hallmark holiday

From the always engaging circulation desk of Open Culture, we are reminded of the commission that Salvador Dalí had from a greeting card magnate in 1960 to create a series of Christmas cards. Though the industry’s reputation is for the anodyne, it had been making forays into the avant garde since the 1940s, introducing contemporary artists to mass-markets by showcasing Pablo Picasso and Georgia O’Keeffe and other contemporaries. Dalí’s interpretation of the Magi, Nativity and other holiday iconography (see also here and here), however, proved too controversial for the general public, with ultimately only two cards out of the ten the surrealist artist was contracted for being printed.

presepio, threepeeo

For this long slog of a year, the Vatican has elected to showcase a profoundly different manger scene that while we think all find this somewhat other than expected and some taking more exception with the choice of the display than others of nineteen to-scale figures executed in terracotta sourced to a crèche that pupils and art teachers made for their town, selected from a Nativity Scene consisting of fifty-four pieces in total—steeped in the tradition of the earthenware—over a ten-year period from the mid-1960s to the mid-seventies.

There’s a helmeted astronaut in attendance as a nod to the contemporaneous 1969 Moon landing plus a centurion that some are comparing to Darth Vader (see link above), though the sculpture pre-dates the franchise by a few years. As one observer enthusiastically commented, it would be a nice ensemble—in miniature—for heath and home. Previously on tour in the 1970s in Israel, Palestine and Trajan’s Forum in Rome, the selection echoes the Pope’s missive from last Christmas—Admirabile signum—that it is customary and expected to include symbolic, contemporary characters to make the display busier and better address the everyday nature of holiness and grace.

щелкунчик

Debuting in Saint Petersburg on this day in 1892 (Old Style, 6 December), the stage, fairy ballet (балет-феерия) adaptation of the short story by E. T. A. Hoffmann—The Nutcracker and the Mouse King—opened as a double-feature with Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s ultimate opera Iolanta, a one-act performance about the Duchess of Lorraine, Yolande de Bar—a romanticised biography of figure who was more retiring and reserved in real life. Though initially not well-received and critics using rather harsh language, the overture and suite that the composer score was an enduring success, with countless Christmas season performances accounting for an incredible forty percent of attendance for ballet companies in North America in normal times.

saint sebastian

Definitely the saint portrayed as the thirstiest, this captain of the Praetorian guard that prudently, sensibly hid his Christianity from Diocletian is venerated on this day in the Orthodox Church on the occasion of his martyrdom in 288, born around 256. Once his faith was revealed, the emperor (previously) ordered him lashed to a tree and shot with arrows. The firing squad departed, leaving Sebastian for dead, but he was able to miraculously recover—with the help of Saint Irene, widow of one of his previously martyred companions. Later Sebastian ambushed and berated Diocletian for his sinful ways and petitioned for better treatment for the Christian community. 

The emperor was first taken aback by such open and direct criticisms, especially from one who was supposed to be dead but soon regained his composure and ordered the saint to be cudgelled to death—probably not as pretty of a picture. Patron of the persecuted, archers and athletes, this Apollonian figure is also the protector of the plague stricken, due to a conflation with Hermes during medieval times, whom was said to deal diseased arrows from on high, and possibly because of his initial recovery which granted him a second martyrdom (called a sagittation and a fairly common theme) and that the wounds resembled the pox and buboes, whose appearance was alarming but not always a sign of certain death.

5x5

kankyō ongaku: the ambient music (see also) of Hiroshi Yoshimura 

solstice sun: locate where and when in your locality where the streets align with the sun’s path at dawn and dusk as they do for Stonehenge—see also  

star with royal beauty bright: afterwards, check the skies for the Great Conjunction where Jupiter and Saturn appear as one celestial body  

solarwind: a look into the extensive cyber breach of US government networks and what information may have been compromised  

blob opera: a fun experiment with a musical quartet—via Boing Boing

your daily demon: murmur

Infernal duke and earl with thirty legions under his command, before the rebellion this fifty-fourth spirit had the name Matthias but now presents as a vulture or crowned warrior astride a griffin, and can be compelled to mediumship with the departed by invoking his seal, which looks very much like a host of astrological symbols. A master of philosophy, Murmur rules from today until the twenty-first of December and is paired with the angel Nilhael.

der spion, der aus der kälte kam

As our faithful chronicler informs, this day in 1965 saw the US premiere of the cinematic adaptation of the eponymous debut spy novel of the recently departed John le Carré, whose realistic and unromantic portrayal of espionage was a welcome and resonant counterpoint to the cloak-and-dagger escapism of James Bond. Whereas the station chief of the West Berlin office of MI6 is seemingly facing redundancy after multiple failures and set-backs, the protagonist’s turning is one carefully orchestrated by Control to out suspected double-agents by transforming one of its own. A refutation of whatever idealism that drives the ideological struggle, the character played by Richard Burton deprecates himself and the profession, limning his kind as not some high-minded defenders of the faith but rather as “just a bunch of seedy squalid bastards like me—little men, drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like mons in a cell, weighing right against wrong? Yesterday I would have killed Mundt [suspected double-agent] because I thought him evil and an enemy. But not today—today he is evil and my friend.” The award-winning film further introduced the general public to some of the jargon of the profession, with honeypot, head-hunter and mole to become common-parlance.