EPISODE 318: THE THINGS WE DON'T SEE

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

So Solo came out, it didn’t immediately make a billion dollars for Disney, and the media called it a disaster. (I’ve seen it twice, it’s not at all what I expected, and I highly recommend it. So much better than its trailers, and remarkably requires no knowledge of Star Wars to enjoy.)

Meanwhile Roseanne did make a ton of money for ABC/Disney, but its outspoken and controversial star was outspoken and controversial – shocker -- and the show got canceled.

Amazing Spider-Man hit issue #800, Superman comics revealed that Krypton was actually destroyed by an outsider because the planet was strip-mining the galaxy to feed their technological innovations (ahem), I spent the weekend watching MSNBC with my dad and it seemed designed to make me crazy, and New York City now has an online tool that can tell you how close you are getting to heart disease. (It has only one question: “Buddy, what do you think?”)

It's June, 2018. You're most welcome.

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Plugging away on this script rewrite. Seemed like it would be a small job when I started on it. Now it feels (and reads) more like an almost total re-envisioning. If it works, that’s a good thing. But it’s a big if.

Meanwhile, May was a busy month for me at America. https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2018/05/30/roseanne-and-two-standards-abc; A piece on the spiritual lesson learned from Roseanne; another on “This is America” as a latter-day Flannery O'Connor, and one on youth radio in the archdiocese of Los Angeles, which I could have written a ton more for, because the people I spoke to were just so interesting.

One of the best things about writing for America out of California is just how many great programs and people I’ve discovered in the dioceses here. Man there’s a lot of good things going on in this state.

I’m at a place where I’m doing a lot of thinking about where I’m going with the articles-writing side of my brain. Lots of ideas, but for now there continues to be only one me, and on top of that he is slow and getting older. So, hmm.

I’ve been kicking around a couple longer ideas including one about finding God in really ordinary things like traffic or TV. I’m not sure there’s a buyer out there, but it’s certainly something on which I’m ruminating.

In the meantime I’ve come across some great articles and conversations. There’s no overarching theme exactly but some rich stuff. From me, to you.

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ONE -- THAT SOUNDS HARD
How to be Polite – Paul Ford is a man who prides himself on being polite in social situations. And he has lots of interesting advice.
Like when meeting people, try to wait as long as you can to ask what they do. Make a game of it. And when you finally do and they tell you, respond with “That sounds hard.”
Or, don’t feel like you have to have or make an opinion about someone you meet. “Politeness buys you time. It leaves doors open. I’ve met so many people whom, if I had trusted my first impressions, I would never have wanted to meet again. And yet — many of them are now great friends. I have only very rarely touched their hair.”
(One of his other rules is never to touch another person’s hair and/or person, which I emphatically agree with.)
My favorite idea, though, is that politeness invites empathy.

There is one other aspect of my politeness that I am reluctant to mention. But I will. I am often consumed with a sense of overwhelming love and empathy. I look at the other person and am overwhelmed with joy. For all of my irony I really do want to know about the process of hanging jewelry from celebrities. What does the jewelry feel like in your hand? What do the celebrities feel like in your hand? Which one is more smooth?

TWO – THE ONLY THING MY FAMILY WILL REMEMBER FROM THIS NEWSLETTER

Photographer Hannele Lahti has done a whole series featuring dog chew toys before and after they’ve encountered dogs. Like you always wanted.

THREE – SOMEWHERE SOMEONE IS SINGING
Right now social media reads like the Cuyahoga River in ‘69, on fire and emblematic of the imminent collapse of civilization.

But you know, there’s a lot of great stuff out there, too. Like this woman, who delivered her own baby during a layover in a hotel room in the Middle East and then tweeted the whole ridiculous and incredible story.

Or there was this thread from Caroline Siede of the A.V. Club arguing that Star Wars is actually the most depressing blockbuster franchise of all time. I disagree vehemently with her interpretation, but its thoughtfulness invited such a deeper level of conversation, it made me happy, too.

Also, did you know that people are using Twitter to offer guided tours of weird and interesting sites. Or that London pays the Queen a knife, an axe, six oversized horseshoes and 61 nails every year. Or that Atlas Obscura’s Twitter feed is filled with these kinds of wonderfully strange factoids and conversations?

This is a whole thread of photographs of snow leopards biting their tails. This is a whole site dedicated to the dogs a nine year old boy named Gideon has pet.

(He says “have pet”; I’m thinking it’s “has petted”. But also, both sound terrible.)

Here’s one of comic books’ great artists, Jamie McKelvie, arguing the idea of creating a “flow” for the page to guide the reader is overrated (which leads to really interesting discussion about comic page design).

And this is an embarrassment of a priest live-tweeting his nephew’s eighth grade graduation.

Just because most of what we’re seeing online is out of Dante doesn’t mean there isn’t somewhere out there singing Puccini.

FOUR – AND MAYBE ABOUT THE CUYAHOGA TOO
One of my favorite Barenaked Ladies songs, which always reminds me of the Cuyahoga on fire. Which now that I write it I realize is a very strange sentence.

FIVE – MY DEAR EUCALYPTUS
The city of Melbourne, often voted the most livable city in the world and certainly in the running for my own favorite place on Planet Earth – their football stadium the MCG is the only sporting arena outside of Comiskey Park that has ever made me think I am in the presence of God – decided a couple years ago to allow their citizens to email the city about problems with individual trees.

Instead – because Melburnians are in fact as fantastic as their beautiful city, people started sending emails to the trees themselves. Sweet, funny, lovely emails.

SIX – VROOM VROOM
Everything You Make is An Engine: Linda Holmes from NPR, reflecting on how “the people I admire the most are the ones who are best at keeping in mind that everything you make is an engine” (and not just for yourself).

SEVEN – SURPRISE!
Maybe the best one minute film ever.

EIGHT – AN INTERESTING FEATURE
If you’ve ever owned an Apple product, Susan Kare has impacted your life. She was the original artist for Apple’s icons (like the Mac’s smiling computer).

Such tiny, limited pixel icons are a thing of the past today. But, as reported in a great short piece in The New Yorker, Kare still loves them. “Simple images can be more inclusive,” she says. Look at traffic signs: “There’s a reason the silhouettes of kids in a school crossing sign don’t have plaid lunchboxes and superhero backpacks, even though it’s not because of technology limitations. Those would be extraneous details.”

Here’s how she came up with the symbol for the command key:

At first I thought about the Ten Commandments, and police hats, and badges, and all the things that maybe symbolize a command. But they seemed too harsh and they didn’t make that much sense in the menu. I was thumbing through a symbol dictionary and I saw a four leaf clover shaped symbol. And it said that it was used in Swedish campgrounds to denote an interesting feature. if you were sightseeing. And I thought, ‘Oh great, it means feature, it's abstract, but it's kind of friendly, and it's really easy to express in pixels.’

Proposal: The world be such a better place if it was filled with signs that meant "an interesting feature".

NINE -- GRENFELL
One year ago, 72 people died in the Grenfell Tower fire in London. It was a devastating experience for the families and the country, and as the one year anniversary approaches the London Review of Books has put out a piece detailing who the victims were and the sequence of events that led to their deaths.
It is a massive undertaking, and unbelievably well reported. I’ve probably gotten through less than ten percent so far myself and already there are so many details I keep thinking about – the flower that fell from one little girl’s shoes; the old man who used to sit in the hardware telling stories; one person’s comment that “you go to be in the house that keeps you safe.”

AND TEN -- ICYMI
Everything is Free Now.

They want to make us crazy. But we don’t have to indulge them. Our choices are our own.

So eyes up, hearts open. Here we go.