And of course, your final weekly <\/em>Vine: Thursday was Chapter 65: \u201cThe Plague of Payouts.\u201d <\/a>Today is Chapter 66: \u201cThe Plague of Vine.\u201d<\/a> The Lazy & Entitled podcast<\/a> will continue in some form eventually, but this week is the last Vine Radio Hour. Sincere thanks to everyone who read, listened, or otherwise supported this project. Lazy & Entitled will return with music (and more!) in 2024<\/a>. <\/em><\/p> There\u2019s something about writing about something that elevates it. Monarchs understood this, and we\u2019re still reading Shakespeare\u2019s histories all these years later. Something I have less than zero interest in\u2014bullfighting\u2014takes on a mythic quality simply because one of my favorite writers was into it. My favorite sport, obviously, is basketball. Second favorite is soccer. The best ways to experience those sports, for me anyway, is playing or watching. Don\u2019t get me wrong, I love basketball and soccer writing. It\u2019s just I enjoy<\/em> playing or watching those sports more than I enjoy reading about them. <\/p> What I\u2019ve Been Reading Lately:<\/strong><\/p> Boxing, though. Can\u2019t help myself, but I do love boxing. Actually doing it and watching it are very fun\u2014I am a father and therefore retired from fighting, but I still train my friends Kevin and Rafi sometimes. For the last two years, we\u2019ve gone to watch the Golden Gloves down in Cicero Stadium, and no plans to not go in 2024. Reading<\/em> about boxing, though, is way more fun than watching the bloated, criminals-in-fancy-suits, we-know-about-concussions-now-and-try-not-to-hit-each-other PPV fights of the Floyd Mayweather Era. And these two books were such a treat. One of them, I\u2019m not even sure if it\u2019s a good book, or if it\u2019s just well-written enough and I really like reading about boxing<\/em>. Of course, I am talking about On Boxing <\/em>by Joyce Carol Oates and The Big Smoke<\/em> by Adrian Matejka. Also the October 2023 issue of Thrasher<\/em> magazine. <\/p> On Boxing <\/strong><\/em>by Joyce Carol Oates: <\/strong>my hangups on JCO were discussed Wednesday<\/a> and are discussed more below, so let\u2019s focus on the book: I really enjoyed it! It\u2019s a slim, well-wrought meditation on the sweet science, which apparently JCO has been a fan of since she was a kid. It\u2019s by no means comprehensive, but it\u2019s a great thinker writing about a sport, that, again, benefits strongly from being written about. There are surprisingly few racial faux pas for a book written by a white woman of the Ivy League in the 1980s-90s\u2014it\u2019s not perfect, but JCO does<\/em> treat the Black fighters with care and dignity, which is more than you can say for most of the sports press during the Jack Johnson, Muhammad Ali, and Mike Tyson eras. There\u2019s some weird gender stuff that I, a cis straight white man, don\u2019t feel totally right commenting on (boxing is<\/em> hypermasculinity, but I don\u2019t think that means there\u2019s no place for the feminine in boxing, as JCO asserts). And yeah, it is a white woman in the 80s and 90s writing about a predominantly Black and Latine sport, with special focus on Black heavyweight champs Johnson, Ali, and Tyson. <\/p> Mostly, you come away realizing boxing is the story of racism in the colonial world. Boxing is the story of capitalism\u2019s most marginalized seeking the biggest paydays (until the 90s, champion boxers were the US\u2019s highest-paid athletes, JCO asserts. Not sure if that\u2019s on a per-competition basis, or if Big Four salaries simply hadn\u2019t climbed that high yet). Boxing, \u201cthe red light district of sports,\u201d also demands the biggest personal cost. There\u2019s a reason boxing comes up in noir so often. It\u2019s not just that criminals and drunks like to see folks pummel each other. It\u2019s that people turn to professional boxing because their options are pretty shit otherwise. Which leads us right into\u2026<\/p> The Big Smoke<\/strong><\/em> by Adrian Matejka: <\/strong>Oh, now this made a nice pairing with the JCO. A poetic biography of Jack Johnson (not unlike Tyehimba Jess\u2019s leadbelly<\/em>, here\u2019s Bob and me discussing <\/a>leadbelly<\/a> <\/em>in two parts on <\/a>The Line Break<\/a><\/em>, and here\u2019s the episode where Bob reads Adrian Matejka\u2019s \u201cMixology\u201d<\/a>) and man what a well-put together book. We see The Champ\u2019s desperation to get out of poverty, we see the extravagances of wealth, we see the racism he faces. We also get some wrenching poems from Hattie to Belle, \u201cwives\u201d of the Galveston Giant (whom he never married). One he did marry, Etta Duryea, is heard only through excerpts of her interviews with the Feds when they were manufacturing a Mann Act case against the Galveston Giant. At the end of the book, Etta commits suicide, implicating Jack and his infidelities. From there, Jack Johnson\u2019s biography isn\u2019t all that unlike the end of Raging Bull<\/em>\u2014depressingly chasing spotlight after dwindling spotlight. Man, poem biographies are my favorite kind of biographies. The only kind I\u2019ll read? Maybe. Recommend some poem biographies to me, please. <\/p> The October 2023 Issue of <\/strong>Thrasher<\/strong><\/em> Magazine: <\/strong>my homie Breno loaned this to me and I\u2019m just now getting around to reading it. What fun! I haven\u2019t read a magazine in forever. This one has pictures of skateboarders! As much as I love skateboarding, I\u2019m very, very bad at it, so reading about it is much more fun than attempting. Elated am I to learn that skateboarders are still fixing infrastructure<\/a>, and that people are still sending handwritten letters to Thrasher<\/em>. From prison, too\u2014even though skateboarding is not, well, y\u2019know.<\/p> LINKS!<\/strong><\/p> Something to listen to? Come on, you know what we\u2019re going with. It\u2019s obvious, right? Here\u2019s Miles Davis\u2019s \u201cRight Off,\u201d from A Tribute to Jack Johnson<\/em>. Seek this whole album out, dudes. <\/p>![](\"https:\/\/substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/images\/afbfcd8e-cd19-4979-9cdb-dcf0c12a5cc0.heic\"\/)
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