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☆ John Belushi Was Just Getting Started
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-13 | by ( Rich Cohen | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +1 min

When a great talent dies young, the world is diminished. You find yourself thinking not only of what that person created but of what that person could have created if he’d had time. For me, there is no purer case of the-acorn-that-would-have-become-the-oak-had-it-not-been-pancaked-by-the truck than John Belushi, who, had he not died at age 33 in 1982, would turn 75 this month. In a world full of followers, Belushi seemed like the last free man. He lived the showbiz maxim: to do anything original, you must be willing to make a fool of yourself.

Persons: he’d, John Belushi, Belushi Organizations: National Lampoon

☆ What Shop Class Taught Me About Myself and the World
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-16 | by ( Rich Cohen | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

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Persons: Dow Jones

☆ We Never Really Escape the Gym-Class Draft
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-20 | by ( Rich Cohen | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

I was never picked last. Or even second to last. I take pride in that. When the captains were selected and the teams chosen, I always stood in such a way—off to the side, but not too far to the side—that I appeared at once ready and aloof. Here’s what my body language said:Yes, I can help you, but please know that even if you don’t take me until after Dennis, even if you take me dead last, you cannot hurt me, for my kingdom is not of this world.

Persons: Dennis

☆ The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen, and Me
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-23 | by ( Rich Cohen | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Bruce Springsteen turns 74 on Saturday, Sept. 23. It’s a date that means something to me. I actually remember when I first became aware of it—that the Boss had a birthday and that, following that day each year, he’d be a little older. I was a relatively early Springsteen adopter. He reached me via the record collection of my older brother, which is why we have older brothers: to strain out the garbage and filter down the gold.

Persons: Bruce Springsteen, he’d, Springsteen

☆ What Michael Jordan Learned From Detroit’s Goons
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-02 | by ( Rich Cohen | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

It’s human nature. When a beautiful thing appears in the world, someone will always try to crush it. That’s what happened when Michael Jordan arrived in the NBA in 1984 to play for the Chicago Bulls. He was a great athlete, of course, a dynamic playmaker and scorer and team leader, but he was also beautiful. It’s less the individual records we remember than the style: the way he back-pedaled after releasing a jumper, how he turned to the opponent’s bench with raised hands (a gesture as old as philosophy), how he hung in the air a moment longer than necessary, as if to demonstrate the true nature of his gift, which was gossamer grace.

Persons: Michael Jordan Organizations: NBA, Chicago Bulls

☆ Forty Years of ‘Risky Business’
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-29 | by ( Rich Cohen | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

When I was 14, my mother took my brother and me to see “Risky Business.” Because the movie was targeted at teens and set in the Illinois town where I was growing up, the theater was packed with kids I’d known my entire life. We adored the film, but none of us were prepared for its raciness. The young stars, Tom Cruise and Rebecca De Mornay, were seen in flagrante delicto in every room of a center-hall Colonial. As the credits rolled, we lingered in titillated silence. It was my mother, Brooklyn accent resounding like a bugle at dawn: “I just saw a porno with my sons.”

Persons: Tom Cruise, Rebecca De Mornay, ” Locations: Illinois, delicto, Brooklyn

☆ The Bombs Bursting in Air
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-30 | by ( Rich Cohen | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Probably the most exciting moment of my childhood occurred on July 4, 1977, when my father, without first reading the instructions, lit a ground bloom flower in our suburban Chicago yard. If placed as directed on cement or some other hard surface, the firework spins wildly and changes color.

Locations: Chicago

☆ The Glory Days of the American Mall
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-29 | by ( Rich Cohen | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Sean Penn (right) and Robert Romanus in ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High’ (1982). Photo: Universal/Everett CollectionIn 1982, the mall meant freedom. Some started at The Sweet Factory, then spent the afternoon dipping a hand into the candy bag like a wino with a bottle. “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” was our mall epic, as “Apocalypse Now” was the epic of the Vietnam War. It captured the mood, and, in doing so, told us where we were going and where we had been.

☆ Trickery in the NFL May Be Wrong, but It Is Also Legendary
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-02 | by ( Rich Cohen | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Lester Hayes of the Oakland Raiders covered with Stickum during the Super Bowl in Tampa, Fla., Jan. 22, 1984In February, when the betting lines settle and the Super Bowl looms, my thoughts turn to Stickum, that viscus goo that once coated the hands, arms and jerseys of football players in search of an edge. Stickum—the color of butterscotch, the consistency of rubber cement—became commonplace in the woolly 1970s NFL, especially in Oakland, where the Raiders wide receiver Fred Biletnikoff raised its use to an art. Thus his one-handed and even no-handed catches. (I swear I once saw him snag a touchdown with his head.)

☆ Playing Risk Made Cold-War Kids Masters of an Unruly Globe
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-07 | by ( Rich Cohen | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

A certain kind of brainy kid will reach adulthood with a few general rules for foreign policy: Don’t mass your troops in Asia, stay out of New Guinea, never base an empire in Ukraine. It is the wisdom of Metternich condensed to a few phrases and taught by the game Risk. When many of us think about Europe, it isn’t a CNN graphic that we picture. It’s the Risk board, which taught us nearly everything we know about geography and politics. If we’re unsentimental on the subject of war and peace, blame Risk, which imparted a simple lesson that shapes how we read the news: In this world, it is do or get done.

☆ How Patti Smith Found the Dark Side of ‘You Light Up My Life’
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-12 | by ( Rich Cohen | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +1 min

The tune had been written by ad man Joseph Brooks for the soundtrack of Brooks’s self-produced, self-directed film of the same name. Brooks made an inspired choice in Boone. She was young (21), pretty in a generic West Coast sort of way, operatic and the inheritor of a great schlock tradition. Her father Pat Boone’s cover versions of R&B hits by Fats Domino and Little Richard are what people really mean when they denounce cultural appropriation. Pat Boone singing Little Richard is a crime.

☆ For a Suburban Kid, There Was No Purer Sport Than Wiffle Ball
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-14 | by ( Rich Cohen | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Anyone who grew up on the North Shore of Chicago in the 1980s can tell you about at least one of my Wiffle ball pitches. Maybe it’s the sinker, which I perfected one August as the street lamps clicked on along Bluff Road. Thrown overhand, the ball came in high, then dove for a strike. Or maybe it’s the sidearm floater, which came from way on the left, described a painfully slow arc, then crossed at the hitter’s knees. Especially when I hammered a hanging curve, then stood watching it travel down the driveway, over the sidewalk and into the distant hedge, which, even more than the ivy at Wrigley Field, marked the threshold of every childhood dream.

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