From Ramsey, here's Henry Alford: YOU never know where goat will take you. When I asked the smiley butcher at Jefferson Market, the grocery store near my apartment in the West Village, whether he had any goat meat, he told me: “No. I got a leg of lamb, though — I could trim it nice and thin to make it look like goat.” I politely declined. We fell into conversation.
I found myself telling him: “Koreans think eating goat soup increases virility. It can lead to better sexytime.” My new friend responded: “My lamb does that a little. You won’t want to every night, but maybe every other night.” Reaching toward his counter to pick up a mound of hamburger, he paused to ask, “It’s for you, the goat?”
Another nugget from Hank Stuever's book Tinsel. Page 181:
As a treasured piece of American journalism history, the full text of “Yes, Virginia” fails upon further scrutiny, if only because its ultimate message is that there is something inherently wrong with skepticism. If a child has concluded, all on her own, that it’s impossible for a man in a flying sleigh to make it all the way around the world in one night, delivering elf-made replicas of all the stuff you see in Target and Best Buy, then that’s a child I would be happy to steer toward a voting booth when she’s eighteen. That’s an American in search of facts. If, however, she goes on pretending to believe well into her teens (I encountered more than one such teenager in Frisco), because it makes her parents (and God) feel sweet and happy, then I become worried. That becomes an American willing to spend $100,000 on her “special day” wedding, or who will believe without hard evidence that other countries harbor weapons of mass destruction when they don’t. The angst over Santa’s existence comes not from the children, I think, so much as the grownups. The adults literally tear up when I ask them to talk about how, and when, their child will learn there is no Santa. Once you know there is no Santa, then there’s no stopping the awful truth about everything else.
Another investigative series on Scientology from the St. Pete Times. Joe Childs and Tom Tobin: For years, the Church of Scientology chased down and brought back staff members who tried to leave.
Ex-staffers describe being pursued by their church and detained, cut off from family and friends and subjected to months of interrogation, humiliation and manual labor.
One said he was locked in a room and guarded around the clock.
Some who did leave said the church spied on them for years.
Others said that, as a condition for leaving, the church cowed them into signing embellished affidavits that could be used to discredit them if they ever spoke out.
The St. Petersburg Times has interviewed former high-ranking Scientology officials who coordinated the intelligence gathering and supervised the retrieval of staff who left, or "blew."
They say the church, led by David Miscavige, wanted to contain the threat that those who left might reveal secrets of life inside Scientology.
From Washintonian.com's Capital Comment blog: Details are sketchy, but numerous witnesses report that veteran feature editor Henry Allen punched out feature writer Manuel Roig-Franzia on Friday....
According to many sources, the incident began when Style editor Ned Martel assigned a semi-political story to Monica Hesse and Roig-Franzia. Playing off of an inadvertent disclosure last week that many congressmen are being investigated for ethics violations, Martel asked the two Style writers to compile a list of similar disclosures in the past. They came up with a “charticle” with a dozen examples, starting with Robert E. Lee’s Civil War battle plans for Antietam showing up wrapped around cigars.
Allen, according to sources, said: “This is total crap. It’s the second worst story I have seen in Style in 43 years.”
Makes you wonder: what's the first?
Anyways, Roig-Franzia wanders in, tells Allen (a VietVet and pulitzer winner, btw) not to be such a "cocksucker" and the old man comes undone. They had to pull him off.
Continuing, Veteran Style writers said they knew Allen wasn’t happy. He had come up in Style’s heady days, when writers could wax for a hundred inches on the wonder of plastic lawn furniture or the true meaning of the Vietnam War Memorial. No more. Working part time on contract, Allen seethed over the lost art of long-form journalism.
After the brawl, Brauchli called Allen into his office and closed the door. Allen’s contract is up later this month.
Big thanks to Ramsey for spending his Friday night (?!) typing up some classic Jimmy Breslin. Breslin did three columns on the assassination of JFK. We all know the gravedigger, of course, but the other two are fine stories. Here's one of them:
Everybody's Crime
Washington -- The Spanish Ambassador was on his knees. The people who were in line behind him walked around him. The coffin was draped with an American flag. But at the bottom, just before the black velvet started, a little bit of mahogany wood showed. The body of the thirty-fifth President of the United States is inside the wood. Or whatever it is that is left after the .25-caliber bullet that ripped his head apart. You noticed the mahogany wood because it was reflecting the bright, bare light the six television Kleig lights threw onto the floor of the rotunda of the Capital building.
The place was silent. The people, silent people who had blank faces, moved around the coffin in two orderly lines. They were trying to pick up their feet so their shoes would make as little of the noise of shuffling as possible. The Spanish Ambassador said prayers.
A Negro woman, a black kerchief covering her head, walked around him. A little boy of about three held onto her right had. The boy had on long pants and an overcoat and a blue cap. He was looking away from the coffin. All the police and soldiers and television lights caught his attention.
The mother yanked his hand. "Look this way, Roger," she whispered. The little head turned and the woman in the black scarf bent over and put her cheek against the boy's. "He's right there under that flag," she whispered. "That's President Kennedy there. Look at it, Roger. Mommy wants you to know about this."
Then she was gone and there was somebody else there. The Spanish Ambassador was on his feet now, and he was walking by too. The place was quiet and unreal, and far above you, up at the top of the dome, shafts of light coming in through the windows crisscrossed each other.
There was a sound in the hallway to the right, the hallway which leads to the Senate offices. The two policemen there moved back. Then you what was making the sound. It was an honor guard coming out. There were six of them. They were holding rifles at carry arms, which means the butt of the rifle is just a little bit off the floor. And they moved imperceptibly. But their heels clicked against the floor in cadence each time they moved, and this was what was making the little noise.
When they got out on the rotunda floor, light from the television Kleig lights sprayed off the bayonets of their guns. Then you noticed the soldiers on duty for the first time. They were at parade rest around the coffin. Six of them. But they had been so motionless that you didn't even notice them before this. You had only been seeing the coffin and the people.
But now you noticed the soldiers. You saw the ones standing so stiffly around the coffin, and the others moving slowly and clicking their heels while the bayonets sparkled. And then everything came over you, and you stood in the Rotunda of the Capitol building of the United States of America and looked at a coffin that held the body of a President whose head had been blown off by a gun fired by one of his own people and now you fell apart inside and there was this terrible sense of confusion and inability to understand what was going on. And there were tears; of course there were tears, there have been tears for three days now; and then you started talking out loud.
"Oh Christ, what are we doing here?" It was a prayer, not a blasphemy.
Dallas. You started to think about Dallas. In Dallas they sat and told you that a Communist shot the President of the United States. They sat and told you that, while everybody in the town with any brains knew that John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the President of the United States, was shot because this is a country that has let the art of hating grow so strong that now we kill our President because of it.
And Dallas does not own hate. Dallas is a collective word and it means Birmingham and Tuscaloosa and, yes, Scarsdale and Bay Ridge and the Bronx too. Dallas means every place where people in this nation stand off with their smugness and their paychecks and their cute little remarks, and run their lives on the basis of hate. Everybody has a piece of this murder. Everybody who ever stood off and said, "That Jew bastard," and everybody who ever said, "I don't want niggers near me," is a part of this murder.
Charlie Pierce: Toward the end of September, a couple in Fredericktown, Ohio, named Richard and Jacqueline Ruhl decided to build a float for the annual Fredericktown Tomato Show Parade. Apparently, the Ruhls had been bothered over the previous nine months by the activities of President Obama, whose three hundred and sixty-three days since we elected him have broken open the fibrotic lesions holding back the old infections of the body politic, the way tuberculosis can lie dormant in the lungs for years then burst through, choking.
Anyway, the Ruhls became convinced that the Obama administration was preparing to expand Americorps — probably to take their guns and restrict their access to the Internet, all in preparation for forcing them and the rest of us into the authoritarian embrace of the North American Union. (Authoritarian Canadians? Isn't that like Vicious Beagles?) In order to fight what they felt was the ever-tightening embrace of Obamofascism, the Ruhls decided that they would make their stand in the Frederickton Tomato Show Parade. What the hell — political movements have started in stranger places.
Tom Lake: The three sons of Verna Underwood were Darren, Dana, and Darwin, and when they were young she drove them around Buckhead to spend imaginary cash. Each boy had a million dollars. She took them to Formula One Imports, where they caressed the Porsches and Lamborghinis, and she showed them the mansions on Tuxedo Road. You see that? she said. Work hard and you can have that. They were not poor. Verna drove a Cadillac Eldorado, and her new husband was a construction superintendent. They lived in a respectable ranch house outside Marietta. But Verna told her boys they could have more, if they wanted it enough. The imaginary million could become real.
Darwin died first. He was the youngest, twenty-two, with the word Trouble tattooed on his right arm. He picked a fight with a friend, and the friend put a five-inch diver’s knife through Darwin’s right femoral artery. Darwin bled to death. When Darren heard the news, he drove ninety miles an hour to find Dana and hugged his remaining brother so hard that Dana’s feet came off the floor. After that Dana got a tattoo on his right arm. It was Darwin’s name, with a rose and a cross.
Dana washed dishes at Red Lobster for a while and worked his way up to line cook and apprentice pastry chef at various other restaurants. By 1998 he was stuck making seven bucks an hour, so he moved into the furniture-moving industry for a dollar per hundredweight. He worked hard and bought his own truck and worked harder and bought a better truck and hired his own workers. Soon he was crisscrossing the country in eighteen-wheelers, moving other people from one big house to another, straining under the weight of baby grand pianos that nobody played, spending most of his capital on labor and fuel. In 2008 a dresser fell on his midsection. Since then he has lived on workers compensation.
Darren made other plans. As they cruised up Tuxedo Road all those years ago, he looked at his mother across the front seat of the Eldorado and pointed to one of the mansions and said, “I’m going to live there one day.”
Another graph from Tinsel. Page 223: The party ends with Associate Pastor Ray Harmon leading a round-robin prayer. We all hold hands and ask God to open our eyes beyond the materialism of the season. A roomful of pretty single women in sparkly blouses and full makeup nod in thoughtful assent, as do the dozen or so single men in the best golf shirts. One woman tells the group that her recent divorce had turned her “Scroogey” this year, until she started buying presents for the Angel Tree at work. Associate Pastor Ray mentions how, the other day on Oprah, everyone in the audience got a thousand bucks on a credit card, but then Oprah told them they could spend it only on a charitable cause. (“With Bank of America credit cards,” Carol notes, proudly, of her employer.) One man tells the group that this Christmas he’s been trying to give up buying things with credit cards, to get past “meaningless debt.” But another man responds that a credit card is okay, and that he has decided to “give over my American Express Blue to God, which I’m using to tithe on.” He now trusts the Lord to provide for the balance.
Any post-World Series stuff out there worth highlighting? Let's see it.
We'll kick it off with Dave Sheinin (thanks, Laura): NEW YORK -- The old ballpark sits across 161st Street from the new one, shrouded in funereal black mesh and towering metal scaffolding, awaiting any day now its death by wrecking ball. A gap in its outer shell provides a voyeur's gaze into its sad, gray innards, picked clean of anything salable. Just this week the giant blue letters that once spelled Y-A-N-K-E-E S-T-A-D-I-U-M across its famous façade were hauled away in trucks. Progress moves forward. Only memories remain, but what memories.
From across the pond, Ben Macintyre (thanks, Jeb): Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing.
The information we consume online comes ever faster, punchier and more fleetingly. Our attention rests only briefly on the internet page before moving incontinently on to the next electronic canapé.
Addicted to the BlackBerry, hectored and heckled by the next blog alert, web link or text message, we are in state of Continual Partial Attention, too bombarded by snippets and gobbets of information to focus on anything for very long. Microsoft researchers have found that someone distracted by an e-mail message alert takes an average of 24 minutes to return to the same level of concentration.
The internet has evolved a new species of magpie reader, gathering bright little buttons of knowledge, before hopping on to the next shiny thing.
Kim Wilmath: TAMPA — Police reports are often rich with jargon — phrases like "victim succumbed to his injuries," or "victim advised that defendant did knowingly and willingly enter his home without permission."
Not so for a report filed by Tampa police Officer Terry Ashe, who wrote a colorful narrative about an alligator that attacked his city-owned Ford Taurus in Pasco County on Oct. 27.
"As I was driving down the single lane, dirt road, adjacent to an old cemetery, I observed a large, menacing, dark object lying in the road obstructing my right of way," Ashe wrote. "With rain pouring down, mist and fog shrouding my vision, large oak trees laden with Spanish moss hanging down around my vehicle, I was uncertain as to what lay in my path."
Erin Sullivan: HUDSON — At 10 o'clock Tuesday night, Amy Reyburn-Phibbs drove down the dirt path beside her house that led into the woods where a man named Dave lived.
Dave was in his late 60s, a slight, sunken man who walked with a cane, his skin yellowed, his dark hair long. He and a cat named Kitty lived in a small home on cinder blocks. Dave had no plumbing, electricity or a front door, but he had a horseshoe nailed above the entrance and a picture of Jesus taped to a wall.
When Reyburn-Phibbs and her husband rented their home on Oak Drive seven months ago, the landlord told them about Dave, living back there in the woods about 200 paces from their house, and said he was harmless. In that time, the couple got to know Dave and cared about him. They brought him food and water. On this night, Reyburn-Phibbs was bringing him medicine for his lingering cold.
This is the trailer for the video for the serial narrative and hour-long documentary that Travis Heying and I have spent the last six months putting together. We went to 12 states, talked to POW's everywhere, and put together the story of the guy who will possibly become the first person ever to win the Medal of Honor and be canonized as a saint.
Coming December 6 in the Wichita Eagle.
Tim Botos: JACKSON TWP. — Marjorie Petry’s heart, faith and principles forever will lie on her mostly pristine homestead — located between the Timken Research Center and three rows of self-storage rental units.
In life, she devoted herself to God.
In death, she wanted to spread the word, with a gift.
She was 95 years old and had spent a decade at St. Luke Lutheran nursing home. Dementia gnawed at the mind beneath her silver hair and behind her large eyeglass frames. When her time on earth ended July 13, she was ready. Petry spoke to a picture of Jesus on a wall adjacent to her bed.
“I’m ready ... I’m ready,” she said.
Many nursing home residents sell their houses at some point. Not Petry. During her stay at St. Luke, she tightly held on to it. She refused to sell, despite incessant pitches from real estate developers. She knew she’d never return. But she had grand plans for her place, known only by a few.
Her house sits on 21 acres, along Interstate 77. It’s a white house with green shutters, a barn, pond and workshop on Hossler Road NW. It was the last remaining piece of her ancestors’ once sprawling farm compound. A house that she and her husband, Edwin, moved onto the site years ago. The place where she nursed him, following a stroke, until his death in 1991. A house where a white Bible still sits on a marble-topped coffee table, exactly where Petry left it when she moved into St. Luke.
Justin Heckert: The ocean at night is a terrible dream. There is nothing beyond the water except the profound discouragement of the sky, every black wave another singular misfortune. Walt Marino has been floating on his back for hours, the ocean on his skin, his mouth, soaking the curls of his graying hair. The water has cracked his lips, has formed a slippery glaze on his shoulders and arms. The salt has stuck to his contact lenses, burning the edges of his eyes. A small silver pendant of the Virgin Mary sticks to his collarbone on a link chain. He can no longer see the car key floating below his stomach, tied to the string of his floral swim trunks. The water licks against his ears. Every familiar sound is gone.
He arches his neck, contemplate again how far of swim it might be to shore. He can’t know how many miles. He tries to convince himself he might be able to make it back to the beach, to the rock jetty from which he was swept out to sea. He starts dog-paddling, but after about 30 minutes his arms give out, his back tires, and he decides that he’ll die if he tries.
In the dark, he can make out only the outline of his hands. He can see a faint glow in the distance, orange and premonitory, like a small fire, what he guesses to be the hotels and condos of Florida’s northern coast. He wonders if someone in a living room watching TV could look out far past the shore and see him floating here.
On one side of the fertile lot stands an abandoned house, stripped long ago for scrap. On the other side, another abandoned house, windows boarded, structure sagging. And diagonally across the street, two more abandoned houses, including one blackened by a fire maybe a year ago, maybe two.
But on this lot, surrounded by desertion in the north end of Flint, the toughest city in America, collard greens sprout in verdant surprise. Although the broccoli and turnips and snap peas have been picked, it is best to wait until deep autumn for the greens, says the garden’s keeper, Harry Ryan. The frost lends sweetness to the leaves.
John Kelly: A deer that jumped a wall at the National Zoo was fatally injured by two lions Sunday as dozens of startled spectators looked on.
-- The Washington Post, Nov. 9
Did I see it? Of course I saw it. Very disturbing, sir. Very disturbing. The lions' technique was all wrong. Paws when they should have used jaws; jaws when they should have used paws.
And did you see when one of the lions had the deer in her clutches and let it get away? That showed a lack of focus. She should have bitten the creature's neck, compressing the windpipe. But instead she looked away. Distracted by the crowd? Perhaps. But as I always say, when you are on the hunt, you cannot afford to be distracted. Eye of the tiger, my friend. Eye of the tiger.
All in all, not a great day for the great cats, although I must note that this episode proves my point that lions are overrated. King of the jungle indeed. Overfed bureaucrat of the jungle is more like it.
From September, Charlie LeDuff: DRIVING THROUGH JANESVILLE, WISCONSIN, IN A DOWNPOUR, looking past the wipers and through windows fogged up with cigarette smoke, Main Street appears to be melting away. The rain falls hard and makes a lonesome going-away sound like a river sucking downstream. And the old hotel, without a single light, tells you that the best days around here are gone. I always smoke when I go to funerals. I work in Detroit. And when I look out the windshield or into people's eyes here, I see a little Detroit in the making.
A sleepy place of 60,483 souls—if the welcome sign on the east side of town is still to be believed—Janesville lies off Interstate 90 between the electric lights of Chicago and the sedate streets of Madison. It is one of those Middle-Western places that outsiders pay no mind. It is where the farm meets the factory, where the soil collides with the smokestack. Except the last GM truck rolled off the line December 23, 2008. Merry Christmas Janesville. Happy New Year.
Punches to Punch Lines; At 75, Former Middleweight Champ Jake LaMotta Still Knocks 'Em Dead
Henry Allen, Washington Post Staff Writer
Jake LaMotta, at 75, says: "I still do 10, 15 minutes shadowboxing every morning. I get up, I throw thousands of punches, thousands. Naked in front of the mirror."
This is during an afternoon at Cafe Milano in Georgetown, where Jake is sitting absolutely still at a table, watching his old fight films on a TV by the bar -- the Bronx Bull, 106 fights, won 83, lost 19 (taking a ridiculous dive on one), drew 4; had one middleweight championship, two jail terms, six marriages and divorces, four grandchildren, one film biography -- "Raging Bull," which won Robert De Niro an Oscar for Best Actor in 1981. Beware his numbers. He'll say he's "going to be 75" when bio after bio has him 75 last July. He wrote an autobiography so preposterous, he once defended it by saying "there's a lot of truth in that book."
The lunch crowd has left. The sunlight is turning orange and crawling around the walls, more like shadow than light, a February orange. There's a table of women ordering more drinks and singing "Happy Birthday." There's a blond hostess who is 20 and walks past Jake's table in a navy blue Bebe pantsuit, walking fast so the fabric moves a lot. She's got a tight smile of the you 'n' me babe variety, and a good wink, if you like winks. Jake told her she reminds him of Vickie, his second wife and the love of his life, but he doesn't look at her when she walks past, which she does quite frequently.
Jake watches the TV, where it's Chicago, Feb. 14, 1951, the 11th round of his sixth and last fight against Sugar Ray Robinson, a fight known as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. He is losing, fighting from a coverup crouch, a kind of zombie carcass-posture he'd assume in his later fights when he didn't have so much strength and he had to pick his moment.
He watches, and you watch him for body English, a head twitch, the ghost of footwork under the table. Nothing. The stillness is all, a boxer's reflexive obedience to the laws of conservation of energy and matter, except when he's putting antipasto in his mouth or lighting a cigarette. He has a way of smoking where he talks through a lot of smoke and then the cigarette just vanishes, like a prop in a magic act. He has that kind of ease. He doesn't sit still, he is still, a dense, sullen, spottily-shaven monument so still you think you can study him like a zoo animal but then he looks back at you and you change your mind.
His hair is thin enough now that you can see liver spots on his scalp, no more black wavy pompadour like in the autographed pictures he sells. A huge head and a nose of many shapes. When he smiles the corners of his eyes droop and his lips move like a preoccupied sea snake, something undersea or underground about him, something chthonic, to be precise, with a smile that runs through tired, suspicious, sad, knowing and satisfied in about .04 seconds. You see the tips of his teeth and a lot of tongue.
He watches. The boxing is very good, not like the clown shows on HBO now.
"We fought a lot more back then. I fought Sugar Ray six times. Pound for pound the greatest fighter who ever lived. I fought Sugar Ray so many times it's a wonder I don't have diabetes," he says.
He loves this joke. He'll do it tonight in a stand-up comedy act for the $ 125-suspenders-and-Cuban-cigars crowd: The act he started 40 years ago after Vickie left him, he lost his Miami nightclub and spent six months on a chain gang for a morals bust involving a 14-year-old girl.
"I been in jail twice. The first time was reform school, they got me for carrying burglar's tools, something like that. The morals charge was a frame-up."
He watches the fight, waiting for the moment when he'll explode with a thousand punches. He was famous for this, playing possum, feigning injury, then exploding.
"I'm making him miss me," he says.
And moving forward, the bull; "a brutal will to win," as the Boxing Register puts it.
"Forward, always moving forward, from the time I can remember, a kid. I was short and the big guys would take advantage; I had to turn myself into a body puncher. By that time I was in reform school, they'd have a boxing match every week, they'd bring guys in from outside to fight me. Always forward, I'd go in without any regard for defending myself. I hypnotized myself so in my subconscious I believed I couldn't get hurt. And I don't mean 'believe,' I mean believebelievebelieve. Like in the animal kingdom, they wanted so much to survive, they'd change. Plants change color. Insects. Because of necessity, nature prepares you, different things, I can't think of the right word, the wolves and the animal that's like a deer. Not elk. Caribou. The wolves develop that technique like an army, they split up and divide the herd."
Waiting, waiting, covering up and swaying. Then he explodes with the thousand punches. Sugar Ray looks startled, amazed, almost insulted -- like, how can you fight against this? Jake puts him on the ropes and unloads everything, full automatic, a human avalanche.
"My final barrage," he says. "This is the end."
Jake stops. He steps back with a modesty that verges on grace.
"I couldn't hold my arms up after that. I went into that fight weak, I lost 30 pounds in training, I spent the night before the fight in the steam room. If I don't make the weight, 160, I lose the championship."
There were two more rounds, Robinson hitting LaMotta at will in the splendid medieval horror-spree of boxing, pounding Jake's face into road kill, but Jake didn't go down, the referee had to stop it.
He staggered over to Robinson's corner and told him: You won, Ray, but you couldn't get me down.
"I didn't want to go down," he says now -- not so much an explanation as a statement of fact, doctrine, natural law. "It was a macho thing. Nobody had ever knocked me down."
The birthday party at the next table is breaking up. You get the feeling that alimony is securing payment of a good part of the bill, but you could be wrong.
Does he still like the ladies?
"I can still function pretty good," he says.
One of them approaches Jake's table. She has a forearm sheathed with a piece of metal jewelry that makes you think of a gladiator. She grabs his upper arm.
"This is called a Hollywood handshake," she says. "Do you know what a Hollywood handshake is?"
She puts her hand in his. You see a piece of paper go from her palm to his. She backs away with eyes hard and soft at the same time as if she's just given him the hand grenade of happiness and pulled the pin. He doesn't move.
When they're all gone, he unfolds the paper.
The paper has a name, address and phone number. It is written in the kind of perfect filigreed handwriting taught to girls who weren't supposed to go out with guys like Jake LaMotta, not ever, not even if the girls were Italian.
Jake LaMotta was every Italian American's nightmare, the monster they feared was inside them, and knew was scaring the hell out of the rest of the world -- an animal, a berserker-jealous, wife-beating Ace-comb Adonis in the sleeveless undershirt still known in New Jersey as the "Guinea tee" -- a cafon', as Italian guys would call each other the way some blacks call each other bamas or whites call each other rednecks, hating it but loving it at the same time, giving rise to the horrible joke of ethnicity: You think we're bad, we'll be your worst nightmare about us, because that's our nightmare, too.
"Raging Bull" has a lot of this.
"A very negative movie," Jake says.
Where would he be without it?
"I'd be in bad shape," he says. "It made me champ all over again. It gave me a whole new crop of young people as fans."
He's selling LaMotta's Tomatta Sauce, with him in his Bronx Bull crouch on the label. Raging Bull Enterprises Inc. sells photographs in black-and-white and color, posters of four Ring magazine covers, miniature boxing gloves (red or blue), regular boxing gloves (leather or vinyl), boxing trunks, movie posters, on and on, autographed in "your choice of black, blue, liquid gold or liquid silver ink."
Near the beginning of the movie you watch him warm up in his corner, shadowboxing with his leopard-skin robe snapping and floating like a flag in slight slow motion and the soundtrack brings up the Intermezzo from "Cavalleria Rusticana," pound for pound maybe the most graceful, noble, sad and beautiful piece of music ever written, and here it's being played for Jake LaMotta, the Bronx Bull, the champion, the dive-taker.
Jake LaMotta, American hero.
"My good things, my bad things seem big. I'm on a different level. A guy lost his car, his home, it's the biggest thing in the world to him. With me it's losing the championship. Everything's relative. I hope I explained that right."
But the movie makes him look like a cafon', somebody says. This thought gets his smile going for a while.
The movie makes Italian Americans look bad, and Italians were, in fact, despised and persecuted in America. In New Orleans one day in 1891, 11 Italians were lynched.
"C'mon," LaMotta says. "They lynched black people, they lynched Jews. I don't think of myself that way. Being Italian is not a big thing. It doesn't mean a lot to me. I was always a loner. I've been a loner for a long, long time. I wasn't into being friendly. I fought all the black guys that the other white guys wouldn't fight. That's how come I got so many fights -- 1943, I beat four undefeated middleweights in six weeks, and the last one was Sugar Ray, the first loss of his career. Three weeks later I fought him again and he beat me. I was ranked number one for five years and I couldn't get a title shot. I had to throw a fight to get that shot."
The idea was, the mob would bet on somebody named Billy Fox, Jake would take a dive and then they'd give him his title shot. Except nobody can screw things up like the Mafia, and they were such pigs the bookies stopped taking Fox money. The whole thing blew up. The newspapers were screaming. Jimmy Cannon, a very big deal in sportswriting, said LaMotta was "the most detested man in sports."
Jake says: "Jimmy Cannon said that? I don't blame him."
Plates come, plates go. Sausage, onions, eggplant. Jake can eat.
The hostess walks past with the wink this time. Jake doesn't look at her. He doesn't look at her so much you start to wonder if he's making a move on her, like he's saying, "You've got to do better than that to get my attention."
That night, the comedy act goes over big. Some of it gets a bunch of fat guys in the corner laughing so hard they scream that fat-guy-laughing scream till you worry they may throw up all over their $ 150 shirts.
Old jokes. "I cut my drinking in half -- I cut out all the chasers."
Wife jokes. "My first wife divorced me because I clashed with the drapes. My second wife was Vickie."
The name gets a cheer -- they remember the nude spread that she installed, at the age of 50, in the retinas of American men, fabulous. "She always complained she had nothing to wear, then I saw her in Playboy."
One routine gets him shadowboxing, faster and faster, the thousand punches and the crowd goes into a deeper cheer, the applause of predators for a predator.
He stops just when people are starting to talk a lot. Now he'll work the crowd, do autographs, moving through the tables with that pageant stillness, as if he were on wheels like a wooden saint in a street festival.
There's Gordon Peterson from Channel 9 with his kids, and Joe DeFrancis, who owns Pimlico, and David Modell, who is son of Art Modell of the Baltimore Ravens, and Jim D'Orta, the doctor whose family made the James Bond movies and who now owns Pamela Harriman's old house in Georgetown. They hang around being Big Guys and smoking Romeo and Juliet cigars from Havana.
The Italian Embassy has a table where they'll tell you that Jake is famous in Italy, there's a lot of pride in emigrants' successes, but lot of embarrassment too -- the Mafia, the cafon' thing.
And there's the hostess, whose name is Joy Woodall, Trinity College, nice Catholic girl, sitting next to Jake at his table now, reminding him of Vickie.
If you're cynical you watch Joy for a hand touch, a squeeze of the champ's shoulder, a little footwork under the table.
It doesn't happen. She gets up after a while and goes back to working the door.
It turns out she knows what she's doing, she knows all about the you 'n' me smile and the wink.
"You want people to feel like they belong here, like this is the right place to be. That's what I do as hostess," she says.
You believe her. Still, you're remembering the Hollywood handshake, and you want to know: Is it possible that Jake LaMotta is sexy?
She pauses, as if she's working out how much of this is proprietary information, female eyes only.
"There's something definitely masculine and manly about him," she explains. "There's a primal urge to mate with the most masculine male, and he was the champion."
It doesn't matter. The next morning he'll get up naked and crouch in front of the mirror and throw a thousand punches.
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
--Jeffrey Eugenides, first sentence of Middlesex
The big man lived in the janitor's closet behind the bar, and through the night you could hear him building birdhouses.
--Christopher Goffard, first sentence of Snitch Jacket
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
--Gabriel Garcia Marquez, first sentence of One Hundred Years Of Solitude
Cormac McCarthy: I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
Tom Junod: On December 7, 2006, a new jail opened in Guantánamo. It was, and is, called Camp 6. Guantánamo is located at the arid eastern end of Cuba, plagued with iguanas and surrounded by the endless indigo desert of the Caribbean. The detention center there, opened in 2002, had always been a provisional thing, defined by its infinities of razor wire and its guard-towered skyline. Camp 6 was different. Built by the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root to duplicate a jail in southeastern Michigan, it was made of concrete as gray as wastewater, and its facade was not only windowless but featureless, a dungeon for an era of diminished expectations. Camp 6 was built for permanence, and by the time the first detainees walked through its iron doors, it was a maximum-security memorial to American prerogative. The detainees who were held in Camp 6 were the ones whose fates were both open-ended and predetermined, the ones who would not be charged, not be tried, and, most important, not be freed. They would stay, extrajudicial guests, until the cessation of hostilities in a war with no end, or until America elected a president who decided that a policy of preventive detention presented a risk to his country greater than the risk of dangerous men going free.
In the down time before another head count, two prisoners play cards. One inmate shuffles and the other flicks his hand, a mystical cutting of the deck. The dealt cards land on the lid of a garbage can used as a table, falling on top of one another, face down.
A form of gin rummy breaks out in the courtyard of the Campbell Pre-Release Center as the inmates, Mark and Mario, toss their unwanted cards into the discard pile. But from deuce to ace, nearly every card is a face card, looking up in silent appeal.
The cards ask: Do you know who killed me? And they ask: Do you know where I am? And they ask: Do you know something? Anything?
Paul Farhi: Bob Marbourg never wanted to spin records or read the news on the radio. One thing, and maybe only one thing, fascinated him: the mad struggle of a few million people trying to get from Point A to Point B each day.
And so for 30 years -- he celebrated his on-air anniversary this week -- Marbourg has sidled up to a microphone at radio station WTOP and narrated the breakdowns, slowdowns and fender benders that make up Washington's so-called rush hour (not much rush, and a lot longer than an hour now).
The Wichita Eagle has an unusual story project set to launch Dec. 6.
It will include an 8-part serial narrative and our first-ever hour-long narrative news documentary. We spent six months on it; we even put a musical score to the documentary.
Father Emil Kapaun was a priest who died as a U.S. Army chaplain in the Korean War. The peg for this is that there is a good chance Kapaun will become the first person awarded the Medal of Honor, and sainthood
in the Catholic church.
The story describes the last 7 months of Kapaun's life, but the sub-purpose is to explore various shades of belief in miracles. For example, the church in studying Kapaun has asked former Korean War POWs whether there were "miracles" associated with Kapaun, and by that they seem to mean Lazarus-style miracles.
The POWs said no. But they said he did many amazing things(see below) -- the sort of everyday miracles we all could do if only we had his character.
Conventional thought says many newspapers (including in mid-sized markets like ours) are no longer able to think big or do long narrative, in video let alone in print. But we've got leadership.
Sincerely...
Roy Wenzl
Here's the video trailer we put together on the documentary. (only about 90 seconds long)
Wes Ferguson: LINDEN — Whatever happened to Billy Ray Johnson?
For years, the middle-aged, mentally challenged black man was a familiar face around town. But on a September night in 2003, four young white men gave Johnson beer at a pasture party and told him to dance while they laughed and used racial slurs. Then one of them beat him.
The beating and dumping of Johnson's unconscious body and the town's reaction drew national outrage.
"Old South racism lives in Texas town," read one headline in the Chicago Tribune. High-powered civil rights lawyer Morris Dees took up Johnson's case, and in April 2007, a civil jury awarded Johnson $9 million.
Kevin Robbins: COLLEGE STATION — Long tables draped with maroon linens held the portraits of the dead. Other photographs were displayed Tuesday at G. Rollie White Coliseum, including images depicting the progression of the Texas A&M University sacrament known as Bonfire: cut, stack, burn. One section of pictures portrayed the events of Nov. 18, 1999.
But John Comstock was drawn to the portraits in the black frames. He gazed at the eyes looking back.
"Hi, John."
Comstock turned.
"Darrin Allen. I found you in the stack."
Comstock searched the man for signs. The eyes. They were blue. Did Comstock recognize those eyes from that morning in 1999? Maybe he did.
People change in 10 years. Comstock was a dark-haired and mischievous 19-year-old freshman who liked being around people — at parties, on campus, at Bonfire — in November of that year. He still had his left leg. His right arm worked. So did his right foot. He could walk and swing an axe. At stack he wore a bandana under a black military surplus helmet — Aggies call them "pots" — indicating his residence at Moses Hall.
The last time Comstock used his pot was back then, when the 90-year-old tradition of burning six tiers of timber before the annual football game with Texas also changed forever.