Judging Annie Leibovitz By Her Cover

In a column this morning for TownHall.Com, David W. Almasi calls me a "race-monger" for pointing out the racial implications of the LeBron James/Gisele Bundchen Vogue magazine cover. Annie Leibovitz's photo was a recreation of a famous World War I military recruitment poster, with James in the role of the woman-lusting gorilla and Bundchen as his prey. People who see King Kong in the cover are not far off the mark.

Citing Chris Rock's Saturday Night Live character Nat X, Almasi, the executive director of the right-wing National Center for Public Policy Research, races to this conclusion:

Rather than judging James -- and, by extension, other blacks -- by the content of their character, skills or intellect as Vogue intended, the race-mongers instead seem more interested in bringing things down to the lowest common denominator. There never seems to be a party where they don't want to be a skunk.

After all, Nat X said that's what we wanted to see.

I contacted Almasi last week after his think tank issued a press release declaring there was "no racial double-meaning" in the cover. I wanted to see if his opinion would change after he saw the poster, which Leibovitz was clearly referencing in her shot.

As you might expect of a person who makes his living holding a rigid ideological position, Almasi didn't budge an inch. He scoffed in email at the notion there's anything racial going on, since the poster's gorilla is a German kaiser.

Surely Almasi knows that the portrayal of a black athlete as a simian is a racially provocative statement. Less than a year after Howard Cosell called an athlete a "little monkey" on Monday Night Football in 1983, a comparison he made previously of other non-black athletes, he was gone from the program. Less innocently, racists have often compared blacks to monkeys and apes.

If Leibovitz had not worked directly from an iconic gorilla/woman poster, we could have the argument Almasi wants to have about how controversies like this are drummed up by people seeing racism in places it doesn't exist. I think he'd still be wrong -- the black journalists who first spoke out against the Vogue cover have a right to find it offensive -- but it's more open to debate.

Instead, Almasi finds himself in the position of pretending there's nothing racial going on when Leibovitz intentionally cast LeBron James in the role of a gorilla.

To paraphrase Nat X, that's what she wanted us to see.

Sports · Politics · 2008/04/02 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Doug Glanville: From The Show to The Times

As I mentally prepare myself for the season in which the Texas Rangers will finally win the World Series, I posted Doug Glanville's latest essay on SportsFilter to mark baseball's opening night:

Doug Glanville: Baseball and the Plankton of Opportunity: "Since a baseball player has the memory of an elephant, my first spring training with the Chicago Cubs might as well have happened yesterday," nine-year Major Leaguer Doug Glanville writes in today's New York Times. "My first roommate was a sleepwalker. He woke up in the middle of the night yelling at shadows; once he crawled into my twin bed after a late-night rant. After that I slept with one eye open and a Pro Stock model M159 baseball bat nearby." More wordsmithing to mark opening night comes from George Will and William Ecenbarger.

In January, Glanville humanized the steroid controversy by explaining how fear drove some players to juice up.

Sports · 2008/03/30 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Vogue Makes King James Look Like King Kong

Today on SportsFilter:

Critics Go Ape Over Lebron James Magazine Cover: A picture of NBA star Lebron James and the model Gisele on the cover of April's Vogue is attracting controversy over their pose. The shot taken by renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz has been compared by some detractors to King Kong holding Fay Wray. ESPN.Com columnist Jemele Hill called it "memorable for all the wrong reasons." The photo is remarkably similar to "Destroy This Mad Brute" a famous World War I recruitment poster.

Update: I took a second pass at this issue for Watching the Watchers. I'm being driven mad this morning by the media's inability to discover the gorilla poster that's a clear and unmistakable inspiration for Leibovitz's photo.

Sports · 2008/03/27 · 11 COMMENTS · Link

Ezra Klein's an Athletic Supporter

I'm a fan of liberal blogger Ezra Klein, but this may be the worst sports metaphor ever:

Since all political commentary is powered by sports analogies, let's take football here. The Clinton team is playing as if this will be decided on points. But in fact, it will be decided by judges, some of them empires, some of them representatives of the crowd, some of them big donors to the stadium. And those judges are terrified of pissing off their loyal fan base. The strategy here should be making the loyal fan base like you, not trying to pummel the other team. ...

Clinton, for her part, could have scored some points with this group by forcefully defending Obama on Wright. But every time she takes a shot at one of these racially-charged controversies, she makes her own nomination less likely. She may score a point, but she turns off more fans, and thus renders more judges unable to vote for her.

Extending Klein's football analogy further, Clinton fumbled the baseball through her five hole. She may be leading by two runs after the first period, but she'll never win Lord Stanley's pennant.

Politics · Sports · 2008/03/26 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Bosnia May Be Hillary Clinton's Biggest Blunder

Taylor Marsh, a vociferous pro-Hillary blogger and radio host, admits that the senator's embellished boast about dodging sniper fire in Bosnia was a huge mistake:

Hillary Clinton trying to prove her importance during her husband's presidency overreached massively and got caught in a whopper on Bosnia that includes tape. Now to be fair, the trip wasn't completely safe from danger, but no one cares now. We remember her well received foreign policy speech from last week, which included the words shown above, with the video tape evidence circulating today that blows what she said in a major foreign policy speech to smithereens. It's a self-inflicted wound that is by no means fatal, but definitely foolish.

As I've said before, Clinton should have from the start simply said she was her husband's most valued adviser. That she was there and learned through their back and forth, as well as from her many trips that span 80 countries, without claiming a war story. It was unnecessary, especially when the blowback certainly won't be worth it. Besides, no one expects a first lady to have the experience of a president. It's Clinton's lifetime of learning that she'll bring to the job that has real value. Hillary's life proves different opportunities from a man that needs no apologies and padding. Confidence in a life well lived has its own reward, especially when you've seen as much as Clinton has over decades of public policy involvement.

Hillary Clinton never should have campaigned on the premise that her experience as First Lady gave her the foreign policy credibility of John McCain. It's absurd -- she didn't have a security clearance and there's a voluminous public record of her globe-trotting, glad-handing trips that can prove they were ceremonial and largely inconsequential. Trading gifts and nice words with the first family of Uzbekistan does not make you more capable of answering the red phone.

Her biggest qualifications to be president are the Clinton record on the economy, the Democratic agenda, her vast public policy knowledge, and her ability to withstand the worst of the right-wing spin machine. If Democrats wanted to win this election on the basis of foreign policy bonafides, they should've chosen my man Joe Biden. Experience is overrated. Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld brought a lifetime of it to the disastrous decision to invade and occupy Iraq.

One thing I've wondered lately is whether Clinton really believes she's got commander-in-chief cred. Her invented heroics in Bosnia have been accompanied by her comment, "there was a saying around the White House that if a place was too small, too poor, or too dangerous, the president couldn't go, so send the First Lady."

This is so baldly idiotic that you have to wonder whether anyone in her campaign gave a moment's thought to how it reflects on the Clintons. Chelsea Clinton accompanied her mother on that Bosnia trip. Does the senator genuinely believe that her husband's policy while president was to send his wife and 16-year-old daughter on diplomatic trips that were too dangerous for him?

Politics · 2008/03/25 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Tay Zonday Rains on Reporter's Questions

In an interview with MSP Magazine published in January, Tay Zonday, the deep-voiced singer whose "Chocolate Rain" became a YouTube sensation, challenges every premise of the reporter questioning him.

Q: Let's talk about the art. What percentage of your success do you attribute to the William Hung factor?

A: I don't really follow William Hung. But the blunt question is, "Do I suck, and do people laugh at me because of it?" I don't know. How does any artist know that? Why would any artist worry about that? Would you worry about that?

Music · Journalism · 2008/03/24 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Review: A World of Thieves by James Carlos Blake

To get into the spirit of Pulp Guns, a game product I'm testing, I went looking for current crime novels that could've been pulps -- hard-boiled stories of murder and mayhem set in the '30s and '40s. I came pretty close in A World of Thieves, a 2002 novel by James Carlos Blake that follows a family of armed robbers across Louisiana and Texas in 1928.

Blake's novel tells the tale of Sonny LaSalle, an 18-year-old amateur boxer from New Orleans who graduates with top grades and should know better than to join uncles Buck and Russell robbing banks. He doesn't, though, and quickly ends up in Angola Prison Farm, a notorious penitentiary bordered by the Mississippi River that's guarded almost entirely by inmates. Sonny accidentally killed a cop in a Baton Rouge jail brawl -- the son of "John Bones," the state's most feared and hard-assed lawman. Bones does not take the news well.

The 296-page novel details LaSalle's extrication from prison and a subsequent crime spree across the two states as Bones relentlessly hunts him down. Blake's criminals are unapolegetic about their livelihood, making the jump from card sharps to con men to armed robbers to bank robbers. Sonny's uncles believe he's foolish for not using his education to better himself.

"We figured you'd end up doing your thieving with law books or account ledgers. Like that."

I wasn't sure if they were joking. They looked serious as preachers.

"World's full of thieves," Buck said, "but the ones to make the most money is the legal kind."

That's about as introspective as the book gets. Blake emphasizes carnage over character, leaving me dubious at one point about an act the LaSalles commit without hesitation or remorse. I didn't think they had it in them. They're in crime for money and thrills, killing only in the act of escaping jobs gone bad (another reviewer charitably describes this as "unintentional murder"). The whole novel's bloody and oversexed, with one particularly cringe-inducing crime of passion that leaves Buck nicknaming a part of his anatomy "Mr. Stump."

I loved the period details in the book: grimy hellish Texas boomtowns, Pierce-Arrow roadsters and Gladstone bags, revolvers, guns and pistols of wide make and utility. As a Texas native, I've been to several of the places in the book back when they still had a little frontier left in them. Blake covers the territory well.

A World of Thieves is crisply told, perhaps too spare in detail when it comes to the heads of its protagonists. I didn't see the ending coming -- a single-paragraph chapter that hits at the speed of a bullet.

Books · 2008/03/13 · Comment · Link

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