EPISODE 1016: LOUIS PREVOST HAS JOINED THE CHAT
Also, I, too, hope Laika never died.
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Hi and welcome back to Pop Culture Spirit Wow. This week we’ve got papal milkshakes, Eurovision 2025, and Tom Cruise threatening the universe with immortality! Let’s get into it.
THE WOWND UP
Last Friday New Jersey transit workers went on strike, completely shutting down NJ transit trains within the state until tomorrow. Meanwhile, in Shanghai transit customers are now allowed to propose their own bus routes, which are then voted on, and if passed become new, active routes within days. Over 200 such routes have been created in the last six months.
It would be a terrible analysis to conclude, ‘And this is what’s wrong with the United States,’ because hey, pay a fair wage, Jersey. (NJ Transit’s engineers haven’t had a raise in 5 years. They are among the lowest-paid locomotive engineers in the U.S. Which is crazy.) But the idea that I could make up a bus route and it might be implemented immediately is pretty cool.
File this under Has a Funny Way of Showing It and also The Trans and Immigrant Communities Would Like a Word: At her show at Joe’s Pub this weekend, actress Betty Buckley posited that the current president of the United States, now officially sponsored by the government of Qatar, loves her performance of “Memory” from Cats because “on a deeper level, [he] wants to connect. He’s trying to be seen and be loved.” Betty, I love your heart, but if I can reference another one of your roles, that guy is way more Carrie’s mom than Grizabella.
And in Hollywood this weekend, Tom Cruise opened his 8th and supposedly final installment of his Mission Impossible franchise. Currently 62, Cruise has spent much of the last 30 years dong increasingly insane stunts for those and other films, including walking between the wings of a barnstorming plane while in zero-G for the latest Impossible. On the red carpet Cruise said, “I’m going to make movies into my hundreds, I will never stop,” and then devoured an entire human.
EUROVISONS
In Sweden Switzerland* this weekend, Austria’s JJ beat 36 other countries to win Eurovision 2025 with their opera-meets-techno song “Wasted Love.” The contest, which has been going since 1956—yes, you read that right—is a worldwide phenomenon. Personally the thing I love about Eurovision is how it reminds me again and again that the world is a mystery that I will never fully be able to understand.
Take, for instance, Estonia’s Tommy Cash doing “Espresso Macchiato,” a love song to yes, espresso macchiatos which involves Cash playing Weird Al Yankovic-esque twins who eventually get sucked into his macchiato.
It came in third in the contest.
Or there’s Ireland’s “Laika Party” from the artist EMMY, which is about an adult woman’s dream that Laika the dog that Russia sent up into space in 1957 did not in fact die but instead is “having a party in the sky.”
“Through the comets and the stones she is howling for her bones.” That’s not the only reason she’s howling.
And from Sweden, there is KAJ’s “Bara Bada Bastu,” “Let’s Just Sauna,” in which three singers in brown suits cook hot dogs, dance with men and women in towels, and whisper “Sauna.” I am not kidding.
Never change, Eurovision. Live on with Vampire Tom Cruise forever.
THE POPE’S MILKSHAKE DUCK
Pretty much as soon as Robert Prevost was elected Pope Leo, Americans were inundated with press stories involving his two older brothers. At first, the focus of those stories was Pope Leo—his love of the White Sox or how he played priest as a kid with Necco wafers as communion. But it didn’t take long for the press to start digging into the men themselves, and discovered that Robert’s oldest brother Louis (above) is very much Team MAGA, with some predictably horrible social media posts.
Prevost went on Piers Morgan’s program—yes, apparently Piers Morgan still has programs—and discussed his views. Asked if he regretted what he’s posted, given his brother’s new job, Prevost said, “Well, I posted it, and I wouldn’t have posted it if I didn’t kind of believe it.” But he said since his brother’s election he’s been “biting his tongue” because “I don’t want to create waves that don’t need to be there.” Which seems like exactly the right thing to do. Actually as much as I vehemently oppose pretty much everything Prevost has posted, he seems entirely clear-headed and concerned about his brother in the interview. Still, the press made a big deal this weekend about the fact that he was at his brother’s installation Mass and filmed the Pope hugging him. (Ugh.)
In 2016, an Australian cartoonist kidded on social media about “a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes” who is then discovered to be a racist. Ever since, “Milkshake duck” has become the pop term for media darlings who are discovered to be problematic. Louis Prevost, with some sympathy, welcome to the conversation.
THE HUMAN POPE
Louis, Robert, and John Prevost.
Prevost’s interview with Morgan was also interesting in another way that hasn’t been reported. Morgan began by asking him what it was like to watch the election and discover his brother was the pope. And in describing that experience, Prevost reflected on his dawning feeling that “maybe I lost my little brother to the church.”
“Honestly,” he said, “on Thursday when the announcement was made, it made me start to cry a little bit.” Apparently the two of them have kept in touch a couple times a week for years. “To take that away at our age…we contact each other every week just to make sure we’re all okay and still breathing and kicking. Now it’ll probably take somebody like you in the media to tell me, ‘Oh, the pope’s not well.’”
It’s not the kind of thing you tend to think about with a pope, how it affects their family. But one thing that keeps striking me is how human and kind of awed or overwhelmed he seems in the role of pope. He cried from the balcony after he’d been announced. In his installation homily yesterday, he likewise said that he begins his work as pope “with fear and trembling…as a brother who desires to be the servant of your faith and your joy, walking with you on the path of God’s love.”
You can see all those feelings in his official photo, too. Usually in these photos the pope is looking away somewhere, off into the distance of his destiny. In a strange way those first official photos almost seem like the kind of thing you’d put on funeral cards. They quietly signal the pope’s distance from us.
But Leo looks directly at us, allowing us to see him for exactly what he is, a guy from Chicago and Peru who somehow finds himself in this incredibly humbling position. And his awe and his human frailty invites us into seeing our own as blessed.
In his installation homily Leo pushed back against any sort of elevation of the pope to some kind of special status. “If the rock is Christ,” he said, “Peter must shepherd the rock without ever yielding to the temptation to be an autocrat, lording it over those who are entrusted to him. On the contrary, he is called to serve the faith of his brothers and sisters and to walk alongside them, for all of us are living stones called through our baptism to build God’s house in fraternal communion.”
He said in the end, “This is the missionary spirit that must animate us, not closing ourselves off in our small groups nor feeling superior to the world. We are called to offer God’s love to everyone in order to achieve that unity which does not cancel out differences but values the personal history of each person and the social and religious culture of every people. Brothers and sisters, this is the hour for love.”
He’s clearly a different kind of person from Francis, shyer, less off the cuff, a bit more hesitant. But in embracing that difference, it seems like he’s hoping to turn the spotlight from the papacy to the people. Which sounds like a great idea.
If you’re looking for more of me, the queer Catholic New Ways Ministry invited me to write a Scripture reflection for yesterday’s Sunday readings. I really enjoyed doing it. Really loved the image they used (above), too!
I also just turned in a piece about the history of Jesus Christ Superstar for Sojourners Magazine. I’ll be back later this week with a bunch of stories for subscribers about the making of that show that I learned along the way.
Have a wonderful Memorial Day weekend!
*Thanks to Friend of the Wow Dude Points for the correction and wonderful comments about Eurovision!
Hi Jim! Thanks for covering Eurovision! Just a note that it was in Switzerland this year, not Sweden. I go to it every year.
A long time ago, hearing Rod Stewart's "Have I Told You Lately That I Love You" being used as a hymn at a mass at a soup kitchen reminded me that God is everywhere, and I had that experience again during Eurovision Week in the unlikely place of Euroclub - the one-week nightclub that plays nothing but Eurovision hits and has sets from Eurovision artists. This week, I was lucky enough to catch a 1:30 AM set from Gustaph, the 2023 Belgian contestant. He always gives me a sense of love and radical acceptance with his music, and I really felt that when he performed this song: https://youtu.be/NYaGkJaJ6so?si=wNnCdsK-Soh7ETIn
wonderful wonderful