By now, you’ve hopefully seen David Bowie and Bing Crosby’s unlikely encounter in 1977, where they sang a hastily prepared medley of “Peace On Earth/Little Drummer Boy.” It’s a curious Christmas classic, and now the subject of a tribute by The Flaming Lips. Above, watch their psychedelic take on the mashup. And if you need to revisit the original, just head here.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Complaints about the commercial-age corruption of Christmas miss one critical fact: as a mass public celebration, the holiday is a rather recent invention. Whether we credit Charles Dickens, Bing Crosby, or Frank Capra—men not opposed to marketing—we must reckon with Christmas as a product of modernity. That includes the sacred ideas about family, piety, and gratitude we attach to the season.
The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony “despised Christmas,” notes Boing Boing. They associated it with debauchery: heavy drinking, gluttony, riots, “rowdiness and sinful behavior.” Not only that, but they “saw it as a false holiday with stronger ties to paganism than Christianity,” writes Rebecca Beatrice Brooks at the History of Massachusetts blog, and “they were correct, according to the book The Battle for Christmas.”
The History Dose video above informs us that in 1659, “the General Court of Massachusetts made it illegal to celebrate Christmas.” Feasting, or even taking off work on December 25th would result in a fine of five shillings. It seems extreme, but the holiday had a carnivalesque reputation at the time. Not only were revelers, at the end of a long year’s work, eager to enjoy the spoils of their labor, but their caroling might even turn into a kind of violent trick-or-treating.
“On some occasions the carolers would become rowdy and invade wealthy homes demanding food and drink,” Brooks writes. They “would vandalize the home if the owner refused.” The Puritan’s authoritarian streak, and respect for the sanctity of private property, made canceling Christmas the only seemingly logical thing to do, with a ban lasting 22 years. In any case, explicit ban or no, spurning Christmas was common practice for two hundred years of New England’s colonial history.
In the end, for all its supposed intrusions into the snow globe of Christmas purism, “we can partially thank commercialization for sustaining the domestic brand of Christmas we have today”—the brand, that is, that ensures we can’t stop talking about, reading about, and hearing about Christmas, whatever our beliefs, in the several weeks leading up to December 25th.
It couldn’t have lasted—a flame burning twice as bright, and so on. One of the best bands to emerge from the explosion of British new wave and post-punk in the 1980s, The Smiths built a template for thousands of mope-rock bands who followed. Longstanding animosity has meant that their brief time together contains their total legacy. No reunion shows or albums—despite rumors over the decades since they broke up in 1987; no ersatz version of the band, missing key members but limping ever on.
Live albums, compilations, and box sets may have appeared over the years, but they all contain music written, played, and recorded between 1982 and 1987, a period during which the songwriting duo of Morrissey and Marr had as much creative energy and purpose as any of the famous songwriting duos of twenty years earlier. Love them or hate them—there seem to be few people in-between—The Smiths’ importance to alternative and indie rock is inescapable.
Like many other hugely influential bands in popular music, the mythology can eclipse the complexities. Unmentioned in many a glowing account, for example, are the unsung onetime-members who played bass or guitar at points in the band’s short life—most significantly guitarist Craig Gannon, sometimes called the “fifth Smith.” Gannon played on such seminal hits as “Ask” and “Panic” before being let go from the band before they played their final concert, an Artists Against Apartheid benefit at London’s Brixton Academy on December 12th, 1986. See it above in a fan-recorded video.
Delayed after Marr was in a car accident, the concert shows them back to their core four lineup, reunited with fired, then rehired (then arrested) bass player, Andy Rourke. They play “Shoplifters of the World Unite” from their upcoming final album, 1987’s Strangeways, Here We Come; they play The Queen is Dead’s “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” for the first, and last, time live onstage; they end the night where they began, with their very first single, “Hand in Glove.” No one knew at the time that it would be their last gig, including the band.
They continued on for the next few months, recording, making TV appearances, and pondering a major label move. Differences personal, legal, and creative soon drove the four members apart. They have all continued to contribute significantly to the direction of alternative rock, as supporting players, superstar indie guitarists, and, well, Morrissey. We might wish for a more polished document of their last show, but so it is. Fans are extremely unlikely to ever get chance to see it happen again.
“Yes, time can heal,” wrote Morrissey in his often embittered autobiography. “But it can also disfigure. And surviving the Smiths is not something that should be attempted twice.” We should count ourselves lucky—those of us in the love-the-Smiths camp—that they survived as long as they did, producing jangly, gorgeous, snide, maudlin, and morbidly hilarious indie-pop gems from the very beginning to the very end of their maybe-perfectly-concise career.
See the full setlist below:
Ask Bigmouth Strikes Again London/Miserable Lie Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others (only live performance) The Boy With The Thorn In His Side Shoplifters Of The World Unite There Is A Light That Never Goes Out Is It Really So Strange? Cemetry Gates This Night Has Opened My Eyes Still Ill Panic /The Queen Is Dead //William It Was Really Nothing //Hand In Glove
During the past few months of this year, as in those same months of any year, we’ve been hearing a great deal of Christmas music. Some of the songs in the mix — “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” “The Christmas Song” — few of us have ever known a time without, and others make it in because of their seasonally themed lyrical content. But certain songs just sound like Christmas songs, somehow, and to understand what, in musical terms, fills those compositions with the spirit of the holiday season, watch the five-minute Vox explainer above that reveals “the secret chord that makes Christmas music sound so Christmassy.”
First we should distinguish popular Christmas songs from popular non-Christmas songs, especially ones recorded in the past half-century. “Rock ’n’ roll songs (and the subsequent pop songs influenced by the genre) may only contain three or four chords, each chord usually being just a major or a minor — the two chord ‘flavors’ analogous to chocolate and vanilla,” writes Slate’s Adam Ragusea. In contrast, a selection from “the Great American Songbook” might “use a Baskin-Robbins shop full of chords and chord flavors — 7ths and 9ths, half and fully diminished, various inversions, and more” under melodies that “tend to include a lot of chromatic notes (the black notes on the piano when playing in the key of C major).”
In the era when most beloved Christmas standards were conceived, songwriters still made much use of that wide musical palette, the sonic colors of which had as much to do with jazz as with pop. But since the 1960s, writers of pop songs have used these now-exotic harmonies “to get a ‘classic’ sound. For instance, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ includes some notes in its choral parts that I think are intended to recall the harmonic vocabulary of those 1940s Christmas standards.” No coincidence, surely, that Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” perhaps the only Christmas song written in recent decades to attain the same popularity as the old standards, uses the same compositional techniques.
“I count at least 13 distinct chords at work in ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You,’ resulting in a sumptuously chromatic melody,” writes Ragusea. “The song also includes what I consider the most Christmassy chord of all — a minor subdominant, or “iv,” chord with an added 6, under the words ‘underneath the Christmas tree,’ among other places.” As in Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” he notes, “the chord comes immediately after a major subdominant chord, giving the effect of a ‘bright’ major subdominant that you might say ‘sighs’ or ‘melts’ into a ‘dark’ minor subdominant spiked with a ‘spicy’ extra tone (the added 6), before the songs settle back into their tonic, or ‘home,’ chords.” And so we come to the unexpected finding — though hardly a displeasing one — that a properly made Christmas song has more than a little in common with a properly made Christmas cocktail.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
If you’ve ever mistaken an Egon Schiele for a Gustav Klimt, you can surely be forgiven—the Austrian modernist don served as a North Star for Schiele, who sought out Klimt, apprenticed himself, and received a great deal of encouragement from his elder. But he would soon strike out on his own, developing a grotesque, exaggerated, yet elegantly sensual style that shocked his contemporaries and made him a leading figure of Austrian Expressionism.
Now, a century after his death in 1918 at age 28, a number of exhibitions have highlighted the complexity of his brief career, during which he “created a formidable output that turned him into a real icon for new generations,” writes Elena Martinique.
Schiele achieved “a remarkable impact and permanency” and it’s easy to see why. Best known for his erotic, elongated portraits and self-portraits, “searing explorations of their sitter’s psyches,” as The Art Story describes them, his depictions of the human form are considered some of the “most remarkable of the 20th century.”
The details of Schiele’s short life paint the picture of a modernist rock star. He is as famous for his work as for his “licentious lifestyle… marked by scandal, notoriety, and a tragically early death… at a time when he was on the verge of the commercial success that had eluded him for much of his career.” In his short life, Martinique notes, Schiele produced “over 400 paintings; close to 3,000 watercolors and drawings; 21 sketchbooks; 17 graphics; and 4 sculptures.”
This incredible body of work will be made available in full online in a project spearheaded by Jane Kallir, co-director of New York’s Galerie St. Etienne, which mounted Schiele’s first American solo exhibition in 1941 and recently staged a “comprehensive survey of the artist’s artistic development.” Kallir authored the most recent catalogue raisonné of Schiele’s work, and rather than publish another print edition, she has decided to put the full catalogue online, under the auspices of her research institute.
The project currently “details 419 works and counting, with a particular emphasis on Schiele’s paintings,” reports Meilan Solly at Smithsonian. His drawings and watercolors will be added in 2019. Though it is a public resource, the online catalogue is designed for scholars, who can use it to “trace specific pieces’ provenance or debunk the existence of forgeries.” Kallir continues the work of her grandfather, Otto Kallir, who wrote the first complete catalogue of the artist’s work in 1930.
That early reference has proven invaluable “in the tangle courtroom drama surrounding the restitution of Nazi-looted art.” The centenary of Schiele’s death on October 31, 2018 has brought even more interest to his work, and a rise in fakes circulating in the art market. “It is very important to have a reliable and readily accessible means of identifying authentic works of art,” Kallir writes in a statement. There is no one better placed than her to create it.
These latter works show a radical development: from the conservative, traditional style of his earliest painting, to the heavily Klimt-influenced work of 1908–9, to 1910–18, when he discovered and perfected his own peculiar vision.
Season’s greetings from Banksy. Two months after shredding a painting at a London auction, the street artist has resurfaced again. This time in Port Talbot, Wales, where he spray-painted a holiday mural on two sides of a garage. One sides shows a young boy frolicking in what looks like falling snow. The other side makes you realize that the snow is really a fire spewing toxic ash.
According to the BBC, Gary Owen, a Port Talbot resident, messaged Banksy last summer and asked him to put a spotlight on Port Talbot’s chronic pollution problem. The steelworks of the industrial town puts dust in the air, creating potential health risks for children. When Owen learned about the mural, he reportedly said: “It’s brilliant. I couldn’t take it in. I didn’t think it was true.” That’s all before some “some drunk halfwit” tried to attack the painting–very fortunately to no avail.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Each day in the 2010s, it seems, brings another startling development in the field of artificial intelligence — a field widely written off not all that long ago as a dead end. But now AI looks just as alive as the people you see in these photographs, despite the fact that none of them have ever lived, and it’s questionable whether we can even call the images that depict them “photographs” at all. All of them come, in fact, as products of a state-of-the-art generative adversarial network, a type of artificial intelligence algorithm that pits multiple neural networks against each other in a kind of machine-learning match.
These neural networks have, it seems, competed their way to generating images of fabricated human faces that genuine humans have trouble distinguishing from images of the real deal. Their architecture, described in a paper by the Nvidia researchers who developed it, “leads to an automatically learned, unsupervised separation of high-level attributes (e.g., pose and identity when trained on human faces) and stochastic variation in the generated images (e.g., freckles, hair), and it enables intuitive, scale-specific control of the synthesis.” What they’ve come up with, in other words, has made it not just more possible than ever to create fake faces, but made those faces more customizable than ever as well.
“Of course, the ability to create realistic AI faces raises troubling questions. (Not least of all, how long until stock photo models go out of work?)” writes James Vincent at The Verge. “Experts have been raising the alarm for the past couple of years about how AI fakery might impact society. These tools could be used for misinformation and propaganda and might erode public trust in pictorial evidence, a trend that could damage the justice system as well as politics.”
But still, “you can’t doctor any image in any way you like with the same fidelity. There are also serious constraints when it comes to expertise and time. It took Nvidia’s researchers a week training their model on eight Tesla GPUs to create these faces.”
Though “a running battle between AI fakery and image authentication for decades to come” seems inevitable, the current ability of computers to create plausible faces certainly fascinates, especially when compared to their ability just four years ago, the hazy black-and-white fruits of which appear just above. Put that against the grid of faces at the top of the post, which shows how Nvidia’s system can combine the features of the faces on one axis with the features on the other, and you’ll get a sense of the technological acceleration involved. Such a process could well be used, for example, to give you a sense of what your future children might look like. But how long until it puts convincing visions of moving, speaking, even thinking human beings before our eyes?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Their one-take performance was part of Role Call, a regular feature of the Late Late Show with James Corden. Usually, this fan favorite is an excuse for Corden and a megastar guest—Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Samuel L. Jackson—to bumble through the most iconic moments of their career.
These kinds of larks are more fun for being a mess, and the live studio audience screams like besotted campers at every goofy quick change and winking inside reference. Blunt and Miranda are definitely game, though one wonders if they felt a bit chagrinned that the film they are promoting, Mary Poppins Returns, is given pride of placement, while the original 1964 film starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke is strangely absent.
Alas, 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is as far back as this skit’s memory goes, presumably because the audience has a greater likelihood of recognizing Marilyn Monroe than say, Howard Keel.
More interesting than the jokey horseplay with Into the Woods and The Muppet Movie is the choice to blithely cast white actors in roles that were written for black women (Dreamgirls, Little Shop of Horrors). I don’t think anyone would try to get away with that on Broadway these days, even in in a spoofy charitable event like Broadway Bares or Easter Bonnet… though if they did, getting Lin-Manuel Miranda on board would be a very good idea.
As to why Hamilton isn’t one of the titles below … it’s not a movie musical—yet!
As we know from conversations in subway tunnels or singing in the shower, different kinds of spaces and building materials alter the quality of a sound. It’s a subject near and dear to architects, musicians, and composers. The relationship between space and sound also centrally occupies the field of “Acoustic Archeology.” But here, an unusual problem presents itself. How can we know how music, voice, and environmental sound behaves in spaces that no longer exist?
More specifically, writes EurekAltert!, the question that faced researchers at the University of Seville was “how did words or the rain sound inside the Mosque of Cordoba in the time of Abd al-Rahman I?” The founder of an Iberian Muslim dynasty began construction on the Mosque of Cordoba in the 780s. In the hundreds of years since, it underwent several expansions and, later, major renovations after it became the Cathedral of Cordoba in the 13th century.
The architecture of the 8th century building is lost to history, and so, it would seem, is its careful sound design. “Unlike fragments of tools or shards of pottery,” Atlas Obscura’s Jessica Leigh Hester notes, “sounds don’t lodge themselves in the soil.” Archeo-acousticians do not have recourse to the material artifacts archeologists rely on in their reconstructions of the past. But, given the technological developments in reverb simulation and audio software, these scientists can nonetheless approximate the sounds of ancient spaces.
In this case, University of Seville’s Rafael Suárez and his collaborators in the research group “Architecture, Heritage and Sustainability” collected impulse responses—recordings of reverberation—from the current cathedral. “From there, they used software to reconstruct the internal architecture of the mosque during four different phases of construction and renovation.… Next, they produced auralizations, or sound files replicating what worshippers would have heard.”
To hear what late-8th century Spanish Muslims would have, “researchers used software to model how the architecture would change the same snippet of a recorded salat, or daily prayer. In the first configuration, the prayer sounds full-bodied and sonorous; in the model that reflects the mosque’s last renovation, the same prayer echoes as though it was recited deep inside a cave.” All of those renovations, in other words, destroyed the sonic engineering of the mosque.
As the authors write in a paper recently published in Applied Acoustics, “the enlargement interventions failed to take the functional aspect of the mosque and gave the highest priority to mainly the aesthetic aspect.” In the simulation of the mosque as it sounded in the 780s, sound was intelligible all over the building. Later construction added what the researchers call “acoustic shadow zones” where little can be heard but echo.
Unlike Hagia Sofia, the Byzantine cathedral-turned-mosque, which retained its basic design over the course of almost 1500 years, and thus its basic sound design, the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba was so altered architecturally that a “significant deterioration of the acoustic conditions” resulted, the authors claim. The mosque’s many remaining visual elements would be familiar to 8th century attendees, writes Hester, including “gilt calligraphy and intricate tiles… and hundreds of columns—made from jasper, onyx, marble, and other stones salvaged from Roman ruins.” But the “acoustic landscape” of the space would be unrecognizable.
The specific sounds of a space are essential to making “a place feel like itself.” Something to consider the next time you’re planning a major home renovation.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
