Editor's Message
Pride and the Yankees
It’s not easy to talk baseball with Yankee fans. All one hears about is the hallowed history. So many championships, so many legends, even a Broadway musical. Well, congratulations. Some of my best friends are Yankee fans. Me, I was named after the greatest Red Sox player ever (note: he was my mom’s favorite player), but I grew up four blocks north of Chicago. In other words, I know a thing or two about losing.
Many of my fondest memories of youth involve Wrigley Field. It was there in the bleachers where I first got drunk. I was fourteen going on twelve, but my pal Robby Rob was seventeen and looked mature enough—at least in the eyes of the beer man— to buy big cups of Old Style. In the late 70s-early 80s the Cubbies were positively wretched. My dad, a research librarian for World Book Encyclopedia, used to take the El home to Evanston from the Merchandise Mart. The train passed the “friendly confines” of Wrigley, where after a home game they would hoist a win or loss flag. It was the pre-Internet era, so I would wait at home for my dad’s report about the score. Needless to say, he was forced far more often than not to be the bearer of bad news.
I grew accustomed to rooting for a losing team, but I still loved the Cubbies. As far as I’m concerned, they can (and may) never win the World Series and it’s still ok (pitiful, ain’t it?). Frankly, I have never met a Cubs fan who’s also a Yankees fan—but then again, I’ve never met Hillary Clinton. Such dual loyalties nonetheless strike me as an impossible combination: After all, how can someone be arrogant and humble at the same time? As this October promises more heartbreak for the Cubs and (shudder) another crown for the Damn Yankees, all I can say is this: the American empire would be a lot better off it were guided by genuine Cub fans.
—T. Hamm
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Bahia Shehab and Haytham Nawar’s A History of Arab Graphic Design
By N.A. MansourAPRIL 2021 | Art Books
Easily the best introduction to the history of modern Arab visual culture on the market today, this new book lacks the jargon of exhibition catalogues, leans heavily on visual sources, and dismisses some previously held assumptions about Arab art.
7. [Lower Broadway]
By Raphael RubinsteinJUNE 2020 | The Miraculous
It’s the mid-1970s. A young abstract painter who has moved to New York from Southern California finds a studio near City Hall on Lower Broadway.
The Jerk Comes Full Circle: Reflections on Developing, Dramaturging, and Directing Fake Friends’ Cinematic and Theatrical Feat
By Rory Pelsue, Cat Rodríguez, and Ariel SibertDEC 20-JAN 21 | Theater
In October, as theaters remained dark for a seventh consecutive month and the content-starved internet feasted on memes to ready itself for the long, dry winter, a new performance-media company emerged from the sweat non-profit theaters drowned in while trying to stay afloat: Fake Friends was born, and so was a hybrid art form.
Dear Comrades, Friends, and Readers,
By Phong BuiJUNE 2020 | Publisher's Message
Call them what you will—autocrats, dictators, totalitarians, and all those who aspire to become as such—the moment that we are going through is forcing those in power to address the systemic racism that has never been resolved in our country’s history, or to put it more factually, the perpetuation of white supremacy.
