Episode 545: Sunday 1, Me 0
Please...My Newsletter...
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
I had so many plans for today’s newsletter. So many plans. The day started well too. I was able to exercise the fullness of my potential as a Gen Xer by using They Might Be Giants in a homily.
Then Sunday came for me like we went to college together and I mocked the way it danced to George Michael’s “Freedom! ‘90” and it has spent the last 30 years plotting its revenge.
(Which frankly is a lot of emotional effort to invest in taking me down, Sunday. I admire your commitment, but really, I’ve been a pretty available target the whole time you’ve been planning, and it’s not like my own 1990s taste in music, which pretty much starts at the Indigo Girls, takes a detour through R.E.M., then ends at Billy Joel, is terribly impressive.
I guess I just hope you got what you needed, and that Saturday and Monday can be the friends to you that you seem to need.)
So now it’s midnight and I’ve been sitting in one posture in my easy chair for so long that my rear end feels like I might be growing a tail, and you know, cool, I guess? But also ow.
So let me hit the highlights of the week:
I watched Mary Poppins for the first time. Cannot quite understand why flying a kite would make me cry that hard but hey, you go where the spirit takes you.
Other than the Disney animated LSD section in the park (what the heck was that?) I loved it. So impressed that Disney produced a film for children that is basically an indictment of Wall Street and the quest for wealth.
I tweeted out a lot about the show online. Someone sent me this recut of the film as a horror movie trailer. It is amazing.
I also watched La Vie En Rose, the biography of Edith Piaf. If you get my One Good Thing newsletter you’ve already maybe seen the ending, which I posted there. It’s really something.
And I finished HBO’s new series The Undoing. My biggest reaction is that Hollywood needs to stop telling the same story about men gaslighting women. The contemporary twist is that the women figure it out in the end, and get their revenge. That can be satisfying!
But in many of these stories, including very much The Undoing, the underlying premise remains that very smart, strong women are actually kind of dumb and weak.
Also on my list of Please No More and Thank You—stories about people of color being harmed by white people that are bizarrely presented from the point of view of the white people and the potential hardship that their actions might bring on them; and stories in which people are beaten to death on screen.
Please God, Please, No More, Thank you.
Speaking of Hollywood, Dave Chappelle did a set recently about his experiences with Comedy Central, HBO and Netflix. It’s quite a story.
Also, I watched the Mandalorian, and it was very fine. White light sabers, y’all.
Coolest thing since Darth Maul’s saber staff.
Also David Prowse died today. Damn you, Sunday.
His story is actually poignant in a way I didn’t expect. From the Guardian’s obit:
“As Darth Vader, you always feel as if fame and fortune’s coming towards you, but, just as it’s going to hit, it passes you by,” he lamented. “Sometimes in the cinema, I want to yell out: ‘Hey, that’s me up there, that’s me you’re all watching.’”
Lots of writing going on, in a hundred different directions, including way too much time writing about the backstory of the Fantastic Four’s first kid Franklin Richards.
I’ve always loved that kid for some reason. I don’t know why, he’s never written well. But he just seems sweet and so I wrote about it for a comic website I love.
Spoilers, I am nerd.
This long simmering script I’ve been working on rewriting is close to done. Days not weeks, I hope. (Well, maybe ten days.) But we are almost there.
Is it garbage? I don’t know. Also, I am at that point where I don’t care. I just need it out of me.
(Is parenting ever like this, I wonder? Do parents get to that point where they’re like, I don’t care if he is a sociopath, I just need him to go back to college, please?)
It’s still really terrible out there. I hope you’re taking care of yourself. I think this week would be a really smart time to stay away from other people if you can. The current surge + Thanksgiving = Uh Oh, Fella Time.
It’s cold here. Genuinely cold. Okay, no, we don’t have snow, and we won’t have snow, and I don’t need a winter jacket during the day. You’re right.
But really, it’s chilly. And I kind of love it. There’s that feeling that happens early in the winter when the chill exhilarates rather than numbs you. It’s like that first week of school sense where anything is still possible and you want to do it all.
It gets dark so early now, a fact that is not new to 2020 (though I wouldn’t be surprised…). I guess because I’m now at home each day when it’s happening it seems new. And the best part of the day, really, is that time in between, when the sun is down but there’s still color in the sky, in fact somehow the sun’s absence seems to create the possibility of colors that weren’t there before, purples and blues that seem again not like a conclusion to something but a beginning, or a door to something, somewhere else.
It’s only open for a few minutes and then it collapses into night. I wonder where it goes. Not some Candy Land, I’d say, of technicolor trees and houses, something more lush and subtle, a planet where dusk is happening in slow motion and the oranges and purples of the evening ocean change the colors of your body as you swim in it as well.
Is this making any sense? See: Long Day.
Pope Francis wrote a letter to the New York Times last Thursday. Because he’s not content to have Advent and Christmas. He’s coming for your Thanksgiving as well!
Okay, that’s it from me. Have a great week. Be safe and keep living. Even now, there’s so much to see.