It May Be Better to Light a Candle Than to Curse the Darkness, But There's No Reason You Can't Do Both
Also: A deep dive into the Nutcracker.
Dec. 18 - The sun shone for a couple of hours yesterday. It was magnificent. I was stuck in the office and therefore didn’t get to feel its warmth on my skin but I caught a few glimpses of blue sky through the windows, and the brick buildings around us were awash in a warm golden glow.
Saying it was a badly needed booster would be an understatement. It was the cocaine in my coffee. The meteorologist on television had informed us the previous evening that there’d been just 8.3 hours of sunshine in Denmark so far this December. I’d been feeling it.
At the time that meteorologist was giving his report, December was about 379 hours old. That means the month had to that point been 97.8% sunless.
Sunlight matters. Its deprivation can suppress your immune system, reduce serotonin production and bone density, lower your metabolism, and play havoc with your circadian rhythms.
Lack of sunlight can also piss some people right the hell off.
So I hope the four people I ran over in the parking lot of the local shopping center will cut me some slack.
One man of northern climes who may have suffered from seasonal affective disorder was the Russian Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikowsky, whose Russian name has so many spelling variants in English that I had to throw a dart at a board to pick one.
Tchaikovsky was a moody man who struggled with depression his whole life. He was also gay, which was a rough thing to be in 19th century Russia. He married a beard, but that didn’t go well. Their honeymoon photo is. . . communicative:
In the spirit of keeping things light, I asked Grok to help out by bringing the picture up to date and making them happy:
The smile on that “modern” Tchaikoffski would probably be intended for the swarthy male photographer. (I asked to have them honeymooning on a Greek island.) Interestingly, Grok’s first attempt actually had Tchaikovski with another man:
Good for them!
But Tchaicowskee’s misery may have been our boon. It was on this date in 1892 that The Nutcracker had its premiere in St. Petersburg.
It wasn’t hailed to universal acclaim.
“It does not even have a story, but is rather a series of unconnected scenes,” wrote one critic.
Wrote another: it is “mere spectacle that is actually an insult. God grant that similar failed experiments do not happen often.”
And still another: “Sucks balls.”
(I mean, I assume some critic or other must have written that last one, given the remarks of the first two.)
Tziaikowfsky must have been furious. He hadn’t even wanted to do the damned thing to begin with. He’d been commissioned to do it by the director of the Imperial Theatre, one Ivan Vsevolozhsky (I swear), who wanted the gloomy composer to pair a ballet based on The Nutcracker story with an opera about Iolanta.
Tchaikowzky thought The Nutcracker story was too simple and stupid to be worth his time. Plus, his sister had just died—her head split in two by the axe of an intellectual student—so he wasn’t in any kind of a mood.
On the other hand, he’d already blown the commission so he didn’t have much choice.
The original story, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, was written in 1816 by the Prussian author E.T.A. Hoffman (whose name was a sarcastic rejoinder assigned by his mother, who never forgave him for being born eight days past his due date). It was a dark and terrifying exploration of childhood fantasy, full of murder, incest, cannibalism, and the torture of woodland creatures.
In 1845, however, the French writer Alexander Dumas Pear had taken Hoffman’s story and, according to his well-known motto of “l’action et l’amour,” transformed it into a bawdy tale of swordplay and passion. Dumas’s editors eventually talked him into excising the more sensuous elements—Dumas’s heroine Marie, whom Tczhaikouvfski would rename Clara, was a sexually frustrated young woman with an inappropriate fixation on a wooden doll—and making the bloody battles between the mice and the Nutcracker less gory. Dumas expressed his disagreement in letters to friends (“No heaving bosoms? No decapitations? Who’s going to be interested?”), but he honored his editors wishes anyway.
The rest is, of course, history: Tchaikoufski adapted the watered-down Dumas version into a ballet, it survived its mixed-review premiere, and we now all hear its melodies repeatedly for the last two months of every year.
That’s light and fun, I guess, but not as much fun as revisiting some of the lesser-known adapations of the Nutcracker
For example, Alfred Hitchcock’s Christmas Eve Insomnia (1956):
Akiro Kurosawa’s Yume no Senshi (“Dream Warriors”) (1976):
Woody Allen’s Clara and Her Toys (1981):
…in which, of course, Allen cast himself as both the uncle:
…and the Nutcracker:
Whether or not you think Die Hard is a Christmas movie, Bruce Willis’s 1993 Crack These Nuts certainly was.
Most recently, Wes Anderson’s 2014 short Clara’s Christmas may have been the most visually engaging version:
But the classic for most of us will always be Frank Capra’s A Wonderful Bunch of Nuts, starring Jimmy Stewart and a young Natalie Wood.
And the less said about Stephen King’s 1982 Revenge of the Mouse King, adapted for the screen by Steven Spielberg, the better.
Although those of us in our teens at the time of its release will surely always cherish that version of Clara…
Silly stuff, I know.
All in keeping with the seasonal theme.
When it gets dark, this almanac gets light.
Yesterday’s News
As pretty much anyone with access to broadcast or print media probably already knows by now, it was 121 years ago yesterdat that Orville Wright made the first recorded flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in a plane he built with his brother. The flight lasted a mere twelve seconds and covered only 120 feet, but a short flight had been expected: after all, two Wrights don't make it long.
(I’m here all week, probably.)
97 years ago yesterday, U.S. Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg suggested a worldwide pact renouncing war as an instrument of national policy. Virtually all of the major powers of the world signed the Kellogg-Briand pact in Paris on August 27, 1928.
Really. These were educated people, presumably, acting on behalf of actual governments, with actual interests, and they didn't even giggle as they signed.
The pact went into force on July 24, 1929. War was finally outlawed and the people of the earth were filled with joy.
The peace achieved by the Kellogg-Briand Pact was an idyll like none other and is still referred to as the happiest seven minutes in human history.
But maybe I'm not giving sufficient credit to the authors and signers of that ill-fated pact for their ironic sense. It was signed on the 149th birthday of Humphrey Davy, the inventor of laughing gas.
December 17 was the birthday of William Safire (1929), Bob Guccione (1930), Arthur Fiedler (1894), and John Greenleaf Whittier (1807).
It's National Day in Bhutan.
Today’s Stuff
Today, December 18, is Republic Day in Niger.
Brad Pitt turns 61 today, Steven Spielberg turns 77, and Keith Richards turns 81 (that's 44 in Keith years). Here he is rocking Satisfaction in concert earlier this year:
They share their birthday with Christina Aguilera (1980), "Stone Cold" Steve Austin (1964), Leonard Maltin (1950), Betty Grable (1916), Willy Brandt (1913), Ty Cobb (1886), and Paul Klee (1879).
Happy Hump Day!
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