Iced gems: artwork, books, music and extra to maintain the house fires burning this winter | Tradition

Movie

Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara play secret lovers in Carol, Todd Haynes’s luxurious 2015 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s semi-autobiographical novel The Value of Salt. In Nineteen Fifties Manhattan, Therese (Mara) is an aspiring photographer working within the toy part of a division retailer for the Christmas season. There, she meets the glamorous Carol (Blanchett), who’s shopping for a doll for her daughter. Their chemistry is immediate; an excuse to additional meet is proffered when Carol leaves behind a pair of leather-based gloves. They share furtive, longing glances throughout the snow, have tête-à-têtes within the cubicles of cosy diners and mirror on failing relationships with males at vacation events. The romance is gradual burning and beautiful, town blanketed with snow and lashed with rain, the cold-weather costuming immaculate. Rebecca Liu

Artwork

Previous work of snow scenes are typically unavoidably nostalgic, a glimpse of a misplaced world that will be predictably rendered crisp and clear every winter. Not so with JMW Turner’s Snow Storm – Steam-Boat Off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842). Its little steamboat is imperilled on the centre of a terrifying vortex of black and gray, an emblem of humankind’s ingenuity rendered ineffective as immense pure forces bear down on it. In Turner’s day, these occasions have been an anomaly, remembered for years by their witnesses. Including further drama to the work, the artist famously – and possibly falsely – claimed that to expertise this icy tempest’s results he’d been lashed to the mast for hours and feared for his life. The mortal menace posed by excessive climate wants no such embellishment now. Skye Sherwin

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Music

There’s something about Grouper (AKA American artist Liz Harris) that has at all times jogged my memory of winter snowfall, albeit by means of a really melancholy lens. Heavy on the synths and light-weight on vocals, Grouper’s 2011 two-part ambient album AIA: Dream Loss/AIA: Alien Observer blends church-like consolation and chilly resignation, conjuring up a way of the serenity {that a} mountain climber suposedly feels of their dying moments of hypothermia. Cheery, eh? Maybe not overtly so, however whether or not you’re ducking on to a moist night time bus or quietly ushering within the new yr with a lonely toast, I promise there’s a romance to its quiet, meditative solitude. Jenessa Williams

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Guide

The Nice Frost that Virginia Woolf describes in Orlando is so extreme that birds freeze in mid-air and drop like stones to the bottom. “At Norwich,” she writes, “a younger countrywoman began to cross the street in her standard sturdy well being and was seen by the onlookers to show visibly to powder and be blown in a puff of mud over the roofs because the icy blast struck her on the road nook.” That is additionally a season of pleasure: of ice festivals on the River Thames, the place frozen roses bathe down on Queen Elizabeth and her women, whereas colored balloons hover immobile within the air. After which Woolf provides us the enjoyment of skating downriver with a brand new love curiosity. Her prose is as beautiful because the climate is chilly, creating one of the crucial memorable winters in literary historical past. Sam Jordison

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Sport

Wintry set-dressing has been a online game commonplace since Tremendous Mario’s first ice ranges, however The Lengthy Darkish is a recreation about winter – particularly, an countless winter within the Canadian wilderness, the place you should do what you’ll be able to to outlive wolves, hypothermia, bears, blizzards and all the opposite risks that nature throws at you. It’s simply you and the weather: you hunt, you forage, you discover to seek out shelter, and you retain going for so long as you’ll be able to. The expertise will be contemplative and exquisite, and it will also be brutal and pitiless. If that each one sounds a bit a lot, you’ll be able to at all times go and shout at dragons within the wintry energy fantasy Skyrim as a substitute. Keza MacDonald