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Posts tagged "christmas"
Pixel Fireplace by Ted Martens
This is a type-controlled interactive fireplace I’ve worked on for a few years. I originally made it because I have fond memories of a fireplace crackling away during the winter while growing up. I didn’t have one at my apartment so I decided to make my own take on a digital yule-log type fireplace. I love pixel art and I’m a game developer so I went with large pixels for abstraction combined with realistic sounds. You can throw up to 5 logs on at a time and they burn down to ash (about 15 minutes per log).
I’m kind of in love with this. Saw it on @rob_sheridan’s feed, bought the full version and sat with Owen just chilling out and staring at it, then set it up on my laptop hooked up to the external monitor so and used it as a kind of writing timer (I think it takes about an hour for a log to run out.) Really simple, really fun.
The song “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” was written by Hugh Martin for Meet Me in St. Louis. Now a holiday favorite, the “initial set of lyrics… were almost comically depressing.”
Among the never-recorded couplets — which he now describes as ”hysterically lugubrious” — were lines like: ”Have yourself a merry little Christmas/It may be your last…. Faithful friends who were dear to us/Will be near to us no more.”
About a week before they shot the scene in the movie, Judy Garland said, “Don’t you think these are awfully dark?” So Martin made some changes.
Then, in 1957, Frank Sinatra — who’d already cut a lovely version with the movie’s bittersweet lyrics in 1947 — came to Martin with a request for yet another pick-me-up. ”He called to ask if I would rewrite the ‘muddle through somehow’ line,” says the songwriter. ”He said, ‘The name of my album is A Jolly Christmas. Do you think you could jolly up that line for me?”’ Not about to give the Chairman any lip, Martin made several cheerier alterations, shifting the happiness into the present tense and changing that ”muddle through” line to ”Hang a shining star upon the highest bough.”
Otis Redding, “White Christmas” (1968)
My favorite performance of Irving Berlin’s song, which has a really fascinating history, so fascinating in fact that NPR has done at least two stories on it: one in 2000 and one in 2002. Both very much worth listening to.
In January 1940, Irving Berlin, the most popular songwriter in America, raced into his office and asked his musical secretary to take down a new song. “Not only is it the best song I ever wrote, it’s the best song anybody ever wrote,” he said. His “White Christmas” was a seasonal, secular hymn that has lasted over half a century.
The composer of one of our most beloved Christmas songs, Berlin was Jewish, born in Russia, and his first language was Yiddish. This really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. When I was reading The Book of Gossage, Howard Gossage wrote that the best creative folks are “extra-environmental”—they are your immigrants, your outsiders, the folks who are able to notice what’s already there because it’s not “natural” to them.
Jody Rosen, author of White Christmas: The Story of An American Song, says that there might be a darker side to the song:
Berlin’s own feelings about the holiday were certainly ambivalent. He suffered a tragedy on Christmas Day in 1928 when his 3-week-old son, Irving Berlin Jr., died. Every Christmas thereafter, he and his wife visited his son’s grave. “The kind of deep secret of the song may be that it was Berlin responding in some way to his melancholy about the death of his son.”
“In spirit, if not in form, it’s a blues song.” (Enter Otis.)
A Very Terry Gilliam Christmas: Season’s Greetings, 1968
Terry Gilliam on making the film:
I went down to the Tate and they’ve got a huge collection of Victorian Christmas cards so I went through the collection and photocopied things and started moving them around. So the style just developed out of that rather than any planning being involved. I never analysed the stuff, I just did it the quickest, easiest way. And I could use images I really loved.
Had no idea Gilliam was on Facebook! Merry Christmas to us.
Kramer advertises Hennigan’s scotch
“That is damn good Scotch. I could do a commercial for this stuff. That’s right, folks. I just had three shots of Hennigan’s, and I don’t smell. Imagine, you can walk around drunk all day. That’s Hennigan’s, the no-smell, no-tell Scotch. Say you got a big job interview and you’re a little nervous. Well, throw back a couple of shots of Hennigan’s, and you’ll be as loose as a goose and ready to roll in no time. And because it’s odorless, why, it’ll be our little secret. H, E, double-N, I…
Filing this under Christmas, because.
(Thx, braiker!)
(Source: eatshitdieslow)
