The hard working souls at Stereogum managed to wrangle the following little video gem from the depths of YouTube. If you don’t smile by the time one of the students pretends to bite into a candy cane, please say hello for us to the three apparitions of various timeframes that you’ll be seeing tonight.

Thanks to the Grade Four students who worked so hard at this wonderful video!

Oh yes, and Merry Christmas from Asthmatic Kitty!

A message From Sufjan Stevens, followed by the winning entry and by a message from the AK Elves:"Having received over 600 Christmas song entries, it became a daunting task to pick just one. I fell in love with them all. Even the songs with expletives, the songs with Christmas clichés, the many songs about ex-girlfriends, […]

As of December 17, we are still trying to decide the winner of the Great Sufjan Song Xmas Change. We received so many great entries, this is a harder job than we thought! Expect something in the next day, and thank you for your patience!

Sufjan Stevens will be participating in the Tibet House Annual Benefit Concert at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday, February 13, 2008.  Sufjan will join Philip Glass, Nawang Khechog, Marisa Monte and others yet to be announced, for an evening of music in support of a good cause.  Please check Tibet House website regularly for updates: www.tibethouse.org

Sufjan Stevens’ performance at Southpaw, Brooklyn to benefit the PEN American Center has been rescheduled to December 17.

A friendly reminder: Sufjan’s Xmas contest – in which he swaps a song for a song – ends on midnight, December 1st. Hurry and get those entries in! Start reading the details here.

It’s Christmas time again! That means tightly bundled scarves, lively debates on the merits of real/plastic trees, a litany of Christmas television specials, and finding the perfect retro Christmas wrapping paper.

And gifts of course! Who could forget the gifts!

That’s why Sufjan Stevens is busy working on a very special gift right now, for a very special person. And in the spirit of Christmas, that person will give Sufjan a similarly special gift.

Here’s how it works: write an original Christmas song, record it, and email the song to us. Asthmatic Kitty will pick a winner, and that person will trade rights to their song for rights to Sufjan’s song.

Just like a gift exchange, Sufjan’s song becomes your song. You can hoard it for yourself, sell it to a major soft drink corporation, use it in your daughter’s first Christmas video, or share it for free on your website. No one except Sufjan and you will hear his song, unless you decide otherwise. You get the song and all legal rights to it. We get the same rights to your song.

Not a song-maker?  It’s ok!  We’ll stream the submissions just after we pick the winner on December 15th…and we are streaming Sufjan’s entire Christmas boxset for free! Click here for contest details and stream, and here to purchase the boxset for $19.

Tonight, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Sufjan Stevens will debut The BQE, a 30-minute symphonic and cinematic exploration of New York City’s infamous Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. A controversial roadway since its inception in the 1930s, the BQE tears through 11.7 miles of Brooklyn and Queens, severing neighborhoods, pillaging industrial yards, and contouring waterways with the brute force of modern urban planning.

Click on more to read further about Sufjan’s relation to the BQE.

For the unacquainted driver, the BQE is a beast to be reckoned with. Unlike the high speed Autobahn or the prestigious New Jersey Turnpike, the BQE is a battered and baffling roadway plagued by relentless constriction and inexplicable traffic jams. Pot holes, steep grades, sharp turns, traffic cones, detours, and a parade of big rigs and Mack trucks create a rollercoaster obstacle course for the unsuspecting commuter. Crumbling concrete, rusted buttresses, and a persistent cast of billboards advertising big cars and Hollywood movies convey less an interchange of traffic and more a post-modern joy ride through the carnival spook house of Brooklyn and Queens.

For Stevens, the expressway is not an unlikely love interest. Born in Detroit, MI, his preoccupation with the automobile is apparent in songs referencing Chevrolet trucks, back seats, hatchbacks, and car factory jobs. But this is not the typical machismo fascination with cars—horsepower and acceleration—but rather a metaphysical romance with movement, progress, and the American landscape, wrestled out with the politics of transportation and car companies. The automobile has come to symbolize one of the most efficient mechanisms of the American Dream, the machine by which drivers achieve their own Manifest Destiny. In this context, The BQE seeks to uncover, through soundscape and cinematography, the countless characteristics of that Manifest Destiny when converged with urban blight. As a musical and visual expedition, The BQE forages cement surfaces, badly marked exits, stilted bridges, spectacular city views, road workers, commuters, and construction sites for systems and patterns of mass movement that map out an epic legend inscribed in the twists and turns of city life. The BQE presents a consensus of abstract patterns of movement and sound personified in the snakelike meandering of roads, evoking a narrative pattern in traffic, in the effects of weather and pollution, in the constant activity of automobiles, the music of the car horn and the hydraulic brake, and the reverent hum of the combustible car engine thumping for miles around.

Sufjan Stevens will be appearing at the BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) in early November, but you can catch him performing for another New York acronymic mainstay, the PEN American Center (which officially stands for poets, playwrights, essayists, editors, and novelists) on November 28th at 8pm at Southpaw (125 Fifth Ave. Park Slope, Brooklyn). Sufjan will be speaking and performing alongside fellow writer/musicians Rick Moody, and John Wesley Harding (aka Wesley Stace).

Doors open at 7pm. Tickets are $10 and available in advance from the Southpaw website.

You’ll of course remember illustrator Tom Eaton’s marvelously animated video for Sufjan Stevens’, "Put the Lights on the Tree" (click here to refresh your memory).

Animation Block Party, which exhibits quality, independent art, is featuring Tom Eaton’s video at their yearly NYC block party. The video will air on the third night of the festival, July 29th, at the Galapagos Art Space.

Congratulations Tom!

See our sidebar for our own collection of Tom Eaton illustrations.