If the Fates Allow

 

I'll write about the bounced commies and Luke Short's new western some other time. For now I want you to focus solely on Norman Rockwell's illustration. The people pictured seem realistically rendered, don't they? That's partly due to Rockwell's skill as a painter, especially his almost photographic attention to detail, and partly because, well, they're real people. The woman doing the hugging is Rockwell's second wife Mary. The young man she's embracing and who's back is turned to us is Jarvis Rockwell, her and Norman's oldest son. On the far-left edge of the painting, in glasses, is youngest son Peter. And the exuberant lad in the plaid shirt right behind Mary is middle son Thomas. The man with the pipe who seems to be looking on at the scene taking place with amused curiosity is none other than the family patriarch, Norman himself. The family that models together stays together.

Yet according to Deborah Solomon's 2013 biography, American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell, this was anything but a model family. Rockwell was insecure about just about everything but his chosen profession. And even then, he was more secure doing commercial art--which a Saturday Evening Post cover basically is--than the type of art found in galleries and museums, which in his case turned out to be the same thing but the latter not realized until very late in his life. This insecurity led to him maintaining a certain aloof distance from family and friends, and family at least paid a price for this aloofness, most notably wife Mary, who developed a serious drinking problem that repeatedly landed her in and out of the hospital. Eventually the whole family ended up in therapy. The illustration itself doesn't truly reflect on the Rockwell family's 1948 Christmas. Norman spent the holiday in Los Angeles--as a kind of personal getaway, while the rest of the family stayed behind in Vermont.

Does that make the above illustration a lie? Not necessarily. It could have taken place during a different Christmas. Or just as likely, Rockwell may have witnessed somebody else's family reunion, and just replaced that other person's family members with his own, achieving in art what his own insecurities prohibited him from doing in life. Whatever the reason or whatever happened, it's worth remembering that imperfect people and imperfect families, both of which there are a great deal many, have to find ways to make it through a holiday season in which the perfected art of happiness is practically a moral mandate. Enjoy the eggnog and brush strokes.

Enough of that. I don't want to ruin your holiday. So I'll turn my attention to the woman pictured above, who is also in the Rockwell illustration. Turns out she was an...

Christmas at Home (1946)

...artist herself.

That's right, it's Grandma Moses. Born in 1860, the farmer's widow didn't take up painting until age seventy-six. Completely self-taught (thus a "primitive" artist) she produced pictures of what she termed "old-timey" New England. One of these pictures ended up hung in a rural drug store, where a big city art collector out for a drive in the country saw it. Soon after a collection of her works hung in the gallery of an Austrian refugee who had run afoul of the Nazis for the twin crimes of being Jewish and advocating modern art. That was waaay different from anything that happened to Grandma Moses in old-timey New Hampshire, but no matter, soon she went from folk art to what might be called fine art, though the style remained basically the same, only now exhibited in different venues. As she became more well-known, Grandma Moses became a pop culture figure as well, thanks in large part to Hallmark cards, which reproduced her paintings on a series of popular greeting cards.

Norman Rockwell, himself a pop culture figure with a line of Hallmark greeting cards, helps Grandma Moses cut a cake celebrating her 88th birthday. The whole thing was a PR stunt dreamed up by a Hallmark exec. It certainly made sense to pair the two, who had just met. Though their artistic styles, and perhaps their artistic sensibilities, differed, what both of them offered the greeting card consumer was that much sought-after commodity: warmth. And wouldn't you know it that a genuine warmth did develop between the two? They became friends. Not best friends. The age difference (he was thirty-four years her junior) and Rockwell's own aforementioned aloofness, got in the way of that, but for a while Grandma Moses was part of his social circle, and as with anyone part of his social (and familial) circle, it eventually got her on The Saturday Evening Post. Not that Grandma Moses needed his help getting on the...

 

 

...cover of a magazine.

 

Take it away, Judy:

The Not-So-Abominable Dr. Phibes

 

"This little green one seems to need a home."

In 1970, a certain horror movie star and his daughter pretty much came to the same conclusion. 

Smart Art (Nonrepresentative Nick Edition)

 Pablo Picasso (seen here with son Claude and daughter Paloma) may have been a great artist, but he just couldn't decide what Santa Claus looked like!

Picasso drew this in 1959. I like the nose-eyes combination.

From the same year.  Kind of a shifty-eyed Santa, don' cha think? I'm not sure whether this should hang in a museum, or the post office.

 

From 1960. Unlike most celebrities, this Santa could go out in public without being mobbed, since I doubt anyone would recognize him.

In the end, I suppose it doesn't matter what Santa Claus looks like as long as he comes through on the presents. What kind of present might a Picasso Santa bring?

Give me enough time, and I bet I could turn it into Guernica.

Vital Viewing (Pulp Christmas Edition)

 

Only four days left to get your official Samuel L. Jackson holiday T-shirt. Hesitant? Not sure it's the right look for you? Perhaps these videos will help you decide:

OK, Jackson couldn't get an F-bomb in edgewise there. At least not one that was picked up by the mike. Samuel is seen and heard to much better effect in this yuletide presentation from the good people at Capital One:

Don't feel too sorry for Jackson. He's paid handsomely every time he references maternal incest in a movie, and that more than makes up for whatever coal he gets in his stocking. As for that other fellow in the commercial, it's proof, as if any was needed, that in this great capitalistic system of ours, even a Sweathog can achieve sainthood.

Bad Santa

 

As Halloween approaches, let us pay tribute to the great Boris Karloff, who so chillingly brought to life--

Wait a second! Halloween's come and gone, hasn't it? So where does that leave poor Boris?

No matter the holiday, you just can't keep a good monster down.

Karloff, and, standing over him, Jones

Though we may associate him with an earlier era of pop culture, Boris Karloff still had a fairly busy schedule throughout the 1960s. He started out the decade as the host of the TV anthology series Thriller, kept on acting in horror films (most of which were low-budget drive-in fare) and narrated a series of children's records based on Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories.  It was the last of these that caught the ear of animator Chuck Jones (best known for the Coyote and Road Runner cartoons.) Jones wanted to make a TV version of Dr. Seuss' The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, and was struck by how genuinely tender Karloff came across as he recited Kipling's tales of how the camel got his hump or how the elephant got his trunk or how Great Britian got India (OK, the last one never appeared in Just So Stories, though Kipling DID bring up the subject quite a bit in his works geared toward adults.) Jones thought such a tender approach would work quite nicely for Seuss' story. Not that Jones was oblivious to the fact that Karloff also could do wickedness extremely well. So both the yin and the yang of Boris' vocal talents were brought to the fore as he's the tender narrator as well as the wicked Grinch who disguises himself as St. Nick and robs the town of Whoville of all its presents and decorations and foodstuffs until finally he has a change of conscience and promises to honor Christmas in his heart and Tiny Tim doesn't die--Oops! I'm getting my stories of Yuletide redemption mixed up. Which remind me...

Don't you think Alastair Sim would have made a scary monster? Just imagine him with a couple of bolts in his neck.

Graphic Grandeur (The Usual Gang of Influencers Edition)

 

1929-2022

Illustrator Paul Coker Jr's remarkable career rests on three mighty pillars. In the mid-1950s he got hired on at Hallmark Cards and very soon became one of that company's top artists. His scratchy style set a tone for humorous cards that is still widely copied nearly 65 years later. If that wasn't enough, he started contributing to Mad beginning in 1960, and quickly became one of that magazine's mainstay artists. And if that wasn't enough, in the mid-1960s Rankin/Bass Productions asked Coker to design the characters for a stop-motion TV Christmas special titled Santa Claus is Coming to Town. The next year he designed the characters for the more traditionally animated Rankin/Bass TV Christmas special Frosty the Snowman, and just about everything else from that company in the decades since. Though it's his Mad work that I most cherish, the Rankin/Bass productions probably got Coker his widest audience (with the Hallmark cards a close second) and that's also what got him the following 2015 radio interview. Actually, it's kind of a behind-the-scenes radio interview that's a little like an old Bob Newhart routine where you hear only the second half of a phone conversation. But as with Newhart, that's enough:  

 

Seems like a nice guy. Now those three pillars I mentioned:

Only 122 shopping days until Christmas.

 

 

 

 

 

This Day in History

 

I know what you're thinking. Today is Christmas. Isn't this Revolutionary War stuff better suited for the Fourth of July? Maybe, but it just so happens that on the night of December 25, 1776, George Washington and his men crossed the Delaware River from Pennsylvania in a surprise attack on Hessian forces camped out in New Jersey, holiday be damned!

None of which means your own holiday has to be damned. After all, there hasn't been a peep out of the Hessians lately. So Merry Christmas everybody, and, please, exercise caution when handling fireworks. 

Vital Viewing (Bethlehem After Dark Edition)

 

A great many people claim to hate Christmas music, but I'm not one of them. I like a lot of different kinds of music, and all the diverse genres come together most often during the holidays. Think about it. Rare is the radio station that has both Burl Ives and George Michael on its playlist, except in December, when it's not at all unusual to hear both "A Holly Jolly Christmas" and "Last Christmas", one after another, without even having to change the dial. If the different races and different creeds and different nations had the same generosity of spirit as does the average radio programmer from the day after Thanksgiving right up to December 25, the world would be a better place. 

Christmas music can be divided into two broad categories: Christmas "songs" and Christmas "carols." So what's the difference between a song and a carol? Well, I've been doing all kinds of googling to find that out, and the answer is a bit unsatisfying. Historically, a carol is a song associated with a festive occasion, and Christmas certainly qualifies. But if we go by that definition, there is no difference! Any song that touches on Christmas is a carol. "Santa Baby" is a carol. "The Chipmunk Song" is a carol. "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" is a carol. Yet I can't imagine carolers such as the ones pictured above going door to door singing those songs, not without getting road salt dumped on their heads. It seems to me that no matter what it says in a dictionary, carolers use some sort of weeding out process before going out and risk having their tongues fall off from frostbite as they make their nightly rounds. After listening to Christmas songs traditionally referred to as carols and those traditionally referred to as songs, I think I've figured that weeding process out. Tradition, in fact, has a lot to do with the difference. As does technology and commercialism. Christmas songs are a relatively recent development, the product of the era of sound recording. Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, but as with so many things that have come to define modernity, the device didn't really become a consumer must-have until the 1920s (you probably weren't paying attention because of all the covid news, but modernity celebrated its 100th birthday last year.) And of course, that's also when "record" went from being a word used mostly by historians and county registrars to one that for a while there came very close to being synonymous with music itself. In the 1930s came radio, which briefly competed with the phonograph for the listeners attention, until companies such as the Radio Corporation of America found it was easy to manufacture both and use one to promote the other.  Around the same time, movies began talking, and singing. In the 1950s came television. More competition, and even more promotion. And finally, the internet. All of which increased the demand for more, and newer, music, and musical stars--everyone from Bing Crosby to Gwen Stefani--to perform it. It also meant $$$$$$$$$$, and the contracts and copyrights to make sure everyone involved gets their cut. As for Christmas, the holiday simply followed, and eventually even magnified, these trends. Yuletide may have its roots in antiquity, but today it is the very soul of modernity.

Now onto carols (and remember, this is an informal definition.) Carols go back to before the 20th century. The copyrights having long since expired, they're today all in the public domain, and though they've certainly made the transition to the phonograph and radio and television and the internet and can and are sung by pop stars, such songs were originally performed by the aforementioned carolers and church choirs. And that brings up another important difference. While there are a few that are secular in nature, such as "Deck the Halls", most carols are religious. Now, as one of the theologically uncommitted, I'm on the outside looking in, yet I can still enjoy the melodic qualities of a good religious carol and even see the appeal of the lyrical content. (A baby born in a manger grows up to be Messiah? That tops Lincoln's log cabin!) I also think carols, unfairly, are seen by some people, whatever their spiritual bent, as being kind of boring, probably because so many of us as children are forced to sing them in school or church pageants, and those wounds persist. So today what I want you to do is really listen to a carol, just one carol, but performed by three different artists or groups of artists. I don't think you'll be bored, and it just might help you overcome any traumatic childhood memories you may have of holding up a hymn book and trying to look at that and not stare at an audience of bored parents staring condescendingly back at you.

 

The carol I've chosen is "O Holy Night", aka, and for a very good reason aka, "Cantique de Noël" ("The Christmas Canticle".)  The original is in French, and not a song at all. It was an 1843 poem titled "Minuit, Chrétiens" ("Midnight, Christians") by Placide Cappeau, who was asked by a parish priest in the small winemaking town of Roquemaure to write something to celebrate the renovation of the church's organ. Soon thereafter, Cappeau showed his poem to Adolphe Adam (composer of the ballet Giselle), who agreed to set it to music. They were an odd pair for a church hymn. Cappeau was a political radical and ardent secularist. Adam eschewed politics but was a musical careerist who composed everything from vaudeville tunes to opera, and not a regular churchgoer. However, both were local celebrities in their day, and the priest probably thought having them aboard would be good PR, a way of getting Frenchmen into the pews between revolutions. The song eventually came to the attention of a Massachusetts-based Unitarian minister named John Sullivan Dwight, who had once taught school at the famous (if short-lived) New England Transcendentalist-friendly Brook Farm commune. After that noble social experiment unfortunately fizzled, and all those 19th century proto-hippies were forced to rejoin the Establishment, Dwight became an influential music critic, as well as the publisher and editor of Dwight's Journal of Music. In 1855, Dwight decided to translate Adam's and Cappeau's Christmas carol into English:

O holy night! The stars are brightly shining,
It is the night of our dear Saviour’s birth.
Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
‘Til He appear’d and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

Fall on your knees! O hear the angel voices!
O night divine, O night when Christ was born;
O night divine, O night, O night Divine.

Led by the light of Faith serenely beaming,
With glowing hearts by His cradle we stand.
So led by light of a star sweetly gleaming,
Here come the wise men from Orient land.
The King of Kings lay thus in lowly manger;
In all our trials born to be our friend.

He knows our need, to our weakness is no stranger,
Behold your King! Before Him lowly bend!
Behold your King, Before Him lowly bend!

Truly He taught us to love one another;
His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother;
And in His name all oppression shall cease.
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,
Let all within us praise His holy name.

Christ is the Lord! O praise His Name forever,
His power and glory evermore proclaim.
His power and glory evermore proclaim.

Love one another? Slave is our brother? All oppression shall cease? Yeah, man, like groovy. Anyway, I don't really expect you to remember all those lyrics, but if you stick around, you'll get to hear 'em instead of read 'em. Three times in fact.

I already told you that Placide Cappeau and Adolphe Adam were celebrities in their day. Well, the 1847 premiere of "Cantique de Noël" involved yet another then-celebrity, opera singer Emily Laurey, whose name, unfortunately for her, has since slipped into obscurity (it's hard for a vocalist to attain any kind of posterity when no machine exists to record her voice.) Still, Laurey debuted the song, so as a kind of tribute to her, I've decided the first video should take place in an opera house, this one in Vienna. Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, and José Carreras, aka the supergroup The Three Tenors, sing "O Holy Night", first in its original French and then in (heavily Italian-accented) English:

Um...that was only two tenors, huh? Perhaps Mr. Carreras had a taste for an eggnog shake and snuck out to McD's. Here's hoping he makes it back in time for "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing."

As you know, Christmas marks the birth of Jesus, pictured above. Except that's not really Jesus. Those Judean overlords the Romans may have known how to build roads and aqueducts and amphitheaters, but photography was a bit beyond them. Not that it matters. The nice thing about Christianity is that it can be so democratic at times. True, the average person can't run or cast a vote for Pope, but Christ himself is open to anyone as long as you have an Equity Card and a good agent. You don't have to be Jesus to be Jesus in a movie or rock opera or movie based on a rock opera. So, lower your heads, my children, Ted has arrived: 

Pretty spirited, even holy spirited, performance, but does he think he's what they say he is?

 

Oh, don't worry, I'm not going all secular on you. I said it's an O Holy Night and it's gonna be an O Holy Night. In fact, once Mariah gets out of her jammies and into something more form-fitting, she's headed for church:

I don't know if it's all she wants for Christmas, but Mariah just gave that old carol some soul.