Why are you so obsessed with Free Darko, Burl Ives, Richard Jefferson, Tim Duncan, Sean Elliott, etc., Alex? I want to hear about actual basketball in an objective and fun way, not about these strange, baroque character sketches with Lovecraftian and otherwise surreal undertones.
That's a good question, Alex. Let me answer your question in order.
1. Bethlehem Shoals (and to a lesser extent Eric Freeman) of Free Darko - Much of the first half of this blog can be read as a surreal parody of Free Darko (SEE: Every use of 'dialectic'). This is because he generally knows his stuff, but often lets his off-beat (though often moralistic or political) character sketches and writerly fixations on interesting narratives take the place of his judgment, like Bill Simmons crossed with...a grad student in journalism or library studies. Granted, he's certainly capable of the occasional "Eff You" short essay, and the clarity of some of his images is often called for. Something that makes Shoals better...or worse...than many other NBA scribes is his (how else shall I say it?) deliberate forgetfulness. It only matters marginally how he characterizes, say, the 2011 Suns when writing about the previous year's or next year's squads. He forgets, for the most part, everything he has written before when the new writing begins, only seeming to explicitly remember them again in the course of writing them. If the 2011 Nash was, say, "Bean from Ender's Shadow," then the process of trading Nash can be "Madame Bovary looking for a suitor" and Shoals will find no need to attempt to reconcile these images. This forgetful approach, without an overarching schema of images, seems cosmically wrong and is infuriatingly vague on occasion (...to the extent anything on the Internet actually infuriates people, a.k.a. annoyance with marginal moral outrage). But it's hard to argue with the results, which are generally successful. There is no ideology, and no bias, to Shoals, which makes his already-nebulous offering of a "unique take" blend further into the surrounding blogosphere, leaving as residue of the apparent uniqueness only the quality of the writing which implies a lifetime of thought and experience that is not perhaps unrivaled but is, still, unique.. Shoals is like a disembodied hand with no accountability, no memory, and no identity, but in the meantime has forged himself as a premier NBA writer. I have high respect for his craft, but his weird ability to co-opt any subject and lend his voice to any narrative he happens to encounter is kind of eerie, and I don't say that altogether respectfully. That fascinates me.
2. Burl Ives - Burl Ives is, as I poorly conceived him, and as he is, the perfect foil to Free Darko. Like I characterized FD above, Ives also is forgetful in some sense: He enters into a song with no ideology except the song itself, and does so with immaculate and creative expression, so much so that he tends to blend (almost invisibly) into the other quality songs of his era. But he has a schema, so to speak. He has an overarching logic to his craft which serves an overarching identity. He may not be speaking directly to the audience about his personal happiness and his personal tragedies, but he may as well be. He has the directness and clarity of a good beat reporter or feature editor, and the flourishes of a master lute master or opera singer (Ives' vocal range is hardly unsurpassable, but his ability to make difficult vocal passages seem casual, direct, and simple may be). But he has an identity on top of that. I don't mean the clumsy, tacked-on "Wayfarin' Stranger" (based on his relatively poor version of the folk standard). I also don't mean his hilariously commercial image as a children's singer, indelible to all of us that grew up with his treatment of folk standards. No, I mean that a series of randomly selected Ives performances from decade to decade, through farcical murder ballads or sincere gospel songs, might as well have been a concert. It flows well through the sincerity of his identity. Burl Ives live is Burl Ives in the studio. His jokes and half-spoken delivery don't require his peak vocal health; they just require his personality, which is ubiquitous in all processes relevant to musicality: song selection, choice of folk verses, meter, tempo, arrangements, and so on. There is just an integrity there which is undeniable. "Silver and Gold" into a bitter divorce? Maybe not my cup of tea tonight, but I can't deny that it's a workable transition that he could make work in a concert, you know? He makes jokes to the audience, even on studio recordings. He knows you may not hear those studio jokes for months, years. It doesn't matter: A listener to Burl Ives is arrested in time.
3. Richard Jefferson - As a friend recently put it, RJ looks better and better the worse his teams are. His claymationesque effort looks like pure basketball at its finest. He jumps high for rebounds. He stays on his man with the shuffling of feet that always means business. He goes for alley-oops and he is the perfect finisher in set plays or fast breaks. He is athletic, and is possibly the most reasonable interview in the entire league. If asked, he can be a driving wing. And dag namit, he wants to win! But he's just not that good. He is the ultimate also-ran, and he has more than a little (though less than a lot) to do with that. He is (as I have said) one of the only players I'm comfortable calling "soft" because he actually appears to wilt. At Miami Heat for the second of the "home court wins by 30" season series, Jefferson visibly sank, bending down, putting his hands to his knees and like...seriously seemed to be broken spiritually after a botched open 3, after which Popovich had to tap him on the back (during the game) and give him some motivation and to get him back on defense. Sometimes that sort of thing would be a tiny part of the narrative, like with LeBron, but with RJ it is the single most representative act of his career. That said, he's also not that bad, and, by all rights, we should probably be blaming RC and Popovich for bringing him in, instead of RJ, who after all appears to be trying his hardest. Just like all of us.
Tim Duncan - Uh...Because he fucking rules, why else? Because he has all the competitiveness of Kobe, has had all the dominance of LeBron, and all the actual carrying-team-on-back-in-all-facets of Chris Paul, but with none of the pretense, none of the drama, none of the arrogance, none of the handlers, nothing. He's just a good guy, it seems like, who has the most riding on the outcome of a game who will show the least. I can't relate to the overwhelming dominance part, but I can relate to that.
Sean Elliott - Sean Elliott is not the worst color commentator in all of sports, nor even of basketball (hello, all the 'blame the refs self-righteously even in a home game' guys, though, indeed, "THAT WAS NOT A BLOCKING FOUL"). But Elliott may be the most subversively bad. You see, Sean Elliott is perhaps one of the most intelligent players in the league. I mean, his presence of mind and intelligence are really hard to match*, and this is obvious when you listen to him. He has a well-timed, engaged sense of humor, a keen sense of observation, and the ironic distance of someone who understands that the deliberately homerish and acting-out qualities of his color commentary are basically acceptable to his local audience bereft of alternatives but would be unacceptable to a national audience and even though he could easily improve by working on his voice and doing a great deal more research with a small additional commitment of time. He has been "exposed" in crucial first-round series this past couple of years, and it's always embarrassing for Spurs fans.
*Possibly the most enigmatic lineup ever (maybe besides the 1973 Knicks) in Moses Malone's final game
6. "I want to hear about actual basketball in an objective and fun way, not about these strange, baroque character sketches with Lovecraftian and otherwise surreal undertones." - It takes time, man. Just time. And effort. There is a definite learning curve here, and I have been only marginally engaged with basketball before 2009 and after 1999. (I know I watched the All-Star games with MJ as a Wizard, heh, and a bunch of Wizards games, too). This is not embarrassing at all, but it's a definite problem of experience to reconcile. I'll try to look at some European leagues, study offenses and defenses a bit more so that my knowledge base is a bit more objective. As a sidenote, I'm slowly realizing what a shame it is that my high school didn't have real recess or outdoor courts.
That's a good question, Alex. Let me answer your question in order.
1. Bethlehem Shoals (and to a lesser extent Eric Freeman) of Free Darko - Much of the first half of this blog can be read as a surreal parody of Free Darko (SEE: Every use of 'dialectic'). This is because he generally knows his stuff, but often lets his off-beat (though often moralistic or political) character sketches and writerly fixations on interesting narratives take the place of his judgment, like Bill Simmons crossed with...a grad student in journalism or library studies. Granted, he's certainly capable of the occasional "Eff You" short essay, and the clarity of some of his images is often called for. Something that makes Shoals better...or worse...than many other NBA scribes is his (how else shall I say it?) deliberate forgetfulness. It only matters marginally how he characterizes, say, the 2011 Suns when writing about the previous year's or next year's squads. He forgets, for the most part, everything he has written before when the new writing begins, only seeming to explicitly remember them again in the course of writing them. If the 2011 Nash was, say, "Bean from Ender's Shadow," then the process of trading Nash can be "Madame Bovary looking for a suitor" and Shoals will find no need to attempt to reconcile these images. This forgetful approach, without an overarching schema of images, seems cosmically wrong and is infuriatingly vague on occasion (...to the extent anything on the Internet actually infuriates people, a.k.a. annoyance with marginal moral outrage). But it's hard to argue with the results, which are generally successful. There is no ideology, and no bias, to Shoals, which makes his already-nebulous offering of a "unique take" blend further into the surrounding blogosphere, leaving as residue of the apparent uniqueness only the quality of the writing which implies a lifetime of thought and experience that is not perhaps unrivaled but is, still, unique.. Shoals is like a disembodied hand with no accountability, no memory, and no identity, but in the meantime has forged himself as a premier NBA writer. I have high respect for his craft, but his weird ability to co-opt any subject and lend his voice to any narrative he happens to encounter is kind of eerie, and I don't say that altogether respectfully. That fascinates me.
2. Burl Ives - Burl Ives is, as I poorly conceived him, and as he is, the perfect foil to Free Darko. Like I characterized FD above, Ives also is forgetful in some sense: He enters into a song with no ideology except the song itself, and does so with immaculate and creative expression, so much so that he tends to blend (almost invisibly) into the other quality songs of his era. But he has a schema, so to speak. He has an overarching logic to his craft which serves an overarching identity. He may not be speaking directly to the audience about his personal happiness and his personal tragedies, but he may as well be. He has the directness and clarity of a good beat reporter or feature editor, and the flourishes of a master lute master or opera singer (Ives' vocal range is hardly unsurpassable, but his ability to make difficult vocal passages seem casual, direct, and simple may be). But he has an identity on top of that. I don't mean the clumsy, tacked-on "Wayfarin' Stranger" (based on his relatively poor version of the folk standard). I also don't mean his hilariously commercial image as a children's singer, indelible to all of us that grew up with his treatment of folk standards. No, I mean that a series of randomly selected Ives performances from decade to decade, through farcical murder ballads or sincere gospel songs, might as well have been a concert. It flows well through the sincerity of his identity. Burl Ives live is Burl Ives in the studio. His jokes and half-spoken delivery don't require his peak vocal health; they just require his personality, which is ubiquitous in all processes relevant to musicality: song selection, choice of folk verses, meter, tempo, arrangements, and so on. There is just an integrity there which is undeniable. "Silver and Gold" into a bitter divorce? Maybe not my cup of tea tonight, but I can't deny that it's a workable transition that he could make work in a concert, you know? He makes jokes to the audience, even on studio recordings. He knows you may not hear those studio jokes for months, years. It doesn't matter: A listener to Burl Ives is arrested in time.
3. Richard Jefferson - As a friend recently put it, RJ looks better and better the worse his teams are. His claymationesque effort looks like pure basketball at its finest. He jumps high for rebounds. He stays on his man with the shuffling of feet that always means business. He goes for alley-oops and he is the perfect finisher in set plays or fast breaks. He is athletic, and is possibly the most reasonable interview in the entire league. If asked, he can be a driving wing. And dag namit, he wants to win! But he's just not that good. He is the ultimate also-ran, and he has more than a little (though less than a lot) to do with that. He is (as I have said) one of the only players I'm comfortable calling "soft" because he actually appears to wilt. At Miami Heat for the second of the "home court wins by 30" season series, Jefferson visibly sank, bending down, putting his hands to his knees and like...seriously seemed to be broken spiritually after a botched open 3, after which Popovich had to tap him on the back (during the game) and give him some motivation and to get him back on defense. Sometimes that sort of thing would be a tiny part of the narrative, like with LeBron, but with RJ it is the single most representative act of his career. That said, he's also not that bad, and, by all rights, we should probably be blaming RC and Popovich for bringing him in, instead of RJ, who after all appears to be trying his hardest. Just like all of us.
Tim Duncan - Uh...Because he fucking rules, why else? Because he has all the competitiveness of Kobe, has had all the dominance of LeBron, and all the actual carrying-team-on-back-in-all-facets of Chris Paul, but with none of the pretense, none of the drama, none of the arrogance, none of the handlers, nothing. He's just a good guy, it seems like, who has the most riding on the outcome of a game who will show the least. I can't relate to the overwhelming dominance part, but I can relate to that.
Sean Elliott - Sean Elliott is not the worst color commentator in all of sports, nor even of basketball (hello, all the 'blame the refs self-righteously even in a home game' guys, though, indeed, "THAT WAS NOT A BLOCKING FOUL"). But Elliott may be the most subversively bad. You see, Sean Elliott is perhaps one of the most intelligent players in the league. I mean, his presence of mind and intelligence are really hard to match*, and this is obvious when you listen to him. He has a well-timed, engaged sense of humor, a keen sense of observation, and the ironic distance of someone who understands that the deliberately homerish and acting-out qualities of his color commentary are basically acceptable to his local audience bereft of alternatives but would be unacceptable to a national audience and even though he could easily improve by working on his voice and doing a great deal more research with a small additional commitment of time. He has been "exposed" in crucial first-round series this past couple of years, and it's always embarrassing for Spurs fans.
*Possibly the most enigmatic lineup ever (maybe besides the 1973 Knicks) in Moses Malone's final game
6. "I want to hear about actual basketball in an objective and fun way, not about these strange, baroque character sketches with Lovecraftian and otherwise surreal undertones." - It takes time, man. Just time. And effort. There is a definite learning curve here, and I have been only marginally engaged with basketball before 2009 and after 1999. (I know I watched the All-Star games with MJ as a Wizard, heh, and a bunch of Wizards games, too). This is not embarrassing at all, but it's a definite problem of experience to reconcile. I'll try to look at some European leagues, study offenses and defenses a bit more so that my knowledge base is a bit more objective. As a sidenote, I'm slowly realizing what a shame it is that my high school didn't have real recess or outdoor courts.
I generally hate anything I've written more than a week ago. Shoot me an email. Freedarko at gmail dot com.
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