I can picture it clearly. My dad had bought a 12 foot-tall Christmas tree. The rec room (and yes we called it that) had cathedral ceilings, thanks to dad and his friends who built the addition (mostly his friends), and we often found a tree that would fill the available space as best as possible. There is still a scratch on the hardwood of the ceiling attesting to the fact that sometimes we took the challenge to find a big tree to its limits.
This particular year we were fortunate to have a tree at all, as it had rolled off the roof on the way back from the lot at St. Phillips-in-the-Field. The Scouts had not done a particularly great job of knot-tying, and the tree went left when dad turned right onto Crescent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Traditionally, we watched Christmas specials or listened to dad’s favorite oldies while trimming the tree. This year, we did both as a trio of desiccated grapes sang a cover of the Temptations cover of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” I think of that often, perhaps too often.
Pop culture and advertising are inextricably linked, but we pretend they exist in separate cultural realms. I mean, sure, we’re all accustomed to the model of creating television content to drive toy sales ( perfected in the 1980s with G.I. Joe, in my humble opinion), but those were things selling themselves–not some monstrous corruption of things that sell other things suddenly selling themselves, too. Sometimes the veil between worlds thins a bit, however, manifesting the absurdly true horror that is the banality of culture…sorry, I’ve been reading a good bit of weird fiction lately. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
As I was reflecting upon this memory recently, it occurred to me that I have never seen this as a half-ass listicle before, so there we go…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today on the Lstrblg...<\/p>\n<\/div>