WRESTLING, WAL-MART
AND THE GREATER GOOD

Is professional wrestling a legitimate vehicle for artistic expression? I don't think so. Is it the future of sports entertainment in this country? I hope not. Nonetheless, I pass along a friend's recommendation of Barry Blaustein's documentary, "Beyond the Mat," for what he calls "its excellent, objective view of the world of pro wrestling."

Why, you might reasonably ask, does my friend even care about professional wrestling? Because it is the entertainment of choice for a very large segment of the U.S. population, and we should understand what our neighbors watch and why. Besides, many people have said that the best times to go to a Wal-Mart is during the telecast of a pro wrestling match or a NASCAR event.

Which brings us to another question: Can we categorize people who shop at Wal-Mart as subversive shoppers? Wal-Mart has been shown to harm rather than help local economies in a variety of ways, like displacing local merchants and refusing to use local vendors (besides paying sub-standard wages and benefits).

So yes, you might reasonably conclude, consumers who shop at Wal-Mart undermine their local economies: Instead of shopping for the greater good, they just shop to save eight cents on a roll of toilet paper.

POSTSCRIPT: Marc Weisblott, pop-culture blogger extraordinaire, recently wrote: "I'm not anti-Wal-Mart out of any sort of principle, but I can't say I've experienced any satisfaction after shopping there. Case in point: Fruit of the Loom boxer briefs, two pair for six bucks. In fact, I picked up two such packages, but forfeited one at the register because it wasn't the discount kind. The reason why became apparent once home--they are the "two pouch" variety, featuring a fly that boasts of being "easy to use" on the basis that it's horizontal. Whose invention was that?"

December 17, 2003 9:46 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by CriticalMASS published on December 17, 2003 9:46 AM.

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