For
example, in the Vatican, in the basement of St. Peters 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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