Month: April 2024

Michael Buffer, Jimmy Lennon, Jr. – and Me!

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Before there was an airport in Philadelphia, planes used to land in Central Airport across the Delaware River in Camden, New Jersey. Weber’s Hof Brau restaurant was at the airport. They had outdoor fights there, too.

My father loved to tell about how he was at the fights at the airport one night and every time this one dude got hit with a good shot, his cup would fly out and the ref would call a halt while his corner men retrieved the reluctant cup and gathered around their warrior to reinstall it.

My one experience as a ring announcer took place at outdoor fights, too, and there was an “incident,” shall we say, at that show, too.

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Brothers Under the Skin (Redux)

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Wesley Hogan’s felt appreciation of Tracy Chapman’s Grammy duet with Luke Combs (here) sent your editor back to another crossover move by the Man of Country, Morgan Wallen. I’m reposting the video of his duet with Lil Durk (along with a short comment on it below). Wallen’s & Durk’s mannish boys’ stance seems backward compared to Chapman’s and Combs’ progressive politesse. Yet the rougher guys’ vernacular — “I’d’ve stayed my ass at home” — brings home the less than colloquial lyrics — …”I’ll get a promotion…we’ll buy a bigger house and move to the suburbs” — that undercut (slightly) Chapman’s attempt to make a song of the people, by the people, for the people. You need to keep an ear out for how underdogs talk now if you mean to write to/for them. I’m glad Wes Hogan is out to make sure we don’t forget C’ and C’s award show turn, but Wallen’s & Durk’s forgotten collab belongs to a river of song that runs below all the Broadways in this world — deep beneath the attention of the gentility.  B.D.

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Preface to the Korean Edition of “The Magna Carta Manifesto”

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This chapter from Peter Linebaugh’s Stop Thief: The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance opens with aristos’ charming spin on the human right to rest. But Linebaugh isn’t one to go on in defense of laziness. Near the end of this short piece, he invokes bookish Reds who once insisted a “Communist is a mere bluffer, if he has not worked over in his conscious­ness the whole inheritance of human knowledge.”[1] Linebaugh has surely put in work on that score. The fact that his essay is a preface to the Korean edition of one of his earlier books stands as a tribute to his worldliness. Linebaugh goes wide in this chapter (as ever) though he begins in bed…

Of the aristocratic and stylish Mitford sisters, Jessica provides us with the Lazy Interpretation of Magna Carta beloved by sluggards everywhere. As a lovely communist (two of her sisters were fascists) she was disowned by her family and fell from the social peaks of English aristocracy to the Dickensian depths of the Rotherhithe docks in London in 1939. Unable to pay the rent she and her husband lived in fear of the process-server who they avoided by going in disguises which the process server soon came to recognize. “Esmond had a theory that it was illegal and in some way a violation of Magna Carta to serve process on people in bed.”[1] So they stayed in bed all day and then all night, and again all the next day, and all the next night under the covers, before deciding to immigrate to America. (Tom Paine, too, thought that independ­ent America was a realization of Magna Carta).

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