I am well aware that in the U.S., professional cycling is viewed as a pursuit reserved largely for gay men and communists. I take this as a badge of honor. With cycling coverage so often focused on “designer” drugs, the sport’s luminaries bearing phallus-friendly names like “Lance”, and the athletes themselves clad in tush-tight Spandex, who can begrudge the boors their opinions?

But the last three weeks have cut the legs out from under me. You can learn a lot about a sport’s fan base by paying attention to commercials advertisers run during competitions. And, sadly, you can learn a lot about yourself. Cycling fans: the news is grim.

Watching the 21-stage Giro D’Italia (Italy’s equivalent of the Tour De France ended Sunday) on NBC’s Universal Sports channel, was a thrill: seeing Lance Armstrong back in the saddle after a three-year retirement was inspiring; watching as eventual winner Denis Menchov crashed in the rain during the final day’s time trial (tearing a hole in his pink leader’s jersey), only to hop back on the bike and power across the finish line was extraordinary.

Even so, the commercials made one thing depressingly clear: far from being among a legion of well-heeled, sophisticated, Europhiles—people who speak more than one language, scoff at the notion of decaffeinated espresso, and medicate their depressed poodles—I am in fact, one of a small and pathetic gang of sad sacks who just can’t seem to grow a pair and watch some NBA playoffs like the rest of their compatriots and may very well never have kissed a girl.

Following is a list of advertisers that ran commercial spots every day during the race:

* Extenze penis enlarging pills.

* A penis pump, which manually inflates your limp member like a bicycle tire (could that actually be the tie-in?)

*Proactiv acne treatment (the manufacturer offers free shipping for the product, in case you want to spend that extra cash on a chocolate bar to rub all over your face)

*A law firm offering help to people who owe thousands of dollars in back taxes

*AloeCure, which “naturally soothes” the digestive systems of people suffering from Acid reflux, heartburn, Irritable Bowel Syndrome and ulcers

*An anti-hunger organization

*The San Jose Repertory Theater, which is mounting a new production of the musical, “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.”

Add to this the fact that the race was followed each day by an hour of women’s doubles ping pong programming, and you get the picture: advertisers, who presumably research these things, believe that we cycling fans are zit-faced, scoff-law senior citizens suffering horrendous bowel distress who not only have tiny penises, but also have discovered that they don’t function properly. And we love the musical theater.

I’m not yet sure how I feel about this portrait of my fellow cycling fans and me. I’ll know better in about ten days, when my penis pump arrives in the mail (shipping not included).

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

A Film Review of Gomorrah
135 minutes—Color—Italian, w/English subtitles—Not rated

Near the beginning of Gomorrah, Matteo Garrone’s jarring new film about organized crime in southern Italy, two teenage boys, decked out in ridiculous Miami Beach guayaberas, do their best Al Pacino impressions while dutifully re-enacting a scene from Scarface. It’s a funny moment in an otherwise sobering film. Even in Naples, home turf of the omnipotent, unmerciful Camorra syndicate, these two boobs strut around like Tony Montana, boasting that they’re going to “blow the Colombians’ heads off.” The way they idolize Pacino’s screen gangster seems innocent enough—like American boys donning straw hats and plastic pistols to play-act life as cowboys. Except that these two young Italian guys have real guns, and aren’t as skilled with them as the more seasoned mobsters who want them dead.

Gomorrah is a self-conscious repudiation of gangster movies like Scarface; it is a reminder, courtesy of a stiff slap in the face, that the classy foot soldiers of The Godfather and the bumbling mafiosi of The Sopranos and even the outsized-if-doomed Tony Montana have very little to do with the real world. Unsparingly violent, Gomorrah aims to portray mob life as it is, and to lay bare how horribly suffocating civilian life becomes for those under its thumb. Over the last three decades, the Camorra—which comprises numerous clans trafficking in guns, drugs and protection, along with interests in fields from textiles to tourism to supermarkets—has murdered some 4,000 people. Its members include not only hoods, but doctors, businesspeople, chemists, builders and street sweepers. No matter where they turn, Garrone tells us, Neapolitans cannot get away. Neither, it turns out, can Garrone: to add grit, he cast non-actors in several roles; three of these non-actors now have been arrested for real-life ties to the Camorra. Moreover, Roberto Saviano, whose nonfiction account of the Camorra was the basis for the movie, is under police protection; the clan has put a price on his head.

Gomorrah tells five interwoven stories about power, money and blood in the slums of Naples. Don Ciro, middle-aged, earnest and discreet, is a sottomarino—he trudges around Naples’ decaying housing projects dolling out (insufficient) hardship money to families of Camorra members who are in jail. Toto, a sweet-faced 13-year-old, is inducted into a Camorra group when he dons a bullet-proof vest and allows himself to be shot at close range. “Now you’re a man,” the triggerman tells the boy, who’s lying on the ground, dazed from this mafia Bar Mitzvah.

Then there’s Roberto, a clean-cut university grad desperate for work, who gets into a racket dumping toxic waste where it shouldn’t be dumped. And Pasquale, an earnest and talented tailor working for a Camorra-funded outfit, whose life is put at risk when he’s recruited by Chinese competitors.

Finally, there are the Tony Montana wannabes. After stealing cocaine from a group of black immigrants; holding up a video arcade; and robbing a bundle of high-octane weapons from a Camorra cache, a clan head puts out a hit on the clueless boys.

The grim portrait the film paints of life in Naples–it is nearly impossible to live normally there–is powerful. When a wedding procession makes its way through one floor of the projects while, upstairs, a group of hoodlums sells cocaine, it is evident the Camorra has driven its tentacles deep into every aspect of these people’s lives.

Even so, Gomorrah doesn’t quite measure up to the best films of its ilk. In City of God and Boyz N the Hood, for example, we are genuinely moved when bad things happen to the characters. That’s because we are their fellow travelers, voyeurs peeking in on their family lives and romances. We know their dreams and hopes.
Not so in Gomorrah, where the characters are shown only during the narrow period the movie depicts, and exclusively as their lives relate to the Camorra. In a sense, of course, that’s the point: in Naples, life independent of the Camorra doesn’t exist. But operating this way, Garrone loses the deep empathy that adheres for characters in these other, better, films.

In the film’s most poignant moment, 13-year-old Toto is forced to choose between his own life and that of a friend. The sequence works because, from the beginning, we’ve seen Toto at home, interacting with his loving mother, delivering groceries for small tips. When eventually he makes his choice, we understand what is being lost. This is not the case for the other characters.

Still, as a brutal indictment of a vicious way of life, Gomorrah delivers. Shot cinema-verité style, the film is beautiful in its depiction of desperation. It does not allow viewers to avert their eyes and never wavers from its central thesis: life under the mafia isn’t Oscar material. It’s grim, narrow, and dangerous.

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

A.J. Liebling once remarked that the authors of newspaper obituaries are “a frustrated and usually anonymous tribe.” That’s certainly true of Gabriel Collins, narrator of Stacey D’Erasmo’s unusual new novel, The Sky Below.

An obit writer for a shrinking Manhattan newspaper that may itself shortly need eulogizing, Gabriel is frustrated by his family, his friends, his station and, at last, by his own ailing body. From the get-go, he insists on his anonymity: “I look familiar, though you can’t quite place me,” he says. “I look like a lot of people you know, or used to know.”

In the hands of a lesser writer, Gabriel’s story may, indeed, have felt familiar. Thankfully, D’Erasmo’s a deft stylist whose expressive prose elevates the book beyond ordinary fare, though certain turns of plot still strain the edge of credulity.

Crushed when his powerful, emotionally absent father takes off, the young Gabriel retreats into a rich fantasy life fed by his mother, who reads to him from Ovid. Lured by a job managing a motel, Gabriel’s mother uproots the family, moving them from a quiet Massachusetts suburb to a charmless town in Florida, where Gabriel, heroically homesick, starts breaking into neighbors’ houses, alternately stealing and leaving behind worthless trinkets. He starts selling drugs and, soon after, turning tricks in a bus station men’s room—though these scenes might have received gory treatment, D’Erasmo renders them almost delicately, making clear her narrator’s troubled frame of mind.

In college, as one of only two openly gay students, Gabriel spends most of his time building assemblage boxes of found objects, à la Joseph Cornell. This also is where he meets Sarah, the best friend, with whom he shares a deep affinity and the occasional fully nude bath.

After college Gabriel relocates to New York, where he finds work at the paper and a lover—an older, wealthier man. He also, improbably, scores a gig writing trashy airport novels when the series’ author, the aging Fleur Girard (née Becky Sharp), suffers a stroke. At first blanch, these sections would seem pure fluff; and yet, when Gabriel betrays the woman, her searing repudiation of him is deeply affecting. This, because Fleur’s pain is rendered so authentically, and because we know that Gabriel has recently been diagnosed with a “lazy” form of blood cancer. He heads to Mexico to track down his estranged father and there lives on a commune governed by an ex-con and his 8-year-old daughter’s dreams.

Liebling, who believed obituaries were fickle chroniclers of history, also said that, “When you write a man’s obituary, you become his advocate.” Perhaps it is this impulse that spurs Gabriel to put pen to paper, to set down his odd life, to advocate for himself when no one else will. As The Sky Below progresses, it becomes clear that its pages represent nothing short of Gabriel’s pre-emptive obituary for himself. And though at the paper he invented details to spiff up the lives of his subjects, here he is honest in his self-appraisal. Gabriel is not a likeable boy, nor, later, man. He testifies against a close friend when she’s caught holding the drugs he’s supposed to sell. He walks out on his lover during an evening at the theater, stepping over the man’s aging mother on the way out. When he learns his best friend is getting married, Gabriel reacts angrily.

Still, there’s something vulnerable in the way he never, even as an adult, gets over his father’s departure, and the loss of the comfortable nest of his early childhood. “As the winter dragged on, we were caught in his enormous, spectral grip,” Gabriel recalls of his father’s sudden exit. “It dimmed the lights and thinned the soup, burned the pancakes, turned over the garbage cans, knocked the City flat, put the needle back at the beginning of Blood on the Tracks.”

When he envisions himself sprouting wings, it is easy to see why Gabriel spends his days writing obituaries, chronicling people and places that no longer exist.

D’Erasmo—whose other books are the evocative Tea and A Seahorse Year—is a beautiful writer, and if her prose is occasionally a touch earnest, it doesn’t diminish this complex psychological portrait of a flawed and damaged man. Gabriel Collins may be frustrated, but by the end of The Sky Below he no longer is anonymous.

Related Posts:

• Drug Violence and the Lacking American Media Response
• Can Legalizing Drugs be a Solution for the Violence in Mexico?
• “Pussy Fever” Loves “Locker 29”
• Why Are You A Prostitute?
• Teleny and Camille