Lance Armstrong returns to the Tour De France, as our Parisian sports correspondent reports…
PARIS—He’s baaaaaaaaaack.
Four years after he last wore the Maillot Jaune on the Champs Elysees – 2005 was his seventh consecutive Tour de France victory – Lance Armstrong, or as I like to call him, The Wristbanded One, is back on French soil. And tomorrow, July 4th, the 37-year-old American sporting icon will celebrate his country’s Independence Day by hopping on a bicycle and setting out with 179 other riders representing 20 teams on a 21-stage, 23-day cycling journey across a country whose general public has never really warmed to the audacious Texan.
The French press has been whipping itself into a decent lather over Monsieur Armstrong’s participation in the 96th edition of Le Tour for the past, oh, forever or so. Technically, though, Lance is not in France yet, and neither are any of his competitors. This year’s Tour kicks off in Monaco with a 15-kilometre time trial, and will pass through five other countries – France, Spain, Andorra, Switzerland and Italy – before a champion is crowned on July 26 at Paris’s Place de la Concorde. (more…)
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Listen to a song from Walrus contributor Nick Hune-Brown’s new musical, Just East of Broadway
From the Dept. of Shameless Self-Promotion: We’re pleased to announce that Walrus contributor Nick Hune-Brown has a new musical, Just East of Broadway, opening tonight at the Toronto Fringe Festival. Nick, who moonlights as the keyboard player for the wonderful Hooded Fang, also co-wrote the 2007 fringe hit Lord of the Rings: The Musical: The Musical!, which the Toronto Star described as “cheerful and slapdash.” Best of luck to him, like he needs it.
Click below for a short description of the play and showtimes at their MySpace site; for the rest of you outside Toronto, The Walrus is happy to showcase this semi-kinda-exclusive demo track from the musical, “The Cookie Never Lies,” performed by Hune-Brown and the show’s director, Lorna Wright.
“The Cookie Never Lies,” [MP3] Just East of Broadway showtimes, [MySpace]
Jonathan Richman doesn’t believe in air conditioning. He doesn’t think that our comfort is worth expanding the ozone hole for, and he feels that “when we refuse to suffer,” we “cheat feeling.” Fair enough, but the motionless ceiling fans above the Great Hall in Toronto, whose floors are slick with sweat, are a bit of a kick in the ass. Sandwiched between my boyfriend and a pair of loudmouthed forty-somethings who are yelling out song requests and botching the titles (”play Summertime Feeling!”), watching Jonathan make eye contact with the audience and wiggle through his dance routine, I’m torn between primal rage and tears of joy. Don’t get me wrong—I take Jonathan’s words as gospel. Living them is a different story.
JR was one of the great discoveries of my life. One of the hardest parts of growing up is realizing that life is actually pretty good, that what seemed like serious pain was really boredom and sexual anxiety. At sixteen, having obtained a fake ID, and, with much effort, convinced someone to sleep with me, I was content. It wasn’t easy. For one thing, I could finally see my musical heroes for what they were: petulant children with undiagnosed personality disorders. Nevertheless, my record collection remained a monument to unwarranted self-pity. When I found Jonathan, I found the idol I should have started with. Whereas most rockstars’ songbooks read like manuals for fucking up your life, JR’s is the ongoing autobiography of a satisfied person. (more…)
The first late night monologues written since Michael Jackson’s death will be broadcast later today. The tone will almost certainly be different from the usual mentions Jackson receives. Along with Bill Clinton’s promiscuity and George W. Bush’s ignorance, Jackson’s strangeness is a recurring trope in paint-by-numbers American comedy. And not without reason. Even Jackson’s most ardent admirers must concede that he was a disturbed figure. Still, at times I’d find myself troubled by the constant barrage of abuse directed at him.
I don’t blame the comedians, really. I laughed at my fair share of the jokes. Still, as Craig Ferguson explained in his first show after Britney Spears’s self-inflicted balding, comedians should focus their abuse on the powerful. Clinton and Bush can handle it. Maybe it’s also fair to have expected Jackson to handle it. Such a monumentally successful musician may not have seemed like a particularly vulnerable target, but remember the abuse Jackson suffered at the hands of his father, and consider that his oft-mocked Peter Pan syndrome was the result of desperately grasping for the healthy childhood he never experienced.
An interview with Camille Paglia, on high art and why Twitter is for high school kids
Interview by David Balzer.From her magnum opus, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson to Break, Blow, Burn, her recent anthology of 43 poems accompanied by close readings, Camille Paglia has become renowned for her irascibility, her indignation, and her blistering wit. Few public intellectuals have been able to squeeze more out of a half-hour — which is what she gave me a few weeks ago, the day after her lecture at the Royal Ontario Museum in June — a talent that speaks to her militancy in the face of a culture that has turned swiftly from the kinds of towering aesthetics and muscular analysis she holds so dear.
It is no coincidence, then, that her talk, on the occasion of the ROM’s Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit, concerned “Hollywood and the Bible,” specifically Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 epic The Ten Commandments. Clearly in reverence of the old American tradition of female Moseses like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Aimee Semple McPherson, Paglia is bombastic and contentious in front of a crowd, inviting fans and detractors alike to listen and testify. Billed as an atheist who had come to defend religion, she spoke first of her Italian-Catholic upbringing, using it as a springboard for an argument about teaching religion in the classroom as a historical compass and a commanding cultural presence. In response to a question on Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, she said defiantly of its title, “I am willing to let my entire legacy rest on one sentence from Sexual Personae: ‘God is man’s greatest idea.’ Let his entire legacy rest on that.” (Read the rest of the interview…)
Black woman, early 40s, wearing white sleeveless shirt, grey dress capris, thick-soled black sneakers, and carrying a turquoise leather purse.
The woman beside her wants to talk. Would the man standing with the small child like her seat? Do the cars have air conditioning? What stop to they get off at? Should she have brought a jacket?
She hugs a small rolling suitcase to her knees, a white leather purse with accidental ball point scribbles along one seam stuffed in her lap. Her son sits across from her, a much larger suitcase closing him. He rests his head on top of it, one earphone in, the other dangling, emitting the steady beats of hip hop.
“You forgot to put the twisty ties on the zippers.”
He lifts his head, nods once, and rests his cheek against the luggage’s handle.
“Nodding ain’t gonna keep nobody out of that luggage. I didn’t buy you no new shorts and T-shirts to have somebody steal them.” (more…)
Like most self-proclaimed serious readers, I maintain loosely-codified mental lists of books I feel I should read and those I actually want to. Then there are those volumes that bridge both categories, but that I’ve avoided because of their intimidating page counts. I feel certain that I’ll eventually get around to reading Middlemarch and Underworld (I’m less sure about In Search of Lost Time), but as of this week I’m joining an array of readers across the Internet who are braving David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
The plan calls for reading an entirely feasible seventy-five pages per week, meaning an approximate end date of September 22. The Infinite Summer website offers several tips which range from the absolutely necessary to the seemingly dubious, as well as testimonials from participants like the blogger Jason Kottke and The Decemberists’ frontman Colin Meloy. I’ve never been one for book clubs, but the site’s discussion forum may well prove to be interesting. (more…)
Hear me, O my rapturous children, and I will tell you the saga of page thirty-eight.
By which I mean: the lettered page proofs for my forthcoming graphic novel The Executor arrived last week. They’ve been a long time coming. I first started talking to Vertigo Comics about writing something for them in 2004, and finished the script in 2007. Worth the wait, though. Absolutely gorgeous art by Andrea Mutti. Another year yet before it hits bookstore shelves, as part of the new Vertigo Crime line; but in the interim, here’s a backstage tour of how and where the magic happens. Buckle up, keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times … and whatever may occur, please do not feed the artists. (more…)
This is not news – the New York Times and Slate have already been on it – but I’m still astounded at how easy it is to make your own yogurt.
Dairy products that go beyond milk tend to have an air of magic or sorcery about them. Yogurt, in particular, is a little eerie for being alive, and it’s certainly not anything I’d ever heard of my friends or family whipping up at home. Like butter, which I still naively tend to imagine being churned by a Swiss milkmaid in an idyllic meadow somewhere, I always kind of thought yogurt was something that only highly specialized masters could produce – yogurt elves, perhaps, or maybe an Indian yogi who spent all of his time on top of a mountain, meditating in front of a giant lake of milk until fermentation occurred. (more…)
There’s a certain disdain in the terms people use to describe Christopher Hitchens
Interview by Dave Morris. There’s a certain disdain in the terms people use to describe Christopher Hitchens. “Bad boy” and “rock star” are quite popular, not least because they subtly suggest that the long-time columnist, literary critic and political commentator’s ardent and passionate mode of arguing — some might even say bullying — masks a lack of substance.
After spending the better part of an hour in the well-appointed 18th-floor bar of the Park Hyatt, trying to find criticisms of his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything that had a hope of sticking, I have one observation to offer: Hitchens freely acknowledges evidence that could undermine his argument, and has substantial respect for those who do the same. Were he a mere showman, or worse, a propagandist, he might try to control the line of questioning so as to avoid being placed in any kind of negative light. But Hitchens never avoids questions that draw him towards controversial or difficult topics — if he makes statements that seem dangerously off-the-cuff, it’s because he’s always willing to clarify or expand on them until his position is clear. Read the interview.
Caucasian male, late 20s, with long dark hair, wearing plain white T-shirt, brown cargo shorts, and black pool slide sandals.
The woman beside him wears crisp white pants and a crisp white jacket. Her shoes are carnation pink, as is her belt, bracelet, and scarf tied neatly around her neck. She slouches in her seat, fatigued, loosely gripping the handles of her carnation pink purse, her nails painted in the same shade. She is defeated in springtime, the sizable mole over her left eyebrow off-shade, tea rose, puce, but not carnation pink, her mother’s favourite flower. At today’s weekly tea she may as well have been wearing amaranth. 52-years-old and she still can’t do anything right.
Julie Wilson is a literary voyeur, the Gossip Girl of the Book World. She tracks readers in the wild at SeenReading.com. Follow Julie on Twitter @seenreading, and @bookmadam where she runs a monthly contest with McNally Robinson.
