beat-blogging

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always a good day to revisit "how tracy austin broke my heart"

Here is a theory. Top athletes are compelling because they em body the comparison-based achievement we Americans revere — fastest, strongest — and because they do so in a totally unambiguous way. Questions of the best plumber or best managerial accountant are impossible even to define, whereas the best relief pitcher, free-throw shooter, or female tennis player is, at any given time, a matter of public statistical record. Top athletes fascinate us by appealing to our twin compulsions with competitive superiority and hard data.

Plus they’re beautiful: Jordan hanging in midair like a Chagall bride, Sampras laying down a touch volley at an angle that defies Euclid. And they’re inspiring. There is about world-class athletes carving out exemptions from physical laws a transcendent beauty that makes manifest God in man. So actually more than one theory, then. Great athletes are profundity in motion. They enable abstractions like power and grace and control to become not only incarnate but televisable. To be a top athlete, performing, is to be that exquisite hybrid of animal and angel that we average unbeautiful watchers have such a hard time seeing in ourselves.

So we want to know them, these gifted, driven physical achievers. We too, as audience, are driven: watching the performance is not enough. We want to get intimate with all that profundity. We want inside them; we want the Story. We want to hear about humble roots, privation, precocity, grim resolve, discouragement, persistence, team spirit, sacrifice, killer instinct, liniment and pain. We want to know how they did it. How many hours a night did the child Bird spend in his driveway hitting jumpers under home strung floodlights? What ungodly time did Bjorn get up for practice every morning? What exact makes of cars did the Butkus boys work out by pushing up and down Chicago streets? What did Palmer and Brett and Payton and Evert have to give up? And of course, too, we want to know how it feels, inside, to be both beautiful and best (“How did it feel to win the big one?”). What combination of blankness and concentration is required to sink a putt or a free-throw for thousands of dollars in front of millions of unblinking eyes? What goes through their minds? Are these athletes real people? Are they even remotely like us? Is their Agony of Defeat anything like our little agonies of daily frustration? And of course what about the Thrill of Victory — what might it feel like to hold up that #1 finger and be able to actually mean it?

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Gothic Church Ruins, 1826 by Carl Blechen (German, 1798–1840)

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I went to rpf island and could not help but notice some interesting dynamics between its inhabitants

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I’d tell him his stuff was great. You’d normally have to be a little bit drunk. It helped.

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HE WHAT

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Prepping breakfast in a snow hole.

Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario

1973

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mclennon sounds like something that white suburbanites would name their daughter

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Fuck it Two of Us (2000) gif

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just got reminded of ringo's cameo in popstar never stop never stopping and the thing he says has such gif potential pleasehold

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john lennon: famously dead, actually dead -> most famously dead

paul mccartney: famously dead, actually alive -> second most famously dead

george harrison: normal amount of famously dead in real life -> good for him

ringo starr: final girl

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just got reminded of ringo's cameo in popstar never stop never stopping and the thing he says has such gif potential pleasehold

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John Lennon & George Harrison testing their swordsmanship while on holiday (Ireland, 1964)

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“Meeting Paul was just like two people meeting. Not falling in love or anything. Just us. It went on. It worked.”

— John Lennon - The Beatles by Hunter Davies

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“Meeting Paul was just like two people meeting. Not falling in love or anything. Just us. It went on. It worked.”

— John Lennon - The Beatles by Hunter Davies

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the way that man has been dead for almost 44 years and still like monthly more insane shit about their relationship is coming out like I'm gonna be 50 and there's gonna be newfound evidence that they did actually physically meld into one person briefly and switched souls back and forth but it just never came up

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i would have been mutuals with him