What Has the Internet Done to Comedy? A Pretty Much Pop Culture Podcast Discussion (#74)

in Comedy, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | December 23rd, 2020

Does remov­ing gate­keep­ers mean a more dis­trib­uted com­ic land­scape, or does it inevitably end with a small num­ber of comics dom­i­nat­ing the world? The Inter­net means that peo­ple can and do judge comics based on very short clips, but also makes it easy to fol­low the activ­i­ties of some­one you dis­cov­er that you like.

Tiffany comes not from stand-up but from music the­ater, and is active in cre­at­ing char­ac­ter-based com­e­dy and nov­el­ty songs for Insta­gram, YouTube, etc. She joins your hosts Eri­ca Spyres, Mark Lin­sen­may­er, and Bri­an Hirt to explore the types of short-form humor and view­ing habits that grow out of video cre­at­ed for Tik­Tok, Snapchat, and oth­er plat­forms. What’s the cre­ator’s rela­tion to the audi­ence? Social media blurs the line between con­struct­ed bits and extem­po­rized com­men­tary. It’s often react­ing to cur­rent events, yet stays post­ed long after. “Going viral” is not typ­i­cal­ly the result of mere organ­ic shar­ing or chance, and some comics (and their con­sul­tants) have real­ly stud­ied the medi­um to find out what appeals and how to get the word out.

We touch on Car­men Lynch, Sarah Coop­er, Eva Vic­tor, Bowen Yang, Coin­ci­d­ance, Miran­da Sings, Lock­Pick­ingLawyer, Jim­my Sloni­na, AskChick­ie, and more.

Watch Tiffany’s Frag­ile White Sad­ness. And her ode to Dis­ney Plus. Our Long Novem­ber has passed, thank good­ness.

Tiffany also rec­om­mends Jen Tul­lock, Josh Ruben, Jor­dan First­man, Megan Stal­ter, Cole Esco­la, Craw­ford Mill­ham Hor­ton, Ben­i­to Skin­ner, Inap­pro­pri­ate Pat­ti, Advent Car­olen­dar, and Marc Rebil­let.

Read: “These Come­di­ans Are Using Tik­Tok to Cre­ate Some of the Inter­net’s Fun­ni­est (And Wok­est) Con­tent)” by Kat Cur­tis.

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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Robert Fripp & Toyah Willcox Sing the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK” While Dressed as Santa and Elf

in Music | December 22nd, 2020

Yes, 2020 sucked. But not com­plete­ly, entire­ly and thor­ough­ly. Enjoy this brief sun­ny moment, cour­tesy of Robert Fripp and Toy­ah Will­cox.

If you vis­it their Sun­day Lunch playlist, you can watch them have fun with oth­er clas­sics by Nir­vana, Bowie, Alice Coop­er, The Kinks and more. Enjoy.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Robert Fripp & King Crim­son Per­form a Stir­ring Cov­er of “Heroes,” Short­ly after David Bowie’s Death (2016)

Robert Fripp Releas­es Free Ambi­ent Music to Get You Through the Lock­down: Enjoy “Music for Qui­et Moments”

Derek Jarman’s Jubilee: “It’s the Best Film about Punk” (1978)

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Bill Gates Picks 5 Good Books for a Lousy Year

in Books | December 22nd, 2020

2020 has been a ter­ri­ble year. But that has­n’t stopped Bill Gates (as is his cus­tom) from choos­ing, he says, “five books that I enjoyed—some because they helped me go deep­er on a tough issue, oth­ers because they offered a wel­come change of pace.”

Below, you can read, in his own words, the selec­tions he pub­lished here.

Range: Why Gen­er­al­ists Tri­umph in a Spe­cial­ized World, by David Epstein. I start­ed fol­low­ing Epstein’s work after watch­ing his fan­tas­tic 2014 TED talk on sports per­for­mance. In this fas­ci­nat­ing book, he argues that although the world seems to demand more and more specialization—in your career, for example—what we actu­al­ly need is more peo­ple “who start broad and embrace diverse expe­ri­ences and per­spec­tives while they progress.” His exam­ples run from Roger Fed­er­er to Charles Dar­win to Cold War-era experts on Sovi­et affairs. I think his ideas even help explain some of Microsoft’s suc­cess, because we hired peo­ple who had real breadth with­in their field and across domains. If you’re a gen­er­al­ist who has ever felt over­shad­owed by your spe­cial­ist col­leagues, this book is for you. More on the book here.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incar­cer­a­tion in the Age of Col­or­blind­ness, by Michelle Alexan­der. Like many white peo­ple, I’ve tried to deep­en my under­stand­ing of sys­temic racism in recent months. Alexander’s book offers an eye-open­ing look into how the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem unfair­ly tar­gets com­mu­ni­ties of col­or, and espe­cial­ly Black com­mu­ni­ties. It’s espe­cial­ly good at explain­ing the his­to­ry and the num­bers behind mass incar­cer­a­tion. I was famil­iar with some of the data, but Alexan­der real­ly helps put it in con­text. I fin­ished the book more con­vinced than ever that we need a more just approach to sen­tenc­ing and more invest­ment in com­mu­ni­ties of col­or. More on the book here.

The Splen­did and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Fam­i­ly, and Defi­ance Dur­ing the Blitz, by Erik Lar­son. Some­times his­to­ry books end up feel­ing more rel­e­vant than their authors could have imag­ined. That’s the case with this bril­liant account of the years 1940 and 1941, when Eng­lish cit­i­zens spent almost every night hud­dled in base­ments and Tube sta­tions as Ger­many tried to bomb them into sub­mis­sion. The fear and anx­i­ety they felt—while much more severe than what we’re expe­ri­enc­ing with COVID-19—sounded famil­iar. Lar­son gives you a vivid sense of what life was like for aver­age cit­i­zens dur­ing this awful peri­od, and he does a great job pro­fil­ing some of the British lead­ers who saw them through the cri­sis, includ­ing Win­ston Churchill and his close advis­ers. Its scope is too nar­row to be the only book you ever read on World War II, but it’s a great addi­tion to the lit­er­a­ture focused on that trag­ic peri­od. More on the book here.

The Spy and the Trai­tor: The Great­est Espi­onage Sto­ry of the Cold War, by Ben Mac­in­tyre. This non­fic­tion account focus­es on Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB offi­cer who became a dou­ble agent for the British, and Aldrich Ames, the Amer­i­can turn­coat who like­ly betrayed him. Macintyre’s retelling of their sto­ries comes not only from West­ern sources (includ­ing Gordievsky him­self) but also from the Russ­ian per­spec­tive. It’s every bit as excit­ing as my favorite spy nov­els. More on the book here.

Breath from Salt: A Dead­ly Genet­ic Dis­ease, a New Era in Sci­ence, and the Patients and Fam­i­lies Who Changed Med­i­cine, by Bijal P. Trive­di. This book is tru­ly uplift­ing. It doc­u­ments a sto­ry of remark­able sci­en­tif­ic inno­va­tion and how it has improved the lives of almost all cys­tic fibro­sis patients and their fam­i­lies. This sto­ry is espe­cial­ly mean­ing­ful to me because I know fam­i­lies who’ve ben­e­fit­ed from the new med­i­cines described in this book. I sus­pect we’ll see many more books like this in the com­ing years, as bio­med­ical mir­a­cles emerge from labs at an ever-greater pace. More on the book here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bill Gates Describes His Biggest Fear: “I Rate the Chance of a Wide­spread Epi­dem­ic Far Worse Than Ebo­la at Well Over 50 Per­cent” (2015)

Take Big His­to­ry: A Free Short Course on 13.8 Bil­lion Years of His­to­ry, Fund­ed by Bill Gates

Bill Gates Rec­om­mends 5 Thought-Pro­vok­ing Books to Read This Sum­mer

How Bill Gates Reads Books

Bill Gates Names His New Favorite Book of All Time

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Peter Jackson Gives Us an Enticing Glimpse of His Upcoming Beatles Documentary The Beatles: Get Back

in Film, Music | December 22nd, 2020

The leg­endary acri­mo­ny of the Bea­t­les’ break-up comes through in Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 film Let it Be, which doc­u­ments the record­ing of their last stu­dio album and their famous rooftop send­off con­cert, joined by key­boardist Bil­ly Pre­ston. Things got so tense that George Har­ri­son left the band dur­ing the ses­sions. He lat­er called them “the low of all time.” Lennon went fur­ther: “hell… the most mis­er­able ses­sions on earth.”

Though some of the worst moments of those ses­sions were cut in edit­ing, there’s no doubt Lind­say-Hogg built the film around stu­dio dra­ma instead of “the monot­o­nies, the lack­lus­ter worka­day yawns, of four peo­ple who know each oth­er too well,” wrote Jonathan Cot and David Dal­ton in a 1970 Rolling Stone review. “We only get a few moments because with 300 hours of footage, only the high­lights, the more dra­mat­ic scenes, and the fun­nier dia­logue are shown.”

In the film, the band ends their last per­for­mance togeth­er with “Get Back,” then Lennon famous­ly jokes, “I hope we’ve passed the audi­tion.” Let it Be, Cott and Dal­ton revealed, was orig­i­nal­ly titled Get Back, the name Peter Jackson—yes that Peter Jackson—has cho­sen for his upcom­ing Bea­t­les film, which will final­ly see the light next year, after the COVID delays that have slowed down every pro­duc­tion.

Build­ing on the archival and restora­tion skills he refined dur­ing the mak­ing of They Shall Not Grow Old, Jack­son and his team have combed through those hun­dreds of hours of film, cut­ting togeth­er 56 hours of “nev­er-before-seen footage,” notes Bren­na Ehrlich at Rolling Stone. “The film promis­es to be ‘the ulti­mate ‘fly on the wall’ expe­ri­ence that Bea­t­les fans have long dreamt about,’” as Jack­son says. “We get to sit in the stu­dio watch­ing these four friends make great music togeth­er.”

The film will also “present a much sun­nier vision of the Bea­t­les’ breakup” and has been made with the full per­mis­sion of sur­viv­ing mem­bers Paul McCart­ney and Ringo Starr as well as Yoko Ono and George Harrison’s wife Olivia. As Starr put it, “There were hours and hours of us just laugh­ing and play­ing music, not at all like the ver­sion that came out. There was a lot of joy and I think Peter will show that. I think this ver­sion will be a lot more peace and lov­ing, like we real­ly were.”

As if to prove the point, McCart­ney, who just dropped his lat­est album, McCart­ney III, tweet­ed out the five-minute clip above yes­ter­day, in which Jack­son intro­duces what he calls a “mon­tage” from the film’s edit­ing process so far. The vivid life­like­ness of the images is a result of Jackson’s dig­i­tal pro­cess­ing, and it does not seem intru­sive. What stands out most of all is the joy the band clear­ly still took in each other’s com­pa­ny, “just laugh­ing and play­ing music,” as Ringo remem­bered. Get Back is slat­ed for release in the­aters on August, 2021.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

How Peter Jack­son Made His State-of-the-Art World War I Doc­u­men­tary, They Shall Not Grow Old: An Inside Look

Watch The Bea­t­les Per­form Their Famous Rooftop Con­cert: It Hap­pened 50 Years Ago Today (Jan­u­ary 30, 1969)

When the Bea­t­les Refused to Play Before Seg­re­gat­ed Audi­ences on Their First U.S. Tour (1964)

How “Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er” Con­tains “the Cra­zi­est Edit” in Bea­t­les His­to­ry

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Why David Sedaris Hates “The Santaland Diaries,” the NPR Piece that Made Him Famous

in Comedy, Literature | December 22nd, 2020

This past fall David Sedaris pub­lished his first full-fledged anthol­o­gy, The Best of Me. It includes “Six to Eight Black Men,” his sto­ry about bewil­der­ing encoun­ters with Euro­pean Christ­mas folk­tales, but not “The San­ta­land Diaries,” which launched him straight into pop­u­lar cul­ture when he read it aloud on Nation­al Pub­lic Radio’s Morn­ing Edi­tion in 1992. True to its title, that piece is drawn from entries in his diary (the rig­or­ous keep­ing of which is the core of his writ­ing process) made while employed as one of San­ta’s elves at Macy’s Her­ald Square in New York. Not only was the sub­ject sea­son­al­ly appro­pri­ate, Sedaris cap­tured the vari­eties of seething resent­ment felt at one time or anoth­er — not least around Christ­mas — by cus­tomer-ser­vice work­ers in Amer­i­ca.

Accord­ing to a Macy’s exec­u­tive who worked at Her­ald Square at the time, Sedaris made an “out­stand­ing elf.” (So the New Repub­lic’s Alex Heard dis­cov­ered when attempt­ing to fact-check Sedaris’ work.) Whether or not he has fond mem­o­ries of his time in “green vel­vet knick­ers, a for­est-green vel­vet smock and a perky lit­tle hat dec­o­rat­ed with span­gles,” he holds “The San­ta­land Diaries” itself in no regard what­so­ev­er. “I’m grate­ful that I wrote some­thing that peo­ple enjoyed, but because it was my choice what went into this book, I was so hap­py to exclude it,” he says in an inter­view with WBUR about The Best of Me. “I want­ed its feel­ings to be hurt.”

Over the past 28 years he has seized numer­ous oppor­tu­ni­ties to dis­par­age the piece that made him  famous.“I have no idea why that went over the way that it did,” Sedaris once admit­ted to Pub­lish­er’s Week­ly. “There are about two ear­ly things I’ve writ­ten that I could go back and read again, and that’s not one of them.” And by the time of that first Morn­ing Edi­tion broad­cast, he had already been keep­ing his diary every day for fif­teen years. “When you first start writ­ing, you’re going to suck,” he says in the Atlantic video just below. In his first years writ­ing, he says, “I was sit­ting at the Inter­na­tion­al House of Pan­cakes in Raleigh, North Car­oli­na with a beret screwed to my head,” and the result was “the writ­ing you would expect from that per­son.”

Since then Sedaris’ dress has become more eccen­tric, but his writ­ing has improved immea­sur­ably. “I want to be bet­ter at what I do,” said Sedaris in a recent inter­view with the Col­orado Springs Inde­pen­dent. “It’s just some­thing that I per­son­al­ly strive for. Which is sil­ly, because most peo­ple can’t even rec­og­nize that. Peo­ple will say, ‘Oh, I loved that San­ta­land thing.’ And that thing is so clunki­ly writ­ten. I mean, it’s just hor­ri­bly writ­ten, and peo­ple can’t even see it.” Much of the audi­ence may be “lis­ten­ing to the sto­ry, but they’re not pay­ing atten­tion to how it’s con­struct­ed, or they’re not pay­ing atten­tion to the words that you used. They’re not hear­ing the craft of it.” But if you lis­ten to “The San­ta­land Diaries” today, you may well hear what Ira Glass did when he and Sedaris orig­i­nal­ly record­ed it.

As a young free­lance radio pro­duc­er who had yet to cre­ate This Amer­i­can Life, Glass first saw the thor­ough­ly non-famous Sedaris when he read from his diary onstage at a Chica­go club. Glass knew instinc­tive­ly that Sedaris’ dis­tinc­tive voice as both writer and read­er would play well on the radio, as would his even more dis­tinc­tive sense of humor. But it was­n’t until a few years lat­er, when he called on Sedaris to record a hol­i­day-themed seg­ment for Morn­ing Edi­tion, that Glass under­stood just what kind of tal­ent he’d dis­cov­ered. “I remem­ber we got to the part where you sing like Bil­lie Hol­i­day,” Glass told Sedaris in an inter­view mark­ing the 25th anniver­sary of “The San­ta­land Diaries.” “I was a pret­ty expe­ri­enced radio pro­duc­er at that point, and I was like, ‘This is a good one.’ ”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

20 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Sedaris: A Sam­pling of His Inim­itable Humor

David Sedaris Breaks Down His Writ­ing Process: Keep a Diary, Car­ry a Note­book, Read Out Loud, Aban­don Hope

David Sedaris Cre­ates a List of His 10 Favorite Jazz Tracks: Stream Them Online

Why David Sedaris Hates America’s Favorite Word, “Awe­some”

David Sedaris Spends 3–8 Hours Per Day Pick­ing Up Trash in the UK; Tes­ti­fies on the Lit­ter Prob­lem

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The UN’s World Happiness Report Ranks “Socialist Friendly” Countries like Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland & Sweden as Among the Happiest in the World

in Current Affairs, Economics, Politics | December 22nd, 2020

One of the most per­ni­cious, “dan­ger­ous, anti-human and soul-crush­ing” myths in the busi­ness world, writes Liz Ryan at Forbes, is the “idi­ot­ic nos­trum” that has also crept into gov­ern­ment and char­i­ta­ble work: “If you can’t mea­sure it, you can’t man­age it.” The received wis­dom is some­times phrased more cyn­i­cal­ly as “if you can’t mea­sure it, it didn’t hap­pen,” or more pos­i­tive­ly as “if you can’t mea­sure it, you can’t improve it.”

But “the impor­tant stuff can’t be mea­sured,” says Ryan. Don’t we all want to believe that? “Can’t Buy Me Love” and so forth. Maybe it’s not that sim­ple, either. Take hap­pi­ness, for exam­ple. We might say we dis­agree about its rel­a­tive impor­tance, but we all go about the busi­ness of try­ing to buy hap­pi­ness any­way. In our hearts of hearts, it’s a more or less an unques­tion­able good. So why does it seem so scarce and seem to cost so much?  Maybe the prob­lem is not that hap­pi­ness can’t be mea­sured but that it can’t be com­mod­i­fied.

Bud­dhist economies like Bhutan, for exam­ple, run on a GHI (Gross Nation­al Hap­pi­ness) index instead of GDP, and pose the ques­tion of whether the issue of nation­al hap­pi­ness is one of pri­or­i­ties. In oth­er words, “you get what you mea­sure.” In March, Lau­ra Beg­ley Bloom cit­ed the 20 hap­pi­est coun­tries in the world at Forbes, using the UN’s 2020 World Hap­pi­ness Report, “a land­mark sur­vey of the state of glob­al hap­pi­ness,” as the report’s web­site describes it, “that ranks 156 coun­tries by how hap­py their cit­i­zens per­ceive them­selves to be.”

Hap­pi­ness is mea­sured across urban and rur­al envi­ron­ments and accord­ing to envi­ron­men­tal qual­i­ty and sus­tain­able devel­op­ment met­rics. The report uses six rubrics to assess happiness—levels of GDP, life expectan­cy, gen­eros­i­ty, social sup­port, free­dom and cor­rup­tion, and income. Their assess­ment relied on self-report­ing, to give “a direct voice to the pop­u­la­tion as opposed the more top-down approach of decid­ing ex-ante what ought to mat­ter.”  The last chap­ter attempts to account for the so-called “Nordic Excep­tion,” or the puz­zling fact that “Nordic coun­tries are con­stant­ly among the hap­pi­est in the world.”

Maybe this fact is only puz­zling if you begin with the assump­tion that wealthy cap­i­tal­ist economies pro­mote hap­pi­ness. But the top ten hap­pi­est coun­tries are wealthy “social­ist friend­ly” mixed economies, as Bill Maher jokes in the clip at the top, say­ing that in the U.S. “the right has a hard time under­stand­ing we don’t want long lines for bread social­ism, we want that you don’t have to win the lot­to to afford brain surgery social­ism.” This is com­e­dy, not tren­chant geo-polit­i­cal analy­sis, but it alludes to anoth­er sig­nif­i­cant fact.

Most of the world’s unhap­pi­est coun­tries and cities are for­mer­ly col­o­nized places whose economies, infra­struc­tures, and sup­ply chains have been desta­bi­lized by sanc­tions (which cause long bread lines), bombed out of exis­tence by wealth­i­er coun­tries, and destroyed by cli­mate cat­a­stro­phes. The report does not ful­ly explore the mean­ing of this data, focus­ing, under­stand­ably, on what makes pop­u­la­tions hap­py. But an under­ly­ing theme is the sug­ges­tion that hap­pi­ness is some­thing we achieve in real, mea­sur­able eco­nom­ic rela­tion with each oth­er, not sole­ly in the pur­suit of indi­vid­u­al­ist ideals.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

How Much Mon­ey Do You Need to Be Hap­py? A New Study Gives Us Some Exact Fig­ures

Cre­ativ­i­ty, Not Mon­ey, is the Key to Hap­pi­ness: Dis­cov­er Psy­chol­o­gist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s The­o­ry of “Flow”

Albert Camus Explains Why Hap­pi­ness Is Like Com­mit­ting a Crime—”You Should Nev­er Admit to it” (1959)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Why Is Napoleon’s Hand Always in His Waistcoat?: The Origins of This Distinctive Pose Explained

in Art, History | December 21st, 2020

If the name of Napoleon Bona­parte should come up in a game of cha­rades, we all know what to do: stand up with one foot in front of the oth­er, stick a hand into our shirt, and con­sid­er the round won. Yet the recog­ni­tion of this pose as dis­tinc­tive­ly Napoleon­ic may not be as wide as we assume, or so Cole­man Lown­des dis­cov­ered in the research for the video above, “Napoleon’s Miss­ing Hand, Explained.” Asked to act out the image of Napoleon, not all of Lown­des col­leagues at Vox tried to evoke his hand in his waist­coat, opt­ing instead for grand pos­tur­ing and an approx­i­ma­tion of the (prob­a­bly apoc­ryphal) mod­est stature for which that pos­tur­ing sup­pos­ed­ly com­pen­sat­ed. Yet enough of us still pic­ture Napoleon hand-in-waist­coat that we might well won­der: how did that image take shape in the first place?

Rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the most famous states­man in all French his­to­ry, from paint­ings made in his life time to Bill and Ted’s Excel­lent Adven­ture, include count­less exam­ples of the pose. This has giv­en rise to bod­i­ly-ori­ent­ed spec­u­la­tions — a man­u­al defor­mi­ty, inter­nal organs pained by the can­cer that killed him — but the form came with his­tor­i­cal prece­dent.

“Con­ceal­ing a hand in one’s coat was a por­trai­ture cliche long before Napoleon was paint­ed that way in the ear­ly 1800s,” says Lown­des, in ref­er­ence to Jacques-Louis David’s The Emper­or Napoleon in His Study at the Tui­leries, a por­trait defin­i­tive enough to head up Napoleon’s Wikipedia entry. Nota­bles pre­vi­ous­ly depict­ed with one con­spic­u­ous­ly hid­den hand include George Wash­ing­ton, Mozart, and Fran­cis­co Pizarro.

Even ancient Greek ora­tor Aeschines “claimed that restrict­ing the move­ment of one hand was the prop­er way to speak in pub­lic.” Accord­ing to one 18th-cen­tu­ry British eti­quette guide, “keep­ing a hand in one’s coat was key to pos­tur­ing one­self with man­ly bold­ness, tem­pered with becom­ing mod­esty.” It even­tu­al­ly became com­mon enough to lose its high sta­tus, until David cap­tured Napoleon’s use of it in his mas­ter­ly pro­pa­gan­dis­tic por­trait. But the extent we think of Napoleon keep­ing a hand per­pet­u­al­ly in his waist­coat today sure­ly owes much to the many car­i­ca­tur­ists and par­o­dy artists who took up the trope, includ­ing Char­lie Chap­lin — who, after try­ing a mus­tache and bowler hat for a role, knew what it was to be turned icon­ic by a seem­ing­ly minor styl­is­tic choice.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Napoleon: The Great­est Movie Stan­ley Kubrick Nev­er Made

Napoleon’s Eng­lish Lessons: How the Mil­i­tary Leader Stud­ied Eng­lish to Escape the Bore­dom of Life in Exile

Napoleon’s Dis­as­trous Inva­sion of Rus­sia Detailed in an 1869 Data Visu­al­iza­tion: It’s Been Called “the Best Sta­tis­ti­cal Graph­ic Ever Drawn”

Napoleon’s Kin­dle: See the Minia­tur­ized Trav­el­ing Library He Took on Mil­i­tary Cam­paigns

The Face of Bill Mur­ray Adds Some Joy to Clas­sic Paint­ings

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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How Joni Mitchell’s Song of Heartbreak, “River,” Became a Christmas Classic

in Music | December 21st, 2020

From Elvis’ “Blue Christ­mas” to Tom Waits’ “Christ­mas Card from a Hook­er in Min­neapo­lis” to the Pogues’ “Fairy­tale of New York,” the most hon­est Christ­mas songs freely acknowl­edge the holiday’s dark under­bel­ly. There are always those for whom the hol­i­days are times of heart­break, which, as we know, makes for bet­ter song­writ­ing than tin­sel, elves, and stock­ings. Near the top of any list of mis­er­able Christ­mas songs sits Joni Mitchell’s hol­i­day clas­sic “Riv­er,” in which she laments los­ing “the best baby I ever had” over the sea­son.

“Riv­er” is not real­ly a Christ­mas song; it just hap­pens to be set dur­ing the hol­i­days: “It’s com­ing on Christ­mas, they’re cut­ting down trees,” Joni sings, “They’re putting up rein­deer, singing songs of joy and peace.” This tran­quil scene pro­vides a trag­ic foil for the song’s true sub­ject. “Ulti­mate­ly,” writes J. Free­dom du Lac at The Wash­ing­ton Post, “‘Riv­er’ is a bereft song about a bro­ken romance and a woman who des­per­ate­ly wants to escape her heart­break, say­ing repeat­ed­ly: ‘I wish I had a riv­er I could skate away on.’”

Mitchell’s “despair­ing dra­ma” has “long been a pop­u­lar cov­er among musi­cians, hun­dreds of whom have record­ed it for com­mer­cial release.” (Accord­ing to her web­site, it has been record­ed 763 times, sec­ond only to “Both Sides Now” at almost twice that num­ber.) Last year Ellie Goulding’s cov­er rose to No. 1 in Europe. First released on Mitchel­l’s 1971 clas­sic Blue, the song delib­er­ate­ly evokes the hol­i­days with strains of “Jin­gle Bells” in its open­ing bars before descend­ing into its deeply melan­choly melody.

“Riv­er” did not enter mod­ern Christ­mas sin­ga­longs until the 1990s. In the Poly­phon­ic video at the top, “Joni Mitchell and the Melan­choly of Christ­mas,” we begin all the way back in the 1880s, with the first record­ings of “Jin­gle Bells.” The his­to­ry frames Mitchell’s use of the melody, almost a form of sam­pling, as rad­i­cal protest of a tune that has become “syn­ony­mous with Christ­mas joy.” It has been record­ed by vir­tu­al­ly every­one, and was even broad­cast from space in 1965 “when astro­nauts aboard NASA’s Gem­i­ni 6 played it as part of a Christ­mas prank.”

No, says Mitchell, there are real peo­ple with real prob­lems down here, and some­times Christ­mas sucks. There’ll be no dash­ing through the snow: “It don’t snow here / Stays pret­ty green.” The sto­ry behind the song is well-known: Mitchell end­ed her two-year rela­tion­ship with Gra­ham Nash in 1970, then “skat­ed away” to Europe to escape the “crazy scene.” While in Crete, “she sent Nash a telegram to tell him their rela­tion­ship was over,” notes Tom Eames. No one should try to force a hap­py hol­i­day in such times. If you’re crav­ing a lit­tle real­ness with your cheer, con­sid­er adding “Riv­er” to your playlist.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Joni Mitchell Wrote “Wood­stock,” the Song that Defined the Leg­endary Music Fes­ti­val, Even Though She Wasn’t There (1969)

Watch Joni Mitchell Sing an Immac­u­late Ver­sion of Her Song “Coy­ote,” with Bob Dylan, Roger McGuinn & Gor­don Light­foot (1975)

The Expan­sive Vocal Range of Joni Mitchell: From the Ear­ly to Lat­er Years

The Sto­ry of The Pogues’ “Fairy­tale of New York,” the Boozy Bal­lad That Has Become One of the Most Beloved Christ­mas Songs of All Time

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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