The most important thing you need to know about my uncle, the porn star, is that he’s not my actual uncle. He’s my mother’s cousin, which makes him my first cousin once removed. Johnny is now a seventy-four-year-old man partial to books-on-tape and cantaloupe, but between 1973 and 1987, he starred in 117 adult films. He was Man in Car, Man with Book, Man on Bus, Man in Hot Tub, Orgy Guy in Red Chair, Party Guy, Guy Wearing Glasses, Delivery Boy, and, perplexingly, Guy in Credits. He was the porn equivalent of Barbie, who can count astronaut, zookeeper, and aerobics instructor among her professional accomplishments. Except that Barbie, like Jesus before her and Prince after her, has no last name. Whereas Johnny’s last name, his actual last name, is Seeman. This is a fact too absurd to warrant further analysis.
I didn’t snoop around about Johnny until college, but this was not for lack of interest. My college years happened to coincide with the late nineties, when the Internet was fast becoming a tool for personal research. Before that, my generation mostly used it for chain letters and lightbulb jokes. How many Harvard students does it take to change a lightbulb? Two. One to hold the lightbulb and the other to rotate the world around him. But suddenly I had a vehicle for my curiosity. So I looked up Johnny to see what I could find. I was neither brave nor willing enough to search for video footage for fear of noticing any genetic resemblance to my mother’s brothers. Even the Greeks don’t have a name for that specific a complex. Instead, I read. My favorite article to this day was one in which Johnny is referred to—revered, really—as the most famous stunt cock ever. That was the headline—JOHNNY SEEMAN: THE MOST FAMOUS STUNT COCK EVER.
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How do you make a documentary about a man who doesn’t have the slightest interest in talking about himself? Well, in the case of Sr., the Netflix documentary directed by Chris Smith (streaming tomorrow), since the subject is the underground filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., you make a movie about a man making a movie. Which is just one of the stories in this enveloping pastiche of a filmmaker and his son, Robert Downey Jr.—maybe you’ve heard of him?
Sr. is about a radical filmmaker who, for a generation, was part of any unsentimental cultural education that included Hubert Selby Jr., Melvin Van Peebles, and Penny Arcade, on through Jello Biafra. It’s both an appreciation of Sr.’s body of work and a document of him in action. It’s about work and how it defines us. The film covers illness, too—Sr., who died in 2020, suffered from Parkinson’s. Sr. grapples with fathers and sons and the distance between them, as well as addiction and its consequences. It’s about what’s said and left unsaid, and, oh yeah, it’s also a beautiful, clear-eyed meditation on death.
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Each night as I put my three-year-old son to bed we read our books, we sing our songs, and I tell myself that he may not survive to see the morning. When I revealed this to my mother the other night, she said it made her sick to her stomach. “How could you do that?” she asked. “How could you possibly think like that?” She sat on the couch in my living room, the light from the fire roaring in the fireplace danced across her face as she looked at me with earnest concern. I sat on the hearth and took a beat to digest the moment. Then I inhaled deeply, and started to explain.
About two and a half years ago, I became fascinated with the philosophy known as Stoicism, an ancient school of thought that urges us to own the immediate present, and in doing so, to achieve true freedom—and, perhaps, even happiness.
My nighttime ritual, I told my mother, is actually the furthest thing from morbid: It is an affirmation of life. It’s a practice I picked up from one of the Roman Empire’s fabled Five Good Emperors, Marcus Aurelius.
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The 50 Best Biographies of All Time |
Biographies have always been controversial. On his deathbed, the novelist Henry James told his nephew that his “sole wish” was to “frustrate as utterly as possible the postmortem exploiter” by destroying his personal letters and journals. And one of our greatest living writers, Hermione Lee, once compared biographies to autopsies that add “a new terror to death”—the potential muddying of someone’s legacy when their life is held up to the scrutiny of investigation.
But despite its long history dating back to ancient Rome and Sumeria, biography as a genre didn’t really pop off until the middle of the twentieth century, when we became obsessed with celebrity culture. Since then, biographies of presidents, activists, artists, and musicians have regularly appeared on bestseller lists, while Hollywood continues to adapt them into Oscar bait like A Beautiful Mind, The Imitation Game, and Steve Jobs.
Why do we read so many books about the lives and deaths of strangers, as told by second-hand and third-hand sources? Is it merely our love for gossip, or are we trying to understand ourselves through the triumphs and failures of others?
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How the Black Dress Shirt Became a Celebrity Favorite |
"Wearing [black] still means something to me. It’s still my symbol of rebellion against a stagnant status quo, against our hypocritical houses of God, against people whose minds are closed to others’ ideas.”
That sound bite comes courtesy of Johnny Cash, the Man in Black himself. And while it no doubt buttresses the tropes of expected rockstar styling, it also prompts a few questions: If, sartorially, black is oft considered rebellious, then why is it also (and as often) deemed universal? Sure, it’s a rebuff of the conventional in that it connotes toughness, maybe angst, maybe doom. But it can also be argued that black simply is convention—far, far more men have items of clothing that are black than, say, canary yellow or fuchsia. It’s barbed and omnipresent, in tandem. And this is the confounding thing about the color: When worn, black seems to hold a wider range of signals than other chroma. Loud rebel to low-key regular guy and back again–but therein lies its chameleonic appeal.
One arena in which we’re seeing an uptick in the use of the color black: Celebrities wearing black dress shirts. Once sequestered to awkward prom looks and cater waiters, the garment now seems–suddenly, improbably–chic.
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Will Smith Hasn’t Earned Redemption. Still, Emancipation Is a Story We Need. |
There they were: A collective of Black culture royals—Rihanna and beau A$AP Rocky, Dave Chappelle, Tyler Perry, Kenya Barris—all of them (save RiRi and her puckered lips) all smiles as they served as the affirmative background of a Will Smith selfie. The occasion for that mirthful photo of elites was a private screening of Will’s movie Emancipation. He took the pic and posted it back in October, and the intent was clear.
Damn, we were to think. Look who’s all standing with him. Emancipation had been one of several of Will’s projects reported to be imperiled by his ineffable, indelible, unprecedented decision to saunter onto the stage of the Academy Awards and slap Chris Rock for joking about his wife, Jada. Prior to that infamous deed, Emancipation was anticipated as an Oscar contender and Will’s performance in it hyped as yet another worthy of an Academy Award. (Recall he won Best Actor that night for King Richard.)
Post-slap, Will was, by and large, persona non grata in Hollywood, a censure that included the Academy banning him from attending the ceremony for ten years, as well as hella Hollywood stars condemning both his actions and him.
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