Rambo is juiced and doesn’t apologize for it.
Not baseball
the “downfall” of the cowboys…
Not everyone is happy that the Giants are going to the Super Bowl.
James White vs. a Jumping Myth
This is an excerpt from a book by Todd Gallagher, called Andy Roddick Beat Me With a Frying Pan, answering abiding sports questions that, in this case, have nothing to do with baseball. But it reminded me of my summer at basketball camp, when I was in between the eighth and ninth grades, at Kutscher’s in the Catskills. Wilt Chamberlain was the big name at the camp, but my best time was spent chatting with Walt Frazier in the parking lot. Still, reading the linked story reminded me of something else.
“Jumping” Johnny Green was our guest coach and apropos his nickname someone asked if he really could pick a dollar bill off the top of the backboard.
“For a dollar bill, no,” he said, as if he’d answered this question a million times (and probably had, what with that nickname of his), “But put a $20 bill up there and I’ll show you how it’s done.”
Needless to say, the scores of 11 year olds that surrounded him in their basketball togs didn’t have a dollar between them, much less a double sawbuck.
Too bad.
Video: James Wolcott on Norman Mailer, 1991
Entertainment & Culture: vanityfair.com
When Norman Mailer died recently I was surprised by the number of friends who told me that Harlot’s Ghost is the book of Mailer’s to read. I’m a huge fan, have read most of the major books and some of the less major, but lost interest in his later books.
About Harlot’s Ghost I remember bad reviews, but with such recommendations I’ll have to find a copy.
In the meantime, here is a short film directed by the excellent Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol, American Psycho) for a PBS TV show that is really a review of Harlot’s Ghost by the excellent Jim Wolcott. It makes me want to wade into those 1,400 page a little less, but is well worth watching for more than the simple review.
Vick takes class in respect for animals
The course was given by PETA, the funloving group of animal lovers who abjure publicity. Dan Shannon, PETA publicist said: “We made it clear to [Vick] that this was something he needed to try to get something out of. We weren’t interested in some kind of PR ploy.”
The source for this story is clearly PETA, which isn’t a problem. Just funny.
Funloving, funny, prone to show pictures of slaughtered animals. It doesn’t quite add up. I agree with PETA about our need to recognize when we’re hurting animals. As a society we’ve shunted the abatoir into the shadows. We eat meat, but we don’t often think about what that means, for the dead meat or us.
PETA is constantly finding ways to dramatize what it means for us humans and the animals we like to eat (or fight) because Ingrid Newkirk and Dan Shannon are most excellent PR people who are putting their passion to their skills. This story about Vick is part of that practice, and it doesn’t bother me at all.
Not until they start messing with my local cockfight.
Memory
I read Slate most every day, but I don’t always watch all the new video and visual stuff they have because I think pictures are more like evidence than reportage. There may be a lot to glean from a photo, but not that much was intended by the photographer. So when I’m skimming I ignore the photos and read the words.
But this photo memorial of the September 11 attacks on NYC (not that there weren’t others, but they aren’t dealt with here) stopped me in my tracks and helped me remember the day.
I live (with my family) just a mile or so east of what was the Twin Towers site, in Brooklyn, and fortunately we (my wife and 2 year old daughter) weren’t in the city that day. But when I came back a few days later my streets were littered with the memories/evidence of people who worked in the Towers. The winds then blew east as they always do.
I had dinner with friends in Tribeca that night in a restaurant just a handful of blocks north of Ground Zero, while pop stars played a benefit on TV above the bar (and in Madison Square Garden), and the feeling was bizarre. Having to have your host (a friend who happened to live below Canal Street) meet you at a check point so police would allow you to get below Canal Street seemed like a scene from some sci-fi story. Hey, we’re Americans. We can go where we please! But meeting guys who drove in from all over the US to work on the site, running on adrenaline and best wishes and the coffee of the local restaurants, was a little overwhelming. Inspiring, really.
Back in the day, when the president was considering using our military to somehow wage a war against terrorism, I wrote more about this on this site. My thought then was that it was stupid, or venal. My cynical reading of GW Bush’s personal history makes it hard for me not to think that he’s placing the interests of his super rich friends ahead of those of the rest of us Americans.
Unfortunately, I think objective evidence bears that out. If you follow the money.
I’m writing about this now because for the last week I’ve been bugged by a decided curse that would only go away when I was cooking, eating or drinking with my friends, who fortunately have been around a lot. But when I wasn’t in action I have felt awful, and the thought occured to me that this awfulness was residual. It sure felt a lot like how I felt after the Towers fell, when I walked streets littered with the paper of people who worked in the Towers, from their desktops or drawers, some of whom certainly died. At that moment, all I really wanted to do was punish those who might have done this thing, because that might make me safe again.
But now things seem much different. I’m feeling the same way again, only my story about sitting on a pile of rock with rescue workers has lost its charm. My daughter’s comment about the smell that wafted above Ground Zero for months after the attack, that it smelt like goat cheese, has became increasingly cute, rather than acute. All because we all know that since that day we’ve been losing a war on terrorism in Iraq that should never have been launched, while we’ve sacrificed nearly 3,800 US soldiers. So far. And others from our Coalition members.
And death isn’t the half of it. Modern medical technology has made it possible to live without arms and legs as if you had then, or at least some of them. But does that diminish the pain felt when they’re gone?
I’m writing about this because I think almost all of the Bush agenda after the September 11 attacks was either cynical, he wanted the oil, or brainless, they thought they could beat Al Queda by overthrowing Saddam Hussein. (The Dick Cheney video from 1995 about why we didn’t overthrow Hussein after the first Gulf War debunks the second strand.)
I’m a baseball guy and I know that George W. Bush, as a baseball owner, was a stooge for moneyed guys who told him when to jump and how high. These same guys paid for him to become president. I really doubt this dog has learned new tricks.
God, I hate this day.
Epicenter-iPhone Mania
This is certainly not the place for this, but I happen to have handled an iPhone last weekend and was mighty impressed. Not enough to even consider signing on to the hefty data charges that come with the ATT service (I don’t really need cellular data), but it sure worked well and felt nice in my hand.
The intro of the iPod Touch changes things. It has web browsing. It has more capacity than my shuffle, and it can help you find your stuff on it because it has a screen. That’s what I’m looking for. It’s an iPhone without the phone and camera, which I didn’t really need to begin with. Count me in.
But then Apple dropped the price on the iPhone, and all hell broke loose. Some people were proud to be early adopters who paid a premium. Some felt that sudden (and early) price drop dissed them.
I have a theory and since I have no other place to post it I’ll do it here. I haven’t seen anyone else come close to this, which is why I claim it as my exclusive tea reading. But I haven’t read everything. So please consider it just a thought.
Apple is trying to negotiate a deal with single carriers in all the international markets, the way they did with AT+T in the US. But cell phone systems abroad don’t work the same way, they resist exclusivity, so Apple is having a problem.
Meanwhile, they have the iPod Touch coming out. It’s an iPhone without the phone. And camera. The beauty of it is that they can sell it all over the world without making deals with the phone companies.
Those phone companies then have to contend with the prospect of losing out on the iPhone business. So maybe they will fall into line. And even if they don’t, Apple is selling pricey iPods all over the world.
All the hubbub looks like more masterful marketing, yet again. Giving out $100 gift certificates will hurt cash flow, but given the push around the world to make the iPhone touch THE xmas gift, that price is chump change.
The deal here is all in the international markets, which is why Apple decided to risk pissing off the early adopters in the US.
It wasn’t because they could. It was because they had to (in order not to surrender to the European cell companies).
If this turns out right, you read it here first.
Tony Wilson, dead
Some time ago I read and became enthusiastic about Griel Marcus’s amazing book Lipstick Traces, which found punk impulses in a series of historical figures going back to medeival times, but mostly concentrated on Guy DeBord and the French Situationist International. DeBord and the SI were a small group who by design spent lots of time in cafes drinking, but who also developed a post-Marxist critique of modern society that in many ways is a shockingly apt description of our celebrity culture and the primacy of entertainment when it comes to keeping people fat and happy.
Smitten with Marcus’s book, I went to Berkeley to meet him and, I hoped, talk him into giving me the rights to make a docucrama TV version that I dreamed would play on some PBS affiliate of MTV. Greil was smart and generous and smartly skeptical, which meant I walked away with a most-treasured mix tape of the music he talks about in Lipstick Traces, an invaluable VHS of the Sex Pistol’s last concert at Winterland in San Francisco, and his suggestion that if I needed money to do this I should talk to Tony Wilson, who, he explained, was the guy who owned Joy Division’s label.
I mention this because for me part of the power of 24 Hour Party People is knowing just how accessible all these people were, at the time, and the recognition that it was my own fear that kept me from phoning Wilson and getting this project off the ground. DIY should mean I should have made that call. Wilson’s death also reminds me about how great Winterbottom’s movie is, and is a reminder that some day Malcolm McClaren will die, too, at which point we will rehash all this stuff again, in spades. And double dutch.
If you are interested in the Sex Pistols and McClaren and the Manchester scene and any or all of London punk, you should read Lipstick Traces, which really is a great book. But tonight we toast Tony Wilson, a man who didn’t wait to meet someone to find a way to express all the stuff that was churning up inside himself. Cheers.
Ousmane Sembène
He is usually called the greatest of all African filmmakers, but this is really an insult. Not because the ranks of great African filmmakers is small, but because Sembene certainly ranks with the great filmmakers of all time. A resolute socialist, a son of the working class and the colonial system—which both shaped his worklife (and life) and ironically provided him the means to succeed as an artist—he was originally a novelist and short story writer. I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t read any of his fiction. It was his concern that his writing would not be widely read (in Africa) that caused him to turn to filmmaking when he was 40.
His first film, Black Girl, an unsparing portrait of a Senegalese girl who is brought to France to work. is notable for its formal elegance and very Senegalese point of view, though it looks like a French film.
His later films can be much funnier, even when dealing with serious themes. I think Guelwaar, the story of a doomed Muslim funeral, is his masterpiece, but others claim similar honors for Xala (a businessman has his mojo stolen and cannot consummate his third marriage), Faat-Kine (a comedy about a woman succeeding in business), and Moolaade (which I haven’t seen, about female genital cutting).
I suggest starting with Guelwaar, in which you’ll discover a wonderful artist with an expansive view of people, politics and the way these things collide, who is working at the top of his game.
Owens getting his bonus from Cowboys, not practicing
I tried to blog about the whole A-Rod lapdance thing yesterday, but the system was down. Let me just say that I can’t think of single reason except venality for the NY Post to run that litany of A-Rod’s appearances in strip clubs. Except, of course, to tittilate. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it is what it is.
This story on Yahoo, which I think comes from Reuters because it is unattributed (though I could be wrong about that), seems to be making the argument that TO shouldn’t get his signing bonus for skipping voluntary workouts. Emphasis on Voluntary.
The reporter seems to know this. Other players who skipped the Voluntary workouts are also listed, though there may be a finger wagging there, too.
I like to think that if they actually had to kill trees to print this stuff someone would try to save the planet, at least a little.
But I’m an optimist.
In the meantime, try to avoid the crap.
Rotoman