"Life Stories: profiles from the New Yorker"

[fiefoe]

A Pryor Love (Richard Pryor) / Hilton Als (1999)

• 'For real?' It's a rhetorical question that black  people have always asked each other or themselves when they're handed more hopelessness: Is this for real?
• the comedy that littered the stage with the trash of the quotidian as it was sifted through his harsh and poetic imagination
• Sensuality implies a certain physical abandonment, an acknowledgment of the emotional mess that oozes out between the seams that hold our public selves together-and an understanding of the metaphors that illustrate that disjunction.
  
• In his work, Pryor was one of the first black artists to unknot the narrative of that desire and to expose it. In life he had to live through it as painfully as anyone else.
• Pryor probably realizes that his legendary status has weakened the subversive impact of his work. People are quick to make monuments of anything they live long enough to control. {This echoes with Sontag on Artaud - 'the domestication of agony'.}
  

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Gone for Good (Steve Blass) / Roger Angell (1975)

    Even back then, 'sport is no longer a release from the harsh everyday American business world but its continuation and apotheosis.' If only I could understand what went on in that imaginary game where Blass threw against the Cincinnati Reds.