CROSS YOUR ENTHUSIASM (intro)
By:
October 1, 2026
In these times of myriad media and impervious bubbles, we can all be many things to many people. Assumed identities and parallel careers are a norm for online existence, and the separate followings for your several personas may have no idea that the zoom-colleague, the substacker and the YouTuber are actually each other. And in late-capitalism’s disposable workforce, where people have to jump to whole new professions after years (or every few), we all have more than one life to live.
People still tend to expect one identity at a time. So when a Senator sings a country song or a basketball player writes a novel or a football coach becomes a Senator, it’s still news. Even more perplexing are the cases that are news-to-us, that is, when we find out that a figure from past times of much more fixed identities turns out to have been, say, equally distinguished in scientific invention as acclaimed for movie stardom.
CROSS Your Enthusiasm meets such figures at the intersection. The artists and others covered here always knew they were more than just one thing, or saw no contradictions among their many selves.
We’re living through an era when trying on each other’s shoes to gain perspective, and departing from the way you’ve always done things to see what new ways might work, are imperative for progress as a people and a planet. Exceeding your comfort zone and breaking patterns are also essential for creative practice, and this series will follow artists and other figures into the unknown to see what they and we might discover.
Some CROSSers are so flexible that their separate gifts seem to be the work of separate people — when Rachel Pollack (profiled here by Rani Som) passed, I shared the news with comics fans who hadn’t known she was a Tarot scholar and designer, and with mystic practitioners who’d never known she wrote comics — while others seem to have lived more than once: Metallica’s Lars Ulrich, as Crockett Doob tells us, left a career as a promising tennis player in his teens, and Crystal Durant gives us the story of how guitar-legend Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, while still touring, is known to a specialized (and perhaps bigger) audience as a designer of missile-defense systems.
In the same way, the visceral virtues of arena-rock don’t prepare most people for the news that Queen guitarist Brian May is a credentialed astrophysicist, and the cerebral sphere of queer theory and psychological inquiry might not lead Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick’s students to expect she was prolific and respected in the tactile, textile arts (we are given the proof, respectively, by Mariane Cara and Miranda Mellis, who each find lyrical metaphors for how their subjects’ variant lives entwine).
Heather Quinlan’s essay and mine each identify how something in our subjects’ character suited them to the wildly divergent roles they took on over the course of their lifetimes — respectively, how a singular (and solitary) genius led to Harry Nilsson’s careers in early computers and then in music; and how masking for a hostile majority culture may have conditioned performer Josephine Baker for her years as an Allied spy.
Spies play a role in plain sight, while “playing yourself” in different contexts can confirm the essence of your identity, as recorded in Carlo Rotella’s essay on boxer Curtis Cokes, and the genuineness he brought to his sole (yet iconic) movie role, as a boxer, in John Huston’s Fat City.
Underestimation, as much as classified government intelligence, may have kept people from conceiving that “the most beautiful woman in the world,” movie-star Hedy Lamarr, and obscure-to-the-mases avant-garde composer George Antheil, would team up on a miliary patent that is now seen as the precursor to any of the wireless communications you may be reading this on (as she always does, Lynn Peril reveals the reality, and its fanciful embellishments).
While some famous figures surprise with their career CROSSings, others step down from the alter of celebrity into occupations meant to blend with the crowd; such it is with born frontman David Lee Roth’s tenure as an Emergency Medical Technician at age 48 (James Scoitt Maloy rides shotgun), and serial Oscar-winner Daniel Day-Lewis’ 5-year disappearance as an apprentice shoemaker (Mimi Lipson tracks it down). The opposite arc, of not nearly enough humility, is traced in Nikhil Singh’s trip through the mind of an aggrieved unknown street artist named Adolf Hitler.
Other artists take their might-have-beens and make even more of them than the artists themselves expected; Holly Interlandi leads us through how Adam Jones terminated what could have been a historic career as a Hollywood makeup and special-effects artist to become… an auteur of makeup, set-design, creature-creation and video-direction for his band Tool’s own clips. Adjacency of mediums can be another short but brave bridge to CROSS, as with director Sydney Pollack’s impressive (perhaps superior) acting career (watched by Jake Zucker), and George Harrison’s shift from being one of the world’s most on-camera personalities to becoming a movie producer (as admired by Josh Glenn).
For many of our subjects and others with their restless individuality, the lines they CROSS are more like the spokes of a wheel they circle: Is Richard McGuire a pathbreaking musician, gallery artist, or graphic-narrative reinventor? Is Henry Rollins a punk singer, storyteller, author, actor, publisher, producer or radio host? Is John Lurie an actor, musician, film composer, painter, TV host, or fisherman? Is Peter Caine a dog-trainer, YouTube conspiracist, sci-fi auteur or satirist? The answer from Douglas Wolk, Adrienne Crew, Deborah Wassertzug, and Jonathan Pinchera, respectively, would be Yes.
Artists like these disregard that the lines are there, while others are all too conscious of the lines drawn around them. Former illustrator and immortal celebrity image-maker Andy Warhol hopped from advertising to museums, from commerce-as-art to art-as-commerce, which is a blurred boundary now but was a steep and steely barricade back then; Jeff Lewonczyk explores several of the timelines his subject CROSSed out, imagining what Warhol might have created had he stayed on the populist and hand-made rather than the provocateurial and machine-produced “side.”
These 20 essays, and 5 more to come at time of writing (list right below!), will introduce you to names you know well in aspects you may never have known of. Join us in seeing both sides and sharing some tales of once-and-future artists who hop the borders and don’t look back!
[HILOBROW thanks the many contributors who donated their honorarium to RAICES (Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services), which helps those making one of the bravest crossings, into America seeking better lives, to get legal aid and support.]
CROSS YOUR ENTHUSIASM series lineup:
INTRODUCTION by Adam McGovern | James Scott Maloy on DAVID LEE ROTH, EMT | Lynn Peril on HEDY LAMARR, INVENTOR | Crockett Doob on LARS ULRICH, TENNIS ACE | Mimi Lipson on DANIEL DAY-LEWIS, COBBLER | Mariane Cara on BRIAN MAY, ASTROPHYSICIST | Carlo Rotella on CURTIS COKES, FIGHTING ACTOR | Josh Glenn on GEORGE HARRISON, FILM PRODUCER | Crystal Durant on SKUNK BAXTER, DEFENSE CONSULTANT | Adrienne Crew on HENRY ROLLINS, PUNK POLYMATH | Deborah Wassertzug on JOHN LURIE, DISRUPTOR | Heather Quinlan on HARRY NILSSON, COMPUTER GENIUS | Adam McGovern on JOSEPHINE BAKER, SPY | Douglas Wolk on RICHARD MCGUIRE, GRAPHIC-LIT INNOVATOR | Jake Zucker on SYDNEY POLLACK, CHARACTER ACTOR | Rani Som on RACHEL POLLACK, SEEKER | Jeff Lewonczyk on ANDY WARHOL, FORMER ANDY WARHOL | Nikhil Singh on ADOLF HITLER, FORMER PAINTER | Holly Interlandi on ADAM JONES, DIRECTOR | Jonathan Pinchera on PETER CAINE, CONSPIRACY STAR | Miranda Mellis on EVE KOSOVSKY SEDGWICK, ACADEMIC WEAVER | Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons on BRENT SPINER, SINGING NOVELIST | Christopher-Rashee Stevenson on QUENTIN TARANTINO, CRITIC | TBD on TBD | Marlon Stern Lopez on GREG GRAFFIN, HARDCORE ZOOLOGIST | Pichchenda Bao on WENDELL BERRY, FARMING POET.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!