From 2006 to 2009, Bob Dylan hosted the Theme Time Radio Hour on Sirius Satellite Radio. Each show featured “an eclectic mix of songs, from a wide variety of musical genres, … along with Dylan’s on-air thoughts and commentary interspersed with phone calls, email readings, contributions from special guests and an array of classic radio IDs, jingles and promos from the past.” That eclectic mix also gave us this: Dylan reading, in his distinctive, quirky way, a list of the most oft-cited New Year’s Resolutions, ones that we annually make and sometimes break. Sound familiar? Welcome to 2024!
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Early in his collecting odyssey, animation historian, archivist, and educator Tommy José Stathes earned the honorific Cartoon Cryptozoologist from Cinebeasts, a “New York-based collective of film nerds, vidiots, and programmers investigating the furthest reaches of the moving image universe.”
More recently, George Willeman, a nitrate film expert on the Library of Congress’ film preservation team dubbed him “the King of Silent Animation.”
The seed of Stathes’ enduring passion took root in his 90s childhood, when slapped together VHS anthologies of cartoons from the 30s and 40s could be picked up for a couple of bucks in groceries and drugstores. These finds typically included one or two silent-era rarities, which is how he became acquainted with Felix the Cat and other favorites who now dominate his Early Animation Archive.
He squeezed his parents and grandparents for memories of cartoons screened on television and in theaters during their youth, and began researching the history of animation.
Realizing how few of the early cartoons he was learning about could be widely viewed, he set out to collect and archive as many examples as possible, and to share these treasures with new audiences.
His collection currently consists of some 4,000 animated reels, truffled up from antique shops, flea markets, and eBay. In addition to his Cartoons on Film YouTube channel, he hosts regular in-person Cartoon Carnivals, often curated around holiday themes.
Stathes’ passion project is giving many once-popular characters a second and in some cases, third act.
Take Farmer Alfalfa, (occasionally rendered as Al Falfa), the star of 1923’s The Fable of the Alley Cat, an installment in the Aesop’s Fables series, which ran from 1921 to 1929.
His first appearance was in director Paul Terry’s Down on Phoney Farm from 1915, but as Stathes observes, baby boomers grew up watching him on TV:
Nearly all of these folks who mention the character will also reference ‘hundreds’ of mice. Few may have realized that, while the Farmer Alfalfa cartoons running on television at that time were already old, the films starred one of the earliest recurring cartoon characters, and one that enjoyed an incredibly long career compared with his cartoon contemporaries.
The Fable of the Alley Cat honks a lot of familiar vintage cartoon horns — slapstick, mayhem, David triumphing over Goliath… cats and mice.
Stathes describes it as “a rather sinister day in the life of Farmer Al Falfa — It’s clear that the animal kingdom tends to despise him! — and his documentation is meticulous:
The version seen here was prepared for TV distribution in the 1950s by Stuart Productions. The music tracks were originally composed by Winston Sharples for the Van Beuren ‘Rainbow Parade’ cartoons in the mid-1930s.
The mismatched duo, Mutt and Jeff, got their start in daily newspaper comics, before making the leap to animated shorts.
Animation connoisseurs go bananas for the perspective shift at the 14 second mark of Laughing Gas (1917), a rarity Stathes shares as a reference copy from the original 35mm nitrate form, with the promise of a full restoration in the future.
(A number of Stathes’ acquisitions have deteriorated over the years or sustained damage through improper storage.)
Dinky Doodle and his dog Weakheart were 1920s Bray Studios crowdpleasers whose stint on television is evidenced by the midcentury voice over that was added to Dinky Doodle’s Bedtime Story (1926).
The characters’ creator, director Walter Lantz appears as “Pop” in the above live sequences.
Stathes’ collection also dredges up some objectionable period titles and content, Little Black Sambo, Redskin Blues, and Korn Plastered in Africa to name a few.
Stathes is mindful of contemporary sensibilities, but stops short of allowing them to scrub these works from the historic record. He warns would-be viewers of The Chinaman that it contains a “racist speech balloon as well as an intertitle that was cut from the later TV version for obvious reasons:”
Such was the vulgar terminology in those days. To question or censor these films would be denying our history.
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. — Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
History favors the eyes.
Visual art can tell us what individuals who died long before the advent of photography looked like, as well as the sort of fashions, food and decor one might encounter in households both opulent and humble.
Pity the poor neglected nose. Scents are ephemeral! How often have we wondered what Versailles really smelled back in the 17th century, when unbathed aristocrats in unlaundered finery packed into high society’s unventilated salons?
On the other hand, given the opportunity, do we really want to know?
Odeuropa, the European olfactory heritage project, answers with a resounding yes.
Among its initiatives is an interactive Smell Explorer that invites visitors to dive deep into smells as cultural phenomena.
Developed by an international team of computer scientists, AI experts and humanities scholars, the Smell Explorer is a vast compendium of smells as represented in 23,000 images and 62,000 public domain texts, including novels, theatrical scripts, travelogues, botanical textbooks, court records, sanitary reports, sermons, and medical handbooks.
This resource offers a fresh lens for considering the past through our noses, an unflinching look at various olfactory realities of life in Europe from the 15th through early 20th centuries.
Survivors of earlier plagues and pandemics might have associated their trials with the purifying aromas of burning rosemary and hot tar, just as the scents of sourdough and the way a handsewn cotton face mask’s interior smelled after several hours of wear conjure the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic for many of us.
There are a number of interesting ways to explore this scent-rich database — by geographic location, time period, associated emotion, or aromatic quality.
Of course, you could go straight to a smell source.
The squeamish are advised to steer clear of vomit (421 results) in favor of the Smell Explorer’s pleasurable and abundant food-related entries — bread, chocolate, coffee, pomegranate, pastry, and wine, to name but a few.
Each scent is built as a collection of cards or “nose witness reports” with information as to the title of the work cited, its author or artist, year of creation and characterization (“good”, “rank”, “peculiarly unpleasant and permanent”…)
Even more ambitiously, Odeuropa aims to give 21st-century noses an actual whiff of Europe’s olfactory heritage by enlisting perfumers and scent designers to recreate over a hundred historic odors and aromas.
While everyone stands to benefit from the added olfactory dimension of such exhibits, this initiative is of particular service to blind and visually-impaired visitors. Expertise is no doubt required to get it right.
We’re reminded of satirist PJ O’Rourke early-80’s visit to the Exxon-sponsored Universe of Energy Pavilion in Walt Disney World’s EPCOT center, where animatronic dinosaurs were “depicted without accuracy and much too close to your face:”
One of the few real novelties at Epcot is the use of smell to aggravate illusions. Of course, no one knows what dinosaurs smelled like, but Exxon has decided they smelled bad.
However detailed they may be in other respects, many accounts of daily life centuries and centuries ago pass over the use of the toilet in silence. Even if they didn’t, they wouldn’t involve the kind of toilets we would recognize today, but rather chamber pots, outhouses, and other kinds of specialized rooms with chutes emptying straight out into rivers and onto back gardens. And that was just the residences. What would public facilities have been like? We have one answer in the Told in Stone video above, which describes “public latrines in ancient Rome,” the facilities constructed in almost every Roman town “where citizens could relieve themselves en masse.”
These usually had at least a dozen seats, Told in Stone creator Garrett Ryan explains, though some were grander in scale than others: the Roman agora of Athens, for example, boasted a 68-seater. A facility in Timgad, the “African Pompeii” previously featured here on Open Culture, had “fancy armrests in the shape of leaping dolphins.”
Judged by their ruins, these public “restrooms” may seem unexpectedly impressive in their engineering and elegant in their design. But we may feel somewhat less inclined toward time-travel fantasies when Ryan gets into such details as “the sponge on a stick that served as toilet paper” that remains “one of the more notorious aspects of daily life in ancient Rome.”
These weren’t technically latrines, as Lina Zeldovich notes at Smithsonian.com. “The word ‘latrine,’ or latrina in Latin, was used to describe a private toilet in someone’s home, usually constructed over a cesspit. Public toilets were called foricae,” and their construction tended to rely on deep-pocketed organizations or individuals. “Upper-class Romans, who sometimes paid for the foricae to be erected, generally wouldn’t set foot in these places. They constructed them for the poor and the enslaved — but not because they took pity on the lower classes. They built these public toilets so they wouldn’t have to walk knee-deep in excrement on the streets.”
The problem of large-scale human waste disposal is as old as urban civilization, and Rome hardly solved it once and for all. The Absolute History short above shows how the castles of medieval England handled it, using lavatories with holes over the moat (and piles of “moss, grass, or hay” in lieu of yet-to-be-invented toilet paper). At Medievalists.net, Lucie Laumonier writes that the urban equivalent of Roman foricae were “often built over bridges and on quays to facilitate the evacuation of human waste that went directly into running water.” Innovative as this was, it must have posed difficulties for boaters passing below, to say nothing of the users unfortunate enough to sit on a wooden seat just rotten enough to give out — the prospect of which, for all the deficiencies of Modern Western civilization’s public restrooms, at least no longer worries us quite so much today.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
From 1967 to 1969, Tom and Dick Smothers hosted The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a politely edgy comedy show that tested the boundaries of mainstream television and the patience of CBS executives. Playing to a younger demographic, the show took positions against the Vietnam War and for the Civil Rights Movement, while featuring musical acts that challenged the norms of the era–everyone from Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, to the Doors and Jefferson Airplane, to Buffalo Springfield and Simon and Garfunkel.
Then came The Who in September 1967. Making its American network TV debut, the band picked up where they left off a few months ago at the Monterey Pop Festival. They performed “My Generation” and went into auto-destruction mode, smashing their guitars, toppling their drums, and creating general mayhem, before bringing the song to a close. But for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The Who added a special twist, packing Keith Moon’s drum kit with explosives, a few too many, it turns out.
Here’s how Allan Blye, a producer-writer for the show, remembers it:
The Who wanted to do a big explosion at the end of their performance. In dress rehearsal, it was a powder puff. So, I say to the special effects guy, “We have to make a bigger boom.” Unbeknownst to us, The Who had told their own guy the same thing. When the explosion went off, it affected Pete Townshend’s hearing permanently. Keith Moon got blown off his drumstand, but was too out of it to know.
Stunned yet poised, Tom Smothers walked onto the stage, only to find his acoustic guitar snatched from his hands and smashed to smithereens too. He later recalled: “Everyone was so shocked.” “When Townshend came over and grabbed my guitar, I was busy just seeing where the bodies were, seeing if anyone was injured. He picked the guitar up, and people kept saying, ‘Did he really ruin your guitar? It looked so real!’ And I’d say. ‘Well it was real! I was confused as hell!’ ”
The suits at CBS abruptly canceled The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1969, leading the brothers to file a breach of contract lawsuit, which they eventually won. (They discuss the sting of that whole experience with David Letterman here.)
Tom Smothers died yesterday at age 86, “following a recent battle with cancer.” His brother Dick announced his passing, stating: “Tom was not only the loving older brother that everyone would want in their life, he was a one-of-a-kind creative partner. I am forever grateful to have spent a lifetime together with him, on and off stage, for over 60 years. Our relationship was like a good marriage – the longer we were together, the more we loved and respected one another. We were truly blessed.” And so were the rest of us.
Among the non-wine-related points of interest in the Loire Valley, the Château de Chambord stands tall — or rather, both tall and wide, being easily the largest château in the region. “A Unesco World Heritage site with more than 400 rooms, including reception halls, kitchens, lapidary rooms and royal apartments,” writes Adrienne Bernhard at BBC Travel, it “boasts a fireplace for every day of the year.” No less vast and elaborate a hunting lodge would do for King Francis I, who had it built between 1519 and 1547, though the identity of the architect from whom he commissioned the plans has been lost to history. But the unusual design of its central staircase — and central tourist attraction — suggests an intriguing name indeed: Leonardo da Vinci.
“In 1516, Leonardo left his studio in Rome to join the court of King Francis I as ‘premier peintre et ingénieur et architecte du Roi,’ ” Bernhard writes. “Francis I enthusiastically embraced the cultural Renaissance that had swept Italy, eager to put his imprimatur on the arts, and in 1516 commissioned plans for his dream castle at the site of Romorantin. For Leonardo, it was an ideal assignment – the culmination of an illustrious career, allowing the artist to express many of his passions: architecture, urban planning, hydraulics and engineering.” But not long after its construction began, the Romorantin project was abandoned, and by the time Francis got started on what would become Château de Chambord, Leonardo was already dead.
Leonardo’s influence nevertheless seems present in the finished castle: in its Greek cross-shaped floor plan, in its large copula, and most of all in its “double helix” staircase, which resembles certain designs contained in his Codex Atlanticus. “The celebrated staircase consists in a hollowed central core and, twisting and turning one above the other, twinned helical ramps servicing the main floors of the building,” says the Château de Chambord’s official site. “Magically enough, when two persons use the different sets of staircases at the same time, they can see each other going up or down, yet never meet.” (Blogger Gretchen M. Greer writes that “one woman I traveled with found the staircase so strikingly symbolic of the marital disharmony and disconnect that resulted in her divorce that she declared the beautiful architectural feature the ugliest place in the Loire.”)
Some scholars, like Hidemichi Tanaka, identify the hand of Leonardo in practically every detail of the château. “Seen from afar, the roof terrace, with its multitude of architectural embellishments, is suggestive of a soaring city skyline,” he writes in a 1992 article in the journal Artibus et Historiae. “It may be worth comparing the ‘city in stone’ with the townscape in the background of Leonardo’s Annunciation in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, as well as with the structures in the drawings of floods which the artist made in his later years.” Though perhaps a chronologically implausible achievement, the design of the Château de Chambord would have been neither technically nor aesthetically beyond him. And indeed, who wouldn’t be pleased to see medieval castle architecture paid such extravagant and still-impressive tribute by the quintessential Renaissance man?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
Some years ago, the Guardian’s Anne T. Donahue recommended, as an alternative Christmas movie, Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail from 1998. “Admittedly, You’ve Got Mail takes place from October to spring,” she writes, “but what matters most is that the movie’s most compelling scenes — when Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) discovers that Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) is ShopGirl, when they have coffee, when Kathleen realizes she’s probably going to lose her store (and again, no, not crying) — occur over the Best Time of Year™.” If none of this rings a bell, jingle or otherwise, you may need to get up to speed on the romantic comedies of the nineteen-nineties. You’d do well to begin with Ephron’s previous Christmastime-set Hanks-and-Ryan vehicle, Sleepless in Seattle.
Despite being primarily considered a spiritual sequel to Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail is also an adaptation of a much earlier picture, Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner. Released in 1940, it stars James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan as co-workers in a Budapest leather goods shop whose mutual animosity conceals, even to themselves, the fact that they’ve been amorously corresponding after being connected through a personals ad. This premise (which in turn comes from Parfumerie, a 1937 play by Miklós László) holds out practically unlimited mileage to the rom-com genre. That two high-profile films have faithfully adhered to Parfumerie gives cinephiles an opportunity to compare and contrast, making a study of how film itself changed over nearly six decades.
Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, attempts just such an exercise in the new video above, focusing on a particularly memorable scene shared by the two movies. “On the day the pen pals finally agree to meet at a café, the man, who gets there second, sees through the window that his beloved is actually his real-life antagonist, and because of this, doesn’t reveal his true identity. This imbalance of knowledge makes for a marvelous scene of dramatic irony, creating a tension that is at once heart-wrenching and hilarious.” In The Shop Around the Corner, this scene plays out in a little over eight minutes; in You’ve Got Mail, it takes nearly ten. But what really separates the styles of the earlier picture and the later is “the number of shots used to cover the scene.”
“In 1940, Lubitsch filmed the café scene in just nineteen shots. In comparison, Nora Ephron, 58 years later, used 133 shots for the same material,” resulting in a difference in average shot length of well over twenty seconds. This increase in cutting could reflect the fact that “early filmmaking techniques were influenced by the conventions of stage plays, where many filmmakers” — Lubitsch included — “began their careers,” whereas “films of the eighties and nineties were influenced by music videos and commercials, which increased viewer tolerance for more rapid editing,” to say nothing of the many other wider cultural differences between the prewar years and the end of the millennium. And when, some Christmas down the line, this material next gets adapted, it will presumably reflect the aesthetics (so to speak) of TikTok.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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 were to ask a certain kind of Englishman what sets his homeland apart from the rest of the world, he might point to the strength of its traditions. And what holds true for England itself holds even truer for its most renowned institutions, especially its most prestigious universities. Those who dream of attending Oxford dream not least of its distinctive traditions: from the relatively frequent Formal Hall, to the various ceremonial rituals on Ascension Day, to the Mallard Song sung just once per century by the elites of All Souls College, dating back to that college’s foundation in 1438— which was still long after the time of Oxford’s ultimate persona non grata, a long-mysterious figure named Henry Symeonis.
As recently as the time of Dickens (or at least the era in which he set his novels), Bachelors of Arts students turning Master of Arts students at Oxford were, according to the blog of the Archives and Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, “required to swear that they would observe the University’s statutes, privileges, liberties and customs, as you might expect; and not to lecture elsewhere, or resume their bachelor studies after getting their MA.” But they “also had to swear that they would never agree to the reconciliation of Henry Symeonis,” whoever that was. “Nowhere in the statutes did it explain who this Henry Symeonis (or Simeonis) was, what he was supposed to have done or why those getting their MAs should never agree to be reconciled with him.”
The clause in question came up for review in the early 1650s, but “even by that time, one suspects that the oath was of such antiquity that no-one knew anything about it and it was thought best to leave it be.” Not until 1912 did Reginald Lane Poole, Keeper of the University Archives, determine that Symeonis was the son of “a very wealthy townsman of Oxford.” In 1242, “he and a number of other men of the town of Oxford were found guilty of murdering a student of the University. Henry and his accomplices were fined £80 by King Henry III in May 1242 and were made to leave Oxford as a result.” Two decades after the murder, Henry III issued Symeonis (who had, in any case, long since returned to town) an official pardon.
“The Government was aware of the volatile relationship between town and gown and was concerned, in 1264, at the prospect of the University leaving Oxford in protest if Henry was allowed to return.” What seems to have happened is that “Henry Symeonis had bought the King’s pardon and his permission to return to Oxford. The King was willing to allow his return if the University agreed to it. But the University refused and chose to ignore the King’s order” — and even “gave Henry Symeonis the unique honor of being named in its own statutes, making the University’s dislike of him official and perpetual.” There his name stayed, receiving the sworn enmity of five and a half centuries’ worth of Oxford students, until the removal of the relevant oath in 1827. “No background information nor reason for the decision is recorded,” notes the Bodleian’s blog, possibly because “nobody knew exactly what they were abolishing.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
Copyright by Charities Aid Foundation America thanks to the generous support of the Bloch family; restoration and digitization: Jewish Museum Berlin. This pertains to all images on this page.
Perhaps at some point in the future,
the poems in your tongue I composed,
will be brought to your notice,
and if so, to delight will I then be disposed.
— Curt Bloch, Het Onderwater Cabaret
Zines typically tend toward the ephemeral, owing to their small circulations, erratic publication schedules, and the unpredictable lives of their creators.
Bloch not only produced an impressive 95 issues between August 1943 and April 1945, he did so as a German Jew hiding from the Nazis in the rafters of a private home in the Dutch city of Enschede, not far from the German border.
His cut-and-paste illustrations are part of a long-standing zine continuum, made possible in part by helpers who furnished him with pens, glue, newspapers and other collage-worthy materials, in addition to food and other necessities.
His print run was sub-miniscule. Duplicating his work was not an option, so Het Onderwater Cabaret circulated in its original form, passed from hand to hand at great risk.
The zine’s title is a play on onderduiken (to dive under), which Dutch people understood as a reference to the 10,000 Jews hiding from the Nazis in their country.
(It) included couriers, who brought food, but who could also bring the magazine out, to share with other people in the group who could be trusted. The magazines are very small, you can easily put one in your pocket or hide it in a book. He got them all back. They must have also returned them in some way.
It’s nothing short of a miracle that all 95 installments survive. Many zinesters fall short of preserving their work, but Bloch could not ignore this project’s personal and historical significance.
For half a century, these zines were known to a select few — family members, their original readers, and a handful of guests whom Bloch entertained by reading passages aloud after dinner parties in the family’s New York home.
Pomerance suspects that Bloch always intended for his work to have a performance aspect, and that the couple who shared his crawlspace quarters may well have been his first audience for ditties like the one below.
Hyenas and jackals
Look on with jealousy
For they now seem as choirboys
Compared to humanity.
Bloch’s daughter, Simone, who describes her dad as a smartass, is working on a website dedicated to his work. Read more about Bloch’s zine at The New York Times.
The images on this page thanks to the generous support of the Bloch family; restoration and digitization comes thanks to the Jewish Museum Berlin.
When A Charlie BrownChristmas first aired 58 years ago, few had any confidence that it would be a hit. Its story and animation, bare-bones even by the standards of mid-nineteen-sixties television, made a positive impression on neither CBS’ executives nor on many of the special’s own creators. They didn’t expect that this very simplicity would turn it into a perennial holiday favorite — nor, presumably, that its soundtrack by the Vince Guaraldi Trio would become one of the most beloved Christmas albums in existence. Now that we’re well into the season when the music from A Charlie Brown Christmas is heard every day in homes, cafés, and shopping malls all around the world, why not get an introduction to Guaraldi, the man and his music, from pop culture video essayist Matt Draper?
“Born in San Francisco in 1928, Guaraldi credited his two uncles with sparking his interest in jazz as a child, with the future musician already learning the piano by age seven,” says Draper. After serving in the Korean War and returning home to study music at San Francisco State University, Guaraldi began to “pursue his love of jazz in local clubs.”
He soon formed his trio, and recording their first albums in the mid-nineteen-fifties, he “expanded his use of Latin jazz and bossa nova.” In 1962 Guaraldi scored his first hit with “Cast Your Fate to the Wind,” a single from an album inspired by Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus. It was a radio broadcast of that song, so the story goes, that caught the ear of Lee Mendelson, who would produce A Charlie Brown Christmas, as he crossed the Golden Gate Bridge in a taxicab.
Mendelson initially commissioned Guaraldi to compose the music for A Boy Named Charlie Brown, a television documentary that ultimately never aired. But its recording sessions brought forth “Linus and Lucy,” which became Peanuts’ de facto theme song, and when Coca-Cola agreed to sponsora Peanuts Christmas special in 1965 — a scant six months before Christmas itself — Guaraldi was called back to score it. “A Charlie Brown Christmas is a rather melancholic story centering on Charlie’s search for meaning and worth in the holiday season,” says Draper, “so it’s fitting that a large portion of Guaraldi’s score is tinged with sadness.” Yet “Guaraldi’s melancholy isn’t overwrought or forced; rather, it’s minor and subtle,” unlike the average film score that tries to “beat its listeners over the head with emotion.”
The soundtrack album, which you can hear (and see accompanied by a Yule fireplace) on the official Vince Guaraldi Youtube channel, offers musical variety from the “ton of swinging style” in its version of “O Tanenbaum” to the “waltz brimming with energy” of “Skating” to “Christmas Is Coming,” with its “hints of rock-and-roll.” In the video just above, composer-Youtuber Charles Cornell explains what makes it “without a doubt, the best Christmas album ever” (a title held along with that of the best-selling jazz album in history after Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue), not least its being less “in-your-face Christmas” than other similarly themed recordings. Yet he also acknowledges that Guaraldi’s most beautiful composition for a Peanuts special isn’t in A Charlie Brown Christmas, but It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, from 1966. When next fall fall rolls around, do make “Great Pumpkin Waltz” the first song you hear.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
Ten years ago, we featured John Waters’ handmade Christmas cards, which he’s been making since he was a high-school student in 1964, long before William S. Burroughs deemed him the “Pope of Trash” (also the title of a retrospective exhibition at the Academy of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles this past fall). It was Waters’ films that qualified him for that honor, of course, but his regular season’s greetings are no less a medium for his career-long artistic reclamation of bad taste. Christmas cards also have the advantage of being even more “underground” than his early features, directed as they are to only a select group of recipients, large though Waters’ mailing list has grown in recent decades: he mentioned to the New York Times that he sends out over 2,000 cards, and that was back in 2013.
“Christmas cards are your first duty and you must send one (with a personal, handwritten message) to every single person you ever met, no matter how briefly,” Waters wrote in a 1980s essay: “Give Me Another Present! Why I Love Christmas”. “Of course, you must make your own cards by hand. ‘I don’t have time,’ you may whine, but since the whole purpose of life is Christmas, you’d better make time, buster.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
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