When you think Christmas, you probably think recently deceased Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland, no? No, you probably don’t, but he made a Christmas record all the same in 2011 (see his “Winter Wonderland” video above). You might say critics didn’t love it, but that’s not really the point. Artists often record Christmas records as novelty items for shoppers on a tear to snatch up and shove in the basket with other last-minute detritus. It seems like common wisdom that if you get your Christmas album on a Starbucks or Target product display, you’ll probably have a pretty happy new year.
But then there are the rare exceptions, Christmas albums made with care, by artists who surely wanted to make money, but who also made something uniquely great of well-worn holiday classics, or penned new ones of their own. There is, of course, the mostly instrumental jazz greatness of Vince Guaraldi’s Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack. But have you heard instrumental surf-rock legends The Ventures Christmas album? It’s outstanding. You’re intimately familiar with The Jackson 5’s brilliant soul renditions of songs like “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” but you haven’t yet begun to yuletide, I say, until you’ve put on James Brown’s Funky Christmas, featuring such original tunes as “Go Power at Christmas Time” and the heartfelt plea on behalf of impoverished kids, “Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto.”
We’ve got these albums and many more greats—from Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, The Beach Boys, Willie Nelson, Ella Fitzgerald, Elvis Presley etc.—compiled in the Spotify playlist above, where they rub shoulders with unexpected gems from indie band Low, punk rockers Bad Religion, and horror legend Christopher Lee, whose Heavy Metal Christmas and Heavy Metal Christmas Too should be required listening at every holiday party. Hosting one of your own? Pull up our playlist of Christmas music worth hearing, hit play, and enjoy many quality hours of jazz, funk, country, soul, and rock and roll cheer and tidings. These suggestions come to us via Rolling Stone, Complex, and our readers on Twitter. If you need to download Spotify’s software, get it here. You can find a complete list of the albums below, with links to purchase them, should you need a last minute gift.
In a time when people offer up every gesture as fodder for their adoring social media public, it’s a little difficult to imagine living a life as private as Jane Austen (1775–1817) did. And yet, the impression we have of her as shy and retiring is misleading. She did not achieve literary fame during her lifetime, it’s true, and it’s not clear that she desired it. As her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh wrote in the Memoir of Jane Austen, the 1870 biographical sketch that helped popularize Austen in the 19th century, “her talents did not introduce her to the notice of other writers, or connect her with the literary world, or in any degree pierce through the obscurity of her domestic retirement.” Yet, reducing Austen’s personality, as Austen-Leigh does, to “the moral rectitude, the correct taste, and the warm affections with which she invested her ideal characters” misses her fierce intelligence and complexity.
Austen’s nephew’s portrait of her seems concerned with preserving those canons of propriety that she scrupulously documented and satirized in her novels. Perhaps this is partly why he characterizes her as a very shy person. But we know that Austen maintained a lively social life and kept up regular correspondence with family and friends. Her letter-writing, some of it excerpted in Austen-Leigh’s biography, gives us the distinct impression that she used her letters to practice the sharp portraits she drew in the novels of the mores and strictures of her social class. Thus it is surprising when her nephew tells us we are “not to expect too much from them.” “The style is always clear,” he opined, “and generally animated, while a vein of humour continually gleams through the whole; but the materials may be thought inferior to the execution, for they treat only of the details of domestic life. There is in them no notice of politics or public events; scarcely any discussions on literature, or other subjects of general interest.”
What Austen’s nephew seems not to understand is what her legions of adoring readers and critics have since come to see in her work: in Austen, the “details of domestic life” are revealed as microcosms of her society’s politics, public events, literature, and “subjects of general interest.” Austen-Leigh almost admits as much, despite himself, when he compares his aunt’s letters to “the nest some little bird builds of the materials nearest at hand, of the twigs and mosses supplied by the tree in which it is placed; curiously constructed out of the simplest matters.” In Austen’s hands, however, the small domestic dramas proceeding on the country estates around her were anything but simple matters. Letter-writing plays a central role in novels like Pride and Prejudice, as in most fiction of the period. The surviving Austen letters are worth reading as source material for the novels—or worth reading for their own sake, so enjoyable are their turns of phrase and withering characterizations.
Take a November, 1800 letter Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra (preserved in the so-called “Brabourne edition” of her letters). Austen begins by confessing, “I believe I drank too much wine last night at Hurstbourne; I know not how else to account for the shaking of my hand to-day.” To the “venial error” of her hangover she attributes “any indistinctness of writing.” She then goes on to describe in vivid and very witty detail the ball she’d attended the night previous, taking the risk of boring her sister “because one is prone to think much more of such things the morning after they happen, than when time has entirely driven them out of one’s recollection.” Read an excerpt of her description below and see if the scene doesn’t come alive before your eyes:
There were very few beauties, and such as there were were not very handsome. Miss Iremonger did not look well, and Mrs. Blount was the only one much admired. She appeared exactly as she did in September, with the same broad face, diamond bandeau, white shoes, pink husband, and fat neck. The two Miss Coxes were there: I traced in one the remains of the vulgar, broad-featured girl who danced at Enham eight years ago; the other is refined into a nice, composed-looking girl, like Catherine Bigg. I looked at Sir Thomas Champneys and thought of poor Rosalie; I looked at his daughter, and thought her a queer animal with a white neck. Mrs. Warren, I was constrained to think, a very fine young woman, which I much regret. She has got rid of some part of her child, and danced away with great activity looking by no means very large. Her husband is ugly enough, uglier even than his cousin John; but he does not look so very old. The Miss Maitlands are both prettyish, very like Anne, with brown skins, large dark eyes, and a good deal of nose. The General has got the gout, and Mrs. Maitland the jaundice. Miss Debary, Susan, and Sally, all in black, but without any stature, made their appearance, and I was as civil to them as their bad breath would allow me.
CBGB, the birthplace of New York’s 1970s punk scene, closed in 2006, with Patti Smith headlining the final show. It was the end of an era, another great New York institution shutting its doors.
As the tweet above from indie radio station WFMU suggests, CBGB will be reincarnated apparently as a restaurant in a Newark Airport terminal, with a menu offering Cheeseburgers, Chicken Wings, Caprese Salads, Seared Togarashi Tuna, and Kobe Chili Dogs. The menu doesn’t seem to be shooting for authenticity, but maybe, hopefully the bathrooms will.
This past summer, we featured a shot-by-shot breakdown of several sequences in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris by filmmaker and video essayist Antonios Papantoniou. Solaris, as well as the rest of Tarkovsky’s oeuvre, has given and will continue to give detail-oriented cinephiles a seemingly infinite amount of material to break down, scrutinize, and explain the genius of.
But what of big Hollywood films? Do they have nothing of interest to offer? Papantoniou clearly doesn’t think so: his other Shot by Shot video essays include looks, and very close looks indeed, at Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables, Martin Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear, and even the mother of all blockbusters, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.
These three auteurs, all of the same generation, came up in the 1970s cohort of filmmakers who brought about the “New Hollywood,” a movement wherein young directors like Spielberg, De Palma, and Scorsese (as well as Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Paul Schrader, and many others) changed the rules of classical cinema, introducing a host of subjects and techniques previously unheard of in mainstream American films. Yet they still did make mainstream American films, which required a kind of hybridization of cutting-edge sensibilities with silver-screen expectations. Papantoniou specifically examines how these directors accomplish it through the kind of shots they capture and how they cut them together.
Papantoniou’s analyses identify the visual evidence of Spielberg’s “appetite for nonstop dynamic filmmaking,” De Palma’s “own unique post-modern style” expressed through techniques like point-of-view-shots, and of how “Scorsese distincts [sic] himself by adopting more rebellious techniques.” You might get the sense of a slight awkwardness in the language here, but the images selected speak for themselves — and besides, if you took film studies classes in college, you no doubt had at least one or two professors who compensated for their odd turns of phrase with their rigorous love of cinema, and from whom you ultimately learned a great deal. Video essays like these have increasingly made it possible for anyone, without going back to college or even going in the first place, to do that kind of learning — and, whether watching Tarkovsky or Spielberg, to never watch them inattentively again.
The end of 2015 has been dominated by crises. At times, amidst the daily barrage of fearful spectacle, it can be difficult to conceive of the years around the corner in ways that don’t resemble the next crop of blow-em-up action movies, nearly every one of which depicts some variation on the seemingly inexhaustible theme of the end-of-the-world. There’s no doubt many of our current challenges are unprecedented, but in the midst of anxieties of all kinds it’s worth remembering that—as Steven Pinker has thoroughly demonstrated—“violence has declined by dramatic degrees all over the world.”
In other words, as bad as things can seem, they were much worse for most of human history. It’s a long view cultural historian Otto Friedrich took in a grim survey called The End of the World: A History. Written near the end of the Cold War, Friedrich’s book documents some 2000 years of European catastrophe, during which one generation after another genuinely believed the end was nigh. And yet, certain far-seeing individuals have always imagined a thriving human future, especially during the profoundly destructive 20th century.
In 1900, engineer John Elfreth Watkins made a survey of the scientific minds of his day. As we noted in a previous post, some of those predictions of the year 2000 seem prescient, some preposterous; all boldly extrapolated contemporary trends and foresaw a radically different human world. At the height of the Cold War in 1964, Isaac Asimov partly described our present in his 50 year forecast. In 1926, and again 1935, no less a visionary than Nikola Tesla looked into the 21st century to envision a world both like and unlike our own.
1. Steam power, already on the wane, will rapidly disappear: “In the year 2011 such railway trains as survive will be driven at incredible speed by electricity (which will also be the motive force of all the world’s machinery).”
2. “[T]he traveler of the future… will fly through the air, swifter than any swallow, at a speed of two hundred miles an hour, in colossal machines, which will enable him to breakfast in London, transact business in Paris and eat his luncheon in Cheapside.”
3. “The house of the next century will be furnished from basement to attic with steel… a steel so light that it will be as easy to move a sideboard as it is today to lift a drawing room chair. The baby of the twenty-first century will be rocked in a steel cradle; his father will sit in a steel chair at a steel dining table, and his mother’s boudoir will be sumptuously equipped with steel furnishings….”
4. Edison also predicted that steel reinforced concrete would replace bricks: “A reinforced concrete building will stand practically forever.” By 1941, he told Cosmopolitan, “all constructions will be of reinforced concrete, from the finest mansions to the tallest skyscrapers.”
5. Like many futurists of the previous century, and some few today, Edison foresaw a world where tech would eradicate poverty: “Poverty was for a world that used only its hands,” he said; “Now that men have begun to use their brains, poverty is decreasing…. [T]here will be no poverty in the world a hundred years from now.”
6. Anticipating agribusiness, Edison predicted, “the coming farmer will be a man on a seat beside a push-button and some levers.” Farming would experience a “great shake-up” as science, tech, and big business overtook its methods.
7. “Books of the coming century will all be printed leaves of nickel, so light to hold that the reader can enjoy a small library in a single volume. A book two inches thick will contain forty thousand pages, the equivalent of a hundred volumes.”
8. Machines, Edison told Cosmopolitan, “will make the parts of things and put them together, instead of merely making the parts of things for human hands to put together. The day of the seamstress, wearily running her seam, is almost ended.”
9. Telephones, Edison confidently predicted, “will shout out proper names, or whisper the quotations from the drug market.”
10. Anticipating the logic of the Cold War arms race, though underestimating the mass destruction to precede it, Edison believed the “piling up of armaments” would “bring universal revolution or universal peace before there can be more than one great war.”
11. Edison “sounds the death knell of gold as a precious metal. ‘Gold,’ he says, ‘has even now but a few years to live. They day is near when bars of it will be as common and as cheap as bars of iron or blocks of steel.’”
He then went on, astonishingly, to echo the pre-scientific alchemists of several hundred years earlier: “’We are already on the verge of discovering the secret of transmuting metals, which are all substantially the same matter, though combined in different proportions.’”
Excited by the future abundance of gold, the Miami Metropolis piece on Edison’s predictions breathlessly concludes, “In the magical days to come there is no reason why our great liners should not be of solid gold from stem to stern; why we should not ride in golden taxicabs, or substituted gold for steel in our drawing rooms.”
In reading over the predictions from shrewd thinkers of the past, one is struck as much by what they got right as by what they got often terribly wrong. (Matt Novak’s Paleofuture, which brings us the Miami Metropolis article, has chronicled the checkered, hit-and-miss history of futurism for several years now.) Edison’s tone is more strident than most of his peers, but his accuracy was about on par, further suggesting that neither the most confident of techno-futurists, nor the most baleful of doomsayers knows quite what the future holds: their clearest forecasts obscured by the biases, technical limitations, and philosophical categories of their present.
BALTIC’s website provides some context for the current installation, a series of nine model buildings in various architectural styles, festooned with Murray’s face and other visual indicators from his considerable oeuvre:
Bill Murray is always authentic. He is consistently ‘BILL MURRAY’. His singularity breaks into irreducible ambiguities and contradictions – Bill the global superstar, the guy-next-door, anti-brand brand, irrepressible lothario, dignified clown and droll philosopher. This exhibition takes these and many other characteristics as an approach, turning them into a fantasy caricature and a poetic tableau of scaled down architecture and collections.
The five minute talk above had the opposite effect.
I’d like to propose a reshoot, starring Bill Murray. Imagine what his particular comic genius could bring to the transcript above?
Saint Bill has demonstrated that he is willing to work below scale when he believes in a project. Perhaps he would accept an exhibition t‑shirt in return for livening up this limp artistic statement.
(Might be what the artist was angling for all along…)
Whatever our set of beliefs, most of us sooner or later unite in the same celebratory pursuit on Christmas Day: the watching of movies. Going out to the theater to catch a holiday-season blockbuster or two after you’ve opened your presents (or after other people have finished opening their presents) has become a kind of tradition in itself, and enough of a tradition to permit variations. Maybe you’d rather use film to free yourself of the burdens of the Christmas season, going instead to the art house and catching the least commercial film possible in this increasingly commercial time of the year.
But even if you stick with the auteurs, you can’t get away from Christmas entirely. A couple Christmases ago, “The Auteurs of Christmas” shot a series of versions of this most anticipated morning in the style of directors Steven Spielberg, Sergei Eisenstein, Wes Anderson, Woody Allen, Lars von Trier, Martin Scorsese, Michael Moore, Stanley Kubrick, Werner Herzog, and Baz Luhrmann.
More recently, the follow-up above expanded the project to envision Christmas as envisioned by Charlie Chaplin, Quentin Tarantino, Terrence Malick, Christopher Nolan, Jean-Luc Godard, Alfred Hitchcock, Morgan Spurlock, David Lynch, M. Night Shyamalan, and Michael Bay.
But just as the conclusion of one year’s Christmas can simply get you looking forward to the next year’s, so these two super-homages make you think about the possible auteurs for inclusion in a third: what would Yasujirō Ozu’s Christmas morning look like, shot just a couple feet off the tatami mat? Or Chantal Akerman’s, which, for proper pacing, might require a whole video by itself? Or a Coen Brothers Christmas? Gaspar Noé’s? Truly, this holiday keeps on giving.
Sometimes when I enjoy a movie less than I thought I would, I find that my dissatisfaction stems from the feeling of having watched a movie made out of other movies, a Frankensteinian creation assembled from the dead bits and pieces that worked well when attached to their original bodies, alive long ago, but, when re-used, don’t come to life at all. When avid cinephile turned avid cinephile and director Quentin Tarantino plays the role of a cinematic Dr. Frankenstein, however, he turns the voltage much higher up, elevating the practice to an auteur’s art.
When Tarantino’s films reference his favorite films — be they classics of the canon, tried-and-true westerns, kung-fu obscurities, pieces of European new-wave, or grind-house exploitation flicks — they often transcend their sources. Jacob Swinney, whose supercuts of Tarantino’s use of sound, close-ups, and cars we featured back in April, has cut together 34 particularly impressive visual references of the thousands found in the director’s filmography and placed them alongside the works quoted.
The video covers, in three minutes, visual references from the “Mexican standoff” from City of Fire in Reservoir Dogs to the dances from Band of Outsiders and 8 1/2 in Pulp Fiction to Superchick and The Graduate’s opening titles in Jackie Brown to Bruce Lee’s tracksuit in Game of Death on Uma Thurman in Kill Bill Volume One to Daryl Hannah’s writhing from Blade Runner in Kill Bill Volume Two to framing from The Searchers in Inglorious Basterds.
It stops short of The Hateful Eight, Tarantino’s latest, leaving it as an exercise for the viewer to tabulate just how wide a swatch of cinema the man has repurposed this time. He’s gone on record as saying he’ll only make two more feature films, but don’t worry, cinephiles: they’ll more than likely contain enough references to other movies, visual and otherwise, to keep you in viewing material for the next twenty years.
Producer David Merrick pulled the plug on a 1966 musical adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s starring Mary Tyler Moore long before its official opening night, thus sparing the drama critics and the public “an excruciatingly boring evening.”
And then there is 1970’s Big Time Buck White, activist Oscar Brown, Jr.’s adaptation of Joseph Dolan Tuotti’s play. It featured Muhammad Ali—temporarily benched from boxing for draft evasion—in the titular role of a militant lecturer, delivering a Black Power message to a character named Whitey.
The primarily white Broadway-going audience that embraced the countercultural “Tribal Love-Rock Musical” Hairtwo years earlier withheld its love. In a colorblind world, we might be able to chalk that up to the champ’s sub-par singing chops or some clunky lyrics, but it would be a mistake to turn a blind eye to the political climate.
(Eight years later, Ain’t Misbehavin’, a tribute to Fats Waller and the Harlem Renaissance was a bonafide hit.)
Big Time Buck White ran for just seven performances, posting its closing notice well in advance of its January 18th appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, above.
These days, the producers would probably scramble to find a replacement, but Sullivan, a staunch supporter of Civil Rights, honored the booking, commanding his studio audience to give the costumed players “a fine reception.”
Afterward, the champ thanked Sullivan for inviting him and “the group” so that viewers who didn’t get a chance to could see “what type of play i was participating in.”
A bit of trivia. Playbill credits actor Donald Sutherland, in the role of Black Man. He may be a movie star, but he’s something of a Broadway flop himself, his only other credit that of Humbert Humbert in 1980’s Lolita, People Magazine’s Bomb of the Year.
Above is another scene from the musical, shared by Ali’s admirer, Mike Tyson.
Have you had enough Star Wars yet? No, you will never have enough Star Wars, not even after you’ve acquired the Star Wars dinette set, Star Wars bed and bath collection, $400 Star Wars Lego Death Star, Star Warschicken frankfurter snack with built-in ketchup (seriously)… and that’s not even to mention the first six movies, re-released every few years in new formats and expanded editions.
Yeah, the merchandising may be a little much; with the inaugural film of the rebooted franchise opening during the holidays, it’s a feeding frenzy, no doubt. But for true fans, no amount of crass materialism can put a damper on the enthusiasm, and yes, the anxiety, for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Will it eclipse our painful memories of the prequels? Will Episode VII rekindle the magic of Episodes IV-VI (formerly Episodes I‑III)? By nearly all accounts, J.J. Abrams reimagining of the George Lucas legacy does all of the above.
To help you prepare for opening night (I’ve got my tickets!), we’ve compiled some of our top Star Wars posts, featuring all manner of documentary explainers, fan homages, interviews, parodies, remixes, etc. From the deadly serious to the ridiculous, perhaps no popular movie property has attracted as much commentary and meta-commentary as Star Wars. That isn’t likely to change anytime soon, what with the Star Wars universe again expanding into infinity. Before you take the leap forward into its future, revisit its past at the links below.
And finally, if you’ve got the stomach for it and you want to catch up on the last six Star Wars films—or watch them all for the first time—you can do so all at once in the mind-bending Meta Star Wars, which layers all six films over each other to create a psychedelic onslaught of whooshing spaceships, droid bleeps and bloops, and flashing blasters and lightsabers. You won’t come away from the experience, if you can stand it, with any sense of plot or characters, but you’ll have an intimate knowledge of the Star Wars universe’s many unique sound effects.
If we think about the times evil has most notably reared its head, many of our minds go right to the Holocaust — as, no doubt, did Marcel Marceau’s, especially since he had first-hand experience with the horror of the Nazis, having lost his father in Auschwitz, and even used the art of mime against it.
The Jewish Marceau (née Mangel) got his first exposure to mime from a Charlie Chaplin film, which he saw at the age of five. Later, when France entered the Second World War, he and his family moved around the country to flee the Nazis, from whom it became increasingly difficult to hide as time went on. “I was hidden by my cousin Georges Loinger who was a heroic Resistance fighter,” Marceau recounted in a 2001 speech. “He said, ‘Marcel must hide for a while. He will play an important part in the theater after the war.’ How did he know that? Because he knew that when I was a child I created a theater for children already.”
The skills Marceau cultivated performing for other children came in more than handy not just after the war but during it, as he performed for youngsters on the run from Hitler. ”Marceau started miming to keep children quiet as they were escaping,” said documentarian Philippe Mora, son of the Resistance fighter who smuggled refugees alongside Marceau. “It had nothing to do with show business. He was miming for his life.”
“Paris was liberated after the Americans entered in August,” said Marceau, “but the war wasn’t finished. Two months before the liberation of France, I entered a famous theater school and a master of mime, Étienne Decroux, said to the young students, ‘Who wants a part?’ And I said I. And I mimed the killer. And the killer was a Nazi, but of course I didn’t say Nazi.” Impressed with his impromptu embodiment of evil, Decroux asked his name. “I said Marcel Marceau,” his new surname inspired by a general who fought in the French Revolution, the “Marceau on the Rhine” of Victor Hugo’s poem (“and I was born in Strasbourg on the Rhine,” the artist adds). “That’s a beautiful name,” said Decroux. And thus the career of a mime legend truly began.
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