In the August issue of Esquire (on newsstands now, but not yet online), there’s a story  by Brian Mockenhaupt called “The Tunnel,” in which inmate Joe Hoffman, encountering sand under the concrete floor of his cell while attempting to procure his freedom, pretty much sums up the quiet desperation of adult men everywhere: (more…)

I just finished reading David Giffels’s All the Way Home, which I’ll soon be reviewing for a different publication. It’s a memoir of a man who, with his pregnant wife and infant child, buys a falling-down mansion and begins trying to make it a home, with minimal help from contractors and maximal stress on his relationship with his wife and son. The house is his white whale, as he notes — to the extent that at one point it actually tries to swallow his leg — and the book is very consciously about Giffels process of trying to sort out his place in the world as a man, among other things (other things: crazy old ladies and how they may have gotten that way, the sadness and anger and confusion of miscarriages, how to fail at getting squirrels out of the attic with a Stratocaster, ghosts). He becomes obsessed with the restoration — an inherited condition for him, apparently — partly out of a desire to fulfill his obligations to his family, partly out of a need to sometimes avoid being an active participant in his family, and figures out how the former somehow leads to the latter while the latter prevents the former from happening. And it’s funny, did I mention that? (more…)

From Jamie Allen at McSweeney’s, a campaign speech on the occasion of the narrator’s 40th birthday:

And from those words, I have sensed what you might be thinking: Should we keep this person as our son … or should we legally disown him?

I want you to know, Mom and Dad: I … Hear … You.

(Applause.)

For that reason, I believe it’s time we talked about change. This campaign is all about change. We all want change for the better. We all want me to change into an independent, responsible adult who lives outside this house. You want it, Dad. You want it, Mom. And I am here to tell you that I want change, too.

As they say: it’s funny because it’s true.

James Bond, shaken and stirring, from “Crying Men,” by photographer Sam Taylor-Wood. The whole series is really beautiful. From The Arab Acquarius:

Taylor-Wood explains, “Some of the men cried before I even finished loading the camera, but others found it really difficult. People can decide for themselves which they think are the authentic tears and which they think are fake. It’s about the idea of taking these big, masculine men and showing a different side.”

The whole subject of men and crying is complicated and interesting and, I think, one of the most frequently misinterpreted elements of the discussion of traditional masculinity. (more…)

The late, lamented Canadian men’s mag Toro is back, sort of. As my good friend Marc Weisblott of Eye Weekly’s Scrolling Eye puts it:

[Of the relaunched, internet-only Toro] “It’s an example of how a men’s magazine looks and acts when taking advantage of state-of-the-art 21st century digital technology — as opposed to 18th-century printing press technology,” goes Morassutti’s YouTube-posted pitch. “Carrying forward just enough of the branding, categories and contributors for continuity — but also creating, from scratch, an exciting new men’s lifestyle platform that plays to the strengths of the online medium.”

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CBC Radio Ideas producer Richard Handler summarizes Dr. Leonard Sax’s book, Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men:

But then he bucks up and gives us five reasons for this epidemic. Many are familiar but Sax puts them all together like a brick thrown through your window:

• Video games. These addictive activities disengage boys from the world. Some young men even seem to prefer online porno to the prospect of sex with another human being.
• Teaching methods. Girls develop intellectually up to two years ahead of boys. Boys in grade school are naturally rambunctious. They need ways to express their native energy. They are being taught to read and write too early. Their mostly female teachers prefer compliant, dutiful girls.
• Prescription drugs. Hyperactive, frustrated boys are increasingly being medicated. This we all know. What Sax claims is that these drugs shrink the motivational centres of the brain and that the effect of this lasts years, well after these kids stop taking their meds. I hadn’t heard this before but if it’s true, it is truly frightening.
• Endocrine disruptors. Chemicals from plastic bottles, canned food linings and some shampoos mimic natural estrogen, the female hormone. Boys’ testosterone levels are half of what they were in their grandfathers’ day. Also, their bones are significantly more brittle.
• The devaluation of masculinity. Boys don’t know how to become men. They no longer have appropriate rights of passage. Once Father Knows Best was the paternalistic model but now he has been replaced (and mocked) by a dopey Homer Simpson. Sax likes the old virtues of courage and temperance, with a good measure of intelligence.

Sounds familiar. Not sure whether I agree with all the elements of his diagnosis. Another book to add to the pile.

Picture this: it’s 2012 and a new Rick Rubin-produced American Recordings masterpiece hits the (by then entirely virtual) record store shelves. The album art features, in arty black and white, a solitary figure, perhaps hunched slightly, but with his chin held defiantly high, sitting at a grand piano in the Nevada desert under a vast grey sky, the panorama of the landscape that surrounds him somehow enlarging him rather than shrinking him. When you press play, you’ll hear the sound of a lone artist in an empty room, the absence heavy in the air as the tentative, almost muted simplicity of a few eerily melodic piano keys provides the solemn backdrop for the voice, once a belting baritone, now roughened up by the sandpaper of hard-earned wisdom and tamed by a reluctant familiarity with mortality. Men and women of America, I give you an artist chewed up and forgotten but not defeated. With the great beyond in sight, he’s perched at an elevation to survey the great before that was One Man’s Life — the showgirls and the bubbly drinks, the whole world as a chorus, the highlights and the bright lights alongside all the derision and disrespect — and to whisper in the only voice with which age can address youth; cracking, failing, but insistent: no regrets, no excuses; it’s sad, and lonely, and scary at the end, and though memories of a life lived on your own terms are a poor substitute for a life ahead of you, they become all that remains. Ladies and gentleman, in the tradition of Johnny Cash, the singer-songwriter as American Icon:

Barry Manilow? Nah, right? But if Rick Rubin can work his man-for-the-ages magic on Neil Diamond, you gotta figure it could be anyone. Manilow? Why not. Elton John? Step right up. Phil Collins? Of course, this came to my attention thanks to Diamond’s song “Act Like A Man,” which is frustratingly unavailable online in a form I can link to available for a free listen right here. (more…)

OK, I can kind of understand the general thrust of Canadian Club’s new ad campaign, with the tagline “Damn right your Dad drank it.”

I imagine that if you are in the business of trying to sell rye whiskey (No, not scotch, the other whiskey. No, that’s bourbon, we mean the other other whiskey.) you hear a lot in focus groups about how it’s an old fogey drink. And so one sympathizes with the effort to turn a positive into a negative — trying to cash in the general “mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again” nostalgia sometimes experienced by dudes entering what another beverage marketing firm would like us all to refer to as our “Carlsberg Years.”

I mean, didn’t our forefathers know how to use tools and fire guns and fistfight bears and all that other badass shit? That’s cool, right? And hell, the kind of guy likely to go in for the wood-panelled rec room vibe in the photos might find himself — fresh home from having his chest waxed and in the midst of plucking stray eyebrow hairs — looking in the mirror and sympathizing with the whole “Dad was not a meterosexual” message. I see the thinking. (You know I’m not immune to that crap.)

But how to understand the fact that not one but two of these ads evoke the image of “your dad” getting laid?

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