Christmas Shepherd
Recomended reading: Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen deconstructs Jean Shepherd, the storyteller behind the beloved holiday classic “A Christmas Story.”
Recomended reading: Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen deconstructs Jean Shepherd, the storyteller behind the beloved holiday classic “A Christmas Story.”
December 27th, 2010 at 2:13 pm
Thanks for the link to that piece. I have fond memories of Shepherd’s TV shows, especially the one where he wandered around New Jersey. While showing footage of the huge plastic advertising figures alongside busy roads in North Jersey, he observed that they were surreal and said that Salvador Dali would have loved them. He found poetry in the cars endlessly flowing around our traffic circles and in Margate’s landmark, Lucy the Elephant, staring steadfastly out to sea.
Unlike Fagen, I never became disillusioned with Shep, though I did get some CDs of his radio work on Christmas a year ago and was surprised at how loose the first program was. It sounds like he had been drinking. But it’s easy to forgive him when I remember the time he read excerpts from a Doc Savage story and revealed new depths in it that may or may not have really been there. Maybe he was right to be embittered that the masses didn’t rise up and praise him.
December 27th, 2010 at 7:31 pm
More great stuff that I didn’t know. I added it to the main, LONG LIST.
thanks Lee…and Tico Rico!
December 29th, 2010 at 11:31 am
I don’t remember Jean Shepherd myself, but my grandparents said everybody on campus used to listen to him back when they were in school.
Actually, I kind of liked I LIBERTINE when I read it a couple years back.
January 7th, 2011 at 9:02 pm
It’s always a blow to ou cores when an idol falls off his pedestal. Still, sounds like Sheperd deserves cowriting credit for a lot of Fagen’s music.