Vice
Messed Up and Crazy: The Sad Tale of Justin Levens
(10/17/2013)
January 13, 2006. It’s a title fight. Light heavyweight championship, World Extreme Cagefighting. They tap gloves like friends. He dropped to 185 and even though the other guy looks denser he knows he’s got heavy hands for the class. He comes out bouncing on his heels, feints with a right, weaves and bobs, and bang, he connects with that swinging right hand, and Scott Smith is on one knee and Justin Levens is thinking he’ll go home a champion. Smith struggles to his feet but Levens is there with the guillotine choke. The choke doesn’t go so Levens transitions to the back. Smith worms out. Levens slides to the canvas with Smith on top—but Levens is cool about it and plays open guard, and when Smith goes for a foot lock he goes for one too. Then they’re back on their feet and Smith lands a right, then a left, and Levens is on his back sucking in right hands with his face. The ref knows what to do. This fight is over.
His first loss. Seven fights, Levens went undefeated. But one loss—it’s not the end of the world. Another light heavyweight, 205 pounds, went on to win 13 in a row after his first loss; Evan Tanner took the heavyweight title of the Unified Shoot Wrestling Federation in 1998 and defended his belt seven times before moving on from the flagging Texas organization to join MMA’s premiere organization, the Ultimate Fighting Championship…
First Man Standing
(10/17/2013)
… “The Strangler” had beaten everyone—Joe Acton, William Muldoon, Tom Canon, everyone—and not only did he beat his contemporaries, he frightened them, using a full inventory of styles: London Prize (bareknuckle fighting), Catch-as-Catch-Can, Greco-Roman, “mixed” (meaning to say the rules were negotiated) and “go as you please” (meaning to say the rules were unwritten). Lewis’ game would be familiar to today’s mixed martial arts fans; though he specialized in the ground attack, he didn’t mind exchanging blows. In an era when matches were not stopped short of injury, Lewis would commonly emerge victorious via broken bone, torn joint, or crushed windpipe.
Lewis’ signature technique, and namesake: the strangle. In 1886, he strangled Matsada Sorakichi until the famed rib breaker’s eyes rolled into his head and he was regurgitating blood. In the rematch, with the chokehold banned, Lewis had promised, “I will not choke you this time, but I will screw your leg off.” Under a minute, and he did just that. The bout made the front page of The New York Times. The injury, the Times reported, reached from ankle to knee and was far worse than a break—joints, ligaments, and muscles were shredded. In 1887, Lewis had destroyed “Stompin’ Tom” Connors, a master of the Lancashire style (a precursor to Catch-as-Catch-Can) who was direct from the source, England. Lewis, perhaps not seeing straight wrestling as his best strategy, had punched, head-butted, kicked, and choked Connors into a limp-limbed doll. It didn’t seem to bother Lewis that the match ended in his disqualification. For a hobby, and sort-of half-time act, Lewis juggled 250-pound Indian clubs…
Kingdom Come
(06/17/2013)
February 16, 2009.
It’s 58 degrees in Orange County. The parking lot of the Market Place Mall is a little damp, and the man playing with the yo-yo is wearing a jumpsuit. The suit has police patches and badges—some kind of Long Beach Police Department issue—but the man isn’t a police officer. He’s unshaven, and he’s wearing flip-flops.
Tustin, California, is an affluent area, but the man, 6’ 3” and 250 pounds, looks strangely at home for someone so out of place. Orange County has a methamphetamine problem, and the man has that pale, grisly look like maybe he’s brushed off a few incursions of black spiders, but as big as he is, his presence is bigger, like maybe he’s one of the many petty-celebrities lurking the auto parks of Southern California. Also, there’s something in his face, some stony regret.
A couple of cops drift by in their patrol car, and they don’t like the jumpsuit. They talk to the man about it, and he doesn’t like that. He can’t explain where he got the jumpsuit, which is a police disaster suit that dates back 10, 15 years. It’s against the law to wear it, the policemen inform him. The man gets annoyed, and they search his car. They find a “small amount” of methamphetamine and a glass pipe to smoke it.
The cops call in their prize; they’ve arrested Kimo Leopoldo, UFC legend, for drug possession and impersonating a police officer. …
The Golden Age of the Cockroach
(02/05/2013)
Every era in art has a new favored subject. The Etruscans looked to Hercules; painters of the Renaissance reenvisioned the Bible; the American Ashcan School rendered sensitive tableaus of poor urban life; and the later half of the 20th century, dominated by the PoMo-ism of downtown NYC, crowned a new king, the cockroach, which was not only an available resource, but a stand-in for the artist—a heroic outcast, thriving in the ruins of civilization.
The oeuvre of the cockroach is best understood as a series of distinct ages that, in turn, comprise a whole. During the Reformation, the cockroach was reconsidered; the Enlightenment percieved the cockroach as potentially “divine”; the Golden Age saw the pinnacle of the discipline; the Silver Age was consumed by celebrity; the Bronze Age refigured the subject as metaphor and victim; the Age of Decline represented the subject in absentia and/or in parts. As far as I can tell, no one has completed, or even attempted, to survey the cockroach’s place in the art world, so consider this seven-part piece that examines an artistic era that scuttled by so quickly, hardly anyone even noticed it…