After several years of indignant denials and aggressive dickishness in response to accusations of doping, cyclist Lance Armstrong has decided to seek absolution from omnimedia queen Oprah Winfrey. In a two-part interview airing Thursday and Friday on Oprah’s cable network OWN, Armstrong will come clean about using performance-enhancing drugs throughout his professional career.

I’m not all that curious about Armstrong’s revelations. It’s pretty open-and-shut: he’s been lying for years, and now he feels bad about it. It’s his choice of venue and inquisitor that intrigues me. Why would Armstrong choose to confess to Mother Oprah, patron saint of carefully constructed celebrity “media events?” And what does Oprah, whose network has run into some high-profile stumbling blocks, hope to gain by giving Armstrong a safe place to admit his wrongdoings? After all, she went full Jules Winnfield on poor James Frey after he admitted his memoir, A Million Little Pieces, was little more than a fiction writing exercise. Oprah later apologized to Frey—but that incident made it clear that she doesn’t suffer liars gladly.

Oprah’s Tuesday appearance on CBS This Morning gives us an idea of her motivations:

I think it’s certainly the biggest interview I’ve ever done in terms of its exposure. I think back in 1993, of course, I did Michael Jackson live around the world. This is going to be live-streamed around the world, as well as on OWN. If you can’t find OWN on your station, you should go to Oprah.com, and we have a channel finder there for people who are still trying to find it.

Millions will tune in to OWN to watch Lance Armstrong’s interview. And that’ll be great for ratings.

Over at The New Republic earlier this week, I wrote about how FX’s new comedy Legit, which premieres tonight at 10:30, encapsulates an underlying theme that animates all of the network’s programming: what does it mean to be a legitimate and successful American man? While not ever FX watcher is loyal to the network’s entire lineup, if you drop in on its comedies and dramas, you’ll find men dealing with everything from how to be better fathers to their children than their own were, coping with the consequences of sexual double-standards, and grappling with downward mobility or weaker economic positions than their partners. Legit, an enormously agreeable show that’s simultaneously sweeter and tarter than many of FX’s offerings, fits in that formula and expands it in some exciting new directions.

Legit has a relatively simple premise: a stand-up comic, Jim (stand-up comedian Jim Jeffries), who lives with his divorced friend Steve (Second City alumn Dan Bakkedahl), who he met when Jim came to live with Steve’s family as an exchange student (Steve tells his mother, who hates Jim, at one point that “I wanted a Swedish female!”), decides to become more “legitimate,” with a vague sense of what that might mean. But he finds some purpose when Steve encourages Jim to reconnect with Steve’s younger brother Billy (DJ Qualls), who has muscular dystrophy, and who is confined to an assisted-living facility. Deciding that Billy, who is 31, has been overly coddled and needs to experience more of life, Jim first takes it upon himself to break Billy out of the facility for occasional adventure, and then decides to move Billy in with him and Steve and begin caring for him. The show, run by Peter O’Fallon, starts off a bit rough around the edges. But it grows quickly in its first couple of episodes, and Legit‘s portrayal of both life with disability and the friendships among maturing men has the potential to be something special.

To start with, it’s very funny. Many of the stories are drawn directly from Jeffries’ experiences with his friend with muscular dystrophy or O’Fallon’s helping to care for his father, who died of ALS. Much of the punch of Jim’s stories comes from his character’s utter lack of social awareness. Sometimes, he’s hilariously entitled, spinning out a fantasy about having a child with a terminally ill woman who will die once their child is old enough to get him beers from the fridge, saving him from having to be a good husband, and guaranteeing that his child will always be grateful. And in other moments, that lack of respect for social norms mean Jim’s capable of caring for Billy without inhibition, whether he’s helping the other man urinate because he’s decided the bottle Billy uses is a genius invention, or helping him through the awkwardnesses of Skpye dates and cybersex. Jim may believe that Billy’s going to be the perfect wing man, and that taking him out and helping him develop a social life may mean that he’s “going to get so much pussy.” But despite his frattish inclinations, Jim spends a lot more time hanging out with Billy at home than taking him out and making use of him. If selfishness set Jim on his quest to become legitimate, it seems that once he’s started visiting Billy again, Jim finds himself in it for the pure enjoyment of Billy’s company—and the joy of tweaking Billy’s mother, Janice.

Steve is an appealing straight man to Jim’s wildness, and an ongoing illustration of the limitations of Jim’s approach to life, and the practical realities of caring for someone with muscular dystrophy. When the two men take Billy on an exuberant road trip to a Nevada brothel so he can lose his virginity, they deposit him in a room with a cheerful prostitute (and Jeffries real-life girlfriend), only for Steve to realize that he’s forgotten to undress his brother. After Jim hands out dating tips to Steve and Billy, Steve initially finds success with an attractive woman from his office by complimenting her eyes, only to end up stuck with variations on that theme after he finds he doesn’t have anything else to talk to her about. Good intentions and low inhibitions aren’t enough, as it turns out, to navigate every situation or to negotiate a truly fulfilling life.
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Chicago rapper Chief Keef’s major-label debut “Finally Rich” has sparked verbal sparring among rap critics about cultural tourism and hiphop. This valuable conversation began with a glowing review by Jordan Sargent, and an angry response from RapRadar’s Brian “B.Dot” Miller. The central controversy is over the responsibilities we have when we talk about hiphop, and who should be allowed access to and influence over those conversations. Sargent is white, and Miller is black. Miller insisted on the New York Times ArtsBeat podcast that his distinction between tourism and legitimate participation in hiphop culture is based upon tenure and not melanin, and the disagreement over Chief Keef does not break along simple racial lines at all. But there is a natural suspicion of white voices in hiphop discourse.

The controversy over Keef is in many ways about the age-old lyrics vs. music wrestling match over how to value hiphop. Craig Jenkins has already eviscerated the “community of gatekeepers” who insist Keef’s lyrical content removes him from serious consideration or threatens to destroy hiphop. I’ll try to add something to the parallel thread about cultural tourism, white privilege, and good intentions.

Suspicion of white folks in conversations about hiphop is natural, and more valid than most acts of cultural gatekeeping. American history makes this inescapable. We’re a superpower built in record time thanks to 400 years of stolen labor and stolen lives, and another 150 of systematic oppression of the descendants of that thievery. (That that oppression is now abstract rather than legislated does not make it disappear.) This makes white appropriation of black cultural output inherently more problematic than, say, a Greenwich-born Bentley-driving 17-year-old who finds her angst validated and channeled in the music of impoverished Appalachia. Or a dentist’s son pouring the pain money can’t treat into an identification with music by blue-collar drug-addicted pop geniuses. The honky-tonk bar crowd might be wary of the rich girl, and the punk club might be angry to learn the mosher among them is going home to financial security and a nuclear family. But class divisions may go unnoticed, and even if they don’t the gap in privilege that financial class breeds is limited, and most of all, impermanent. Progress for the rich is, to borrow a phrase, fragile and reversible.

When it comes to hiphop, the privilege gap between the outsider and the insider is based on hundreds of years of brutality. When suburban white privilege comes to the rap show, it’s crossing a hell of a lot more space, and that space is going to be enforced by society far into the future. (To steadily decreasing effect, inshallah.) Straight, white, and male is the easiest difficulty setting in life. Even the white kids who were dealt a bad socioeconomic hand are holding it at a damn good table. And again, history: However sincerely we participate in hiphop culture, we’re beneficiaries of systematic oppression finding an outlet in the anthems of the systematically oppressed. This is the source of the suspicion that sometimes greets white hiphop heads, and which lingers to some extent even after we succeed in proving our sincerity and depth of knowledge or curiosity about the culture. This is why some people call us tourists even after we’ve stayed awhile and taken up residence in hiphop culture.

There are a lot of us expats, in an ill-defined space between those raised on black music and culture and those just-visiting dilettantes. We think we’ve earned some standing (and some codeswitching). But some folks regard us more as colonists. And that’s not a crazy sentiment, especially as regards white folks’ interest in violent drug rap. Dave Bry’s New Republic piece does a nice job of explaining why:

For me, a white person, a rap fan who does in fact enjoy Chief Keef’s album, for musical reasons, much the same as I enjoy Waka Flocka Flame’s music, even as I find the lyrics banal and deplore much of their message—a person who likes to think that I can compartmentalize various elements of artistic expression, and appreciate music without any agenda—it’s worth giving hard thought to what it means that a black person is saying that she can’t. It’s worth ruminating on how deeply and insidiously white privilege and the black lack thereof infect every aspect of life in America—even something as simple as enjoying a good pop song. […] We want it to be different, us well-meaning white people. Maybe that’s even part of why we listen to rap music, or part of why we started to, anyway, because we want to do our best to make amends, to bridge the divide. We don’t want to be outsiders; we don’t want for there to be such a thing as outsiders. We want it to be different, but it’s not.

We want it to be one way, but it’s the other way. (Quoting “The Wire” sagely is another primary identifier of us would-be expats.) I don’t agree with Bry about Chief Keef on artistic grounds – based on two spins of “Finally Rich” and video evidence of his formulaic plug-and-play vapidity as an emcee, I want badly to side with Keef’s critics – but he’s dead on that it should be impossible to consider the Keefs and Flockas and Gunplays of the world completely outside of moralized critique, no matter how much serious white fans of their music might wish it so. Still, I think Bry missed a spot.

When he says he enjoys thuggish rap “even as I find the lyrics banal and deplore much of their message,” he’s pleading innocent of partaking in ign’ant shit as escapist fantasy. This seems disingenuous. Part of the appeal of everybody from Keef to Nate Dogg is that they give us access to a synthetic blend of toughness, indomitability, and limitless sexual potency that most of us don’t actually enjoy. Those banal lyrics and deplorable messages aren’t just part of the fun– they are the fun. That folks like Bry or myself aren’t enjoying this stuff in a mocking or ironic way does not make it completely above-board. We’re getting sincere enjoyment from something that makes us feel more alive, but as his piece notes so eloquently, we don’t live with the consequences when the music stops. Insofar as we white sojourners praise and download this stuff because it lets us play gangster, we’re taking advantage of the privilege gap Bry discusses.

And that gap puts the lie to the expat aspirations of even the most sincere and versed of white hiphop heads. Jamelle Bouie’s recent piece on his decision not to carry a flatscreen TV to his friend’s house alone, for fear of being taken for a thief, reminded me that my tourist status can’t be erased by my own actions. It’s imposed by the culture around us that assumes the worst about a black face – an attitude with much deeper roots than rap music, but which has been drawing strength from rappers for decades.

But Chief Keef can’t be responsible for that attitude. Neither can any other rapper. Images of black virility, self-determination, and power have scared white folks since long before Ice Cube nailed the motives of white cultural reactionaries in an interlude on his 1992 album “The Predator.” Every white hiphop head should check their privilege almost constantly. That privilege does not oblige us to be silent about our tastes or criticisms– much the opposite, in fact. It obliges us to speak a lot, because it obliges us to speak carefully and inquisitively, and recklessness always takes fewer words than consideration. Just playing good rap for our friends isn’t being down for any cause unless we’re also participating in the conversation about systems of oppression. Hiphop kickstarted that conversation long before we got here, and however much time we’ve put in learning this culture we should always acknowledge that we’re guests.

Otherwise, we’re not just tourists or commuters to hiphop, free to walk unjudged through the streets our musical heroes depict. We’re worse than that. We’re subconsciously preying on that privilege in order to enjoy feeling Like A Bawse in private. We’re colonizing the music of someone else’s struggle.

I had never read a word of H.P. Lovecraft until last summer. I figured it was like pot—if you got into him in high school, you’d probably like him forever, but if you didn’t, you wouldn’t, no loss. But then I realized that I knew a ton of women who were huge Lovecraft fans. And this struck me as so strange that I had to see for myself what all of the fuss was about.

Reading him as late as I did was interesting. I mean, like everyone else, I had watched “Ancient Aliens” on the History Channel and laughed, but I certainly didn’t understand before how much of it is an—I think unintentional—homage to Lovecraft. Shoot, any number of unscripted shows on TV right now seem based on Lovecraftian premises: there’s something out there in the dark that most people know nothing about, but our intrepid protagonists, who might seem a little goofy, have evidence of vast hidden knowledge of this horror, which they will use to investigate said horror. See the aforementioned “Ancient Aliens” or “Finding Bigfoot” or any of the “Ghost Hunters/Adventures/etc.” shows.

And he is a skilled writer. He can take things that just are not objectively that scary—a giant elbow, an alien shaped like a pyramid—and creep you right out with them.

But whoa doggy, the dude is racist. And not just in the “oh, he had some unfortunate personal beliefs, but we can overlook them and still enjoy his art” way. His stories often hinge on the idea that “fully human” is English people and people of English descent and creeping up out of the uncanny valley to ruin things for people of English descent are bunches of different groups of people who range from not very human at all—strange islanders and non-white people of all sorts—to people who could almost pass for human, if you weren’t vigilant—like the French.

One of his best stories, “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is all about how a man is rightfully repulsed by the residents of Innsmouth, who have, to put it mildly, interbred with the wrong sorts of people, people they met while they were out sailing around the world, only to discover, to his horror, that he is one of these repulsive people. The story is great and scary and ooky, but the story doesn’t work without the premise that there are some folks we just shouldn’t mix with.

So what do you do with an author who is hugely influential and, in many ways, rightly so, whose work has some enormous problems? That question becomes more interesting and less hypothetical when you realize most, if not all, Lovecraft stuff is probably in the public domain. If you want to try to fix your problems with Lovecraft’s stories, you can.

While I was trying to figure out what made my friends swoon over Lovecraft, I came across his story “The Shunned House,” which is, as far as I’m concerned, just about as perfect a haunted house story as you can get (with one massive exception—the stupid giant elbow at the end).

So, I got this idea to retell “The Shunned House,” but set it near where I live, and post the story at my blog. I thought this would give me a chance to really understand Lovecraft’s technique, to see how he does what he does.

Lovecraft is so confident in his storytelling ability that he can tell you what happens—in this case that the narrator’s uncle dies—right up front. Most storytellers build suspense by keeping from you what happens until the last minute, but Lovecraft builds suspense by withholding how it happens. I don’t think this is a good strategy for most writers. To me, a horror story is a kind of tragedy. Letting your reader know that almost everyone has a happy ending ahead of time seems like you’re backing away from the tragedy of it.

But, obviously, it works for Lovecraft. And for “Ancient Aliens,” for that matter. I mean, every episode, you know it was aliens that did something. The mystery of the episodes is what they did.

I also think that it’s really genius how Lovecraft lets things build up without immediate resolution. He brings things up early on—not just the uncle’s death, but the other deaths in the house, and then drops them for a while. He just leaves their unresolved nature hanging over the story. So, even though the story starts out without anything particularly scary happening at the moment, and the only weird thing Lovecraft’s narrator brings up is a strange moldy spot, the deaths the reader doesn’t know enough about set a tone. This is a trick utilized by “Ghost Adventures” every week. They tell you the story of the place upfront, and it’s not particularly scary, but the weird stories you’re told in the first half set the tone for the things that happen (or don’t) in the second half.

But even in this awesome story, which I love, you can’t escape the specter of Lovecraft’s ubiquitous gross personal beliefs. One of the house’s inhabitants, William Harris is described as “enfeebled as he was by the climate of Martinique,” because, of course, the tropics are corrupting and ruinous. Even people from the countryside come in for a Lovecraftian sniding, “Mercy should have known better than to hire anyone from the Nooseneck Hill country, for that remote bit of backwoods was then, as now, a seat of the most uncomfortable superstitions.” And the one weird thing that ties all the deaths in the house together is that people speak French. Quel horreur!

Lovecraft’s politics are right at the heart of his stories. You take the heart out, and I’m not sure how Lovecraftian what’s left is. But I’m also not sure that’s all that terrible. We seem to be doing all right with reanimating the heartless corpses of his work and putting them work to our own ends. That seems fitting.

Trust, but verify. That three-word phrase popularized by Ronald Reagan is a valuable lesson the sports media could use today, less than 24 hours after Deadspin broke one of the most bizarrely fascinating stories sports has ever seen. It turns out the most riveting and inspirational story of the 2012 college football season, the one in which Notre Dame’s star linebacker Manti Te’o was at the center, was a fraud, a hoax perpetuated either by Te’o himself or by a group of people who found the perfect mark.

Te’o, we heard all season, was playing through the adversity of the deaths of his grandmother and his girlfriend, who died, depending on which report you read, either on the same day or within days of each other last fall. The story erupted when Te’o led the Fighting Irish to an upset victory over Michigan State just days after the deaths; it ended up as a centerpiece of Te’o's Heisman Trophy campaign and Notre Dame’s surge to the national championship game. It was reported widely, first by the South Bend Tribune, then by Sports Illustrated and ESPN, and later by other national outlets like CBS News. It was a heart-stirring story, the kind sports journalists love to tell. In a world of cynicism, stories like Te’o's are gold.

The problem, as Deadspin exposed, is that the girlfriend, the one with whom Te’o supposedly spent hours on the phone as she suffered from leukemia, never had leukemia. She never died. She never even existed.

Why it happened, and what exactly happened, is unclear. Notre Dame and Te’o maintain that he was the victim of an elaborate hoax, and an NFL player claims the woman is “real.” Te’o and family members claim to have met her, and Te’o talked about her at a Jan. 3 press conference, a week after he supposedly found out it was a hoax. Did Te’o and his family perpetrate the hoax to make him more marketable, or was he a dupe who was taken advantage of by others? We’ll likely find out more about that as the days wear on, particularly now that the media has turned its attention to digging up every detail.

That the sports media failed to verify Te’o's story and subsequently built up a heroic story that was nothing more than a fraud, however, is painfully obvious.

This, unfortunately, is a familiar pattern in sports, where heroes are built on against-the-odds or larger-than-life stories that aren’t verified or properly vetted until it’s too late. Then, when a story-shattering revelation comes to the surface, the media forgets the image it helped create and turns its attention to destroying that image piece by piece. Little attention is ever paid to its own role in the process.

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