The Lost People of Mountain Village

Is it better than Guffman? Probably not. It might tell a more relevant story, though. This came my way via a Telemarktips thread and I've wanted to post it for a while. Seems like the last day of the first decade in a new millennium is reason enough to watch a film about an extinct species of humans. Happy New Year!

More info about the film is available on this website.

There's a Tear in My Eggnog

For the second annual Home Is Where Your Skis Is Christmas music compilation we're coming in off the sagebrush desert of last year and heading straight for the bar. The lucky number is thirteen and it's filled with tearjerkers and certifiable holiday classics. Hope you have your stack of quarters 'cause it's gonna be a long night. Have a honky-tonk Christmas.

Smiley Bates: Daddy's Drinking Up Our Christmas

George Jones: Lonely Christmas Call

Willie Nelson: Pretty Paper

Kitty Wells & Johnny Wright: There Won't Be Any Tree This Christmas

Terry Fell: Let's Stay Together 'Till After Christmas

Lulu Belle & Scotty: The Empty Xmas Stocking

Jimmy & Lisa Sara Martin: Daddy, Will Santa Claus Ever Have to Die?

Eddy Arnold: Will Santy Come to Shanty Town?

Tammy Wynette: (Merry Christmas) We Must Be Having One

Loretta Lynn: Gift of the Blues

Johnny Paycheck: Mommy for Awhile on Christmas Day

Del Reeves: Christmas Is Lonely

Merle Haggard: Daddy Won't Be Home for Christmas

And while you're waiting it out for last call be sure to pay homage to the skier's best friend, Little Sandy Sleighfoot. The link to the song is now fully restored.

I Washed My Face

Tom T. Hall: I Washed My Face in the Morning Dew

Really, then, the question is whether Tom T. Hall imitates life or does life imitate Tom T. Hall?

Literary Skiers 10a

 

They stopped for icicles to cool their drinks. Suttee clambered over a low stone wall and dropped into deep snow. Down the slope the firs stood black and brambly in their white shrouds and a fine mist of snow was blowing with a faint hiss like sand. He pissed a slushy yellow flower in the landscape, standing there with his drink in one hand, looking out on a wild white upland world as old as any thing that was and not unlike it might have looked a million years ago. Just when he would have said that nothing lived in these frozen altitudes two small gray birds flew. They came from a clump of snowbroken heather below and crossed the slope in a loping flight like carnival birds on wires and vanished in the forest.

He walked up the road, his shoes crunching in the packed snow. Under an overhang of icebound rock where sheer palisades of opaque crystal walled up the black forests above and he could hear the wind suck and moan in the trees. He reached to pluck small icicles from the rocks until he'd filled his glass with them.

Back in the cab she covered him with the blanket and rubbed his hands. You're icy cold, she said.

At Newfound Gap there were skiers, a bright group bristling with their poles and skis about the parked cars. They pulled in to watch them, goggled madmen in clouds of powder dropping down through the fir forests at breakneck speed. She clutched his arm, them standing there with their drinks and their breath swirling in the cold.

They went back in the early blue twilight, ghosting down the mountain with frames of snowy woodland veering inverted across the glass. They made love under the blankets in the back seat like schoolchildren and later she sat up and talked into the silent cabman's ear and made him promise not to tell what they had done and he said that he would not.


--Cormac McCarthy, from Suttree, 1979