December 21, 2012 On Television Keep Me in the Loop, You Dead Mechanism By Dave Tompkins What’s Christmas without some ancient demons embedded in the chimney? On the evening of December 25, 1972, BBC viewers celebrated the birth of Christ by being scared to death. They learned that their homes could be resonating with discarnate traumas absorbed over centuries, that the limestone walls have been listening, recording, and screaming—and that the ghost of Christmas past had been using their minds as its personal VCR. Scripted by Nigel Kneale, The Stone Tape is about a British electronics company who’s in a race to beat Japan to a super washing machine and a groundbreaking recording medium based on the “magnetic susceptibility” of certain minerals and their capacity to retain terrible memories. Holed up in a Victorian mansion, the team of bickering scientists working for Ryan Electronics would discover that haunting was a new form of playback. Merry Christmas. Kneale had grown up on the Isle of Man, home to a mongoose named Gef who could prove his own existence in six different languages, including Russian and Arabic. Kneale’s imagination flourished in television, a medium with a reputation for killing souls. His teleplays seemed intent on trying to out-weird each other: a taxidermist gets stuffed by a pond of vengeful toads; a man is choked to death by his own bike wreckage; a porn cinema is haunted by dolphins. He also gave us titles like “Vegetable Village,” “Clog-Dance for a Dead Farce,” and “The Big Big Giggle.” One of my favorite Kneale shows involves a frumpy supermarket cashier who enlists the store mascot—a woodchuck called Briteway Billy—to wage telekinetic war against her tyrant boss, pummeling him to death with nonperishable canned goods. How many soup cans can a supermarket woodchuck ghost hurl? Read More
December 21, 2012 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Nutcrackers, Louie, Bing By Sadie Stein “He is at once too cynical, too sincere, and too weird for schmaltz”: Paris Review special Mad Men correspondent Adam Wilson turns his gaze on Louie over at the L.A. Review of Books. —Lorin Stein This hallucinatory Christmas duet between David Bowie and Bing Crosby has become, thank God, an improbable standard, but the story behind it deserves some extracurricular reading. Peruse to deepen your experience of this seasonal wormhole as it collapses the distance between genres and generations and renders our edgy Ziggy saccharine as a candy cane. That snow-white tan is just snow, and the only things that look especially well hung are the stockings. —Samuel Fox Read More
December 21, 2012 On the Shelf Grass Libraries, and Other News By Sadie Stein Cornell has installed an indoor grass library. Reading habits across America. Speaking of: writers who do not live in Brooklyn. The OED apologizes for insensitivity. More apocalyptic reading.
December 20, 2012 Video & Multimedia Holiday … Cheer? By Sadie Stein Earlier today, Edward McPherson wrote about his hometown for the Daily. In keeping with that post, enjoy the following clip from Dallas, which, as the poster informs us, is the only time Christmas was ever mentioned in the series.
December 20, 2012 Video & Multimedia “Hooray for Santy Claus!” By Sadie Stein You may well know the 1964 camp classic Santa Claus Conquers the Martians as one of the worst films ever made, but did you know there’s also a novelization? That’s right: in 2005, Lou Harry gave us the print version the world needed.
December 20, 2012 Look “Make Time, Not Love” By Jason Novak Jason Novak works at a grocery store in Berkeley, California, and changes diapers in his spare time.