Life Imitates Art

By Keith Boykin, in pop culture
Monday, September 15 2003, 10:24AM

It was a scene straight out of last night's "Sex and The City" finale. I opened the newspaper today and saw magician David Blaine suspended in a 7 feet high, 7 feet long, 3 feet wide plexiglass box over London's Thames River where he will spend 44 days with no food and only water to drink. It was just like the installation art on "Sex and the City" last night where a woman vowed to spend several weeks in a gallery display without food. These days, it's hard to tell if you're watching television or on it.

This is a column about nothing, which is to say it's about everything, which of course means it's about life.

After three weeks of using my busted cell phone, I finally broke down and got a new one yesterday. I had avoided doing this because I hadn't taken out insurance on the phone and didn't want to pay $200 for a new phone. Saturday the phone stopped working, and Sunday I found myself being lectured by a "technical support" representative at the Verizon Wireless store on 34th Street.

"You didn't take out insurance," he said rhetorically. "That wasn't very smart." When he finished condemning me, he inspected the badly damaged phone, punched a few buttons on his computer keyboard and returned with a replacement phone that cost me $50.

I'm still trying to figure it out, but it seems like I got away like a bandit on this one. If I had taken out insurance, it would have cost me about $8 or $9 a month. After 6 months, I would have paid about $50 anyway. So what's the use in buying insurance?

Maybe he didn't get it, but at least he was smarter than the cashier at a Food Lion in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, where a customer passed off a counterfeit $200 bill with a portrait of George W. Bush on the front. The customer presented the fake money to pay for $150 in groceries and the cashier gave the man $50 change.

I spent much of the weekend thinking about sports. I went to the world wrestling championships Saturday afternoon and spent Sunday explaining to my friends that it wasn't the World Wrestling Federation. It was the international freestyle wrestling championship at Madison Square Garden, not the bloody, fake sport you see on television.

In a scene reminiscent of the Olympics, American fans chanted "USA! USA!" while Iranians chanted even louder for their country's competitors in English and Arabic.

There was much more fakery going on in Las Vegas than in New York over the weekend. Fight critics immediately jumped on the unanimous decision for Shane Mosley in his bout against Oscar de la Hoya Saturday night. Some writers called it the end of boxing as a legitimate sport, but I doubt it. If Mike Tyson can bite off a guy's ear and still keep competing, it's hard to believe that boxing was ever that legitimate in the first place. It's all about money.

Farther west, the elder sister of Venus and Serena Williams was shot and killed in Compton, California on Sunday. It was a tragic loss for the family, but just as tragic knowing that the story would have been ignored had it not been for her famous sisters. Just another black person shot in the hood.

Forty years ago today, four black girls were killed in the hood when a bomb exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Those murders helped to galvanize public support for strong civil rights legislation and dramatized the racist power structure in Alabama.

Today in nearby Arkansas, that state is now beginning to test all of its 447,000 school children for obesity. Results will be sent to parents, but I wonder if that's a good idea. If the parents need a school nurse to tell them that little Johnny is overweight, maybe they're not the best parents in the first place.

I've seen a lot of hefty kids in my neighborhood, but I wonder if they might be better off going to a park, riding a bike or playing a game of ball instead of being stigmatized with the fat label.

I remember a test from my 8th grade P.E. class where we had to bend over and have our backs inspected. I was given a note to take home that said I had "sclerosis." I threw it in the trash instead of telling my parents I had a strange disease with an unpronounceable name. I lived in fear for years that I would die from sclerosis.

It's probably a good idea to take out some of those vending machines that sell soda and candy in schools, but that won't solve the diet problem so long as kids can still walk outside and buy the same products at the local convenience store after school. Unfortunately, we'd rather cut our taxes than fund our schools, so the school districts have to beg companies like Coca-Cola to help pay for textbooks. It's all about money.

In the wake of all the obsession over healthy body image, it's worth noting that some people are just too thin too. I saw a couple of fashion shows over the weekend for Fall Fashion Week in New York and I was amazed at how skinny some of the models are these days.

Good thing people like LaShawnna Stanley understand that real people eat. Stanley runs her own modeling agency for models to appear in rap music videos and urban fashion catalogs. She watches over her models like a mother hen and won't allow her agency to become a breeding ground for the booty-shaking video girls. There's only so much you can show on television.

Here's something else you haven't seen on television: honest reporting about the war. CNN's chief war correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, said recently that the press censored itself during the Iraq war. CNN "was intimidated" by the Bush administration and Fox News, which "put a climate of fear and self-censorship," she explained. "It's not a question of couldn't do it, it's a question of tone," Amanpour said. "It looks like this was disinformation at the highest levels."

The press is making a big deal about Bill Clinton the past few days. Why not? Since the Republicans are still trying to blame him for everything from the Bush recession to the World Trade Center attacks, he might as well get some of the credit.

Clinton's resurrection is part of a larger phenomenon in politics. The liberals are back. Thanks to Al Franken, Howard Dean and George Bush, it's not longer a bad thing to be a liberal. Al Franken's new anti-Bush book is at the top of the bestseller list. Howard Dean's anti-Bush campaign is surging. And George Bush is doing more to damage George Bush than all the Democrats combined.

Someone once said, never interrupt your enemy when he's in the process of destroying himself. If that's the case, now might be a good time to find a plexiglass box and stay in it for a few weeks.

Comments (7) reveal