a column by 

Sky O’Brien

I pilfered the name for this column from Annette Lavers’s translation of a line by Charles Baudelaire describing a painting by Delacroix, which appears as an epigraph at the beginning of an essay by Roland Barthes: “The grandiloquent truth of gestures on life’s great occasions.” Baudelaire was writing about Delacroix’s depiction of the Crusaders pillaging Christian Constantinople, and Roland Barthes was writing about wrestling. The motto, for me, is “Anything goes.”