EPISODE 316: GREETINGS FROM THE ARCHDUKE OF ROTHESAY
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Hello from Pre-Royal Wedding Central. Are you ready?
HarryNMegan4VER Royal Wedding Checklist
Have you:
Put out the family china?
Binged watched The Crown at some point in the last week? (Victoria and Downton Abbey are also acceptable.)
Yeah she did.
5. And most importantly, have you established your royal name?
Coverage of This Year’s Wedding for the Ages starts in Los Angeles at 2:30am. This is not a time one would normally think of to begin the doing of a thing that is not turning over. But the Australian national television network has this fantastically smart and funny journalist covering it, a woman named Annabel Crabb.
She did a piece from London this week, interviewing Londoners about the wedding while riding in a taxi around the city; it is marvelous.
So I’m going to give it a go for as long as I can and/or 3:30am, whichever comes first.
If nothing else, this whole experience has already taught me that the crumpet is not in fact a large crouton. (It’s more like an English muffin, but made with milk and baking soda and cooked only one side. Learn more here. Or in your belly.)
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I’ve spent the week with my writing brain locked in a brakes-frozen skid. I think I might have signed on to one too many little projects and my mind is letting me know it.
In the meantime I’ve discovered Counterpart, this ten part Starz show about a low level paper pusher in a German intelligence agency who discovers the intelligence they’re gathering is actually from another Earth, where he is a bad ass super spy. Translated into nerd, it’s Fringe, but with espionage instead of mad scientists. It’s really really good, not only as a sort of Cold War spy show but as a meditation on roads not taken and that exquisite middle aged experience of existential uncertainty marinated in a delicate soupçon of inadequacy. (Really loving the late 40s, God. What a fun time.)
And I’ve taken a bite into the new Han Solo novel that is both prequel and sequel to both the upcoming movie and Return of the Jedi. So far my biggest takeaway is that the new Star Wars continues to have some really great ideas for droids and also ship and control panel AIs.
(If I could get in a room with JJ or Kathleen, I would absolutely pitch an all-droids heist movie. And I would give Threepio the chance to do actual protocol.)
(The novel also has a lot about Han Solo as new dad – Ben is just two years old here. He hasn’t even murdered anyone yet! And Han is having a lot of doubts about his adequacy. It’s great stuff.)
I honestly think the movie is going to be kind of like kids playing dress up. No, now I get to be Han Solo! But the scenery looks amazing and I’m always down for the underbelly of the Star Wars universe.
Today I pass along some links and assorted things. They seemed random as I was collecting them, but then in writing this up I began to notice they all kind of seem to be about How to Build your own Universe.
And then as I was reading through them again I realized they also work as advice on How to Have a Happy Life. So there you have it. So there you have it. Enjoy!
7 Steps To Building Your Own Universe and/or Living a Happy Life 1. First, Look Around. Maybe there’s a universe waiting right in front of you.
Social media gets a pretty bad rap these days; but there are some good things there, too. Like apparently some people are now posting photo-threads of journeys through historical sites. It’s pretty cool (and the kind of thing we could all do).
2. Don’t be fooled by the hype; a universe doesn’t have to be a large place. Even just two creatures spending time together can be a whole world.
From the Washington Post, the story of a spider that lived in the wild for 43 years, and the woman who spent her adult life watching and loving it.
3. Do not Settle for Neat. The Best Universes/Lives are Messy.
From a talk the great scifi writer Philip K. Dick gave on the topic.
It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe — and I am dead serious when I say this — do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live.
4. Make Sure There’s People/Enormous Floating Space Crustaceans/Microscopic Algae That You Can Love.
The New York Review of Books did this great piece about the famous Anglican poet W.H. Auden, and how he used to do all these good deeds for people in secret.
When NBC Television was producing a broadcast of The Magic Flute for which Auden, together with Chester Kallman, had translated the libretto, he stormed into the producer’s office demanding to be paid immediately, instead of on the date specified in his contract. He waited there, making himself unpleasant, until a check finally arrived. A few weeks later, when the canceled check came back to NBC, someone noticed that he had endorsed it, “Pay to the order of Dorothy Day.” The New York City Fire Department had recently ordered Day to make costly repairs to the homeless shelter she managed for the Catholic Worker Movement, and the shelter would have been shut down had she failed to come up with the money.
Fun fact: I did a big paper on Auden for a class I had with Seamus Heaney almost thirty years ago. I had no idea what I was talking about (a conclusion with which Heaney agreed). But this article really does. A beautiful story (with unexpected echoes to today, too).
5. You Know When You Go to Hear a Speaker and Someone Asks How They Got to Where They Are and the Speaker is like, Um, Okay, Everyone Asks This and I’ll Tell You But Every Path is Different? Listen to them. AKA Imitation May be a Form of Flattery, but It’s Not Usually A Successful Universe/Life Choice.)
Joe Russo, co-director of Avengers: Infinity War, was interviewed by Variety about the movie’s success and trends in storytelling. He thinks storytelling is in the midst of “this massive moment of disruption”, where the standard two-hour movie or week-to-week television shows are completely up for grabs.
And in the midst of it he sees studios like Universal or DC trying to ape Marvel’s way-long-form model. And he thinks it’s a big mistake (as does the box office).
The advice would be to continue to look for new ways to tell stories, because I think the audience is open to it. There is traditionally a generational divide, but I think this new generation is going to advance storytelling in a way we haven’t seen in a long time because of the tech advancements in their lives and the way they are used to digesting content on YouTube and social media in much more compressed formats, more facile, fluid. And they like longterm emotional commitment, but there’s lots of ways to engender that that do not involve building out a universe.
Maybe the next great story universe is built across the entire web, with stories or characters found on different sites like a treasure hunt. Maybe movies get filmed three or four at a time and then released every six months, or a film studio or TV network decides that all of its stories for a period of time would exist in the same narrative universe and sees what sort of crazy possibilities that might create. Maybe someone creates a bunch of characters on Twitter and scripts them into “our universe”.
But spending ten years building a movie universe, or outNetflixing Netflix? Not going to happen.
6. Take Something You Think You Absolutely Need and Try it Without It.
There’s a couple videos floating around right now where someone has taken scenes from Friends and removed the laugh track. The result is...really unexpected. Not at all terrible. Haunting, actually. It’s like something huge and European is hanging over them, their mortality or the fear their lives are meaningless. It’s worth watching.
What would life on Earth be like if there was no such thing as gravity? Or everyone was deaf and blind and could only communicate through touch? Or I refused to rush some day, no matter what? What cool things might I uncover?
7. If At All Possible, Ask Greg Berlanti to Oversee It.
One of the craziest takeaways from the Upfronts was that producer Greg Berlanti will have 14 different shows on television next year. (Shonda has like maybe four. Ryan Murphy, I don’t know, five?)
Berlanti’s shows include Riverdale, Blindspot, all the DC shows and a bunch of new ones. It’s insane. (He definitely has a counterpart.) But hey, if he can do that, why can’t he help you?
Warren Ellis, last week:
Take care of yourself, take five minutes for yourself every day, remove yourself from the trash creatures who want to colonise your brain, give yourself permission to live your life in the ways that you want and need, because it's fine.
Trash creatures who want to colonize your brain: So. Real.
But we've made it this far. Plus now we have a fancy hat.
Here we go.
(BTW: The photo at the top was entitled "Avengers 4".)