Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

Aches in the bones, moving slowly, my body refuses to cooperate Sick and sad over the cold weather; it's frigid out there waiting White winds blow white snow over white roads -- white The grey skies sit against heavy trees, laden with yesterday's batch. Twisted slivers of air, cold shards of temperature, ever dropping Except when it warms to snow. The supermarkets are full of shoppers trying to miss the weather, bundled up like yesterday's babies, blocking the aisles, hogging the warmth. I stand looking at boxes of fabric softener. Later, at home, I count my books and avert my gaze from the windows. Snow on the window ledge only strengthens the ache.

My mind floats between images on the screen, pure and pristine, and flickering print in books, studying, fretting, thoughtfully coursing through tons of material -- materiel? The list is long and twisting: Dead Elvis by Greil Marcus, The Foundations of Screenwriting by good ol' Syd Field, a horror movie podcast, (complete with cheesy trailers), Robert Bloch's Psycho , Don DeLilo's White Noise   the twisted golden age comics of Fletcher Hanks. This is all part of the process in studying for PhD exams. Throw it in a blender and hit frappe.

"Christmas Day" is a seven-minute gothic country exploration of loneliness. White tells the story of another lonely man stranded on his way to Mobile. The "devil is in the details" as the narrator sits crying at the Greyhound Station on Christmas Day in 1998. The sparse guitar work underlines the tragic experience and White's vocals only make it more harrowing. The song is one of the loss and love that are seldom explored in most well-known Christmas songs which typically prefer to gloss over the loneliness that comes with this season, instead piling up a hootenanny of pleasant experiences. Even the songs rife with loneliness prefer to traffic in what the narrator hopes to find at home or misses, instead of reveling in loss. "Christmas Day" doesn't do that; the narrator wallows in self pity and continually returns to the sweet smile of his love. He discusses the good fiction that the situation might make, weaving in between reality and unreality...