Storefront Manitoba's Playlist is a monthly curated list of films, podcasts, and other resources that aim to entertain, inspire, enrich, and advance critical discussion.
As we celebrate the holidays and desperately seek some levity in a world filled with increasing doom and gloom, we decided to focus this month’s podcast on celebration. Festivity, in whatever form that takes, keeps us hopeful.
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This playlist features examples of celebration through song and dance and creative expression and a list of environmental successes that give us some reason to celebrate at the end of 2021.
We’re hopeful that 2022 will bring many reasons to celebrate, including our long-awaited Table For 1200 More!
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CELEBRATION!
1980 | 4 Minutes
To get you in the mood for this month's playlist, let's start with the Kool and the Gang classic "Celebration". It was released as the first single from their twelfth album, Celebrate! and was the band's first and only single to reach No. 1 on the US Billboard Hot 100.
NO SPECTATORS: The Art of Burning Man
Renwick Gallery, Smithosonian
2018 | 2 Minutes
Each year in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, a city of more than 70,000 people rises out of the dust for a single week. During that time, enormous experimental art installations are erected and many are ritually burned to the ground. The thriving temporary metropolis known as Burning Man is a hotbed of artistic ingenuity, driving innovation through its principles of radical self-expression, decommodification, communal participation, and reverence for the handmade. No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man brings the large-scale, participatory work from this desert gathering to the nation’s capital for the first time.
SWING: The Velocity of Celebration
2000 | 102 Minutes
As the Great Depression deepens, jazz thrives. The saxophone emerges as an iconic instrument of the music and women musicians emerge on the jazz scene. Benny Goodman holds the first-ever jazz concert at Carnegie Hall.
IT'S SNOW
Gayle Thomas
1974 | 5 Minutes
Colour cut-out animation inspired by the shape of snowflakes and touched with the airy magic of these fragile designs. While music tinkles invitingly, snowflakes roll and whirl, pulse and glitter, shining with the many hues of twinkling lights. Made without words, this is a joyous film to please the fancy and captivate eye and ear.
HOW TO CELEBRATE NEW ARCHITECTURE
2017 | 1 Minute
After finishing a building, the client is faced with an important question: How do they celebrate the new architecture? This moment offers an essential opportunity to inform the public about the existence and mission of the building. Therefore, the designs of opening ceremonies are often loaded with symbolic imagery to construct a new identity. Fireworks and light shows are an especially common part of the powerful repertoire used to magnify the aura of architecture. This luminous storytelling can underline the client’s uniqueness and superiority on both a local level and an international stage.
AULD LANG SYNE
The Anthropocene Reviewed
2020 | 21 Minutes
On the Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green reviews facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale. In this podcast’s first-ever one-review episode, John Green reviews Auld Lang Syne, a song that is today most associated with New Years’ Eve. He finds it fascinating that in a world where so much is so new, we welcome new years by singing a very old song.
TANZ TANZ REVOLUTION
99% Invisible
2021 | 44 Minutes
Today, Berlin is one of the premier destinations for techno music fans. People come from all over the world to party all night to the rhythmic beat of Berlin’s club scene. And this music that the city is most famous for developed in large part because of the thing the city is most infamous for: the Berlin wall, which divided the city into east and west for almost thirty years.
HOW TO BE HAPPY
Freakonomics
2018 | 55 Minutes
The U.N.’s World Happiness Report — created to curtail our unhealthy obsession with G.D.P. — is dominated every year by the Nordic countries. Freakonomics heads to Denmark to learn the secrets of this happiness epidemic (and to see if they should steal them).
5 ENVIRONMENTAL VICTORIES FROM 2021 THAT OFFER HOPE
National Geographic Society
In a year of seemingly continuous bad news, there are many reasons to be hopeful about the environment. It’s easy to feel despondent about the state of the global environment in 2021. More than a million species are at risk of extinction, levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continue to increase, and the planet was rocked by a series of climate change-fueled extreme weather events. Meanwhile, the world continues to grapple with a deadly pandemic that seems like it will never end. But, as the year draws to a close, there are reasons to feel cautiously optimistic about areas in which the environment scored victories in 2021.