Have you ever really gone shopping? I don't mean, oh, take Mr. Washington here and get yourself a gumball, you rascal! I mean the self-experiencing chaotic organism of shopping.
A point is that which has no part. In economics, a point is just a shopping cart full of food. Now, if you're like me, you want to buy the best shopping cart of food every time. If you can do better and pay less by switching from a pound of lamb to a couple chicken breasts, then why not? You switch it. You change the point you are at to the point you want to be at. Now you have a better shopping cart and it is full of food! What will you make tonight? Anything you want, because your shopping cart is just right. This is the satisfaction of the marketplace.
Richard Dawkins is a biologist and, full disclosure, he is also an atheist. But before he was an atheist, he was a biologist. He still is, in fact. Renaissance man Richard Dawkins is a biologist and he is also an atheist. Richard Dawkins turned evolution on its head when he said (in The Selfish Gene) that we are just glorified gene machines. The genes are the real actors, and what appears to be behavior in the name of survival or reproduction is actually the action of your genes trying to reproduce themselves. Organisms are not the unit of evolution; genes are! Selfish, selfish genes.
I want to do to basketball what Dawkins did for evolution, except without taking God out of the equation (I assume you are familiar with Dave Berri in any case). First, however, I'd like to talk about Shaq. Shaq was a genie in the oft-derided satire of consumerism, Kazaam. Shaq rejected the marketplace perforce. "Mischief for a dollar; you have to shape up." was the motto. Scarce wonder the movie is little seen. There's a part when the protagonist, a punk of 11 years, realizes for a moment how absurd it is that Shaq is without a basketball court throughout the eighty-some minutes of the movie. The labyrinthine plot culminates when the child learns that his actions were only serving Shaq. You see, this child, of limited intelligence and self-awareness, was getting played by the great center. His will was irrelevant, and his explorations and wanderings served a greater purpose, and he falls from a great building into a giant basketball hoop. The whole movie was just an exhibition for Shaq's basketball skills, played out in sprawling, gigantic artistic generality that leaves the viewer weeping and staggered. Shaq is the czars, the Hitlers, all those who believe that freedom is instrumental to higher plans of central governments. But Shaq is also the social manipulations we use on other people. Shaq has displaced greed with utter, banal, impersonal control.
The common wisdom of the Shaq aneqdote is that the players control the ball, and the most skilled of them rise to professional leagues and championships, or otherwise receive massive endorsements for their skills. What I'm proposing is that while this is a useful way to look at things, I believe it is more useful to look at a revolving door of modalities that holds all the power in the NBA and beyond.
Let's establish something. "Having game" is relative to time and place. If you pass to someone who can't receive, you do not have game. If you have passing skills that don't match with your teammates' receiving skills, you do not have game. In another context you could be a great passer, but now you are just "that crazy person that makes the ball spin on the ground until the shot clock expires" and useless for most plays. Having game is a collection of abilities which correctly interact with a game.
The collection of abilities that fills one who has "got game" is a shopping cart of sorts. Now, for a basketball game, when the players interact, that is like shopping. The game sees that chicken on the rack and makes the center make a move inside. That center finds blood on the bottom, which is just nasty. Put it back. You cannot score on this play. Shaq kicks it out to, oh, let's say, Mo Williams. The game makes Mo WIlliams do something competent. Mo Williams checks the eggs. Perfect shot from beyond the arc. The collection of abilities that are needed for shopping right and having game are remarkably similar. Shopping for skills, knowing when to switch, knowing when to practice, all of these things help your game. Good players adapt to the situation. And if players don't adapt, then new players that can adapt will take their place. Abilities hold all the power in games and leagues. They are the real players, and the players are just impersonal conduits for their holistic perfection.
Now that we have established that "having game" is just having access to certain skills and these certain skills hold all the power, we know therefore that being a good player just means being able to conjure up and create effective manifestations of subtle and invisible process. Process swims all around us in the incredible, formless structure of possibility. We work where the money goes. Players work where the scoring goes. But even this is not enough! God bless the human mind!
My real thesis is that it is not players, nor is it abilities, that truly control games. It is the ball itself. Think about it. What could be more sinister? Follow the money, and the most sinister conclusion is sure to be true! What centers the game around itself? What do all abilities, to a second and third approximation, boil down to? That is right. It is the movement of the ball. The ball is a conscious entity which has access to all the psyches and minds of the basketball players. It can hear the breath of a fan in the stands. It can sense the structure of the arena. It can make a player, as in the WNBA finals, jump backwards and throw it at another player in order to make that other player be credited with making the ball move the direction the first player jumped backwards, just so that she could have access to the ball. Like Lady Macbeth the ball stirs her to murder the king to become king. But Lady Macbeth has controlled everyone, the whole time. The ball goes insane as the power doth wane. The championship has been won, and the ball lies at the feet of the heaped, exhausted players, its power having been as exhausted by overuse. The players in their life of pure function – what are they? Living is just having your eyes open. But they are shopping.
A point is that which has no part. In economics, a point is just a shopping cart full of food. Now, if you're like me, you want to buy the best shopping cart of food every time. If you can do better and pay less by switching from a pound of lamb to a couple chicken breasts, then why not? You switch it. You change the point you are at to the point you want to be at. Now you have a better shopping cart and it is full of food! What will you make tonight? Anything you want, because your shopping cart is just right. This is the satisfaction of the marketplace.
Richard Dawkins is a biologist and, full disclosure, he is also an atheist. But before he was an atheist, he was a biologist. He still is, in fact. Renaissance man Richard Dawkins is a biologist and he is also an atheist. Richard Dawkins turned evolution on its head when he said (in The Selfish Gene) that we are just glorified gene machines. The genes are the real actors, and what appears to be behavior in the name of survival or reproduction is actually the action of your genes trying to reproduce themselves. Organisms are not the unit of evolution; genes are! Selfish, selfish genes.
I want to do to basketball what Dawkins did for evolution, except without taking God out of the equation (I assume you are familiar with Dave Berri in any case). First, however, I'd like to talk about Shaq. Shaq was a genie in the oft-derided satire of consumerism, Kazaam. Shaq rejected the marketplace perforce. "Mischief for a dollar; you have to shape up." was the motto. Scarce wonder the movie is little seen. There's a part when the protagonist, a punk of 11 years, realizes for a moment how absurd it is that Shaq is without a basketball court throughout the eighty-some minutes of the movie. The labyrinthine plot culminates when the child learns that his actions were only serving Shaq. You see, this child, of limited intelligence and self-awareness, was getting played by the great center. His will was irrelevant, and his explorations and wanderings served a greater purpose, and he falls from a great building into a giant basketball hoop. The whole movie was just an exhibition for Shaq's basketball skills, played out in sprawling, gigantic artistic generality that leaves the viewer weeping and staggered. Shaq is the czars, the Hitlers, all those who believe that freedom is instrumental to higher plans of central governments. But Shaq is also the social manipulations we use on other people. Shaq has displaced greed with utter, banal, impersonal control.
The common wisdom of the Shaq aneqdote is that the players control the ball, and the most skilled of them rise to professional leagues and championships, or otherwise receive massive endorsements for their skills. What I'm proposing is that while this is a useful way to look at things, I believe it is more useful to look at a revolving door of modalities that holds all the power in the NBA and beyond.
Let's establish something. "Having game" is relative to time and place. If you pass to someone who can't receive, you do not have game. If you have passing skills that don't match with your teammates' receiving skills, you do not have game. In another context you could be a great passer, but now you are just "that crazy person that makes the ball spin on the ground until the shot clock expires" and useless for most plays. Having game is a collection of abilities which correctly interact with a game.
The collection of abilities that fills one who has "got game" is a shopping cart of sorts. Now, for a basketball game, when the players interact, that is like shopping. The game sees that chicken on the rack and makes the center make a move inside. That center finds blood on the bottom, which is just nasty. Put it back. You cannot score on this play. Shaq kicks it out to, oh, let's say, Mo Williams. The game makes Mo WIlliams do something competent. Mo Williams checks the eggs. Perfect shot from beyond the arc. The collection of abilities that are needed for shopping right and having game are remarkably similar. Shopping for skills, knowing when to switch, knowing when to practice, all of these things help your game. Good players adapt to the situation. And if players don't adapt, then new players that can adapt will take their place. Abilities hold all the power in games and leagues. They are the real players, and the players are just impersonal conduits for their holistic perfection.
Now that we have established that "having game" is just having access to certain skills and these certain skills hold all the power, we know therefore that being a good player just means being able to conjure up and create effective manifestations of subtle and invisible process. Process swims all around us in the incredible, formless structure of possibility. We work where the money goes. Players work where the scoring goes. But even this is not enough! God bless the human mind!
My real thesis is that it is not players, nor is it abilities, that truly control games. It is the ball itself. Think about it. What could be more sinister? Follow the money, and the most sinister conclusion is sure to be true! What centers the game around itself? What do all abilities, to a second and third approximation, boil down to? That is right. It is the movement of the ball. The ball is a conscious entity which has access to all the psyches and minds of the basketball players. It can hear the breath of a fan in the stands. It can sense the structure of the arena. It can make a player, as in the WNBA finals, jump backwards and throw it at another player in order to make that other player be credited with making the ball move the direction the first player jumped backwards, just so that she could have access to the ball. Like Lady Macbeth the ball stirs her to murder the king to become king. But Lady Macbeth has controlled everyone, the whole time. The ball goes insane as the power doth wane. The championship has been won, and the ball lies at the feet of the heaped, exhausted players, its power having been as exhausted by overuse. The players in their life of pure function – what are they? Living is just having your eyes open. But they are shopping.
Unintelligible drivel. A bad attempt at humor or a worse attempt at something else, I'm not quite sure which. First of all what does shopping have to do with this? You seem to be attempting this weird tie in to talk about shopping by talking about basketball, and talking about basketball by taking about a move. In your ramblings about basketball and Kazaam you don't tie shopping in strongly enough, in fact you barely tie it in at all, so it's seems like something stupid and completely irrelevant even though your first couple paragraphs (and third to last) would lead me to believe that it's the topic of your entire post. Your last paragraph in fact indicates otherwise, saying that it's really a statement about basketball. In which case, why attempt to draw the analogy in the first place? Oh there's shopping again in the last sentence, you haven't made it clear how it relates to anything else.
ReplyDeleteIt's a stream of incoherent thoughts linked incoherently.
The bit about Dawkins seems totally off the wall, and even if there's a decent reason to include it (and there might be) it's too rambling, a point that I could make about the entire piece, by the way. Making your points clearly is important even if you're going for surrealism, and you simply lose them in the muddy water of your text.
cryofdragon was born a rambling man
ReplyDeletebro scuffled as only mo williams can
sad memories i can't recall
-- the buddha
Will, that thing totally made sense right up until that final paragraph. If he'd reworked the bit about the ball and lady macbeth somewhere higher up, then cut the last paragraph, it would've made perfect sense.
ReplyDelete