This post originally appeared on June 24, 2010 at 6:26 p.m.
Maybe “well” is subjective …
If anyone but my Asia Argento plays Lisbeth Salander in an English-speaking adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I will put my hand through a blender. I pictured her the entire time I was reading.
Finished Girl With the Dragon Tattoo over a sleepless night that lead to one uneasy stretch of light snooze cut short by sudden bouts of vomiting. I found it very absorbing — the book, not the violent gut spasms from who-knows-what combination of stress and inattentively poor personal care — but it caromed briefly in to a few areas for which I was not wild. Still it all hung together in the end and I recommend it without reservation. Then I ended up reading a particularly pulpy and breezy Ross Macdonald mystery from the 70’s whose title I have already forgotten even though it kept me company for several hours.
See? Lots of people have insomnia and go on to have perfectly normal Summers! The Shining (Kubrick, 1980).
I only remember that I’d picked it up a few months back along with a couple 70’s editions of Zane Grey at my preferred comic store, which, besides selling comics and related games and accessories, also carries a small inventory of used, cheapo books and spotty collections of memorabilia depending on what luckless local nerds have either died or lost enough money to place their treasures in hock. I snatched up the Greys and this Macdonald book a few months ago because I dug the kind of blocky-schlocky look to the lines of the cover art.
The Underground Man — that’s right. Decent enough title, I guess.
The phrase “blew my mind” was used repeatedly in the book to refer to literally taking too much acid and suffering brain damage and prolonged schizophrenic episodes triggered by hallucinations, which usage I thought was a handy demonstration of the evolution of slang — in the book it was suggestive of overdose and possible fatality, but you can see how it developed over time the more benign definition it has now in the sense of changing one’s worldview in a feller-than-the-usual-pace-of-educational swoop, while still somewhat referencing the phrase’s original intent.
2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968). He swar to gar for all his life that whole sequences of this film were not planned to look like an acid trip, to which anyone who has ever done acid says, “Sure.”
The Macdonald book wasn’t the worst thing ever and some of the slangy shenanigans and quaintly dated rough talk in it wet my palate for some Hammett. I never re-read Red Harvest until October (red HARVEST, get it?) but I also brought down with me from Portland The Dain Curse and the Op’s short-story collection and could give one of those a spin. Think that’s what I’ll do tonight.
Actually maybe Hammett is only the appetizer. Know what? I think I will try to squeeze in L.A. Confidential before I have to pick up Tommyknockers. I usually, though not maniacally, like to read that closer to Christmastime because of the whole Bloody Christmas scandal that sparks so much of the action, but I’ve been self-auditing through all these long sick waking nights, and by setting this bookfoolery in to print I have come to see that I’ve got some really fucked-up and compulsive reading habits which are even perhaps the least of my worries and so I feel like rebelling against myself in this small thing to test the waters of making Change happen. I’m going to do this because I can.
Synchronicity — just dug out Red Harvest and the quote on the front cover is from Ross Macdonald, the author whose pulp I read this morning. Wild way that the universe is telling me I’m on the right track? or subconscious self-affirmation from whatever part of my brain has been looking at that (quite kickass) Red Harvest cover for the last four years?
I can’t say for sure. Either way, tell that girl from Canada that it ain’t ironic.
Once, a boyfriend and I were drinking spiked egg nog and sitting on the couch in his seedy apartment, surrounded by the trappings of our small, personal Christmas Eve gift exchange. I was planning to go home later in the evening and spend Christmas Day proper with my parents, and, since neither of us believed in Santa anymore, although I was wearing a smashing Mrs. Claus number from Frederick’s of Hollywood that he’d just given me, we saw nothing wrong with doing the gifts on Christmas Eve rather than pushing in on my family celebration for the morning.
His arm around me while we watched a burning log on a channel he’d found on the television, this boyfriend asked me, “What’s your favorite Christmas memory?”
My favorite Christmas memory. I was four years old and we lived in our second doublewide and, being a runt and not even considering myself worthy of a bed but dimly aware that it was too near a waste of money to buy child-sized things, as we would just outgrow them and render the gesture useless, I still slept in a crib. It was the year Strawberry Shortcake was first really huge, and I used to beg my parents to rent a VCR so we could watch Strawberry Shortcake tapes.
We went to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. It was the first time I’d ever been to Midnight Mass and been awake for it. All the lights were off in the church and we each carried a candle with a little cardboard-paper holder to protect our hands from the wax. I cradled mine in front of me and tried to guard the flame from my breathing — you know how kids breathe hotter and harder than adults, like they take in bigger gulps of the world, like we give up more on wanting a part of it all the older we grow, until at the end we can only reluctantly take in these thin little sips that don’t even stir the air. I shifted from foot to foot and spun my head around to get the best view of Our Lady Star of the Sea, looming and receding, so deliciously unfamiliar and creepy, in the flickering shadows thrown up by the candlelight, as the cantor sang the lineage of Christ.
At the final lines, “And thus, all things being right in the universe (or something like that) … Jesus Christ is born,” and the lights all came up at once and a tympani rolled and trumpets began as the choir started singing “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” and it blew my mind.
On the ride home, the defrost on the Honda we had didn’t work anymore, and my dad had his window down and kept leaning out and wiping the windshield. In the backseat, the dew on the windows refracted the orange sodium vapor lights and I could see myself reflected in the window, suffused with the glow of dancing lights as we passed under them.
It was a pretty decent trailer court (one of those ones that says it is a Mobile Home Park) and a lot of people had gone all out on decorations. Because I was only four, I hadn’t been out and about seeing the lights at night in the weeks prior, so it was new to me. Everything looked unearthly, serene and intended and transformed, and the air that came through my father’s rolled-down window was humid because our town was surrounded by bogs but frosty, too, like sucking in freezer air, or the blowback of your breath against a tray of ice cubes. It was bracing and beautiful in that way that only very cold things can be.
When we got home, I went to my room to put on my pyjamas and there was a bed in my room. It had an actual headboard, which my parents’ bed and certainly the hide-a-bed in the couch did not, and turned-back striped pink and green sheets and a Strawberry Shortcake quilt. There was a red heart-shaped decorative pillow on top of my regular pillow, edged with cotton eyelet lace. Propped against the heart pillow sat a Strawberry Shortcake doll, and I could tell she was one of the new ones that had strawberry-scented breath. The doll was the part that startled me the most, because it grounded the experience: this was something I’d seen on the television and not even dared ask for. This room could not be mine.
I stood in the doorway gaping. I remember I had to pee and was freaked out that this beautiful bed was in the middle of my room, where my crib should be. My first reaction was anxiety. I felt like I shouldn’t be there, or that someone was going to take it away. My father came in and threw me on the bed, so I bounced, and my mother took pictures of me holding the pillow and the doll.
After I’d changed and gotten ready for bed, and climbed in it for the first time, my mother came and sat by me and told me how my father got the pieces for the frame and my grandfather and uncle had put the bed together while we were at Mass. My aunt had bought the doll, my mother made the heart pillow, and my grandmother sewed the quilt. Money was very tight for my family at that time, and everyone had come together to make sure I got a big girl bed for the first Christmas I’d remember. While she described their plans, this feeling in my stomach shook looser and looser, and it got away from me and filled the room and I started crying.
My mother clucked over me and said I was tired, and stayed next to me with the light off until I made my breathing regular enough to convince her I was asleep and she left. I lay in the dark looking at the textured ceiling, trying to avoid the spots where in the dark it made shapes that scared me, and felt tears run backward down my cheeks and drip slowly in to my ears. It was like Christmas and the choir at Mass and the cold vastness of the empty town on the drive home, with the lights on and no one on the street, and yet the tiny little family with all their love filling up the inside of my room and our home — was all so big and simultaneous that I could only cry, not from being sad, but from being humbled.
I thought about all that when my boyfriend asked me my favorite Christmas memory, and got shy. “You go first,” I said.
He described how one Christmas, after they’d opened all their toys and were having breakfast and watching cartoons, his mother surprised them with another box full of toys for him and his sister.
I asked, “Do you think — was that maybe the first Christmas after your parents divorced?”
“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “That all runs together. It was just awesome when she brought in that box and I knew it was full of more toys. I got everything that year — G.I. Joes, the Castle Greyskull, like, seriously. Everything.”
I looked at him and he had these particularly garish colored lights strung up on his fake Christmas tree, the kind where the red is really pink, and he’d set them to blink, and at that moment he was lit by them in a way that made me not recognize him as he stared at the television. He seemed like a total alien, like someone with whom I’d never spent hours: a stranger the planes of whose face I had never memorized in the dark. And I never told him my memory.
It wasn’t his fault, and I railed against myself for it later and tried to pretend it hadn’t happened, but, in that exchange, this sharp divide fell down between us, for me, and I could never seem to want to get it back up. Maybe if I’d told him then about this disparity in our childhood memories, things would have been different, because it really wasn’t a big deal and might even, in the telling, have picked up some softer and selfless side, some deeper soul in him that I cheated out of revealing itself. I’ll never know, because I never told him about it.
Now, when I remember the Strawberry Shortcake bed, I remember, too, those decades later, sitting in self-imposed silence in my cheaply-ribboned red velvet and mirabou beside a stranger with a pink forehead and shadow-socketed eyes before a picture of a burning log, when I maybe missed the mark — or maybe ducked a knife — and I think again of the bigness of my family’s love and the smallness of the details of our lives, and am grateful more than ever before. And I still let tears roll into my ears sometimes, because of course they will all die, they have already begun, just as I will and have nearly, and all that I can do is cling to these passionate recollected moments, captured so clearly in my memory, and hold them close enough to keep my heart in its right shape, so then when I join them they’ll be able to recognize me.
Port-au-Prince, Haitian children in costumes for a Christmas pageant.
Much they saw, and far they went, and many homes they visited, but always with a happy end. The Spirit stood beside sick beds, and they were cheerful; on foreign lands, and they were close at home; by struggling men, and they were patient in their greater hope; by poverty, and it was rich.
Hathaway House orphanage. Highland Park, Los Angeles, CA. Dec. 23, 1948.
In almshouse, hospital, and jail, in misery’s every refuge, where vain man in his little brief authority had not made fast the door and barred the Spirit out, he left his blessing, and taught Scrooge his precepts.
(Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol. The Second Stave: The Ghost of Christmas Present.)
I hope that wherever we are, no matter our faith or circumstance, we do not in our little brief authority leave an embodiment of love for our fellow man out in the cold. Don’t bar the door. Let him come in and know you better.
No way, dude — stop him! Even though he is just thinking about Tzin-Tzin’s plan, look how Batman’s mouth has dropped open in outrage and chagrin. Go get ‘im, buddy!
I’m gonna spend my Christmas with a Dalek,
And hug him under the mistletoe
And if he’s very nice, I’ll feed him sugar spice
And hang a Christmas stocking on his big left toe
And when we both get up on Christmas morning
I’ll kiss him on his chrome implanted head
And take him in to say hi to Mum,
and frighten Daddy out of his bed!
The Go Gos. “I’m Spending Christmas With A Dalek.” Les Vandyke and Johnny Worth*. Oriole CB Records. 1964. Limited edition picture sleeve shown here.
*The same person. Mr. Vandyke created the production credit to make the outfit seem bigger.
It’s hard to believe it was just last Christmas that Harmony and I changed the world. And we didn’t mean to and it didn’t last long. You know a thing like that can’t.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Shane Black, 2005).
A murder mystery brings together a private eye, a struggling actress, and a thief masquerading as an actor.
(the imdb)
Look up “idiot” in the dictionary. You know what you’ll find?
A picture of me?
No. The definition of the word idiot, which you fucking are!
She opens the door, and she’s got nothing on but the radio. Yeah. She invites me to sit down, sits on my lap, fires up a spliff —
Geez. Really?
No! Idiot.
Merry Christmas, sorry I fucked you over.
No problem. Don’t quit your gay job.
She’s been fucked more times than she’s had a hot meal.
Yeah, I heard about that. It was neck-and-neck — but then she skipped lunch.
I peed on the corpse. Can they do, like, an ID from that?
I’m sorry, you peed on…?
On the corpse. My question is —
No, my question. I get to go first. Why in pluperfect hell would you pee on a corpse?
Hey, hey, hey! It’s Christmas. Where’s my present, Slick?
Your fucking present is you’re not in jail, fag-hag.
You don’t get it, do you? This isn’t “good cop, bad cop.” This is fag and New Yorker. You’re in a lot of trouble.
I think this is a killer movie and I don’t want to give away the plot, which is why these blurbs between the pictures are all quotes from the incredibly witty, breakneck script. Writer-director Shane Black’s screenplay is loosely adapted from the Brett Halliday novel Bodies Are Where You Find Them (real name Davis Dresser).
The title underwent many changes over the course of production, before, allegedly at Val Kilmer’s suggestion, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was finally settled on. It comes from the 1968 book by film critic Pauline Kael.
Kael heard that in Italy James Bond was known as “Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” and thought that was the most succinct summation of the appeal of cinema she had ever heard. She fell in love with the phrase. Though she heard it from an Italian movie poster, “Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” was in wide use, from Southern Europe all the way to Asia, as the vernacular for the Bond flicks.
The film is a blend of mystery, neo-noir, camp, dark comedy, and romantic comedy genres. The fourth wall is continually broken,not only by Harry, the narrator-thief-would-be-actor, but also by Gay Perry, the former cop turned private eye who the studio instructs Harry to follow for his upcoming role. The self-awareness works really within the genre, kind of scooping it away from the cheese into which it could descend, but the film still sticks with the noir genre at the same time, with duplicitous blondes, sleepless runs through L.A., and body counts galore.
Thanks for coming. Please stay for the end credits. If you’re wondering who the Best Boy is, it’s somebody’s nephew. Um … don’t forget to validate your parking. And — to all you good people in the Midwest? Sorry we said “fuck” so much.
You will never forget Val Kilmer’s turn as Gay Perry in this movie. That is a promise. Watch it today! Or tomorrow! Or at your convenience!
This entry was originally posted on November 30, 2009 at 9:16 am.
Leeds, England.
Bump a fat rail because foot-traffic at the mall was a fist-raping, soul-tarring clusterfuck, but by gum, Jesus would’ve wanted you to get that doorbuster deal, so you done all right, sunshine.
I’m coming back to this later because Shel Silverstein contributed an awesome piece to this issue, but I’m out the door for now to paint faces at my kid’s school carnival. Sorry, but it’s Lorem Ipsum City, population: you … until I return. Catch you on the flip!
Photographed by William Crespinal and Sherman Weisburd.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut pretium viverra urna quis varius. Vestibulum vitae venenatis nulla. Vivamus quis nulla sed sem suscipit iaculis nec eget ligula. Nulla vitae massa non lorem placerat ultricies eget et orci. Quisque sed viverra elit. Duis auctor, nisl at accumsan pharetra, lacus enim facilisis lorem, in tempor lorem quam ut erat.
Donec nec tellus non magna scelerisque lacinia a ut turpis. Ut ut tempus nisl. Vestibulum sollicitudin, augue nec faucibus fermentum, odio enim dictum neque, interdum vulputate lacus elit vitae lectus. Mauris nibh urna, suscipit at sodales vel, volutpat eu enim.
Duis posuere tortor justo. Phasellus quis nulla nec metus volutpat consectetur. Morbi id nulla magna. Aliquam aliquet tristique nisi eu varius.
Favorite.
Quisque volutpat dictum laoreet. Nullam nisl est, sodales eget aliquet nec, elementum nec velit. Praesent aliquam malesuada diam, quis mollis quam tristique at. Nunc fringilla nibh a enim gravida molestie tincidunt purus ullamcorper. Fusce suscipit nisi non velit semper sit amet varius massa ultrices. Donec id dictum eros. Fusce dui sapien, iaculis quis luctus ut, consequat a justo. Vestibulum nisi ante, convallis a sollicitudin et, dignissim a odio.
Pellentesque rhoncus lacus quis nunc condimentum suscipit. Suspendisse mi erat, lobortis nec luctus sed, mattis eget felis. Aenean a mi sed nunc adipiscing sagittis. Morbi ultrices sagittis volutpat. Mauris sagittis, enim non ultrices sollicitudin, arcu diam vestibulum metus, eget luctus eros elit et enim. Aliquam tincidunt quam sed odio elementum porta.
Curabitur rhoncus accumsan ligula, et condimentum neque faucibus at. Suspendisse eu sagittis dolor. Sed egestas sapien et ligula sollicitudin eget pretium odio pharetra. Morbi rhoncus enim ut libero ultricies convallis. Mauris eleifend aliquet ligula.
Mauris ornare nulla sit amet est ultricies ac vestibulum elit sagittis. Phasellus pharetra tortor tincidunt risus porttitor luctus. Nunc nisi velit, tincidunt sit amet vulputate nec, sollicitudin sit amet velit. Etiam euismod metus tincidunt nulla luctus consectetur.
Quisque facilisis accumsan nunc at dapibus. Morbi eget sem massa. Sed et convallis sem. Sed accumsan hendrerit sagittis. Nulla euismod, metus sit amet hendrerit congue, nisi tellus ultrices urna, et dignissim enim urna nec libero. Sed purus ligula, blandit non lobortis nec, adipiscing fermentum ligula.
These buns previously featured in the Inaugural Showdown!, yellow rain slicker edition. (Voting still open.)
Pellentesque justo nibh, condimentum non imperdiet vel, luctus eget nibh. Quisque id turpis leo, et feugiat dui.
Praesent interdum, turpis quis egestas laoreet, urna nisl rhoncus nisl, eget dictum ante nisl ac risus. Aliquam tristique faucibus pharetra.
Sed in arcu risus, nec mollis leo. Proin iaculis felis sit amet sem ultrices sed molestie dolor tristique. Sed feugiat ultrices erat pretium adipiscing.
In arcu orci, lacinia a pretium eget, posuere ac mi. Vestibulum rutrum lectus sed quam gravida non tincidunt eros malesuada. Suspendisse sed neque at orci euismod bibendum sit amet ut quam.
If anyone but my Asia Argento plays Lisbeth Salander in an English-speaking adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I will put my hand through a blender. I pictured her the entire time I was reading.
Finished Girl With the Dragon Tattoo over a sleepless night that lead to one uneasy stretch of light snooze cut short by sudden bouts of vomiting. I found it very absorbing — the book, not the violent gut spasms from who-knows-what combination of stress and inattentively poor personal care — but it caromed briefly in to a few areas for which I was not wild. Still it all hung together in the end and I recommend it without reservation. Then I ended up reading a particularly pulpy and breezy Ross Macdonald mystery from the 70’s whose title I have already forgotten even though it kept me company for several hours.
See? Lots of people have insomnia and go on to have perfectly normal Summers! The Shining (Kubrick, 1980).
I only remember that I’d picked it up a few months back along with a couple 70’s editions of Zane Grey at my preferred comic store, which, besides selling comics and related games and accessories, also carries a small inventory of used, cheapo books and spotty collections of memorabilia depending on what luckless local nerds have either died or lost enough money to place their treasures in hock. I snatched up the Greys and this Macdonald book a few months ago because I dug the kind of blocky-schlocky look to the lines of the cover art.
The Underground Man — that’s right. Decent enough title, I guess.
The phrase “blew my mind” was used repeatedly in the book to refer to literally taking too much acid and suffering brain damage and prolonged schizophrenic episodes triggered by hallucinations, which usage I thought was a handy demonstration of the evolution of slang — in the book it was suggestive of overdose and possible fatality, but you can see how it developed over time the more benign definition it has now in the sense of changing one’s worldview in a feller-than-the-usual-pace-of-educational swoop, while still somewhat referencing the phrase’s original intent.
2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968). He swar to gar for all his life that whole sequences of this film were not planned to look like an acid trip, to which anyone who has ever done acid says, “Sure.”
The Macdonald book wasn’t the worst thing ever and some of the slangy shenanigans and quaintly dated rough talk in it wet my palate for some Hammett. I never re-read Red Harvest until October (red HARVEST, get it?) but I also brought down with me from Portland The Dain Curse and the Op’s short-story collection and could give one of those a spin. Think that’s what I’ll do tonight.
Actually maybe Hammett is only the appetizer. Know what? I think I will try to squeeze in L.A. Confidential before I have to pick up Tommyknockers. I usually, though not maniacally, like to read that closer to Christmastime because of the whole Bloody Christmas scandal that sparks so much of the action, but I’ve been self-auditing through all these long sick waking nights, and by setting this bookfoolery in to print I have come to see that I’ve got some really fucked-up and compulsive reading habits which are even perhaps the least of my worries and so I feel like rebelling against myself in this small thing to test the waters of making Change happen. I’m going to do this because I can.
Synchronicity — just dug out Red Harvest and the quote on the front cover is from Ross Macdonald, the author whose pulp I read this morning. Wild way that the universe is telling me I’m on the right track? or subconscious self-affirmation from whatever part of my brain has been looking at that (quite kickass) Red Harvest cover for the last four years?
I can’t say for sure. Either way, tell that girl from Canada that it ain’t ironic.
Sheets of rain keep falling here. It’s pretty when a little sun comes through, it makes it look like glass. But otherwise it’s overall a very dingy scene and it bums me out even more than a rainy day normally would (I actually like the rain, mainly) because I am waiting to hear from my husband about his grandmother. She’s not expected to live much longer than the next few days; when she passes away, I will fly to Portland to be with him and the family. I simply can’t let him go through that alone, and I would never disrespect my in-laws by even considering not going, to say nothing of the fact that I would like to say goodbye to a woman in whose home I lived (we rented from them once they moved to a retirement center), whose son I spent a great deal of time with, and to whose grandson I got married. It will be difficult, but it has to be done.
So today, being that it was raining cats and dogs and I think I even saw a ferret, and as kidlet had a school holiday, I wanted to have special bonding time before I travel without her. We are almost never separated, so I’m anxious about that as well.
We decided to make chicken noodle soup and grilled cheese sandwiches (total rainy day food) and watch us some uplifting movies. First up was The Wizard of Oz, and it started my wheels turning about the books and about the pluses and pitfalls of escapism.
Folklore, legends, myths and fairy tales have followed childhood through the ages, for every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instinctive love for stories fantastic, marvelous and manifestly unreal. The winged fairies of Grimm and Andersen have brought more happiness to childish hearts than all other human creations.
Yet the old time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as “historical” in the children’s library; for the time has come for a series of newer “wonder tales” in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale.
Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.
Having this thought in mind, the story of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was written solely to please children of today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.
L. Frank Baum
Chicago, April, 1900.
(The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Introduction.)
A lovely sentiment, but I find Baum’s assertion as to the lack of nightmares and heartache in the final product of the Oz books — of which I am one of the world’s staunchest and most highly devoted fans — intriguingly debatable. If I have time later this week, I will try to have a movie moment with Return to Oz, which will shed some light on what I mean.
Holly Owens as Dorothy in the Emerald City, for Tarina Tarantino’s “My Pretty” collection.
— Can you even dye my eyes to match my gown?
— Uh-huh.
— Jolly old town!
“If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn’t there, then I never really lost it to begin with.”
Did You Know? … two of the images in this post are pictures of my daughter at Christmas. She gets a new pair of ruby slips every year.
l to r: Selina Kyle, Bruce Wayne, Tim Drake, Barbara Gordon, Dick Grayson, and Alfred Pennyworth. Dig Alfred bunny-earing Dick and Strawberry Shortstacked in the first take.
One of my favorite holiday songs brought to wonderfully creepy, multi-track resonant life by super-hot fave Nicole “lionface” Atkins.
Nicole Atkins – Blue Christmas
All photos from Ellen Von Unwerth featuring Ana Beatriz Barros. “Merry Me,” V Magazine Iss. #32 (2004).
“Blue Christmas,” music and lyrics by Jay W. Johnson and Billy Hays, 1947. The holiday rock ‘n roll classic was originally recorded by Ernest Tubb, 1948, charted by Elvis Presley in 1957 and again by the Beach Boys in 1964.
I’ll have a blue Christmas without you
I’ll be so blue just thinking about you
Decorations of red on a green Christmas tree
Won’t be the same dear, if you’re not here with me
And when those blue snowflakes start falling
That’s when those blue memories start calling
You’ll be doing all right with your Christmas of white
But I’ll have a blue, blue Christmas
And when those blue snowflakes start falling
That’s when those blue memories start calling
You’ll be doing all right with your Christmas of white
But I’ll have a blue, blue Christmas
I’ll have a blue, blue *Christmas
* the girl can yodel like Wanda Jackson and Patsy, even. God, I love her.
The Thought Experiment 