Look At These Two
It’s one game with two sides. Tonight is an important night for DSM. Let’s look at the number two. No, not like Sesame Street. Like baseball, and literature. Tonight two teams renew their rivalry. It’s a rivalry that never ceases to enthrall us, no matter what the standings say. Like most years, the Yankees and the Red Sox are the top two teams in the game. (The Senior Circuit doesn’t count. Sorry, Dodgers.) And hear this: As a rule, the number one and the number two teams in the AL East usually make the playoffs. (Look it up, we swear.) But the race is far from over. Without further ado, here goes our riff on, Two: the number of Sox employees arrested for steroids. Two: the number of Sox players recently outed for steroids. Two: the number of teams destined for the playoffs. So tonight, as your two noble kinsmen stress over cans of Miller Lite and Mt. Rainier, one will be happy and two will be sad. With an apropos theme of the numero dos, see the story of a jailed Chinese rabble-rouser, and then Douglas Rushkoff’s Life Inc. We’ve got a Times review of Richard II and news of Budd Schulberg’s death, a man who lived to be number one. And so he was. — Andrew Geer
– Ji Sizun, a legal activist who represented ordinary people, disappeared into the clutches of Chinese state security a year ago, on the fourth day of the Olympic Games in Beijing. He had wanted to demonstrate in one of the official “protest parks.” Instead, he ended up in prison. — Ji Sizun, Part I, in Der Spiegel
Barely Missed The Cut
– He helped migrant workers defend themselves against police abuse, and he went to court with elderly women who had been expropriated without compensation in connection with hydroelectric dam projects. He helped teachers secure their pension payments, and he negotiated damage payments for people who had been the victims of work accidents. — Ji Sizun, Part II, in Der Spiegel
– “For me, the idea of selling out was the worst possible thing,” says Douglas Rushkoff during a discussion with friend and fellow writer Walter Kirn one recent evening at an independent bookstore in SoHo Manhattan. Still, having risen to be something of an icon in the digital world, Rushkoff, the progenitor of such phrases as viral media and social currency, concedes that “there’s really no way to prosper in today’s world, without selling out.” — Douglas Rushkoff in The Rumpus
A Dapper Fellow Indeed
– When Douglas Rushkoff was mugged in front of his apartment building in a posh Brooklyn neighborhood, he did what just about any affluent white academic would do in response: First he felt guilty for his part in gentrifying Park Slope and leading his young attacker to a life of crime, and then he wrote the introduction to his new book, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back (intro title: “Your Money or Your Life: A Lesson on the Front Stoop”), citing the mugging as a symptom of colonialism and, therefore, corporatism. — Douglas Rushkoff in The Stranger
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– Shakespeare’s “Richard II” is essentially the story of a man who loses a kingdom and gains a soul. Of course it also explores the nature and obligations of political power and the processes of history. But it’s the sad poetry of the title character’s downfall, not the stern lessons in right rulership it may impart, that gives the play its haunting beauty. — Richard II in The New York Times
– Budd Schulberg, who wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for the Marlon Brando classic “On the Waterfront,” died Wednesday at age 95. Schulberg, the son of a studio boss who earlier had defined the Hollywood hustle with the novel “What Makes Sammy Run?” in 1941, died of natural causes at his home in Westhampton Beach, on Long Island, said his wife, Betsy Schulberg. He was taken to a nearby medical center, where doctors unsuccessfully tried to revive him, she said. — Budd Schulberg in the AP
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