{"id":187,"date":"2020-12-15T22:57:51","date_gmt":"2020-12-15T22:57:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/terry-torres.com\/plays\/?p=187"},"modified":"2023-09-07T15:43:43","modified_gmt":"2023-09-07T15:43:43","slug":"the-new-torres-christmas-canon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/localhost\/terryplays\/2020\/12\/15\/the-new-torres-christmas-canon\/","title":{"rendered":"The New Torres Christmas Canon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em>{ Previously: <a href=\"http:\/\/localhost\/terryplays\/2020\/12\/15\/the-greatest-christmas-songs-of-all-time\/\">The Greatest Christmas Songs of All Time<\/a> }<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Theme to On Her Majesty&#8217;s Secret Service<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"07 On Her Majesty&#039;s Secret Service\/A View to a Kill - Suite\" width=\"750\" height=\"422\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/C2GS6kfkTUE?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><em>December 18, 2017<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Welcome to the 2018 inductees to the Torres Christmas Canon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As a discerning connoisseur of the Christmas Spirit, it\u2019s easy to become inured to the joys of the traditional Christmas canon after so much exposure. That\u2019s why I make a point to pepper my Christmas playlists with songs that are just barely Christmas adjacent \u2013 and some songs that only have anything to do with winter celebrations if one were to use my specific psychological profile as a cipher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>On Her Majesty\u2019s Secret Service is the sixth James Bond film. It was George Lazenby\u2019s only portrayal of the character, and features the only \u201cBond girl\u201d to actually marry James Bond, portrayed by Diana Rigg \u2013 known by then as one of the leads of the TV spy fiction The Avengers, probably better known now as Olenna Tyrell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One particularly tense sequence has Bond making a daring escape from longtime adversary Blofeld\u2019s headquarters in the Swiss Alps which naturally results in a downhill ski chase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I\u2019m not even the hugest James Bond fan. It\u2019s just that our household had a lot of movie soundtracks, including the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra\u2019s take on much of the film series\u2019 scores. The standout for me, the theme to On Her Majesty\u2019s Secret Service, invoked such a specific sense of tone and intention that it made perfect sense to me to discover it set to a thrilling ski chase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Much like the Trans-Siberian Orchestra\u2019s work, this song takes the sort of features you\u2019d expect of a Christmas song (here, sleigh bells (huh&#8230; or is that tambourine)) and makes something a little more sinister, exaggerating all of the surrounding elements to get something more intense, moody, and driving than a simple jingle. I\u2019ve come to associate it with adopting the resolute mindset and courage necessary to brave the elements on the worst of winter commutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It also has this ticking clock feeling that\u2019s exciting and anxiety-inducing, very appropriate for the season. Will you sail through effortlessly as Bond always manages to, or soar off a cliff like Blofeld\u2019s cronies? Hope you\u2019ve done all your shopping!!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Look forward to a few more inductees to the Torres Christmas Canon (TCC). Are there are any songs you get in the mood for around this time of year that you\u2019ll never hear playing over the speakers at the mall?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Seasons, by Future Islands<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Future Islands - &quot;Seasons&quot; @ Letterman 3\/3\/14\" width=\"750\" height=\"422\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/GK4lD3Uf8_o?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><em>December 19, 2017<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Welcome back to the 2018 inductees to the Torres Christmas Canon \u2013 my own personal reserve of songs that I play alongside the better known Christmas classics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As I talked about with Last Christmas, Christmas, being such a tentpole on the social calendar, has come to nearly outpace New Years Day as a unit of measurement in the Western world. An event built on tradition invites endless comparison to its previous iterations. But measuring time really means measuring something more important: change. Noticing the weather, noticing the seasons, is noticing change. To reflect on the seasons is to anticipate, look forward to, or dread those changes. How often do we fantasize about gently falling snow in the blistering heat of summer, or about bright sun and blooming flowers while trudging through slush? How do we assert our desires and maintain our senses of self even while at nature\u2019s capricious whims, going along for the ride?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Aside from the changing seasons, the other way to measure time is in other people, and that\u2019s what this song is about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In this video, frontman Samuel Herring, channels a strange, emo Elvis, moving his body with the effort of someone trying to have a great time, but is infected with something that might be killing him. It\u2019s easy to get used to the idea that change is something that will happen in due time if you let it \u2013 which can blind one to the fact that change, much more often, requires a choice to be made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Though the song seems to be about a slow, extended ending to a relationship \u2013 and the realization that stagnation can look so much like comfort \u2013 in it is an acknowledgment of what an enduring relationship is supposed to look like: something that allows you to change and grow together with the seasons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To talk about seasons, to me, is to talk about winter and not-winter. That\u2019s why this feels like a Christmas song to me. It takes something cold and uncomfortable and makes it\u2026 hopeful? At least, if you choose to look at it that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I particularly like this live performance done on Letterman. Herring really goes for it, and I\u2019m thrilled that Letterman seems to love it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Lahan (aka My Village is #1)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-4-3 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=0xWWORjQ2cQ&#038;fbclid=IwAR0h8wrQ4_QVN9m6pLyZwDwyZMbUMyJo4g-ql7_nJEN32dyoI-km7sMHuyk\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><em>December 20, 2017<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Introducing another inductee to the Torres Christmas Canon, a special reserve of songs that I attempt to argue to actually be Christmas songs. Here\u2019s a weird one, so great ready.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Two of many staple albums of the Christmas season in the Torres household were Celtic in style.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One, sponsored by the elder generation, was The Bells of Dublin from The Chieftains. I really liked this album when I was younger because it did for me what no other Christmas music I\u2019d been exposed to could. For the most part in my life till then \u2013 and, really, even now \u2013 the most played Christmas songs were easily divided in two categories: carols and hymns written (or rewritten) in the 1800s, and \u201cinstant classics\u201d penned and crooned in the 1940s and 50s. The Chieftains\u2019 music managed to evoke an era in-between the songs that had become popular with time and repetition and those that became popular because they were written to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It also invoked a place set apart. Repeated images of carolers, holiday feasts, and \u201chow Christmas ought to be\u201d often evoke for me an old world setting, places where many American immigrants families may have come from. Being an observer of Christmas in America is constantly acknowledging that the root of the traditions you participate in came from a different time and place. Where many performances of the old, arcane Christmas canon can feel distant and too-holy, the Bells of Dublin feels so much more inviting, a mix-up of the personal and the sacred.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And more strikingly, as someone who basically never considers his heritage or genealogy, it makes me wonder how members of my family who died before I could speak with them celebrated Christmas \u2013 if they would have preferred either the more solemn or more jolly tunes at a given time. It should be stressed as well that this was my first and most enduring exposure to Irish folk music, which tied the genre inextricably to the holiday season in my mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The second album was discovered by me and my brothers on the Internet at the turn of the last century. This was before the dawn of Napster and P2P file sharing, when downloading a single MP3 file was a momentous occasion. An American otaku living in Japan took on the responsibility of sharing the video game and anime soundtracks he bought online. But the times being as they were, he didn\u2019t have the storage space or bandwidth to share and upload entire albums at once. Instead, he decided to curate a rotating selection of music and host it on a public website. This was <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20001208054500\/http:\/\/bigmog.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">BIGmog.com.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It was here we would listen to music from video games that weren\u2019t even available in America yet. We would also discover a trend that had been secret to us until then; the demand for video game music CDs in Japan was big enough that sometimes the creators of that same music was release new albums rearranging that music with real, live instruments instead of synthesizers. It was a heady rush to see our niche interest lent a new dignity and sense of legitimacy in this way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In this way, bafflingly, we began to download and listen to another album with Celtic influence: Creid. We were already familiar with Yasunori Mitsuda\u2019s work with the game Chrono Trigger. With this album, arranged from his music for the coming game Xenogears, he went in our eyes from a someone who made video game music to someone who made music. His music wasn\u2019t merely cool \u2013 now it could MEAN something. From Wikipedia:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><p>The album&#8217;s title [\u2018creid\u2019 is Old Irish for \u2018believe\u2019] refers to two ideas, with one being \u2018a message to those who feel they have lost sight of their ambitions for the flood of information this era surrounds us with\u2019 and the other an affirmation to himself that Mitsuda had \u2018rediscovered [his] own path\u2019. Mitsuda felt that with this album, he had \u2018discovered the precise mode of musical expression [he] was seeking within\u2019 himself and \u2018given form to the belief within [his] heart\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>More interview excerpts with Mitsuda get across his excitement in getting to play and record new takes on his music with other people in Ireland and Japan. This sensation of gratitude and collaboration is encapsulated in the album\u2019s penultimate song, Lahan, named for the protagonist\u2019s Doomed Hometown. The feeling of the Beloved Peasant Village is incredibly strong here, and as it goes on, it sounds like the more talented and expressive residents of a tucked away settlement deciding to come together, culminating in the sort of atmosphere you\u2019d expect at one of those impossible, idyllic, year\u2019s end celebratory holiday feasts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because Yasunori Mitsuda&#8217;s work reminded us so much of the Chieftains, we routinely attempted to insert it into the the house&#8217;s Christmas album rotation with only some success<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">History Maker<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"DEAN FUJIOKA - &quot;History Maker \u301cHITM Ver.\u301c&quot; Music Video\" width=\"750\" height=\"422\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/nnEOS5kupuc?list=PLVzn2fO0Wl-yWoY-Ol8jSDk8qssia6AIY\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><em>December 21, 2017<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Introducing our final 2017 inductee to the Torres Christmas Canon. Finally, the reason I decided to initiate the Canon to begin with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Going off of yesterday\u2019s Japan motif\u2026 the way Christmas is observed over there, at least as I understand it, is really interesting to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In European style, Christmas Eve seems to be bigger than Christmas Day itself. Moreover, Christmas Eve has come to have very romantic connotations \u2013 like Valentine\u2019s Day, but in Overdrive. Unlike Valentine\u2019s, Christmas usually comes with time off from work, and is followed closely by the New Year. This raises the stakes exponentially, as dramatic romantic gestures are more expected and single people have to decide with whom they\u2019ll be spending New Year\u2019s Eve in a week. This leads often in Japanese narratives (at least those that I have observed (or at least Terrace House and Love Hina)) to a decisive \u201call or nothing\u201d conveyance of affection, made more fateful by the fact that it will be the last great affirmation of one&#8217;s will that may be made in the calendar year \u2013 and will define this year\u2019s You. Here, the \u201cChristmas miracle\u201d is not something that happens to you, it\u2019s something that you make happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The enduring themes here are \u201clove\u201d and \u201ccourage\u201d, and to an extent, \u201ctiming\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The best expression of the sort of passion that results in these \u201call or nothing\u201d moments is the theme song to last year\u2019s special little darling ice-skating show, Yuri on Ice. So often a story of achieving one\u2019s dreams, especially in the context of a competition, is about obstruction. Narratives like this are about what\u2019s in your way, about all the reasons you \u201ccannot\u201d. Obviously, this is the most dramatic way to tell a story. But it\u2019s also exhausting, and, if you\u2019re like Yuri \u2013 someone for whom the \u201cself\u201d is the greatest obstacle, for whom shame and sabotage come unbidden \u2013 potentially oppressive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Imagine instead a story of self-actualization that emphasizes the \u201ccans\u201d instead of the \u201ccannots\u201d \u2013 that your success, your glory is fated, inevitable, because OF COURSE you can do it, you were always going to be able to. What separates this from other pump-up songs is its perspective. Even though it\u2019s one singer, it starts by going back and forth between two people: the one stuck in the darkness, and the one who guides them out of it. The chorus goes to first person plural, and then the next verse goes back to two people, but now the magic has already taken hold \u2013 our dreams have gone from something that we talk about to something that we can see! The way these two voices alternate between standing out individually (I, you) and combining as one (we) not only illustrate the metamorphic quality of an empowering love, it \u2013 FUCKING BRILLIANTLY \u2013 evokes a pair skating routine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s your preemptive victory parade. It\u2019s about having the courage \u2013 and more importantly, the permission \u2013 to believe in yourself. I\u2019m on your side. HISTORY is on your side. You\u2019ve already won!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That belief, that hope in darkness, lets me comfortably play this alongside other Christmas songs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(Also, it\u2019s got skating and tubular bells, I don\u2019t know how else to sell it!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>{ Previously: The Greatest Christmas Songs of All Time } The Theme to On Her Majesty&#8217;s Secret Service December 18, 2017 Welcome to the 2018 inductees to the Torres Christmas Canon. As a discerning connoisseur of the Christmas Spirit, it\u2019s easy to become inured to the joys of the traditional Christmas canon after so much&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/localhost\/terryplays\/2020\/12\/15\/the-new-torres-christmas-canon\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The New Torres Christmas Canon<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[14,15],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/terryplays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/terryplays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/terryplays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/terryplays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/terryplays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/terryplays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/terryplays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187\/revisions\/258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/terryplays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/terryplays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/terryplays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}