Wesley Morris's NYT Magazine piece on white folks' fear of the black man's genitalia, "Last Taboo," sounds uncomfortable. It's not. It is brutally frank, at times hilarious, but throughout, it treats the topic with the respect it deserves--and calls out Seth MacFarlane in the process:
Officially, there are no penises in “Ted 2,” the comedy written by, directed by and starring Seth MacFarlane that was a hit last summer. And yet they’re everywhere — scary black ones. Mark Wahlberg plays a New England knucklehead named John, who swears that you can’t use the internet without running into one. When a mishap at a fertility clinic leaves him covered in semen, a staff member tells him not to worry; it’s just the sperm of men with sickle-cell anemia, a disease that, in the United States, overwhelmingly afflicts African-Americans. John’s best friend, Ted — a nasty animated teddy bear — gets a huge kick out of this: “You hear that? You’re covered in rejected black-guy sperm,” it says. “You look like a Kardashian!"
The sperm bank is the pair’s Plan B. Plan A entails Wahlberg and the bear breaking into Tom Brady’s house and stealing some of his spunk as he sleeps. When they lift the sheets, staring at his crotch, they’re bathed in the golden light of video-game treasure. In another movie, this might be a clever conceit. Here it feels like paranoid propaganda, a deluxe version of what entertainment and politics have been doing for more than 200 years: inventing new ways to assert black inferiority. Now a teddy bear has a greater claim to humanity than the black people it mocks.Just read it all.
In a piece that really was uncomfortable, Deadspin spun out an obit for/tribute to Jennifer Frey, the one-time superstar sports writer who succumbed to alcoholism in March at the age of 47. Every reporter of a certain age who covered national sports ran into Jennifer. I attended one of her March Madness-tub-full-o-liquor-post-deadline parties. And everyone, even those who didn't know her, had an opinion about her. Not all of them were altogether positive. But everyone acknowledged her talent. What the story touches on, but doesn't quite delve into, is the pervasiveness of drinking in journalism--an old, sad story.
Speaking for myself, but I suspect for a whole lot of other writers, there but for the grace of God...
