No, dear child, ’tis Satan, summoned by an innocent mis-spelling on the part of a young girl eager for a Christmas puppy.
When the post office delivers her similarly misaddressed envelope to hell by December 25, the buff and tattooed Lord of Darkness’ heart grows three sizes. Everyone likes to be told they’re special.
Next thing you know, he’s traded the fiery furnace for a gluten-free bakery in Shoreditch, where he’s a happy team player, making latte art and wearing a goofy cap.
The ending is a sweet mix of “I hate you, you ruined Christmas, go to hell!” and “God bless us everyone.” Santa doesn’t survive, but the childlike capacity for wonder does.
Those with sensitive stomachs may want to go easy on the eggnog while watching this soon-to-be-holiday classic. The projectile vomiting rivals the Exorcist’s.
And happy holidays from all of us at Open Culture!
Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town, The Santa Clause, Santa Claus: the Movie, Bad Santa, the unforgettable Santa Claus Conquers the Martians: we all have a preferred depiction of Saint Nicholas on film, the selection of which grows larger each and every Christmas. The tradition of Santa in cinema goes back 120 years to a couple of obscure 1897 shorts, Santa Claus Filling Stockings and The Christmas Tree Party, made by a company called American Mutoscope, but it finds its fullest early expression in the following year’s Santa Claus.
Directed by hypnotist and magic lanternist turned filmmaker George Albert Smith, this 66-second production, though a highly elaborate one for the time, purports to show just how Santa Claus makes a visit to drop off gifts for a couple of sleeping children. When their nanny turns off the lights for the night, we see superimposed on their darkened wall a vision of the jolly old elf himself landing on the roof and clambering down the chimney.
“What makes this treatment considerably more interesting than a conventional piece of editing,” writes the British Film Institute’s Michael Brooke, “is the way that Smith links the shots in terms of both space and time, by placing the new image over the space previously occupied by the fireplace, and continuing to show the children sleeping throughout.”
Brooke calls that effect “cinema’s earliest known example of parallel action and, when coupled with double-exposure techniques” that Smith had developed for his previous films, it makes Santa Claus “one of the most visually and conceptually sophisticated British films made up to then.” He notes also that Smith corresponded with Georges Méliès, his fellow pioneer of not just special effects but cinema itself, around the time of this film, no surprise since “the two men shared a common goal in terms of creating an authentic cinema of illusion.”
Watch Santa Claus on this Christmas Day, and you’ll find that, in the words of Kieron Casey at The Totality, “the plot is simple, but the magic is not — viewed over 100 years later, it’s impossible not to be touched to the very core with the wonder on display in the film. In the same way young hands will find the most simple of toys mesmerising when touched for the first time, there is a real innocence and enthusiasm in G.A. Smith’s film – it’s a short movie which is full of imagination and discovery, the type of which will never again be experienced in cinema.” But seeing as Santa Claus existed long before cinema and will exist long after it, rest assured that he’ll bring his trademark twinkle to any storytelling medium humanity comes up with next.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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.
Just when you thought you had Christmas all figured out, Matthew Salton comes along with this new animated short, “Santa Is a Psychedelic Mushroom.” It makes the case that maybe, just maybe, “the story of our modern Santa Claus, the omnipotent man who travels the globe in one night, bearing gifts, and who’s camped out in shopping malls across the United States, is linked to a hallucinogenic mushroom-eating shaman from the Arctic.” Specifically a historic Shaman from Lapland, in northern Finland, who tripped out on Amanita muscaria, the toxic, red-and-white toadstool mushroom you’ve seen in fairy tales so many times before. Elaborating, Salton talks with Carl Ruck, a Boston University professor who studies mythology, religion and the sacred role of psychoactive plants. And also Lawrence Millman. Writing at The New York Times, Salton adds:
According to the writer and mycologist Lawrence Millman, the shaman would make use of Amanita muscaria’s psychoactive effects in order to perform healing rituals. The use of Amanita muscaria as an entheogen (that is, a drug used to bring about a spiritual experience) would enable the shamans to act as intermediaries between the spirit and human world, bringing gifts of healing and problem-solving. (Although these mushrooms are poisonous, the Sami reduced their toxicity by drying them..) Various accounts describe the shaman and the rituals performed in ways that are fascinatingly similar to the narrative of Santa. An all-knowing man who defies space and time? Flying reindeer? Reindeer-drawn sleds? Climbing down the chimney? The giving of gifts? The tales of the Sami shamans have it all.
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We like to bring this chestnut back from time to time. Watch it, and you’ll know why.
In 1977, just a short month before Bing Crosby died of a heart attack, the 40s crooner hosted David Bowie, the glam rocker, on his Christmas show. The awkwardness of the meeting is palpable. An older, crusty Crosby had no real familiarity with the younger, androgynous Bowie, and Bowie wasn’t crazy about singing The Little Drummer Boy. So, shortly before the show’s taping, a team of writers had to frantically retool the song, blending the traditional Christmas song with a newly-written tune called Peace on Earth. (You can watch the writers tell the story, years later, below.)
After one hour of rehearsal, the two singers recorded The Little Drummer Boy/Peace on Earth and made a little classic. The Washington Post has the backstory on the strange Bing-Bowie meeting. Also find a Will Ferrell parody of the meeting here. We hope you enjoy revisiting this clip with us. Happy holidays to you all.
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Several years ago, we featured a list Kurt Cobain made of his top 50 albums, which appeared in his journals, published in 2002. It’s mostly a typical list of standards one would find in any young punk’s record collection in the late 80s/90s. As we wrote then, his “‘Top 50 by Nirvana’… seems like the ideal code for producing a 90s alternative star.” But these sources were not widely accessible at the time. Cobain’s influence was such that he turned millions of people on to music they’d never heard before. That influence continues, of course, and you can partake of it yourself in the playlist below.
Amid the classic rock and classic punk—the Beatles, the Clash, the Sex Pistols—are a few slabs of classic DC hardcore, then and now pretty obscure. Dave Grohl—stalwart of the DC scene before Cobain recruited him to move across the country and join Nirvana—may have added these albums to the list, or Cobain might have done so himself. In any case, his mentions of them, and their posthumous appearance in his letters and notes, brought bands like long-defunct Faith and Void new recognition, as well as post-hardcore pioneers Rites of Spring, who helped inspire the emo and screamo to come, for better or worse.
Alongside Iggy Pop, Black Flag, and Bad Brains are lesser-known punk bands like the Raincoats, the Vaselines, and the Saints, playful lo-fi weirdos like Daniel Johnson, the Shaggs, and Half Japanese; the country blues of Lead Belly, caustic noise of Butthole Surfers, thunderous, punishing nihilism of Swans…. Cobain may have helped them all sell a few records, and he definitely inspired new bands that sound like them by turning people on to their music for the first time. (When Cobain covered David Bowie, however, fans started to mistake “The Man Who Sold the World” for a Nirvana song, to Bowie’s understandable consternation.)
Cobain’s list is limited to a fairly narrow range of styles, with some rare exceptions: Lead Belly, Public Enemy, Aerosmith (!)—it’s an almost purist punk and punk-derived palate, the DNA of Nirvana. In the age of the internet, one can cobble together a list like this—with no real prior knowledge—in an hour or so, simply by googling around and doing a bit of research. During Cobain’s formative years on the outskirts of Seattle, when a lot of this music circulated only on limited cassette runs and poorly recorded mixtapes and copies, on record labels financed by vegan bake sales and loans from the ‘rents—it could be very hard to come by.
While Cobain’s list may look, in hindsight, like standard fare to many longtime fans, what it represents for those who came of age musically in the years just before the Web is a physical journey through all of the relationships, concerts, and record shops one had to move through to discover the bands that spoke directly to you and your friends.
This Christmas, as our computers fast learn to compose music by themselves, we might gain some perspective by casting our minds back to 66 Christmases ago, a time when a computer’s rendition of anything resembling music at all had thousands and thousands listening in wonder. In December of 1951, the BBC’s holiday broadcast, in most respects a naturally traditional affair, included the sound of the future: a couple of much-loved Christmas carols performed not by a choir, nor by human beings of any kind, but by an electronic machine the likes of which almost nobody had even laid eyes upon.
“Among its Christmas fare the BBC broadcast two melodies that, although instantly recognizable, sounded like nothing else on earth,” write Jack Copeland and Jason Long at the British Library’s Sound and Vision Blog. “They were Jingle Bells and Good King Wenceslas, played by the mammoth Ferranti Mark I computer that stood in Alan Turing’s Computing Machine Laboratory” at the Victoria University of Manchester. Turing, whom we now recognize for a variety of achievements in computing, cryptography, and related fields (including cracking the German “Enigma code” during the Second World War), had joined the university in 1948.
That same year, with his former undergraduate colleague D. G. Champernowne, Turing began writing a purely theoretical computer chess program. No computer existed on which he could possibly try running it for the next few years until the Ferranti Mark 1 came along, and even that mammoth proved too slow. But it could, using a function designed to give auditory feedback to its operators, play music — of a kind, anyway. The computer company’s “marketing supremo,” according to Copeland and Long, called its brief Christmas concert “the most expensive and most elaborate method of playing a tune that has ever been devised.”
Since no recording of the broadcast survives, what you hear here is a painstaking reconstruction made from tapes of the computer’s even earlier renditions of “God Save the King,” “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” and “In the Mood.” By manually chopping up the audio, write Copeland and Long, “we created a palette of notes of various pitches and durations. These could then be rearranged to form new melodies. It was musical Lego.” But do “beware of occasional dud notes. Because the computer chugged along at a sedate 4 kilohertz or so, hitting the right frequency was not always possible.” Even so, somewhere in there I hear the historical and technological seeds of the much more elaborate electronic Christmas to come, from Mannheim Steamroller to the Jingle Cats and well beyond.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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.
’Tis the season to break out the family recipes of beloved relatives, though often their provenance is not quite what we think.
(Imagine the cognitive dissonance upon discovering that Mother swiped “her” Italian Zucchini Crescent Pie from Pillsbury Bake-Off winner, Millicent Nathan of Boca Raton, Florida…)
When it came to crediting the eggnog she dubbed “the taste of Christmas Day,” above, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eudora Welty shared it out equally between her mother and author Charles Dickens:
In our house while I was growing up, I don’t remember that hard liquor was served at all except on one day in the year. Early on Christmas morning, we woke up to the sound of the eggbeater: Mother in the kitchen was whipping up eggnog. All in our bathrobes, we began our Christmas before breakfast. Throughout the day Mother made batches afresh. All our callers expected her eggnog.
It was ladled from the punch bowl into punch cups and silver goblets, and had to be eaten with a spoon. It stood up in peaks. It was rich, creamy and strong. Mother gave full credit for the recipe to Charles Dickens.
Nice, but perhaps Dickens is undeserving of this honor? The contents of his punchbowl bore little resemblance to Mother Welty’s, as evidenced by an 1847 letter to his childhood friend, Amelia Filloneau, in which he shared a recipe he promised would make her “a beautiful Punchmaker in more senses than one”:
Peel into a very strong common basin (which may be broken, in case of accident, without damage to the owner’s peace or pocket) the rinds of three lemons, cut very thin, and with as little as possible of the white coating between the peel and the fruit, attached. Add a double-handfull of lump sugar (good measure), a pint of good old rum, and a large wine-glass full of brandy — if it not be a large claret-glass, say two. Set this on fire, by filling a warm silver spoon with the spirit, lighting the contents at a wax taper, and pouring them gently in. Let it burn for three or four minutes at least, stirring it from time to Time. Then extinguish it by covering the basin with a tray, which will immediately put out the flame. Then squeeze in the juice of the three lemons, and add a quart of boiling water. Stir the whole well, cover it up for five minutes, and stir again.
This sounds very like the “seething bowls of punch” the jolly Ghost of Christmas Present shows Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, dimming the chamber with their delicious steam.
It’s also vegan, in contrast to what you might have been served in the Welty ladies’ home.
Why not serve both? In the words of Tiny Tim, “Here’s to us all!”
Eudora Welty’s Mother’s Eggnog (Attributed, Perhaps Erroneously, to Charles Dickens)
6 egg yolks, well beaten
Add 3 tbsp. powdered sugar
Add 1 cup whiskey, added slowly, beating all the while
Fold in 1 pint whipped cream
Whip 6 whipped egg whites and add to the mixture above.
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From Travis Lee Ratcliff comes a video essay that explores the influence of Constantin Stanislavski, the Russian theatre director whose “system” of actor training shaped a generation of iconic American actors. Here’s how Ratcliff sets the stage for his video essay.
In the 1950s, a wave of “method actors” took Hollywood by storm.
Actors like James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Montgomery Clift, brought a whole new toolset and perspective on the actor’s craft to the films they performed in.
The foundation of their work, however, was laid in Russia more than fifty years prior to their stardom.
Stanislavski’s conception of “psychological realism” in performance challenged ideas about the essential features of the actor’s craft that had been held for centuries.
In theatre before Stanislavski, acting was defined as a craft of vocal and gestural training. The role the actor played was to give life to the emotions of the text in a broad illustrative fashion. Formal categories such as melodrama, opera, vaudeville, and musicals, all played to this notion of the actor as chief representer of dramatic ideas.
Stanislavski’s key insight was in seeing the actor as an experiencer of authentic emotional moments.
Suddenly the craft of performance could be about seeking out a genuine internal experience of the narrative’s emotional journey.
From this foundation, realism in performance began to flourish. This not only changed our fundamental idea of the actor but invited a reinvention of the whole endeavor of telling stories through drama.
Teachers would adopt Stanisvlaski’s methods and ideas and elaborate upon them in American theatre schools. The result, in the 1950s, would be a new wave of actors and a style of acting that emphasized psychological realism to a greater degree than their peers in motion pictures.
This idea of realism grew to dominate our notion of successful performances in cinema. Stanislavskian-realism is now central to the DNA of how we direct and read performances, whether we are conscious of it or not.
I think it is important to know this history and consider its revolutionary character. Understanding the nature of Stanislavski’s insights allows us to look at other unasked questions, other foundational elements of our craft that we might take for granted.
Beyond this, Ratliff also provides a list of Stanislavski’s books, which still provide “fascinating explorations of the craft of performance.” Check them out:
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What kind of a blighted society turns the word “snowflake” into an insult?, I sometimes catch myself thinking, but then again, I’ve never understood why “treehugger” should offend. All irony aside, being known as a person who loves nature or resembles one of its most elegant creations should be a mark of distinction, no? At least that’s what Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley surely thought.
The Vermont farmer, self-educated naturalist, and avid photographer, was the first person to offer the following wisdom on the record, then illustrate it with hundreds upon hundreds of pictures of snowflakes, 5,000 in all:
I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind.
Bentley left a considerable record—though still an insignificant sample size given the scope of the object of study. But his photographs give the impression of an infinite variety of different types, each with the same basic crystalline latticework structure. He took his first photograph of a snowflake, the first ever taken, in 1885, by adapting a microscope to a bellows camera, after years of making sketches and much trial and error.
Some great portion of this work must have been tedious and frustrating—Bentley had to hold his breath for each exposure lest he destroy the photographic subject. But it was worth the effort. Bentley, the Smithsonian informs us, “was a pioneer in ‘photomicrography,’ the photographing of very small objects.” Five hundred of his photographs now reside at the Smithsonian Institution Archives, “offered by Bentley in 1903 to protect against ‘all possibility of loss and destruction, through fire or accident.” You can see a huge digital gallery of those hundreds of photos here.
Along with U.S. Weather Bureau physicist William J. Humphreys, he published 2300 of his snowflake photographs in a monograph titled Snow Crystals. Bentley also published over 60 articles on the subject (read two of them here). Despite his contributions, he receives no mention in most histories of photomicrography. This may be due to his provincial location (he never left Jericho, VT) or his lack of scientific training and credentials, or a lack of interest in photos of snowflakes on the part of most photomicrography historians.
Or it may be because Bentley was thought to be a fraud. When a German meteorologist commissioned some images of his own and got some very different results, he accused the farmer of retouching. Bentley readily admitted it, saying, “a true scientist wishes above all to have his photographs as true to nature as possible, and if retouching will help in this respect, then it is fully justified.”
The defense is a good one. Although the “nature” Bentley’s photos show us may be a theoretical idealization, so too are the hand-rendered illustrations of most scientists throughout history (and nearly every medical diagram today). Take, for example, the psychedelic, brightly colored patterns of accomplished biologist Ernst Haeckel, who turned the micro- and macroscopic world into surreally symmetrical art in his drawings. Though he might not have said so directly, Bentley was doing something similar with a camera. Just listen to him describe his process in a 1900 issue of Harper’s:
Quick, the first flakes are coming; the couriers of the coming snow storm. Open the skylight, and directly under it place the carefully prepared blackboard, on whose ebony surface the most minute form of frozen beauty may be welcome from cloud-land. The mysteries of the upper air are about to reveal themselves, if our hands are deft and our eyes quick enough.
In the “quiet frenzy of his winter’s quest,” writes Allison Meier at Hyperallergic, he produced images of “beautiful ghosts from a winter that bristled the air over a century ago.” Learn more about Bentley’s life, work, and the Smithsonian collection in the short documentary further up, the Washington Post video above, and the Radiolab episode below, in which a breathless Latif Nasser takes us into the heart of Bentley’s origin story, and “snowflake expert and photographer Ken Libbrecht helps set the record straight.”
Real snowflakes have many imperfections, and perhaps Bentley did snow a disservice to so strenuously suggest otherwise. But the record he left us, Meier notes, “is appreciated as much as an artistic archive as a meteorological one.” He might have been a scientist when it came to technique, but Bentley was a romantic when it came to snow. His story is as fascinating as his photographs. Maybe a delightful alternative to the usual Christmas fare. There’s even a children’s book called… what else?… Snowflake Bentley.
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