Hi, everyone. Oh, I see you've tripped over your own feet and spit out your coffee at having seen a new Pearls of Mystery post. Yes. Well, nice trip. See you next... it's almost fall, and it's been several months since I have posted here. This is good because I've been posting and editing at The Gothic Ginobili, which is in the process of becoming a Truehoop affiliate.
Now, The Gothic Ginobili has been wonderfully successful by any measure, thanks mostly to Aaron McGuire, but I've had a lot of great pieces go up and I've done a lot of fine editing. We've even had a few new writers and a few more guest writers, which is wonderful. I had a lot of pride when my link to "The Consummation of Dirk" turned out to connect its fine DFW-influenced author Jonathan Callahan to a literary magazine for the analogical "Beyond Good and Evil" to the "Thus Spake Zarathustra" of "Dirk".
Overall, the only regret I've had with GG is that the consistent feature I could theoretically bank on for a couple posts a week has thus far eluded me. So I go through alternating periods of intense posting activity and barren writer's block. So - in the utter midst of such a block - I want to spend my way out of the recession, so to speak, by putting some ideas to virtual pen.
Anyway, one of the only content restrictions (and the only one I see affecting what I would conceivably post at the GG at all substantially) will be Truehoop's steadfast soft ban on posting many forms of media criticism. Freedom of expression questions aside, the affiliation with ESPN understandably makes such criticism a potential legal, social, and branding boondoggle - "Look what ESPN said about Bill Simmons!" is not a comfortable position to put the sports media behemoth into. And frankly, even if we did feel censored by this, media criticism is not what viewers of basketball blogs generally want anyway - oh, sure, some "F- the ruling body" catharsis is nice, but our audience is self-selected by the desire for coverage of the NBA and by the desire for the interplay of intellectual rigor and imagination. Going to that audience and occasionally making some well-deserved gripes is satisfying but ultimately not the "Spurs Way" and, thus, is not really the Gothic Ginobili way, at least as Aaron and I have conceived it. It's not exactly Kobe taking public shots at his teammates or demanding a trade, but it's also not exactly a point in our favor. So the media criticism can go.
Still, there are some media critiques which deserve conception, communication, and the undertaking of a couple young, gifted, eclectic intellectuals, right? Maybe. Let's talk about one idea I've had recently (and apologies for the double introduction here).
The inestimable jollyrogerwilco, who was the head editor of the wonderful Spurs blog Pounding the Rock, made a fantastic point to me in our first conversation of an already quite fruitful collaboration (though hopefully much more in the future). Anyway, jrw (let's call him "Dale") pointed out that some of the most knowledgeable people in basketball for any team tended to be editors or big contributors on their respective SBNation.com affiliates. Now, the same exact point goes for Truehoop bloggers, granted, but SBNation and his own PtR in particular is more germane for this.
Because PtR is a community. And the vast majority of the denizens of this community just happen to be as well-versed as or more so than any well-connected general columnist at ESPN proper, at least on the Spurs organization, roster, dealings, and style of basketball. And a lot of their special acumen for the Spurs comes directly from this community
Are these the obsessive fans that stay up all night wondering what will happen at the trade deadline or in Game 5? Yes! But also, they're the fans that write statistical pictures of the Spurs for sparse forums, they're the people (like me) that write altogether disturbing fan-fiction about Richard Jefferson's simultaneously likable and out-of-place-on-the-Spurs character. They're the people that (like their connected counterpart Bill Simmons) make elaborate Game of Thrones comparisons. The community at PtR has its own familiar set of "memes" and even (jrw told me proudly) his own "Lexicon" for PtR's community. which rivals "The Devil's Dictionary" and "Baseball's Sad Lexicon" (okay, only sort of counts) as the most entertaining examples of that word. PtR is an example of fanaticism of content production and content consumption, well-organized into a fairly tight (but thankfully not too cliquish) community.
PtR is a shining jewel exemplifying just how the Internet has allowed the most engaged and contributory people towards any goal or common interest myriad platforms to consume, to communicate, to collaborate, and (best constructed Jesse Jackson impression, everyone!) to commiserate and to commemorate, when the time is right.
(xkcd had an amusing observation recently about subcultures being "fractal with no bottom." Which is to say that like those structures, subcultures tend to fracture and fragment along lines of cliques and specialization so much that you'd think there would eventually be a point where "no, this subculture is just one guy, now." But that's not what happens, because in the fragmentation also comes a sharpening of the sword of the subculture's appeal, which leads others to flock to it and (eventually or immediately; the critical term "always already" comes to mind) fragment into still smaller and more refined subcultures. Cultures by their very nature (especially in the Internet era of transient community) always already contain the instrument of their own fragmentation into smaller cultures, which in turn by their very nature, etc.)
That parenthetical is important because only through the Internet does the fractal hyperdrive of multiple community identifications become really practical. If you have to join a bunch of mailing lists in the pre-blog, pre-forum, pre-saturation-point-Internet, okay, you can immediately hold that down. But if you instead have to go to ten different physical places to satisfy your intellectual cravings to produce and consume? Better be in an intellectual hotspot. If you have a decent enthusiasm for something but don't want to build your reputation up just to be able to start contributing to a community? Better be socially gifted and better know all the right social signals (that's part of the Internet too, especially the earlier days, but even then, it's a bit less sophisticated). And so on, and so on. The Internet is the single most crucial dividing line between generally participatory and generally non-participatory communities, excepting those occasional intellectual hotbeds that have sprung up from time to time in the forms of universities, creative meccas like Tin Pan Alley. Only unlike those places, required to be so low in entropy and so high in population, the Internet enables instant and total participation from a few people cracking wise in IRC to a million people making image macros on an image board. All this to say: The Internet immediately eliminates or ameliorates many of the barriers to entry and exit and top-heavy politics that have long plagued traditional community forums. What's more, that element of the Internet's bottom-up enabling of community involvement is becoming more and more ubiquitous. Comments are an important, often inextricable, feature of a blog, forum participation and "original content" are now important responsibilities of many community denizens and authors. And collaboration is not just a happy accident of tightly-connected musicians finding each other at a social occasion and agreeing to meet later but a constant experiment the general audience feels compelled to constantly and consciously conduct with itself and its main contributors.
The takeaway - especially among the younger generations - is that this mindset has ingrained itself into our basic characters and into all our interactions. And we quickly find roles. Those of us less creatively-oriented* find themselves in the business of calling attention to, intelligently responding to, and filtrating upward of the content they appreciate most. Those of us less socially-oriented (myself certainly included) find ourselves in the business of obsessive analysis, elaborate attempts at expressing for ourselves and communicating for others, and the gradual negotiation between their message and the audience that most appreciates them (if you are one of my few readers here, you might correctly suspect that that has been problematic for me). The Internet - and now its effect on ourselves - is that we fall into our respective roles in these sense very quickly and that the vast majority of us can act in both roles simultaneously - as producers and as consumers of content. As participatory members of a community - not just as stratified classes of creators and specialized distrbutors of content and consumers individually responding to the same.
*which is hardly a euphemism or an insult; I know my place as an amateur writer and musician is not privileged among the many roles for people in society. We sometimes want cultural consumption to be passive and production the essence of an intelligent person's activity. But the reality is that both have elements of passivity and activity. Being less-creatively oriented doesn't mean you're less proactive in and of itself, it means the expression for your proactive nature is not a tangible piece like a work of art but the intangible mental model you build around your consumption of such. This is one reason an author is often ill-equipped from authorial intent to describe the importance or real situation that their work describes so aptly - they are not consumers of work and they aren't able to think through things precisely as a well-traveled reader with a greater sense of typical human experience might.
Okay... so where have we gone in the course of this post (which inevitably I'll end up rewriting and reorganizing again and again because I'm already unsatisfied with my current product)?
Well, we have a bunch of self-described experts on places like Grantland, the Onion's AV Club, sports media in general, celebrity coverage, political talking heads, and so on. Roger Ebert is a classic example of this archetype, though everything I've read by him suggests an honest-to-god humble and respectable intellectual (the same goes for many of these people). And you could include the Truehoop network in this lumping.
In the traditional media paradigm, these people walk an uneasy negotiation between what publishers want them to say and what is popular. Dogs and dogs of books have been written about what happens with the Internet: Now the audience and author can find one another, and the publisher's role is more limited to popularizing authors it thinks will work (as opposed to controlling collectively what is consumed and trying to maximize profits from its oligopoly-like position with other publishers). And, in turn, both the authors and the audience gain compensatory tendrils of functionality to reach one another.in search engines, in recommendations, in vast sampling and free content (including p2p and torrents), and in communities like PtR. The publishers still have a significant foothold, because mass media is still a real thing and still subject to inherent winner-take-all laws of mathematics (which affect every community to some degree, I'll get to that) and access to the more advanced media (e-book readers, smartphone apps, distribution of 3D movies, etc.). But the foothold is less potent than it ever was, at least in the United States and Europe (I don't want to extend my narrative outside my realm of familiarity).
And then you have PtR, which goes even beyond the unshackling from publishers. PtR creates the cultural experts and gives them a platform. PtR develops the constructed audience for an author and the constructed authors for an audience, using a top-down core of glorious leaders to filter and write its primary content and a larger groundswell of bottom-up contributors to filter and write all the rest and to respond to both the primary and the secondary content. PtR stands tall, not just as emblematic of the social development of the Internet and our reception of sports and culture, but also as emblematic of the new power structures and expertise of media that the future holds out promise for. Because PtR is a community, first and foremost.
When Dale/jrw of PtR told me about the great special expertise (easily exceeding that of general columnists at major media hubs) of the SBNation.com editors and posters, I was a bit unimpressed at very first impression. Okay, Dale, cool. Now let's get to work! But then he immediately followed that up: "Once you really internalize that, you start to see what blogs can do differently, and you start to see the sports media quite differently." And it clicked for me. I was talking with one of the foremost "experts" on the San Antonio Spurs, wasn't I? And he was talking with one of the foremost "experts" on the San Antonio Spurs, in turn. Our meeting was more germane with respect to the San Antonio Spurs than any meeting on cable between talking heads. Is that self-congratulatory? No. It's simply the recognition that our established "experts" of traditional media hierarchies are only as good as their ability to specialize to meet the needs of its audience. Just because you know basketball better than me doesn't mean you have carte blanche to contribute at any level of specificity than me without criticism. You know the math and the spirit of your sports but you don't know my specialization of math and spirit that I bring to the table, and I therefore have the right to be skeptical. I - a blogger who has followed the Spurs closely with the most subjective and fan-intensive of approaches, but who also used it to study the league - trump you, an established media figure that thinks in generalities when your area of specialization does not extend to the Spurs. You say they're boring, and even if you're right, your use of the word "boring" is almost meaningless and so hopelessly anchored in the limitations of your expertise that it is little better than a casual fan's reaction... and no better than the casual San Antonio Spurs fan's reaction.
ESPN is a wonderful place and the fact that they have reached out to us is a testament to their understanding of the new paradigms of media. This isn't some self-congratulatory statement, so much as it is my continued expression of surprise. Look, I'm the guy who wrote Pearls of Mystery. One of the weirdest basketball blogs in all existence, if I'm being perfectly honest. There is literally a piece of fan fiction on this site about Bethlehem Shoals of Free Darko, an inexplicably-alive Burl Ives, and a protagonist whose strange and violent rage evokes some sort of anti-hero from literature. And I didn't get like, way less strange when I moved to the Gothic Ginobili, where I've been easily the second-most prolific contributor. Aside from a spot edit, we "censored" fully one word of the whimsical Mikes Woodson/Brown piece. And yet, ESPN has a network reaching out to me (okay, Aaron mostly) to write for them and even act as one of the "experts" on their panels from time to time. It's totally mindblowing.
But at the same time, as I hope this piece somewhat demonstrates, I know that I'm not an expert on the NBA. I'm not an expert on basketball. Heck, I'm not really an expert on the San Antonio Spurs. I'm not an expert on most of the things I talk about. I'm simply a writer, a contributor, and the mental vistas I inhabit (called "expertise" for convenience) are not unfathomable but accessible to anyone with a modem. But that's the thing... so are the mental vistas of the experts I now join at Truehoop, of most of the experts I now join at ESPN. That's not to say that these people don't generally know basketball more than I, or that they don't have sources that would make any respectable journalist salivate. I'm not at all saying this to put anyone's experience down. Certainly these people - like Aaron and I, like the casual fan - all have their respective levels of intelligence and writing talent and expertise. And their knowledge of the NBA far exceeds my own in innumerable cases. But the intersection of that expertise and the content we decide to cover (or are asked to cover) is not perfect, is not even solid. We are always talking about things we do not totally understand, and we are not experts in any traditional sense. And so the cultural expert and the responsive, worldly layman are united in the uneasy footholds of our accrued wisdom in various areas. Some of us have higher footholds on those mountains and others have lower footholds. But we all have the ability to climb and the vulnerability to fall from time to time, and the ones with lower footholds in one area or context may find themselves at the height in another area or context, whether their early years were spent poring over Bill James or reading pulp novels or doing path integrals. Every day the self-proclaimed expert becomes the layman and the self-proclaimed layman becomes the expert and we are all the better and we are all the humbler for it.
And yet, instead of being frustrated by the inherent limitations of myself and my contemporaries of the therefore fictionally lofty "sports media" titles, I find myself excited by the prospect to show that - despite these limitations - I still have the initiative to say something, the intelligence and persistence to put it to words, and - now, in these hallowed days of potential influence - the acuity and the soul to say something important that testifies to my only true expertise, in the final tally - that of my own life and experiences - and the analogous expertise of others.
On the aborted second half of our initial podcast, blogger Matt Moore (and certainly one of the more credible and respectable NBA experts out there) mentioned at the end of our interview that the great thing about life is that you choose what to care about. When we have our survival taken care of (working on it, heh), our free time is directed towards what we decide to care about, be it the royal family, or the NBA, or a flash game, or children, or charity, or drugs, or television, or sex, or Renaissance dancing on weekends. And when I diss someone's hobby or lifestyle, or laugh at the way they choose to use their particular genius... well, short of true ethical considerations, what I'm really dissing is the whole point of freedom of expression. Internalizing what Matt Moore said to us brings you back to Earth fast.
And after that first dose of health and humility, we can re-examine our lives and note that today, our hobbies and our free decisions thereof are not afterthoughts but centerpieces of your life. And hopefully I'm also conveying that these centerpieces of your life, in turn, have value to other people. Hopefully I'm also conveying that the genius of the modern day is that these centerpieces of our lives are more or less an infinite expanse of space with which to fill the idle days - with our fire of inspiration and a limitless well of clay in which we might mercifully fill that expanse for our fellow seekers, in which we might fill that expanse with something more than plains.
And so that is the dream of our day: To build mountains of our own imagined shapes with that clay, with that fire.
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