Buzzards Worth the Stairs
R.I.P. THIS POST
THIS PHOTO IS OF A HERZOG FILM. . . STARRING KINSKI. . . AS A CHARACTER THAT SHOWED WHAT A FINE LINE THERE WAS BETWEEN THE TWO.
LOOK UP TO FOR MY TRUE FEELINGS.
posted by Bethlehem Shoals @ 3/02/2007 05:46:00 PM
16 comments
16 Comments:
I guess the question I would ask you is why you are so emotionally invested in Arenas being weird. Why do you care so much? Doesn't it say a lot about his supposed eccentricities that they're so important to you?
Interesting seeing Livingston as 12 on the "Free Darko" list
I feel ilke I understand Arenas pretty well: he's a celebrity who wants affection, and decided to close the gap between him and the fans by being the most 'real'; he just happens to have a skewed sense of what sounds 'real' when you tell it to an interviewer.
Thanks for the surreal link.
Maynard
60 pills isn't just an arbitrary reference to suicide, though -- it's a reference to TO. One thing about Gilbert is that he often asserts, to sportswriters, that he's not like sportswriters' bad guys: TO, Artest, Sheed.
Which is fine: I'd much rather spend an afternoon with Gilbert than TO or Ron-Ron. But it's at least worth noting that he's happily and cannily making use of the preexisting structures of athletic good and evil that this blog spends so much time criticizing. This isn't Gilbert being weird; it's him at his most normal(ized/izing).
i'm aware of terrell owens, which is why i made the 60 pills=suicide attempt inference.
and you completely missed my point: simply not trying to kill yourself does not make you normal. in fact, it's bizarre that, in an attempt to convince the world that he's sane, arenas says "hey, i'm not attempting suicide, right?"
I don't think that I completely missed your point. But I came to a different because I don't think he's being completely literal. I don't think he's really talking about suicide, one way or the other. I think he's just saying, "At least, I'm not like TO" and brings in the suicide attempt as a way of referring to him.
Fitzcarraldo?
I know the JpGs are oblique atmospherics. And they're funny too. But the Arenas/Herzog connection might not be as tenuous as it seems. Two genuinely weird, and totally self-aware, brilliaint maestros of their respective forms.
i'm blown away by the fitzcarraldo comparison.
bloodofthewig pretty much summed up what i was going to write. all that's left is to say is that you are now officially my favorite blog.
In an era where Gilbert Arenas psychoanalyses on the internet are a dime a dozen, this has to be one of the most shallow. Klosterman's point was that honesty and personality, which are completely missing in other superstars, are in themselves normal, even given the particular quirks of Gilbert.
i am so fucking sick of anonymous commentors. is it that hard to come up with a zany handle?
first off, asshole, i've been doing 1,000 word analyses of arenas since before you knew who he was. so please don't accuse me of jumping on an arenas bandwagon or lazily following the tide. you could have at least clicked on the link to my earlier piece that i provided.
and secondly, klosterman's point is that arenas's quirks are relatively minor and that his persona depends on honesty about these. thus contradicting the usual "HE IS A MADMAN" line. my point is simply: there's a difference between outright insanity and having a very strange sense of logic. yes, arenas can explain himself, but THE WAY IN WHICH HE DOES SO is not the stuff of "media-created" eccentricity.
the "what"--that's he's not totally nuts--is not at issue here. what is is the "how" of it.
seriously, if you plan to leave this kind of comment, and leave a trail of smugness dripping down your pants leg, wouldn't you want to claim credit for it!?!?!?!?!?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TXpPrVX_mU
'twasn't me, but I have enjoyed the part and parcel of this specific topic. My trousers are drip free and I am off to NYC to see Stoppard channel Bakunin and I will give Eddie Curry the finger upon sight.
I've dropped my own take on Klosterman's piece over on my blog: www.michaelreddyourboatashore.blogspot.com
I, too, had difficulty with Klosterman's reading of Arenas but for different reasons. Let me know what you think.
wha happened to this post? is this the whole thing? i dont get it if it is...
"LOOK UP TO FOR MY TRUE FEELINGS."
Even if that sentence made grammatical sense I wouldn't understand what it meant. Look up to what? What happened to the article here?
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