDATE 2026: Last summer, I finally saw the film One From the Heart. Like The Moderns, it was nothing like the movie I had created in my head. Unlike The Moderns, it's terrible
The most interesting aspect of the new Marvel Comics summer blockbuster Guardians of the Galaxy is, of course, The Awesome Mix Vol.1. Our main protagonist ... well, our main protagonist is Rocket, but the guy we follow from the beginning of the film, the one human in the company, is Peter Quill, was abducted from Earth in 1988, when he was about ten years-old.
His most treasured possessions are a late-80s model Walkman, and more importantly a cassette tape given to him by his mother while she was dying from cancer. On it are songs she thought he needed to know and love as she did.
All well and good, when a Baby Boomer aged parent believes they are acting to hold back the onslaught of rap music and hair metal which would otherwise poison a boy's love of real music. I could go on about Baby Boomers and their arrogant insinuations that the music of their childhood was the last great pop music, but in the past ten years I have heard enough members of my generation saying the same thing about the 80s and 90s. It's an American thing.
However, as the music on The Awesome Mix is almost entirely from the 1970s, it should be noted what a peculiar time in music history that was. The Baby Boomers, as always the dominant force in taste and culture, shaped the pop charts for a longer period than any other generation in history. So as the "Me" Decade stretched on, with Boomers aging into their late twenties, the pop charts became more adult, introspective, and maudlin.
The number one song of Summer 2014 was Fancy by Iggy Azalea. That is a song for teenagers. The number one song of Summer 1978 was the Doobie Brothers' Minute By Minute, a song which has the sonic medicinal qualities of warm milk. That is a song for shut-ins.
Peter Quill's mother apparently thought it was vitally important he be lulled into an early sense of self-involved torpor by including I'm Not In Love by 10cc. I mean, I had to listen to that song on the radio ten times a day when it was current, and it made me the solipsistic man I am today. Why on earth would anyone intentionally subject a child to that kind of abuse?
Throughout the film, I was also painfully aware of how each of these songs were chosen as a marketing device, to satisfy the parents in the audience who were accompanying their children to this big, loud, superhero flick. I mean, I wanted to be there, too, I am not pretending I didn't, but I also felt I was being pandered to. It's not like these are deep-catalog cuts, they are entirely ultra-familiar songs, most of them having been featured prominently in numerous previous films.
However, let us at last take the premise of this mixtape gift from dying mother to son sincerely, and at face value. As our favorite songs from our youth remind us of who we are, so does the gift of our favorite music say, this is who I am. Remember me.
I am reminded of the Canadian film Last Night (fans of Slings & Arrows take note, it stars and was written and directed by Don McKellar - deal with that) and takes place on the final evening before the world ends. Why the world ends isn't important. I mean, it really isn't, we never learn why or how it is everyone knows this is the case. It's just a dark comedy about what everyone might do if the end of the world were certain, and known. I love this movie.
From time to time, we hear a DJ on the radio spinning the "Greatest 500 Songs Of All Time". The thing is, they are obviously not the greatest songs of all time, they include such non-hits as Jimmy Loves Mary-Ann (from the same clowns who recorded Brandy, You're a Fine Girl) and Heartbeat It's a Love Beat by the DeFranco Family.
The man says, "We've reached number twelve on the top 500 of all time, according to ...
me, all right? So don't bother calling in. This time, it's my choice."
Last week, my boss sent me this from his cellphone -- they were on the "impulse buy" shelf in Marc's in Berea.
My reaction was $6.29? For real, $6.29??? Those aren't on the "dollar" shelf?
Those are crap tapes, too. 'Normal Bias.' Those are for recording lectures with in a class through which you intend to sleep.
My attic is slowly but surely becoming denuded of cassettes. The problem is not the factory-produced albums on cassette. In spite of the hipster boom-box revolution, I have tried and failed to sell even the rarer items on hand -- unique "Not-For-Resale" radio interviews with Elvis Costello lifted from WXTQ, a hard-cased soundtrack to The Magic Christian, doesn't matter -- no one will spring for them on eBay or anywhere else.
If I see this graphic one more time I am having everyone born between 1961 and 1981 murdered.
No, throwing all those away are easy. It goes without saying that every Maxell or Memorex with entire albums dumped onto it went first. No, they aren't the problem. It's all the mix tapes.
I am not going to revisit the emotional attachment to mix tapes that Nick Hornby did so successfully in High Fidelity (the book, not the movie, you philistine) suffice to say, yes, they each hold significant memories. They were each made at a significant time in my life, probably a depressing time in my life, because when you are happy you do not have time to cue up vinyl or a CD, start recording at the right point (listen to the previous track, crank the volume until the very last sound fades away, stop, eject, quarter turn back with you pinky, return to deck, hit record a breath before staring the next track) and wait until the song is over, in real time.
Mix discs created on iTunes are easy. No wonder they're all disjointed, thoughtless and awful. But then, you don't have to listen to a disc all the way through the way you have to with a cassette.
Recently I rediscovered the best mix tapes I ever made, ever. Three cassettes on a similar theme -- hating myself, and fucking.
pathetic. (1993)
The first -- pathetic. -- had a purpose. I tried to think of every song that made me feel like biting my pillow. Almost every single one had something to do with a woman from my past, or a man. The fact that I felt the urge to compose the ultimate self-loathing cassette a scant three months after I had just gotten married was probably not a good sign.
really pathetic. (1994)
The followup -- really pathetic. -- was not just more of the same. Many more of these were recent releases, specifically reflecting the state of my marriage. We were each searching for happiness outside the home (did I put that politely enough?) and speaking just for myself, I was in therapy, miserable, and feeling reckless. And yet there is Wham! on this, so I was still kind of a pussy.
pathetic and sad. (1995)
Having made the first, I had not intended to make a second. After the second, I did not imagine the third -- pathetic and sad. -- would be the last, nor that it would sound like this. Marriage over, a startling new relationship begun, these are the songs that made me think, "I'm sorry." But not to my ex-wife, nor any of those other women. I was apologizing to me.
