EPISODE 527: A LAZY TWIST OF GOLD
I don't know how the science fiction redoing of your life works either, Helen Hunt. But I sure would like to.
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
I find myself with not a lot to say today. Rather than try to force something let me share a few random bits and bobs that I’ve come upon this week.
Consider me your faithful magpie.
Is the handbag a thing of the past? The New York Times wonders.
Reading the piece I realize my backpack has been sitting in a corner of my room for over four months now. I used to have it with me so much – not just in coffee shops when I was working but out to dinner, at the movies, in a bar -- my friends would laugh when they saw me coming.
Now it’s been so many months since I’ve had any need for it, I don’t even notice that it’s sitting there.
Pour one out for Dojo Bear, For He Faces His Greatest Test
How I Spent My Covid Staycationmare, by the World’s Youth
You know how I like Haunted Mansion-ish muzak and Rube Goldberg devices?
My Siblings and I Have Written a Song which We Will Now Perform For You.
I Know We’re Telling Her This New Project is Great, but Between You and Me, Is Cher Okay?
I’m not sure that I’ve ever read an interview where the reporter accidentally calls the subject by the wrong name – strike that, I have definitely never read an interview where that happens – but that is one of the many wild things you will find in this interview with Helen Hunt about the making of Twister.
When I went looking for that picture of Helen Hunt to go with that blurb — one of the things they talk about is how little sense it made that in a movie about chasing tornados the scientist at the center never ties back her hair — I came upon an archived music video that combines an even younger Helen Hunt, a Say No to Drugs campaign, Hall & Oates and Keyboard Cat.
It is Literally Everything.
How Paris is Doing Social Distancing:
How I Am Doing Seeing That:
This week I read the Economist’s marvelous obituary of Ennio Morricone, which among other things describes how his frequent film collaborator Sergio Leone would often ask him to compose the music before the shooting started.
It led me to another recent Economist obituary for William Dement, the Stanford University professor who pioneered sleep clinics after discovering just how sleep-derived most people are. (Fascinating point in the article: not only a high number of fatal road accidents but the grounding of the Exxon Valdez, the near-meltdown at Three Mile Island and the loss of the space shuttle Challenger all involved sleep-deprived people.)
Meanwhile these days it is a rare night that I am in bed before 2am. Even when I’m ready to go to bed by midnight, I just can’t help but putter around. Sometimes those two hours and the hour I spend reading in the morning are the best parts of my day, actually. In the stillness of the middle of the night every sound, from running the faucet to a spoon clinking against a cup, becomes like a whole story of its own.
And Speaking of Whole Stories…
Ann Wroe, who writes the Economist’s obits, also once wrote an obituary of Benson, a fish. This is one of its many outstanding paragraphs:
In her glory days she reminded some of Marilyn Monroe, others of Raquel Welch. She was lither than either as she cruised through the water-weed, a lazy twist of gold. Her gleaming scales, said one fan, were as perfect as if they had been painted on. Some wag had named her after a small black hole in her dorsal fin which looked, to him, like a cigarette burn. It was as beautiful and distinctive as a mole on an 18th-century belle. Her lips were full, sultry or sulking, her expression unblinking; she seldom smiled. Yet the reeds held fond memories of her friend Hedges, her companion in slinky swimming until she, or he, was carried away in 1998 by the waters of the River Nene.
Someone was explaining to me last week that one of the problems of going to Mass now is that because the congregation can’t sing along, everything feels empty and dead.
You want people to be able to participate. But they can’t do it by singing. So what if instead the congregation was taught to make certain moves to make during songs? It could be sign language or it could be something else, a series of gestures that look like what’s being sung.
Signing can be so beautiful. It’d be interesting to see what kind of emotions it might stir in people if they were invited to join in.
At that last item almost every Jesuit in the whole world just shrieked at the same time.
To them I say:
Looking up I just discovered my room filled with golden light like a farm house in summer in a field of wheat.
As quickly as it came the sunlight went, leaving the purple mountains which enfold us here, rimmed in skies of peach.
Take time to enjoy your own bibs and bobs. Have a good week.