Yule Love Alone Is Not Enough (et cetera)

And so to the Day In Question, the main event, the big kahuna. Christmas. 

Let Chaos Reign!

Christmas is a special time for me. A close to the year, a time for food and family, the stuff of memory building - and, indeed, memory revisiting. Nostalgia feeds our annual year-end feast, whether it's an imagined Victoria experience of snowdrifts, sleigh-bells, and red-breasted robins roasting over a crackling Yule log, or something more intimate and local. For me it's the memory of past family gatherings, the larger Simian whanau coming from Dunedin and Christchurch to share Christmas with us, the rolling maul of big dinners, eked out into leftover cold servings and, yes, barbeques. The last Christmases together, before one or more of us left our home, or left the embrace of our family. I lost a cousin two weeks ago; as one ages, Christmas mingles happy memories and sad, the most bittersweet of anniversaries.

But to a kid in the Seventies Christmas was huge. Toys, holidays, long summers, trifles and jelly, cousins and play mates. My family's Christmases are an unashamed attempt to recapture some of that for our kids and ourselves. A riot of colour, activity, smells, tastes and noises. You're pooped by the end of it all - eyes glazed with TV specials, belly groaning from rich multiple servings, ears ringing from the long hours and laughter. Enough nostalgia, though. Or... not...?

Christmas day, stuck in the seventies

Play all day with your Scalectrics

Oh my god, I got a tomahawk

How sweet life can be

Manic Street Preachers' Send Away the Tigers was an improbable hit. A chart-topper that delivered a righteous hit in Nina Persson duet, but delivered thin servings thereafter. Far from the experimental Lifeblood before it, or the divisive and cut-down double Know Your Enemy before it, Tigers is a wry re-run of past victories and crowd-pleasers, lacking only a needle to push. However, it did delivery some good B-Sides, including this particular burst of UK Christmas nostalgia - an unashamed mash of memberberries. It is, in the words of What Is Music podcast a right banger. 

Best of all for 2022 is Manics re-releasing Know Your Enemy in as close to its original intended form as possible. A real surprise and a Christmas treat to be sure. 

Merry Christmas, Everybody!    

Christmas Eve in the Valleys

 'Christmas Eve' by R.S. Turner, music by Manic Street Preachers (2021)

 

 It's Christmas Eve in the Monkey House, usually a time of slightly frazzled repose before the perpetual motion machine that is Christmas Morning to Christmas Lunch to Christmas Afternoon (brief pause for the King's Message) and then the likely-to-be-barbequed Christmas Dinner. It's a hectic time, the most ex-haust-ing time of the year, in fact. Christmas Day is the main event; the night before barely gets a word in, much less in songs (unless you happen to be in a New York drunk tank, of course)

 So spare a thought for this liminal pause, then. The moment of quiet betwixt the end of the Shouting Boxing Day Sale reminders of TV and the internets, and the blinking awakening of The Day in Question. To my mind, the commercialism has dominated Christmas Eve - one last, frantic exhortation of the nation's retailers to us to fill the tills emptied months before in anticipation, and reward the faith months of loss-leading have born witness to.

Bah, humbug.

And so to noted poetic Grinch, R.S Thomas, whose The Furies was once quoted in the liner notes to fellow countrymen Manic Street Preachers'; melancholic, none-more-Welsh peak This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours. In the same work Thomas dedicates four short poems to the winter holiday, and it's this one, Christmas Eve, a contemplation of the commercialism of the season with the coming of 'the child' triumphant and soundless, 'like radiation' - brief and full of mystery.

The music works, provided as usual by twin composers James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore, who likely provides the trumpet for this piece. This is not a release proper, but is just a year old, a contribution to Michael Sheen's Christmas Day show for Radio Wales. I like it a lot, and I hope you do, too.

More Manic, more Christmas - tomorrow.

Happy Halloween, Punks!

 It's the most WOUNDERFUL time of the year - Halloween again! And this year the Simian Samhain has taken place a little more quietly, but with the usual guests in tow...

Jet Junior is now into his teens, and so the allure of Halloween is a changing thing. No more trick or treating for him, instead the decision tree that is creating the Perfect Halloween Playlist. His tastes are changing - perhaps next year it'll be a proper teenage Halloween Party for him? Who knows? But in the mean-time, father and son have shared yet another Halloween tradition: the designing and carving of the yearly Jack O' Lanterns...

Last year's seeds didn't take in time for April/May, so instead we used the tried and tested garden centre vines on the home pumpkin ladder. I thought we had one good looking fruit survive the season, but when I went to pull out the exhausted vine, another almost perfectly-formed fruit appeared, peeking out from behind some protective lavender. Given the number of ants in the garden it's a Halloween miracle that they made it, made it through the winter in the garage, and through to their de-BOO. 

Introducing Scary and Eerie, designed by me and Jet Jr:

EVIL- er, I mean Eagle-eyed readers may notice a cold sweat on old Scary. That's because he was first to be carved and spent the night in the cooler (well, the fridge). He's got a candle to keep him warm now, though. They even had some neighbourhood kids visiting and pointing out their toothy maws. Smiles all-round. Job done. 

Happy Halloween, everyone! 

The Empire Runs Back Again!

 Holy cow - it's the ides of May again? You know what that means - Star Warps Day!

Usually I do something silly for Star Warps Day and really stick it to the OG Fifties trilogy, but I rarely go past the original Star Warps. It's the one that sticks most in my mind, like the after-image of an exploding Deadstar. 

But you know, in this day and age of steaming Disney+ TV series and movies spun off from the universe and on everyone's lips, like the new prequel trilogy, and El Landolorian and Booger-Bobber Fett, it's easy to forget the second Star Warps movie, the downbeat and complicated The Empire Strikes! So here are some of my favourite images from that one.

Here's Luke and Layer (left) talking to robot C-thru-PO in the chilly caves of the ice planet Hot:

"I thought you smelled bad outside!"

This installment also introduced us to a galaxy of fantastic new locations and characters, like the dashing gambler and mayor of Clown City, Lango. Is he friend or foe? Watch your back, Hank Solo!

"You've got a lot of guts here!"

Speaking of that roguish Hank, my mind was blown when it was revealed that he was Layer's sister after all (spoilers!), and here he is with Opie "Ken" Benobi and one of the many many glamourous and powerful women of the original Star Warps trilogy, just before he got frozen and taken back to Jabber:

"I love you!" "You know it"

Happy Star Warps Day! The Warps will be with you. All ways.