Tom Chiarella's profile of Ben Affleck for the April issue of Esquire might best be explained as an attempt by the magazine to keep its discontinued "Dubious Achievements" feature by other means. Topped by a headline describing Affleck as "A Smart, Talented Man Trapped in Lindsay Lohan's Life", it begins with a scene of the reporter in a car with his subject after the subject has picked him up, always a sure sign that what the writer most wants to convey in this piece is the message, "Mom! Fill-in-the-blank [name of celebrity] hung out with ME, in a CAR, and HE drove!!" There's just one spot of mold on the six foot hoagie that is Chiarella's life: Affleck picked him up in a loaner. But Chiarella makes lemons with it, seizing this sour persimmon as an excuse for him to dazzle the reader with his deductive skills and ability to buffalo his way into the mind of his superstar quarry: "For some reason Ben Affleck doesn’t want me to see his car. So he's picking me up at my hotel in a new hybrid sedan. White. Nice car but distinctly anonymous, devoid of detail, interior unblazoned by the obvious signifiers of a personal life. A fitted Red Sox cap on the floor and his BlackBerry — that's it...We both know this is a tell that the guy doesn't want to show me anything he doesn't have to." Chiarella doesn't take it personally, because he knows that Affleck is besieged in his everyday life by "sweatpants-wearing, camera-wielding, junior-college-dropout paparazzi"--those other guys who document the lives of celebrities for a living. Chiarella finished junior college, by God! And to prove it, he paints a vivid man-crush prose poem of Affleck, that recognizes that the key to Ben's awesomeness is how much he superficially a regular guy, only better, right? "He's both jumpy and liquid in his movement. He carries himself as if held together with kite string, which means he looks at once crinkly and cool. Jeans, no belt, plain-Jane sneakers, a black long-sleeved T-shirt. And he looks a little more fragile than you'd expect, like a guy thinking about his persistent back pain. The effect: He walks light on the depthless veneer of the world, here on this lambent late afternoon at the joining edge of Beverly Hills and Culver City, where and when the house shadows always insinuate a little doom to me." "Lambent" is the present participle of lambere, i.e., "to lick." I looked it up.
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