This Is Not the Life I Ordered - The Last Word on The Last Supper vs. The Feast of the Gods at the 2024 Olympics Opening Ceremony

If the artist (or someone else) has to explain (not interpret or explicate but explain, as in "this is the right interpretation and this is the wrong one") the work then it has failed. Regardless of however much one is or isn't fluent in classical studies or Greek mythology or fine art or Rupaul's Drag Race, the point of the work was lost and that's the artist's fault, not the fault of the audience.

When you release your work for public consumption, you don't get to decide how it's digested. Blackface minstrel shows in the early 20th century in America, to use one example, might have been an homage, one could argue, to the animatedness and musicality of Bl@ck American culture. But that's not how it was received and that's not how it will be remembered, at least so far.

If I were the artistic director of the opening ceremony and my inspiration was Dionysus and the Feast of the Gods, I would have been very careful to make that abundantly clear and distinct from any resemblance to a drag version of the Last Supper UNLESS I wanted this controversy to ensue to rile people up and get noticed. The two works are not similar. But one is far more iconic. And while the Olympics are obviously Greek in origin, the ceremony should be a distinctly French performance, and imbued with French cultural references. So with France being a largely Catholic country, it makes perfect sense that people would see the tableau as a reference to Da Vinci's Last Supper. That's a perfectly legitimate interpretation.

So artistic director Thomas Jolly either wanted to stir up some kind of mixed message so that he could clap back and make people feel ignorant or he just didn't see how his own work could be misconstrued, which would mean he failed at his job. I'm not entirely sure this wasn't some form of trolling on his part and that he isn't having his own Dionysian bacchanal celebrating the backlash to all of this as we speak.

This Is Not the Life I Ordered -- The Healthy Wear a Crown

 The healthy wear a crown that only the sick can see.

A Yemeni doctor acquaintance of mine shared this resonantly profound Arabic proverb with me a few years ago, and boy is it true.

The last two months have been some of the scariest in my life. Short version: I had an "event" in my vision that my doctor thought was a TIA, which is a transient ischemic attack, also known as a fucking mini-stroke. Yes, you read that correctly. So I've spent the last two months taking a zillion tests, each one further confirming that I'm healthy but not quite checking all boxes, until I finally took the two most important ones yesterday and found out that I have no artery blockages in my head and neck and there is no residue from a stroke or stroke-like incident.

So I'm in the clear.

Oddly, the night that I had this "event" -- whatever it was -- was the night I graduated with my Master of Science in Publishing from Pace University. In the months and weeks prior to this event, I had been extremely stressed out trying to get it all done, all while working a gig as an AI editor at Google, which was as awful as it sounds, and also applying for another Master's program at NYU. I was in the gym every day, I was drinking too much to wind down at night, and I was completely overwhelmed. My blood pressure got so high I had to start taking medication for it and testing my BP at home (which always raised my BP so I have stopped doing that).

On the night I officially graduated, I was leaving a graduation party and had just walked out of the subway. As I turned on my street, I realized that the leaves had grown on the trees and I had missed them budding. I wondered, "When did the leaves come out on all the trees?" and just as I was admiring the nature I had been too busy to notice over the last few weeks, about 1/5 of my vision in both eyes went black, as if a curtain had been pulled over it. It only lasted a few seconds but it was really eerie.

The next day I Googled it and didn't like what I read so I emailed my doctor, the deeply patient and beautiful soul that is Dr. Jordan Coleman, and he contacted me immediately and told me what a TIA is -- and what the implications of this were.

It made sense that I would have something happen to me, in retrospect. I was burning it on both ends. So for the last two months I have been scared shitless that I had a mini-stroke, which is usually a precursor for a major one. Every day I woke up basically surprised I woke up. I dreamt of having a stroke many nights. The word "stroke" seemed to show up in everything I read or on every other ad or commercial. I started wondering what would be said of me in the Facebook RIPs. I spent a lot of time thinking about that.

I also spent a lot of time changing my lifestyle. I already work out lifting weights almost daily, but I rarely do any cardio beyond running errands around NYC on foot and the occasional jog through Central Park. And I mostly eat well. But, as those who know me know, I am a 51 year old man who loves potato chips, beer, and Marlboro Lights. Yes, I smoke. I love to smoke when I am drinking beer. And I love drinking beer.

So I started taking 10am cardio classes at my gym, ditched the smokes and the beer, and eliminated almost all traces of sodium from my diet for a month. I was irritable, angry, and bored out of my fucking mind. But I was alive. Even if I didn't feel like this was much of a life worth living. I realized that everything I liked was off limits. And yet, every day I saw people on the street who were strung out, smoking all kinds of things, or carrying an obese body and wondered how in the hell I of all people ended up having to worry about a goddamn stroke. I was angry at myself a little bit for having certain indulgences and angry at life in general for seeming to go by so quickly. How the fuck was I in my 50s taking blood pressure medication and worrying about dropping dead? I'm built like a brick shit house, I just banged some gorgeous 30 year old guy three times in a row, and I just graduated Magna Cum Laude from my Master's program. How could I possibly be this old???

The healthy wear a crown, indeed. I walked around for weeks in a sober, high-anxiety daze looking at other people who were happy and enjoying their summer and I was envious. I thought, on one of my zillion hospital visits over the last two months, how many times I'd passed Mt. Sinai and NYU Langone hospitals and never gave them a passing thought and now I was there for something it seemed like once a week.

And today I got the results from yesterday's head and neck MRA that I'm actually really healthy and whatever happened was probably just some strange visual fluke. I'm a little leery, but overall relieved that it wasn't my bullet this time. *Gulp*

Thank you to the few people I shared this with, especially my dear friend Jordan Coleman. You are the best doctor in the world and I am so dearly grateful for your friendship. Also, thank you to Amy Opperer Brode Josh Daitch and Erica Dennison Daitch and Ryan Kaluzny and Jennifer Tisdale Kaluzny and Naftali Goldsmith and LaShonda Steele Allen for letting me vent and, at times, completely freak out.

Now my summer has just begun.

This Is Not the Life I Ordered - Here Comes the Mirror Man

 Mistrust of the U.S. government is now equally equally embedded, if not founded (whether rationally or irrationally or viscerally or somewhere in between)), on both sides of the political spectrum. And when I say mistrust, I mean psycho paranoid lover mistrust. Literally, people think our government will fake school shootings, terrorist attacks, fake elections and presidential assassination attempts, sacrifice civilians, and in some cases kill presidents, presidential candidates, and influential entertainment icons. How long this has been going on, I don't know. But for me, it reaches back to "grassy knoll" speculation after the assassination of JFK over 60 years ago. (Or maybe a year earlier, with Marilyn.)

Today, we have the "bloody ear" or "rally sniper" conspiracy theories, or however this latest incident will be remembered by history.

I must admit that, with some shame, I am guilty too. Because I am partly struggling -- okay, make that REALLY struggling -- to believe in the most recent of these events, the attempt on President Trump's life. This assassination narrative, frankly, stinks a bit to me. I've read about an ear plug, about someone in the audience clapping too early, about the fact that they couldn't even make the assassin a conservative, even though that is usually demographic in these lone-wolf scenarios. But what really gave me pause when I watched the video is Trump's reaction. He was so quick to be heroic that he forgot to appear shocked. The fist pumping, the "Fight, fight, fight..." When Trump ran in 2016 there was a scare at one of his rallies and he ducked the hell down and had to be whisked away, looking totally shocked and frozen at the time. This Trump seemed not to be surprised at all. He got back up when his detail corralled around him and he immediately reveled in the applause and his resplendent new martyrdom. If this was staged, what a huge risk to take with Trump, who has absolutely no empathy, no capacity for subtlety, and no ability to lie convincingly. So as far as his acting skills go, this was actually pretty damn good.

And then I feel like a hypocrite because I've spent a decade castigating conservatives for their hyperbole and paranoia and bottomless cynicism when it comes to "mainstream media," "the liberal agenda," "globalism," and "crisis actors." Now my mind has gone into Alex Jones-land and I want to kick myself because I can't stop wondering if I'm just really that biased...or if living in the world's most powerful country is to live morally lubricated by privilege in the most nefarious empire the world has ever seen. And in these events, we citizens on both sides of the political and all checkpoints on the cultural spectrum get glimpses into what we're really dealing with: A divided and conquered electorate of quasi-placated (mostly) well-fed, over-medicated, terminally indebted, globally isolated, highly entertained, and faux-controversially distracted and racially and culturally bifurcated fools.

I don't know who said that the smartest thing the devil ever did was convince the world he doesn't exist. But the smartest thing the U.S. government ever did was create two parties with a steadily decreasing Venn space between them and an electorate that mutually despises one another, even as it becomes increasingly obvious that we are mirroring each other.