A grab bag of holiday delights
Featuring Tove Jansson, Whit Stillman, Patti Smith, Arnold Roth, and more
Between this, that, and the other - not to mention the fourth thing, the additional complications, a further that, and the rest of it all to boot - I’ve struggled with the “holiday spirit” this year. The most festive activity I can imagine is sleeping in a cave for three months. Sure, I love life and people and doing things - but all the time? Also the world seems determined to punish us all for existing in it, so a break sounds pretty nice.
A few scattered moments, however, have emerged from the gray goo of late 2024 to provide fleeting glimpses of solace. As our year careens madly, without driver or seatbelts, straight into the brick wall of the future, perhaps you too might enjoy seeing these images flash before your eyes as you brace for impact.
For Christmas my senior year in high school, I received my first personal TV set. It wasn’t wired for cable, of course (remember cable?), so when I plugged it in, dazed from the peculiar melancholy of Christmas night, there wasn’t much to see. I flipped to PBS, where some young people, just a few years older than me, were sitting around in tuxedos. It didn’t seem very promising at first, but within a few minutes I was completely captivated by their cool Manhattan milieu - these people were wealthy snobs, but also quite smart and funny. I soon began to care for them, and the aching sadness around their silhouettes suited my mood perfectly. By the time it finished, I was in love.
The first thing I did the next morning was pull out the local paper’s TV supplement (remember the local paper’s TV supplement?) to look up the title: The movie was called Metropolitan, and even though it had come out just four years earlier, it felt like a relic from a deeper past. This was no accident - the film depicted an upper-class milieu of private schools, debutante balls, and unsupervised afterparties that was very self-consciously crumbling before the characters’ eyes. The movie’s self-awareness led its wistful romanticism in a confident fox-trot, tapping the rhythms of another New York dream into a head that was already full of them.
That dream came the closest it ever has to reality when Hope and I got to see an anniversary screening of the film last week from the first balcony row of the Paris, the theater where it premiered in 1989. Writer-director Whit Stillman appeared afterward for a talkback, accompanied by Chris Eigemann, the actor who played the story’s dangerously likable loudmouth, Nick.
I loved hearing their stories about how nobody knew what they were doing during the production, which is ironic considering how poised and confident it is. At one point they stole a shot on the front steps of the Plaza by having the actors circle in and out of the building half a dozen times through the Oak Bar (remember the Oak Bar?) - a workaround that would be completely impossible today for so many reasons. New York is always dying, and Stillman knows this well. Metropolitan is, almost unintentionally, a great Christmas movie - but it’s absolutely the greatest post-Christmas movie.
A week earlier, to celebrate Dash successfully turning in his high-school art portfolios (three of them, featuring about 20 separate pieces in toto - it’s a hell of an accomplishment), we brought him to see a VERY DIFFERENT movie that also ranks as one of the top wintertime flicks of all time.
We learned about Hundreds of Beavers when we stumbled upon a YouTube trailer earlier this year. We were desperately interested but something held us back from streaming it. It’s as if we knew that the optimal viewing experience required the helpless, hyperventilating laughter of a couple hundred other people. So when a special holiday screening was announced at the IFC Center for the week after his school application deadline, we jumped on it.
We knew that we’d enjoy this movie, and yet it somehow exceeded our expectations. As you can see from the trailer, it’s a snowbound slapstick comedy of the Great North that’s equal parts Buster Keaton, Looney Tunes, and Donkey Kong, all whipped together into a glorious green-screened concoction that gleefully transforms its very phoniness into an irresistible coup.
This was another screening with a talkback - in this case, the fight director and the guy who played the horse (yup) told us how the film took shape over several winters, filmed just a little bit at a time. The director, Mike Cheslik, apparently carried around the whole master plan in a binder, and he patiently grabbed what footage he could. A motley assortment of friends and colleagues created the effects with only six beaver costumes, which, as the film’s final scenes make very clear, were blown all to hell by the end.
On the spinning sphere of my favorite films, Hundreds of Beavers is the antipodal Metropolitan. Though poles apart, they share a preternatural confidence of execution, underscored by a mordantly comical perspective that somehow lacks a single drop of cynicism. I am so grateful to live in a world where I can have both.
Speaking of northern climes, I’ve been working my way through Tove Jansson’s Moomin books, about one a year. I owned a few of them when I was a kid, but I was never able to read them - there was something far too Nordic about them to suit my juvenile tastes. But since I seem to be growing more Arctic as I age (even as the Arctic itself disappears), I now count these as some of my all-time favorite works of literature.
Though written for children, the emotional texture of these books is incredibly nuanced and mature. Sure, you have characters with names like Moomintroll and Snorkmaiden and Snufkin and Fillyjonk and Little My and Sniff who happen to resemble folkloric fairies and beasts, but they live lives much like ours - domestic, often dull, occasionally frightening, with sudden breathtaking flashes of beauty. I’m not sure what I would have made of these stories had I finished one 30 years ago - as an adult, I feel more seen than by Jansson than almost any other author.
The seventh book in the series, Tales from Moominvalley, is a collection of outwardly unconnected short pieces. As such, I thought it would be lighter reading, but nope - by winnowing her narrative beats to their essence, Jansson drops a series of pendulous, glistening teardrops into your slowly steeping tea. Generally following characters that exist on the margins of the Moomins’ world, they are loving studies of disappointment, depression, and grief, leavened with enough hard-earned sweetness to make them a pleasure to swallow. It might be my favorite Moomin book yet.
The collection closes with a piece called “The Fir Tree” that perfectly captures my current feelings about the holiday season. The Moomins normally hibernate through the winter and so know nothing of Christmas - but when a pushy neighbor wakes them up, they’re swept up in the chaos of preparation. Everyone is so breathlessly stressed that the Moomins assume Christmas is some sort of horrible impending catastrophe that they need to appease with a tree and lights and gifts. It all works out in the end, but I suspect Jansson too was overwhelmed by the demands of communal celebration, and just as desperate to find some meaning beneath the madness.
One of the ways my household makes sense of the season is by watching forgotten holiday specials, the more baffling the better. We hit a jackpot of sorts this year with one dimly remembered from childhood, featuring the comic-strip cavemen from Johnny Hart’s B.C.
I read B.C. in the paper every day growing up, but I found it hard to love. Its visual style reflected the kind of snide ‘70s minimalism that you could also see in The Wizard of Id (which Hart also wrote) and Momma and Tumbleweeds, with a kind of sweaty cigar-smoke humor that I never found too appealing (for Christ’s sake, the only two female characters are named Fat Broad and Cute Chick).
Adding to the weirdness were occasional flashes of painfully sincere Christian belief. Among cavemen? Thousands of years before the dawn of civilization? Okay, sure. For all that, though, this Christmas special doesn’t spend much time on the biblical story, instead devising an alternative origin of Santa Claus as a cold-hearted cash grab devised by a couple of scammers. What elevates the material is that these scammers are voiced by the immortal deadpan comedy duo of Bob and Ray, whose decades of collaboration bring some real lived-in grit to the dialogue.
This is well worth watching as a curiosity for anyone interested in odd pop-culture juxtapositions, especially those that are holiday-related. If your taste threatens to take you deeper, make room next November for B.C.: The First Thanksgiving, which we watched last month. It’s cruder and more disjointed than this one, lacking the consummate professionalism of Bob and Ray - but come on, how many turkey specials are out there?
An illustration style that suits my tastes far more than that of Johnny Hart is Arnold Roth. I used to see him as something of an American Ronald Searle, but in reality he’s more like the most ornamental and improvisatory of the MAD Magazine generation. Though he was never an official member of the Usual Gang of Idiots, he was a fellow traveler and collaborator with many of the greats, and work has appeared over the years in publications ranging from Playboy to National Lampoon to the New Yorker.
Though primarily an editorial illustrator and cartoonist, Roth did lend his talents to a few children’s books, two of which, both written by the journeyman children’s author Jane Yolen, I discovered earlier this year. The first, The Witch Who Wasn’t, is a fairly straightforward good-little-witch story, while the second is a Christmas sequel, Isabel’s Noel. For both, Roth provides a dense and layered illustrated world of little creeps and goblins that provide a level of whimsy and weirdness that goes above and beyond the stories’ demands. I suppose his work might feel a little overheated to some younger readers, but I bet I would have adored this as a kid.
Anyway, the same week I received Isabel’s Noel in the mail, Hope and i caught up with a superhero-themed Christmas cartoon that we had missed last year - Merry Little Batman. Notice a resemblance?
Whose idea was this? It’s such a weird combination. The designers specifically cite Searle as an influence, and that comes through very clearly in the concept art - you can see how his inky embellishments play nicely into the gothic background designs. But the inevitable simplifications of the animation process - not to mention the addition of rich color - somehow bring the entire thing more into Roth’s world. The movie’s script is serviceably entertaining, but I’d like to see a hundred more things with this type of loopy, funny visual style. Thanks for taking the risk, guys!
Btw, Roth is still alive and turns 96 in February. He hasn’t updated his Instagram account in several years, so let’s all wish him good health!
I discovered the work of Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai in the wake of Donald Trump’s first election. It was a book called War and War, about a deluded archivist who discovers a lost manuscript and, determined to share it to the world, embarks upon an insane adventure that lands him exactly where he started, with absolutely nothing changed. Strongly influenced by Samuel Beckett, Krasznahorkai’s endless, rambling sentences scrape away life’s surfaces to reveal the bleakness beneath - but they do it in such a hypnotically musical way that it felt cathartic to surrender to their dismal power.
It was an alarmingly good fit for those early days of uncertainty - so much so that I haven’t read any of his full-length novels since. The book has loomed large in my imagination, though, so when I heard that Krasznahorkai would be making a rare personal appearance in NYC to promote his new book, Herscht 07769, I counted myself as very lucky to snag one of the limited seats.
After arriving at the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea (with a backdrop of deliriously chaotic canvases by Cecily Brown), I somehow managed to grab a front-row seat. After settling in, these guys showed up:
The seated man is Hungarian artist Viktor Lois, who, among other things, constructs his own strange, elaborate musical instruments (many of which you can see here). As people took their seats he played a low, droning composition that seemed to embody the trance-inducing quality of Krasznahorkai’s prose - all while those poor interns stood still, holding up that ridiculous sign. As I sat listening, I glanced at the other end of the row, and who should be sitting there but the legendary Patti Smith. Before taking the stage, Krasznahorkai himself walked over to say hello and gift her of a couple of his books:
Most of the evening was taken up by a conversation between Krasznahorkai and the novelist Hari Kunzru about the new book, which I’m looking very forward to reading. It’s about Florian Herscht, a giant man-child who works as a graffiti remover near Bach’s birthplace in the depressed German state of Thuringia, where he writes letters to Angela Merkel about the dangers of antimatter as neo-Nazis destroy the world around him. Not a beach read, per se, but Krasznahorkai expressed a nearly childlike sense of wonder when speaking about the writing process. He said that he believes there are thousands of unseen beings around us at all times, who want to join our world through our stories. While touring the key sites of Bach’s life, he felt the figure he would call Herscht looming behind him, and insisted that the book was the result of taking dictation from his title character. I also loved his stated reason for writing in long sentences - it’s not enough to say “I love you,” he declared; you need to add on all the reasons that I love you, one by one, until the sentence conveys everything that stands implicit in the love you’re trying to convey. It was pretty amazing to hear such an intense, uncompromising writer declare an unironic belief in fairies and ghosts and the power of love.
That Krasznahorkai hails from Hungary, whose president Viktor Orbán is the knowing template for Trump’s impending “illiberal democracy,” was lost on no one. Yet he seemed entirely undaunted by the fact that the world is a shithole - that is simply a fact, he tells us, and therefore something to be dealt with. He explained that the novel’s epigraph - “Hope is a mistake” - is not a capitulation to easy pessimism, but a call to be open to the present moment, since ultimately that’s all we have.
At the end of the interview, Krasznahorkai called on Patti Smith to come up and read a couple of his short pieces in English (she can do it so much better than I can, he said). She delivered them with a bemused, low-key tone that gently played up their humor and absurdity. But when Krasznahorkai followed up by repeating one in his native Hungarian, the gentleness of the man gave way to the fierceness of the author - his performance was harder and more possessed, like a preacher doing everything he can to keep himself from screaming at his parishioners. Not the first time I’ve been taken aback by the gap between the person and the artist.
In any event, Viktor Lois returned to play us all out, with the same young dudes holding up the reverse side of the sign from the beginning:
And so I invite you all to join me in saying farewell to this exhausting, exasperating, explosive year. I’ll miss it as much as I pine for the next one - very little. But the moment, the moment! I will take that and keep it as best I can, and I thank you all for sharing it with me.
Those paintings in the gallery are a turgid frenzy of (almost) mud. And I can't stop staring at them.