December 25, 2007
Merry and bright
A Belarusian Jew named "Israel" might not seem the most likely person to write the great American Christmas carol. But Israel Isidore Baline, the greatest songwriter of the dying days of Tin Pan Alley, had a brainwave one winter day at a spa in Phoenix, and wrote the best-selling song of the first hundred years of recorded music. Baline, working under his adopted name of Irving Berlin, excised the somewhat sardonic framing narrative of the song, about a California millionaire wishing for the snowy Christmases of his youth, and things took off from there. Fred Astaire, to whom he presented the song, liked it, but it ended up sung by Bing Crosby in the Crosby/Astaire film Holiday Inn. Although the hotel chain took its name from the movie, "White Christmas" was Holiday Inn's true legacy.
The movie is less known today than it might be, perhaps because of Crosby's blackface-and-dialect number in celebration of Lincoln's birthday in the February sequence, perhaps because it wasn't terribly good, and perhaps because the song's unexpected success — millions of singles sold, an Academy Award for Berlin — prompted Paramount to release a musical starring Crosby, Danny Kaye, and Rosemary Clooney. White Christmas was the top-grossing film of 1954 and focused on war buddies putting on a heckuva Christmas show in Vermont, leaving out all the extraneous Independence-Day-and-Thanksgiving-type songs. ("Abraham" makes an appearance, as an instrumental only.)
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December 24, 2006
So jolly and quick
The small town of Kale in Turkey has a few claims to fame. There are some lovely Roman ruins around town; one of Turkey's major industrial conglomerates, the Kale Group, is based there; and the city surrounds the ancient city of Myra, jewel of the Lycian Alliance. Myra was part of early Christendom, and its bishophric produced a man of renown in the fourth century: Nicholas of Bari. Little is known about Nicholas' life; veneration began relatively soon after his death, and to this day, his remains are said to miraculously generate water ("manna of Saint Nicholas") held to have curative properties. Nicholas is one of the most important saints in several Orthodox traditions; he is the patron saint of sailors, pawnbrokers, children, and thieves. And yet in America, he is, by and large, remembered thanks to two lines from one poem, written by a farmer named Henry Livingstone and for a hundred years published under the name of Clement Moore:
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there
Why pick on Saint Nick?
(more...)November 21, 2006
Hello, I must be going
Some holidays are regional. Sweetest Day is celebrated almost entirely in the Great Lakes region. It's Valentine's Day in October, a day invented out of whole cloth by Cleveland candy manufacturers to spur October chocolate sales in an era before Halloween was a festival of cavity-inducing gluttony. Huge amounts of newspaper advertising, candy gifts to newsboys, and a promotional push by the great Theda Bara, Hollywood's original vamp, failed to break it out of its regional shell; Buffalo and Detroit are among the few areas other than Cleveland where Sweetest Day continues to move heart-shaped boxes off the shelves. Some holidays are pointless; not even the popcorn people admit to knowing who came up with National Popcorn Day. And some are wholly spurious; the purportedly Inuit Festival for the Souls of Dead Whales probably goes over well among String Cheese Incident fans, but bears no relationship to any historically celebrated Native Alaskan holiday. But some, like World Hello Day (link via the similarly bewildered LGM), manage to combine all three qualities. Who are these McCormacks who came up with the idea? Why November 21? Why on earth do they want us to say hello to people, when holidays would ideally celebrate people leaving one another alone? And perhaps they do things differently in Arizona, but even if Esquivel, Seamus Heany, and Olivia de Havilland all say it's a fine idea, a holiday dedicated to introducing oneself to strangers seems likely to get one killed in, say, New York. Far better than World Hello Day would be Hello World Day, celebrating 32 years of every programming manual's stock first example. Global diversity could be honored by recognizing our rainbow of programming languages, from Pascal to Brainfuck, and when we were done we could all sing a song, examine some art, and return to our homes without bothering anyone.
July 14, 2006
The dogs of war
Carthage's most famous son is best known today for his tactic of marching elephants through the Alps (or possibly for having a name that rhymed with "cannibal"). But his sharp mind for tactical advantage, including the cavalry techniques that enabled him maintain a fifteen-year campaign against the Romans in Italy, weren't the first instance of his military innovation. Hannibal was the first man in recorded history to engage in biowarfare, flinging urns full of snakes at enemy ships in the Mediterranean. Use of cavalry predates the Battle of Cannae, of course; the chariot was invented around the year 2000 B.C., and the invention of the stirrup — a profoundly simple invention with drastic world-historical effects in both Europe and Asia — meant that cavalry could ride horses directly. (Other animals, such as the Carthaginian elephant or the Arizona camel, were also used.) But Hannibal's snakes were another technology entirely: animals not as a tool of soldiers, but as weapons themselves.
June 19, 2006
Swap meets
It's about that time of year again; while the rest of the world worries about the beautiful (if bloody and tragic) game, nebbishy number crunchers here in the last remaining superpower fret about Melky Carbera's VORP. Fantasy baseball may be widely derided as having turned a manly sport of drunken brawlers into something that only sabermetricians, lonely shut-ins, and boys named Theo care about. But this point of the season, when weaknesses start to become really glaring, offers a form of ritualized combat that most people in today's effete society can only dream of: the chance to rook one's friends and coworkers and then mock them mercilessly for having made the dumbest trade of the year.
(more...)May 31, 2006
Tubular bells
Kevin Kelly is a technophile, and has been since his Whole Earth Review days; like many people who really like tools, he often finds that specialized and old-fashioned implements are the cheapest, most efficient, or most aesthetically pleasing way to get jobs done. And if his theory that "species of technology do not go extinct" is correct, then he's in luck -- those lovely speed levers and screw punches will be around for generations to come. Kelly acknowledges the counterexample of Greek fire, the terrifying napalm-like weapon used by the Byzantines to ensure their naval superiority. Various glazes, perfumes, and dyes are gone, but it's doubtful that Kelly would consider the failure to replicate particular shade of blue stained glass a "species extinction". He's right that in an amazingly wealthy world, it's possible to find almost anything. Even if we can't duplicate a Stradivarius (ignoring the debate about whether Stradivarius himself had any secret techniques), it's possible to buy a violin in any well-equipped music shop; given enough time and money, you could acquire a brand new pianoforte or glass harmonica. The problem isn't with Kelly's insight; it's with his metaphor.
(more...)March 31, 2006
Proteus brought the upright beast
When Gen. Edward Bragg nominated Grover Cleveland to be Democratic candidate for president in 1888, he said that the American people loved him most for the enemies he had made. The DC Comics superhero the Flash must therefore set a record for the least-loved long-running character in the four-color world. It's not just that he travels through time with a Cosmic Treadmill; that the original character's death was the capstone on the most baroque storyline in the history of American comics; or that he was played by Dawson's dad on a dreadful t.v. show. It's the bad guys.
Batman faces distorted reflections of his own warped psyche: the researches into the theory and praxis of fear conducted by the Scarecrow; the three-steps-ahead planning of Denny O'Neil's eco-terrorist Ra's al Ghul; the Manichean worldview of Two-Face. Superman, the All-American boy, fights the military-industrial complex personified in the body of evil billionaire (and ex-president) Lex Luthor. Wonder Woman fights the very gods of Mount Olympus. Despite a history dating to 1939, including some lovely, loopy early stories written by Gardner Fox, the Flash's rogues' gallery doesn't measure up. He fights people like sinister violinist the Fiddler, ice-skate wielding villainess the Golden Glider, and Australian menace Captain Boomerang. It denotes a certain lack of seriousness -- or perhaps something in the water at DC -- when the most you can do for a nemesis is a superintelligent gorilla.
(more...)January 31, 2006
Live in vain
Isaac Asimov was one of the most successful science fiction writers of the Twentieth Century. His Foundation series was Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, projected into the far future and with one man attempting to turn back the waves; his "Three Laws of Robotics" led to both an OED entry and a Will Smith movie. Asimov spent the vast majority of his life within the Northeast Corridor, venturing out from the Boston-to-New-York axis only occasionally. He stopped teaching as an associate professor at Boston University in 1958, with no major research to his name (although he wrote a college textbook; given his consumate skill as a popular science writer, it was probably a better read than most). He was afraid of flying (he flew only twice in his life, both in the course his military service during World War II). Isaac Asimov spent the vast majority of his life staying in one place and writing. It showed, both in his often prolix novels and hs staggeringly lengthy bibliography. He is, most likely, the boringest man ever to inspire a deranged Japanese death cult.
(more...)December 30, 2005
Bring me flesh and bring me wine
Any American child who has had to perform in a Christmas conert or gone caroling has suffered through the interminable verses of "Good King Wenceslas". Caroling is basically a medieval English tradition adopted (like so many others, with its edges filed off) by the Victorians; Sir Arthur Sullivan, of Gilbert-and fame, tried his hand at a few, but "Good King Wenceslas" is by an earlier writer, the Anglican scholar and hymnist John Mason Neale. The carol itself contains no references to the Nativity or to Christ; instead it talks about King Wenceslas as a saint and reminds "Christian men" of the virtues of charity. Wenceslas, also known as Vaclavor, was a tenth century Czech ruler, the Duke of Bohemia. He was raised by his grandmother, Ludmilla, a royal convert to Christianity following the proselytizing mission of Saints Cyril (or Cyrillic fame) and Methodius; his mother, however, was a pagan. The conflict between the pagan nobility and the Christian Vaclavor was not just over religion but also about Vaclavor's relationship with Henry the Fowler, king of the Germans, whose son Otto would become the first Holy Roman Emperor, and the relationship between the Czechs and the Germans. Tenth century primary sources being scarce, it's difficult for modern sources to say what stirred emotions -- religious conflict, a move by Henry to make Bohemia into a client state -- but rebellion broke out during Vaclavor's reign. Ludmilla's martyrdom proceeded Vaclavor's own (at the hands of his brother) by only fourteen years. Today he's the patron saint of the Czech Republic, and Wenceslas Square is at the heart of downtown Prague. He was, as the carol tells us, known for his good works and charity towards the poor; miracles associated with the saint include healing the lame and the blind. But it's not a Christmas carol at all; the only reason most non-Czechs have ever heard of Saint Wenceslas is that Neale decided to set his song during the Feast of Saint Stephen -- Boxing Day. Celebrity has nothing to do with talent, even for thousand-year-old saints.
November 30, 2005
In praise of follies
At one point in R. A. Lafferty's story "Nor Limestone Islands", a Miss Phosphor McCabe requests zoning permission to build a structure on her plot of land: a thirty-acre pagoda, four hundred feet high and built of three hundred thousand tons of pink limestone. It will be, she asserts, real pretty, and a tourist attraction to boot. This being a Lafferty story, Miss Phosphor has an entirely sensible plan for obtaining a three hundred thousand ton limestone pagoda: she will ask her friends on the Grecian flying island to touch down and cut off a chunk. Baldasare Forestiere didn't have any such floating friends, which is why he carved his underground gardens the old-fashioned way. There are a surprising number of these fairy castles and visionary landscapes dotting the globe. The reasons for crafting them vary. Howard Finster's Paradise Gardens and Benedictine monk Joseph Zoettl's Ave Maria Grotto were created as expressions of deeply-felt religious belief; Simon Rodia's Watts Towers (1, 2) or eccentric millionaire Edward James' surrealist masterpiece Las Pozas seem to have been created as consciously artistic endeavors. Some, Alex Jordan's House on the Rock, were commercial ventures; others, like the Winchester Mystery House, are sad legacies of madness. But to me the most wonderful are those that seem to stem from the British tradition of follies, the ones that suggest someone just thought to him- or herself that it would be swell to live in a bizarro junk castle or a bottle house. Why shouldn't one live in a home made entirely from paper products? As Miss Phosphor wrote:
Please come and see my Pink Pagoda. All the people and all the officials avert there eyes from it. They say that is impossible that such a thing could be there, and therefore it cannot be there. But it is there. See it for yourself (or see plates IV, IX, XXXIII, LXX especially). And it is pretty (see plates XIX, XXIV, V, LIV). But best, come see it as it really is.