Something Good #3: Various Fireplaces, With Commentary
I have lately become obsessed with fireplaces, none of them my own. In the heart of a grim COVID winter, I’ve found myself turning to YouTube, where you can find footage of them in glorious eight-to-ten hour stretches, (broken only by horrible commercials). Wood-burning fireplaces are illegal here in Montreal, but I’ve found that the image and sound of one on an LCD screen makes for an effective mental and emotional substitute.
Some of the videos are simple and documentary-style, just a camera pointed at a hearth, but others are stranger, fantastical, so synthetic that they approach an uncanny valley of coziness. An elaborate, mutating kitsch aesthetic seems to have sprung forth from the site’s recommendation algorithms, fed by the “likes” of cramming college students and shivering shut-ins.
Here are some fireplaces of note, with commentary from both myself and the online fireplace community.
(To those who would suggest that this is Christmas content, I would like to remind you that I am staring down the barrel of several more months of frigid confinement, and I need these fireplaces more than ever.)
The first televised fireplace programming appeared on New York’s WPIX in 1966, for the benefit of city-dwellers with nowhere to burn a Yule Log of their own. Amazingly, according to Village Voice, the original three-hour 16mm footage was shot in the mayoral residence of Gracie Mansion, but the crew accidentally scorched a priceless rug and were never invited back.
The YouTube video that has played for the most hours in my home is “🔥 The Best 4K Relaxing Fireplace with Crackling Fire Sounds 8 HOURS No Music 4k UHD TV Screensaver.” This one kinda just nails it. Nice warm colour palette, the brick backdrop isn’t too industrial-looking, a pleasing soundscape with no music, and it’s in 4K if you want it.
A true eternal flame. You’ll notice that over four hours, the sun never quite sets, the logs never burn down. Like nearly all of these, you’re watching a loop, a moment decelerated and suspended in time. As authentic as this footage might appear, it’s artificial in its own way. Stick it on a computer monitor on a pedestal and you’ve got an art installation.
The above was shot in Norway, appropriately enough the home of the “Slow TV” movement, a spiritual descendant of the televised Yule log, featuring videos like this 10-hour journey by train to the Arctic Circle.
With “Rain & Fireplace Sounds | Cozy Cabin Ambience 8 hours | Sleep, Study, Meditation,” we enter into the realm of pure aspiration: remote cabin, wood-burning stove, steaming tea, sleepy cat…
And once we’ve stepped into this fantasy, there’s no turning back.
All the signifiers of coziness can be found in “Cozy Cabin Ambience - Rain and Fireplace Sounds at Night 8 Hours for Sleeping, Reading, Relaxation”—the cat, the mug, the book, the candles, the storm outside—and yet nothing feels quite right. It feels like it must be at least partially computer-generated, or at least composited. What is this dreamworld? Is this where the lucky uploaded minds will spend eternity after the singularity?
I want to end on this synthesized masterpiece. Statuary and candelabra complete the Oxbridge ambience of the “Royal Library.” We’re no longer imagining a cozy cabin or perfect reading nook; we’ve entered the realm of pure fantasy. I picture this playing for hours on the display of some sort of gaming laptop while somebody studies nearby.
I went deep and found a video of the creator showing how he painstakingly makes his environments using 3D and compositing software. And I gained some appreciation for this weird craft, a product of this even weirder time, when all of us stuck at home can use technological assist to augment our by now too-familiar surroundings, and where playing a 10-hour video is as easy as loading YouTube. (There are thousands of these videos, some catering to highly specific niches, like the Yule Log that caters to Star Wars fans, a Pokémon by a campfire, Nick Offerman silently nursing a glass of whisky.)
They may be pure kitsch, but they also feel like an extension of the same impulses behind ambient or New Age music—a form of sensory transportation, free of narrative logic but able to stimulate our imaginations nonetheless.
If you enjoyed last week’s recommendation of Steve McQueen’s 1980-set Lovers Rock, you’ll probably like Lost Notes: 1980, a podcast miniseries hosted by poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib about this hinge year in pop music, where everyone seemed to be dabbling outside their comfort zone; disco melding into rap into soul into reggae etc. The second episode, about The Sugarhill Gang and “Rapper’s Delight,” with its invocation of “the shared communion of the dancefloor,” is a perfect complement to McQueen’s film and a good place to start.
Bonus track to tie it all together:
Every week I’m going to send you Something Good (unless you unsubscribe). If you want to support this newsletter, please tell someone you love, respect or admire to subscribe to it. Or tell an enemy not to subscribe to it (reverse psychology). Big thanks to the very talented Rachael Pleet for the beautiful mug design above, inspired by a stray line in last week’s issue.
