EPISODE 347: BEST OF RHINOS
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
It’s the end of the year, supposedly a time for a letting go of the past and considering with fresh eyes the new. I’ve been filling a legal pad the last few days with project ideas and possibilities for 2019.
But I find my mind drifting often into thoughts of age. My own, to be precise. I turned 49 in August and it seems to be the entrance into something, a new phase of my life. (He says, while his imagination presents the cheery sign on Dante’s gateway to Hell: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” Thank you, my imagination. You can go now.)
I’m not even sure exactly what I mean; it’s like something happening down deep, the weird alien neon creature roaming at the bottom my very own Marianas Trench. And some of it may be as much about the state of everything else in the world as my own internal clock. (Speaking of which, could I please get someone over here to turn down the ticking? I get it, I’m mortal, yadda yadda yadda.)
The U.S. Church in particular sort of seems like a six year old just ran in from a full day of playing in piles of leaves, set her eyes on the dirty throw rug that sits at the front door and before you can stop her has taken one end and whipped it into the air, filling the air with dirt and dust. What’s it all going to look like when the dust clears? I’m not too sure. And what will be the best way to help? Again, stay tuned.
(And/or keep your eyes on Pope Francis. The kind, prayerful center in the midst of it all.)
Sometimes that all gets to be a bit much. I was realizing after a particularly hysterical rant/hostage situation (my poor community members) a few weeks ago that I may be going the full Denethor here. For those not all in on their Lord of the Rings references, Denethor was the king of Gondor who spent so much time staring into his super secret (but also secretly super cursed) crystal ball that supposedly predicted the future (always the worst possible version) that he lost touch with reality and tried to burn his family and city alive.
Because if you’re all doomed anyway, why not just end it all with something painless and instantaneous, you know, like fire.
There is something that seems very satisfying about the idea of burning down a life, relationships, etc. that are going badly. It’s like, Oh you’re going to betray me? Think again: I got their first. (Though also: WOW, does fire hurt.)
But the birds still sing. The work I get to do is still pretty great a lot of the time. God is still here. So have a little perspective, you know?
Could that be part of the work or blessing of mid-life (argh)? To pull your head out, as Australians so wonderfully say, and take a look around a bit more?
Older people, give a kid a hint, wouldja?
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Everyone loves a good top ten list at the end of the year. If you’re interested, I wrote one for Americaabout TV shows, with special effort to include a few shows most American readers have almost certainly not heard about, like Mum, which is a fantastic, “What if Parks & Rec’s Mike Schur wrote British sitcoms” Will They, Won’t They comedy.
But you know, there’s other great things that I’d love to list. More specific things. In fact, here’s a list of them.
TOP FIVE LIST OF TOP FIVE LISTS
WHICH DO NOT NECESSARILY LIST FIVE THINGS, 2018
BEST STORIES I HAVE JUST DISCOVERED ABOUT PEOPLE IN MID-LIFE, 2018 (DID I MENTION I TURNED 49?)
1. The Trip films
Middle-aged U.K. actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play fictional, frenemy versions of themselves doing foodie tours of different parts of Europe for a British paper. The two are exceptional mimics; see: their Mick Jagger (which I have watched about a dozen times). Or their very famous dueling Michael Caines.
What made it compulsive, binge viewing for me was the quiet conflict between the two men; Coogan, the more famous actor who believes he’s a genius but can’t get Hollywood to agree, and Brydon, who is successful in his own right but nothing on the scale of Coogan. Brydon is really the rock, the goodness of the series, but it’s Coogan I can’t stop watching, his constant insecurity and deep frustration with how things are turning out.
(The Trip to Italy also ends with a meditation on love and duty that is one of my very favorite film endings of the year. Not a great version but passable version here. The film is also available on Netflix.)
GQ and The Washington Post have some great articles about The Trips. And while I can’t say my life at this point is consumed with much of the kind of competition that the films have on full display, the insecurity and unavoidable vulnerability is both familiar and a real relief somehow to see.
2. Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing
You might remember that a couple months ago I posted a clip of a British comedian named Bob Mortimer fooling a bunch of intelligent people on a game show into thinking that he cracks an egg into his bath every night. I’d never heard of Mortimer before, but since then I’ve become a fan of his podcast Athletico Mince, in which he and another British comic make up characters and tell funny, often very colorful stories.
So Mortimer had serious heart issues a few years ago. And a friend, British actor Paul Whitehouse, who had had heart issues of his own, reached out to him to commiserate. And somehow that eventually led to the two of them doing a six part series for the BBC where they fish, eat healthy and talk about life. It is not at all flashy, in fact I’d say it’s sort of like “Slow TV” – it takes its time, and it’s really relaxing. And it’s one of my very favorite things that I saw this year.
In the US only the first episode is available. Which is fine, it’s not like there’s a twist in episode four or a murder at the end. If you’re looking for a great way to spend a half hour on New Year’s Day, look no further.
3. Lodge 49
So AMC put out two shows this year and almost nobody watched, and it’s too bad because they were both pretty fantastic. Dietlandtold the story of a 30something woman struggling with body image issues who slowly comes to value herself (in part through the action of a group of mysterious women who are kidnapping men who have assaulted women and murdering them). It didn’t get a second season, but it’s still worth a watch, I’d say.
The other was Lodge 49, a laidback, happily mellow show about a youngish beach bum who’s kind of lost his path, who stumbles into a SoCal version of a Masonic Lodge and decides it’s a mystical place filled with secrets and destiny.
Beyond that main character, almost everyone at the Lodge is in the middle of their life, largely being dumped on or discarded by the world around them for being too old, too dumpy or not digitally savvy enough. For them the Lodge is a social club, a place to tell stories and support each other in the midst of what seems like the tail end of their lives.
In the fourth episode, sort of the acting Grand Poobah of the Lodge, a guy named Ernie, is sitting with Dud – our hero – and he makes this pronouncement:
Why would anyone want to live forever? I just want to live for real, for a little while, right here. People always go looking for unicorns when we’ve got rhinos.
Rhinos?
The rhinoceros is a fascinating animal. All this beautiful stuff right here in front of us. Screw unicorns, man. What’s the use of living forever, if you’re all alone on a Sunday?
So great. (And it got renewed!)
THE BEST SCIENCE FICTION/FANTASY I READ IN 2018
1. The Broken Earth Trilogy, N.K. Jemisin
Set in a millennia-distant future where something we’ve done has so completely screwed everything up that every ten or twenty years now (and sometimes sooner) there is an environmental disaster that almost completely wipes out the entire human race again, a slave with the power to tap into the energy of the earth to help defuse catastrophic events – and another who hides her power so she won’t be killed by her neighbors – are forced by horrible circumstance to set out from their normal lives to save themselves, their families and the world.
Jemisin is the first author to win Hugos (SciFi Oscar) for all three novels in her series. And the series ends up being a meditation on the catastrophic consequences of prejudice and the question of whether to show mercy to one’s oppressors. It is super gripping stuff.
2. Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor
Set in a millennia-distant future where we’ve completely screwed the environment up (sense a pattern?), a young African woman conceived by rape and victim of intense prejudice discovers a special power within herself and must decide whether to use it to punish her birth father or somehow save the world from its extreme prejudice.
One book, filled with so much power and struggle and beauty. So freaking bold.
I’m told there’s a prequel, too, The Book of Phoenix, but I haven’t gotten to it yet. (I did also read Okorafor’s Binti novellas, which feature an equally strong young female protagonist trapped in difficult, often prejudiced situations. It is equally astonishing – and cheap!)
3. The Power, Naomi Alderman
Women all over the world begin to manifest the power to generate and shoot electricity. Men don’t like it (of course). Conflict ensues.
I haven’t finished this yet, but it is just blowing me over. Great, unexpected characters and a plot that goes in unexpected, challenging ways. Not for the faint of heart, but powerful.
4. The Worldbreaker Saga Vols. 1 and 2, Kameron Hurley
Imagine what if Game of Thrones was not about different kingdoms of people at war, but the same group of people from different universes? Oh, and a massive and recurring environmental disaster is on the near horizon. (Surprise!) And there’s a lot of stuff about slavery.
Not the easiest first book to get into, but once it gets going it has twists that are every bit as jaw dropping as Thrones. The second book has more failure and disaster in it than any Thronesbook, believe it or not.
5. The Only Harmless Great Thing, Brooke Bolander
Basically it’s the story of Dumbo but where instead of being trapped in a circus the elephant is trapped manipulating radioactive material until it’s going to kill them.
A story about the stories we tell (and don’t tell), and also once again (I swear I didn’t know this at the time) about the horrific consequences of slavery not just for the enslaved but for society.
(Just read this crazy piece about elephants. According to scientists who work with elephants, the only thing that keeps them from having the potential to become a real “human” society is the fact they have no means of storing and resharing the knowledge they gain. Elephants are apparently brilliant, communicative creatures.)
This is what happens when you leave your Thanos doll near the Elf on the Shelf, people.
BEST PODCAST EPISODES THAT I HEARD IN 2018
1. Reply All #129, “Autumn”
As a little girl, Autumn lost her grandmother. And in trying to protect Autumn from that loss, Autumn’s mom ended up leaving Autumn without ever having had the chance to say goodbye. As a coping mechanism, she added a Sim of her grandmother to her playing of the video game The Sims.
It’s a story about how we deal with grief and the power of letting go. Beautiful stuff.
2. Serial #302, “You’ve Got Some Gauls”
This year on Serial, host Sara Koenig and her team traveled to Cleveland to report on stories from the Cleveland city court. There’s no one character or story they follow; instead every episode tries to take a look at a different part of the judicial system in Cleveland – the lawyers, the judges, defendants, police. It’s by turns fascinating and shocking, and by the end I felt like most of the trust I have in our legal system is actually just a fiction borne of my own lack of experience with what it’s like to be in court.
The whole series is great, but if I had to pick one I think I’d go with episode 302, which focuses on some of the judges. I learned so much about parole – and what a nightmare that can be if you have the wrong judge.
3. Slow Burn #201, “Deal or No Deal”
For its second season Slate’s Slow Burnpodcast decided to retell the story of Bill Clinton’s impeachment. On the surface I was very strongly not interested. It’s a hard pass, as they say in Hollywood.
But then I listened to the first episode, which is all about Monica Lewinski. And I was faced with the fact that I had her all wrong, and in some ways Clinton too.
A moment in time that looks completely different in the wake of #MeToo. Fantastic reporting.
Super Special Extra Mention: Heavyweight, Season 3
Do you know Heavyweight? It’s a show where host Jonathan Goldstein gets recruited by friends and others to help them deal with things that have long been weighing them down – events from childhood, long-standing conflicts or shame, promises that haven’t been kept. Imagine Touched by an Angelif it were a podcast hosted by a Jew from Canada who likes to mispronounce words and at least half the time drives those around him crazy.
Past seasons have had some great moments (see: the one where Jonathan helps his friend get CDs back from the artist Moby), and also some uneven ones. But this season has been start to finish outstanding. There’s the stories of a woman whose best friends cast her out as a kid without explanation, a woman who never told the father of her child that she had a baby, two people who made big promises they didn’t keep and have been haunted ever since, a guy who screwed up one of the biggest and most difficult film shoots of all time, and a guy haunted by his vote on a death penalty case. They’re all so good I couldn’t pick one. Start at the beginning: it’s the very funny story of comic actor Rob Corrdry, whose family insists he did not break his arm as a kid.
COOLEST IDEAS WHICH ARE ALSO IT TURNS OUT MOSTLY DISTURBING, 2018
1. Social Nudging
City Lab this year did a piece on the small things Japan does in its train stations to guide those passing through. Like they use a blue mood light because the color tends to keep people from wanting to throw themselves on the track to die; or how they replaced buzzers at each new stop with a different song at every station, so as to de-stress passengers. (And studies show just that seems to have reduced injuries sustained while rushing through the airport by an astonishing 25%.
The AI article – are we asking what kind of society we want to live in?
2.Time Travel is Space Travel
I just love it when something I think I understand is totally upended. Like the idea that I kept running into this year that time travel always has a space component. Stars and planets move over time; if you want to be able to catch up with them, you need not only to change what year you’re in that you are.
3. The Dark Forest
In his incredible Remembrance of Earth’s Past, Chinese science fiction writer Cixin Liu proposes that the our ideas around extraterrestial contact are astonishingly naive. Lacking anything in common to help us evaluate one another’s claims, we find ourselves in a situation where anyone we might contact cannot be trusted – and will not trust us, in fact will almost certainly try to wipe us out once discovering us, so as to protect themselves.
The universe as a whole, he argues, is not like some happy village but like a dark forest in which hide other forms of intelligent life. The only way to survive is to keep your head down and your radios off and pray those who are so much more powerful will for some unknown reason decide not to destroy you.
I could easily have included Liu’s work in my list of books. Each of his novels is filled with such big, explosive ideas; they’re a delight to read. And a real challenge.
BONUS: Jacob Marley is Not Who I Thought He Was
I started A Christmas Carol for the first time over the holiday weekend, and I was surprised to discover that Scrooge’s partner Marley is sad not just because of the bad, miserly ways he behaved in life, but because he never really LIVED.
Now he’s relegated to a life of watching life happen for others – and also being unable in any way to help. It’s a painful, sad moment that turns Marley into a much more interesting and sympathetic character.
Who’s up for a spinoff?
AND FINALLY, FAVORITE QUOTES THAT I HAVEN’T ALREADY SENT YOU, 2018
1. Emily Wilson, the first female translator of The Odyssey (How is That Possible? ARGH) on the Self and Time
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.
2. Emma Thompson on Holding onto Gratitude
Interviewer: Sometimes I feel like appreciating one’s life is such an obvious thing to try for, but is so hard to actually do in any holistic way. I’ll have a moment of deep gratitude and then get on the crowded subway on a hot day and immediately I think screw this.
Absolutely, but you’re young. When you get older it’s much easier to hold onto that appreciation because you’re more mortal. I want to enjoy every minute and use the wisdom that I’ve accrued whilst acknowledging my fallibility and the continuance of all sorts of foolishness. It’s so enjoyable to be alive in this state.
3. Actress Evangeline Lily on the LOST Finale
For those of who you didn’t like it; you loved our show, because at the end of every week, it would leave you with an impossible and pressing mystery. It would force you to the water cooler, or the dinner table, asking each other the most difficult questions. Usually philosophical questions. Sometimes questions that touched on God or religion and reality, and what it means to be human.
And then, on the finale, you sat waiting with baited breath, thinking “They’re gonna give us the answer”…well, that’s what religions do. So if you want the answer to the great big question of life, go to church, go to God, find the answer, but art…art is supposed to, every time without fail, turn the question back onto you, and asks you to look at what you’re seeing, listen to what you’re hearing, experience it, and then look at it in the mirror of your soul, and figure out what it means to you.
And so there is no one interpretation of the finale of LOST, for as many people that are in this room, there are that many true, real, endings for LOST. Because it’s just a reflection of who you are, and it’s the ultimate question being posed to you, not the ultimate answer being handed to you.
Preach it, Evangeline.
Honorable Mention for Best Use of the Word Homunculus: James Poniewozik on TV Title Sequences
A title sequence is not a disposable wrapper. It is part of the program. It is, at best, the show’s homunculus, the creation in miniature. It sets a mood. It establishes themes. It brings you into the world of the series, atmospherically, like the ethereal trance of Twin Peaks.
++ LINKS ++
Three Reasons Why Your Experimental Planet Needs Humans. (“Humans are wonderfully unpredictable! It is anyone's best guess what a human culture will value most. Do you expect humans to value their young? Don't bet on it!”)
Profiles of Two Great Catholics who have recently died: Spiritual giant Thomas Keating, who invited people to find God in silence; and Sister Wendy the Art Critic.
And finally, One Last Star Wars Link for the year, in which Mark Hamill reveals who he hoped Luke’s mom was, and it is insane and also kind of brilliant.
Thanks to each of you for your willingness to wander with me down rabbit holes and across outer space this year, and for your kind words. It remains such a pleasure to write this, and it makes me happy to know some of my craziness brings you pleasure too.
I'll be off next week dreaming about possibilities for 2019. Until then, take it gently. Flamethrowers are fun, but not when applied to oneself. Big questions are usually much more real (and more interesting) than most answers. And fireworks are a light show just for you.
You're all wonderful. Thank you for this year. See you in the next one.
