Some trajectories
Machiavelli and Tolstoy: “Cool Guys”
Thoughts on “Mike Tyson Film Takes a Swing at His Old Image” by Tim Arango, in the New York Times.
“I don’t know who I am,” he said in an interview in his Las Vegas home, one of the few extensive interviews he’s given in the last few years. “That might sound stupid. I really have no idea. All my life I’ve been drinking and drugging and partying, and all of a sudden this comes to a stop.” He speaks in his familiar high-pitch voice with a trace of a lisp, but there is no menace as he frames his past as a series of mistakes. It is easy, sitting next to him as he speaks softly and contritely, to forget how feared he was.
With Ali it’s possible to see a narrative perfectly defined by race. A black man competing at the top of a physical sport many people consider to be barbaric, speaking with an accent while making remarks very easily characterized as stereotypically black, undergoing a religious conversion to a strange and threatening (some would say racist) faith, fighting the white government by refusing to fight in its war, becoming a figure of defiant American blackness, then gradually succumbing to the Parkinson’s disease, his outspoken personality and physically imposing presence reduced to a bumbling, nearly mute, birthday-party magician brought around for photo ops with Fidel Castro and the Olympic torch – a sort of disabled, emasculated Uncle Tom. When Ali was painted in the media as a bad-boy, for dodging the draft, for his multiple marriages and promiscuity, it was minor and it seemed always somehow to be symbolic of something: Ali’s race, the 60s, Malcolm X. And now that he’s a good guy, it’s just that the symbolism has changed: America, the 60s, a tragic hero or a martyr to less civilized times.
Mike Tyson was different. He wasn’t outspoken, he didn’t pay lip service to being any sort of community leader, when he talked about religion it came out more like drug addled nonsense than conviction, and when he was convicted, he was really convicted, incarcerated, and written off by everyone. There was no moral high ground. When he was painted as a bad-boy it was usually because he was, at least in the sense that he did bad things like rape people or beat them up outside of clubs.
In that context it was fun for some people to play Tyson as an inhuman killing machine, an animal, a brute force. He was a boxer, and it’s hard to deny the existence of this sort of mentality, if not it’s implications in regards to his personality or intelligence, for Tyson. But anyone familiar with Tyson outside of the boxing ring knows that while he may not exactly be erudite, it’s not entirely surprising to hear him use the word “erudite” in conversation or, in this case, an interview. As a boxer, though, he was able to keep this side of himself out of the public consciousness, and as long as he was a boxer he was to be feared. As long as he was a boxer he was able to capitalize on that fear.
But now, Tyson doesn’t box anymore. He’s broke. He needs to play on his past glories to pay his debts and he’s roped Ali’s marketing team in to do the job. Even with the face tattoo, the force-of-nature Iron Mike angle isn’t gonna work anymore, so it’s time to play up the soft spoken, intelligent, down on his luck, Great American Boxer angle, and hope that the public buys it.
Given these circumstances, the question is, should we be concerned with the idea that Mike Tyson might turn into the next Muhammad Ali? A once-mighty personality turned into a meaningless spokesman? Only if he has the lack of foresight to let his handlers have their way with his image. Tyson doesn’t have Parkinson’s, and he never was stupid. Essentially, nothing has changed for him now, except that he doesn’t box or take drugs anymore. Unfortunately, these were the two things that comprised Tyson’s public image as a dangerous man. If Tyson is still a public figure, it’s no longer as a menace or a symbol of the rage of inner city youth. Unlike Ali, Tyson can’t really signify anything anymore. I wouldn’t catch him carrying the Olympic torch anytime soon.
RELATED Tyson vs. Colay and a typical post-fight interview.
Outside looking in
Anne Hardy is a British photographer—installation artist—sculptor whose recent work is currently being shown at Bellwether Gallery (134 Tenth Avenue). She builds “entirely fictional” environments in her studio and photographs them in medium-format with a wide-angle lens: rather in the Thomas Demand—James Casebere tradition. This week she has submitted to a (very brief) interview with Rosecrans Baldwin at The Morning News, which despite its length manages to draw out some background on her process and the dimensions of her work.
Assessed for mellowness and strong personalites
Adda Birnir wrote a nice review which I largely agree with on Ryan McGinley’s current work at Team Gallery (38 Grand Street), on ArtCal.
As a person in my twenties, tangentially part of the community McGinley purports to represent, I have long resented him for promoting a patently false, fetishistic image of an East Village hipster milieu whose reckless abandon is largely inspired by self-destructive drug use. At best, this falsehood was a tired old cliché that has sold art for decades. At worst, it was part of a collective fantasy of immortality that can — and has — had disastrous consequences.
Breakfast on the go
(color models available)
Speaking of cigarettes
Luc Sante, author of Low Life, No Smoking and the 2007 retrospective Kill All Your Darlings (and a recent addition to our reading list), will be speaking downstairs at Cake Shop (152 Ludlow Street) on Wednesday, May 7. Two very good musical acts, PG Six and Crystal Stilts, will perform later that evening.
International news and tobacco
The news stand on Twenty-second Street and Second Avenue is a space densely, superlatively self similar. It is the most temporary of permanent structures, a space rented and unchanged, filled with constantly shifting but indifferent goods: cigarettes, newspapers, magazines, a few bags of peanuts, cans of Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite. A sheaf or two of scratch-off cards in a spectrum of hot glossy colors set at intervals with metallic ovals. It is no different from any other news stand: it’s not in the nature of news stands to differ from each other any more than it is in the nature of their contents to vary in ways more radical than an advertised degree of intensity or the color and contour of its exterior wrapper.
A pair of dead eyes float above the register, whose corresponding hand, when directed, moves with the slow, automatic motion of a machine, one which can no more be charged with laziness or distraction as with familiarity or self-knowledge. Behind him are arrayed the cigarettes: long, square, tall, stubby, with flip-tops or shoulder cases, arranged in five long rows of uneven height, behind each front box governmental warnings zip up in compressed letters the length of the sides of the boxes behind; they are motley in color, traveling with an interval of darker shades of mint, touching on a sturdy red or a streak of Southwestern pastels, and popping out again with a blue-red-yellow trim along a continuous body of shiny bleach white. Their alternating but homogeneous shapes assemble a pattern of rooftops against a crease of sky, like one glimpsed down the side street on this block in East Gramercy.
Opposite them are vertical shelves stacked with magazines, some printed heavily with news already beginning to be stubbed out; and the others with carbon-pure expanses of ageless flesh pressing fervently against elastic waistbands or through pale onionskin blouses. At their feet are stacked piles of thick, unfeeling newsprint: describing identical stories in flavors ranging from extra mild to merely light. This wall of text circles the store: a neatly gridded cycle of gently variegated repetition: mounting from crisp stacks and scaling the walls to the ceiling, as if to enclose by means of their woven substance alone a precisely demarcated, fluorescent flat of linoleum. A strangely blank and unadvertised space in which someone can find himself hopelessly unidentified, unannounced, individual; where temporariness is constantly conscious, laminated against the threat of each declining sun. By morning, only this floor will be unchanged, while cartons of cigarettes will have burned, and the papers will have tumbled down from their rack, no longer tangible instruments of current information – with the iteration of a digit above the fold, they will pass into utterly ephemeral and endlessly redundant textile matter, bounded on every side by their unsold duplicates, and tossed against the back of the shuttered stand, next to a loading crate and a heap of slick black trash bags.