Tuan_Jim wrote:I haven't watched Ascent of Man but will do so now. Since we'd rather discuss documentaries than the WBC heavyweight champion, can I also recommend Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos'? 5 or 6 discs, and Sagan gives the complete account of existence from beginning to present. A cautionary note. The subjects are of such colossal immensity that watching it will make your life feel like the obscure blip that it is.
RE: heavyweights. To echo C-P, please to be finding one positive thing I've had to say about a heavyweight...? I merely expressed boredom with a boring subject, & am self-aware (& old enough) to remember a Glyn Leach article circa 1993 alternately bemoaning & hacking wildly at the (then-current) state of the heavyweight division.
That such lean times are now viewed as the last sort of Golden Age of the heavyweights (well, all right, an Iron Pyrite Age of the Heavyweights) is alternately sobering & massively hilarious to me, remembering also Srikumar Sen writing of Holyfield's defence versus Holmes: "A journeyman is still a journeyman, even when he wears a crown."
I really don't think much of Wilder (I wrote a two thousand word screed/takedown for Boxrec News the day after he beat Scott, describing him, amongst other things, as "little more than a giant pair of shoulders balanced on a pair of pipe-cleaners"; what else is there to say about him, apart from his astonishing technical ineptness & brilliant marketing? Perhaps I don't talk about him much 'cos I've already used up all my best jokes), but then again neither does everyone else apart from some xenophobes on the Current Scene, so instead of blustering about the whole shitfest more than is seemly I devote my attention to more worthy (or at least, interesting) matters. I have to say that Wlad, though I've ripped the piss out of him for years, has surprised me with his longevity & gained a sort of grudging respect, & I think people will look back on him with some fondness when he goes.
Sen & Leach's views of the heavies of their time is useful to remember, I think, as I slide inexorably into middle age: sometimes things were really good. But also: Butterbean, Herbie Hide as some sort of heavyweight champ, Oliver McCall alternating crack with going mental, Tyson raping & biting to bookend the decade, Michael Moorer being shouted at by the execrable Teddy Atlas, Frans Botha & Axel Schultz. Some things were clearly not at all good.
You do get points for the O'Toole joke, though, nice one.
PS: & yes documentaries are far more interesting than the current heavyweight division (which, to go back on what I said above, lacks the shoot-outs & spectacular crumblings at the last hurdle that made 90s heavies so awkwardly compelling, imo: whither the likes of Darroll Wilson vs Tshabalala these days?). Another vote for Cosmos over here.
Have you seen any of Adam Curtis's stuff, especially "Century of the Self"? Very good if you can stomach a sort of John Dos Passos approach to Big Questions, though his targets are so massive he sets himself up to fail from the start, really.
