Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, “The Cardsharps” (ca. 1595)
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, “The Cardsharps” (ca. 1595) Read More »
Manti T’eo: LGBT Icon?
At my Facebook page yesterday, a friend teased me about being the “Access Hollywood of the erudite class.” She has a point. First I promoted my article about how Lance Armstrong deserves to be ignored. Then I reveled in the truly bizarre Manti T’eo story. In particular, I love the fact that it will steal the show from the Armstrong-Oprah Winfrey shenanigans. But my attitude towards T’eo is very different than my take on Armstrong. As I explained yesterday, Armstrong’s impending celebrity rehabilitation is such a cliché as to bore me stiff. Plus, he doesn’t seem to deserve our sympathy. But T’eo is another matter altogether. Let me explain why. There are really only two possibilities here. Either he’s the most gullible person in the world, or he was in on it. After reading the extensively researched Deadspin article by Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey that broke the story, I find it very unlikely that T’eo is some heartbroken simpleton. Rather, he probably concocted the entire story with the help of a 22 year old named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo. So $64 question is: Why?
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I’ve Come to Bury Lance Armstrong, Not to Hate Him
There are so many reasons to hate Lance Armstrong. For some, it is enough that he cheated his way to the top. For others it is that he lied about it repeatedly. And for yet others, such as Linda Holmes at National Public Radio, it’s about the way he lied, arrogantly flinging indignation in our faces. And then there’s all the stuff unrelated to his fraudulent cycling career. Such as the way he abandoned his wife, who had raised their kids while he was off biking and supported him while he fought cancer, so he could have an affair with singer Sheryl Crow. Before moving on to actress Kate Hudson, fashion designer Tory Burch and child actress Ashley Olson (she was 21, he was 36). Hell, the magazine Ask Men came up with no less than ten reasons for hating Lance Armstrong, ranging from his shallow and self-entitled political aspirations to the fact that he hangs out with Matthew McConaughey. Why does everyone hate Matthew McConaughey? No matter. I don’t hate Matthew McConaughey. And I don’t hate Lance Armstrong either, though he probably deserves it. Because to me, hating Armstrong is uninteresting.
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Baltimore on the Lewis (Loose)
I’m only now just “crawling from the wreckage,” as Dave Edmuds once put it. The carnage from what remains of Baltimore is naught but charred ruins and empty Courvoisier bottles. This city has always been a fuse. The spark came on Friday when Baltimore Ravens linebacker/legend Ray Lewis stunned his loyal fan base by announcing he was done after this playoff run. Seventeen years was enough. The fine citizenry of Charm City, a.k.a. Harm City, a.k.a. Mob Town, a.k.a. The City that Bleeds, a.k.a. Bodymore, Murderland, immediately entered a panicked frenzy. What would they do without their beloved linebacker/murder suspect? For two days the town was on edge. It all culminated with yesterday’s game, a home playoff tilt against none other than the Indianapolis, née Baltimore Colts. Bring home Baltimore’s once-beloved team to play the villains in Ray Lewis’ final home game? It was too much for people to take. It’s like telling a man his children are going to die regardless, but at least they’ll go to heaven if he murders his wife. The town snapped.
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Facing Down Christmas
I have very fond memories from the 1990s of listening to a friend’s Gujarati Indian immigrant family butcher Christmas carols. It was an annual Christmas Eve tradition for these religious Hindus. Each year, with women on one side of the room and men on the other, the genders separated by the large, decorated tree, they joyously worked their way through about a half-dozen classics. Sometimes they sang in unison, and sometimes they traded parts while they consulted xeroxed lyric sheets. When it came to “Deck the Halls,” everyone always got a chuckle out of the men warbling “Fa la la la, La la la la!” For me, an 20-something atheist half-Jew, it was a liberating experience. If you have overwrought memories of and expectations for Christmas, it can be quite stressful. If you’ve become jaded about the holiday’s commercialism and relentlessness, it can be incessantly annoying. But if you’re Jewish, it can raise issues of inadequacy. Christmas just seems like so much fun. For starters, there’s the Christmas tree, that coniferous shrine of positive reciprocity, which is certainly one of the coolest things in and of itself in the eyes of a child. And the litter of gifts it bears? For a pre-pubescent, the orgy of Christmas gifts is about as close as you get to sex. But it wasn’t just tinsel and ribbons I envied. The seasonal kindness and fraternity that accompanies Christmas also made me jealous. Goddamn if those Gentiles don’t seem like they’re having the time of their lives during the Christmas season. All of a sudden everyone is in such a good mood, doing nice things for each other, extending holiday greetings, and sharing moments of real, heart-felt sincerity. Christians, even relative strangers, have a way of looking in each other’s eyes during the Christmas season and saying just the nicest things in the world and seeming to really, really mean them.
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Edward Hopper, “Early Sunday Morning” (1930)
Edward Hopper, “Early Sunday Morning” (1930)
Edward Hopper, “Early Sunday Morning” (1930) Read More »