“An algorithm is a well-defined procedure for carrying out some computational task. Typically the task is given, and the job of the algorithmist is to find such a procedure which is efficient, for example in terms of processing time and/or memory consumption. CS 224 is an advanced course in algorithm design, and topics we will cover include the word RAM model, data structures, amortization, online algorithms, linear programming, semidefinite programming, approximation algorithms, hashing, randomized algorithms, fast exponential time algorithms, graph algorithms, and computational geometry”
There’s a war on Christmas, don’t you know. The attacks are relentless—at every shopping mall, drugstore, grocery, family dinner, badly-lit office party. It is the scourge of bland Christmas music, and it can absolutely ruin your holiday. There you are, merrily shopping for the perfect gift or the perfect ham, and, wham! The most dispiriting version of “Little Drummer Boy” you’ve ever heard in your life. You feel sick, depressed, deranged. Is this some kind of sonic weapon? Or do you respect the season too much to let it be demeaned by mediocrity?
Fight back, my friend, with the playlist below. Keep your Christmas cheer—if that’s your bag. The discriminating Yuletide celebrant must guard their ears zealously, lest some undead zombie travesty of a “White Christmas” (or worse yet, “Blue Christmas”) does them in. Opt instead for the simple celebration of the Ramones’ “Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want to Fight Tonight).” Listen to the Damned. You don’t have to believe in Santa Claus, but you know “There Ain’t No Sanity Clause.”
The Vandals keep it moving with “My First X‑Mas (As A Woman),” a straight-ahead burst of positivity, empowerment, and coming out as trans to the family. They return later with “Grandpa’s Last X‑Mas,” an honest reckoning with mortality during the season. Check out the earnest rendition of “O Come All Ye Faithful” from Bad Religion, who clearly adore the song enough to really do it justice, even if many of their usual lyrics can be summed up by swapping the words in their name. (They put out a whole album of respectful Christmas tunes. “Anyone expecting some sort of subversion of the holiday classics,” notes Apple Music, “will be disappointed.”)
As this playlist shows, punk rock has always had a special relationship with Christmas. But if you think about it, so have many indie, fringe, and avant-garde movements. John Waters believes the “whole purpose of life is Christmas.” Andy Warhol “really, really loved Christmas,” and made several Christmas-themed artworks. And in 1977, the Sex Pistols played their last UK gig, a Christmas benefit for an audience of seven and eight year olds. Johnny Rotten remembered it later as “one of the highlights of mine and Sid’s career.”
Fantastic. The ultimate reward. One of my all-time favourite gigs. Young kids, and we’re doing Bodies and they’re bursting out with laughter on the ‘f*ck this f*ck that’ verse. The correct response: not the shock horror ‘How dare you?’
The kids get it, why can’t we? Christmas is a fine time for irreverence, camp, crude humor, booze, and candor. It is also a time for the heartfelt appreciation most punks seem to feel for the holiday of light shows and inflatable reindeer, of a crackling fire on TV and a place that does delivery. Santa Claus, the Holy Baby, and Gremlins. Stuck with relatives who can’t get the spirit of giving? Put on “Bloody Unholy Christmas,” “I’ve Got a Boner for Christmas,” and “Credit Crunch Christmas,” and turn them all the way up. And have a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.
No, dear child, ’tis Satan, summoned by an innocent mis-spelling on the part of a young girl eager for a Christmas puppy.
When the post office delivers her similarly misaddressed envelope to hell by December 25, the buff and tattooed Lord of Darkness’ heart grows three sizes. Everyone likes to be told they’re special.
Next thing you know, he’s traded the fiery furnace for a gluten-free bakery in Shoreditch, where he’s a happy team player, making latte art and wearing a goofy cap.
The ending is a sweet mix of “I hate you, you ruined Christmas, go to hell!” and “God bless us everyone.” Santa doesn’t survive, but the childlike capacity for wonder does.
Those with sensitive stomachs may want to go easy on the eggnog while watching this soon-to-be-holiday classic. The projectile vomiting rivals the Exorcist’s.
And happy holidays from all of us at Open Culture!
Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town, The Santa Clause, Santa Claus: the Movie, Bad Santa, the unforgettable Santa Claus Conquers the Martians: we all have a preferred depiction of Saint Nicholas on film, the selection of which grows larger each and every Christmas. The tradition of Santa in cinema goes back 120 years to a couple of obscure 1897 shorts, Santa Claus Filling Stockings and The Christmas Tree Party, made by a company called American Mutoscope, but it finds its fullest early expression in the following year’s Santa Claus.
Directed by hypnotist and magic lanternist turned filmmaker George Albert Smith, this 66-second production, though a highly elaborate one for the time, purports to show just how Santa Claus makes a visit to drop off gifts for a couple of sleeping children. When their nanny turns off the lights for the night, we see superimposed on their darkened wall a vision of the jolly old elf himself landing on the roof and clambering down the chimney.
“What makes this treatment considerably more interesting than a conventional piece of editing,” writes the British Film Institute’s Michael Brooke, “is the way that Smith links the shots in terms of both space and time, by placing the new image over the space previously occupied by the fireplace, and continuing to show the children sleeping throughout.”
Brooke calls that effect “cinema’s earliest known example of parallel action and, when coupled with double-exposure techniques” that Smith had developed for his previous films, it makes Santa Claus “one of the most visually and conceptually sophisticated British films made up to then.” He notes also that Smith corresponded with Georges Méliès, his fellow pioneer of not just special effects but cinema itself, around the time of this film, no surprise since “the two men shared a common goal in terms of creating an authentic cinema of illusion.”
Watch Santa Claus on this Christmas Day, and you’ll find that, in the words of Kieron Casey at The Totality, “the plot is simple, but the magic is not — viewed over 100 years later, it’s impossible not to be touched to the very core with the wonder on display in the film. In the same way young hands will find the most simple of toys mesmerising when touched for the first time, there is a real innocence and enthusiasm in G.A. Smith’s film – it’s a short movie which is full of imagination and discovery, the type of which will never again be experienced in cinema.” But seeing as Santa Claus existed long before cinema and will exist long after it, rest assured that he’ll bring his trademark twinkle to any storytelling medium humanity comes up with next.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Just when you thought you had Christmas all figured out, Matthew Salton comes along with this new animated short, “Santa Is a Psychedelic Mushroom.” It makes the case that maybe, just maybe, “the story of our modern Santa Claus, the omnipotent man who travels the globe in one night, bearing gifts, and who’s camped out in shopping malls across the United States, is linked to a hallucinogenic mushroom-eating shaman from the Arctic.” Specifically a historic Shaman from Lapland, in northern Finland, who tripped out on Amanita muscaria, the toxic, red-and-white toadstool mushroom you’ve seen in fairy tales so many times before. Elaborating, Salton talks with Carl Ruck, a Boston University professor who studies mythology, religion and the sacred role of psychoactive plants. And also Lawrence Millman. Writing at The New York Times, Salton adds:
According to the writer and mycologist Lawrence Millman, the shaman would make use of Amanita muscaria’s psychoactive effects in order to perform healing rituals. The use of Amanita muscaria as an entheogen (that is, a drug used to bring about a spiritual experience) would enable the shamans to act as intermediaries between the spirit and human world, bringing gifts of healing and problem-solving. (Although these mushrooms are poisonous, the Sami reduced their toxicity by drying them..) Various accounts describe the shaman and the rituals performed in ways that are fascinatingly similar to the narrative of Santa. An all-knowing man who defies space and time? Flying reindeer? Reindeer-drawn sleds? Climbing down the chimney? The giving of gifts? The tales of the Sami shamans have it all.
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We like to bring this chestnut back from time to time. Watch it, and you’ll know why.
In 1977, just a short month before Bing Crosby died of a heart attack, the 40s crooner hosted David Bowie, the glam rocker, on his Christmas show. The awkwardness of the meeting is palpable. An older, crusty Crosby had no real familiarity with the younger, androgynous Bowie, and Bowie wasn’t crazy about singing The Little Drummer Boy. So, shortly before the show’s taping, a team of writers had to frantically retool the song, blending the traditional Christmas song with a newly-written tune called Peace on Earth. (You can watch the writers tell the story, years later, below.)
After one hour of rehearsal, the two singers recorded The Little Drummer Boy/Peace on Earth and made a little classic. The Washington Post has the backstory on the strange Bing-Bowie meeting. Also find a Will Ferrell parody of the meeting here. We hope you enjoy revisiting this clip with us. Happy holidays to you all.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Several years ago, we featured a list Kurt Cobain made of his top 50 albums, which appeared in his journals, published in 2002. It’s mostly a typical list of standards one would find in any young punk’s record collection in the late 80s/90s. As we wrote then, his “‘Top 50 by Nirvana’… seems like the ideal code for producing a 90s alternative star.” But these sources were not widely accessible at the time. Cobain’s influence was such that he turned millions of people on to music they’d never heard before. That influence continues, of course, and you can partake of it yourself in the playlist below.
Amid the classic rock and classic punk—the Beatles, the Clash, the Sex Pistols—are a few slabs of classic DC hardcore, then and now pretty obscure. Dave Grohl—stalwart of the DC scene before Cobain recruited him to move across the country and join Nirvana—may have added these albums to the list, or Cobain might have done so himself. In any case, his mentions of them, and their posthumous appearance in his letters and notes, brought bands like long-defunct Faith and Void new recognition, as well as post-hardcore pioneers Rites of Spring, who helped inspire the emo and screamo to come, for better or worse.
Alongside Iggy Pop, Black Flag, and Bad Brains are lesser-known punk bands like the Raincoats, the Vaselines, and the Saints, playful lo-fi weirdos like Daniel Johnson, the Shaggs, and Half Japanese; the country blues of Lead Belly, caustic noise of Butthole Surfers, thunderous, punishing nihilism of Swans…. Cobain may have helped them all sell a few records, and he definitely inspired new bands that sound like them by turning people on to their music for the first time. (When Cobain covered David Bowie, however, fans started to mistake “The Man Who Sold the World” for a Nirvana song, to Bowie’s understandable consternation.)
Cobain’s list is limited to a fairly narrow range of styles, with some rare exceptions: Lead Belly, Public Enemy, Aerosmith (!)—it’s an almost purist punk and punk-derived palate, the DNA of Nirvana. In the age of the internet, one can cobble together a list like this—with no real prior knowledge—in an hour or so, simply by googling around and doing a bit of research. During Cobain’s formative years on the outskirts of Seattle, when a lot of this music circulated only on limited cassette runs and poorly recorded mixtapes and copies, on record labels financed by vegan bake sales and loans from the ‘rents—it could be very hard to come by.
While Cobain’s list may look, in hindsight, like standard fare to many longtime fans, what it represents for those who came of age musically in the years just before the Web is a physical journey through all of the relationships, concerts, and record shops one had to move through to discover the bands that spoke directly to you and your friends.
This Christmas, as our computers fast learn to compose music by themselves, we might gain some perspective by casting our minds back to 66 Christmases ago, a time when a computer’s rendition of anything resembling music at all had thousands and thousands listening in wonder. In December of 1951, the BBC’s holiday broadcast, in most respects a naturally traditional affair, included the sound of the future: a couple of much-loved Christmas carols performed not by a choir, nor by human beings of any kind, but by an electronic machine the likes of which almost nobody had even laid eyes upon.
“Among its Christmas fare the BBC broadcast two melodies that, although instantly recognizable, sounded like nothing else on earth,” write Jack Copeland and Jason Long at the British Library’s Sound and Vision Blog. “They were Jingle Bells and Good King Wenceslas, played by the mammoth Ferranti Mark I computer that stood in Alan Turing’s Computing Machine Laboratory” at the Victoria University of Manchester. Turing, whom we now recognize for a variety of achievements in computing, cryptography, and related fields (including cracking the German “Enigma code” during the Second World War), had joined the university in 1948.
That same year, with his former undergraduate colleague D. G. Champernowne, Turing began writing a purely theoretical computer chess program. No computer existed on which he could possibly try running it for the next few years until the Ferranti Mark 1 came along, and even that mammoth proved too slow. But it could, using a function designed to give auditory feedback to its operators, play music — of a kind, anyway. The computer company’s “marketing supremo,” according to Copeland and Long, called its brief Christmas concert “the most expensive and most elaborate method of playing a tune that has ever been devised.”
Since no recording of the broadcast survives, what you hear here is a painstaking reconstruction made from tapes of the computer’s even earlier renditions of “God Save the King,” “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” and “In the Mood.” By manually chopping up the audio, write Copeland and Long, “we created a palette of notes of various pitches and durations. These could then be rearranged to form new melodies. It was musical Lego.” But do “beware of occasional dud notes. Because the computer chugged along at a sedate 4 kilohertz or so, hitting the right frequency was not always possible.” Even so, somewhere in there I hear the historical and technological seeds of the much more elaborate electronic Christmas to come, from Mannheim Steamroller to the Jingle Cats and well beyond.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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