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Feb 3, 2016

How Joan Didion the Writer Became Joan Didion the Legend

I want you to understand exactly what you are getting.” I suppose I’m operating under a similar set of impulses—a mixture of candor, self-justification and self-dramatization, the dread of being misapprehended coupled with the certainty that misapprehension is inevitable (Didion’s style is catching, but not so much as her habit of thought)—when I tell you I’m scared of her. Before I get into why, I need to clarify something I said. Or, rather, something I didn’t say and won’t say, but which I’m anxious you’re going to think I said: that Didion isn’t a brilliant writer. She is a brilliant writer—sentence for sentence, among the best this country’s ever produced. And I’m not disputing her status as cultural icon either. As large as she looms now, she’ll loom larger as time passes—I’d bet money on it. In fact, I don’t want to diminish or assault her in any way. What I do want to do is get her right. And over the past 11 years, since 2005, when she published the first of her two loss memoirs, one about Dunne, the other about Quintana, her daughter, she’s been gotten wrong. And not just wrong, egregiously wrong, wrong to the point of blasphemy. I’m talking about the canonization of Didion, Didion as St. Joan, Didion as Our Mother of Sorrows. Didion is not, let me repeat, not a holy figure, nor is she a maternal one. She’s cool-eyed and cold-blooded, and that coolness and coldness—chilling, of course, but also bracing—is the source of her fascination as much as her artistry is; the source of her glamour too, and her seductiveness, because she is seductive, deeply. What she is is a femme fatale, and irresistible. She’s our kiss of death, yet we open our mouths, kiss back. The subject of this piece, though, is not just a who, Didion, but a what, Hollywood. So to bring them together, which is where they belong, a natural pairing, this: I think that Didion, along with Andy Warhol, her spiritual twin as well as her artistic, created L.A.—that is, modern L.A., contemporary L.A., the L.A. that is synonymous with Hollywood. And I think that Didion alone was the vehicle—or possibly the agent—of L.A.’s destruction... (Vanity Fair)

Jan 8, 2016

Chiefs try to shrug away ghosts of 2014 and that awful playoff loss at ...

And for this team, it’s still with us, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.” Smith said this last Sunday in a moment of apparent postgame candor. By Tuesday, he was at least publicly dismissing the idea that anyone was lugging this with them. “This is a completely different team,” he said. “It’s a new challenge, a new year.” That’s all true, of course, just as Smith and Johnson are correct when they say it helps no one to try to channel the weight of the last 22 years going into this year’s playoff opener.   “Every year’s different,” Johnson said. “If you go on the field thinking about what happened a couple years ago, or what happened in the past with the playoff games, you have no chance of going out there and winning the game. Our mind-set is, man, we’ve got blinders on.” But one way or another, the past lurks as part of the franchise DNA — whether as a hangover or inspiration or a lesson or just something that once happened that added to the wretched lore they aim to end. And one way or another, the last one will remain with them until they change the narrative. If siphoned properly, though, it also perhaps could be of service in reversing all this. Of course, there’s a fine line between moping about something like that and examining it critically as something to be learned from or motivated by. That line can be heard in Colquitt in one breath saying the Chiefs need to have flushed that away and in another adding, “It’s something that needs to be fresh in our minds.” That’s why safety Eric Berry watched it repeatedly that offseason, remarking in 2014 that he learned something from it with each viewing. That’s why many Chiefs talked about “finishing” when they began the 2014 season … only not to finish well enough to make the playoffs. But that game also is why they are acutely conscious of finishing now, an emphasis that has to have been bolstered by a 2015 season-long trend of establishing a fine lead and being left barely holding on. “Rather than dwell on it, try to learn from it,” said Reid, who in his first season had revived the Chiefs from a 2-14 2012 to a 9-0 start and that postseason berth.   Some aspects of that defeat, of course, were just cruel quirks of fate. How could it be that the Chiefs could force Donald Brown to fumble … and have it carom to Luck, who gobbled it up and bashed into the end zone as if he were anticipating just that bounce? Why would it be that five Chiefs would be knocked out of that game, including Jamaal Charles, Brandon Flowers and Donnie Avery with concussions and Justin Houston with an injury unspecified at the time? Meanwhile, in the more rational realm, what might have happened had Reid opted to go for it on fourth and goal at the 1-yard line instead of settling for a field goal after Indianapolis zoomed to a touchdown on its first drive of the game? And why couldn’t the Chiefs simply stop Luck, who somehow threw for a career-high 443 yards despite essentially being in obvious passing situations the entire second half? Whatever it is the Chiefs took from that game, virtually to a man they sum up the solution thusly: “You’ve got to finish the game,” Reid said. Added Sutton: “You’ve got to play it all the way to the end, and don’t even look (at the score). You’ve just got to go.” Lest they go and add another infamous chapter to a prologue that seemingly can’t be topped. “No matter how you lose it, it takes your breath away a little bit, you know?” Sutton said, adding that in the playoffs, “There is no next time, there is no next game. There’s nothing, and I think the finality of that … slaps you in the face.” Sometimes worse than others. (Kansas City Star (blog))