EPISODE 1009: I'M GOING TO NEED A MINUTE

Is it weird that I used to be afraid of being abducted by aliens, and now I'm hoping for it?

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

Hi and welcome to Pop Culture Spirit Wow! Remember when it was like Did anything happen this week? Those were the days, amirite?

This week: The return of the Wownd Up! The decade I spent worrying that my brother or I might get abducted by aliens! And Gen X, the Greatest Generation that Nobody Ever Remembers (except for the ones that are crazy).

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THE WOWND UP

This week in We Like Tourist Dollars But Could You All Please Go Home and Mr. Big Does Not Live Here and Never Did, the story of the man who lives in the building that Carrie Bradshaw made her home in Sex and the City, and his entire life is dealing with people outside at all hours being horrible.

Elsewhere, in case you haven’t picked up what they’ve been laying down, the Heritage Foundation apparently wants to deport Prince Harry, too. It’s because of his drug use as a young man, and definitely, absolutely not at all the fact that he is a white Aryan man married to a strong Black American lady.

In a related story under the heading of WTF Now? and also Nice is Different than Good, the President of the United States has apparently said that he is open to the United States of America becoming an “associate member” of the British Commonwealth, an idea that a British organization has apparently been pushing for some time, saying the presence of the U.S. in the Commonwealth of countries would “make the Commonwealth even more important as a global organization.”

And in Pop Culture that makes you go Wow, this scene from last week’s White Lotus. Warning: While the visuals are fine, the story that Rockwell tells is definitely NSFW. But my God is it astonishing.

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BECAUSE SOMETIMES YOU JUST NEED A ROTHKO

“Untitled (Yellow over purple)”, Mark Rothko, 1956

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WELCOME TO THE PARTY, RANDY!

Over the weekend I found a wonderful McSweeney’s list, “Signs You are a Gen-Xer Who’s About to Turn Sixty.”

My favorite:

You have seen only a rare few mentions in the news that the oldest Gen-Xers are turning sixty this year, which is both the least surprising and most Gen-X thing ever.

WORD.

In honor of my friend Randy, who turned 55 this weekend (Happy birthday, Randy!), I’ve come up with something of my own:

Top 7 Things You Have No Problem Insisting Because You’re 55, Goddammit

1. You were there when Star Wars came out, and yes, that actually does mean your opinion on the franchise has more merit that yours, Prequennials. P.S. The Last Jedi is a masterpiece.

2. Yes, Singin’ in the Rain is and always will be extraordinary, but Molly Ringwald’s dance in The Breakfast Club is the greatest onscreen dance ever, not only because of her passion and exquisite footwork, but because that girl doesn’t need a man to rock.

Yes, I’ve posted this before, but I am 55 and I am trying to help you.

3. You knew Sondheim was gay long before the press told you so.

4. You’re only a real comic book fan if you actually grew up in a place and time where people would potentially beat the crap out of you for reading them.

5. You grew up frightened of being abducted by aliens, and you still are.

6. Lost got a bad rap.

7. You miss Sno-Balls.

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TRUCKSTOP DRAGONS

I’ve been thinking lately about this weird habit I had as a kid. When you’d go into a gas station or convenience store, like the Open Pantry near my house, they would always have wire racks filled with either comic books or old paperbacks.

I always loved looking through those, because of course I was. And I was particularly obsessed with three kinds of books: Stephen King novels, which somehow seemed as though they had been made to be sold in that way; alien abduction stories; and true stories of shark attacks.

The thing that these three things have in common, for me anyway, is that they were absolutely terrifying to me. And yet, at least in the case of the abduction stories and shark attack stories, my parents let me buy some of them, not knowing that I would spend the rest of my life afraid of being attacked by a shark in any body of water that I couldn’t see the bottom, including fresh water lakes, ponds, and swimming pools when I wasn’t looking down.

Nor did they know that I spent a lot of my childhood afraid that not robbers but aliens were going to show up outside my second floor window in the middle of the night and take my brother or me away. Without ever really realizing I was doing it I actually developed rules about protecting myself. As long as my body was completely under the covers, they couldn’t come take me, with the exception of my head, which was fine as long as it was on the bed and not hanging over the edge. (However, given how frightening seeing such aliens would be—for me they looked like the standard grey aliens, only blue and glowing—it was probably advisable to bury my head under my pillow just so I wouldn’t have to see them.)

(It’s probably worth noting that I never informed my brother of these fears or the rules by which to protect himself. But in my defense it was all entirely crazy.)

People think the X-Files was so popular because it was a conspiracy show at a time when people had lost faith in the government, which I mean, sure. But for younger people like me it wasn’t Nixon that required the X-Files, it was Close Encounters.

I also had an unhappy fascination with atomic destruction. The Day After and Special Bulletin are movies you only watch once, and then they live with you forever.

Does any of this resonate? Were you ever obsessed as a kid with things that actually frightened you? It seems strange, and yet I look back on those memories with unexpected fondness. I would love to see some of those paperbacks again. Somehow they feel like they represent part of an earlier, rawer version of my imagination. Aliens, sharks, nuclear blasts, these are primal forces, really, things that actually can’t be understood (something that Steven Spielberg has always understood and Christopher Nolan never has). They’re sort of like the fence posts on civilization, our own version of the sea serpents that sailors used to draw at the outer edges of their maps with the inscription, “Here, there be dragons.”

But they, along with the arcades and arcade games of my childhood, also seem like they were my first personal experience of mythic. Maybe in a way they were my early experiences of divinity, something impossible to capture or understand, and therefore frightening, but also magical and inviting.

In the end, did I read those books to frighten myself? Or might it also be that they offered the promise that there was so much more to the world than I could see?

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HAVEN’T I SEEN YOU SOMEWHERE BEFORE

I’ve had a bunch of pieces come out lately—an interview with the British American singer/songwriter Emmi, who is putting together an album of prog rock songs from the point of view of different characters from Shakespeare; we spent a happy hour a few weeks ago talking about the Prologue to that album (see below) and her own journey from fear to courage and vulnerability; an interview with Father Frank Brennan (above), one of the great Jesuits of the Australian province, as he celebrates 50 years as a Jesuit; and my interview with trumpeter Glenn Drewes, a New York and Broadway legend, which just got published by the International Trumpeters’ Guild. Find it in their March journal here.

This week I’ve got my fair share of things coming out this week, too, including an interview with Australian political scientist John Warhurst about the effect of the American Catastrophe on the upcoming Australian election, and a profile of a friend who is a longtime lobbyist in Washington, both here, an interview with the Tony Award-winning writer of The Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder Robert L. Freedman at TheaterWow, and a review of Denzel Washington on Broadway in Othello over at Fordham’s Sapienta.

Gosh, things are hopping, aren’t they? Stay tuned!

MOMENT OF WOW

I love this song so much.