POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Hi and welcome back to Pop Culture Spirit Wow, the newsletter that asks the question, Forget the groundhog, I want to know whether I can poke my own head out this month. January 2025, don’t feel like you need to come back anytime soon.
Today on the Wow: David Lynch screams; Timothée Chalamet Sings; I Know What You Should Eat on February 25th is the reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer I Want to Write, and my vote for the animal to be the next monarch of memes.
Your February Almanac
Before Thanksgiving I was wandering in the Village and found myself sucked by a tide of people into a book store. Almost immediately I was fighting to get out, but before I could I found myself deposited at the register, where they were selling pocket-sized almanacs for New York City for 2025.
I completely forgot I had bought one until I got back from Australia and found it sitting there on my couch waiting for me. It’s a tidy little book, nothing like the Farmers’ Almanac tomes I grew up with. While weather gets a mention at the start of each chapter (along with a NYC-related book and movie of the month), what I find really pleasurable is the actual day-by-day calendar, which focuses on arts events beginning or ending in New York, alongside occasional quotes and little bits of history. (Above is a shot of a two page spread from last year. It’s cute, right?)
It’s all so neatly presented, it makes me want to go out and do more artsy things. It also made me wonder what other obscure trivia I could find, things to do to make this often-miserable month more meaningful.
Here’s a couple things I came up with.
February 4th: Mardi Gras. (See follow up.) Also, he feast of St. Agatha, patron saint of nurses and breast cancer patients.
February 9th: Norman Rockwell was born on February 9th, 1900 in New York. And 64 years later the Beatles appeared for the first time on Ed Sullivan, changing music in the United States forever. In 1966 Rockwell drew The Saturday People for McCall’s. If you look closely, you can see one of the Beatles in the crowd.
February 12th: George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” is played in New York for the first time on February 12th, 1924.
February 17th: Atari patents the first home video game Pong on February 17, 1976.
The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism, but February.... Spring is too far away to comfort even by anticipation, and winter long ago lost the charm of novelty. This is the very three a.m. of the calendar.
—Joseph Wood Krutch, long time theater critic for The Nation and professor at Columbia University
February 19th: In 1963 on this day, Maurice Sendak published Where the Wild Things Are.
February 22nd: in 1819 New York opened the city’s first public school for the deaf.
February 25th: National Clam Chowder Day.
February 28th: On this day in 1939, the non-existent word “dord” was discovered in Webster’s New International Dictionary. It was actually a typographical mistake, but it still took 8 years for the company to remove it. People refer to mistakes like this as “ghost words” which I think is really freaking cool, and I feel like we all owe it to reality to find a way to use “dord” on the 28th.
The Scream
The avant garde filmmaker David Lynch died last month. I did a piece for Fordham about his unique sacramental vision of reality. And I’ve been thinking since he died about the strange way that he uses weeping in Twin Peaks. In the pilot, the body of Laura Palmer is discovered. Over the course of the next 20 minutes we get various glimpses of people reacting to the news. And the reactions are just weird somehow. Two of Laura’s classmates see another classmate running through campus screaming; when Laura’s mom finds out on the phone she starts howling. And her father Leland repeatedly break downs over the course of the season in ways that just seems so strange.
The thing that really united these performances is that they seem somehow amateur, unpolished in an ugly way. They are the kinds of performances that most filmmakers would insist on reshooting. And yet instead Lynch seems to revel in them, letting some of those moments go on far longer than is comfortable. Bcause these moments don’t fit the conventions we’ve been taught our whole lives about such scenes, they create anxiety in us. What exactly are we watching?
And that anxiety is Lynch’s goal. Storytelling conventions provide signposts which allow us to enter into raw moments like family learning of a death and still feel safe, secure. We know how these scenes go, and so it’s going to be okay.
Lynch wants the opposite. He’s trying to force us to grapple with the actual life-shattering, world-destabilizing horror story experience of a loved one’s murder. And so he has his actors break with the general cop show conventions for this kind of moment so as to slip past all the walls we’ve developed and force us to feel more of what the characters are feeling, to feel vulnerable, uncertain, and afraid. And he’d keep using techniques like this over and over in the show.
Lynch isn’t for everyone, but in some ways I think what he was always doing was very explicitly offering us his hand and saying, All those other stories you’ve seen, they’ve done you no favors. Come with me. I promise, it’ll be worth it. Trust me.
Hey, Hey Woody Guthrie
I went to see the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown over the weekend. I don’t know much about Dylan or that era, but I found the film enormously endearing.
The beginning really sold me. (Note: Spoilers ahead.) Unknown begins with a young Dylan arriving in New York looking for his hero Woody Guthrie, who he has heard is in the hospital. Of course he’s not in the city at all, he’s in Jersey, a simple moment that shows Dylan’s sweet naivete.
When he finally tracks Guthrie down, he sings him this song. And it tells us everything we need to know about who Dylan is and why we should love him (and also why we can trust Chalamet with this part).
I want you to know just before hitting send I discovered that instead of the Dylan song I had accidentally posted this clip from Twin Peaks.
It’s definitely a different vibe. Call it my version of a Rickroll.
But I will say, I would read a very long article about Lara Flynn Boyle and Timothée Chalamet’s hair.
Enchantment by Birds
While I was in Australia I came across a book that I feel like was written just for me. Enchantment by Birds by Russell McGregor is a chapter-by-chapter look at various birds of Australia and what makes them so special.
The galah [guh-LAH] is a pink and grey cockatoo common in many parts of the country. They’re absolutely gorgeous. Australia knows how to do pretty birds.
They’re also really playful. Here’s journalist Michael Sharland quoted in the book about the galah’s instincts toward clowning around on telephone wires:
I once thought that their contortions were due to the wires being slack and the consequential difficulty of holding on, but on several occasions later I found they would perform, evidently for the joy of it, and just as readily, on the fine, rigid branches of a dead tree. Here I watched them against the sky, spreading their wings and yelling, waving their heads about with stumpy crests erect, and sometimes turning a complete circle upside down with their feet clinging to the branches. It was quite an art this turning turtle and coming back to the upright again, and they did it purely in find I believe.
Here’s a great example of what he’s talking about.
This one takes a second to get going but it’s fun.
So take a seat, kittens. There’s a new memeable royal in town.
I’ll be back later this week with some subscriber fun. Happy Mardi Gras Month!