On Not Wanting to Wake the House Up Singing WHAM into My Computer And Then Run of the Risk of Everyone Thinking I Am Insane

I just spent an hour researching which christmas song to record for one of my friends who is collecting recordings of friends doing ridiculous holiday things, and I've decided to get a bad Google voice mail transcript of WHAM's Last Christmas, and then perform the bad transcript, karaoke style, with the instrumental of the song. So I had to not only find a good instrumental version of the song, but also listen to the original song over and over, because I don't know the song all that well other than the chorus. This also means more than just listening to the song over and over, but then also, watching the video over and over.

It was one of those videos that had a plotline (of sorts); it's about the band vacationing in the mountains with a bunch of friends, frolicking in the snow, and then George Michael occasionally looking moody at some woman in the group who clearly he has a history with (and she looks a little like Lara Flynn Boyle circa 1990).

Everybody else looks like they're having a grand old time with throwing snowballs and laughing, but he intermittently looks sad, where it wouldn't be such a stretch to see him kicking at a pebble and going, "Aw shucks." I think maybe Andrew Ridgeley is supposed to be dating George Michael's ex, or maybe it's just a case of George and the lady broke up but Andrew is still friends with her. I kind of got the impression George Michael is supposed to be dating the blond woman in the video that apparently has his same haircut. It wasn't until I watched the video 17,000 times that I realized that there's supposed to be flashbacks happening. In one flashback they're happily traipsing in the snow and falling on each other laughing.

In another clip he gives her a bedazzled brooch. (And then in the present, the next year, post-breakup, even though the two of them have an icy sexual tension and they're surrounded by other people, she's still wearing the bedazzled brooch!)

In another flashback, he jovially enters the dining room carrying a cake adorned with sparklers while everyone claps. But oh! Such happiness is long past! Surrounded by all these people, if only they truly understood how unhappy George Michael is! He puts up such a good front until those moments when none are watching and the facade must fall! Quelle malaise! A graveyard of memories! Fragments shored against his ruins!

Also, there's a gondola ride.

Anyway, the problem with this recording project, is that I need to speak the lyrics so that I can get the transcript fed back to me so I can use those lyrics as the ones to sing. But at this late hour, I don't want to wake the people I live with, especially by creepily whispering WHAM lyrics into a phone, which is essentially serenading a robot over a phone. At 1:15 in the morning. And then on top of that, then singing WHAM at my computer. At then 1:20 in the morning.

I guess this project is going to have to wait until sunrise.

What's extra hilarious is that one of my friends went to Cambodia and sent me a whole mess of Cambodian karaoke discs, and I think this song might be on it, so it's sort of ridiculous that I would have to go find an instrumental on-line. It's just that I couldn't figure out how to rip the audio off of that disc -- for some reason since there's some region code issue thing where it doesn't work on my computer, even though it does on our DVD player, but then, not on our actual karaoke player. OH THE HUMANITY. Yeah, so, you know, life is tough all round.

All of this is to say, I will probably record this sometime this week and I'll post it when I'm done.

In other news! I finished zine about hair a split zine I did with one of my friends, which I'm bringing to Quimby's tomorrow. It's called Be Hair Now. So that's where to get it! I'm toying with the idea of making an Etsy site for my zines, but the thing is also, that you can get most of zines from quimbys.com, so I don't know if it's worth it. Thoughts, people? E-mail me at CabooseZine(at)gmail(dot)com if you have thoughts about this. Or thoughts about Last Christmas. Specifically these lines from it that are sort of preposterous:

A face on a lover with a fire in his heart/A man under cover but you tore him apart

I expect a 375 word essay on these lyrics on my desk tomorrow morning.