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 Worth of Salt. In 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 instantaneous; 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 sluggish burning and beautiful, town blanketed with snow and lashed with rain, the cold-weather costuming immaculate. Rebecca Liu
Artwork
Outdated work of snow scenes are typically unavoidably nostalgic, a glimpse of a misplaced world that might be predictably rendered crisp and clear every winter.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, a logo of humankind’s ingenuity rendered ineffective as immense pure forces bear down on it. In Turner’s day, these occasions had been an anomaly, remembered for years by their witnesses. Including further drama to the work, the artist famously – and doubtless 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 risk posed by excessive climate wants no such embellishment now. Skye Sherwin
Music
There’s something about Grouper (AKA American artist Liz Harris) that has all the time jogged my memory of winter snowfall, albeit by means of a really melancholy lens. Heavy on the synths and lightweight 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 humid evening 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
E-book
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 normal 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 avenue 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 girls, 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 memorable winters in literary historical past. Sam Jordison
Recreation
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 limitless winter within the Canadian wilderness, the place you will need to do what you possibly can 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 search out shelter, and you retain going for so long as you possibly can. The expertise will be contemplative and delightful, and it will also be brutal and pitiless. If that every one sounds a bit a lot, you possibly can all the time go and shout at dragons within the wintry energy fantasy Skyrim as a substitute. Keza MacDonald
