Ten years ago, a director’s cut of “The Exorcist” was rereleased with several minutes of footage missing from the 1973 theatrical version. This additional material includes the infamous “spiderwalk scene,” in which a devil-possessed Regan scurries backward down the stairs, much to the horror of her mother, Chris — and, now we’ve seen it, the world.

I’m not sure why this is, exactly, but on YouTube two versions of the spiderwalk exist: one ends with Regan pausing at the bottom of the stairs with a mouthful of blood.

William Friedkin, “The Exorcist, deleted spiderwalk scene” (1973)

In the other she flicks out a forked tongue and, on hands and knees, goes scampering after her mother’s friend. (Or personal assistant? Or partner? I’ve never been clear on who this person is).

William Friedkin, “The Exorcist, spiderwalk alternative” (1973)

Which version do you think is scarier? Me, the first one: I like how the shot cuts to black, and the monster-roar that plays over the blank screen is super creepy.

And that’s pretty much all I have to say about the spiderwalk. What interests me infinitely more in “The Exorcist” redux is a different outtake in which Regan is diagnosed with a “nerve disorder.” While I couldn’t find any corresponding video online, here’s the script. (Dr. Klein has just handed Chris a prescription from his notepad.)

DR. KLEIN
Now this is for Ritalin. Ten milligrams a day.

CHRIS
What is it? A tranquilizer?

DR. KLEIN
A stimulant.

CHRIS
Stimulant? She’s higher than a kite right now!

DR. KLEIN
Her condition isn’t quite what it seems. Nobody knows the cause of hyperkinetic behaviour in a child. The Ritalin seems to work to relieve the condition, but we really don’t know how or why, frankly. Your daughter’s symptoms could be an overreaction to depression — but that’s out of my field.

CHRIS
Depression?

DR. KLEIN
Well, you mentioned her father… the divorce.

CHRIS
Do you think I should take her to see a psychiatrist?

DR. KLEIN
Oh no. I’d wait and see what happens with the Ritalin. I think that’s the answer.

Ritalin! For demonic possession! While I have no idea what sort of resonance, hilarious or otherwise, this might have had to audiences in 1973, in 2010 Dr. Klein’s diagnosis feels like the sort of ironically referential, aren’t-we-wiser-now schtick most prominent, these days, in AMC’s TV Series “Mad Men.” (Dr. Klein, incidentally, lights up a cigarette in his office moments later.)

Matthew Weiner, “Mad Men” (Series One, Episode Two; 2007)

Though are we really any wiser? What might have been a throwaway line nearly forty years ago feels satirical now, especially considering how endemic drugs have become in the treatment of childhood behavioural disorders. Among the 4 million young Americans currently diagnosed with ADD/ADHD, some 2.5 million are on long-term medication — a 1600% increase from the seventies — most of it Ritalin or some off-brand version of methylphenidate.

Two and half million children, in the U.S. alone, on Class A psychoactives. This feels like the pretext for its own horror movie—not one little girl, thrashing around in bed and barfing green stuff, but a whole nation of preteen zombies drugged to the point of catatonia, vacant and oblivious to the world as it spins idly by.

Conversely, since methylphenidates are, as Dr. Klein points out, stimulants, they actually increase some children’s hyperactivity. In a Guardian piece, “Ritalin made my son a demon,” the mother of a pill-dependent five year-old describes her son: “He [became] like something out of ‘The Exorcist’… He stabbed his brother in the foot with scissors. I was frightened to go to sleep sometimes.”

Though it’s tempting, I’ll spare you my big pharma conspiracy theories and a semi-informed rant about ADHD as a fad diagnosis. I used to work at an elementary school, so I’ve seen first-hand the pitfalls and also the benefits of medicating “troubled” kids. But I’m no longer a teacher of kids, or a kid myself, and I have no pressing aspirations to become a child psychologist, family doctor, drug salesperson, or even a parent; I don’t have much invested in this issue beyond a persistent, nagging worry that it’s just another symptom of how deeply we’re fucking up life on planet earth.

And then there’s this:

The RSA, “Ken Robinson: Changing Education Paradigms” (RSA Animates, 2010)

I was introduced to “RSA Animates” when a friend alerted me to David Harvey’s excellent video treatise — “Crises of Capitalism” — and I’ve been a fan of the illustrated talks ever since. (I’ve included the video as an appendix at the end of this essay).

Ken Robinson wasn’t previously someone whose work I knew, but I’m in love with it, and him, a little bit now. Putting the animations aside for a moment, his lecture, though at times dismaying, is pretty compelling stuff. And while the titular paradigm shift will surely require a total reboot of not just pedagogical methods, but our entire culture, the solutions Robinson proposes feel exciting, possible, and hugely encouraging.

The bit I like most is the clever (at least to me, though I’m easily impressed) binary that Robinson draws, subsequent to his critique of the “fictitious epidemic” of ADHD, between aesthetics and anaesthetics. What seems at first a tricky bit of semantic finagling is so flawlessly integrated into his argument, so convincing on semiotic, linguistic and metaphorical levels… Well, let’s just say that the idea dazzled me just as much as a possessed nine year-old scuttling spiderlike down a staircase.

Of course, what makes the video YouTube-worthy, and I hope worth writing about here, is the accompanying “live” drawing. Maybe not so coincidentally, the RSA Animate spots seem to achieve exactly the sort of aesthetically inclined pedagogy Robinson is calling for. Without sensationalizing or compromising what’s being said, the illustrations, as they unfold in not-quite-real-time, add layers of subtlety, irony, humour and meaning not just to Robinson’s, but all the lectures in the series. Simply put: they reveal the speakers’ words as art.

Ken Robinson praises what he calls “aesthetic experience” for its capacity to “awaken” students and make them “fully alive.” Unfortunately, he claims, “We are getting our children through education by anaesthetizing them” — both pharmacologically and culturally. While Robinson limits his argument, at least in this talk, to public education, there’s something much more broadly relevant here, too. The prospect of a culture in which all people — adults and kids — fail to engage with anything that might “wake [them] up to what they have inside themselves” feels perfectly analogous to an epidemic of drugs designed to deaden the human spirit.

“Our business in living is to become fluent with the life we are living,” wrote John Cage, “and art can help this.” As he often did, here Cage borrowed (precariously, maybe, to skeptics — like me — of appropriated Asian wisdom) from Eastern philosophies that prize clarity and oneness of the self. Still, cynicism aside, wouldn’t all our lives be a little better if we knew ourselves a little more?

Modern society seems to specialize in an ongoing process of subliminal obfuscation, not to mention providing us countless mechanisms to consciously obscure ourselves from one another. But, yes, “art can help” — help slow us down, think, feel, listen — and aesthetic experience, as per Ken Robinson’s definition, seems a perfect antidote to the numbing, blurring clutter that fills our 21st century lives.

The RSA, “Slavoj Žižek: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce” (RSA Animates, 2010)

The terror of “The Exorcist” is based in a common fear: the total eradication of selfhood. This feels just as poignant and frightening today as it did, if the film’s success and legacy are any indication, in 1973. Never mind the spiderwalk; the movie is scary because, invaded and corrupted by the devil, Regan loses all agency over and fluency with her own body and mind. There is “someone inside” her and it makes her do awful things no nine year-old girl should ever do; Regan isn’t just possessed, she becomes something terrifying, and terrifyingly Other.

Watching the film now, with what we know about methylphenidates, that Ritalin is offered as a potential solution to this displacement seems a cruel joke. But when the drugs don’t work, it’s telling what finally rescues Regan’s true identity. (Take a bit of a symbolic leap with me here; let’s make Ken Robinson proud with our divergent thinking.) After all, what is an exorcism but someone reading, out loud, the powerful, restorative words written in a book?

- Pasha Malla

Video Appendix:

The RSA, “David Harvey: The Crises of Capitalism” (RSA Animates, 2010)

John Erman, from “The Empath” (Star Trek Episode 67, Season 3, 1968)

Okay, first off: “Star Trek” (the original 1960s series) is awesome. This might not be news to you, dedicated Trekkie, but I spent thirty-two years in the dark—until last week, that is, when I watched my first-ever full episode, chopped into nine-and-a-half minute segments, on YouTube (…no longer available due to a copyright claim by CBS).

I have no idea if this is typical, but much of “The Empath” takes place in a minimalist void reminiscent of the backdrop from Lars von Trier’s “Dogville” and the set of “Parlez-Moi,” a TV Ontario show starring Marc Favreau as Sol, the morosely pedantic, presumably alcoholic, francophone tramp-clown:

Marc Favreau, “Parlez-Moi” (TVO, 1978 -- 80)

The plot of “The Empath” begins with Kirk, Jim and Spock landing on a previously undiscovered planet. After a series of painful teleportations, they come across a mute woman, whom Jim, somewhat imperialistically, names “Gem,” and, soon after, some sparkly-robed, complexly foreheaded aliens.

The aliens—stoic, paternal, vaguely communist, possibly gay—turn out to be hostile, and they trap the Enterprise boys (”Phasers on stun!”) in a laser-beam prison. It’s not a particularly effective prison, though, and after the aliens traipse off-screen the triumvirate scoots away with Gem, only to be ambushed by one of the aliens, now inexplicably (though conveniently) solo. They escape again, this time thanks to Spock doing that neck-pinch thing, which sends the alien into a slow, wilting collapse. (A nerd-bully in my grade six class used to try this stupid move on me all the time—it never worked, but might be the reason I’ve avoided “Star Trek” for so long.)

As they’re set to flee the planet with Gem, the relentless, blithely enraged aliens turn up again, and Kirk gets zapped by some sort of slow-motion laser, though by the time Gem, Jim, and Spock rush to his aid he seems to be fine again, i.e., back to regular speed. Except now the aliens demand that (as restitution, maybe? then why not Spock?) Kirk become their test subject; to great chagrin and vigorous eyebrow-twitching from Jim, he agrees.

John Erman, from “The Empath” (Star Trek Episode 67, Season 3, 1968)

Kirk ends up crucified, harangued and shot with pain lasers by the aliens, while Gem crouches nearby and, as per the episode’s title, absorbs his pain. The continuity guys must have gone to sleep on this one, as the previous scene concluded with Gem vanished by a disappearing laser—but, anyway, here she is, her tortured, empathetic face rendered in soft-focus and accompanied with searing, plaintive-sounding violins every time Kirk gets zapped.

John Erman, from “The Empath” (Star Trek Episode 67, Season 3, 1968)

I won’t wreck the ending, but rest assured that lasers/phasers are involved.

John Erman, from “The Empath” (Star Trek Episode 67, Season 3, 1968)

I’ve been being glib, but there’s a remarkable dream-logic to “Star Trek” (or at least this episode; keep in mind it’s the only one I’ve seen) that I like a whole bunch. It reminds me, in the best way, of “Dr. Snuggles,” a show I watched as a kid and which similarly abandoned typical notions of causality, motivation and narrative convention. It’s also hugely refreshing, as so much of the appeal is based on the agency afforded to the viewer in the storytelling process. It’s up to us to make this place make sense and understand it as a world.

Jeffrey O’Kelly, “Dr. Snuggles” (1979)

Here’s Lars von Trier, interviewed about “Dogville”:

“The problem is that now, it has become too easy—all you have to do is buy a computer and you have filmic. You have armies rampaging over mountains, you have dragons. You just push a button… It’s another art form, I’m sure, but I’m not interested. I don’t see armies going over mountains, I only see some youngster with a computer saying, ‘Let’s do this a little more tastefully, let’s put some shadows in, let’s bleach the colours out a little.’ It’s extremely well done and it doesn’t move me at all. It feels like manipulation to a degree that I don’t want to be manipulated.”

Amazingly, von Trier said all this five years before “Avatar.” When a whole universe, like that $300 million one, is, to every trembling, digital leaf, detailed for us, we don’t need to do any work; we just sit in voyeuristic awe and marvel at the spectacle. There’s no place for us in that world, which doesn’t require our imaginations to complete it: everything flutters and ripples before us in all its vivid, lurid, 3D glory.

Below, James Cameron talks about how “Avatar” restores humanity to CGI creatures by mimicking the actual actors’ facial expressions—thus, he claims, traversing the animator’s “uncanny valley” to the realm of naturalism.

James Cameron, “Avatar: Motion Capture Mirrors Emotions” (2009)

This to me couldn’t be any more boring. Give me a weird crinkly-browed Star Trek alien any day over those sleek blue animatronic creeps. “Avatar” just seems so instructive, so limiting, so delighted by its own trickery. It holds the audience at a distance, if not disregard. There’s much more dignity, to me, in the minimalism (maybe budgetary, but whatever) and anti-naturalism (maybe amateurism, but, again, whatever) to “Star Trek,” or at least the 50-odd minutes I know of it.

Of course this is artifice, seems to be the admission, and as such it demands a pact with viewers—willingness to concurrently suspend our disbelief and become participants, not just spectators, in the show’s creation.

In the black voids of “The Empath” and “Dogville” and, sure, “Parlez-Moi,” there is room for the viewer: we fill them out and up with details from our own minds and lives. We participate in these worlds; they require us to be active and engaged. While I have no clue as to the actual neuro-psychology of the whole enterprise, as an experience it feels close to reading.

I enjoyed Cormac McCarthy’s most recent novel, “The Road,” very much. Part of what makes it work, as Oprah might tell you, is the sparseness of the language: those sentences are perfectly commensurate with the desolate world they invent and capture. The film adaptation was okay, but if it was missing anything it was that nothing was missing—the book was about absence, while in the movie everywhere you looked was something.

John Hillcoat, “The Road” (2009)

It seems counterintuitive to try convey the gaps between words, the emptiness of white paper onto and from which a reader projects his or her own fantasies, through cinematic starkness. That bleak, gray sky in the above clip still has presence: it looms, it takes up a place in the viewer’s visual field; every pixel of it exists in space and time.

An unmentioned sky in a book, of course, isn’t there at all; a sky that is only “a sullen murk” (a studio’s-worth of digital rendering summed up in two, perfect words) is much more poignant because we have to imagine how, exactly, that might look—and in so doing it becomes our own, unique to each of us inside our brains.

I’d never suggest that books are better than movies. I love movies—so much that I confused that love with wanting to make one, and went, stupidly, to film school, where I wrote, directed, shot, edited and produced arguably the worst piece of cinema ever made (and dropped out a few weeks later). And, after everything I’ve said here, I kind of liked “Avatar.” It looked great. But everything about that world was explicitly shown to me, and the only work I had to do was keep the 3D glasses on my face.

“Plenitude—experiencing all the space as filled—means impenetrability,” wrote Susan Sontag. The aesthetic totality (or what seems an attempt at something like that) of “Avatar” creates an experience, Sontag might tell us, “to which the audience can add nothing… not even add its thought.”

All we walk out of “Avatar” with is a pedantic message (and a cumbersome, confused one at that) that has been projected onto the screen, and us, for 160 minutes. We stumble into the daylight knowing everything about this movie and what it has tried to say.

What’s wrong with a bit of a void?

Spalding Gray, “Monster in a Box” (1991)

- Pasha Malla

I’m glad I waited to write this. With the internet there’s always that nagging urge to get on things quickly, because they expire so quickly: something interesting pops up and prompts a sudden, always fleeting rush of attention—if you have anything to say, say it fast!

And maybe that absence of consideration, of slowing down, is why there’s so much stuff online that feels temporary, disposable, and almost instantly redundant, regardless how instantly thrilling. It’s an overwhelming, exhausting way of negotiating culture that makes me feel anxious and frantic and competitive and worried—but then there’s Kutiman’s Thru-You project, which, returning to a year after it first hit, feels just as novel, exciting and affecting as it did in March, 2009.

Kutiman, “Mother of All Funk Chords” (”Thru You“)

On March 11, 2009, Tech Crunch writer Roi Carthy wrote, “If you haven’t heard of Kutiman yet you’re about a week late on the latest music sensation to be incubated on the Web,” and went on to extol the “interesting social media angle” of the project. (A week late, pal!) Carthy’s was typical of the initial journalistic outpouring (which all but dried up within the month) about Thru-You: the urgent desire to break, then define, in largely technological or commercial terms, what it meant, rather than, in artistic and human terms, what it was —and, let’s not forget, remains.

But wait. If you haven’t heard of Kutiman before, and haven’t been able to figure out what’s going on from the above clip, here’s the deal: the Israeli DJ and producer crafted entirely new songs out of edited, tweaked and spliced-together videos he found on YouTube, and posted them as a freely available, online mixtape at thru-you.com. Everything you see and hear comes from some original source, all of which are documented and acknowledged in the CREDITS section of the website, and none of which Kutiman received permission to use.

While Thru-You certainly raised questions, to anyone who cares about such things, about copyright and technology and whatever else, the people involved were getting lost in the discussion. This was dismaying, because, at least to me, the humanity of Thru-You is what makes it so amazing.

Kutiman, “Wait For Me” (”Thru You“)

Here’s W.B. Yeats, in his introduction to Ezra Pound’s book of Noh theatre translations: “I love all the arts that can still remind me of their origin among the common people.” Yes! Me too! Art-making should, I think, be fully democratic and completely accessible, and I like when there’s an echo of that accessibility in the finished product.

Pound’s socialist invocation of the plebeian, or at least the popular, is something I value greatly in music, books, visual art, movies and theatre. (I don’t know that dance works on these terms, though I also don’t know very much about dance.) I want voices that falter; I want raggedy, flawed stories; I want portraits that are just a little off and actors that flub their lines and sunspots on the camera lens and the screech of fingers sliding along guitar strings. When it comes to art, I crave anything that suggests the involvement of human beings, with all their inevitable fallibilities and fears and fuck-ups.

“I am bored and wretched,” Yeats continues, “when [the artist] seems no longer a human being but an invention of science.” We have a lot of art as science (and commerce) these days, so much that feels crafted by formula. And while I’m not quite as bored and wretched as Yeats (I think autotuned vocals, if used judiciously, can be pretty awesome), what inspires and moves me about Thru-You is that such remarkable work has been crafted from the humble, generous and brave artistic gestures of ordinary people.

It is lonely to make art—or at least to write, the only kind of art-making I can speak about with anything approaching authority. I spend most of my workday either typing at my computer or reading books, alone, and everything I write comes out of this loneliness; in some way everything I write is about loneliness, too. Though maybe all art is an articulation of loneliness, of acknowledging that each of us is alone on the planet and the hope that, through making something creative that represents ourselves, we might be able connect in some intrinsic, spiritual way with another person.

Of course the thing that’s nice about music, as opposed to writing, is that it can be made much more easily—in concert—with other people. I’m envious of the community cultivated by musicians, and it doesn’t seem just a semantic coincidence that what they do together is called playing.

Kutiman, “Babylon Band” (”Thru You“)

Consider the videos that Kutiman used to create the seven tracks that comprise Thru-You. They include a new mom singing into her webcam, an agogo lesson that looks to have been filmed in a public shower, and a Handycam-taped complaint about a used Farfisa organ.

Who are these people performing for? They’ve posted their videos to YouTube, so they’re clearly after some sort of audience. And that strikes me as such an expression of loneliness, that reaching out for anyone, anywhere, to listen, whoever that might be. What a relief that Kutiman has taken all these cries into the ether and revealed that none exists without an echo—and, even better, now millions of people have enjoyed that agogo lesson, too.

I love that the opening track of Thru-You, “The Mother of All Funk Chords,” (the first video posted above) begins with a conversation between the very famous session drummer Pretty Purdie, some random guy playing bass in the top left frame and some other random guy playing guitar in the top right. (Where else would these two nobodies—I use the term relatively, and I hope gently—get to play with one of the founding fathers of funk?) But as you watch these nobodies become not just musicians, but human beings. Each flash of a teenager sawing listlessly away at a cello recital or a hookah-wielding student singing ghazals to his buddies is a glimpse into someone’s private life, a brief moment of autobiography that invites speculation and wonder. Who are these people? (Go to their YouTube pages and find out!)

Also, the songs are great. And, really, that’s the most appealing thing about Thru-You: not only is it impressive how artfully Kutiman has cobbled together all these disparate clips, but that the resulting music is so undeniably strong. There’s such harmony to the playing, too; in the words of Sasha Frere-Jones: “The effect is breathtaking—total strangers collaborating on what sound like live songs.”

Kutiman, “Just a Lady” (”Thru You“)

While I do think that the internet has unparalleled potential for community-building, proved indubitably at thru-you.com, what still unnerves me is the swift, consumptive violence with which it’s trafficked: in what seems the same instant something can be hyped, expended, and forgotten. So if you check out Thru-You, I’d recommend taking your time and enjoying the site with the patience and consideration it deserves.

Kutiman “collaborator” Leslie singing “Take Me For a Fool” (posted 2007)

Kutiman and his collaborators, however unwitting, have together made something honest and communal and good, something which none of them could have created on their own. And it accomplishes what the best art should do, I think, not only in process, but in its end results as well: it makes me feel a bit more hopeful, and a lot less alone.

- Pasha Malla

I have been in something like a demolition derby. Though it was not a demolition derby, exactly; the purpose was not to crash our cars into one another, though that happened a lot. It was a race. The drivers in this race were blind, and each driver had a seeing-eye navigator like me. This race, called Défi-Vision, takes place every year in Quebec as a fundraiser for MIRA, a nonprofit organization that trains and provides guide dogs for the visually impaired.

Here’s a video of how Défi-Vision looks from the grandstand:

Tommy Lafleur, “Défi-Vision — Autodrome Granby” (July, 2006)

And here’s a view from inside the car:

Yves Séguin, Marc André Labrosse, “Défi-Vision — Granby” (July, 2008)

The origins of the demolition derby are debatable, but its invention is often attributed to motor sports guru Don Basile, who was organizing smash-ups as early as 1947. Basile’s son Bob explains the appeal: “People just go to a [car] race to see a wreck. With the derby, there’s a wreck every second.” In my limited experience, I agree. While the competition of the Défi-Vision race was fun, the best moments by far were the crashes, and we had many.

After an initial bang-up, I found myself longing for more, bracing myself but needing them — the sudden explosion of life through your body, disbelief, survival! There was a carnality to it that bordered on something vaguely sexual — or at least primal. In the afterglow we’d take stock, make sure that the car was still working and we were okay, and then tentatively continue on our way.

It was also liberating: in any other context car crashes elicit guilt and rage, monetary panic and legal wrangling. At Défi-Vision they are sanctioned, even expected; every collision is a glorious accident. And so the idea of the demolition derby appeals to me. It is about having fun with destruction. It is about recognizing that a race is lonely, and that coming together, despite trying to smash the shit out of one another, is much more thrilling. It is about the joyful, beautiful anarchy of collisions.

But isn’t this also what being a person is about, the desire and fear of having your life crash into someone else’s? Isn’t being alive a similar state of melancholy and ambivalence — cautious hope for a collision tempered by the potential ruin of the aftermath?

Someone named Kyle Smith (YouTube handle: smitty4657) has created a video for “Songs: Ohia’s” beautiful piece of music, “Hold On Magnolia,” out of footage from the Boone County Fair Demolition Derby in Columbia, Missouri.

smitty4657, “Boone County Fair” (Columbia, MO); Ohia, “Hold on Magnolia” (2003)

A person made this, an ordinary person with a camcorder or some such thing. And what he has made is great. I love Kyle Smith for creating this perfect — and perfectly unlikely — accompaniment to Jason Molina’s amazing song. He has brought the violence of the demolition derby to a song about death and love and the terror of being alone, and he has brought the beauty of the song to the demolition derby and revealed tenderness beneath all that destruction.

I don’t really want to say much else. Kyle Smith seems to have created this video intuitively and humbly (“used without permission, but honourably, I hope”), and to write about it excessively feels unnecessary, even unfair. Some things are best left unexplained, and instead felt, and felt deeply.

One last thing: someone shared this video with me. When this person sent me a YouTube link (“You may already know this.” — I did not — “Super sad.”), at the time we were just getting to know each other from opposite sides of the country. I watched the video once, and then again, and since then I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve watched it, which is every time I miss this person, which these days is a bit too frequently, because she lives far away and when I miss her, I miss her very much.

It is good to let yourself crash into someone else, I think, to let go of fear and give in. It is good to hold on. And it is good to hold on, with everything you have, as much as you can, as often and long as you can.

- Pasha Malla

Long before my family ever bought a VCR (we would rent them for birthdays, along with “The Neverending Story“), I owned one video:

I’m not sure where I got it, or why, as I could only ever watch it at friends’ houses, but this 65-minute VHS tape became an integral part of a childhood spent obsessing over soccer. (What follows might only appeal to fellow soccer fans; though, maybe not…) And of the 101 Goals, there was one that was my unequivocal favourite—a stunning, unbelievable piece of magic by a black player with a funny name: Fashanu.

Norwich City vs. Liverpool (1980)

I was reminded of this Fashanu, whoever he was, during the 2006 World Cup, when Argentina’s Maxi Rodriguez smacked a very similar volley into the net against Mexico.

Argentina vs. Mexico (2-1, 2006 World Cup, Round of 16)

This set the wheels of nostalgia tumbling into motion. What ever happened to that Fashanu character—had he scored any more goals like that two-touch miracle back in 1980? And so to the internet I went, where answers—and videos, I hoped—awaited me.

Here is the condensed version of what I learned: While that marvellous goal (at eighteen years of age!) promised great things, Justin Fashanu never really fulfilled his potential as a professional footballer. After securing a million-pound contract, the first ever for a black player, he bounced around between a dozen clubs, increasingly frustrated on the pitch and brooding off it. Then, in 1990, he dropped a bomb in the British tabloid press, and came out.

Fashanu’s homosexuality wasn’t a huge surprise; his regular visits to “poof clubs” had accounted for at least one team dumping him. But in a league rampant with homophobia, no other player had ever admitted publicly to being gay (and none has since). What Fashanu, already the target of racial discrimination, assumed would be liberating—he’d previously retreated into Christianity, which had only made for suffering—turned into a nightmare.

With a knee injury providing an excuse for no British team to take him on, Fashanu ended up in America, where he teased fans and teammates with irregular moments of brilliance before retiring from the sport in 1997. He stayed on in Maryland to pursue coaching, but the following year was accused of sexually assaulting a 17 year-old boy after a party at his house. Then, on May 2nd, 1998, after fleeing back to England, Justin Fashanu hanged himself in a deserted lock-up garage. His suicide note denied the rape charge: “I didn’t sexually assault the young boy. He willingly had sex with me… Why did I run? Well, justice isn’t always fair. I felt I wouldn’t get a fair trial because of my homosexuality.”

I was gutted. Sure, I’d let soccer fall off my radar, but how did I miss this story? Scouring the internet for more information yielded the misguided, confusing and completely asinine, but also a few gems. This interview with a young, wide-eyed, earnest Fash (at the end of the clip) reveals the sort of athlete—“accommodating, articulate and charming in a world where surly, thick and gum-chewing is the norm”—you feel lucky to cheer for.

Norwich City vs. Birmingham City (February, 1981)

That same warmth and little boy naivete is echoed on a single, more than a little reminiscent of Eddie Murphy’s foray into pop music, he recorded in 1982.

Unfortunately, most of the stuff I found was far less heartening. Remembered variously as “one of the most complex and, perhaps, tragic players of his generation” and, in The Voice, “an affront to the black community… pathetic and unforgivable,” these reminiscences framed Fashanu’s life exclusively within the all-too-commonly perpetuated narrative of gay tragedy. Little felt like anything approaching a respectful elegy—even the normally reasonable Independent misinterpreted Fashanu’s grandstand-bestowed nickname, “The Queen of Hearts,” and corresponding chant, “Say ooh, aah, up yer arse,” as somehow “affectionate.”

Most upsetting was a profile written by someone named Brian Deer, published in the reactionary Mail on Sunday. Deer’s missive ranged from transparent, racialized manipulation (juxtaposing Fashanu, “powerfully built: 190lbs, 6 foot 2 inches,” with his accuser, “17 years and three months-old, fair haired, blue eyed, with a wide smile and pink cheeks… the best-looking boy in the room.”), to, considering that the charges were dropped due to lack of evidence, unabashed libel: “The ex-star raped the boy.”

The article was a raging, hate-mongering document of its author’s prejudices, culminating, to me, with the greatest offence of all. That beautiful volley from the top of the box—BBC’s Goal of the Year in 1980, arguably the Goal of the Fucking Century—Deer dismissed as “a big chunk of luck.” And, most dismayingly, Peter Tatchell’s otherwise heartfelt rebuttal, published in the Guardian, didn’t tackle this comment.

“A big chunk of luck”—here is hatred beyond anything I can fathom. I am not trying to be funny. Justin Fashanu’s private life is one thing; his motives for coming out (he was paid in excess of 100,000 pounds for the story) and the events of that night in Maryland are certainly subject to speculation. But that goal! It was, and remains, a moment of pure, glorious truth—and I’d assumed irrefutable as such. To deny this must require the absolute darkest, most evil and hate-filled blindness. How do you not, as the performance artist Inter Ference puts it, “remember that famous goal with a sigh?” How do you not see in it all the potential for beauty in the human body, spirit and mind?

Dave Hickey has written about a similarly riveting highlight in the sport of basketball: Dr. J’s astounding reverse lay-up during the 1980 NBA Playoffs (the same year Justin Fashanu scored his legendary goal).

Seventy-Sixers vs. Lakers (1980 NBA Playoffs)

Hickey’s essay wonderfully captures the exuberance and awe that I felt as a kid—and still feel now—at a gifted athlete’s act of singular genius: “Jesus, what an amazing play! Just the celestial athleticism of it is stunning, but the tenacity and purposefulness of it, the fluid stream of instantaneous micro-decisions that go into […] completing it. Well, it just breaks your heart.”

Consider:

And:

And also:

What sort of monster do you have to be that, with one kick, Justin Fashanu doesn’t break your dead fucking heart?

- Pasha Malla

Please visit The Justin Campaign website.

Every few days, my friend Mat and I email each other links to old school hip-hop videos. The fun of it, I think, is tweaking a pal’s memory to some long-lost hit he might have otherwise forgotten: Geto Boys, Stetsasonic, Eric B. & Rakim—back and forth we go, always trying to one-up the previous track.

(For example, I shot Mat a link to “Watch Out Now.” His reply: “Amazing… though I still think “Lost in Thought” was the pinnacle of 90s Latino hip-hop.”)

The last video I sent Mat was more recent: Fatlip’s first solo effort after getting kicked out of The Pharcyde in 1997. Mat’s response echoed how I felt about the video (directed by Spike Jonze): “Great Fatlip track. I love the kid that steals his bike—you’re friggin’ killing me…”

At first, “What’s up Fatlip?” struck me as it had in 2000: ridiculous, pathetic, hilarious. Fatlip was a crazy motherfucker who may or may not have been bounced from his group for being a crackhead. And here he was, playing the chump: a clown getting squared by a toddler, drunk on Crown Royal in a diaper and trenchcoat, all raggedy-ass blow-out and K-Mart sweatpants.

But, man. Something hooked me. I watched it again. And again. And again—I couldn’t get enough. I started really listening to what Fatlip was saying—“See I been a loser just about all of my life… I make myself sick”—and was like, whoa, what? The whole thing quickly sank from uncomfortably funny to tragic. Behind that twinkly beat, what the fuck had I thought he was rapping about?

Fatlip, “What’s Up Fatlip?” (2005)

“Of course all life is a process of breaking down,” begins F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crack Up.” The essay, published in three installments of Esquire between February and April, 1936, was self-analysis made public, the author’s emotional and creative bankruptcy on full display.

In a response typical to his contemporaries, William Dubois dismissed the piece as “indulging… in sentimental wallows.” Fitzgerald’s revelations consciously resisted—even rejected—the macho posturing of male writers of the time. “The Crack Up” was too vulnerable, too personal, too honest—nothing anyone wanted to hear.

Hip-hop culture is just as intensely masculine, just as invested in illusions of bravado, as the literary scene of the first half of the 20th century. With some obvious notable exceptions, rappers can build careers on what are often fabricated gangsta images. But Fatlip’s not hard, and he’s too honest a guy to fake it. On “Writers’ Block,” off his only full-length solo record, 2005’s TheLoneliest Punk, he raps:

I never been shot or been to jail.
But I’m beginning to wish I had been,
just to put it down on a pad with a pen.

How does someone who’s “far from hard” and “regarded as a retard” fit into a culture so rooted in machismo? It’s something that seems to have taken its toll on hip-hop’s great sad-sack MC. And so we get the intensely confessional “What’s up Fatlip?”—a rapper’s take on “The Crack Up,” the opposite of all the embarrassing cock-swinging and misguided ego-tripping we’ve come to associate, for better or worse (and some of this stuff is admittedly awesome), with hip-hop.

I won’t walk you through the video with my “insights”; if you’re feeling me at all you can watch it and come up with your own ideas. I do, though, want to speak briefly about what I think is the video’s most revelatory and redemptive moment—what Roland Barthes (yeah, I went there) might call the video’s punctum.

About two minutes in, Fatlip goes to visit his mother. A few jump-cuts later, he’s perched on the armrest of the living room sofa with her at his side. His mom seems to be humouring him to some extent, patiently and sort of vacantly looking into the camera (but her toe’s tapping—you can’t fade this beat!)

Fatlip’s flowing, caught up, and obliviously drops the line, “choppin’ bliggy on a table.” Immediately he realizes what he’s done—after a quick “oh shit” laugh, he looks, with the sort of wide-eyed severity that speaks of a lifetime’s worth of apologies, at his mom. But she’s laughing too. There’s love in her eyes; it’s okay.

In an interview a few years ago, Fatlip admitted, “I get broke to the point where I don’t even have enough to pay for a phone call to call my mother to borrow money.” But on “Today’s Your Day,” he raps, “My mission is this: get in position to assist my folks.”

He’s a torn-up dude, but articulating his struggles is Fatlip’s greatest strength. “What’s up Fatlip?” is less pity-dig than sublimating personal conflict and sadness into art; it’s honest and true because that’s all Fatlip can be.

The video ends in a typically therapeutic mix of self-mockery and humour, with Fatlip doing his best Anton Jackson impersonation (“I still got it, I been working on my stuff”) and dancing into the sunset—then, one last joke, a yipping Chihuahua chasing him down the street. It’s funny, and it’s okay to laugh. “What’s up Fatlip?” is a great track. I love the kid that steals his bike. And for a bunch of reasons, Fatlip friggin’ kills me.

- Pasha Malla