For example, in the Vatican, in the basement of St. Peter’s Basilica, I photographed a funerary slab dedicated to someone named "Ursinus." A quick web search revealed that he was an "anti-pope" who had lived around 360 A.D. The name Ursinus, of course, is derived from the Latin root for "bear," and it was around the time that I was researching this inscription that I happened to come across, on late-night Italian television, some very strange footage of John Denver and a grizzly bear. Further web research confirmed that John Denver had indeed made such a film a couple of years before his death: a frontier drama called Walking Thunder. Apparently the film was so bad it was never released in the US, not even on video, and had only seen the light of day through limited distribution to parts of Europe, for broadcast under the title Friend of the Bear.

Thus did a commemorative inscription for an obscure, renounced pope become a commemorative inscription for an obscure, renounced media artifact by a kind of pop culture saint.

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