Month: December 2012

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We Can Be Happy Under

From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:

A man prepares to bathe in the Cantabric Sea at the beach named La Concha, in San Sebastian, northern Spain, Friday, Dec. 7, 2012. The air temperature was 9 degrees Celsius ( 48.2 Fahrenheit) and the water temperature 13 degrees Celsius (55.4 Fahrenheit).  AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza)

This brave, stupid man. I’m reminded of a time when friends tried to convince me to run into the Ocean at sunrise, back when I lived in Aberdeen, in Scotland; even then, I knew it was a terrible, terrible idea.

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366 Songs 342: Everything’s Gonna Be Cool This Christmas

I want to say I heard this for the first time in a Christmas season that I needed this kind of a message, but that almost sounds too cute to be true. Nonetheless, it is; it’s not that that Christmas was especially cruel or difficult, but it was one where there was a lack of optimism for various reasons, work- and relationship-related, and just the sound of someone saying something as simple (Ridiculously so) as “Everything’s gonna be cool” with such excitement and glee was so… surprising, and welcome, that it felt like the best gift I could’ve gotten.

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366 Songs 341: Just Like Christmas

In many ways, this song isn’t about Christmas at all, but about the idea of Christmas, and what Christmas means to different people (“And you said it was just like Christmas/But you were wrong”). And yet, even as Christmas as idea and feeling (as opposed to weather and visuals) is pushed forward, the music does the same thing; there’s a ramshackle attempt to rebuild the aural quality of Phil Spector’s A Xmas Gift To You album in this song, in a weird but entirely welcome way that I love, here. I’d suggest that it sounded like Christmas, but I’d worry that singer Mimi Parker would find me to say “But you were wrong” afterwards. It sounds like my idea of Christmas, perhaps; maybe that’s what I mean.

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I Know Your Skies Too Much

From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:

Light fantastic! An installation by artist Damien Fontaine at Les Chrysalides de Saint-Jean Cathedral during the rehearsal for the Festival of Lights in central Lyon, France. Photograph: Robert Pratta/REUTERS

What I love about this photo is the color of the sky; you can tell that it’s a winter’s night, cloudy and grim and lit from the world below. It reminds me of a trip to Paris when I was 21 at this time of year and the way the night looked then.

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366 Songs 340: The Man in The Santa Suit

It’s been a long day, in a good way; lots of things being accomplished and a tiredness that feels earned as opposed to heavy and guilty. To celebrate, then, here’s a happy song that demystifies the worlds of the men who dress up as Old Saint Nick at this time of year from the simultaneously over- and underrated Fountains of Wayne (Songwriting is always interesting, although something you can’t tell by their performances).

Me, I vastly prefer the Neil Halstead version:

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Fun with Cognitive Dissonance

From io9, on Monday, explaining why the site has pulled theFan Fiction Friday column after two posts:

When io9 makes fun of Damon Lindelof or the latest episode of Beauty and the Beast, we are picking on targets who are our own size or bigger… Our goal as satirists is to mock targets our size or bigger — or, alternatively, to criticize ideas rather than individuals.

From io9 on Tuesday:

Admittedly, it’s not what it seems – the headline/pic is misleading, because (a) that’s not the “worst Star Wars fan in the entire world” in that pic, and (b) the post is actually complaining about a quote from an anonymous fan from Deadline Hollywood, and is actually a pro-fandom piece in spirit – but still: That the latter headline/pic combo made it onto the site the day after the “We only go after bigger targets” post is one of those “How did that get through?!?” moments.

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Too Big To Fail (or Write, in This Case)

This week’s Time piece is all about Twitter, and storytelling on it. For some strange reason, I didn’t want to write it when it finally came time to do it; I found countless other things to do instead, putting it off until the very last possible moment; even the rewrites yesterday after getting notes from my editor, I was very “Oh, I’ll save that until last because, oh God” for some reason. It’s not that I didn’t know what to write, but that I just found myself entirely daunted by the idea of writing a long piece this week. Strange but true.

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366 Songs 339: O Come, O Come Emmanuel

I don’t think I’d ever heard this (“trad,” as the music books would call it) song before this version by Belle & Sebastian, but I adore it for its gentleness and the harmonies that appear in the latter “Rejoice/Rejoice” refrains. A quiet moment of holiday cheer for a day that’s been far, far too busy for my own good (I still have work to do; this is me taking something approaching a break).

Here’s Sufjan Stevens doing another version: