The truth is, I find the stadium experience to be annoyingly corporeal.
Arriving at the hotel in Kansas City, I realized I had never been in a hotel full of Ecuadorians because in Ecuador, the hotels are full of tourists. It was a sea of bright yellow soccer jerseys. Vamos, carajo! Everyone was singing, walking around wrapped in the flag, greeting strangers warmly. It was more Ecuadorian than Ecuador. In the hotel elevator, at random bars in town, at the vintage clothing shop, there were clumps and clusters of people in yellow. Everything was inside out.
It’s a literature of dimming stars, smoggy drives through flammable chaparral, frequent benders, prostitutes. Flash periods of productivity where somebody bangs out a script in a week. There’s at least one genre-disorienting tour through the facades of a studio lot, like the masterpiece sequence in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, and plenty of languid musing about the vicissitudes of fame, often delivered poolside.
In a league hellbent on favoring the pass, the honest, appraising physicality of blocking and tackling has been replaced by the weaselly violence of the passing game. We wince for defenseless receivers, or throw up our hands at another ludicrous pass interference call, or stare in disappointment at another dropped ball.
He roamed the streets with a television camera, looking for women to proposition. He was somewhere between a talent scout for a modeling agency, a casting director, and a photographer, but he conducted his business not in a studio, or an office, behind closed doors. Rather, he strolled the boulevards of midtown Manhattan, dressed outlandishly. Even though the drama of his half-hour shows culminated—or did not culminate—in revealed breasts, some of which I still recall, the most vivid imagery of the show were the shots of Ugly George himself, a lunatic in hot pants, shirtless in the summer, with a huge camera on his shoulders, strolling through midtown amidst a sea of people in suits.
Fascist America, like America in general, has rarely had a problem with absorbing the cultural output of those it seeks to destroy
To anyone psychically invested in the velvet glove of normal life, we are already in the throes of an insurrection that must be stamped out. We are nearing the end of a summer that taught us nothing is inviolable, not precincts and not the promise that black people will entertain us to the bitter end. Republicans know that what has been unleashed will not be pacified easily. Pat Lynch, the head of the NYPD union, gave a speech castigating the left and the Democrats and all but swearing fealty to Trump. The congressional Democrats who embarrassingly kneeled in kente cloth were featured in a video roll call of radicalism alongside the DSA and toppled Confederate statues.
