EPISODE 322: HELLO FROM YOUR EVENING SHOULDER KITTEN

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

I had visited Los Angeles many times by the time I finally moved here in 2010. I’d spent vacations riding the Big Blue Bus back and forth between Loyola’s campus and the gorgeous beaches of Santa Monica, which always seemed post-apocalyptic in their emptiness; at dusk I’d swim in the Pacific. The water was like liquid color, blues and oranges and russets and purple rolling over me so thick and pure I expected it to dye my skin.

I spent another six weeks at USC trying to learn how to make silent movies, every old lady at a bus stop transformed into a world of possible stories by my hyper-primed imagination. And I had a week visiting faculty at USC, UCLA and LMU, trying to reconnoiter and make an impression the spring before I applied to film school. I remember walking amongst eucalyptus trees and statues on the upper campus of UCLA, having completely blown my meeting with one of the co-directors of the writing program there, and commiserating with a Jesuit buddy on my first cell -- each key three different letters, scrolled through via multiple presses.

(I was such a nervous stammering wreck during the fifteen minutes the co-chair gave me, he actually walked out halfway through to visit with one of his peers.

A year later I walked into my interview in a tiny hotel room in Midtown Manhattan, and who sat before me but those two men. Neither had any memory of me. Sometimes it’s good not to make an impression, too.)

The point is, you’d have thought I knew the city a little bit.

But tonight as I watch the light of the sun dim and fade behind the Santa Monica Mountains, so like a film set that has gone dark for the evening, I realize how little I had noticed about this place beforehand, and how beautiful it is in unusual ways and moments.

People come here and wonder what the big tourist sites are. It’s a pretty short list – Disneyland; Universal Studios; a studio tour. The LA Cathedral if they’re Catholic. Most want to go to Hollywood, walk on the stars, put their hands and feet in the cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. That should be our Times Square, but it’s mostly kind of a cesspool, people in tight and stinky spandex costumes making you wish Marvel made fewer movies.

The real LA, the magical LA is not the kind of thing you discover in a few days. Maybe that seems like it’s true of any place, but in fact you can spend a week in Chicago, New York, Milwaukee, New Orleans or Washington and feel like you’ve actually experienced a lot. As you get back on the plane how from LA, you’re much more likely to feel a certain emptiness. I was there, but where was it?

The LA of beauty is what you discover driving down side streets at dusk, turning a corner and suddenly finding yourself on the kind of street Randy Newman sang about, filled with palm trees rimmed in the golden light of magic time and floating against the ripening blue skies.

Or it’s sitting at home as the light fades and watching the city transform into a noir scifi starscape of reds and whites and blues, all seeming somehow close even as they twinkle from ten, twenty miles distance. The mountains which during the day are easy to ignore suddenly womb, embracing arms and proscenium.

There’s something about the darkness here, too, a lushness and a silence that you don’t expect in a big city. Cool winds sighs through the palm trees like the world slowly breathing, maybe able to breathe once again, the freneticism of the day past and the tyrant sun finally having relinquished its hold over us. (Don’t trust the idyllic sunshine movie version of LA. The daytime light of LA is far more like look of video, harsh and overexposed and inescapable. We crowd into coffee shops not just because we’re all writers looking for our big break but to find some escape from the relentless searchlight.)

I know, the world is on fire and there are so many people in need and nothing’s really helping. It’s a mystery really that there could be beauty in the midst of that; it seems self-centered and socio-pathological to spend a page describing it.

But last night I was walking to my room and suddenly I heard the palms and watched the city crossfading from Mad Max to Renoir and it stopped me. ++ What to say about what's going on? I feel powerless and confused. What can I do to help? is the question I keep asking. Your mileage may vary.

I spent a lot of time yesterday and the day before trying to figure out something I could say here that might be of value. But is it me or is (yet another) strange element of 2018 that not only is everything happening all at once but it’s all being written about with a crazy-intense level of scrutiny. If you are a person of the think piece 2018 is your birthday, your wedding and your anniversary, congratulations, you’re welcome, now please make it stop (also be careful because no one can eat that much all at once).

The other thing I find is, no matter how occupied it might seem elsewhere, Crazy is always willing to move in. And all it needs to make a home in us is us regularly talking about it. It’s like this Jesuit once said to me about entertaining Asmodeus, aka the bad spirit, aka those voices in us that want us nuts and sad and alone and are you gonna eat that.

You think to yourself, he said, I’ll just have one cup of coffee with him. I know who he is, he knows I know, it’s all good.

And turns out, Yep, you’re right, that first cup of coffee, you’re fine. You know who he is, he knows you know, he can't get anything past you and so he doesn't try.

No, the problem is when you decide based on that, Hey, I don't need to worry, how about a second cup? that things go off the rails.

I don’t want to ostrich, but I'm also not interested in giving Asmodeus that second cup, you know?

So in place of that, today here's a couple things I’ve been reading, seeing and listening to that have been giving me unexpected hope and joy.

ONE SCENE
Shortly before he died Dr. Oliver Sacks published On the Move, a memoir of his early life. It was one of those books I grabbed right away in 2016 and then forgot about. But I put it on my summer reading list, and just the pressure of that (what is it about To Do lists that drive us into action that just knowing something will probably make you happy does not?) got me back into it recently.

In an early chapter he talks about hiking in the Canadian Rockies with a professor and his family. Coming upon a glacial basin, the professor suddenly stops them.

‘Think!’ cried the Professor. ‘This prodigious bowl was filled with ice to a depth of three hundred feet. And when we and our children are dead, seeds will have sprouted in the silt, and a young forest will nod over these stones. Here before you is one scene of a geological drama, past and future implicit in the present you perceive, and all within the span of a human generation, and a human memory.

Our whole lives, just one scene in a much bigger story.

IMAGINING THE WORLD INTO BETTER
I also recently started Invisible Listeners, a book about the lyric poetry of George Herbert, Walt Whitman and John Ashberry. Not totally sure why; the writer, Helen Vendler, is someone I knew a little bit when I was studying English at Harvard back in the twentieth century. I might even have had a class with her; I thought I did, but now I’m not sure because I am old and broken.

Anyway it’s not like I know much about lyric poetry; in fact it took the introduction for me to learn that lyric poetry is verse in which the poet addresses themselves to someone else. Like a soliloquy, but with a specific audience in mind.

Vendler’s three poets are each addressing themselves to someone they long for but can’t find in their lives – Herbert, a certain version of God; Whitman, someone who might love him; and Ashberry, an artist who appreciates what he’s trying to do. So there’s poignancy in their work, a loneliness and longing.

But also, says Vendler, there’s a bold attempt to change the world, to use the poem to expand readers’ imagination of what is possible.

The poet, she writes,

aims to establish in the reader’s imagination a more dmirable ethics of relation, one more desireable than can be found at present on earth. Such is the Utopian will of these poets, as desire calls into being an image of possibility not yet realized in life, but – it is postulated – is realizable....Intimacy with the invisible is an intimacy of hope. Reading these poems, we take a step forward in conceiving a better intimacy – religious, sexual, or aesthetic – than we have hitherto known.

Poetry as a means of creating the possibility of a richer, better world for us all: Yes.

Harlan Ellison, RIP.

MARKED MAN
It’s football season in Australia, and I have to say I find myself longing to see a game. It's like a physical yearning, in my bones, pulling at me. (If you're ever going to visit Australia, try to go in their winter, and spend an afternoon at the Melbourne Cricket Grounds watching the footy. I'm telling you, it is a religious experience.)

If you’ve never seen an AFL game, I think I might have described it here before as like the game of American football but without pads, in a terrain like soccer, with the dribbling and leaping ability, the big scores and massive, sudden changes of momentum of basketball.

Another way of describing it would be it is wonder and beauty and grace and puts all the American stop and start, time for commercial games to shame.

One of the most exciting moments in the game involves players leaping up near the goal posts from amidst a crowd of teammates to seize the football, in what’s called “a mark”. Any time a player catches a kicked ball – much of the movement up and down the field comes via players passing the ball via punt-like kicks on the run (just had to look up the difference between field goal and punt kicking, and strangely I have never felt prouder) -- the opposing team is forced to back away and give them space to kick on.

In other words, if you catch the ball on the fly your opponents can’t just tackle you, they have to give some time to make a move. So when you seize a mark near the goals, you’ve basically got a free kick.

Part of the drama of the mark is that under certain circumstances I don’t fully understand and am happy not to because mystery is almost always better than answers (except when you’re at your nephew’s middle school graduation and it's very long and the school has an exceedingly weird name), a player leaping can actually push off of the backs of those around him, including opponents, to leap even higher.

Americans, you may think you didn’t read that right. You did.

All of that is legal. It’s ridiculous and incredible.

With that massive preface... I’ve just begin Richard Flanagan’s novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Within the first ten pages, it has a description of a mark that hopefully will seem just as beautiful even if you don’t know the game or like sports.

On the third day, he found himself up close to the back of the pack when, over their shoulders, he saw a wobbly drop punt lofting high towards them. For a moment it sat in the sun, and he understood that the ball was his to pluck. He could smell the piss ants in the eucalypts, feel the ropy shadows of their branches fall away as he began running forward into the pack. Time slowed, he found all the space he needed in the crowding spot into which the biggest, strongest boys were now rushing. He understood the ball dangling form the sun was his and all he had to do was rise. His eyes were only for the ball, but he sensed he would not make it running at the speed he was, and so he leapt, his feet finding the back of one boy, his knees the shoulders of another and so he climbed into the full dazzle of the sun, above all the other boys. At the apex of their struggle, his arms stretched out high above him, he felt the ball arrive in his hands, and he knew he could now begin to fall out of the sun.

A THING YOU UNLEASH
This American Life this week followed Jeff Beals, a school teacher running for the Democratic seat in the 19th district in New York. It’s a piece that exposes quite a bit about the politics within (and problems of) the Democratic party today. Big donors pressuring Beals to be less progressive; the party interested only in how much money he can raise.

And at one point Beals talks about trying to collect signatures to get on the ballot. It seems like that should be super easy – they only need about 1100 signatures; but between the rules of who can sign and under what circumstances and the legal battles that usually ensue, it ends up involving tons of money. Beals was told he’d need a lawyer and professional signature takers, and to expect to spend $200,000 just on that effort. (Imagine it for a second, All the stuff you could do with that much money. All spent not to win an election or a primary, but just to get on the ballot.)

Beals did not have $200,000. So he had to rely on volunteers going around collecting signatures – you know, like the law originally imagined. And it worked. He got more than 3200 signatures, and he was good to go.

As he’s reflecting on this, he had this insight:

You realize a campaign is not a thing you run, it’s a thing you unleash. And it either is picked up and carried forward by people or it isn’t. And that started to happen. And that’s—you know, calling it inspiring is an understatement. That was incredible. And frankly, my whole candidacy has been a gamble on the existence of that. If it’s there, then there’s a campaign. And if there isn’t, then no campaign.

You think it’s all up to you, how am I going to make it all happen, make things work. But then from time to time we get that glimpse/realization that it’s not. It can be scary – ARGH, I CAN’T MAKE LUCY HOLD THE #!%! BALL DOWN. But it can also be a huge relief.

More about the race in the 19th. How Beals did Tuesday.

REMEMBER THE SCRAP

The Outsider is your classic Stephen King summer beach read – a small town Oklahoma police chief publicly arrests the town’s beloved coach with incontrovertible evidence that the man has committed the most heinous of crimes. As the town goes crazy at the revelation, the man presents just as incontrovertible proof that it wasn’t him, and everyone involved has to deal with the possiblity of something far more strange and horrible. (Cue: Monster.)

Actually it’s far less supernatural than you might expect. The first half is just a really compelling detective story; and even as it starts to dip its toe into waters weird, it remains heavily grounded in the work of detectives and police investigations.

At the very end – actually, this is a bit of a spoiler. Not very much, but if you’re going to read the book and you want to discover everything on your own you might skip ahead.

We good?

So, spoiler, the good guys win in the end. (Not sure King’s ever written a book where evil triumphs, actually...) There’s a cost. (There’s always a cost, baby.) But our heroes win.

In the aftermath, two of the characters have this conversation about a piece of evidence they came upon along the way. I won’t explain its significance; suffice to say it was small but important.

Holly spoke in a voice so low he had to lean forward to hear her. ‘He was evil. Pure evil.’

‘No argument there,’ Ralph said.

‘But there’s something I keep thinking about: the scrap of paper you found in the van. The one from Tommy and Tuppence. We talked about explanations for why it ended up where it did, do you remember?’

‘Sure.’

‘They all seem unlikely to me. It never should have been there at all, but it was. And if not for that scrap—the link to what happened in Ohio—that thing might still be out there.’

‘Your point being?’

‘It’s simple,’ Holly said. ‘There’s also a force for good in the world. That’s something else I believe. Partly so I don’t go crazy when I think of all the awful things that happen, I guess, but also...well...the evidence seems to bear it out, wouldn’t you say? Not just here but everywhere. There’s some force that tries to restore the balance. When the bad dreams come, Ralph, try to remember that little scrap of paper.

Asmodeus sits at home sipping his latte as he tries to convince us that there is nothing but nightmare and despair in the universe, we are all alone and on our own and will have to fight our way out.

But it’s not true. There is goodness, too. We know, because we’ve seen the scraps in our lives. ++ LINKS++ I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned that I’m kind of a Star Wars fan. (Ahem.) IGN had an interview with Mark Hamill this week on Luke’s story as Tragedy. It’s pretty interesting; if you’re on Twitter I had things to say about it.

Luke Cage Season two dropped last weekend on Netflix. Very solid, no sophomore slump here. Definitely better than season one. (Let us never mention Diamondback again.) They seem to have figured out Mariah, Luke gets some really fine stuff with his dad. The music is, as the kids like to say, "lit".

It also has an ending that lands that in that magical writer’s paradise of really unexpected and really satisfying. There’s a nod to a very famous film that all by itself makes you want to stand up and start clapping.

Anyway, Vulture did a post-game interview with showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker, which includes the revelation that Coker made his writing team read all of Vulture’s recaps of season one, because he found them highly critical of the show, but in all the right ways. (Coker sounds like he must be a pretty great dude.)

Also, in case you missed it in the midst of the everything else, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is back. They’re releasing the season in two halfs, which is a great idea, PLEASE STOP DROPPING THIRTEEN SHOWS OF THIRTEEN EPISODES ALL AT ONCE NETFLIX. And after a kind of meh Season 3, so far Season 4 is excellent.

There are wild dogs outside Moscow that ride the subway into the city every morning and evening; New York City is going to have 1000 singers stand along its wonderful High Line for a week in October singing tunes inspired by interviews with New Yorkers about what 7pm means to them; and there’s a way to see where your current address was hundreds of millions of years ago.

(Mom and Dad, once upon a time you had oceanfront property. Sorry.)

If you liked that image at the top of the newsletter, artist All Mingaleva has more like it.

Also, I just found this on my Twitter feed.

There’s a lot of terrible hard stuff going on. But it’s not all there is. Take breaks when you need them.

July's a'comin. Here we go.