IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST:

"40 Favourite Nursery Rhymes 2" CD
"Baby Genius Classics for Intelligence" CD (Mozart, Bach, Vivaldi, Dittersdorf (who??), Schubert, Handel, Praetorius)
"A Charlie Brown Christmas" VHS
"The Time-Life Treasury of Christmas" 2CD

The beast of fatherhood, that is. It's a very cuddly warm and kind beast, but sort of like a cross between a sloth and a silverback gorilla, it's also really powerful and it can turn on you in a heartbeat, like when you come home from a hard day at work and find the ole 5-disc changer filled with no shit-fi and/or psychedelic mind-erasers but THESE kind of joints, and Favourite Nursery Rhymes 2 is playing and my god that's a chirpy disc. By track 31 or so you'll feel like you've been trapped forever in a shopping mall where you would never buy a single thing and the music never stops. The Classics for Intelligence disc came on next and it was much better. It's not so much a mind-eraser as a defragmenter. After that I owed the kids some movie time and the selection was the all-time classic Charlie Brown Christmas on the warbling fuzzy VHS tape I bought for 50 cents last year, around the corner at Magic Video. (No website.) This movie kills me softly in that vintage gently sad C. Schulz manner. The kids giggle at the choice Snoopy slapstick and get up and dance when the Peanuts gang do, but Sally Brown's utterly forlorn trapped-consumer lament goes right over their head: "All I want is what I have coming to me. All I want is my fair share." After all that I put on the Time-Life Treasury, and you know, I take back some of that shit I was saying about how much I love Christmas music earlier. Suddenly hearing the likes of Nat King Cole Slaw and Bing Cherries Crosby smugly chew their way through this mega-orchestral pro-Christ propaganda is rubbing me the wrong way. There's plenty of stuff on here I can hang with though, like "The Chipmunk Song," blues & doowop by Charles Brown, Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, Eva Cassidy (my favorite song on here, "It's Not the Presents Under My Tree (It's Your Presence Right Here Next To Me)"), whatever you call Eartha Kitt doing "Santa Baby" (it's definitely pretty secular), and the amazing prog-pop opus "I Believe in Father Christmas" by Greg Lake. Shit, I already wrote about this album in Blastitude last year. Hey, at least I KNOW I'm lame...