In Which I Sing Dwarven Carols
I cannot tell you how excited I am to share this video with you all.
That’s my friend Daniel Jordan on the right; he’s a biophysicist and excellent musician who’s writing a way cool rock opera adaptation Wagner’s Ring Cycle, because that’s how we roll in Somerville Mass.
Other news, if you are insufficiently Holiday’d: Tor.com, the more fools they, invited me to write about whether The Nightmare Before Christmas is properly a Christmas movie, or a Halloween movie, or what. This in turn occasioned me to engage in my favorite pasttime: obsessive rumination on religion and story structure, plus Die Hard references!
This is a frivolous question, sure, like some of the best. But even frivolous questions have a serious edge: holidays are ritual times, and stories are our oldest rituals. The stories we tell around a holiday name that holiday: I’ve failed at every Christmas on which I don’t watch the Charlie Brown Christmas Special. When December rolls around, even unchurched folk can get their teeth out for a Lessons & Carols service.
So let’s abandon trappings and turn to deep structures of story. Does The Nightmare Before Christmas work as Christmas movies do? Does it work as Halloween movies do? It can achieve both ends, clearly—much as a comedy can be romantic, or a thriller funny. But to resolve our dilemma we must first identify these deep structures.
Happy holidays, y’all!
