On February 21, 2001, Eminem and Elton John performed "Stan" at the Grammy Awards. The performance came after nine months of controversy concerning the homophobic lyrics on Eminem's second album, The Marshall Mathers LP, and before the show gay activist groups had protested outside the Staples Center. "Believe it or not, it was my idea to perform with Elton," writes Eminem (with ghostwriting by Sacha Jenkins) in his recent autobiography, The Way I Am. "Elton and me—we're friends … He's gay! And we're friends! And who cares?" To the protesters' relief, Eminem failed to win Best Album that night. He lost to Steely Dan, a band named after a dildo. One song on Two Against Nature is delivered from the perspective of a pedophile.

Genres of music ought to be classified by the emotions they inspire in their listeners. Joy, comfort, arousal, self-satisfaction—for rock music, those are emotions it's easy to talk about.

Punk rock began for me with fear. The music arrived for me historically late, at the end of the 1980s, and personally early, when I was fourteen years old. I was a child. Rock is for children. You have to be that young to feel it with full intensity, to hear the drumbeat strike and think it is the world reaching out to punch you. With experience the nerves become sclerotic, and you learn that the promises of the lyrics are lies and posturing. By twenty-eight you're left with the knowledge that you're the fan of a deficient art form. Your emotions have evolved to deny you rock music's best benefits, and it's become much too late to develop any comparably deep feeling from any other music. As a grown-up, still listening to the same stuff, you're genuinely ruined.

Read More

Josh Hamilton (With Tim Keown). Beyond Belief. Faith Words. October 2008.

The most striking pages of Beyond Belief tell the tale of Texas Rangers' All Star Josh Hamilton's astoundingly precocious talent. At the age of six, Hamilton could throw a baseball 50 miles per hour—his first peg from shortstop in Little League knocked his bewildered first baseman to the ground. Shortly thereafter, he was elevated to a "Majors" team in North Carolina's Tar Heel League, where his manager (also his dad) batted him ninth behind boys twice his age for the sake of propriety. The first-grader punched his first home run over the left-center field fence off a pitcher who must have had at least the beginnings of pubic hair. It was Hamilton's earliest spiritual moment: "It's hard to explain, but on contact, I felt nothing. It's one of the best feelings in the world." 

Read More

There was a time during the middle of 2007 when every junior staff member at the magazine where I worked was looking for love on the Internet. The art director, an amiable Scandinavian in his mid-twenties, set up a white umbrella lamp in his tiny office and snapped some pictures of our coworker Rob that revealed a pair of bee-stung lips and dreamy eyelashes we had never quite noticed while sitting hunched in the glare of our computers. Rob had wanted the pictures for online-dating purposes, and he posted them, next to descriptive text that made him sound noble and introspective (maybe, all this time, he really was noble and introspective). Within a few weeks, Rob began dating a beautiful Cuban law student. I felt a sense of envy, maybe, but not of loss. I didn't quite want to date Rob. Sitting four feet away from me, day in and day out, he was too close already to want to bring into that other kind of closeness. But the rest of New York, it seemed, was too far away. Surely there were other offices on our block where people our age also toiled with computers and ideas. Why couldn't we meet them? We could invite them all to our office for Friday-afternoon beers, and the next week, they could have us over to theirs. Like many sensible things, it seemed impossible to arrange.

Read More

He'd felt it slipping away with every passing week. He only had another three months, four at most, to amount to something. Striding, sliding almost, in a frenzy of purposelessness down the street, he looked straight ahead, eyes narrowed, clutching groceries bought in panic, nothing he could actually eat (a lime, some broccoli). He needed to get back and sit at a table, clear it and clean it, then sit at it, straight-backed, focused. It was this tedious necessity of going out, buying produce, eating, which was holding him back. And then all the endless cleaning, and the sudden fear of what would happen if he did not speak to other people for days on end. Would he forget how the world was? He'd stopped reading the news. He knew nothing. He paused, contemplated in the cold, then walked in to a small convenience store. He needed table polish. Read More

School #2 in Yoloten, Turkmenistan, was built in 1931, right as the first exiles began arriving from the Pale of Settlement in Ukraine. I know this because I worked at school #2 for eighteen months, and because Renata Aleksevich, school #2's gym teacher, would tell me this sort of thing, hand-rolling his makhorka cigarettes and trying to figure out what an American was doing in what is still sometimes referred to locally as a corner of the Gulag. Yoloten had largely been built and populated by Ukrainians and Armenians, Tatars and Georgians and Azeris—osobeiye izganniki, special exiles sent to Central Asia during the upheavals of the USSR. It was sometimes suggested in Yoloten that I, too, must have been exiled to end up there. This wasn't exactly true, but my job there was at times difficult to understand.

Read More

It's a little sad to see GM dying just the way they lived. Their latest death throe is called the "Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility," an incredibly awkward name designed to yield the acronym P.U.M.A. The PUMA is a two-seater city car based on the Segway scooter, a vehicle which has done more to advance situation comedy than personal transportation. The oblivious magician Gob Bluth drove one on Arrested Development, not caring that he was chasing pedestrians off the sidewalk, and Niles Crane briefly tooled around his brother's apartment on Fraser. With the effete Niles there was the added whammy of watching a man who simply can't handle his technology, all very funny until you realize where it leads. Bush showed himself a techno-fool by falling off a Segway in 2003, shortly after he invaded Iraq. 

Read More

Having demonized Lytton Strachey in The Voyage Out (1915) by making the purportedly straight character based on Strachey misogynist, Virginia Woolf treats him rather well in Jacob's Room (1922). Not only is Richard Bonamy, the decidedly gay character based on Strachey, not misogynist, he's the hero Jacob's fondest friend, just as Strachey himself had been to Virginia's brother Thoby. He's also someone with whom Woolf seems to identify: it's Bonamy, after all, who's left alone with Jacob's mother in that suddenly empty room and to whom, holding out a pair of shoes, she poses that suddenly sentimental—and unanswerable—question: "What am I to do with these?" Or at least I find the question sentimental, almost unbearably so—which for me happens to be a good thing, and which is why I cherish it more than any other finale in prose fiction. Read More