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So who had Robert Francis Prevost on their bingo card?
No one, right? The election of the cardinal to succeed Pope Francis as Leo XIV came so far out of left field as to be outside the park of the Chicago-born Leo’s beloved White Sox. And yet, it didn’t take long to see that the choice of Leo – calm, centered, bespectacled, math-studying, multilingual, trumpet- and tennis-playing ,Republican primary-voting, Francis-mentored Leo – was the perfect one to countermand the rising American nationalism under President Donald J. Trump.
In the musical “Hamilton,” Alexander Hamilton sings about writing his way out — of the tragic storm on his childhood home of Nevis, an act that would set him on a course for New York and destiny, and later out of scandal.
That’s the good thing about being a writer — maybe the bad thing, too — you can write your way out of almost anything but especially tumult as you try to make sense of the irrational.
This week, I was verbally attacked by two people.
Last night, I saw “A Complete Unknown,” based on Elijah Wald’s book “Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties,” and I found myself haunted not just by the music and the excellent evocation of Bob Dylan —from his 1961 arrival in Greenwich Village as a gifted but vulnerable folk music newbie to his imposition of rock’n’roll on the 1965 Newport Folk Festival as its legendary, disruptive closing act. — but by an idea.
And that idea, beautifully embodied in the film by Timothée Chalamet, is this: Why Dylan? Why not somebody else, or, for that matter, anybody else?