EPISODE 823: BARBIE AND STEPHEN AND TOM AND HARRISON
...AND KEN, I GUESS?
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Hi and welcome back to Pop Culture Spirit Wow, the newsletter that asks the question, What do you have to wow about?
I had originally thought to post this as an extra last week, but as it turns out it felt like it worked better as a regularly-scheduled newsletter.
There’s plenty going on. Let’s jump in!
THE WOWND UP
So, the big news in recent weeks that you may not have heard about is that Stephen Sondheim’s townhouse on the East Side of Manhattan has gone up for sale, for the low low price of $7 million, and all I can think about is how I can get my hands on it, because wow does it look extraordinary.
A friend of mine actually knows someone who has toured the place and says it needs a lot of work, to which I say, Baby, me too, now gimme the keys.
Meanwhile, Twitter’s blue bird is supposedly going to be replaced with an “x” today. I’m not going to try and explain that, because it’s obviously dumb. Elon Musk is an anger vampire. We stopped paying attention to him for a minute, so now he’s hungry.
Far more importantly, amidst the wreckage of the summer movie season, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, about the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, about um, Barbie, both completely kicked butt this weekend, with many moviegoers calling themselves the “Barbenheimers” seeing both films as a double feature, which I am hereby proposing as the greatest idea of the 21st century.
Truly, the next time the news makes you wonder about the future of humanity and you need something to remind you that there is still reason to believe, Look on this poster and delight in the world that we have also wrought.
SHE’S BARBIE
I’ve been loving the memes that have emerged from that deliciously light souffle of joy that is Barbie. My favorite by far is the tagline meme, where the Barbie tagline is applied to other pop culture relationships, as Buzzfeed reported a while back.
This one is my favorite:
The thing that I find fascinating is that once you apply this meme to these relationships, it really does change them. Somehow the meme detaches the Barbies from their Kens and underlines how fabulous they are on their own.
TO GOD, THROUGH REAL ESTATE
I realize not everyone here is going to be a Sondheim person, but I want to say a word about the experience of looking through the photos of his home, because I found them deeply haunting.
Each of them is just a picture of a setting. If I sent them to you without any context you’d probably shrug.
It’s nice, right? But it could be anywhere. And honestly the thing that makes it most striking is knowing that is a part of a home in Manhattan. Like, how is their space for this to be an apartment in Manhattan, let alone for this to be just one of the rooms?
But knowing that Sondheim lived there—which may to be to say, knowing the someone that lived there—it’s like he’s somehow still present precisely in his absence. Like if you could pour the right invisible ink on the photos or photographed the rooms in the right spectrum of light, you’d see him lying on that couch, or sleeping in the chair next to the piano, dreaming of a new show.
The picture below in particular really gets me. I can just about see him sipping coffee and reading the Times as he eats breakfast on one of those stools.
For me, meeting God is usually more about being quietly present to the world and seeing what happens. Allowing the world in.
Sometimes that world makes that a lot easier. When I’m standing before the ocean or under a night sky, those settings tend to strip away so much of that top layer of myself, the ups and downs that have little to do with what’s really going on inside. I’m left feeling exposed but also in the presence of something greater.
When I look at these photos where someone I loved-from-the-cheap-seats used to live, I find myself drawn into a similar kind of space. I have that sense that there is more here than meets than eye. And there is nothing for me to do but to drink that in.
COMIC-CON KEEPSAKES
One of my favorite things at Comic-Con is discovering new things to investigate. Here’s a couple I found at one panel that you might also like.
CAMP SNOOPY—2023 is the 50th anniversary of the first appearance of the Beagle Scouts in a Charles Schultz cartoon. And in honor of that, there’s going to be a new Beagle Scout-centric show on Apple TV next year called Camp Snoopy. I’ll be honest, since the horrifying 3D-ish Peanuts movie in 2015, I’ve been running pretty cold on new Peanuts stuff. But I have to say, this looks absolutely gorgeous. Think the rich lighting and beauty of New Mexico mesas in a Peanuts cartoon.
OH MY GOD ARE WE ALL GETTING APPLE WATCHS NOW?—The Peanuts panel also revealed that the company has been designing tiny, 4-5 second microanimations of Snoopy and Woodstock for the Apple Watch, to be released in the fall. And I have got to say, I can only hope they release something similar for the iPhone, because they are TREMENDOUS. There are over 140 of them, many of them tied to the specific weather, holidays or events you’re at that moment experiencing (including exercise, which I guess I’ll never see lol).
I know it sounds like such a small thing, but I really think these mark a whole new layer of experience from Apple, for the first time in forever.
VIEWER MAIL
Shout out to the kind reader who Venmo’d me a tip with the subject heading “Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.” I feel very seen (and I laughed out loud).
Shout out, too, to the reader who noticed that I don’t have a closet in my new apartment and thought I was making a quip about being on leave. First of all, thank you for thinking I’m clever enough to make that kind of pun. I wish!
Second, in case it wasn’t clear, I really don’t have a closet. I bought an armoire, which coincidentally is another piece of furniture that I assumed based on its name was something much fancier.
No joke, I thought this is what an armoire is:
(You are all learning a lot about my very sheltered take on reality.)
The fact that I don’t have a closet in my apartment had not struck me in any way other than as a personal challenge. But having it pointed out to me now, I have to say I’m delighted. I love it when reality playfully reaffirms our choices.
MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE
There’s a moment in the new Indiana Jones movie that I can’t stop thinking about.
(Actually there are two. But one is a big spoiler while the other’s just a little spoiler, and it’s posted online, and also the movie’s been out three weeks and Kylo Ren killed his dad and Bruce Willis was dead the whole time.)
Indiana is being chased through a parade by Nazis (of course). And he gets up on a horse, which at age 80 seems pretty damn impressive to me and like maybe they should all just say Bravo Mr. Jones and go home.
But no, they keep coming, and so he takes off riding through the streets of New York, while the lead bad guy hops a motorcycle in pursuit. And the parade is all around them and #!%! is getting crazy.
There comes a point where Indy just sees no good options, so he tears on horseback into the subway and onto the platform itself. And the psycho on the Harley (I have no idea what kind of bike it is; Harley for me is like saying Co-Cola in Georgia) follows.
And now Indy is really trapped. So, still on horseback, he gets down onto the tracks and then rides away, toward a train coming at him.
Mind you, all of this is completely spontaneous. Indy doesn’t know something about subway trains that you and I don’t. This is just the only option he has, so he takes it. He rides directly at a train hurtling toward him.
And at the VERY last second, the VERY last, he sees that the obstacles that block off this track from the track going the other way have dropped away for a moment, and he bursts through onto that other track, WHERE ANOTHER TRAIN IS ALMOST IMMEDIATELY ON HIS TAIL before finally he escapes.
That last beat, that’s what happens in any good Harrison Ford action movie. The last laugh is almost always on him.
But that moment of him riding toward a train is different. Not silly. Insane and terrifying. Can you imagine riding a horse toward a train? I cannot.
(Imagine what that horse told his pals later. “So I’m at the parade, right? The Man is sitting on me, half asleep. And then this old man LEAPS on me, like, who the fuck are you buddy?
And then he kicks me in the sides and we’re barreling down the street THROUGH the parade—I know—DOWN to the subway—I KNOW—and we LEAP ONTO THE TRACKS STRAIGHT AT A TRAIN—I KNOW!)
Obviously this is just a movie. Ford has been known to do a lot of his own stunts, but he’s ne’s not like, Well, I guess I better spend the next year working on dodging trains. He’s no Tom Cruise.
Tom Cruise vs. Harrison Ford action movies: Ford is forced to climb a mountain. The climb beats the living daylights out of him.
Cruise is forced to climb a mountain, declares I am the only mountain I must conquer and then does this.
Tom Cruise vs. Harrison Ford action movies: Ford is forced to leap off a cliff and screams all the way down. Cruise is forced to leap off a cliff and is like, it’s cool, I’ve done this 300 times.
Still, there’s something about seeing someone running toward their destruction because that’s the only possible way out that just seems like such a powerful image of hope. I can hope to get ice cream tonight, or hope that I get a certain job, or hope that someone does or doesn’t get elected, but those are all just the Disney fairy tale versions of hope. The Sunny Ds of hope, if you will. It’s all upside and no teeth.
Real hope, existential hope is when you have nothing to fall back on, nowhere good to go, so you run into the only option you have, because even if it is really, really bad it’s still something, and you just never know where something may lead.
I guess there’s a humility to hope, in a way. To hope is to acknowledge not only that I can’t figure it all out on my own, but that what I see in front of me, what I believe is all that there is is not necessarily all that there is. Who’s to say there’s not a life-saving gap somewhere ahead, or someone waiting to catch you when you leap?
That’s my message in a bottle. If it’s something that speaks to you, it’s yours.
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I’m on vacation this week, but see you next Sunday for more Wow.