So Wrong It’s Right

So Wrong It's Right Credits

I watched “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” (2002) the other day — sure, I’ve seen it a few times before but I always get a kick out of the way it lampoons the creation of diaspora identities and the way they can end up being over-the-top parodies (because they’re based on estranged memories) of the thing people think they’re just modeling. Continue reading “So Wrong It’s Right”

Everybody Plays the Fool

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When [Walter] Kirn was just starting his novel-writing career, he met a man who was a bold financier, an art collector, a fussy eccentric, a dog lover and a Rockefeller. They became friends.

But over the years Kirn began to learn that the man who called himself Clark Rockefeller was none of that — not even a dog lover. He was a psychopath and a killer.

How did Kirn fall for the fraud? Was Christian Karl Gerhartsriter — aka “Clark Rockefeller” — extraordinarily compelling? Or was the novelist, like a lot of other people drawn to the imposter, duped by his own desire to have an attachment to a famous name?

So opens a radio story on the curious case of Clark Rockefeller — or, might we say instead, the curious case of people, such as Kirn himself, who believed his friend to be the man he claimed to be. The difference between how we approach this story — is it about Rockefeller (pictured above) or Kirn? — tells us much about the social theory used to tell the tale. Continue reading “Everybody Plays the Fool”