Running for Your Life: Shap! We Hardly Knew How Much We Need You!

What is it about Denis Shapovalov?

That, at 18, (he won’t be 19 until April, by the way) he is excelling at arguably the most amazing mass-market solo sport imaginable: Men’s Single Tennis.

That he does it while wearing his goofy teenage identity; What me? A star? Nah, let’s go get some grilled cheese and craft root beer, or maybe a cream soda, and talk about anything but that.

On anyone else that backward sweat cap, with the gappy extension band square in the forehead middle, would look ridiculous and W-A-A-A-Y pretentious. On Shap, it looks just right.

That he’s a Canadian. Can’t you see him asking these bears to leave his property …. http://bit.ly/2yKWOhp ?

That he’s now a regular court catch on the Tennis Channel. If he’s playing, I place the set on mute and watch. And, yeah, all these thoughts that I’ve just put down come into my head as I smile with the vanishing of my worries, if only for as long as he is playing the sport that demands power, touch and intelligence in equal measure … at 18 years old !!

Next: Running for Your Life: After the Half !

Running for Your Life: Chairman Zuck

A lot has been written and speculated about what Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is doing, re: his presidential-like tour, pledging to visit each and every one of the fifty states, and in so doing hang out with regular Americans.

Wow, no way in hell a Kardashian (excepting political hopeful Caitlyn Jenner, perhaps) would do that!

Zuck will in 2020 be old enough to be eligible to serve as American president. (Although, trust me, the current president wouldn’t be above conducting a birther campaign to accuse Z of using a fake ID. CARD HIM! Trump loyalists will be barking.)

No, don’t believe the bunk that Z is priming the populist pump for a 2020 presidential run. When you’re the planet’s Big Brother what in hell do you want with the world’s most undoable job: being the US president?

Next: Running for Your Life: Shap! We Hardly Knew How Much We Need You!

Running for Your Life: Last Week of the Symbolists !

What do you believe if not universal truths as a ritual to divine enlightenment?

Life, it could be argued, isn’t black and white. But during one brief period in a Paris salon just before the turn of the last century, some very talented artists seemed to be doing their darndest to find a painterly pathway to nirvana.

All of which can be seen in one tidy exhibition at Manhattan’s Guggenheim Museum. (Or a single ring of the snail; you go Frank Lloyd Wright!)

What you want to look at is just beyond the entranceway. The “hologram” of angelically dead Orpheus by Belgian artist Jean Delville, with face upon a ripple river, stars reflect, traces on the canvas suggesting ancient wood, giving life to his death.

If this is one of the ways to go, who can quibble?

Then Henri Martin, before this blending of the skills of the Impressionists (Pointillism) to reveal otherworldly beauty and “spirituality” vanished, paints his shimmering “Young Saint.” Like, he had just done so and left the room.

What else? “I Lock My Door Upon Myself” by Fernand Khnopff, a sensibility that shudders in our culture yet, the personification if not the “pornification” of women figures, celebrating beauty not intellect, throwback to the pre-Raphaelites, whose title was derived from the poem, “Who Shall Deliver Me?”, by Christina Rossetti, sister of the pre-Raph painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Then we got a girl with a sheep … and one that strikes me as being done in the spirit of a top editorial meeting at the New York Times in the days after the botch job reporting of the presidential election. “The Disappointed Souls” by Ferdinand Holdler. Influenced as he was by Thanatos, the personification of death in Greek mythology.

Hurry, you’ve only a week to go and see the Symbolists ! before the show closes. You’ll thank me (or maybe not …) J

Next: Running for Your Life: Fall Into Place

Running for Your Life: Punditocracy Picture

It is getting to the point that I can’t read certain columnists, the hand-wringers of the left (you know who you are) topping the list.

But imagine my surprise when the folks who I traditionally don’t agree with, those wrestling with their conservative souls under this most preposterous of presidents, air the most surprising and freshly baked views.

I wrote in this space recently about the “Tribal” column in New York magazine by Andrew Sullivan. Because this is what I do for my time’s-of-the-essence mobile phone-using friends, I’ll do another link to it here. (Deserves a re-reading, anyway.) http://nym.ag/2jJPMXU

Then, last Friday (Sept. 22), I came upon a piece of similar, responsible quality by conservative columnist David Brooks of the New York Times. http://nyti.ms/2y7cpvH

Brooks writes about Sam Francis, a political thinker who the pundit resurrects in an attempt to explain how exactly we came to this excruciating moment in US political history. In short, Francis saw the potential for a demagogue who could articulate what the vast majority of white America wanted, which began with a sound rejection of both parties of the ruling class.

Brooks closes with this:

“Trump is nominally pro-business. The next populism will probably take his ethnic nationalism and add an anti-corporate, anti-tech layer. Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple stand for everything Francis hated — economically, culturally, demographically and nationalistically.

As the tech behemoths intrude more deeply into daily life and our very minds, they will become a defining issue in American politics. It wouldn’t surprise me if a new demagogue emerged, one that is even more pure Francis.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Last Week of Symbolists !

Running for Your Life: Men and Women of the Jury

There is a guy in my jury pool (Sept. 12) with his nose deep in a book, spine splayed for all (50 people?) to see its title:

THE SUBTLE ART OF

NOT GIVING A F—K

The guy read his book for a while, yawned, placed it on the table in front of him and put his head down to rest. Before too long he looked like he was sound asleep.

Obviously, he needed to study some more. Sleeping in the jury pool didn’t seem all that subtle when it came to appearances of whether he was giving a f--k.

It was a good idea to bring something to read to while away the hours. Not too much for us to read in this room. Only four words in this crème caramel-colored courtroom:

IN GOD WE TRUST (Sans serif – more along the line of Hell-vetica, if you ask me.)

At the end of the working day, having failed to be accepted for the one jury I was ordered to attend, because I answered in the affirmative when asked if I would be attending Jewish new year services this month, the chief clerk of the court excused me from jury duty.

The guy reading “Subtle Art”? Well, he was free to go too.

Next: Running for Your Life: Perils of the Punditocracy