Keep Shining On

This Coldplay video was directed by Mat Whitecross and filmed in London on Thursday November 25th, 2010.

Uninvited Holiday Guest

I don’t know how my resumé found out
we were staying in town for Christmas,
but he pulled up as soon as the girl left
to visit her mother’s side of the family.

He’s still driving the hail-damaged Corolla
with the broken muffler.
I accepted the foil-wrapped plate of assorted cookies
and invited him in for a bowl of soup.

We exchanged the details of our holiday plans
like presidents of small countries
offering economic updates and projected budgets,
implying confidence for growth in the coming year.

He still favors films outside the mainstream
in spite of the isolation that tends to cultivate,
and he was especially enthusiastic about poets
he had recently discovered.

We could tell he’s as curious and idealistic as ever,
and his assets remain primarily intangible.
He’s still second guessing his choices, lacking in confidence,
and haunted by a persistent aversion to boredom and risk.

He sight-read a few carols.
We didn’t point out the shakiness of his Brahms
and he didn’t tell us that our piano
had drifted imperceptibly out of tune.

He seemed underwhelmed by our gifts to each other
and we yawned when he solved my new Rubik’s cube.
When he finally left, we hurried out to see the new
Meryl Streep movie which promised not to resolve at the end.

Peace

[Thanks Linda!]

A Holiday Classic

Knowledgeable People

From Nietzsche’s prologue to On the Genealogy of Morals:

We don't know ourselves, we knowledgeable people—we are personally ignorant about ourselves. And there’s good reason for that. We've never tried to find out who we are. How could it ever happen that one day we'd discover our own selves? With justice it’s been said that “Where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also.” Our treasure lies where the beehives of our knowledge stand. We are always busy with our knowledge, as if we were born winged creatures—collectors of intellectual honey. In our hearts we are basically concerned with only one thing, to “bring something home.” As far as the rest of life is concerned, what people call “experience”—which of us is serious enough for that? Who has enough time? In these matters, I fear, we've been “missing the point.”

Our hearts have not even been engaged—nor, for that matter, have our ears! We've been much more like someone divinely distracted and self-absorbed into whose ear the clock has just pealed the twelve strokes of noon with all its force and who all at once wakes up and asks himself “What exactly did that clock strike?”—so we rub ourselves behind the ears afterwards and ask, totally surprised and embarrassed “What have we really just experienced? And more: “Who are we really?” Then, as I've mentioned, we count—after the fact—all the twelve trembling strokes of the clock of our experience, our lives, our being—alas! in the process we keep losing the count. So we remain necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not understand ourselves, we have to keep ourselves confused. For us this law holds for all eternity: “Each man is furthest from himself.” Where we ourselves are concerned, we are not “knowledgeable people.”

Un Conte de Noël
(A Christmas Tale)

Arnaud Desplechin, the director of A Christmas Tale, interviews Catherine Deneuve in the November/December 2008 edition of Film Comment.

The Holy One

"The word Santa means holy. And Santa Claus is one of the true figures of imagination that we have left that children can really relate to. Adults can, too, but maybe not with the same sense of reality as children obviously. But I don't know if there are any other figures of imagination that have so much reality...I do think he embodies the real spirit of Christmas. And I'm speaking as someone who has really studied theology for a long time. I don't think we should give Christmas over to the theologians to discuss the intricacies of theology. I think that it's about a figure who understands what it means to give, to relate to children, to have a good spirit, create friendliness in the world, and bring the world together. He travels the whole world on Christmas Eve, it's not just one country. There's an awful lot in Santa Claus that I really love."

~ Thomas Moore, on Open Line with Fred Anderle (12.18.08)

You’ll Never Get It If You Don’t Slow Down

From “Auggie Wren’s Christmas,” by Paul Auster:

Auggie and I have known each other for close to eleven years now. He works behind the counter of a cigar store on Court Street in downtown Brooklyn, and since it's the only store that carries the little Dutch cigars I like to smoke, I go in there fairly often. For a long time, I didn't give much thought to Auggie Wren. He was the strange little man who wore a hooded blue sweatshirt and sold me cigars and magazines, the impish, wisecracking character who always had something funny to say about the weather, the Mets or the politicians in Washington, and that was the extent of it.

But then one day several years ago he happened to be looking through a magazine in the store, and he stumbled across a review of one of my books. He knew it was me because a photograph accompanied the review, and after that things changed between us. I was no longer just another customer to Auggie, I had become a distinguished person. Most people couldn't care less about books and writers, but it turned out that Auggie considered himself an artist. Now that he had cracked the secret of who I was, he embraced me as an ally, a confidant, a brother-in-arms. To tell the truth, I found it rather embarrassing. Then, almost inevitably, a moment came when he asked if I would be willing to look at his photographs. Given his enthusiasm and goodwill, there didn't seem any way I could turn him down.

Clips from Smoke:

 

[Link to this story found on Jonathan Carroll’s blog]

You're a Bittersweet Classic, Charlie Brown

I heard this great piece on NPR this morning about how A Charlie Brown Christmas almost never made it on the air for the first time in 1965. CBS thought that the jazz didn't mix well with traditional carols, that the voices should be provided by professional child actors, and that the tone and themes were too heavy for kids. It turned out that half of the people watching television across the country that night tuned in to watch.

The composer of the soundtrack, Vince Guaraldi, died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1976. "He was found in a room at the Red Cottage Inn hotel, relaxing between sets at Butterfield's nightclub in Menlo Park, California. Guaraldi had just finished recording the soundtrack for It's Arbor Day, Charlie Brown earlier that afternoon."

He wasn't around to discover that his music had become modern Christmas classics. A remastered edition of the soundtrack, which has never been out of print, has been released this year.