Those Inflatable Santas: Eyepoppers to Eyesores
HOLTSVILLE, N.Y., Dec. 19 — On a recent quiet afternoon, with few witnesses around, Homer Simpson, Santa Claus and a penguin perched on an igloo suddenly appeared here on the Long Island landscape as if from nowhere, unfolding slowly like Frankenstein monsters lurching to life on the table. As Homer’s extremities reached full size, his pink nylon fist puffed into Mr. Snow Man’s face — an involuntary attack, to be sure. Bop.
Such is the phantasmagoric, Disney-esque experience of the new Christmas custom sweeping the suburbs.
Whatever else Christmas in America means — the birth of Jesus, holly wreaths, the Chipmunks, cultural tension — it now also includes these gargantuan, inflatable outdoor decorations, called “Airblowns” by their chief manufacturer.
They have been around for a while, but mark 2006 as the year these decorations became a full-blown fixture in the pantheon of holiday traditions — and, as is the holiday tradition, the subject of a rift.
Not quite a culture war. Call it an intramural disagreement among the Christmas crazed.
“Appalling,” Catherine Bruckner, a traditionalist who decorates only in holly and evergreen, sneered as she stopped her car in front of an inflated Santa playing poker with two shrewd-eyed reindeer in a menagerie totaling two dozen figures. “It’s bad enough to see those things on Halloween. At Christmas, they rise to a level of tackiness that is horrible.”
For the purists, the old-fashioned stuff is still out there: the strings of lights along the gutters, the lighted tin soldiers, crèches. The homemade wooden Rudolph with blinking red nose, hauled out of storage every Christmas for 45 years and put up on Frank and Diana Culmones’s roof in Franklin Square.
But the inflatables have brought the notion of Christmas self-expression to another plane. Now, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, that televised triumphal march that inaugurates the season, can live on in miniature for weeks at a time, swaying and bobble-heading across the front lawn of anyone willing to pay the electric bill — maybe a thousand dollars if you keep them inflated all the time, less if you leave the skins of your Christmas characters sprawled on the ground most of the day, their crumpled faces staring blankly at the sky or the sod, depending.
Some people do not like — inflated, deflated — the whole thing...[READ MORE]
MUSIC
Featured Album: Twin Cities Electropunk Volume 3I recently received a very interesting music selection to a genre that I've never really been exposed to, Electropunk. According to the TC Electropunk website,
Nobody invented this electropunk thing. No city can claim it (though New York certainly tries). It's simply what happens when you take a generation of bored teens and twentysomethings - raised on hardcore punk, British techno, Nintendo, and Doritos - and place cheap digital recording technology within their grasp. Next thing you know, you've got a million zillion half-rock, half-electronic, cyborg bands thrashing out one MP3s after another of ragged, jagged synthesizer pop and giving it away for nothing on their websites. Nobody asked for some big record label's permission – heck, most of them didn't even pay for the software they're using - they're just doing it for the hell of it. Because there's no excuse for boredom when you’ve got computers and guitars.
If that ain't punk, I don't know what is.
And while I said no city owns the electropunk movement, the kids in the Twin Cities are definitely ahead of the curve. Maybe it's because they had Prince to show them the way of the synthesizer, and Hüsker Dü to teach them how to make a big noise in the underground. Or maybe it's just because, with the weather being as cold as it is, they spend more days locked inside with their instruments and their PCs, while those of us in sunny L.A. and temperate Chicago are down at the beach. Don't ask me why... all I know is that, everywhere you turn in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, there's another band mixing punk attitude and electronic noises in bitchin' new ways.
So here you have it, Twin Cities Electropunk Volume 3. Fourteen tracks of raging, Technicolor techno-punk from the Great White North. Lap it up, love it, copy it, give it to all your friends, or throw it away. Then go get a computer, a CASIO, and microphone and start your own scene. Hey, if it can happen in Minnesota, it can happen wherever you live, too. - Emil Hyde
Avenpitch - "Nothing"
Tim Rally Gold - "Break Up at the Waffle House"
MSRP - "All That's Left to Say"
Hondo - "Hats"
Like what you hear? Download the rest of the Volume 3 compilation here for FREE!
Download Electropunk Volume 2 FREE!
Download Electropunk Volume 1 FREE!