The blog of author Dennis Cooper

Month: December 2016 (Page 2 of 8)

5 ghosts of DC’s Xmases past: “Awful” Christmas attraction closes after ONE DAY / Santa Claus’s House / 25 defunct Xmas themed parks and attractions / DC’s animated Xmas tree lot / You are sort of there: Lapland New Forest

“Awful” Christmas attraction closes after ONE DAY

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It promised a ‘fully immersive’ Christmas experience, with reindeer, a festive market and, of course, Santa’s grotto. But visitors to Yorkshire’s Magical Winterland found it to be far from magical and barely wintry. Children were left in tears as they entered a desolate warehouse with cardboard boxes and random material strewn all over the ground. Magical Winterland only opened its doors on Wednesday, but was forced to pack up just 24 hours later due to its “appalling” quality.

 

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‘The Yorkshire Magical Winterland, set up at the Great Yorkshire Showground, advertised the event as having “fantastic features” and offered visitors the chance to “focus on losing yourself in our Magical Winterland”. But the grim reality of the Christmas-themed event was that of rubbish-strewn hallways, poorly-constructed exhibitions and sombre-looking reindeer surrounded by a sprinkling of straw.

 

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‘Hundreds of messages were posted on the Magical Winterland’s Facebook page after it opened. All complained about the price of admission – the top price for a child is £22.50 – and accused the management of misleading the public. Matt Freeman wrote: “I could have cobbled something together better than this in my own back garden for half the cost.”

‘”Something didn’t feel right,” wrote Beryl Mansfield. “Perhaps it was the thick white paint that rubbed off the festive polar bear fountain and all over our clothes. Or the rictus-like grins of the shivering elves in their cheap velour outfits. It was a spectacular disaster of smoking elves, sweary Santas, smelly mud, piles of rubbish and sacks of fake snow dumped on wooden pallets by the main entrance.”

Families were left stumped by many of the exhibitions in the winter walk, saying it was unclear what the scenes were supposed to represent.

 

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‘Kat Manson, from Skipton, West Yorks, who booked to take her niece Evie to the event, said: “We’ve had a family ticket booked for a long time for this special event. The journey there was full of excitement and wonder, Evie was going meet Santa! We checked the website this morning to see what we were going to be doing but there was no mention of any closure. We were all excited. We arrived at a near empty car park and a lonely car park attendant ushered us into a car parking space without saying a word. We were met at the desk by two female staff who said sorry we are closed. They explained that our tickets were valid for the other days but so many people had complained that it was a waste of money that they were closed. How were we supposed to explain to a four year old girl that she couldn’t see Santa after all. She was devastated. She thinks Santa didn’t want to see her.”

Parents complained about the creepy-looked mannequins and statues of an ice queen and one which looked like an attempt at the Grinch.

 

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‘Mother-of-one Suzie Smith, of Barnsley, South Yorkshire, who brought her daughter Heidi, two, to the attraction, said: “I had a vision in my head of a really magical place for kids to come before Christmas but to be honest it’s just a bit depressing. The area is too big and they haven’t been able to fill it. It’s been advertised as a magical place to come and it just isn’t.”

‘There were multiple reports that the attraction’s multiple Father Christmases (five were spotted by some confused children) were alternately too gruff, too skinny or smelt of booze. One elf reportedly told a guest to ‘have a s*** Christmas’. The presents they gave out were cheap, plastic and unwrapped. And then there was the “snow”.

‘”Mummy, this isn’t snow. It’s strange,” said one child within earshot of this reporter. He was pointing at what looked like dirty papier-mache spread greyly across the mud outside the front entrance. “It looks like paper. I think it’s litter. It looks like litter. It’s stuck to my boot. Mummy, get it off!”

There was a three-hour wait to visit Santa, who was guarded by another pair of elves who were reportedly Incapable of answering basic questions about the event.

 

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‘Mother-of-one Laura Bamforth, who is also 30-weeks pregnant, from Pontefract, West Yorkshire, said: “We spent a total of 20 minutes in the building and we were totally appalled with the entire event. The event itself was nothing more than a fairground. The rides was overpriced and the so-called Christmas market was a total of four stalls. When leaving the event feeling very let down we told the staff on reception who also was very rude and never tried to apologise. I would like a refund for all the money I have spent.”

‘One family from Solihull spent £85 on tickets for three adults and two toddlers. “It was even worse than I had read in the newspaper,” said the mother of the family Karen Brosius, 32. “The elves’ smiles were so fixed it was scary. It was as if they had never seen a child before — they didn’t have a clue.”

The festive nine hole golf course promised ‘twinkling Christmas lights, fantastic gifts to overcome and even Santa Claus himself’.

 

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‘After nearly three hours — a good half of it spent waiting about and looking vainly in the stalls for something decent to buy — this reporter had had enough. As had a young boy near me. “Can we go home now?” he asked his father. “I thought there was going to be snow. But there isn’t — it’s just that strange grey stuff.” And when his father asked him what had been his favorite part of the Magical Winterland, perhaps Father Christmas, or the merry-go-round or the Fairy Queen, or even the two live reindeer? “Splashing in puddles in the car park,” he said.’ — collaged

It is with great regret that we have decided to close Yorkshire’s Magical Winterland at the Yorkshire Event Centre in Harrogate permanently from tonight. We worked very hard to create a family event and have received some positive feedback but also some adverse publicity. We plan to refund anyone who bought tickets in advance and can be contacted at info@yorkshiresmagicalwinterland.co.uk

 

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Santa Claus’s House

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‘In 1821, the book A New-year’s present, to the little ones from five to twelve was published in New York. It contained “Old Santeclaus”, an anonymous poem describing an old man on a reindeer sleigh, bringing presents to children.

‘Many of Santa Claus’s modern attributes are established in the 1823 poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas” (better known today as “The Night Before Christmas”), such as riding in a sleigh that lands on the roof, entering through the chimney, and having a bag full of toys. St. Nick is described as being “chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf” with “a little round belly”, that “shook when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly”, in spite of which the “miniature sleigh” and “tiny reindeer” still indicate that he is physically diminutive.

‘As the years passed, Santa Claus evolved in popular culture into a large, heavyset person. One of the first artists to define Santa Claus’s modern image was American cartoonist Thomas Nast, an American cartoonist who immortalized Santa Claus with an 1863 illustration for Harper’s Weekly in which Santa is shown dressed in an American flag, and has a puppet with the name “Jeff” written on it.

The story that Santa Claus lives at the North Pole may also have been a Nast creation. His Christmas image in the Harper’s December, 1866 issue included the caption “Santa Claussville, N.P.” In 1869, a poem appeared in Harper’s titled “Santa Claus and His Works” by George P. Webster, which stated that Santa Claus’s home was “near the North Pole, in the ice and snow”. The tale had become well known by the 1870s.

‘The popular conception of Santa Claus’s home traditionally includes a residence and a workshop where he creates — often with the aid of elves or other supernatural beings — the gifts he delivers to good children at Christmas. Some stories and legends include a village, inhabited by his helpers, surrounding his home and shop.

‘By the end of the 20th century, the reality of mass mechanized production became more fully accepted by the Western public. That shift was reflected in the modern depiction of Santa’s residence—now often portrayed as a fully mechanized production and distribution facility, equipped with the latest manufacturing technology, and overseen by the elves with Santa and Mrs. Claus as executives and/or managers.’ — collaged

 

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Architecturally

‘There’s an old riddle that challenges children to draw a diagram of a house without lifting their pencil or repeating a line. The basic shape is composed of a square with diagonals running from corner to corner, topped with a triangular roof. In Germany, kids are taught to speak one syllable of the phrase, ‘Das ist das Haus des Nikolaus,’ for each line they draw. The game is known as ‘The House of Santa Claus.’ This simple line drawing represents some of the architectural imagery that forms the setting of the Santa Claus myth. His home, village and workshop, have transformed through the centuries in step with the evolution of the man himself.

‘Scandinavian influence on the St. Nicholas myth formed the basis of the Santa Claus story and would be the first point of reference for his architectural traditions. Now living at the North Pole, his house was believed to be a traditional earth hut of northern Lapland. These circular homes were constructed of curving pine rafters that formed a dome shape, supported with sod and covered with reindeer skins. A hearth was placed at the centre of the room, vented through a smoke hole at the top of the structure. Village shaman would traditionally enter through these holes, thought to be the origin of Santa’s ritual chimney descent. Children in Denmark and Greenland today believe that Santa Claus lives in one of these huts on the island of Uummannaq in western Greenland.

‘As the legend of St. Nicholas continued to evolve, his home became associated with traditional Scandinavian log structures that combined the artistic skill and woodworking techniques of Viking ship building. Known as stave construction, unpainted vertical pine logs were set within a post and beam frame that supported a high pitch, wood shingle, pagoda style roof. Gables, doorways and structural supports were decorated with ornate wood carvings similar to the prow of a Viking ship. This timber frame, alpine image has prevailed through the centuries as a common representation of Santa’s home in popular culture.

‘Popular associations with the architecture that surrounded Santa changed in the late 1800s into the traditional half-timber buildings common in northern Europe. This construction style uses large oak timbers to create a structural frame that is filled with light coloured brick and plaster. The contrasting dark wood columns and angled bracing form a distinctive pattern that is expressed on the building’s exterior. This construction method was widespread across northern Europe and has become the predominant architectural imagery related to Santa Claus, found in snow-globes, children’s books and on Christmas decorations.

‘The 20th Century did see periodic diversions from this traditional imagery. In England, the characterization of Santa as a “right jolly old elf” resulted in his home being represented at shopping malls and department stores as a grotto or magical cave, the mythical home of Scandinavian elves. Popular children’s holiday cartoons such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Santa Claus is Coming to Town, portrayed Santa living in a Romanesque style, Bavarian castle with towers, gables and ornamental turrets.

‘Modern interpretations have generally returned to the image of European half-timber buildings, but with the introduction of Santa’s workshop, the architecture of the North Pole has taken on a grander scale. Modern Hollywood movies describe Santa’s home as a bustling European style, medieval village surrounding a monumental production and distribution facility, equipped with modern manufacturing technology, staffed by teams of tireless elves.

‘As the depiction of Santa Claus has evolved through the centuries, so, too, has the architecture that provides a context to his myth. Santa’s timeless image will likely remain consistent in the future, but his architecture will continue to evolve.’ — Brent Bellamy, Number Ten Architectural Group

 

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Interview

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Do you have visitors at the North Pole?

Well it is a little difficult to give direction, because the North Pole is not stationary, the water above which is thick ice is constantly moving because of the ocean currents. If I were to give you directions on where we were by the time you got here we wouldn’t be here. If it were not for my reindeer’s keen sense of direction I might get lost too.

Do you live at your North Pole Village?

The North Pole is my permanent residence and the place I love the most. But, throughout the year I visit many cities and countries, where I stop and stay for a few days. Many of my favorite places to visit are a secret known only to Mrs. Claus and me.

What do you do when you’re not making toys?

Santa relaxes by walking in our forest just outside North Pole Village and listening to the voices of the wilderness. I also spend time preparing for next Christmas delivery by reading children’s letter. You know children write me all year long and I so do look forward to hearing from each of them. My favorite pastime is reading books and listening to music.

Do you understand animal language?

Why yes, I understand a little animal language. But actually the animals are very smart and they totally understand everything that I say. Have you found that you do not always understand one of your pets, but they understand things that you say or tell them. It’s really remarkable.

Are all the gifts made at Santa’s North Pole Village?

Not all of them. Some are made at home, and they are especially precious. You’ve surely heard of homemade jelly or mustard or hand knit wool socks. In some places there are little workshops that also help Santa by making gifts.

How many elves are there living at North Pole Village?

That’s something no one knows exactly. Elves are such fast little people, and they are rarely ever all in the same place at the same time. But when the sun sets in the North Pole, there are probably as many little elf toes under the blankets as there are stars in the night sky, if not more.

Do you have swimming trunks?

Indeed I do, and I use them regularly. I like to swim best in the summer but I am known to jump into the icy cold water and play with Polar Bears, but I always make sure the Elf lifeguards are on duty.

What does your house look like?

That’s a good question.

 

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65 educated guesses

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25 defunct Xmas themed parks and attractions

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Cidade Albanoel (Paraty, Brazil)
If you like your Christmas-themed amusements to have a little more edge, then this derelict Santa Claus theme park in Brazil is for you. The vast park, where construction began in 2000, was intended to be spread over 38 million square metres, but was never completed after the Brazilian politician who came up with the idea was killed in a car crash right outside its entrance. The site remains filled with gradually decaying Santa figurines, rusty reindeer rides and crumbling candy cane turrets, making it feel more eerie than festive.

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A Winter Wonderland (Milton Keynes, UK)
Queues for miles, outrageous prices and a melting ice sculpture: it wouldn’t be Christmas without another tale of a disastrous “winter blunderland”. Families who tried to attend the Christmas Wonderland event in Milton Keynes were promised an “evening of enchantment and adventure”. Instead of which they were met with the bizarre spectacle of what appeared to be a man in a wheelchair on fire. Organisers took down their Facebook page after it was inundated with complaints, with some visitors saying they had queued for two hours to get in, only to see some melting ice sculptures and “just fairy lights hung over some trees”.


 

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Santa’s Land USA (Putney, Vermont)
You won’t find a brochure for Santa’s Land USA easily in Vermont. The official Vermont Attractions Map does not list it. It has no billboards. Even the publicity material for Santa’s Land USA’s home town, Putney, VT — which carries glowing descriptions of local businesses like Basketville and the Putney Food Co-op — fails to mention Santa’s Land USA. The entire attraction, which covers many acres of pine-shaded woods, appears to be run by five people: the kindly lady in the gift shop, the guy who sprints between the Sweet Shoppe and Candy Cane Cupboard, the train engineer, the kiddie ride attendant, and Santa. The first thing that catches our eye when we enter the park through the fairyland cottage gift shop is a huge blob of discolored white stuff lying near a little pond. What is it? Fake iceberg? A wad of funnel cake that fell out of Valhalla? The TV in the kid’s video theater in Santa’s Arcade shows nothing but electric snow. We walk up the hill to the quiet of Santa’s House, and can see red legs through the doorway. Santa sits, motionless. We assume he’s a stuffed dummy. Then a truck klaxon echoes through the woods — the over-the-top horn for the tiny Alpine Train — and Santa jerks to life. “Ho ho,” he says groggily. “You caught Santa napping.” The next words out of his mouth startle us even more than finding him asleep. “You look like prosperous gentlemen. Would you like to buy Santa’s Land?” Santa says that the park’s current owner wants to sell the place. The owner’s pumped a lot of money into its electric wiring and septic system — over $100,000 by Santa’s guess — but the right buyers have been as elusive as flying reindeer. The manager abruptly left a couple of weeks ago, and the place is currently run by the multi-tasking Sweet Shoppe guy. “The original owners — I forgot their name, I forget everybody’s name — built it. There used to be an airstrip here. For the war, you know. It’s not here any more.” Santa recalls that a family named Brewer purchased the park in 1970 and ran it for almost 30 years. “This place was Mr. Brewer’s pet. It did quite well for a few years, but then it sort of petered out. They lived up there, in the Igloo Pancake House,” Santa says, pointing into the woods. “Before it was the Igloo Pancake House. If you take the train, and get off at Pancake Junction, you’ll see it. It’s an igloo-type thing.” Note: Santa’s Land USA closed on Dec. 18, 2011.

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Dickens Victorian Village (Cambridge, Ohio)
Welcome to Cambridge, Ohio, a small town that, until last year, celebrated the holidays in a big way, from Dickensian street scenes to contemporary light shows. It all started eight years ago, when Bob Ley, who owned a men’s clothing store downtown, traveled to Oglebay Resort, the city park in Wheeling, W.Va. that stages a major holiday light festival every year. Why couldn’t Cambridge capture some of those thousands of drivers traveling along I-77 to Wheeling? So Ley and his wife, a retired English teacher, came up with an idea: Create street scenes, with full-size mannequins depicting life during Dickensian England, and place them throughout downtown. At the annual event’s height in 2013, visitors saw 160 statues – including a cast of characters from Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” a group of ice skaters, a chimney sweep, money lenders (placed strategically in front of US Bank), a beggar, a bobby, a blacksmith, and a man in a wheelchair.

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The Death Yard Christmas Haunted Attraction (Nashville, Tennessee)
“Instead of Christmas cheer, we are spreading some holiday fear,” said Carroll Moore, who in 2014 turned his Halloween season “Death Yard Haunted Attraction” in Hendersonville into a Yuletide horror show. For $10 and an unwrapped new toy, visitors passed through the 13,000-square-foot warehouse northeast of Nashville crammed with Yuletide horrors. For $5 more and a second toy, they could go to the paintball range just outside and take 15 shots at Zombie Santa and his friends. “You can unload on the undead,” Moore said. “Maybe Santa Claus wasn’t good to you last year.” Moore also offered chainsaw-wielding maniac elves, rabid and violent reindeer, and killer Mrs. Santa Clauses. The unwrapped new toys were intended to go to Last Minute Toy Store, which operated out of a Nashville church and gave parents who could not afford toys a chance to look for things their children might want, for no cost. All was well until Nita Haywood, who ran the Last Minute Toy Store at the 61st Avenue United Methodist Church, where she was director of youth and family ministries, visited the Horrific Haunted Holiday two days into its intended three week run. “I was horrified and nauseous,” she said. “The presence of the Devil was very, very strong.” After speaking to local police and the mayor, the attraction was immediately shut down. “New toys are new toys,” she said. “But not when they come from Hell.”

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Staff of Death Yard Haunted Attraction demonstrate the Zombie Santa features at their haunted house in Hendersonville
A Zombie Santa is pictured Death Yard Haunted Attraction in Hendersonville

 

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Santa’s Village (Dundee, Illinois)
Santa’s Village in East Dundee, Illinois (1959-2006) was a theme park built in 1959 by H. Glenn Holland who also built the other two in San Bernardino County, California and Santa Cruz County, California. This park was the third and last that he built. The buildings were modeled on what an average child might imaging Santa’s Village would look like. When it opened, it was a very prominent theme park. Over the parks history more than 20 million people passed through the front gates. One addition to the park, opened in 1963, was the Polar Dome which provided an ice skating and hockey venue under a forced-air supported dome. On November 28, 1966, a strong wind caused the Polar Dome to collapse. The unsuccessful launch of the Typhoon roller coaster and decreased attention to the aesthetics of the park eventually prompted the corporation to sell. The sale did not proceed as smoothly as hoped, and with many setbacks and unmet deadlines the park had to shut its doors.

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Santa Present Park (Hokkaido, Japan)
This amusement park has to be included among the most poorly conceived, planned, built, and attended amusement parks in history. It was tied into a popular ski resort and featured numerous Christmas-themed attractions including four roller coasters. Like all theme parks in Japan, it was only open during the non-winter months. Unfortunately, the ski resort was only open during the winter season. Long story short, after having been built for $10,000,000, it never opened and was torn down after standing empty for eight months.

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Magic Forest (Lake George, New York)
This was the weirdest place I’ve ever been. I came for Santa and for Lightning the diving horse, and stayed for all the other weeeeird ass shit. It was OLD OLD OLD, snack bar (wish I’d brought my own food) OLD OLD OLD. Sign on the gift shop read, closed but go to the snack shop if you want to buy something. During the Christmas Safari ride (don’t ask me), we noted three instances of racist portrayals. As we got on the ride, I almost knew it was coming. The first was a display with a person being boiled in a pot with dark-skinned mannequins all around holding spears. Ugh. The whole park was dirty, in definite disrepair, and some of the ride operators were creepy, rude and two seemed kinda drunk. Needless to say, it was magical! RIP

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Sherborne Wharf’s Search for Santa (Birmingham, UK)
Until 2014, Sherborne Wharf near Brindleyplace used to run canal trips through Birmingham city centre on a quest to find Father Christmas. All participants were geared up with the latest “Santa-detecting technology” and shipped off aboard narrow boats in search of the Man in Red himself. Apparently finding him wasn’t very hard and, when he was found, he wasn’t very interesting.

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Santa’s Village (Scotts Valley, California)
In 1958, Santa’s Village was created in the wooded hills of the Santa Cruz mountains. This Christmas wonderland served thousands of park visitors each year with its holiday cheer! Residents of Santa’s Village included Santa and Mrs. Claus, their elves and gnomes, who operated the rides and sold tickets. There was a baby petting zoo filled with goats, sheep, bunnies, ducks, deer and a Mexican burro. Children could feed the animals green feed pelets that they purchased from dispensing machines. Four reindeer from Unalakleet, Alaska, pulled Santa’s sleigh. There was a bobsled ride, a whirling Christmas tree ride and a miniature Santa’s Express train ride. Other attractions included a giant Jack-in-the-Box, an Alice in Wonderland maze, Santa’s enormous boot, brightly painted cement mushrooms and a Queen of Hearts figure … all part of Fairytale Land. Mrs. Claus had her own kitchen, where hamburgers, hotdogs and steak sandwiches were served. An egg-shaped cottage and a shoehouse were open for children’s exploration and imaginations. In 1977, after the Santa’s Village Corporation had filed for bankruptcy, Billawalla bought the whole of Santa’s Village for $615,000, speculating that he could build a more attractive theme park there. The City of Scotts Valley rejected Billawalla’s plan to create a Knott’s Berry Farm-type complex, which would have included a hotel, a shopping center and rides. That year there were heavy rains during the park’s peak season of November and December, coupled with the political bureaucracy of the City of Scotts Valley … it proved to be the death nell for Santa’s Village.

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Parlor Lucky (Tokyo, Japan)
Parlor Lucky was a karaoke bar in the Ginza section of Tokyo where patrons could only enter if they were wearing a Santa Claus costume. Costumes could be rented at the Santa Claus Everyday rental costume store next door.

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Christmas Land (Marshall, Texas)
Seasonal attraction with year-round Santa statue, sometimes headless, now reduced to an entry sign.

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Christmas Fantasy Village (Great Bend, Kansas)
Christmas Fantasy Village (1979 – 2000) was located on Highway 281 about 3 miles south of Great Bend. If you followed the lighted signs during the winter that started at 10th and Main, you were able to find it. You knew you were there when you saw the 50 foot tall lighted snowman! The Christmas Fantasy Village started as a couple’s celebration of Christmas, and turned into a local event.

 

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Santa Land and Zoo (Cherokee, North Carolina)
I haven’t been able to find out the history of the park, but I suspect it was around for a while. Many of its kiddie rides dated back to the 1950s and a few of them came from the Allan Herschell factory. The Rudicoaster was exactly the same as the coaster in Santa’s Village in Ontario; a steel figure-8 configuration with a Rudolph themed car in the front. There was also the token train, a CP Huntington, that went around the entire park. Kids could visit with Santa in his house every day. He had a large sleigh they could sit in and tell him their secret wishes.

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Elf School (Brierly Hill, UK)
For one strange Christmas season in 2013, kids from Brierly Hill and beyond were welcome to enroll in Elf School, going through what as billed as a complete elf makeover, learning an elf chant, and taking home their own elf hat. Finally, they got to meet Santa and visit his toy shop where they could choose a present to take home with them. The Elf School experiment was never repeated because many parents complained that, after the event, their children were acting strangely and, in some cases, refused to return to their human form to the point that the parents were driven to seek psychological counseling for their brainwashed children.

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Santa Land (Santa Claus, Arizona)
Nina Talbot and her husband founded Santa Clause in 1937 with the hopes of turning the desolate wasteland into a place where families could settle and live the suburban dream. They hoped to attract investors with North Pole themed buildings and children’s attractions dubbed Santa Claus Land. Unfortunately for the Talbots, investors never came. Thought a diner in the quaint snowy desert oasis gained a few fans through the years—including Duncan Hines and actress Jane Russell—the Nina Talbot sold the land in 1949. By the 1970s, the town had started to fall into disrepair. Now, derelict wooden huts and barbed wire fences are clear signs that Santa Claus doesn’t live there anymore.

Alive

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Dead

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Eastland Mall Christmas (Charlotte, North Carolina)
Eastland Mall was famous in North Carolina in the 1990s for its yearly elaborate Christmas makeover. Until everyone stopped going there. Or caring. In about the year 2000 when it closed and became an empty shell. There were plans to turn the giant building into a movie studio but they never panned out. So they tore it down.


 

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Santa’s Village (Lake Arrowhead, California)

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Santa Claus Land (Santa Claus, Indiana)
Santa Claus Land opened August 3, 1946; the theme park included a toy shop, toy displays, a restaurant, themed children’s rides, and, of course, Santa. Koch’s son Bill soon became the head of Santa Claus Land. In 1960, Bill married “Santa’s daughter,” Patricia Yellig; he remained active in the family business until his death in 2001. Bill and Pat had five children; the eldest, Will, was the park’s president for more than 20 years until his unexpected death in 2010. Over the decades, Santa Claus Land flourished. Children from across the country came to sit on the real Santa’s knee and whisper their Christmas wishes. Guests included Ronald Reagan, who stopped by in 1955.

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Ruislip Winter Wonderland (Northolt, UK)
Parents have vented their fury after another winter wonderland festive fun fair has been cancelled just two days before it was due to open. Despite announcing the event more than a month ago, the Ruislip Winter Wonderland in north London, was cancelled yesterday with organisers citing a disagreement with landowners. Today, one day before the scheduled opening, the site earmarked for the funfair at India Gardens in Northolt appeared barren and undeveloped. A “star-studded” opening night featuring appearances from I’m A Celebrity contestant David Van Day, EastEnders actor Matt Lapinskas and Coronation Street star Adam Rickitt was due to take place tomorrow. Other celebrity scheduled guests included Blue singer Lee Ryan, Another Level singer Dane Bowers and boxer Joe Calzaghe. Since the statement was posted more than 200 angry parents have posted messages over their disappointment, with some saying they believed it might have been a hoax. Nicola Powis commented: “The idiot running it has showed unprofessionalism, petulance and idiocy in all of the responses to the comments. I don’t believe they ever had any intention of putting on the event. Idiots.”

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Minnie’s Christmas Party (Anaheim, California)
Minnie’s Christmas Party premiered at Disneyland on November 2, 2001, for the 2001 holiday season. But that was the end of its run. In fact, that was the end of having Christmas shows in the Fantasyland Theatre. Minnie’s Christmas Party was virtually nonexistent in scope. The set was simplistic and flimsy enough that vibrations from the passing monorail caused it to shake so violently that an earthquake was hastily written into its plot. The plot — humans visit Minnie Mouse on Christmas — was dispatched with in five seconds followed by 45 minutes of yelling, jumping up and down, and painful stretches of up to minutes with performers standing in stunned silence. The script seemed to be written for children under the age of 1 year old.

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The Christmas Factory (Athens, Greece)
If you are outside of the country of Greece, the Greek National Tourism Organization would like you to believe that The Christmas Factory, “the most fabulous factory of Christmas”, has returned to Technopolis – City of Athens in Gazi from November 28, 2015 to January 6, 2016. It is claimed this amazing theme park is installed in the centre of the city and – “with the help of elves, fairies and goblins – aims to spread the magic of Christmas to all visitors to Greece”. Holiday travelers to Athens are told of the games, sweets, ‘cheats’, songs, presents, awards awaiting them at the Santa’s House, the Toys Factory, the Digital Christmas, the Sweet Factory, the Ice Rink, the Carousel, the Train, the Wheel and the Slides “thanks to these fanciful heroes”. The interesting thing is that there is no advertising for The Christmas Factory inside of Greece. That is because there is no money in Greece to produce The Christmas Factory this year. Visitors lured to Athens by the florid advertising for The Christmas Factory which is widespread throughout Europe, paid for by God knows whom, will, upon reaching the site of The Christmas Factory, find instead a single mechanical man statue dressed in a Santa Claus costume that has seen better days standing on the sidewalk. His recorded and looped voice thanks whoever has found him for visiting Greece in its time of need. You will also find two members of the military stationed near the Santa Claus mechanical man who will confiscate your phone or camera if you try to take a picture.

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DC’s Animated Xmas Tree Lot

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You are sort of there: Lapland New Forest

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‘Creating a winter wonderland really does take a lot of care and expertise. Artistic attention to detail is crucial to creating Santa’s frozen arctic world just five miles north of Bournemouth. For this reason we have bought in many specialists and showmen, including the multi award-winning Hollywood film and tv special fx’s experts who made the awesome winter scenes in films such as: Archangel, Gladiators, Vertical Limit, The Day After Tomorrow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone, Dr Who and more … With the Snow Business ice experts on board, we can assure you of an absolutely magical scene.

‘After your journey through the beautiful Tunnel of Light where you post your christmas wish to the North Pole Post Office, you will enter the incredibly beautiful ‘frozen’ world of Lapland village, with it’s snowy log cabins and fantastic ice rink that Santa brought along for everyone to play on …

‘Inside the real log cabins you will find helper elves busy with interesting Christmas preparations and other activities that you can either join in or learn all about: Toy making, Dolls House making, Rocking, Chair making, Gingerbread decorating, Face Painting, Sled dog running and adventure … & more … and then there’s the bustling Christmas Market with it’s stalls ranging from xmas paper to xmas trees, for the mums and dads to discover …

‘But do remember at some point during your 4-6 hour day to seek out Shamus the Elf, as only he can lead you to Father Christmas, who is waiting to give all the under 12’s their top quality personal present.

‘As our show is being staged for the first time our website can only begin to hint at the wonder of our winterland to be. Next year’s online presentation will be a total treat to view and we really do wish that we could show you just how incredibly spectacular Lapland New Forest will look at night.’ — Lapland New Forest

 

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‘Lapland New Forest park claims to offer families a magical festive experience. According to the scores of disgruntled visitors streaming out of the gates, experience is one word for it. As tempers fray, it seems this little corner of Lapland, which opened on the Dorset-Hampshire border at the weekend, is going from mudbath to bloodbath.

‘The two brothers behind the business venture misled its visitors, many of whom had travelled long distances, it was said Victor and Henry Mears advertised the park with a website that depicted images of an ice rink and a bustling snow covered Christmas village. A flyer also claimed to offer the chance to see a polar bear – which turned out to be a model. Yhe ‘magical tunnel of light’ was merely fairy lights strung from trees and the ‘wonderful’ ice rink was broken. The advertised ‘delicious seasonal food’ at the Christmas market was discovered to be two stands offering pork and stuffing baguettes and German sausages. In court, Henry Mears said: “Whatever you do, you will find the public complain about something.”

‘One visitor, Dawn Saxby-Willis from Ringwood, said: “I was absolutely stunned at how poor we and our children were treated. I took my son to the toilet and he saw ‘Santa’ having a cigarette break at the side of a Portaloo. Needless to say, the two reindeer – one with a broken antler – were clearly not enjoying their experience. The majority of the huskies were chained up behind a fence whining, others were chained up outside some of the wooden sheds with no-one looking after them.

‘One security guard, who obligingly told visitors at the gate they were about to be ‘ripped off’, quit after being hit on the head by one who didn’t appreciate the advice. Adrian Wood, 49, was full of tales from the warzone. “Santa was punched by a furious father who had been waiting in line for four hours,” he said. “He had got to the front only to be told he couldn’t take a picture of his children and that they weren’t allowed to sit on Santa’s lap. The family were then told they would have to get in another queue to get their presents. That was the final straw.”‘ — collaged

 

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‘Emma Craven and Daryl Yarwood left their jobs as Santa’s little helpers at a “Lapland” theme park in Dorset amid fears the stress would make them ill. And Emma said: “When I got there I was thinking ‘Oh my God, is this it?’ It was a huge muddy field with a few sheds popped in it and a few little Christmassy looking things. Angry people just kept shouting, ‘Is this it’? It was really doing my health in.”

‘Frustrated customers attacked three elves and a Father Christmas after forking out £30 a ticket to queue in a muddy field for Lapland New Forest. Dozens of workers at the attraction, which had a closed ice rink and a nativity scene nailed to a billboard, were pulled out for their safety by an employment agency. Trading standards had over 2,000 complaints. The attraction opened during the holiday season in 2008 and was labelled as a “glorified car-boot sale”.

‘Elf Emma quit the park after she was slapped in the face by an incensed mother. The 30-year-old, from Bournemouth, said it happened as she looked after a queue of punters at the grotty grotto. Emma said: “From the first morning I worked there it was just a barrage of abuse from the moment you got in until the moment you left. “People kept asking me, ‘Is this it’? and telling me what a rip-off it was and how we should be ashamed of ourselves.”

‘Pal Daryl left his grotto job after just four days — sickened at ordering parents to fork out £10 extra to have their kids photographed with Father Christmas. Daryl, 23, said: “From the first day we were all getting stressed out. There were parents screaming at me and children crying. It was really badly organized. I nearly got lynched. If I didn’t have the mental strength it could have made me ill. I’d definitely have quit if the agency hadn’t pulled us out. It’s not like it was big money. They offered us £5.90 an hour.”’ — collaged

 

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‘Visitors who had paid up to £30 each for tickets to a “Christmas Wonderland” in the New Forest were turned away yesterday by a woman shrieking: “Santa’s dead.” This morning a convoy of lorries and horseboxes carrying reindeer, donkeys and huskies left the muddy site after contractors called in the police, claiming they had not been paid. More than 50,000 tickets to the attraction known as Lapland New Forest had been sold in advance. It is not known whether any of those who had paid up to £130 for a family ticket would get their money back.’ — collaged

 

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‘Families have been left stunned, shocked and speechless after two brothers accused of conning people into visiting a Lapland-style theme park had their convictions overturned. Victor and Henry Mears, from Brighton, were jailed for 13 months in March this year and have both now served their sentences. At the original trial the brothers denied eight charges of misleading advertising but they were found guilty on all counts by the jury at Bristol Crown Court.

‘Lisa Perry, from Wyke Regis, and 12 members of her family went to the attraction which was based at Matcham’s Leisure Park. She said: “I’m stunned. I can’t believe how they can overturn the conviction on the strength of that. I don’t know what else to say, I’m speechless.” Mrs Perry said that her family had been disappointed with their experience and never got any compensation for the £300 they paid. She said: “You had to be there to see it. I have never been to anything as bad as that.”

‘Christine and Eddie Teague, from Dorchester, took their grandchildren to the attraction and said it was ‘nothing like’ what they were expecting.Mrs Teague said: “I think it’s a disgrace. I took my two grandchildren. We waited for hours to see Father Christmas.” She added: “It was nothing like Santa’s Grotto, nothing at all.”’ — collaged

 

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p.s. Hey. I decided for whatever reason that your Xmas present would be the resurrection from the dead of five old Xmas posts from the past that got murdered by Google along with my former blog, and so there’s a gigantic post for you if you find yourself with nothing more fun to do on Xmas Eve or X-Day itself. Otherwise, I’ll just add that I seem to be coming down with some kind of illness, so if I seen fuzzy in the p.s., that’s why. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Cy Twombly wishes. Great, just in time to be a Xmas present: your ‘Silence’ review! I will savor it in just a short while. Everyone, Mr. Ehrenstein has focused his always masterful thoughts and writing abilities on Martin Scorsese’s new and 30-years in the planning film ‘Silence’, so go check it off your Xmas to-do list and enjoy the spoils. Here. ** Steevee, Hi. I really need to see ‘TONI ERDMANN’. Either it hasn’t opened here or I missed its run. Everyone, Here’s Steevee. Listen/read up: ‘Here’s my review of my favorite film of the year, TONI ERDMANN’ Curious to hear about your new film idea when the time is right. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Oh, gosh, yeah, I think sharing one of those Bellmer/Zurn photos could easily have knocked you off Facebook. You’re a brave man. I hope if you’re doing anything related to Xmas it’s as festive as anything could be. ** Bill, Hi, B. I do know that Zurn is one of your inspirations, yes, and I was consciously hoping the post wouldn’t let you down. I assume that by the time you see this, you’ll be far away and hopefully happily so. Enjoy the beginnings! ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T. A massive sprawling essay … yum, obviously. Yes, I’m picking up the buche that I ended up selecting amongst those that were still on the market this afternoon. And this one is the winner. Have the loveliest Xmas! ** Marilyn Roxie, Hi, Marilyn! Very happy holidays to you! Obviously I’m very happy that Zurn’s work and the Bellmer/Zurn photographs are useful and inspiring for you. That’s the best! And thank you for investigating my music faves. Klara Lewis is wonderful, yeah. Have a great weekend! ** Misanthrope, Hi, George. It is an awfully good book. And, yes, exactly, about what Serdar wrote. I’m right there with you, man. I’ll look for your email, thank you. I’m sure you and your lot are going to do Xmas up prettier than heck, so enjoy all of the food and, I presume, the football or something, and everything else. ** Kyler, Hi, K. Suicide is both an incredibly difficult and immensely interesting thing for me, in massive part because of George. I personally am not suicidal at all, or not since I was a gloomy, confused teenager at least. I hope your Xmas goes very well. Are you in NYC or down with the folks or … ? ** Jeff Coleman, Hi, Jeff! It’s really nice to see you, man! Happy Xmas whatever that entails! Great thoughts and words re: and deriving off Zurn, my friend. I so appreciate them. Take care. ** B, Hi, man. Good, great that the salon went well. As ‘in the moment’ disappointing as a lower than hoped for turn-out can feel, that’s always the least important part, you know? You know. No, it’s going to be an extremely quiet Xmas. No plans at all other than taking bites from a Christmas buche at a certain, as yet undetermined moment of the day. Maybe a nice, long walk in what will be a uniquely deserted Paris. Enjoy whatever the vaunted day brings your way. ** Okay, Happy Xmas to each and every one one of you. See you when it’s over on Monday.

_Black_Acrylic presents … Penda’s Fen Day

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I first saw Penda’s Fen just a couple of weeks ago, as part of a DVD box set of films directed by the great Alan Clarke for the BBC. Clarke had his own DC’s Day here quite recently, but I’ll explain why this specific film demands an even closer look and why it now means a lot to me personally.

Penda’s Fen is kind of an outlier among Clarke’s other work, being visionary and epic as opposed to his usual social realist style, and seeing the present day England through a prism of its ancient pagan past. It’s an England viewed by the central character Stephen Franklin as a place of radical heterogeneity: “No, no! I am nothing pure! My race is mixed. My sex is mixed. I am woman and man, light with darkness, nothing pure! I am mud and flame!” The scene involves an apparition of King Penda, England’s last pagan king before the Church of England stitch-up turned UKIP mess of the present day.

So I did a little online sleuth work and found that the area in Leeds where I was born and raised, with its Penda’s Way and Penda’s Fields, was actually the place where this pagan king died in the Battle of Winwaed back in 655ad. And spookier still he died on my very birthday, the 15th November. I’d like to think those ancient pagans had a few wild parties around where I grew up and the historical context does give this film some extra resonance for me, but it’s still a unique work of art that deserves to be seen more widely:

 

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Penda’s Fen is a British television play which was written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clarke. It was commissioned by BBC producer David Rose, and first broadcast on 21 March 1974 as part of the corporation’s Play for Today series.

Set in the village of Pinvin, near Pershore in Worcestershire, England, against the backdrop of the Malvern Hills, it is an evocation of conflicting forces within England past and present. These include authority, tradition, hypocrisy, landscape, art, sexuality, and most of all, its mystical, ancient pagan past. All of this comes together in the growing pains of the adolescent Stephen, a vicar’s son, whose encounters include angels, Edward Elgar and King Penda himself. The final scene of the play, where the protagonist has an apparitional experience of King Penda and the “mother and father of England”, is set on the Malvern Hills.

Critics have noted that the play stands apart from Clarke’s other, more realist output. Clarke himself admitted that he did not fully understand what the story was about. Nonetheless it has gone on to acquire the status of minor classic, win awards and has been rebroadcast several times on the BBC.

Following the original broadcast Leonard Buckley, The Times wrote: “Make no mistake. We had a major work of television last night. Rudkin gave us something that had beauty, imagination and depth.”

In 2006, Vertigo magazine described Penda’s Fen as “One of the great visionary works of English film”.

In 2011, Penda’s Fen was chosen by Time Out London magazine as one of the 100 best British films. They described the play as a “multi-layered reading of contemporary society and its personal, social, sexual, psychic and metaphysical fault lines. Fusing Elgar’s ‘Dream of Gerontius’ with a heightened socialism of vibrantly localist empathy, and pagan belief systems with pre-Norman histories and a seriously committed – and prescient – ecological awareness, ‘Penda’s Fen’ is a unique and important statement.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penda’s_Fen

 

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Penda’s Fen is a breathtakingly complex, bravely ambitious, expertly executed and profoundly subversive Pilgrim’s Progress in reverse. It charts the rebellious journey of a sanctimonious clergyman’s son from doctrinaire adolescence to emotional, political and sexual maturity. At the start of his quest, young Stephen Franklin gazes dreamily across a sun-dappled green and pleasant land and, stirred by Edward Elgar’s emblematic oratorio ‘The Dream of Gerontius’, asks himself how he might best serve his country. By journey’s end, he no longer wishes to follow England’s ‘Aryan national family on its Christian path,” is more relaxed about his homosexuality, and has shaken off parochial, parroted patriotism in favour of more heterodox and nuanced notions of nationhood earthed deep in the pre-Christian pagan past.

As Stephen’s moral compass swivels and the tectonic plates of his universe shift, he comes to see himself, those in his orbit, even the landscape of his boyhood in a different light. His father proves to be more interesting than he’d allowed and other than he’d assumed. He develops affection and respect for the radical writer, Arne, and his wife – a progressive couple he formerly despised. Having initially viewed the Arnes’ childless marriage as an example of divine justice, he comes to hope they can adopt: ‘I hope they give you lot’s of children, a whole tribe, because you’re interesting people and your children will have interesting lives.” The very names of places he thought he knew change before his eyes and take on fresh significance (Pinvin, Pinfin, Penfen, Penda’s Fen). The countryside comes to seem less and less benign. Arne (a surrogate Ruskin as much as Stephen is) suggests that chilling state experiments are afoot beneath the land. And, as Stephen unravels before aligning with his authentic self, as his pubescent infatuations solidify into adult sexual desire, things become increasingly strange and dark, occasionally apocalyptic and violent.

One of the most powerful, haunting and thought-provoking films of its era, indeed of any era. An endlessly fascinating, forensic examination of England, its landscape, its past and its politics; a perceptive, completely convincing, and moving portrayal of the turbulence of adolescence; a philosophically and politically rich meditation on what it is to grow up, and continue to be human. Television could do this once. Alan Clarke, David Rose, David Ruskin. The holy trio. Emblazon their name in shining lights. Please, don’t dilly-dally, watch this magnificent film without delay. Highly recommended.
Jerry Whyte
http://www.cineoutsider.com/reviews/bluray/p/pendas_fen_br.html

 

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At certain times, the stars and planets seem to be in perfect alignment. Take for instance a particular time in the early 1970s when folk art abounded and films like The Wicker Man were being made.

TV companies at this time ploughed money into new and experimental writing, such as for the Play for Today series. Many of these lovingly crafted screenplays are recognised in hindsight to be lost treasures, such as Good and Bad at Games and Just a Boy’s Game. Most were a slap in the face for any repressive establishment. These exciting times peaked for me in 1974 when the singular talents of director Alan Clarke, producer David Rose and writer David Rudkin collaborated to make Penda’s Fen, the most striking, multi-layered and affecting film I have seen.

Part-inspired (and admired) by Harold Pinter, Rudkin is an unusual character; humane and vulnerable, with an edgy wit and titanic intellect. A consummate dramatist and screenwriter, he is most importantly a storyteller from the Anglo-Irish tradition (I think here of the darkly soporific tones and the relish with which he introduced Penda’s Fen on its 1989 rerun, drawing us into its world). He had appeared to wait in the regional wings behind Brook and Tynan throughout the 1960s, soaking up a different kind of wisdom. Things “came together”, he said, with Penda’s Fen.

Made at the BBC’s Pebble Mill studios, the film is set in the rural midlands, Rudkin’s spiritual homeland, where the last urban outposts of Birmingham meet the ancient hills that Elgar walked and immortalised in music. Among these contrasts and to the strains of the hymn Jerusalem, played on the school assembly organ, we witness a soul in transition, that of an adolescent boy, Stephen Franklin. Voicing his outrage at the ‘unnatural’ content of popular television plays, we meet him as a priggish and idealistic young conservative about to be engulfed by the natural mysteries of the visionary landscapes that surround him.

As we watch he is unravelled on every level as the voices of the ancient land penetrate the staunchness of his defences. His homosexual awakening is punctuated by apparitions of angels, demons and the ancient fathers who walked his hills, including the affirming presences of the ghosts of Elgar and the pagan King Penda. Stephen descends further into a fantasy space where place names regress hypnotically. He witnesses the sick Mother and Father of England, “who would have us children forever”, a TV couple he once admired for upholding family values. In a memorable scene their yellow-clad devotees willingly surrender to mutilation with much wrist chopping and bloodstained oaks. Certain times, the stars and planets seem to be in perfect alignment.

And many of his other suppositions are challenged. His father turns out to be not as religiously conservative as Stephen had imagined but is still a stabilising presence. He provides a historical context with reference to the struggles of Joan of Arc and King Penda in which Stephen can locate his own turbulence. Mr. Arne, the local radical screenwriter and his wife become unexpected friends to Stephen as opposed to people to be feared and ridiculed. Stephen is rejected by his militaristic boys’ school for his lack of national pride and his entire direction changes. He becomes ready to receive his true inheritance.

David Rose has praised the economy of Rudkin’s writing and, indeed, nothing is overstated as Stephen’s values- moral, political, sexual, emotional, spiritual and familial – are decimated, leaving a space in which something new can be created. It is a film of changes; Stephen is nurtured through his journey by the hills and the phenomena sent out by the “primal genie of the earth” to guide him on his way.

This is not general pathetic fallacy, but something much more intricate; the landscape seems alive, active and knowing. It communicates with Stephen, encourages him and he receives his true parenting from it and his ancestors. The film captures the process of change so accurately, with a real understanding of the trials of emotional development.

I first saw it when I was eighteen. To witness at that age (the same age as Stephen) the cathartic turmoil of his adolescence was like being blessed; something about the irrevocable force of change and progress implicit in the film stayed with me. The idea of working for a more genuine and authentic self which has the potential to be at odds with social normality has enabled me to work on the frontline with people who are in transition, who are achieving meaning and progress through the most seemingly senseless of adversities. Penda’s Fen has informed my understanding of this in many and profound ways.
Victoria Childs
https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/volume-3-issue-1-spring-2006/penda-s-fen/

 

 

‘I am afflicted by images, by things that are seen, pictures of things,” dramatist and screenwriter David Rudkin told an interviewer in 1964. “They are extraordinary, momentary, but they stay with me.” He was talking about his play Afore Night Come (1962), which led Kenneth Tynan to proclaim: “Not since Look Back in Anger has a playwright made a debut more striking than this.” But it’s also true of Penda’s Fen, an unforgettable hybrid of horror story, rites-of‑passage spiritual quest and vision of an alternative England that has been hailed as one of the most original and vauntingly ambitious British films of the last half century.

Originally broadcast in 1974 as part of the BBC’s Play for Today strand, and directed by Alan Clarke, who would later become celebrated for scaldingly in-yer-face social realist films such as Scum (1978) and Made in Britain (1982), it’s set in Worcestershire, at the heart of pastoral England. Stephen Franklin (played by Spencer Banks) is a pastor’s son who talks fondly of supporting the “Aryan national family on its Christian path” and is repelled by the arrival in his village of a socialist writer who defends striking workers and asks pointed questions about government-backed projects in the local countryside.

Soon, however, Stephen’s moral certainty and grip on reality begin to founder. He has dreams of naked classmates, of a demon sitting on his bed. He sees an angel in a stream. He meets Edward Elgar who tells him the secret of Enigma Variations. Cracks appear in a church floor and he learns, not only that his father holds a far less orthodox position on Christianity than he imagined, but that he is adopted. Then, just when things couldn’t get any more mysterious, he starts to come into the orbit of King Penda, the last Pagan king of Britain who died in AD655.

The film is a passionate deconstruction of conservative myths about nationhood. At a critical point, the formerly hidebound Stephen cries out: “No, no! I am nothing pure! My race is mixed. My sex is mixed. I am woman and man, light with darkness, nothing pure! I am mud and flame!” Rather than hewing to a belief in tradition, continuity or stability, Rudkin champions hybridity and what Salman Rushdie would later term cultural “mongrelisation”. A while before it became fashionable for historians to talk about the inseparability of “nation and narration” or “the invention of tradition”, Rudkin was arguing that English Christianity was a violently imposed ideology. The family, heterosexuality, militarised manhood: all these pillars of patriotism take a tumble.

What makes Penda’s Fen particularly prescient is that it locates these hybrid transformations in the English countryside. The 1970s saw a number of artists offering new versions of pastoral – Philip Trevelyan’s The Moon and the Sledgehammer (1971) was a creepy documentary about a family living without electricity in a wood; Richard Mabey’s The Unofficial Countryside (1973) introduced readers to what would later be known as edgelands; Jeremy Sandford’s Tomorrow’s People (1974) portrayed the Dionysian longings of free-festival revellers. Rudkin shows rural England to be a place of struggles and heresies, of antagonisms and anguish. The film even turns to etymology, arguing that “pagan”, which originally meant “belonging to the village”, referred to the politics of local governance as much as it did to theological doctrine.

Stephen, the film’s unsteady centre, is told: “Be secret. Child be strange, dark, true, impure, and dissonant. Cherish our flame.” For Rob Young, author of Electric Eden (2010), Penda’s Fen is part psychogeography, part toolkit for imaginative unshackling: “The pattern under the plough, the occult history of Albion – the British Dreamtime – lies waiting to be discovered by anyone with the right mental equipment.”

The film is acute in its portrait of adolescence at a time of scepticism, idealism, susceptibility. Priggish and a touch self-righteous, Stephen is not someone with whom it’s immediately easy to empathise. He is not as lovable as Billy Casper in Ken Loach’s Kes (1969). Nor is he a hero or a role model. He doesn’t have the charisma of Mick Travis in Lindsay Anderson’s If… (1968). But, like Mick, he finds himself in flight from the corridors of English power, its citadels of prestige and establishment group-think – its imperial masculinity.

Even though its effects are primitive by today’s standards, Rudkin’s drama, appearing a year after Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, is often hailed as a watermark of British horror. But its real peers are eldritch TV thrillers such as Jonathan Miller’s adaptation of an MR James story Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968), Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (1969-1970) and Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape (1972). For Jim Jupp, one half of the Ghost Box record label whose sonic and visual aesthetic owes a debt to Penda’s Fen, “What made these films so powerful to me as teenager was that you didn’t know anything about them. They weren’t repeated. There was no internet to help you crack them. They kept their mystery.”

Another mystery, from a modern-day standpoint, is how Rudkin’s script was even commissioned: deeply layered, rich in sexual and mythological motifs, trusting the audience to have the patience and intelligence to engage with its handling of complex theological, historical and political ideas, it also migrates beyond the social-realist templates of the majority of screen and stage productions in the early 1970s – the West Country has never looked so Aztec – and uses a subtly minimalist sound design shaped by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s Paddy Kingsland.

Penda’s Fen’s admirers include TV historian Michael Wood, comic-book writer Grant Morrison, and Sight and Sound editor Nick James. For various copyright reasons it has never been issued on video or DVD. Nonetheless, divining the ways in which archaeology can be a necessary agitation, landscape an imaginative resource, Rudkin’s work is as vital now – and as incandescent a rejoinder to the pious bucolics of cultural nationalists – as it was in 1974.
Sukhdev Sandhu
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/nov/14/pendas-fen-heresy-horror-pastoral-horror

 

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Penda’s Fen is a dense, difficult work, drawing on themes of theology, psychogeography, national identity and classical music. It’s if anything too dense, a film which no doubt needs unpicking over more than one viewing. That’s quite an ask for a television production for which the original contracts specified one showing with the possibility of one repeat within two years (which it received, on 13 February 1975). For the great majority of the population, there was no means of recording a television programme, and plot points were in danger of being missed if the phone rang or you dozed off, with no means of replaying. Penda’s Fen was repeated again in 1990, which was the first time I saw it.

One risk the play takes from the outset is that Stephen is an all but insufferable prig. But over the next 89 minutes, the pillars of his worldview have been undermined: church, school, the army (Stephen is a cadet), the sanctity of marriage and heterosexuality. He wonders if his neighbour, Arne (Ian Hogg), is “unnatural” – homosexual – and suggests it’s for the best that Arne and his wife (Jennie Hesselwood) have not been able to produce children. But he soon wonders if he is homosexual himself.

Early on, we see him in debate praising a Christian couple for obtaining an injunction aganst the showing of a documentary about Jesus. Take note of the couple’s triumphal gesture, as it recurs in a dream sequence where Stephen sees a group of smiling children lining up so that a man can chop their hands off with an axe – a clear linking with evangelical religion with older faiths involving child sacrifice. Rudkin suggests that as newer religions supplant older ones, the older gods are cast in the role of the Devil…and it may have been that Joan of Arc (and death by burning also features here) worshipped an older god than the one in whose name she became a Christian saint. Penda’s Fen harks back to an earlier, visionary tradition where people regularly saw angels and devils, and that’s exactly what happens to Stephen. We see the angel before Stephen does, implying that it is real and not simply a product of his imagination. Contemporary life, it’s suggested, has narrowed its perspective, and we have a barrier preventing us from seeing angels. And if we have such a barrier above, so we have one below: we don’t see devils either. For Stephen, those barriers have become porous.

At the beginning of the film, Stephen is writing an essay on Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, a vision of death, the afterlife and a meeting with God. As Ken Russell did in his own film on Elgar, Rudkin and Clarke frequently lets Elgar play out on the soundtrack, a departure from Clarke’s usual practice of not having any non-diegetic music in his work. Another unusual technique is mismatching the soundtrack and visuals at certain points. Partway through the film, Stephen meets Elgar (Graham Leaman) who gives Stephen (and us) a key to what is going on: he left a piece of music as a puzzle, to work in counterpoint with an unspecified well-known piece of music to produce something new. Arne and his wife’s “chemical compound” does not work as they are infertile. Jesus, Stephen’s father says, is where “legislator and demon fuse” and he compares him to Karl Marx, another visionary whose message is distorted by those who followed him, and both are “crucified” over and over. Light and darkness. Two of the ancient elements: mud (earth) and flame (fire). Man and woman. Finally, Stephen has a vision of King Penda, the last pagan king of England, whose tribe intermarried with the Welsh, and after whom the village is named. (Penda’s Fen – Pendefen – Pinfin – Pinvin.)

Heady stuff, and if ultimately this is a writer’s film rather than a director’s one, in Clarke’s hands it has a realism which prevents the whimsy that could have infested a story like this. It’s certainly a play of ideas, and so the characters tend to be mouthpieces for those ideas rather than nuanced people, the play is still as well acted within those limitations as you would expect from Clarke. It’s certainly an outlier in his work, but a compelling and highly original one that, it was widely suspected, was only made in the first place due to its Birmingham base. In London, it might have met with more interference. No doubt most people watching on that Thursday night in 1974 hadn’t seen anything like it, and it’s hard to imagine it being made at all nowadays.
Gary Couzens
http://television.thedigitalfix.com/content/id/2961/pendas-fen.html

 

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Come back to the village: A Penda’s Fen pilgrimage:
http://pinvin.com/pendas-pilgrimage/

To watch the film itself, you have two options. The only embeddable YouTube clip has it showing in a corner of the screen against a backdrop of falling snow:

 

 

Alternatively, the film is available fullscreen by simply clicking on this link:
http://openloadmovies.net/movies/pendas-fen-1974/

Thanks, and I hope you enjoy it.

 

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p.s. Hey. This is really nice: Last week or thereabouts, as you will remember, I did an Alan Clarke Day. Today, _Black_Acrylic aka artist Ben Robinson does a zoom-in and concentration on one of the films that was briefly presented in the larger post. Which is kind of beautifully meta in that sense, not to mention the fact that you get a great post that is fascinating on its lonesome. Please dig in, thank you, and, as always with guest-posts, do reward _B_A’s work and generosity with a word or many more. Big up and huge thanks from me, Ben! ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Yeah, my friends who’ve had artist parents always both express their feelings of luck for that and caution me not get too daydreamy about how perfect that situation is. But it’s very cool that all of you in your family are artists. My parents weren’t, like I said, but my grandmother, my uncle, and my great grandmother were all painters. My siblings aren’t artists, but my nephew is a writer. I feel lucky for that much. Setting up the bank account is in motion, and hopefully I can get that done by the first of the year. The location photos were great. We’ve found the world where our film will be shot! It’s a kind of bleak but beautiful newish neighborhood/ housing development on the outskirts of Cherbourg that has most of what we’ll need: blocks of towering brutalist-ish social housing buildings, small houses, parks, playgrounds, strange mall, etc. all right next to each other so we won’t have to fake the neighborhood we’ll need by having shoot pieces of it all over the place. We still need to find a few locations like a small amusement park, a small river, a field, and a mine, but we’re getting there. So, yes, everything is going really well. The rehearsals went very well yesterday. Good progress. One last long rehearsal today and then there’s a break for a few months. I hope you a very great day yourself? Was it? ** Jamie, Hi! Thank you, sir. About the poetry post. Yes, I got your emails. I will write to him very soon, as soon as I’m not eaten up by the dance rehearsing. Everything went excellently out in Nanterre. A lot of concentrating on helping the dancers develop their individual characters and figure out how to move/dance while staying in character to a degree that the viewer can read them as individuals with narrative agendas and emotional trajectories and so on. The progress was very good. It is fun work, and the dancers are such awesome, dedicated people, so they’re a true pleasure to collaborate with. No, I didn’t see that Zadie Smith piece. I’ll go find it. Thanks for alerting me. Make Xmas cards? Like by hand? Future collectibles! I’m back at he dance rehearsals again today. And you? And Thursday? How did you and it get along? Love, me. ** David Ehrenstein, Ha, it’s true. ** Steevee, Ha, I suppose I could figure out a way to compose a BDSM loving detective if I had absolutely had to, ha ha. Well, your doc is probably right, although I did immediately think, ‘Doctors always want to take the credit for any positive effect in their patients’. Well, I’m not sure how hard it is for someone in France who has a ‘9-5 job’ and an easily proveable income, but for an artist like me who makes money randomly and unevenly, it’s definitely harder here. Like I think I mentioned before, I need to set up a French bank account, and it needs to contain an amount of money covering at least a year’s worth of rent in advance before I can even begin the process of renting anything. ** Tomk, Hi, T. Promising, if only. No, there is a charm to have one’s culinary possibilities bracketed by what fits inside a machine. Well, what I really wanted was one of these awful, usually kind of stale sugar-coated cold waffles that are generally a staple of French vending machines. But they were sold out! So I bought, ate, and could ultimately accept a Bueno bar, if you know Bueno bars. I think today I will try this horrible looking kind of roll thing that has some kind of horrible looking jelly inside it and is called Petit (something). Nice, man. xx ** Omar, Hi. Yes, here’s the deal. MAC VAL is rather disorganized, to put it mildly. At the moment, the plan is that there will be no advance tickets sold, and it will be a first-come-first-served situation. Gisele does not like that arrangement one little bit, so she’s trying to get them to offer advance reservations. We will see. In any case, I can get you in. Whatever the arrangement is, I can put you on ‘the list’ and guarantee you a seat. Basically, write to me at my address — denniscooper72@outlook.com — sometime between after Xmas and whenever in January, and I’ll put your name on the company’s reservation or guest list or whatever it ends up being, if that makes sense and is okay? ** Larry Delinger, Thanks a lot, Larry. I’m very happy that the poems gave you pleasure. ** H, Hi. Thank you about the poem post. I’m getting the buche today. I actually put it off too long, and now a number of the best candidates are already sold out, so now I have to choose among the remainders and reserve asap. Eek. Xmas themed experimental films! I would love to have a peek at your list when you’re finished compiling. ** Misanthrope, Thank you, sir. Staying in the city would be nice. I didn’t realize you weren’t staying in the heart. That sounds like a lot busy work. Yeah, I understand. I generally can squeeze humor out of everything, and the blacker the humor the better, but I just can’t with him. It’s biologcal or something. ** Mark Gluth, Hi, Mark! Oh, I fear my high five just ended up being a strange looking, indistinguishable one. Maybe if I tried to construct that new-form high five as the substructure for a novel, I could do it, but in the real world, I just went dork. I most assuredly will keep my half of that promise, I promise. ** Jeff J, Thanks, Jeff. I think, if I had to guess, no, on the Berrigan question. Yes, so we have aligned about ‘Evolution’. Lucille (the director) is a good friend of Gisele’s, and I know her through Gisele. (Gisele helped choreograph that static orgy scene on the beach in ‘Evolution’.) Lucille’s also the partner of Gaspar Noe, and I know her through Gaspar. I think she honestly is trying to do what you would think she’s trying to do: construct a compelling utter cinematic mystery involving but not overly disclosing childhood-centric fantasies and emotions intersected with adulthood-centric fear and repressed erotic perversion. I just think that she ends up giving too much weight to her film’s atmospherics at the expense of whatever meaning the atmospherics are resulting from. Or something. I think she’s very talented, and I think she’ll get closer. I’m well on my end, busy like you are, and I’m glad you’re striking a good balance. ** Right. Forage in ‘Penda’s Fen’ today, and talk to _B_A, and to me too if you want, and thank you again. See you tomorrow.

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