EPISODE 606: THE LIL FLOW CHART THAT COULDN'T
I've Got Six More Episodes of Emily from Paris and then The Only Thing Left Unwatched on Netflix is Anime without Translation, is a joke I really liked that you will not be able to read.
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
I feel you, Kathleen Katkath. A year ago I was having nightmares of finding myself wandering through parties and suddenly realizing no one is wearing masks and neither am I. (Also six months ago, and three months ago.)
Now I’m having dreams of not being invited to those parties.*
*Okay, not those parties. Masks on, please, Susan and John’s 25th Anniversary Gala. But social events and locations, yes, I am looking forward to those.
As I said to a friend recently, I really want to eat food and drink things in front of your face.
So I think for maybe only the second time ever I had to “skip an episode” last week. Sorry about that. I actually had a draft, but put WAY too much time into something that really didn’t really work that I’m going to show you in a second anyway, and it just Titanic Meets Iceberg’d the whole thing.
So I’m starting to hear a lot of conversations around when it’s okay to get vaccinated.
Actually, let me step back a second and make this observation: This is the thing I worked on last week, and in what seems to be the much-happier March 2021 call back to March 2020’s Start of Pandemic Oh My God What is This Nightmare, every day news around the vaccine seem to change (mostly for the better), so much so that I almost wonder if this topic is even still relevant just a week later.
A week ago, I was definitely hearing a lot of conversation around this, and given the fact that 80% of Americans have not been vaccinated yet, I think it’s safe to say that in fact it still is a pretty big question and if it doesn’t seem that way it might be that we’re just so caught up in the romance of dreaming about exactly which bar we’re going to leave our ATM card at.
With that in mind:
This question of whether it’s appropriate to get vaccinated yet is the latest in a now-long series of ways in which real pandemics are totally different than movie pandemics, which also includes of course an entire year watching Netflix, anti-maskers (though every pandemic writer is definitely kicking themselves for missing that one), and everyone’s favorite, hoarding toilet paper.
In a movie pandemic, there’s never any conversation about whether it’s ever okay to get a vaccine. Usually that’s because there’s almost no one left, and also the zombies are coming.
But the zombie genre does offer debates that are pretty similar. The central ethical conflict is often who gets rescued. Are we all in this together, or not, or under what circumstances?
It’s trickier for us in some ways, in that the consequences of our choices are hidden. In a zombie movie when you leave someone behind, you see zombie kids chewing on their ears like onion rings. But it’s not clear that anyone doesn’t get rescued if I get vaccinated now rather than in May. As I said, things seem to suddenly be moving pretty fast and covid numbers are dropping. Maybe it’s fine.
But some of our debate is actually less about the immediate life and death issues, I would suggest, and more about who we want to be as persons. It’s a starker version of the same question we confront at airports, amusement parks and at 9:55 am outside Broadway theatres: Am I the person who feels fine about having someone “hold my place” or slip me in ignoring all those who have been patiently waiting, or am I the person who respects that the other people waiting are at least as important as I am, if not moreso?
And that’s an interesting question to consider. When all of this is said and done, who do I want to have been? Who do I want to see when I look in the mirror?
Speaking of Vaccine-Related Things I Don’t Want to See:
Seriously, why does the vaccine syringe emoji have blood in it? Are the people at Apple secretly anti-vaxxers? Thirsty vampires? Or Techbro Freddy Kruegers, living off our nightmares?
My friend Ken and I were kicking around these questions in a different way recently. In some states, educators are now eligible to get vaccinated. But who counts as an educator?
Coming out of our conversation, I basically broke my life trying to come up with a witty flow chart for people to use in considering whether it was their time to get vaccinated or not. Yes it is basically impossible to read and has too may squares, but I am posting it anyway because as I learned in grade school, every Thanksgiving turkey drawn from your hand is special and beautiful.
Seriously, in Flow Chart School this flow chart absolutely gets picked on on the playground.
If I may say so, Creately, you are not not a great program to use.
Thank you.
You’ll see I mention in the flow chart (or rather Trust me, I mention in the flow chart) the idea of helping other people get vaccinated. Last week I talked to Dominic Redman, a student at Canisius Prep in Buffalo, and his mom. His grandmother apparently kept bugging him to help her sign up, because she couldn’t figure it out. Then all the relatives are calling. And then at some point he decided, let’s make this a thing. He put an ad in one of those little local papers like you pick up at supermarkets and suddenly he’s been deluged with requests.
He’s turned it into an activity everyone can get involved in, either by having him pass along some names of people you can help, or just by going out and finding five people who aren’t vaccinated yet who need help to do so. He calls it “Take Five”; here’s his Facebook page, which has lots of people getting involved and also information on how to do it.
It’s a great idea. Something to think about…
What I hope some day my flowchart can grow up to be:
THE MOVIES NOBODY HEARS ABOUT ARE ALSO GOOD
Do you keep lists of TV shows and movies you’ve heard you need to watch? Or is that just me?
Sometimes it’s helpful. Other times it’s like it turns all my joy into homework. Hearing your 2nd grade teacher complain that you still have not watched Freaks & Geeks or the movies of Bergman is not really the kind of thing that helps you remember that the reason it’s on your list in the first place is someone said it would fill you with delight.
One thing that’s for certain: pretty much anything on my list is there because it has buzz of some kind or another. Might be 75 year old buzz, but still. People talk about it.
Then the other day I was on Hulu and for some reason it suggested I watch Match, a Patrick Stewart film about a dance instructor who is confronted by someone claiming to be his child.
In any other time of my life, that would have been as much as that movie ever registered. Because have you ever even heard of it? No, right?
It has to have been relegated to the streaming version of Straight to Video.
But I don’t know, maybe because my lists never seem to get any shorter and why do I need to watch Tom Hanks be amazing again tonight anyway, I decided to check it out.
And it was good. I mean, GOOD good. Like, this is a movie I want people to watch and how did I never hear about it?
Last night I had the same experience. There’s a Spanish actor I like, Javier Camara. He’s been in a bunch of Almadovar films. He also plays the quietly-gay confessor to the popes on The Young Pope and The New Pope, and is basically the voice of mercy on the show.
So I was looking for other things he’s done, and I come upon this movie Truman (on Amazon and iTunes) about a guy who spends four days visiting a longtime friend who is dying. It has a dumb name—Truman is the name of the dying guy’s dog, and not a terribly important plot point at all. But you know, dogs sell, so here he is on the ads.
But the move itself is tremendous. I don’t even really know how to describe it…You know how Georges Seurat and Vinny Van Gogh’s paintings are often composed of a million little dots? Well this movie is like that—a bunch of small scenes of a guy kind of packing up his life as he prepares to die that together create this incredible portrait.
Camara plays the friend, and once again he’s great.
I don’t know that I’ve ever really had the experience of watching films literally nobody is talking about or perhaps has ever talked about. But I highly recommend trying it. It turns out there’s a lot of great films out there that no one is talking about at all.
TIM MINCHIN AND HAROLD RAMIS MADE GROUNDHOG DAY FOR US
I’ve been listening to the soundtrack for the musical Groundhog Day a lot lately. At first it was just something different to kind of cut through other stuff going on in my life, but now it’s become kind of this spiritual gift, like someone is giving words to my life experience.
Basically, Groundhog Day is the 2021 version of the Psalms.
Or put another way, it’s as though in 2017 (and 1993) Tim Minchin (and Harold Ramis) put a message in a bottle and threw out into the ocean, and unlike your typical bottle message lots of us picked it up along the way and loved it, but really it was always intended to get to us here at this particular moment when we’ve all been trapped in a loop for a while just like Phil Connors. Even though it’s a work of fiction, it still feels like this deeply reassuring message that we have not been alone, and that this time has not been wasted. Yes, according to the internet, Connors actually spent 12, 395 days in his loop, i.e. just short of 34 years. (PS Figuring this out plus GIFs of cats is what the internet is for, as far as I’m concerned.)
Meanwhile we’ve all just had one year. But still, I look at the growth he went through and feel more hopeful that maybe I’ve grown some too.
Things do seem to be getting better. 20% of the US has had at least one shot; less than two weeks ago it was 10%. I hop on the Marie’s Crisis Facebook feed and see them partially open and people singing show tunes together and it’s like seeing a flower open up to drink in the sunlight. More please, yes please.
But also in this moment (or maybe because of precisely how things are changing) I find myself wanting to try and own what has happened more, to slough off the old skin and see what’s there underneath. And listening to Groundhog Day helps me.
If you’re interested in the musical, the whole thing is available on YouTube, and the quality is actually not bad.
I know this will sound like blasphemy, but I actually prefer the musical to the movie. The songs are insightful in ways that the movie just can’t be.
But you could also take a night and rewatch the movie.
I swear, you’ll find it weirdly helpful.
A few weeks ago I mentioned that probably soon we’d be getting lots of pieces from people about “The Last Thing I Did Before Quarantine” as our whole country hits the one year anniversary this week.
Here’s a couple that have popped up in my feed – one from readers of L.A. Magazine, one from a New York City theatre critic. And here’s something I wrote about my own experience saying Mass on Facebook for the last year.
I also saw this great little piece in New York Times Magazine about my Covid Home Away From Home, Marie’s Crisis, which has partially reopened. The performers there have been so generous with their willingness to perform online this year. May blessings be showered upon them forever.
If you’re looking for other stuff from me, I wrote a piece for Fordham’s Center for Religion and Culture on WandaVision, which I found, um, kind of troubling. And my blog on learning how to write better from TV shows and movies is entering Week Four. Blogger is a kind of a disaster and I’m actively trying to migrate the blog to WordPress where it was originally supposed to be. But on the whole it’s been fun to do.
Look after yourself this week. Nourish your spirits. Spring is coming.