Paul O'Donnell: July 2008 Archives

The news that comedian Andy Dick had been arrested for groping a female fan while apparently blind drunk and carrying pot sent us back to the interview he gave us five years ago, when he was starring on the sitcom "Less Than Perfect" and touting his connection with Jesus, whom he'd found in rehab.

Dick, in a bit of reckless honesty coming from a celebrity, admitted that it was easy to find Jesus in rehab--but harder to stick with his spiritual practice when he got his life back together. "When I was at my worst, I was really in contact with God, just praying with conviction to just please get me out of this," he told Steve Lawson in 2003. "I find it harder to pray when everything is going great."

If the spiritual realm can be said to have hard facts, this is one. Whatever faith you have, and whatever you depend on it for, it can leave you in a minute, and never faster than when you think you have everything in hand. Andy Dick is currently out on bail.

Every generation has its signature Catholic movie: Bing and Barry Fitzgerald in "Going My Way," Julie Andrews nose-wrinkling her way through "The Sound of Music," the ambivalent faith and flawed priests of 1984's "Mass Appeal," Mel's militant metaphysics in "The Passion of the Christ."

Late last year, Colleen McDannell, the authority on the "material culture" of American religion, has written, "Catholics in the Movies," a book that shows how a Protestant country's movie industry made Catholicism its official religion.

The art of Andres Serrano has been derided in the crudest ways. Now it seems those comments, at least the most potty-mouthed, are all true. The artist, who has long experimented with bodily fluids in his photographs, will display his images of animal feces, including a human being's (his), at a gallery in New York this fall. Serrano told the New York Post today that his use of poop "pushed even his buttons."

Okay, there's some cynicism brewing out there about today's sale at a London auction house of John Lennon's scrawled lyrics to "Give Peace a Chance." Gail Renard, a Canadian television writer who lives in London, parted with the scrap of cardboard, on which Lennon's penned the song during his 1969 lie-in for peace with Yoko Ono, for some $800,000, according to Christie's.

On first blush, the sale does seem to fall in line with rock music being deployed to sell VWs, or Bob Dylan working for corporate radio. Lennon himself would no doubt have a bitchily witty comment about how many iBooks $800K would buy for Afghan schoolgirls.

The longer view says that artwork and its accoutrements gathers value as the message it contains does: feminist artists like Judy Chicago don't quibble with the prices their work fetches because lucre might cheapen the cause. The fact that Lennon's lyrics brought $200,000 beyond their highest expected price listed in the catalogue should only ennoble his sentiments.

Lennon, at any rate, might be bitchy about this, but he wouldn't be surprised. When he handed Renard his handiwork in Amsterdam 39 years ago, he reportedly told her, "Here. This might be worth something one day."

The devil has a place in American baseball lore, thanks to the classic 1955 musical "Damn Yankees," in which a beleaguered baseball fan named Joe Boyd sells his soul to Satan in return for the batting chops that help his beloved Washington Senators finally vanquish the Yankees. Spoiler alert: it doesn't work.

The devil never helped the Tampa Bay Devil Rays either. After ten years of existence as the Devil Rays, the former expansion team dropped "devil" from their name this year. The change was reflected in new uniforms for the team, in which a sunburst replaced an abstract icon of the locally abundant fish.

Needless to say, the Rays promptly leapt to the top of their division. You can choose to believe that the teams' fortunes have followed their logo up from the watery depths to the sunny Florida sky. To this writer, and to any reasonably superstitious baseball fan, the turnabout is solely the result of the exorcism of the word "devil."