EPISODE 343: A VERY MERRY BURT BACHARACH L.A. CHRISTMAS CAROL
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
It’s been raining off and on all day here in Los Angeles.
I realize, for many of you that’s just a way of describing Thursday. But it almost never rains here. I mean really, almost never. It’s so unusual that when it rains – at all – Los Angeles shuts down. Seriously, the roads on a rainy day are like insert your city here on Christmas.
My first couple years here I sort of laughed at Angelenos about it all. Guys at dinner would be saying can you believe how hard it’s coming down and I’d look outside and no joke it was just misting. You’d literally have to work at getting soaked.
But these days, I don’t know.... It didn’t rain constantly today, and I’m not sure it ever rained all that hard either – or at least not for more than a couple minutes.
But I just found myself relishing it – the sound of the water smacking against the concrete, the Midwestern autumn-like chill in the air, which has deepened into the evening, such that right now as I’m writing this the world outside feels like a sweet taste of Christmas. An editor’s version, without all that nasty snow that goes from gorgeous to dirty and wet so quickly.
I’ve often complained about the fact that Los Angeles is a living, breathing Groundhog Day. Every morning you wake up and it looks exactly the same. But the upside of that is that when weather happens it is so unusual that it retains a bit more of the wonder you had seeing it as a kid, a bit more of that absolute preciousness. ++ Los Angeles is not an easy place to fall in love with. Even if you love the ocean – and I love the ocean so much – it’s just hard to ever feel like you’re actually “there” in the way you do once you’ve spent ten minutes in New York or maybe an hour in Boston or Chicago. I’d say it’s slippery, but that suggests that actually there is a “there” somewhere slipping away. That’s not the case. L.A. is not like a shape shifter who can move their heart and brain anywhere they want on their body; it’s a creature that either has 17 different hearts and brains or – and somehow I think this is more true – does not exist with hearts and brains at all, sorry, those categories don’t work here.
So what, am I saying L.A. is like an earthworm? Hmm....cut part of it off and it grows a whole new worm...Self-propagating, which actually fits a pretty common sentiment you hear in Hollywood.... I might able to work with this...
But no, I was thinking, it’s more like someone you work with for ten years without ever having much interest or maybe even a real conversation. And then one day they say one thing and you realize, oh wow, this person has LAYERS. Like, so many layers I will never see them all and also really the best part is just letting yourself continue to be surprised.
I remember early in my Jesuit brain ninja training we read this guy Emmanuel Levinas, who talks about how by nature we humans try to simplify everyone and everything into categories we don’t even know we’re using. And how when it comes to other human beings that’s pretty genuinely awful, because they’re more than some judgment I make, but that it’s okay because the cool thing about human beings is they come with faces.
(Suddenly I’m wondering if AA batteries are required.)
The thing about faces is, they’re always changing. I can stereotype you all I want when I see you on the bus, but if I actually pay attention, your face is going to eventually resist my assumptions. It’s always more than I want to allow it. It is the Joker to my Batman. God to my Church. Last Jedi Luke to my New Hope Luke.
LA is like that. Which means it’s deeply unsatisfying and also kind of magical.
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Is the Joker Batman’s image of God? Or if not image, his experience of the presence of God? Something so close and yet always fundamentally a mystery?
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Warren Ellis, who I’ve quoted (and also ripped off) here many many times, likes to write about the mystical dimension of places. He’s British, think druids and fairies and Stonehenge. (Actually none of those terms really fit anything that I have ever read from Warren Ellis, but there is a sort of connection. The land is rich with our choices, our history – deep history – and that gives it a kind of power and life of its own.
I’m not sure exactly how that fits with Los Angeles. The natural world is almost completely hidden here, paved over and built upon. But then I read that the path through the Sepulveda Pass that leads from what most people think of as “L.A.” into “the Valley” originated thousands of years ago with the Tongva Indians. And I wonder if maybe the whole “Indian burial ground” horror movie genre is Los Angeles processing itself, trying to free up and surface its deeper history by way of story and myth.
I wonder what a Los Angeles that was more balanced between nature and city would feel like to live in. I have this image in my head that I could stand on my patio looking out on West L.A. and it would be filled with ghosts floating along the byways. Maybe even whole villages supernatural and glowing. And somehow that seems like it would be a good thing, a kindness to them and also to ourselves. A communion that’s waiting for us if we’d only make the decision to allow it.
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We were talking about ghosts at dinner tonight – I was super impressed with my community both for accepting the topic as something worthy of conversation and for the degree to which guys of every age agreed that ghosts are a real thing that happens.
If you believe in an afterlife, it seems to me that you kind of have to be open to ghosts. But that is definitely not a belief that I have found widely embraced by my fellow Jesuits!
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I’ve been listening to a lot of great podcasts this fall. And one that’s really been affecting me of late is Slow Burn, in which host Leon Neyfakh takes a moment from U.S. political history and over the course of eight episodes helps you see it in a totally different way.
The most recent season was about Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton’s impeachment – a topic I never had any interest in before. But after one hour of considering Lewinsky I found myself realizing I had completely misjudged her and pretty much everything to do with that moment in our history.
Now I’m listening to the first season, which is about Watergate. And once again I found myself at the outset assuming I’d listen to the first episode and that would be that. Because I’ve seen All the President’s Mena lot. And all the other Nixon-era movies too.
But what I’m finding is that actually I know almost nothing (shocker), this was a process that took years to unfold, not just the time it took Woodward and Bernstein to write stuff. And that it took most people a lot of time to come around to seeing Watergate as not only a legit accusation but a serious serious issue.
Donald Trump pretty much came into office with the question of whether or not he and his people colluded with Russia pinned to his back. Which made me in a sense to discount it – not its veracity but its value. You can’t impeach a guy you literally just elected. And is it really THAT bad?
But the more I listen to Slow Burn, the more I’m realizing I may need to radically rethink the way I’m approaching this.
I just love/hate a story or article that reveals and undermines all my assumptions.
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Speaking of Robert Mueller (sort of?), I came upon this video yesterday of Mueller dancing. Think the Christmas videos people were sending each other a few years ago with their families' faces placed over dancers, but with Robert Mueller. It is absolutely wonderful. The facial expressions are unbelievable.)
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Did you see the story this week about the 6 year old kid who interrupted a Pope Francis event at the Vatican? It’s pretty fantastic. And I turned it into a photo thread of life lessons.
A taste:
Never Be Afraid to Rush the Stage. You Never Know What it Could Lead to.
Colin Firth Doing Things. (h/t Laura Olin, as always). Personal favorites: Things he does with his face. (Also, please explain this.)
What if feeling down is just a thing that sometimes happens, like a cold (aka Why therapists can be awesome).
A daughter gets help saying I love you.
And some cool thoughts from the first female translator of The Odyssey.
What is it to be in a family? What is it to be a person over time? For me, that’s one of the most fascinating questions just in general, but then The Odysseyspeaks to that question of, am I the same person that I was 20 years ago? Am I the same person in America that I was in the UK? Is Ulysses the same person when he’s on the battlefield, verses when he’s with his son, verses when he’s with his wife? What is it to be the same or to be different? How do we treat people who are different from us? It’s a poem that’s about diaspora, immigration, emigration, travel, belonging, being at different places geographically and also being at different places spiritually and psychologically.
On some level we're all the ghosts of ourselves, aren't we, haunting our present?
And I personally believe no matter how scary or violent a ghost may be, fundamentally they're still around because they're stuck in some way. They need something, and we can help them.
Maybe that's true of our past selves, too. We're haunted by them, sometimes scared of them, but really they need us to release them, to let them go, so they/we can be free.
See you next week. Be kind to yourself.