EPISODE 538: WENOWDIS

All shall be well.

Yes Virginia, there is a Christmas bag of threats.

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

Hello from Los Angeles, where it has suddenly started to get darker earlier and a cool wind seems to blow almost constantly, especially at night. That’s what winter looks like here, and I love it. Actually in the midst of everything that is strange and different the drop in temperature is reassuring, a promise that some familiar things can still be expected.

A couple weeks ago I temporarily halted (or maybe finished?) my “I watch all the British detective shows now because 2020 is hard” binge.

I’m watching more movies instead. I’ve got a long list of films I’ve never seen, but heard about, like Altered States, which I discovered is basically The Fly but with cavemen; Halloween I & II and also the most recent sequel, which is fantastic, Jamie Lee Curtis as trauma survivor who has spent the last 40 years preparing for her homicidal brother to break out of his mental institution and come for her. She is READY.

I watched Pride, which is a wonderful true story about gays and lesbians in 1980s London who decide to raise money for the Welsh miners on strike. Definitely a movie to watch if you need a lift. Also a great companion piece to The Crown’s third season episode “Aberfan”, about the Welsh mining town where the pits collapsed and all of the town’s children are killed. What an hour of TV that is….

But the film that most struck me this week has been Cinema Paradiso, the story of an Italian boy whose mother is pretty much at wit’s end trying to raise him and his baby sister.

The boy befriends the local movie theater’s middle-aged projectionist, who has no children of his own. It’s by turns a funny, sweet and poignant story of their relationship and this child “Toto” growing up and coming to a life of his own.

It’s also a story about the importance of movies. Everyone in this town comes to the theatre. It’s where everything in their lives seems to happen. Over the course of the film we see babies being nursed there, teenagers having sex, couples fighting, people laughing, people crying and even people dying. In some ways Toto and Alfredo’s story feels like an excuse to just be with this community of people and relish how the movies and the physical theatre bring them all together.

I don’t know if this is true everywhere but here in Los Angeles we seem to be getting daily stories about the dire situation of movie theatres. The persistent question is, can they survive? Will there ever be theatres again?

Watching Cinema Paradiso, in which the theatre also comes and goes, it’s so clear, of course there will be. Once it’s safe to go back I suspect the theatre will actually be more popular than ever, at least for a while. It’s fine to watch movies on your TV or computer, but after so many months of isolation, I think even the most introverted among us has some longing for the lush shared silence of a story received together, that experience of being like children again, having our snacks while we sit together and let someone else take us on a wondrous unexpected journey.

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This was a great SNL sketch last night that turned into a very human moment about living through now.

(Many say McKinnon broke character at the end and they went off script. I think it might have been part of the idea. Either way, it was a perfect ending.)

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If you’ve been reading this very long you know I love oral histories. I found a fun little interview with Jamie Lee Curtis about making Halloween.

She says an amazing thing near the end about the relationship between the Michael Myers’ mask (which by the way is a William Shatner mask that’s been painted white) and the success of the series.

The reason he continues to have the impact that Michael Myers has is the simplicity of the evil. The enigmatic, faceless, expressionless look of Michael, it projects into that mask every terrifying image we have.

You see, I think we can put all of our fears and concerns and knowledge that evil exists in the world, ’cause evil exists in the world. Put it behind that mask and it can be anywhere anytime, anybody. I think it’s the simplicity of that. That is terrifying.

A lot of video games work much the same—the avatar is kept simple visually precisely so that we can pour anything of ourselves we want into it. Pac-Man. Mario. Zelda.

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Today is National Coming Out Day.

A queer writer/artist I really love, Noelle Stephenson, told her coming out story in Oprah’s Magazine this week. Worth reading. (The image above is from her.)

Tomorrow is also Indigenous Peoples Day. Jeffrey Palmer is an Emmy-award winning Native film maker that I’ve recently stumbled upon. He’s got a bunch of short non-fiction films about Native life. Here’s a nice one about a girl and her garden.  

I really like the pacing. It’s like a little meditation.

Others by him can be found on Vimeo just below the video.

“Masked Chief”, By Brent Learned

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And this is Jonathan. At 188 years old, he is the oldest terrestial being on the planet.

I just thought you should meet him.

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A strange week to be sure, one where I was never sure what I’d find when I went online, and which then defied if not my worst fears (thank goodness), still my expectations too.

If you had “President gets COVID, three days later takes off mask, declares himself cured and thanks God he got it” on your 2020 Bingo card, all I can say is, you win. Please tell us what 2021 holds and which horse to bet on in the 7th.

I see a lot of apprehension about what the weeks to come will bring. I share it, but for some reason I’m finding talking too much about it feels like saying Beetlejuice three times.

Words to me so often seem like magic. They can summon things into existence just by being spoken over and over.  We don’t want to live in denial, of course. But if I have to say anything, I think I’m going to go with All shall be well. All shall be well. All manner of thing shall be well, and spend the rest of my time looking at Jonathan, who has already seen everything.

Look after yourself.