Pearls of Mystery

Spurs Grizzlies Update

2011-10-15T10:19:00.000-05:00

So far I've gotten through one rotation of Game 2, after promising a full play-by-play, a full possession-by-possession of the entire gosh-darned game of 48 minutes. Yes, it's coming sometime, but I've found it hard to continue. Why? Because many of my organizing assumptions and working concepts for the piece turned out to be false.

Problems I'm having extending the first rotation to the rest of the game:

Too many images; not enough visual cues: A picture is worth a thousand words, but if the picture is of ten basketball players (as most of the pictures were) I've already diluted that maxim down to one hundred words per player. Okay, seriously, though, it's hard to tell from a grainy still which short Grizzly is Sam Young and which one is Mike Conley. I need to explain visually (using cues like arrows/screen arrows/shading/words on the image) what is going on, then use those cues (and only those cues) in order to explain what is going on in the picture. In other words, I need to treat stills as if they are of 10 wire-frames, assuming the reader doesn't know the difference between Duncan and Parker, but also assuming they can find the "left elbow" or the "mid-post" if I mark Tim Duncan there with a yellow circle and refer to the area in the text. I don't think this is at all condescending; rather, I think describing these plays is telling me how little I actually understand of basketball strategy. It's what NBAPlaybook does and as far as I'm concerned, Pruiti's site is the absolute gold standard.
Not every possession is atomic: This wasn't obvious when I did the first rotation but when I started to do the second one it was clear: The structure of half-court sets really broke down for the Spurs and their opponent when Tim Duncan and Manu checked out. I'm probably going to be using "flows" or natural sequences of possessions when chippy, scrappy scrums of turnovers begin.
Learn the difference between the different types of screens: A self-explanatory dictum that will allow me to avoid misuse of the word "flare" when describing a brilliant non-flare screen play.

I think that about covers the problems I've been having, and their obvious solutions. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, as we see once again. Anyway, I have to go back to my cave for a few weeks and finish this entire play-by-play. Pearls...Away! :hops into gigantic flying pearl laden with question marks:

Redundancy of Roles and the 1960s Celtics: An Academic-Sounding Blog Post Title

2011-10-14T17:15:00.000-05:00

Over at A Substitute For War (a neat NBA blog if ever one existed), there's a great little piece about what the author believes to be the best starting five of all time. Instead of going with the "All-Time All-NBA 1st team, so to speak," they simply describe an ideal team, taking into account that many of the best players in history (almost because of their greatness) would be redundant in their roles, and that having 5 incredible scorers but no one to hit an open 3 or get putbacks would not actually be ideal. It's a fascinating concept: that players like Shane Battier might be better on an all-time team than LeBron, despite every statistic on Earth favoring LeBron as an individual performer (for all of Battier's particular areas of greatness). Given (as ASFW notes) that the Heat were a solid contender this season whose limiting factor seemed to be the offensive redundancy of Wade and LeBron, I really agree with this concept, and I'd like to put to words a new take on a very old concept, a take that immediately jumped out at me after reading this piece (coming from someone fascinated by the relative strength of eras and conferences).

Okay, for some context for what I'll say next: I'm the first person to say (basically) that we are living in the best of possible NBA worlds. There is an embarrassment of talent on at least 15 teams (I'm looking at you, entire Western Conference besides T'Wolves and Warriors) and the fact that #1 and #2 seeds keep getting bounced in the West - I sincerely believe - has as much to do with diminishing returns on such incredibly loaded (and well-coached) rosters as it does with sheer random chance, matchups, and injuries. Every team in the Western playoffs belongs, and then some. The 2011 Grizz and 2007 Warriors (and 2010 Spurs at the 7 seed) were fantastic, near-contending teams*. And the East - while incredibly top-heavy - is actually quite heavy at the top and its top teams rival the West's top teams. In short, we are looking at an incredibly loaded era which will surprise me if it can get any better, but given the intelligence at work in (most) of these great teams' front offices, I won't be too surprised. What I'm saying is I have never bought the concept that the talent pool today is at all diluted relative to any other era - fewer teams or not. If it seems like there is a diluted talent pool, I think it is mostly because there are the same proportion of bad/disinterested owners with a larger sample size (i.e. there are literally more examples), and that proportion's actions are more firmly in public view thanks to first ESPN and then the Internet.

*Granted, all eventually lost in the second round, but still, all three won the first in 6 convincing games and injuries hardly totally account for the difference in any of the three.

On the other hand, though the talent pool might be more barren than today, if we can accept that historically great players today and yesterday are comparable, then maybe the very best teams of yesterday are not as far behind our best teams then we think. After all, historically great teams might not feature a whole lot of historically great players...but they certainly might feature a few historically great players and many historically great role players that complemented them (and be better off than the former situation, even ignoring egos and salaries). And that got me thinking: What about teams like the 1960s Celtics? Even with a drier talent pool, didn't they have historically great players and fill in the gaps with remarkable craft and intelligence?

The 1960s dynasty Celtics - almost all of whose opponents are somewhat (and somewhat rightly) derided for being shorter, whiter, and less well-organized than today's teams - were extremely well-structured (in the second FreeDarko book, they are illustrated as a literal machine). It's at least plausible (though impossible of course to test) that they would be competitive (or - given a couple trades - even absolutely dominant) against today's teams. Red Auerbach and Bill Russell were such visionaries on and off the court and respectively had a good nose for 1) finding/acquiring the best players available at the time and 2) finding/creating roles for those players. Reading anything by or about Russell, it's obvious that the man was (besides being enigmatic and generally brilliant) a basketball mind of basketball minds. His capability to read and visualize offensive situations in order to defend them is unmatched by any big since, perhaps excluding Tim Duncan (and even then, it's at most a push). Short of a 3-point shooter or a stretch 4, the Celtics had all the components of a modern team, perhaps most closely resembling turnover-and-transition machines like this year's Grizzlies (except Russell's D and block/deflection ability was miles above Gasol and Z-Bo's).* So yeah, I conclude that they'd fit in today's league, and depending on whether their conditioning were modern or contemporary, they would be either dominant or legit contenders.

*Just as a thought experiment, in today's terms, I suppose the 1960s Celtics (and a lot of what we understand of them is through anecdotes and first-hand account instead of, say, through Youtube) don't have too many deprecated skills. Russell would (speculatively) look like a fast, lower-usage, late-prime Duncan (immaculate defense, incredible outlet passes, efficient, physically quick scoring threat from the post) with Dennis Rodman's rebounding acumen. We have something comparable to the ideal Stockton-Jordan backcourt that ASFW posits in Havlicek and Cousy - overall scoring prowess, tough D, stealing ability, surreal passing ability (Cousy's arm structure is the stuff of legend). Of course, we also know Cousy's horrible lifetime shooting percentage (to contrast starkly with Stockton's efficiency) and Havlicek uh...not being as good as Michael Jordan. But I mean, you might be able to accept that you get 75% of what would be a transcendent, even ideal, backcourt from Cousy-Havlicek. Add role players like K.C. and Sam Jones, Don Nelson, Tommy Heinsohn, etc, many of whom (Sam Jones comes to mind) Russell in his day recognized could occasionally be transcendent (tough defenders/scorers/shooters that played off of Russell), and you have a team that fills every role of that era especially well and with a special degree of non-redundancy.

Suppose we're willing to accept this extreme example - that the 60s Celtics were so well-constructed and skilled (that is to say, not redundant nor especially lacking in any qualitative basketball skill) that the worse conditioning, overall talent pool, and worse dissemination of information wouldn't stop them from being a contender today and possibly still a dynastic force. Then we can ask the old questions about which teams are historically more capable of dominating a given era or one another from a new pespective. See, because of this line of thought, I feel the general talent pool/conditioning arguments* no longer resonate as strongly, because the very best teams of their eras could plausibly field two or three HOFers that complemented one another, and then use front office/coaching acumen (something the Celtics definitely had) and the very best role players to turn these HOFers into a historic-level team that could qualitatively do anything on the court. That is to say, though I feel the general talent pool (outside of the very best players) is still half a tier** higher today than even like 1993 (much less 1977 or 1963), dominant teams like the '83 Sixers, the '77 Blazers, and the 80s Lakers and Celtics teams would rival (and the best would utterly dominate) the best teams today.

*arguments I've long taken as gospel that put Duncan as a first-ballot HOFer alone, if you get me. No, if we accept that the general talent pool is a couple full tiers higher** than Russell's era, then what is really, unfathomably impressive (as in comparable to Russell's unfathomable several titles) about Duncan's Spurs is their insane winning percentages and ability to consistently crush the 1st rounds. A 61-win season in 2011 might well be comparable to winning 8 or 9 consecutive first-round series (or winning 72 games) in Russell's era...and he only had to win two or three rounds to net a title. Also, my general argument that historically (shot clock era) great teams would dominate or contend in any era kind of implies that titles are somehow proportional in greatness to the greatness of the very best (and most various) also-rans they dealt with and with what success. That is, the greatest teams relative to any era may truly be the greatest absolute teams of all time (if you could arrange a meeting). Here we get into sticky ideas like "How can an also-ran truly establish its own absolute greatness if it can't win a title to prove it?" and we then have to talk about qualitatively and statistically what the players on that team were actually contributing relative to their peers in the era and the level of those peers. Sticky, sticky, sticky. But we might be in methodologically sound territory now.

This argument also implies that it's totally fair to use qualitative individual contributions for and against these greatest teams in order to judge individual greatness across eras, sample size be damned (maybe my single biggest annoyance with the Wages of Wins program (which is saying quite a lot) is its dismissal of playoffs). Duncan actually comes out extremely favorably - maybe even more so, to my astonishment - when all of this stuff is actually taken into account. Duncan may not be competing for titles with the historically best teams in history up to that point, but he is competing with a lot more historically solid and historically great teams and a lot fewer historically abominable teams, all because of the general talent pool increase. He is getting 40 of his annual 50 wins against teams that Russell would not face until the playoffs, and he might face three teams out of four in a playoff run at levels that Russell would face at most twice in a run. Don't misunderstand me; 11 titles in 13 years is almost beyond comparison, utterly insane. But the evidence suggests that what Duncan has done with the Spurs is seriously comparable to Russell's dynasty.

**Tiers being something like borderline D-Leaguer, 10/12th men, rotation players, starters, marginal All-Star, perennial All-Star, marginal HOFer, 1st ballot HOFer. I'm no statistician, but a great example is given by two Spurs' wings: Richard Jefferson and Sean Elliott - pretty similar statistics, similar career development, same position and abilities (though of course, playing with peak David Robinson and peak Jason Kidd engender very different roles). Elliott made it to (and earned) 2 All-Star apperances. Jefferson made it to (and earned) none, though he was a solid starter at his peak.

The central perspective shift of the ASFW piece (have you read it yet?) is that non-redundancy of roles is a fundamental concept that in some ways dualizes the concept of individual skill - a dual artifice that (combined with the glue of teamwork, unselfishness, intelligence, and chemistry) forms the seeds of greatness or disrepair. Given this dialectic of skill and non-redundancy - the call and response of basketball - we can formulate and reason about the particular qualities of the very best teams and the teams with tremendous skill that fail to flourish.*

Of course, the academic in me has to make a final footnote,** but the Positional Revolution just got retrospective, to sound like a 1980s trailer for a movie about my life.

*My friend Aaron will be my editor on an upcoming blog and he will literally murder me through the Internet if I use this many gigantic footnotes, so I guess this is kind of a bank run, but with footnotes. Bigfootnotes. Footnotes comparable in greatness to the 1986 Boston Celtics.

**that this does hinge on (the Russell-esque belief) that the very best players are (athletically and temperamentally) similar throughout eras, such that a player with Russell's body could (with the right dose of motivation and similar work ethic and intelligence) compete with a player like Tim Duncan (who came along 42 years later). I happen to think so, but it's really hard to judge. In this specific case I think it's more than fair: Russell (and Wilt, strangely) was an Olympic-caliber high jumper in college (with physical feats that easily challenge even Shaq, David Robinson, and Dwight Howard), Duncan was an Olympic-caliber swimmer in his adolescence before a hurricane ripped through his pool. As for temperament, certainly West, Robertson, and Russell belong in any era of competitiveness.

"Solving For Pattern" and the NBA Lockout

2011-10-12T10:18:00.009-05:00

Thanks to Larry Coon (via Pounding the Rock) we learn that the lockout is extraordinarily more expensive than the marginal percentages at stake in lockout negotiations. Now, as someone applying for jobs in computer science, and someone that has recently been obsessed with proper solutions to problems on small and large scales, maybe I can weigh in here with my (probably idiotic and reductive) two cents.

Wendell Barry's great essay "Solving For Pattern" (warning: PDF) is a fantastic burst of sense that tells us lucidly about "holistic" and "organic" solutions to problems without falling into ideological or mystical claptrap. Barry tries to differentiate between good solutions and bad solutions and uses as an example some case studies in agriculture. In his view, good solutions don't create problems outside the scope of the solution or the original problem. As Barry attempts to show, good farms mimick nature in her elegance, rather than in her bare-stripping brutality. Good farms don't pollute the surrounding area with manure. Good farms don't demand too much in resources of the world outside the farm, don't deconstruct their own long-term goals with short-term cash grabs (for example, by destroying the farm's topsoil with a monoculture). Good farms turn (as much as is possible by the Great Eroder) cattle waste into fertilizer for plants and plants into feed for cattle. Good farms are really good (if highly artificial) ecosystems with a sustainable yield. Good farms are not so large in scope or size that they cannot economically sustain the humans needed to tend to them. Good farms are good interrelated processes with the overall goal of social health and well-being.

Now, Barry is not just talking about some pie-in-the-sky utopia rooted in Ecclesiastes' meditations or some sort of Platonic or Randian ideal where a farmer is some sort of virtuous, compassionate genius or anything. No, Barry just calls for the existing attention and intelligence and vision of farmers to be directed to appropriate solutions, rather than directing that mental power to ameliorating work and liabilities with directionless amalgams of short-sighted band-aids (that in the end tally, says Barry, are unsustainable on every level). Barry recognizes that any solution not rooted in a whole understanding of problems, any solution that is not recognized as a process with its own qualitative demands and yields (he uses the analogy of an organ in the body) is doomed to fail at resolving the solution's goals in some ultimate sense.* Transparently, Barry's argument applies to just about any organization and its problems.

*Hilariously (especially to a Spurs fan), Timothy Varner of 48 Minutes of Hell uses Barry's essay (Varner's piece actually inspired the piece you are reading right now) to call Richard Jefferson out as a "bad solution" to the Spurs' basketball needs. Varner therefore interprets the George Hill/Kawhi Leonard trade as an Barry-like attempt to ameliorate RJ's toll.

But that's not what I came to talk to you about. I came to talk about the draft...er, the lockout. Heh. From my relatively short experience as a Spurs fan (and as an avid reader of basketball literature), I have a few examples and I'd like to share my interpretation of what is wrong with the NBA's negotiation structure. We have a tendency to overpersonalize systematic problems. Farmers (to go back to Barry) don't decide to ravage their topsoil: They make good-looking crop decisions that are ill-fitted or short-sighted. Similarly, owners and players aren't just being greedy. Their negotiation structure is just a status quo that seems inevitable, and they negotiate (often in good faith mixed equally with self-interest) to the best of their ability.

You see, the collective bargaining agreements that the NBA makes once every 5 or 6 years may be the result of thousands of independent entities (players, ownership groups, teams, TV networks, demographics of consumers, advertisers, the NBA's front office) with loose and often contradictory needs and goals. And as a result, when 12 or 18 years have passed - and there is a tremendous amount of turnover not just in the negotiating entities but in the world at large compelling these entities - the terms of the previous CBA seem not to fit. What's more, many of the people that negotiated the last CBA are in totally different negotiating positions after an era, and want to take advantage of what they had originally lost or hold on to what they had originally won. And this is where the fundamental disagreements stem from that cause lockouts.

On the surface this all appears to be straightforward economics and politics. But there is a fundamental fallacy here - wrought of the heat of negotiations - that bears mentioning: The lockout is not a zero-sum interaction of the negotiators: This is where Barry's essay comes in.

The 1999 regular season - as Jeff Van Gundy helpfully reminds us - was "an abomination of basketball." After one of the great stretches in NBA history - the second Bulls threepeat - the league seemed to cut its ties with its fans as coldly and as destructively as the Bulls ownership cut its big three and Phil Jackson.* The quality of play suffered, older players (who in normal situations would love 50-game seasons) were tired out by the ugly back-to-back-to-backs that wore down their already slow recovery times, and overall, while the Spurs deserved to win the title (extremely convincingly), Phil Jackson placed an rhetorical asterisk on the title that is hard for even this diehard Spurs fan (esp. the Twin Towers) to completely remove.

*Yes, I know, a little reductive. I read "Playing For Keeps," though, and it was certainly a tough situation by the Bulls that the foursome managed to get through.

What am I getting at here? I'm getting at the idea that these lockouts - as negotiating tactics - are not just kind of bad or mediocre for everyone involved. I'm getting at the idea that - as with monocultures or unsustainable foreign policies or bad trades - the twice-a-decade CBA format represents a fundamental problem with the NBA's negotiating structure - a fundamental failure to solve problems in ways that do not deconstruct ultimate goals like market reach, advertising money, and good, healthy basketball at the highest level. Sure, the evidence is in the lockout, but the evidence is also in the ridiculous half-solutions that come out of non-lockout negotiations.

When Tim Duncan refused to leave Wake Forest before he had spent four years dominating his field, Duncan not only made himself an anachronism rooted in an amazing dedication to family (he claims he stayed to keep a promise to his mother). Duncan also showed himself to be an astonishingly complex decision-maker: The rookie scale was initiated in the CBA of 1995 (I believe) before what became Duncan's junior year. Kevin Garnett's - and Juwan Howard's, hilariously enough - infamous $100M+ contracts happened of course before the rookie scale. Though in retrospect Duncan's decision looks at worst nuanced and as best a stroke of self-aware genius, he gave up (in the short term) tens of millions of dollars, and is only now - in his twilight - being fairly compensated for the value he brought to the Spurs' organization. An injury or two along the way and we could all be singing "This Nearly Was Mine" at his terrible misfortune.

Now, whatever you may think of this whole Duncan situation, I believe very strongly that the astonishing variation in rookie scales between his freshman and senior years is in itself an incredibly strong piece of evidence that these CBAs bring distortively radical solutions. This isn't analogous to Bill Gates deciding to leave Harvard, on the precipice of a substantive revolution. This is basketball now or basketball in three years, and yet relative to the market situation, Duncan's choice had an analogous level of variability of fortune and significance to the league...almost solely because of an emergency, sudden CBA solution to a mid-level problem. Duncan may be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but pure league politics - rooted in cultural assumptions (read Terry Pluto's unfortunate "Falling From Grace" for a primer) and bad ownership and completely unrelated negotiators - should not have been the major economic factor in his choices. Ultimately, if the NBA wanted a market system then Duncan should have received what he could negotiate, and if they wanted to shift from elements of a market system then so be it: but the entire negotiating position of Duncan's eventual draft class should not have hinged on a sudden decision that completely changed the nature of contracts. Yet this is what the CBA consistently encourages, just as it encourages the waves of absurd contracts we saw in 2010. We have a fairly stable (though dynamic) league, and yet a lot of decisions are made around a completely artificial bombshell that arrests our attention every five years.

Even worse from a player's perspective is the notion that they might enter a draft only to lose a season of solid development to a lockout. Tiago Splitter was one of the Spurs' most exciting foreign prospects entering last season, but he missed training camp because of a hamstring injury during FIBA. And - not-really-dirty little secret - since NBA players don't practice that much during the season together, Splitter was never able to develop into the Spurs complex offensive schemes. A young seven-foot big that could defend and provide more of a driving presence than starter Antonio McDyess and more height on D than sixth man Dejuan Blair...exactly what the Spurs needed against, oh...say...Zach Randolph and Marc Gasol, not to mention against any of the powers they could have faced if they could have held on in the first round. Splitter's hamstring injury (at least on the margins) hurt the Spurs' title hopes in 2011 to an incredible extent. Would Splitter be a star? No, but he could have been the difference. I know from extensive viewing of the Spurs (and some considerable scouting of Tiago) that Splitter's lagging development certainly hurt the extent to which the Spurs were able to play brilliant and structured basketball in a great series.

I'm not at all bitter about Splitter's injury. Injuries are generally not deliberate. But I do believe that on two loaded teams, a training camp issue to an eighth man might have made the difference in one of the best series of the playoffs. Imagine what happens to basketball in general when not just Splitter but entire teams miss training camp. The starters will lag behind and the brilliant offenses and defenses of the best coaches may never materialize, a constant fog of injury and disorganization distorting their active intelligences into mere triage and attrition. Because of the Blazers' surreal situation, Nate McMillan is arguably more prepared for the lockout than any other coach and that's an awful thing to have to say. This dire situation is amply precedented by 1999: It won't be just Bynum and Bogut being terribly out-of-sync and in obvious pain for long stretches....but Kobe, Chris Paul, and LeBron, and an army of role players having systematic problems just setting up plays. Bankable superstars will miss training camp and never - except in gametime situations and occasional intrasquad scrimmages - practice fully with their team. The NBA missing training camp - as it already sort of has - hurts the global brand of basketball and the 30 NBA teams as fully as any revenue sharing system could possibly hurt them. I am bitter about lockouts. Lockouts are generally deliberate.

Any negotiating system that systematically eats its revenue stream alive - or systematically provides a credible threat to do so - is a broken system that Wendell Barry could only shrug at with disappointment. We injure ourselves more systematically than we could possibly do accidentally. The league moves into disappointment as if populated by a thousand Tiago Splitters. Dig me?

All that David Stern has done for the sport of basketball in his branding, his global reaching-out, his refusal to contract teams as a point of pride - all of it is threatened or mitigated by the lockouts that he, the owners, and the players have allowed to occur. All of this in total (and possibly willful) ignorance of their ultimate goals to the public* and to themselves as a whole entity. I don't know where to begin with solving this but I think the changing the status quo is a good start: We have a CBA as a "five-yearly shock to the system" instead of a continuous and substantive evolving negotiation between players and owners. While continuing negotiations are inherently built on shifting power and incentives and cynical negotiators, we know from every branch of the social sciences that methodology matters. And a shock to the system that we dance around and silently** dread until it becomes catastrophic is not sound or defensible methodology.

*the libertarian in me cannot help but note the massive public subsidies teams receive for arenas, built partially on the premise that the arenas will guarantee decades of consistent economic activity
**the NBA systematically practically muffles frank public discussion by players and owners with fines

We have guaranteed contracts, and we have guaranteed revenue cuts. But we don't have guaranteed training camps, we don't have guaranteed good-faith negotiations and we don't have the healthy infrastructure of systematic politics and informal legal attention and intelligence that is the backbone of every successful global organization. I wish I knew where to start, I'm just someone applying for jobs in computer science, obsessed with proper solutions to problems on small and large scales.

Thanks for reading.

"Friday" by Rebecca Black is Actually Alright

2011-09-28T20:06:00.004-05:00

Listen, I know as well as anyone that this is a basketball blog where we make dark, semi-literary vignettes about Richard Jefferson. Right now we're in the middle of documenting - to the possession - what happened to the Spurs against the Grizzlies, a complex, winding tour through marginal athletic advantage and its sometimes gigantic consequences in the legacy of professional athletics. I know all that.

But I just wanted to say that "Friday" by Rebecca Black is an alright song. It gets tons of bile towards it - somewhat justifiably, considering it's one of the simplest, most banal songs ever written, and doesn't say much of anything. It's entertainment at best. On the other hand, when did it pretend to be anything different? It's a melody, some lyrics, and a little bit of flashy image for teenagers. That's all it is, and if you're looking for more, then you're not going to find it.

But I mean, its melody is decent - one of those Gaga-esque "chants" that toe the rhythmic line between through-composed hymns and outright improvisational hip-hop. The singing is decent: surely no one is faulting Black for having a perfectly guileless, sugary-sweet voice, right? I suppose you could say that her vocals (if anything) are too innocent of malice, of even substance. But I mean, they hold up to every other form of scrutiny.

The lyrics are kind of substanceless too. I have friends and I wake up on Friday thinking about the weekend. This anticipation and the unique position of Friday in the calendar combine to make a similarly unique experience. That's basically it. Without substance, how could lyrics be appealing except for wit? Unfortunately the lyrics are short on wit, too, and are as descriptive as they are guileless. Even the bridge, which could be a brilliantly subversive way of telling an incredibly boring, literal truth, devolves into the boring, literal truth itself. "Oklahoma!" and "June is Bustin' Out All Over" by Rodgers and Hammerstein show how even something like the founding of a state, the spelling of a word, or the passing of months can be turned into a showpiece. But "Friday" fails in this respect.

And yet I can't help but think that these lyrics - for having no intrinsic merit - are a fantastic method for delivering the melody. As much as this may be derided among "serious" songwriters and critics, on some level lyrics are just as much about delivering the music as music is about delivering the lyrics. I hate when even a great songwriter puts so much stock into their brilliant lyrics that they neglect the music. Rebecca Black's "Friday" delivers better than any of these would-be poets. Don't get me wrong, Elvis Costello is a genius. "The Other Side of Summer" (just off the top of my head) puts this entire discussion to shame. But without a melody - without a vessel for his lyrics - even a brilliant lyricist does nothing, and that's the truth. It's why when you have the best MCs of all time, like Tupac, Jay-Z, Rakim, and Guru, the limiting factor then becomes the quality of their DJs. Check it: The best MCs are (maybe definitionally) about as good as their DJs, and - in a weird sort of symmetry - the best DJs of all time have as limiting factor the quality of their MCs. Speaking of which, the "random rapper" (as rapgenius puts it) Patrice Wilson does a lot of good work with prosody and rhythm in his short section. Even without lyrical substance, he still manages to put something substantive musically out there.

Overall, if you're looking for a repeatable experience, "Friday" is harmless enough - mere white noise on a radio filled with noise that is a little more substantive. But come on, how often is the marginal substance of music yet another amelodic lament for lost love, a codeword for an attractive singer or a secretly filthy concept, a cheap and arbitrary vessel for a chiptune backing track, or another nasal voice autotuned into homogeneity? I'm not bitter about the state of modern music (hardly) or even of the mainstream hits (all other stations benefit from nostalgia and filtration, and filling the hours isn't cheap or easy), but "Friday," even bereft of substance, finds itself at a cool median on modern hit stations - not too bad, not too good. If it gets overplayed (which it does), that's a problem with the delivery of hits, not with the song itself. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

It's just fine, you guys. And now, I've alienated at least one of my two remaining readers. Heh.

Spurs-Grizzlies Game 2 - Part 2

2011-09-19T22:54:00.020-05:00

Today we finish up the first rotation of the game. Everyone is still in the same place they were yesterday. Same exact players. Zach Randolph is no wider; Tim Duncan no thinner. Richard Jefferson no taller; Manu no less tenacious.

9:02 4-6

I was watching the Spurs-Knicks series a few weeks ago, and there were a couple hilarious Spurs possessions where no one was doing anything on offense, so much so that the announcers were vocally complaining before the possession was over. And then, with just seconds left on the shot clock, Tim Duncan still managed to drive to the basket or hit a high-arcing shot over his defender. It was really funny until I remembered this series, in which Zach Randolph did the exact same thing over and over. And his defender - usually that pinnacle of class (and legitimately skilled as a man defender) Antonio McDyess - could do nothing.

This was especially frustrating because McDyess was constantly competing with Z-Bo on every Grizzlies possession. Look at how he stands right in the paint here, flanked by Z-Bo at the low block above. He has held off Randolph once again, whom the Grizzlies had wanted to feed near the basket. Marc Gasol doesn't have any obvious targets inside or open, so he moves inside after swinging the ball to the guards.

Even though there are three bodies in the paint for the Grizzlies screening and trying to create mismatches, RJ, Duncan, and McDyess are not giving them an opening. Handling this situation correctly is almost completely a mental skill, and it's one that Tim Duncan - despite his obvious physical decline the last couple seasons - still excels at. Manu's tenacious positioning prevents an easy pass inside, in any case. The Grizzlies don't get anything out of this formation.

Sam Young comes to the left wing to receive a pass to try to convert with :08 on the shot clock: Short of Gasol immediately screening RJ, the Grizz are forced to make do with something involving Young and Randolph against RJ and Duncan on the left side. Since Sam Young isn't exactly a fantastic offensive option, he feeds Z-Bo and clears out. Randolph posts up on Duncan.

Randolph has enough length (and a high enough release) to create space for a contested (but clear) high-arcing shot against the Spurs' premier defender. The ball doesn't go in - and the degree of difficulty was higher than an open shot - but the shot had a good chance. And this, my friends, is the essential narrative of the series: Randolph had a soft shooting touch and could get his (reasonably efficient) shot off from just about any location on the court against any defensive pressure. Even ignoring his great offensive rebounding and his soft hands to finish, David Lynch's "Doughface" gave the Spurs nightmares worse than from "Eraserhead".

8:36

Collisions, collisions, everywhere, and not a shot to sink.

First Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker collide while Manu brings the ball upcourt. Parker is disoriented and awaits a corner three for the rest of the possession. Luckily for Tony the possession is a Manu-Duncan two-man game.

Manu passes to Duncan, who passes back and screens Tony Allen as Manu goes toward the free throw line.

You can't tell just from this picture, but Duncan's screen on Tony Allen straight-up levels him. It seems like a flop by Allen, but he also ran into Duncan pretty hard. Tough call. If you're keeping track, Duncan has leveled two Grizzlies so far. Obviously Duncan - a noted WWE fan - has been taking notes.

With his man on the floor and some space at the elbow Manu rises up for an open jumper above trailing Zach Randolph. The shot is close, but it doesn't go in. Maybe Manu was just having a bad shooting night. Or maybe his literally broken and sprained (and consequently splinted) right arm had something to do with it. By the way, Sean Elliott - who is basically the Spurs' really self-deprecating, dryly humorous, dulcet-toned version of Tom Heinsohn - kept making annoying allusions to Willis Reed in reference to Manu in this game. Of course, at the same time, we didn't know then the full extent of Manu's injuries, and so the comparison's a little more plausible now.

Anyway, Grizzlies ball.

8:25

This is kind of a broken play based on a tricky no-call . Tony Allen penetrates and pretty directly charges at Manu, but McDyess is streaking into the charge himself and all three tumble to the ground. While they're all falling to the ground (completely blocking the Spurs path to the open Sam Young on the left wing), Allen smartly kicks it out to Young, who drains a long two. Weird play.

8:15 6-6

After Dice and Z-Bo collide accidentally for a no-call, McDyess comes up to screen Tony Parker's man Mike Conley at the point. Parker uses this opportunity to draw the defense in with fast, weaving dribble penetration, as is his wont.

Both corners (Manu and RJ) are completely open now. Both Sam Young and Tony Allen have left their post to cover hip-hop sensation Parker. Since the defense is more strongly shaded towards the right, Parker takes the path of least resistance and kicks it out to RJ in the left corner.

Now, if you didn't know, the corner 3 was kind of an RJ staple this season, as you can tell from one of the greatest moments in the history of the league:

Ah, but not this time, Richard. He takes a good shot. It just doesn't fall.

Above, we see the ball at its apex, just getting ready to bounce from the rim back to the left block. Sigh. I guess the Spurs will get nothing out of this fundamentally solid possession. The Grizzlies are probably going to win the game, because San Antonio can execute perfectly and come away with nothing. There's no way Tim or Tony or anyone else on the Spurs has a chance to get that offensive rebound with Z-Bo and Marc Gasol right there.

And then, as Bill Walton might say, comes "one of the great offensive rebounds in the history of basketball." Seriously, check it out: Manu rebounds not only out of his area, but against a center. He doesn't just establish position, he leaps wackily into the space where the ball will fall before it can reach Gasol's hand. You saw where Manu was in the last picture (when RJ's shot was at its apex); he was 5 or 6 feet outside the paint, on the other side of the court. Look at how far he's traveled and how much he's re-positioned his body in just two seconds. Remarkable. If he can just call a time-out or pass the ball out for a reset, Manu will have completed one of the great "David vs. Goliath" sequences in the history of the league.

Oh, I guess instead of securing control for a reset of the possession, he's just going to turn away from Gasol and make a three-quarter turn towards the basket to draw the shooting foul from Zach Randolph and fall on the ground with a broken, sprained, splinted arm. Wait, what? What is happening? Where am I? I'm so disoriented just thinking about this play. Goliath shrugs.

"Shine on, you crazy motherfucker."

I suppose it goes without saying that he made both free throws.

7:49 6-8

Kind of a weird set-up for both teams. The Grizzlies have their front court stationed at the top of the key, both with the power to screen Tony Parker for Mike Conley. This is kind of deceptive by the Grizzlies. The play originally looked like a PNR for Conley and Gasol, but Z-Bo came over to set the pick.

Whatever the case, Gasol heads towards the elbow forcing Duncan to stay with him, and Conley goes to the right wing on a Z-Bo block. The deception misleads McDyess, and he and Parker both commit to Conley, leaving Z-Bo wide open.

Though Z-Bo ended up missing this shot, he is obviously a credible midrange threat and this could have been a costly mistake by McDyess. Good play by the Grizz, and the first real defensive mistake of the game by the Spurs.

7:32

Sam Young - who has been the least important player on the floor thus far - finally does something substantial and positive for his team. Sam Young: an inspiration to us all.

It's another Tony Parker penetration play (they must call plays in twos, I suppose).

Tony kicks the ball out to Richard Jefferson at the right wing, who starts to fire up another open shot.

But Sam Young - Jefferson's man - closes out well enough that RJ has to pump-fake and drive left into a tangle of bodies. Since Jefferson is quite a bit worse than Tony at driving and the bodies in the paint are the same, Young's close-out has effectively neutralized Tony's drive.

Jefferson still manages to break through Young, the first line of defense. But as he's passing Young, Sam manages to put an arm out to pry the ball loose. In the ensuing scrum, Marc Gasol and RJ both laid claim to the ball and the refs (to the visible bafflement of all the Spurs players and coaches) called a jump ball.

7:20

This goes against everything I've fought for on this blog, but...in this play Richard Jefferson wins the tip against Marc Gasol (who so far has really been burnt by every Spurs player except Dice). RJ's small victory was for me hard to admit, but it's ridiculous enough to put a smile on my face. Tim Duncan gets the ball off RJ's tip, thus keeping the universe tethered to sanity.

Tim and Tony do a pick and roll on the right side of the court. Marc Gasol doesn't cover the league's bread and butter play especially well on this possession, and like McDyess before ends up covering the guard. Parker makes a neat bounce pass to Duncan who pump-fakes Z-Bo once and then finishes for an easy drive.

7:11 6-10

Four more possessions in this rotation. We're almost home.

Conley and Gasol try to run a PNR against Parker and Duncan. I'm not sure why, but Duncan (see him on the right elbow above) seems to be giving up too much space to Gasol. He seems to be focusing on denying Randolph from getting the ball near the basket with single coverage and cutting off Conley's penetration. However, Gasol's midrange shot is credible, and I think Duncan could be better served moving a few feet forward to mitigate it. Then again, he is Tim Duncan and I'm some guy on the Internet. Also, (and you can't see it from the images) Gasol has a very quick release on this shot. So it's not bad defense at all.

More glaringly for the Spurs, though, I don't think Richard Jefferson is doing anything for this play. He's standing in the paint by the left block, which is great for getting a long rebound, but couldn't he at least be giving Sam Young the time of day? Or, if he's not going to treat Sam Young as a credible offensive threat, couldn't he be making some sort of pass harder or giving something more to McDyess and Duncan? Especially considering he's not helping all that much even when Randolph and Tony Allen rotate to the left side:

In any case, Duncan gives up enough space for Gasol to take a sparsely contested free throw...

...which Gasol promptly misses. Luckily for the Grizzlies, Zach Randolph's presence bothers the Spurs rebounders (Dice, RJ) enough that they lose it out of bounds. This is a pretty bad possession for the Spurs. The Grizzlies don't score, but they get a good shot from Marc Gasol (finally, right) and they get the ball back.

6:47

With a full shot clock the Grizzlies go to a workaday standard once Conley is reset right of the point. Tony Allen cuts through the paint along the baseline and then runs back along the paint to the left elbow. Meanwhile, Z-Bo, who is standing right next to Allen's path, puts down an arm to block Allen's man, Ginobili: not unlike a parking ramp's gate or a selectively permeable cell membrane.

This half-screen by Randolph gives Allen space to receive the feed from Conley and have some room to begin a drive past Ginobili:

Allen blows past Ginobili and finishes easily at the rim, even with Duncan there. I suppose this was a savvy calculation by both Allen and Duncan: Duncan with the silly offensive foul a few minutes back, not wanting to pick up his second foul (against the contact-happy Allen) in the first rotation, and Allen realizing this and taking advantage.

6:39 8-10

Uh...Manu drives into four Grizzlies in the paint and draws a foul on Mike Conley in the chaos and confusion. Then again, with Manu it's hard to call anything chaos: "There is a long way between chaos and creation," as Paul McCartney famously said on a solo album. In any case, Manu misses both free throws. All or nothing with this guy, right?

6:35

Last possession of the first rotation before Coach Popovich calls a timeout for the Spurs. I think the timeout was just because he wanted to spell his players: The final possession featured Mike Conley leaping into a shot over Tony Parker from the free throw line. It seemed like a low-percentage shot that you would live with even with a great shooter like Chris Paul or Steve Nash.

6:22 10-10

Wrap Up of Parts 1 and 2:

The Spurs played nearly flawless basketball on offense (Duncan's senseless charge the only real mistake), and quite well (if not perfectly) on defense. The Grizzlies played pretty well on both ends themselves, though with much more questionable shot selection, hitting long and contested twos and kind of letting plays develop into desperation feeds to Z-Bo. Manu and RJ's open shots weren't falling; on the other hand, neither were Gasol's or Z-Bo's. Manu has once again established to me how essential he is to the Spurs - being pretty crucial on almost every offensive possession. Duncan's defense is a step slow from its historical perfection, but in this rotation he still made life difficult for PNR tandems, the Grizzlies' big men in man defense situations, and anyone trying to go into the paint. Richard Jefferson and Tony Parker were both doing their couple gimmicks extremely well and McDyess played his many little roles admirably. Tony Allen was fantastic on both ends, Mike Conley was not a liability. Finally, Sam Young was a supreme liability on offense, but he created a crucial turnover and played decent defense. Both teams created mismatches really solidly and exploited them just as well. Overall, they were supremely evenly matched in this rotation, even using an extremely similar playbook. The Spurs were executing better but the Grizzlies had more mismatches.

Spurs-Grizzlies Game 2 - Part 1

2011-09-18T17:34:00.042-05:00

Introduction

As part of Pearls of Mystery's ongoing commitment to "stretch the game out; etch your [own] name out," we're going to be deconstructing the heck out of the Spurs-Grizzlies series. The goals here are several, most of them federal:

Improve my ability to analyze basketball on a strategic level
Improve my knowledge of various star players and their actual contributions to basketball games, and
Improve my communication and research apparatus of the above

So we're going to do look at every single possession of Game 2. Some of these are going to be forgettable, especially in garbage time (after one rotation I eminently understand how the old saw "right way to play the game" has quite a bit of evidence), but even when a possession itself is broken or boring, oftentimes a string of possessions will be interesting and coherent. So part of the challenge for me is to break it up into "possessions" at some times and "flows" at other times. Will it drag on? Yes, but after the first game or two like this, I'm going to switch this mode of analysis into 3-8 minute sequences deconstructing incredible runs or incredible breakdowns, or just basketball at its starkest and most stylistically interesting (for example, the Miami collapse in Game 2).

12:00, First Quarter, 0-0

The first possession of Game 2 is a startlingly elegant set play by the Spurs. Sebastian Pruiti shows perfectly a more extreme (and decisive) example of this play, but this more workaday possession is still a beaut.

After Duncan wins the tip, the Spurs and Grizzlies start with an insultingly simple defensive and offensive set-up reminiscent of a tic-tac-toe game gone wrong. I am insulted by this simplicity, Tim! Antonio McDyess stands in the high post (guarded by Zach Randolph) while Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, Richard Jefferson, and Manu Ginobili stand around the perimeter. This is straightforward in every sense except that Tim Duncan has the ball.

Jefferson runs down the baseline on a McDyess screen to change the inside-outside balance and force his man (Sam Young) to react. Young easily fights through the McDyess screen and Dice and RJ are on the low blocks, guarded tightly by Randolph and Young respectively, as you can see below:

While this is happening, Duncan hands the ball off to Parker who dribbles it left, to the top of the arc. Duncan (guarded by seven-footer Marc Gasol) heads to the right. His location above (around the elbow and wing 17 or 18 feet away) is one of his favorite shots, of course, especially with his famous use of the glass. Also, Jefferson's cut has opened a fairly sparse backcourt, perfect for a pick and roll. So Gasol saunters over to cover him at the elbow. Tony passes to Manu, who rotates to the right wing.

But, instead of staying around for a midrange assisted jumper or a pick and roll, Duncan keeps running to the baseline, and Marc Gasol, at first oblivious to the cluster of Spurs and Grizzlies near the basket, gets caught up in a McDyess flare screen (a trademark of Popovich's set plays).

Here is what you might call "checkmate". As Duncan keeps running along the baseline, behind the four players clustered at the basket, Gasol (who has fought past the McDyess flare screen) still has to run around two Spurs and two Grizzlies in order to get back to his man Duncan. To further aggravate the Grizzlies, Jefferson uses the Spurs' second flare-screen of the possession against Randolph. Now at best the Grizzlies have Sam Young (supreme mismatch) or a trailing Marc Gasol to defend Duncan right at the basket. Manu throws an easy pass to Duncan.

Duncan smartly makes a pump fake. Gasol smartly uses his height to contest the pump fake without fouling, but the play is basically over: Duncan finishes easily. The Grizzlies - just like the Bucks in the Pruiti analysis above - didn't really make any mistakes as far as I can tell. In retrospect, with perfect knowledge, sure, but as solid defensive players reacting to the game around them? No, the Grizzlies just fell victim to a good, solid play, almost reminiscent of football with an "offensive line".

11:43 0-2

I'm pretty new to this so I can't really speculate too much about options, but this next possession ended up being a pretty clear Z-Bo iso.

Everyone in the AT&T Center and everyone watching knew this would be another Randolph drive or shot over McDyess: As an aside, probably the enduring systematic image of this series is of Z-Bo again and again shooting over perfect man defense by Dice. For Spurs fans this was frustrating and ironic. Indeed, the Grizzlies looked like a vintage Spurs team in this series, basketball-wise. Anyway, you see Manu above, standing near the left elbow? Keep that in mind.

Manu lithely runs to contest the drive and blocks Zach Randolph's shot out of bounds with 9 seconds left on the shot clock. Spurs fans know that Manu has a tendency towards the impossible, and so even the slightest possibility of a perfect play is easy money for Manu.

11:27

Now the Grizzlies have a clipped possession that ends badly.

Manu covers Tony Allen's inbounds pass extremely well, even preventing a chipshot to Mike Conley in the corner, so Allen has to send the ball sailing back to Gasol at halfcourt, who passes to Mike Conley.

At this point Conley and Gasol have a kind of abortive pick and roll against Parker and Duncan that actually ends with Gasol getting a reasonable open shot with :02 on the shot clock which Gasol (under marginal pressure from the rotating wing Jefferson) passes off to Sam Young (mismatched horribly against McDyess) for some reason. Shot clock violation.

11:17

This next possession shows how a very well-executing Spurs offense managed to come up short pretty frequently against the Grizz. For the first twelve seconds of this possession the Grizzlies stopped all the gaps and passing lanes that the Spurs were looking for.

The setup at this point is kind of clustered for both teams. Parker has the ball on the left wing, Duncan and McDyess are both at about the same point near the elbow. Ginobili is rotating towards his frontcourt, and you can also see Richard Jefferson moving across the paint. Parker will pass to Jefferson with his back to the basket, as McDyess signals to Ginobili to move behind the arc on his screen of Tony Allen.

Jefferson now competently penetrates to the basket and neatly kicks the ball out to Manu:

Quick quiz just for Spurs fans: The ball is moving quickly and accurately towards Manu Ginobili. What should happen here?

Give up? The answer is: Manu makes a catch-and-shoot three, of course! Or, rather, the answer would be, in a sane universe, one in which Tony Allen isn't one of the single best defenders in the league at the guard position. Allen gets in Manu's face just enough that Manu has to ball-fake and start penetrating.

So Allen forces Manu left with :06 on the shot clock. In the ensuing chaos, Manu turns it over on a botched pass. And...Z-Bo pokes Tim Duncan in the eyes (unintentionally, I presume). Just one of those series.

10:57

I'll spare you the visual atrocity of this possession: Mike Conley uses a Marc Gasol screen at the left wing to jack up (that is, off the dribble, not from a good base) a long, kind of open two. And that's it. The other Grizzlies do nothing. It doesn't go in.

10:47

Obviously getting hit in the eye on the Spurs' last possession temporarily enraged or blinded Tim Duncan, because Tim straight-up runs right through little Mike Conley in the paint as Duncan passes to McDyess in the corner. Maybe Duncan was just disappointed in Conley's 22-foot two-pointer just before. Maybe it's just that Mike Conley is relatively tiny, and even without the visual impairment, Tim Duncan would have run him over anyway. Offensive foul. Oh, gosh.

10:40

Now we actually get a few possessions in a row that actually work. Fancy that.

For the first twelve seconds of this possession Memphis was trying to do some interior screening and misdirection on the right side, but it wasn't really working: When Duncan broke up a pass from Sam Young to Gasol, the Grizzlies finally gave up and swung it out to Tony Allen in a 1-on-1 against Manu at the left wing.

I think Tony Allen is a decent offensive player. He's not Ray or anything, but considering what he gives Memphis on defense, he really deserved to be the starter in this series. Here, Allen crosses Ginobili up and makes a decent drive into the lane.

Unfortunately for Allen, to the right of the two shooting guards is a player that is good at guarding shots: Tim Duncan contests Allen's shot from the circle and it is an airball.

Fortunately for Allen, Z-Bo is in the lane. Randolph correctly predicts the airball and uses his wide body to establish position. Z-Bo catches it in the middle of Jefferson and McDyess and finishes for an easy two.

10:19 2-2

After Tim Duncan feeds him from the elbow, Tony Parker is at the right wing dribbling. Richard Jefferson is at the hash marks. Duncan flare-screens his man Gasol as Jefferson runs back to the top of the key. As Jefferson's man (Sam Young) tries to cover him, Duncan puts a hand out to force Sam Young to take a convoluted route to Jefferson, giving ample time and space for Jefferson to dribble once set up and step into a midrange jumper from the elbow. Money.

10:05 2-4

As you can see, Dice and Z-Bo are fighting for position at the low block. Dice essentially wins, and so Mike Conley begins to penetrate, ending up on the right side.

Here's a good example of how the Grizzlies' frontcourt depth really hurt the Spurs in subtle ways. Conley is going to kick it out to an open Tony Allen for a long (but with a low degree of difficulty) two. Tony Parker, Conley's man, is a sieve, so Manu - rather than covering Allen at the right wing, shades instead against Conley. Normally this would be Duncan's assignment to help TP out, but if Duncan moves to cover Conley's drive, he leaves Marc Gasol open for an easy catch-and-shoot from the elbow.

Granted, when the kick-out comes, Manu makes an admirable attempt at covering Allen, but Allen has a high enough release that it doesn't matter. The basket is good and Tony Allen kind of looks like how I picture the devil.

9:50 4-4

This play actually ends in a miss, but it does show how throughout the season the Spurs were often able to use the speed and penetration of Tony Parker and Richard Jefferson to get them out of dead-end possessions and get open shots.

Tony (if you can even see him through the tight nest of blue bodies) is dribbling out from the left corner. No one knows how or why he got there in the first place. Well, anyway, Tim Duncan is going to screen Parker's man Conley off him as Parker darts along the arc and finally passes from the elbow to RJ, who is waiting at the wing.

RJ B RJ. No, seriously, RJ, do it: Be RJ; drive the ball. Take the ball from Tony, and dribble penetrate. Then kick it out to Manu.

Nice. Except probably don't bowl over Sam Young like that next time. That will often be called as an offensive foul. Good. Now Manu just has to make a wide-open shot and we're good.

Oh, wait, that's right. You literally broke and strained your arm, Manu, so that you had to miss Game 1, and you are wearing a gigantic elbow brace that (as the sideline correspondent colorfully reports at one point) "would make Barry Bonds jealous". Despite being central to and highly successful in almost every possession on offense and defense so far, it is still pretty hard to shoot a basketball 25 feet with a broken arm, isn't it, Manu. Huh. Too bad.

9:38

I'm no comedian, but, just like Turner cable TV, I "know funny". This possession is quite funny.

Notice #4 (Sam Young) chilling way to the right (of the image) of all the other players? Notice how every Spurs player is basically helping to defend Zach Randolph on some level?

Well...the Spurs somehow shade even more towards Z-Bo in the next second. Luckily, Z-Bo has dependable old Sam Young just hanging out there for the pass:

Whoops. Angering Lionel Hollins and theologians everywhere, Sam Young flubs a perfect pass and loses all the ground the Spurs have been giving him the entire possession. He falls on the ground and passes it to Mike Conley. I think the funniest part here is that he has time to drop a pass, fall on the ground to retrieve it, and still have the nearest open player be three feet from him.

Now Young gets up and swings the ball out to Tony Allen at the corner. Allen drives baseline and misses a tricky shot. The possession is almost over, but not before both Duncan and Gasol flub the ball.

Oh, Game 2 humor. It never gets old. At least I hope so because we're barely 3 minutes in!

9:18

This is kind of an awesome possession, actually. At the 9:50 possession how I speculated about why Tony Parker and Antonio McDyess were on the baseline near the corner in a thick tangle of defenders. Well, on the very next Spurs possession, we have our answer. They run a decent pick and roll together with a couple of weird throws.

Above you can see Tony gets the ball from a high Manu pass. Sam Young neatly covers the baseline.

Dice screens Sam Young and Marc Gasol switches to pick up Tony. So there is a mismatch in the frontcourt.

At this point, Sam Young can choose between a positive mismatch if he leaves to guard Parker's pass and a negative mismatch if he stays with McDyess - who can shoot right over him. So Sam Young plays the odds and rather smartly tries to trap Parker. Parker sees it and leaps to throw the ball right over the arms of Sam Young - himself leaping - to Dice.

Z-Bo sees the high-arcing pass and runs to cover McDyess while the pass is still in the air.

But Z-Bo isn't enough. Dice - the old head - still has some legs and buries the jump shot (as high arcing as Parker's pass) over Randolph. He turns the tables on Z-Bo.

And so it is that the first rotation of Game 2 comes to a---halfway point. Heh. Spurs 6, Grizzlies 4 - after 3 minutes.

The Grand Plan

2011-09-18T09:13:00.002-05:00

Here's the plan: I'm starting a new NBA blog with a friend - a rather smart fellow, I might add - slated for the beginning of October, and being that he is quite literally a statistician out east and I am trained mostly in mathematics, it will be more statistically-inclined and prone to player descriptions and my (actually quite competent) book reviews. We've been wanting to do this for a long time: even *shudder* devoting an entire blog to his alma mater's sports, Duke, as a longform test run.

What does this mean for your old pals at Pearls of Mystery? Statistically, nothing, unless you are me. What does this mean for Pearls of Mystery? Well, to put it bluntly it will probably skew towards the longer end of character sketches, like before, but more so. About two-fifths of what I write about basketball receives the intensive editing of a post I really develop, and three-fourths of that actually ends up being reworked and posted here. So you're getting 30% of what I write now; in the future you might be getting 20%: the longer two-thirds of what remains. The good news - from my perspective - is that I have an extra 20% (in addition to the 30% I post here) which really doesn't belong here in general - basketball book reviews belong so much more on this other site that I have deliberately held back on them. Links posts on Pearls of Mystery, you ask? Don't make me laugh. Because this suggestion itself has done it to me.

On the other hand, good writing tends to create an egocentric hegemony with the writer at the center. And I promise that if this writing I do is good I will make sure this hegemony swallows Pearls of Mystery, reader, like some such membrane engorgement.

So what's the beginning of the end (or the end of the beginning)? Well, I was thinking it would leave a good taste in everyone's mouth if I started a series on here that I'll continue on the new blog. This will be more or less a infinite-part series describing the first round of Spurs-Grizzlies series in absolutely exhaustive, possession-by-possession detail, and I'll do the 10-or-so-part 1 in the lead-up to the launch.

Bless you, incidental readers.

Tim Duncan Player Description - The Crowning

2011-09-17T11:56:00.003-05:00

A friend of mine on a certain private forum has for some months been taking on the absurd task of describing in great detail every single substantial player in the NBA, from rotation players to superstars. He has a bit more experience with many of these players than I do. But today he's covering Tim Duncan, our mutual favorite player. And, being that this is a basketball blog which has had at its emotional center The Big Fundamental, I think I should do the same here on Pearls of Mystery. And for the last week I've been trying to think of what to say, even writing a secondary post to bolster the argument in favor of Tim Duncan's era (and by extension, in favor of Duncan himself). So, for a few absurdly long posts, I'm going to talk about Tim Duncan: his playing style, his personality, and today, his simple, raw success.

In sports, the bare facts aren't so meaningful without context - the name Bill Russell next to that freakish number of titles, the video game numbers from Wilt's great 1962 campaign, Jordan's clipped parabola six-peat, and 72-10? They show a great deal of historical imbalance in favor of those players and teams, sure, but I could probably win 11 of 13 championships against third-graders, and so could you. By myself. No, we have to ask: were these players conquering historically great times or stealing titles from historically weak times? This is relevant because how you see the last decade in the NBA should naturally determine (to great extent) just how you choose to view Tim Duncan's four titles. I mean, it's a good question: are these four titles mere low-hanging fruit - transitional years in a transitional era - or are they representative of a historically great player conquering historically great opponents?

At first glance, four titles might even seem like a misprint to you: who actually remembers the mostly forgettable 1999 title against the Knicks? Who remembers the defensive slugfest against the pitiful Nets in 2003? How about the 2007 Finals, that - far from a brilliant display of domination - sort of just felt like what should have happened to LeBron long ago in the playoffs? While I think most (even quite casual) basketball fans abstractly acknowledge Duncan's greatness, it's also easy to view the titles with befuddled amazement and sometimes with disdain and injustice (the 1999 "asterisk" and the 2007 Horry cheap shot on Nash). The East seemed hard pressed to field a single historically great team in the 2000s (realizing only the Pistons and the Celtics). When Duncan slapped down the East's survivor, 3 times it felt like child's play and only once did you get the sense that he actually needed teammates to win the title. While in theory that sounds great for a player's legacy, especially an absurdly team-first superstar, it ends up making his own success seem easy, and by extension, the quality of his opponents seem mediocre. Honestly, it makes a lot of sense. If what is supposed to be your best opponent turns out time and again to be harmless, then how are you supposed to be regarded as a great conqueror in the same chain of reasoning? Consider the following:

-Russell faced an increasingly desperate West/Baylor tandem year after year after year, a tandem that finally absurdly added Russell's great rival Wilt Chamberlain for Russell's final year, and Russell still won.

-Jordan had to take down the Magic Lakers, the Barkley Suns, the Drexler Blazers, the Payton-Kemp Supersonics, and the Stockton-Malone Jazz: historically interesting and often great teams.

-Magic, Isiah, Bird, and Jordan had each other to contend with in their title years. Just to get to the Finals in the East meant taking down one or two historical-level players and then facing (in all likelihood) the Magic/Kareem Lakers. What a quarry was a title!

-Duncan's Finals opponents were pathetic: The 1999 Knicks were an 8th seed living on a series of miracles, the 2003 Nets just didn't belong, and the 2007 Cavs...well... Moving on, Duncan has only gotten the benefit of a great Finals series once (in 2005).

All of this is true, and if it were the whole story (as it often seems) it would be pretty powerful evidence against keeping Duncan on an all-time team in favor of, say, Oscar Robertson. It just doesn't seem like a strong legacy at first glance.

But, as I talked about a couple weeks ago, the Western Conference in the 2000s was absurdly overpowered. And the past 15 years in the West - easily the deepest era (even only allowing the Western Conference) in NBA History at the power forward slot - constitutes Tim Duncan's career. Top-heavy, bottom-heavy, whatever you want to say: The Western Conference was and is heavy from #1 to #8, and except for 2009 and 2011, Duncan led the Spurs past a tough first-round opponent every single year.

With all the depth in the West, the 2000s should not have been a decade for one to dominate, especially a power forward. But Duncan did. In his 14-year career, his Spurs won at least 50 games* every year. His Spurs took home 4 Finals trophies. His Spurs knocked on the gates of the title door more often than they did not. Because of the depth in the West, Duncan's Spurs won staggeringly consistently while the other team's HOFer PF or C played in direct opposition to him. That's fact. That's dominance.

*or, in 1999 currency, at least 31 games

In the history of the league (by my count) there have been 10 teams that were perennial title threats for the better part of a decade: The 1960s Lakers and Celtics, the 1980s Lakers and Celtics, the 1980s Sixers, the 1990s Bulls, and the 2000s Lakers, Mavericks, Pistons, and Spurs. Each of these dynasties had varying levels of total success (titles, conference titles), consistency (few first-round exits, decent roster stability), and longevity (self-explanatory), and I think those traits, in order, can be used to rank dynasties well.

The 1980s Sixers had the least longevity of all 10 teams, only knocking on the door for an (albeit successful) four year stretch, the 1960s Lakers, along with the 2000s Mavericks and Pistons, had the least success among the remaining 9 (though the Lakers' dominance of the West was spectacular and the Mavs are still amazingly consistent), and the 2000s Lakers had the least consistency among the remaining 6. I think the Spurs survive each of these filtrations with relative ease, coming out fifth. That is to say, what Duncan has done with the Spurs is an (albeit distant) 5th place behind the Michael Jordan Bulls, the Bill Russell Celtics, the Magic/Kareem Lakers, and the Bird/Parish/McHale Celtics in terms of long, untouchably historic dynasties.* And Duncan has been at the center of it. That's dominance.

*The only reason I give the nod to the Celtics over the Spurs is because their peak success (from 1984-1987) is one of the highest in sheer basketball terms of any of the dynasties. And, you know, the strength of their opponents and the incredible cultural relevance of the rivalry.

To put the man's career into perspective: in ten of the first eleven years of Duncan's career*, the Spurs got past the first round of the playoffs. While this is kind of interesting by itself, more interesting is something else that happened in these first ten playoff runs. You see, Duncan either won the title or lost to the eventual Western Conference champion in each of these years. Of the six times they lost? They were pretty clearly the second-best team in the Western Conference for at least three of those years ('04,'06, '08). In 2001-2002, Duncan's best teammate David Robinson was struggling in the twilight of his career, and the Kings had a much stronger case for second place. In 1998, the Rockets put together a really solid run against the Jazz. The Spurs still had a decent argument for second-best team with 56 wins...in Duncan's rookie season. And the West has only rarely been eclipsed by the East since Jordan's retirement. Putting this all together, for Duncan's first 11 years, the Spurs were a top 5 team, largely because of Duncan. That's dominance. What else can you say to that?

*That is, Duncan's first ten playoff runs. See, Duncan was injured in 2000 and missed the playoffs (his team got eliminated by Kidd's Suns) after guiding the team to 48 of their 53 wins.

But despite staying competitive with and often beating the West's best (an endless series of incredible teams and players) year after year after year, we don't remember any of that as distinctly as we remember changing the channel on another dull Finals. We don't as well remember the playoffs before the Finals and what we do remember is a dull, classy guy whose seemingly cynical, weirdly crafty, and often cheap teammates and coaches just happened to help him bury the most exciting, likeable players and teams in basketball year after year after year. His titles feel like transition years because he seems like a player that does not start or finish eras, the constant, always-already substance to whom miracles and career years are the only possible antidote. The 1999 run had two incredibly memorable shots for the Spurs - Sean Elliott taking the Blazers down with a 3 so that the Spurs won in 4 games, and Avery Johnson taking the Knicks down with a wide-open midrange shot so that the Spurs could win in 5 games. Meanwhile, in 2004, 2006, and 2008, the decisive shots and games were miracles and unexplainables. How can you tell your kids a story about a great player when his best stories are losses and his greatest victories are inevitabilities? Bill Simmons and Joe Posnanski, to their great credit, can and do, but they seem to be the exceptions: Most of even the highest praise for Duncan is tinged with a sense that all we can do is marvel that a player was that good for that long and couldn't give us anything beyond impeccable substance, talent, and character - not even a style beyond some vague allusions to D&D and The Crow. His legacy is (to large extent) just his deeds - nothing more, nothing less - and in the ESPN era we see how much that actually counts for. That said, it is only a tragedy in the public sense: I don't think he cares at all about any of this. Heh.

Whatever the case, a few facts jump out at us, without much countermanding evidence. From 1998-2002, the Spurs were the silver of the league. From 2003-2007, the Spurs were the gold of the league. Since then, they've been the bronze of the league - the ultimate baseline standard for a contender. And most of this has to do with Tim Duncan. No, ultimate champions don't have phases, but maybe that's the problem: He's not an ultimate champion; he's just a baller that for a time - his time - was irrefutably the best player in the league and for an even longer period of time made his team one of the best in the league year after year. Just a baller, a great competitor, and a man of high character. Yes, he is not an ultimate champion. But he's the greatest of his era, and in our capacity as chroniclers of basketball and its culture, we should give Tim Duncan the equivalent of a medal for what he's done, because we're here and we still remember. Let's make this medal one-third gold, one-third silver, and one-third bronze, one for the three phases of his career. This is a medal that stands alone. Yes, let other medals be the more gilded. Let other medals be the more a-gleaming. Yes, let other medals be studded the more with gems and let other medals have contours and angles that time cannot forget. Yes: Let other players have their anthems sung from the highest. And when the other medals melt away after one hundred eons, let Duncan's shine on: For no other medal in our time is for a man of all seasons, and no other medal is quite as pure or right.

Everyone Needs To Know About This One Joke Tom Lehrer Made in 1959

2011-09-17T11:22:00.002-05:00

Quite apart from basketball, I have a lot of different interests. I have a tendency to wear my mind up my sleeve. I have a history of losing my shirt. It's been one week since I blogged at you. I like music a great deal, is what I'm trying to say. I like jass bands, rappers, rock-'n'-rollers, and vaudevillians. I especially like Tin Pan Alley and Broadway. I'd give a pretty penny for the tenor at the Met; I'd give a quarter for a Cole Porter lyric and three for a melody by Strauss. "It's smooth! It's smart! It's Rodgers! It's Hart!"

On the lighter side of music is outright parody: Weird Al, that band that recorded "No Pigeons" in response to TLC's "No Scrubs": Yes, the list goes on of bands I don't listen to, not even a little. But parody - when mixed with a real capacity for ironic distance and a sincere musicality - has the chance to transcend its object. Tom Lehrer is one such parodist. You may remember his hilarious "New Math" but he took on any number of odd intellectual and political subjects in his few songs: folk music* ("Folk Song Army"), an optimistic interpretation of nuclear holocaust ("We Will All Go Together When We Go"), and even overzealous songwriting ("Clementine"). This latter is what I'd like to talk about.

*Probably his most scathing pronouncement was that "Little Boxes" was the most sanctimonious song ever written. Heh.

The conceit of "Clementine" is simple and well-executed: What would Cole Porter or Duke Ellington or Mozart or Gilbert and Sullivan do with a simple song like "Clementine"? It's a cute idea, and Lehrer's mastery of the composers' various tropes** propels the song to that rarefied air* of "songs you show to your friends and parents and future children".

*Which apparently means "less dense air," you know, like the stratosphere!
**Granted, he mocks "Night And Day" which is brilliantly direct for all its harmonic and lyrical complexity. But it's still pretty funny, Tom.

Lehrer introduces "Clementine" facetiously:

"...The reason most folk songs are so atrocious is that they were written by the people, and if professional songwriters had written them instead, things might have turned out considerably differently. For example, consider the old favorite "Clementine": In a cavern, in a canyon, dah dah dah dah-dah dah-dah dahhhh, a song with no recognizable merit whatsoever..."

And then Lehrer moves on into the parody.

So, yeah, "a song with no recognizable merit," whose most obvious merit is that it's so recognizable. I think that's hilarious. I think that is about the wittiest throwaway line I have ever heard. And I haven't seen anyone on the Internet that seems to have picked up on this. Maybe it was just so obvious, but I felt that I had to post it and explain it for all of you to read. Later.

Next time, on "Pearls of Mystery covers lyrics forgotten by the Internet," we cover "Don't Pass Me By" by Ringo Starr and its horrifying description of a car crash victim likely suffering serious brain damage. (No, seriously)

Tim Duncan Contemplates a 2003 Nets Fast Break

2011-09-12T06:26:00.001-05:00

It's the Spurs-Nets Finals. Manu catches and shoots a three without moving his head or legs. Long story short, Richard Jefferson, Jason Kidd, and Kenyon Martin are on the break against only one player - Tim Duncan. Kidd has the ball.

Heh. I wish David Robinson were in the game. It's always fun smothering an offensive possession with the Admiral. I wonder if that's what the Navy is like, all just sailing to other countries and stopping them from becoming too offensively powerful. I wish I knew more about politics.

Well, I guess I'm back on defense. I wish someone else were here to help. I guess I'll have to handle it myself. Hmm, I'm in pretty much the right position, being on the corner of the paint. I wish I knew what this spot was called after all these years. Maybe it's the elbow. It has some kind of a name. I'll find out later. After all, my concentration is the only thing that stands between Richard Jefferson and a basket.

Jason Kidd is dribbling up the court. Jason is my rival in this series, according to all the postgame interviewers. I guess that's somewhat true, and he is a good basketball player. I don't really think in terms of rivals though. My only rival is Professor Oak's grandson. Gary Oak is more like Kevin Garnett, but this year maybe I'll decide to name him "Jason" when the new games come out. I hope that's soon. I hope the professor still lets me name his rival and choose Grass once again. There's nothing better than having your opponent choose Fire and then beating them with ordinary old Grass.

Anyway, Jason is flanked on both sides by Richard Jefferson and Kenyon Martin, both hurrying, sort of faltering over their feet in their haste to try to get a basket. I move from side to side like a human pendulum at the free throw line because it means RJ and K-Mart have to go around me to get to the paint. It also prevents Jason Kidd from breaking my ankles, and I get to pretend I'm a point guard. Overall I have made the right choice.

Now Jason won't be able to drive on me straight on. In fact, I personally think he should shoot the ball or pass the ball to one of his flanks of lesser ability. That's what I think Jason should do. The break continues, though, regardless of what I think.

I heard that with bears if you make yourself look bigger they get scared. Maybe this pendulum move makes it seem like I can stop anything they'd want around the free throw line. It makes me seem like I am as wide as the free throw line, that there is no getting around me. Just like that bear thing I was just talking about. Oh, well, all I know is it worked for the Chicago "Bears" linebackers. I am such a card with these "Bears" puns, aren't I. Anyway, I had better pay attention to the game, or it will be some "Bad News, Bears"! Wait, I'm always paying attention, even when it seems like I'm not.

But what's going on with this fast break? It's not very fast to me, anyway. I think I'm going to dare Jason Kidd outright to shoot the ball. You see, somehow I'm flare-screening both Richard Jefferson and Kenyon Martin simultaneously at the free throw line, keeping them from cutting towards the basket. I guess I kind of caught them off guard with that pendulum move. I am always juking players with my crossover pendulum. In any case, that's also blocking Jason Kidd from getting into the lane through the top. Unless he wants the defense to reset, he'll have to shoot the ball. Their coach is going to be furious when he sees this coup I've pulled off, this...Maginot Free Throw Line. Actually that name is accurate: Jason is using his speed to dribble around the free throw line past all three of us. Darn; he has an open lane to the basket! I should have realized the best point guard in the game would think to go around me. Oh, well, the play isn't over. I run to cut off Jason. I tell him aloud that a bear is chasing him. He tells me to fuck off. But I'm fast enough to cut off his favorite angle, and he is forced to pass the ball to RJ. I guess this whole fast break hasn't taken very long, because at a glance, I note my team is still at halfcourt sprinting (in vain) to help me out, no matter how ridiculous this possession has been so far. What a loyal team.

Now Richard Jefferson has the ball at the corner of the free throw line, his break mates at the baseline in the paint. I'm acutely covering both of Richard's passing angles, but he's becoming more and more obtuse as Jason and K-Mart are rotating about halfway back towards their corners to get open midrange shots. I decide to insult Richard Jefferson profoundly but in order to avoid arousing his anger I don't change my facial expression at all, or even say a word. No, I insult him by hanging back a bit to block the driving lanes of Jason and Kenyon near the basket, giving Richard's capable hands all the passing, shooting, and dribbling lanes he should ever need. I gamble that he will screw this up, somehow. I'm starting to feel good about this play, even though Richard Jefferson has everything a wing should need to kill a single defender.

Even if RJ does something before the defense resets, I still have two seconds to myself while he just thinks to himself. In an ideal world he would just commit to something, anything. He would punish me for giving him this space with an open shot. He would punish me for not directly cutting off his defenders with a quick pass to an open man. He would just fake a couple passes and force a 3-second violation or make me come back to the free throw line to help him. Something, anything. He would do any of these things. But this series has told me he won't. So I have some time to myself, then. What can I think about with these precious moments of spare time?

If you could predict the future perfectly, could you (even theoretically) design an initial neural network... Oh, I guess Richard is going to try to drive the ball himself. What a surprise. That's pretty funny to me. Heh. Heh. Heh.

As much as I had insulted Richard by dropping back to the basket, I think I'm even more insulted that he thinks he can drive the ball on me. Maybe he has a plan to kick it out to Jason, who seems to be rotating to catch the pass. Then again, maybe not, because Jason has a look of basketball horror on his face. Yeah, definitely not, I can just tell. Jason has given up on the play and he's not going to get the ball. Now I just have to block RJ. I wonder if I can. Richard is a fine young man with great bursts of speed and power. Surely this time he will do right. Surely this time down the court, RJ won't try to go straight up and forward to try to draw the body contact even while holding the ball above his head so that I have a chance to play the ball without getting close to fouling him. I wonder if that will happen. Yes, I think so. It's looking like it. Heh. I guess I'll just have to block this and throw an outlet pass to my team for a quick uncontested two at the other end. Yes. I am doing it. I bet I look like a soccer player when I throw the ball. I guess I am kind of a goalie.

Oh, gee, that was my seventh block of the game! I think I'm having a good game! The crowd that is looking for dunks and brilliant offense must have found that...unBearable! Oh, well. I guess it's time for another defense of the basket. I should probably ask Pop to bring David in for this next rotation. It's a lot of fun to block Richard Jefferson time after time and I know the Admiral will enjoy it. I hope we can pull this game out. I guess we'll see. I think we will.

Confession Time

2011-09-12T05:20:00.000-05:00

I'd like to make a few confessions on behalf of Pearls of Mystery. In the course of writing a blog post, numerous sins of the writer tempt me at every turn. Like, there was this one time I convinced my alcohol-neophyte friends to mix Dr. Pepper and Irish Cream*. Still other times I have had to break someone's leg. I dont remember why or if it had anything to do with writing a blog.

*actually quite tasty, though the tasteless slurry on the bottom would make it unsuitable for a general drink.

But the worst thing I've ever done is definitely that time I tried to break someone's leg. Wait, no, that wasn't me. And even if it was, I don't think that had anything to do with the blog.

In fact, I've never really done anything bad on this blog. But I haven't done anything good, either. Now my task is simple: I just have to do something good without doing anything bad, and I will be tied for the best blogger in the world according to efficiency metrics. Then I just have to keep writing neutral and good things, so that I climb steadily up the usage chart.

Onward!

15 Years Later

It's 2026 and I'm full of regrets. I wish I had been a good blogger like Tim Duncan, or even an evil blogger like Kevin Garnett, instead of whiling away the days, blogging just adequately, like Richard Jefferson - standing beside but apart from this mountain of good and evil. I wish I had done just one thing that wasn't perfectly neutral, one thing that was centrally good or evil in my life. Oh well, that's why we live the days - to determine who is good and who is evil and who is better and in what ways. Also Tim Duncan is 50 years and a few months old, and that's kind of a terrifying thought; the only thing more terrifying is that I'm 37. Me! That intrepid kid with the blog! Imagine that! And what they say about me behind my back! "All he does these days is bring impressionable college students to his apartment and lecture them about the blood of the workers and then he asks them to pay his rent for him. He's almost 40 and I struggle to remember a time when he was young." Nonsense! I am so young I practically speak and write as if I were 15 years in the past!

*Shout out to Tim: Hey, congratulations on your 24th major title, your third of this year. You're right on pace to be the first winner of the Grand Slam Dunk in the Open NBEra, Tim. That's real special. But you earned your title, Tim! Again!

Still Crazy After All These Two Years

2011-09-05T04:47:00.000-05:00

Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart
And you'll never walk alone

~"You'll Never Walk Alone," from Carousel

I'm afraid they have made the play far too sad. I doubt whether anyone will pay $6 for tickets to have their hearts completely broken.

~Lawrence Langner, on Carousel

As Paul Simon might say, we at Pearls of Mystery (okay, it's just me) are "Feelin' Groovy" and not just because we're kickin' down the cobblestones and looking for fun. You see, it's been two years since the Inception of this blog. I can hardly believe it.

I realize this blog entry is going to be a bit pretentious, but I put a lot of work into this blog and it feels like a good time to write a reflective "legacy" post, as unreadable as this will be for most of you readers. It's been 2 years, and I've written 75 things, and most of them are pretty long (and which very rarely had unjustified noise, for all my fixation on random bullshit). In fact, in the aggregate, I've written the equivalent of a long novella or a short novel (quite a bit more than 50000 words, probably closer to 60000 to be precise). And you know what? That's kind of how I actually see this blog: as some sort of perpetually-evolving, timestamped log of my personal development from this part of my life. A novel, told through its author's vignettes, of narratives yet unknown to me. A semi-fictional autobiography with no knowledge of the ending.

When Jeremy and I started Pearls on September the Fifth, 2009, a lot of things were different:

-Richard Jefferson had not played a single game for the Spurs. It's funny, because in the 24 months that followed, his...Prufrockian tragedy became the central narrative of this blog: his... claymationesque effort the perfect metaphor for this blog.

-Gilbert Arenas still seemed like an alright guy.

-Heath Ledger was still alive. Wait, no he wasn't. It's been 44 months, which is kind of astonishing to me. Four years this January. Christ.

-The Heat were preparing themselves for a solid 6 seed and the Cavs for a likely 1 seed.

-I still had never read anything by Chekhov or, really, by Lovecraft. This is pretty astonishing to me, in retrospect. The blog didn't really get...good in any sense until I had read a lot of Chekhov and gone through a lot of horrible Lovecraft imitation. I don't think the blog is good now, but I think it is a lot better than when I started and was still in the "incomprehensible and unexplained juxtapositions are a sign of writerly depth" phrase. Not to say it was all without value, and I liked a lot of the things I thought of, but I wish I'd done things like this a little more often. I guess I thought simplicity and sentiment and leaving images to the imagination...were bad things. Funny that I didn't ever seem to apply that to things I'm reading. But live and learn, right?

-My favorite piece, by far, that I've ever written is the great Mike Brown-Mike Woodson conflict. As odd as it is to think it was already 20 months ago, it's even odder to consider that there was a time when it didn't exist.

-This is not the best piece I've written by any stretch, but I think it might be the most mature in its style, structure, and content, and I think if I can make its approach a little less dry, a little more vivid, and a little more considerate of readers, I can continue to make really solid improvements. It's something I literally would have not have had the vision and ability to pull off a couple years ago, and maybe that's the only testament to my development I've ever needed. Yes, this blog is the result of an optimist, my patient friend Aaron, my flighty but good-natured friend Jeremy (we're still bros, bro, really), and a lot of hours of work. And it's not very good. But it's getting better. Heh.

Thanks for reading.

Synecdoche: 2001 All-Star Game and Relative Conference Strength

2011-09-04T16:07:00.000-05:00

I’ve always found the relative strength of conferences and divisions to be such an interesting topic. The separation between "conferences" is starkest in baseball: There are two basically independent leagues with rare regular season offerings between them. We also get an All-Star Game and the World Series between the two leagues. For this reason, the World Series - for all the wonderful sabermetric tools - seems to me somewhat mysterious going in, the term "mysterious" going well beyond "unknown".

In NBA basketball, on the other hand, both Finals teams have generally played one another twice, and against the other team's conference fully 30 times. A lot of games (generally 450) are played between the conferences in the NBA. Because of this, strength-of-schedule ranking methods have a solid chance at giving us info about the relative strengths of conferences. While we might not know what to expect, we can make empirically plausible predictions in an extremely direct and simple way. "This team is 6-23 against the West, I'm pretty sure they'll lose in the Finals by an average of 5.4 points against the best team in the West right now, based on this graph here." If you're wrong, there's probably going to be some good reason for it, either an overestimate or an underestimate of someone's efficiency or shot volume or a certain play-call. Then again, few picked Dirk from the first round onward, so maybe our speculation is not so reasonable.

In any case, I was watching the 2001 NBA All-Star Game, and this strength of conference concept seemed kind of important as I looked over the rosters. First of all, I noted that the 2001 West All-Stars had an interesting positional distribution. Of the players selected:

-2 were point guards (Jason Kidd and Gary Payton).
-2 were shooting guards (Kobe and Michael Finley).
-0 were small forwards
-6 were power forwards (Chris Webber, Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett, Karl Malone, Rasheed Wallace, Antonio McDyess; Webber started at SF)
-3 were centers (Shaq, David Robinson, and Vlade Divac).

Of these 13 players, only Vlade, Dice, Sheed, and Finley aren't surefire HOFers (though Vlade has a decent case from his international career). Now, if they’d let in 15 players instead of 13 (just like there are three All-NBA teams), our next two choices could very reasonably be the Mavericks’ Steve Nash and Dirk Nowitzki. In 2001, both Nash and Nowitzki were just entering the long primes that would cement them both as ultimate superstars and, of course, as first-ballot HOFers.

So we have 15 players, 11 of which will be first ballot HOFers, in all likelihood. Let’s just say (for the sake of simplicity and reasonable accuracy) that these were the 15 best players in the Western Conference in February 2001, and (why not) the 2000-1 season at large. Though clearly Robinson, Malone, and Divac were all in a period of great decline in 2001, most of these 15 players were just entering their primes. So...let me just repeat this: 12 surefire HOFers, 10 at or entering their best basketball years, all in the Western Conference. And even the three older players were hardly “legacy” picks in February 2001; in fact, all 3 of them ended up leading plausible championship teams in their latter years.

The takeaway here - if I'm not making this clear enough - is that the Western Conference was utterly, unfathomably loaded with historically great players in February 2001, especially in the frontcourt, most especially in the versatile power forward position (of the frontcourt players listed, only Malone and O’Neal never developed an especially reliable midrange game and most all of them were good or great rebounders). I'm saying that for a period of time, 15 players played in the same conference, most in the frontcourt, and you'd be hard-pressed to exclude more than 5 of them from the top 50 in NBA history. The Western Conference - mind you, not the entire league or world - fielded a team in the post-Jordan era that probably stood a chance against the Dream Team in terms of positional versatility, athletic brilliance, sharp vision, and utter tenacity. I think that's pretty cool.

Some more fun facts: In the next decade after this All-Star game, 7 of the Finals 10 teams in the East prominently featured one or more of these 15 Western players. The only exceptions were the 2001 Sixers (the ASG barely preceded the trade deadline), who lost 4-1 to the Lakers, the 2007 Cavs, who lost 4-0 to the Spurs, and the 2009 Magic, who lost to the Lakers 4-1. That’s right, every team from the East that won a championship (or even that won more than 1 Finals game) in this next decade (2001-present) featured a crucial player from this 2001 West team (to be fair, ‘Sheed wasn’t some sort of decisive force that swung the 2004 Finals, though he helped the Pistons take down the Nets in the ECF). Astonishingly, some of these Western players went to the Finals and stayed in contention within a couple years of being traded to the East - Jason Kidd, Shaq and KG, all with good teams, yes, but all crucial and decisive to their runs. It almost goes without saying that all 10 of the West Finals teams from this decade had at least one of these 15 players (in fact, from 1996-2011, every West Finals team featured one player from the 2001 ASG West squad). And, it should be noted (kind of amazing by itself), none of these players were flashes in the pan. Even with McDyess – who suffered an awful injury that put him out of commission for 2+ years and who was never the same – you have to say that these players all were or became veterans (you'd get at least 10 quality years from most all of them) with long and fruitful careers. They weren't just HOFers and perennial All-Stars - they stuck around and kept playing at a high level. 10 of 15 were still around when the 2010 season began; 4 of 15 were still All-Stars in 2011 (with Nash a close snub). All of the 15 went to the Finals…except Steve Nash; 10 of 15 won the title at least once, all in crucial starring roles. Oh, jeez, Steve Nash. My heart hurts.

The 2001 East All-Stars - as much as they have a lot to like as a whole - simply pale in comparison. I mean, it is true that Allan Houston, Allen Iverson, Ray Allen, Latrellan Sprewellan, Jerry Stackhouse, Theo Ratliff, Glenn Robinson, Anthony Mason, Dikembe Mutombo, and Alonzo Mourning actually did make it to the Finals at least once (most albeit as minor contributors). And it's also true that the other players were Vince Carter, Grant Hill, Tracy McGrady, and Stephen Marbury. Of these players, only Iverson, Allen, Mutombo, and Hill are really plausible HOFers (Hill and Mutombo partially as unique, likeable cultural icons); Iverson and Allen are the only first-ballot players for sure. More importantly, you couldn’t build a contender around any of these players except A.I. and maybe Ray Ray. You would never say “Well, now I would like Theo Ratliff to take over this game”. It’s probably not going to happen. These were contributors, defensive role players, and streaky shooters and talented, flawed scorers for the most part. The only players you couldn’t say this absolutely for are Ray Allen, Allan Houston, Allen Iverson, Latrell Sprewell, Grant Hill, Alonzo Mourning, and Tracy McGrady, probably the seven best players for the East. Even in acknowledging their incredible talents, it's also rhe case that Ray Allen is the only one of these seven that didn’t have significant, career-threatening injury or off-court issues, which is kind of shocking after looking at the relatively fortunate West.

After looking at both conferences, a weird thought emerges: If you ranked the 29 players in the 2001 ASG historically (adding Nash and Dirk), you might very reasonably take 12 of the top 15 from the West and 11 of the bottom 14 from the East, with maybe the top 10 spots (in no particular order, Duncan, Garnett, Malone, Robinson, Shaq, Kidd, Kobe, Webber, Dirk, and Nash) going to Western players. That’s simply insane to have such a preponderance of talent in one conference.

Of course, eventually the conferences went through some diffusion of talent, and with excitingly good players like Dwyane Wade, LeBron, Chris Bosh, Dwight Howard, Andrew Bogut, Rondo, and Derrick Rose falling into the hands of the East, the league at least has some degree of conference parity at the very top, which is what matters with the current playoff format. But even so, the West is still as good as it was back then, if not even better. Z-Bo, the Gasols, Yao, Chris Paul, Deron Williams, Andrew Bynum, Tony Parker, Manu, Kevin Durant, Kevin Love, and Blake Griffin all entered the West in the next decade. These players, along with an hugely improved scouting presence in Europe and South America (and the seemingly endless collection of solid role players this scouting has found) and improvements in sports medicine, have continued the continuing and astonishing upward climb of the Western Conference.

Maybe the next Jordan was never meant to be a similarly transcendent scorer, athlete, defender, and general competitor. Maybe the next Jordan was never a person at all, but the apparatus, the process of figuring out what the next Jordan would look like and the pursuit of this dream with reckless objectivity and passion. Manu Ginobili is not the next Jordan, but netting a dozen players of his caliber, extending Kobe and Dirk's careers by several years, giving superstars a reasonable amount of compensation and above-the-table power, and creating ever more granular environments for superstars? Yeah, we may not have Jordan, but we have the framework in place for someone like Chris Paul to be Jordan for a night against teams that are usually better than the ones Jordan usually faced, for LeBron James to be Jordanesque for a 9-game stretch, for Dirk to give us the sort of clutch reserved in the modern era for Jordan, and so on. Ah, but that's a tangent.

No, the main story here is that - for all that build-up about historical and even contemporary disadvantages in talent - the East won 111-110. It was an entertaining, competitive All-Star Game, in which AI forced his team back from a deficit. Duncan (from Kobe) missed a last-second shot that would have won it; the two greatest players of the new millennium missed a game-winning assisted midrange jumper. Allen Iverson, a historical footnote by all rights, bore the game unto himself and led his team and his body conquered their superiors once again, proving his MVP valid, foreshadowing his brilliant Finals run, and guaranteeing him the solid respect of a fickle generation. Also, Shaq was injured and that probably had something to do with the East winning, even a little. I don’t know that Shaq would have mattered, though. This was 2001 and A.I. probably could have taken on a team of the 50 greatest players, all in their primes and stolen one or two Finals games from them. The evidence speaks for itself.

Ideal Job Offer

2011-09-04T02:33:00.000-05:00

John: So, I can write whatever I want about basketball, sir?

Interviewer: Yes, John. We think this is going to be a great collaboration, and we’re pretty sure we want you. I just have a few more questions for you, before we hand this job offer to you.

J: Okay. Can we go over the salary terms again, sir?

I: Of course. With a broad brush, we will be paying you one hundred thousand dollars per year to write whatever you want about basketball, in any quantity, for the next five years. It’s a guaranteed contract with options to leave after every six months without any penalty, and with marginal penalty otherwise. You have to write for our company, but you can write for other companies while you are writing for us, so long as you aren’t reproducing material between publications. You can work from home, and have any hours. All we ask is that when we are promoting your work, you attend promotional events specifically for your work. We’ll handle food, transportation, and so on to get you there, and we’ll give you at least two weeks' notice before any such event. There is a monthly video-conference that of course can be attended from home. You will also receive a 20 percent royalty on ad revenue to your blog and published works that are sold under your name.

J: I know this is a bad negotiating move, but I am extremely satisfied with all of that, sir. This is a dream job.

I: Call me Dave, John. Yes, it is very generous, which is why we’re confident you’ll accept. I would just like to ask you a few questions before we offer this.

J: By all means, Dave. What would you like to know?

Dave: Do you have adequate health insurance?

J: No.

D: Well, we can certainly put that into this job offer. It costs us a relative pittance, compared to how much we value you, John.

J: That’s incredibly nice, Dave!

D: We thought you’d like that. Anyway, one or two more questions, here...

J: Okay, go ahead, Dave.

D: John, do you have any problems with Isiah Thomas?

J (thinking): Damn. There had to be a catch. No one just offers a job like that (to someone so obviously unemployable as me) unless there is something seriously wrong with the person making the offer or the offer itself.

J: No, I don’t think so. I don't have any problems with Isiah Thomas.

D: Do you mind explaining that?

J: Not at all, Dave. You see, the terrors Isiah has unleashed upon basketball and the basic concepts of organization offend me, Dave, but they offend me on a moral or a spiritual level. I think it’s much easier to rationalize away moral or spiritual injustices when they are not harming people and teams I personally value.

D: Can you give me an example?

J: Yeah. Like, I think it’s quite a shame that the CBA failed thanks to Isiah, but I also think that it doesn’t have all that much bearing on the quality of professional basketball, or at least not enough to cause me to resent Isiah. The same is true of my Spurs. Horrible general managers on teams not my own are probably a net gain for teams that I root for. I’m guessing the Spurs probably ended up benefiting from having troubling GMs in at least four potential rivals and trade partners. Even if the Spurs didn’t benefit, his Knicks at least didn’t trouble the Spurs enough to cause me to resent him. The list goes on and on of people and teams that Isiah has damaged that ultimately had no bearing on me personally or, if they do, have such a small impact that I can't hold it against him.

D: But if you, say, worked with him, that would be a problem, then, right?

J: Maybe, but it’s more likely he would damage the organization around me and make my own mistakes look small in comparison. The risk is especially low with a guaranteed contract for a non-administrative job. Overall, I still have no problems with Isiah Thomas.

D: What if Isiah Thomas challenged you to a fight for your insulting comments? Would you have a problem with him then?

J: Then I would probably sign that job offer as quickly as it was feasible to do so, call 9-1-1 on my phone, like, light a brush fire between myself and Isiah, and board the bus on back to my apartment, in all likelihood. I think the amount he could harm me is far less than the amount that job offer could help me, so I still would not have any real problem with him.

D: I appreciate your honesty, John. I just have one more question.

J: Okay, Dave.

D: What if Isiah Thomas were in this room?

J: What d-

Dave removed his mask. He was Isiah Thomas.

Dave/Isiah Thomas: What if Isiah Thomas were…Dave, John? Would you have a problem with Dave, John?

J (stammering): I guess- I mean- Not with Dave, technically speaking. I don't even-

I: What if I were just petty and bitter enough to offer you the precipice of the comforts of life just because you insulted me in that “Ideal Job Offer” piece on Pearls of Mystery, John? What then? What would you do?

J: Anything and everything in my power so that the world understands what kind of person you are.

I: Like what, kid? Like what?

J: Like…blog about it, I don’t know…..

It was at this point that I trailed off in a deep reverie, certain that my anecdote would net me 100 hits, at least. I had blog-dollar signs in my eyes, and Isiah Thomas could not match that with any job offer in the world.

Where the Wind Comes Sweeping Down the Plain

2011-09-02T07:39:00.000-05:00

1. The Move

The fortunes of the Spurs ownership sort of collapsed in 2012, not into dire straits but into a place where owning a team was suddenly an unaffordable luxury. So, even as their team arrested time for an improbable fifth championship, their owners could talk privately only about what the title would do for the selling price. The celebration was outfitted with the second-best champagnes and rings of 80% gold. And they announced, a couple months after the Riverwalk title strut, that Tim Duncan would not be resigned. Gregg Popovich, still regarded as an elite coach, left with him. The other expiring contracts left as well, leaving the Spurs more or less depleted, at once in rebuilding mode. Most of us thought Tim was going to retire, and the TV networks in the area devoted considerable space to tributes for a few days. Then he and Popovich signed absurd 5-year contracts with the Oklahoma Thunder. It was a period of sadness, but no one in San Antonio could really complain about their lot. It was just something that happened, albeit something strange and unfortunate. So everyone was on good terms when the airship of Duncan and Popovich sailed the Texas land-sea up to Oklahoma on gossamer wings in the clouds. From the windows the two saw banners at the airport they'd left behind, thanking them for all the memories and titles. Of course, they wouldn't see my car until they had landed.

See, at this point I'd been a mop-boy for the Spurs since 2009. Alas, the Spurs were downsizing and mop-boys were as a rule not retained: In a revolution, the mop-boys are always the first to be destroyed. Once I'd heard about Duncan and Popovich, though, I decided immediately that I would follow them to Oklahoma and see if I could parlay my experiences with the Spurs to get a mopping job with the Thunder. So for a solid hour I packed my things into my car and I was off. I was an adult for the first time, so I could and would make my own choices from now on, according to my family. Thus debriefed, I immediately chose the route that seemed most familiar to where I had just been, because that wasn't so bad. That was what I was looking for in the Thunder job. Also, as a basketball journalist, Tim's northern migration was the most interesting story in basketball, and I wanted to be on the ground level for the exclusive story. All the tape recorders and notebooks took up almost my entire car. All my lap was filled with food and toiletries and I went to Oklahoma.

I arrived at the Thunder's practice facility just in time for the airship to descend outside. A large crowd with banners (easily 20,000 strong) was there to greet the landing duo. There were also a large contingent of people on horses and a lot of speaker systems everywhere. Such is Oklahoma. The Thunder's core were signing autographs at separate tables, each player commanding fairly gigantic lines. Kevin Durant, clad in warmups and a tiny backpack (that seemed most suited to house a rabbit than anything else), commanded the largest queue. And there, near the front, was Clay Bennett, the scowling cowboy, obviously still lamenting over the fact that days earlier he had accidentally let his ownership lapse to the local theatre guild and GM Sam Presti, the boy wonder of basketball.

After the airship had landed, the horses ran around in several concentric circles in various directions, while the theatre company at the center performed a selection from Oklahoma!, the naturalistic waltz "Oh What a Beautiful Mornin'" as Presti kept time with his efficient feet. They were competent and all, but I had to admit it was pretty weird having a tenth of the large crowd dressing up like farmers and ranchers, singing merrily about their prospects. But in a way, that was how I felt, on the frontier of basketball journalism. As Duncan and Popovich descended the stairs, the group played the title song "Oklahoma!" All I could do was sigh and memorize every relevant piece of information around me for the advancement of my career.

2. The Interview

I spent the night in a hotel and prepared a ridiculous suitcoat-greatcoat combo that, in its day, had won me every job I'd ever gotten an interview for. I went to the Thunder's office for basketball operations and asked, no, demanded, to speak to Sam Presti. After an hour of half-hearted commitments and office candy, one of the secretaries eventually got me in touch with Presti.

"Give me a job, Sam," I said forcefully, "You need me more than I need you."

"What job would you like, young man?" Presti asked with worried curiosity.

"I would like to be a shooting guard, a backup to Russell Westbrook, who plays 20 minutes a night and tenacious defense."

Presti looked at my shoulders and laughed, "Your trapezius-to-collar ratio is much too high for a shooting guard, and your pituitary development is within one standard deviation of an average person."

"What?"

"In layman's terms, 'No.' You probably aren't even an athlete."

"Fine, Sam, you caught me. I was a mop-boy with the Spurs and I want to be a mop-boy with the Thunder. I'm a big Tim Duncan fan. You caught me, Sam, are we going to have to let this poison our entire working relationship," I said with the utmost rationality.

Sam Presti just cackled in response, "Damn, I love how calculating some of you youngsters are. Reminds me of myself at that age and, to be honest, at this age. I wouldn't be surprised if this whole mop-boy routine is just how you get some sort of access to players for some larger plot."

I didn't know what to say. I just continued to sit down in silence until I thought of something and said, "Well, if I meant any harm, I'm sure you'd be able to ask any of the Spurs from the last three years about it. But," I had to smile, "you're absolutely right, Sam. I'm wearing a tape recorder right now. I'm a journalist. Of basketball," I said, trying to be as measured as possible in the revelation.

Sam smiled and became a bit more businesslike, "Alright, I'm going to hire you. Just don't attend any administrative meetings...John," for that was my name, "and be forthright with everyone about what you're doing. We keep things close to the belt here, just like in San Antonio I'd imagine. But as long as you're obeying basic Thunder and journalistic protocol, we should be fine. You know everything hinges on having a job here, and you know I know that. So I think we're good. You're probably pretty good at mopping by now. So you're probably pretty valuable to me, just purely as a drone."

I got a little worked-up at this objectification. "True, but I also know that you assume that I'm going to be rational, when I'll actually go to irrational lengths to get to the heart of a story, Sam." Whoops.

Sam got a little bit flustered, and blinked about twice as much as he had. "Um...okay. See you on Monday, then?" He handed me some materials and sent me on my way.

"I was joking?"

"Just...just go, John. Good interview." I did.

3. The first day

Not coincidentally, my first day was also the first day of training camp. I was in the gym and mopping to the beat of a Strauss waltz from my mp3 player. As soon as Duncan arrived, he and Popovich exchanged a glance, and experience taught me that they were going to double-team someone for a talk. I correctly guessed Kevin Durant, star of the franchise. Suddenly my mop gained a life of its own, and I waltzed over to where they were gathered and discreetly turned off my mp3 player. I saw Duncan sigh with a bit of annoyance.

"I think John is ready for this talk, too. He's going to find out, anyway." Tim said, and it wasn't just a compliment for an investigative mind.

"Fine," said Popovich.

I kept mopping in three-quarter time. Tim looked right at me and said, "Stop pretending like you can't hear us, John. We worked with you for three years. Come over here. Sit down. Heh." Tim thought that my pretense was hilariously over-the-top sometimes. Honestly, so did I.

Kevin asked, "Who is he?"

Tim spoke with the irony of an old person not really trying to sound hip, "Oh, he's cool. He worked with us back in our hood in San Antone. Good mop-boy. Should have been elected to the All-Star Game last year. As a mop-boy."

All four of us sat down, kind of groaning at Tim.

"Uh...what is this meeting about, Coach?" I asked politely.

"It's about the future of basketball." Popovich drily noted, "Or maybe it's about the future of an irrelevant superstar that could never turn it on when it really mattered." And he stared at Kevin probingly.

Kevin was a bit taken aback. "But I went to the Western Conference Finals last year, Coach! I think next year is finally going to be the year we break..." I nodded to echo this sentiment, which had to be at least the secondary feeling of most journalists.

Popovich stopped him with a hand gesture, "No, Kevin, that's what everyone thinks. It's what everyone wants to hear, too, so it doesn't seem so bad. But as long as you think it, this will never be your year. It's funny how that works. You go into a season thinking you have the preponderance of talent and heart and then, at the end of the day, you're explaining to a reporter why Game 6 didn't turn out like you'd hoped. Kevin, let me tell you what Tim and I told Sam in order to get those contract terms. You know Sam well, right? He kind of knows his stuff, right?"

Kevin had a look of surprise on his face at this new information. I laughed at the coach's understatement. "Yeah, he kind of does, is my general impression of things. Sam kind of knows his stuff," Kevin deadpanned to move the conversation along.

"Well, he kind of also signed us to 5-year contracts, Kevin."

"He kind of did, Coach. He kind of did. Do you mind telling me what the connection you're making is, here? Do you mind telling me what kind of things you told Sam?"

Popovich was famous in his circles of this kind of gamesmanship, but Kevin was meeting him quip for quip. I smiled, because Kevin Durant was still wearing a child's backpack as he engaged the coach.

"We told him we'd make the Thunder into champions, Kevin. Is that kind of something you'd kind of like to see happen, Kevin?" Popovich continued the volley.

"Of course, Coach. I want that more than anything. It's the only thing that matters."

"More than your arms?" Popovich grinned.

"Fine, I prefer my arms to a title." Kevin admitted, and Popovich continued to chip away.

"How about your friends and family?"

Durant didn't bite, though. "If my friends and family are standing in the way of my title, they aren't my friends and family."

Popovich furled his brow and said, with a little bit of anger, "You don't really think that, do you," and it wasn't much of a question at all. Duncan and I looked at Kevin, who was apparently having some internal conflict about how he felt: His face kept changing back and forth, from joy to anger to joy. As he wavered, his little backpack looked like a rabbit's house and then a possum's house and then a rabbit's house, depending on his mood. Tim half-chuckled a sympathetic "Heh." and quickly regained his ordinary poker face.

A bit defeated, Kevin said, "No, no I don't. But I feel like, on some level, if I don't think that, I'm never going to be a champion. I have to be willing to leave behind everyone and everything except my team if it means reaching that ultimate glory. And I know I can't."

Tim pointed at Kevin and said, "That's exactly what David Robinson said to us when I came into the league." Boy, he made his words count.

Popovich continued the thought, "Yeah, we had this same discussion with David Robinson."

Now I was pretty curious, "What did you say to him?"

Popovich took over. "We told him that all he was saying was bullshit, and that a champion is just a team that wins four best-of-seven rounds against four teams, and nothing else. Sure, you have to earn each of those rounds, each of those games, each of those quarters and possessions. But that's all you have to earn. A man doesn't have to earn a dime more than his standard of living, and a champion doesn't have to earn a dime more than its four rounds. There is no ultimate victory, no definitive answer to the question of who is best. Just four rounds, and four defenses to beat and four offenses to stop. An MVP is just the one that plays the most and does the most to earn it. There's no mystery, no pure competitive situation, no narrative. Just a game, just a series, just a tournament, and, in the end, just a champion."

As a mop-boy that used calculus on my mopping patterns in order to minimize time spent mopping and maximize time spent interviewing, I immediately understood this. If I let an ideal mop-stroke become my fixation, my efficiency would actually suffer. But there was no room in this view for sentiment, and that seemed to bug Kevin, who signaled to speak.

"That's all well and good," Kevin started, "but what about those famous highlights we remember? What about all those great Cinderella stories, those legendary teams, those displays of total dominance we remember and try to emulate? Nobody goes in thinking about winning four rounds. They think about hoisting the trophy, shooting over Bryon Russell and stealing from Karl Malone, or being Bill Russell or Mo Malone. They think about having a 16-point fourth quarter, a quadruple double, a 50 point game on 10 shots. They think about the total dominance of the team concept striving over selfishness. They think about something. It's not just about the victories, it's about the class and determination and attitude and the work ethic. And teamwork. I don't want to win without any of those things. I want to win so hard that they'll say we won five rounds, and I want to do it the right way."

And Kevin too had a point. I started to wonder if maybe I had sacrificed something in mopping so efficiently. After all, as much as we all laugh at people who have absurd wells of idealism and sentiment, these people seem to be pretty happy (at least as much as anyone), and not at all dumb or unsuccessful. Kevin Durant sitting before us was a perfect example. He would not while away his days mopping; he might even revolutionize the field.

But Popovich answered, "Let’s talk about teamwork. Good idea, right?” Kevin nodded, “But let's face it: at times you've simply taken over games, Kevin, just like Tim back in the day. If you yourself could win without teamwork all the time, then you should, every single time, because you would still be held up by everyone that matters as a great teammate and a great person. And you would never need to sacrifice anything. In fact, you would be praised for being able to win games by yourself and still managing to stay humble. I mean, do you think anyone holds it against Tim that sometimes, for entire rotations in his prime, we just fed him in the post and did almost nothing to support him? Of course not. He still respected his teammates deeply, and when we couldn't go to him every possession, whether in his prime or not, he deferred instantly. Teamwork, if you chase after it too far, can be an arbitrary barrier to team success, especially in basketball. What you should really be after is judgement: knowing when to take over and when to defer.”

“What about class, coach?”

“Class? Sure, it's important...to how you’re treated. People remember the cheap shots and the missed handshakes for a long time. And they ought to. But it has hardly anything to do with the title. Tell me with a straight face that untouchable class had any relation to championship quality the last 50 years. It never has and it never will.”

“What about dedication and a positive attitude?”

“99% of the time class, determination, attitude, and so on, have nothing to do with winning. They’re just ornaments on a player as far as I’m concerned, at least as a coach. Attitude does not matter to Sam Presti, and I consider that a basic requirement for a general manager. My favorite general managers were those that didn't feel this way, because I would beat them in trades every time,” He smiled, "It's a lot harder to have a positive attitude when you aren't winning 55 games. You know this as well as I do, Kevin."

Kevin deployed the final virtue, his trump card. “What about the work ethic that got me here, coach? Is my work ethic just an ornament to you?”

“By itself, yeah. Work ethic is just an ornament by itself, even though I see trading for work ethic in elite players as trading up. Look, Kevin, you already have a fantastic work ethic, and still, the only things that matter about it are the things you’ve applied it to. Those are what matter. Your attention to detail, your ability to work through things to their last detail, the development you’re willing to put in on your defense and even your iso and post moves. It’s impressive, but if you’d gotten it without the work ethic, I’d be just as happy to have you start for my team. I wouldn’t compliment you after the games as much, for sure, but I wouldn’t exactly be unhappy. Do you think Phil Jackson is really unhappy with Shaq’s production in the threepeat? Work doesn’t matter as far as coaching goes.. It’s all in the results. A work ethic is a tool to help the results, but if you had a work ethic and had worked on all the wrong things, I would feel horrible for you. I’d like you as a person, but I don’t know that I’d want to have you as a player. Players that have longer careers because of their work ethic are indistinguishable to a coach from naturally durable, adaptable players. Sorry. I like the first group a lot more, if it's any consolation."

I hadn’t fully considered this logic. After all, how many times had I worked overtime just because I thought I was a better person for having more of a work ethic? How many times had I submitted myself to the will of others in zero-sum interactions, because I had arbitrarily favored the ideal of charity over fulfillment? No, I didn't need to work overtime if it wasn't going to satisfy any of my goals. Sam Presti was just a person who had some things I wanted, and I would help him exactly as far as I needed to help myself, and if I needed or wanted more, I would help him more. There was no inherent virtue in hard work, except to the extent that that hard work led to outcomes I truly valued. There was no virtue in learning, in justice, in anything, if you sacrifice the things and people that are most important to you to attain them. The ends of a healthy person were not ideal love or ideal dominance or ideal wealth; they were a certain person, a certain objective standard of attainment, a certain financial standard and the certain ends to which this money is deployed. I didn’t need to prove that I was better than anyone else, even to myself. I didn’t even need to prove I was good. I just needed to make realistic goals that were within my grasp and to take appropriate measures to attain them, whether those goals were general or specific. Ascetics, mystics, also-rans, martyrs? They can be kings of infinite space for all I care. I decided I was moving on with my life, in a nutshell if need be. No, I thought, I would never go to work just because I’m supposed to, but only because the work supports the concrete things I truly value. But I would go to work. I would buy in to something. I would learn to value something new and add to the things I already valued. And ironically, in so doing, I would want to work harder. I would want to take on burdens, because the value in people and things that could come from these burdens would be ever clearer to me. I have been crafty and I have been intelligent in my day, but without a good end to both, I was no better than an idiot rambling. That’s what the Spurs had been trying to teach me, I had just been too busy with my tape recorder to sit back and listen. But I guess it’s harder to pick up Thunder on a tape recorder, isn’t it. I had my story. I just needed a conclusion. I sat back and listened to the conversation. I was a journalist.

But there was no conversation to listen to. The other three were silent in thought. Kevin finally broke the silence. "Whoa, John," He was staring at me. "That was great."

“What is it, Kevin?”

“What are you talking about? Don't you remember what you just said? You said it yourself - 'I am a journalist'. You spoke for like 10 minutes. That was inspirational. It was pretty weird that you just said all of that, straight-up and in a line, with your eyes closed and without any sort of continuation to the conversation. But you know what, John? I agreed with it. I mean, that was pretty convincing. Good job. I can see why you’d be in the All-Star Game as a mop-boy. There’s a kind of philosophy to being a mop-boy, you know, and some mop-boys can never grasp it. Never totally rational, never totally charitable. A mop for all seasons. We're glad to have you.”

How embarrassing, I thought. I would take care never to let this uninhibited personal expression happen in the future. “I hope I don’t have like narcolepsy or anything.”

"This was a fun conversation with David, too," Tim finally interjected, "Heh."

"You did well, Tim," Popovich grinned, "Do you think we should tell Kevin there’s no God next Monday?"

Popovich turned back to us and said with seriousness, "We both have a lot of faith, in our own ways, Kevin. We really do. Just not in the Basketball Gods. I just don't believe there's any attitude of life that can make someone any better at basketball, Kevin, except some basic psychological approaches to keep your attention span high and your stress level right where it needs to be. But you already have all of that."

Tim was filled with the glee of anticipation, "You wanna know what we told Sam to get five-year contracts?"

Kevin, still in shock from the hour-long basketball equivalent of Nietzsche, practically begged for the dulcet tones of the basketball equivalent of Greg Maddux, and stammered out a "Sure, TIm."

Tim spoke with unremarkable dryness. "We told Sam that I'm going to be a 55% three-point shooter who can still work the post without turning the ball over, averaging 20 mpg over 5 years. We told him that Pop has already developed some great offensive schemes for you, Russell, me, Harden, Perkins, and Collison, and that our frontcourt, even in my declining physical state, would still be unrivaled in the entire league, enough to give us a trump card against Miami's team defense. We told him that Pop and I had developed countless defensively limited players into defensive powerhouses. All of this is true, and we demonstrated what it was possible to demonstrate. That was enough for Sam," Tim caught his breath, having spoken fewer words in the last eighteen months. "That's all we said. Heh."

"Wait, what about that whole speech Pop gave? Did you mention that?" I asked Tim as Kevin furrowed his brow with befuddlement.

"We never even mentioned it." Tim was half-chuckling half-controllably for almost a minute. "Heh. Heh. Heh. Heh. Heh." Half-chuckling more than I’d ever seen him before. He must have something very funny in mind, I thought.

"Wait, you didn’t tell Sam about that entire lecture? Then why did you say-" Kevin started.

And Tim, with a devious smile, had a punchline in mind. Right on cue, he announced, "Because, like Pop said, it doesn’t even matter." and continued half-chuckling endlessly.

I was pretty sure this was Tim’s idea of a joke. But the attempt was so sincere, so dry, so absurd in its attempt, that Tim’s half-chuckle did the unintentional humor no justice. The set-up and punchline fused with the comedian, and the already specious joke became a Gordian knot of misconceptions about humor - you could unwind for hours and still not find the end of it. All three of us started cracking up at Tim, and I was trying my best to stop from ruining my tape recorder as I doubled over. Kevin's face didn't look like a frown to anyone except himself. As I was laughing, I started to understand the joke a little bit, hoping there was something more than the surface and the build-up. I finally decided that I had just heard the lamest, most sincere attempt at a joke that I ever would, and said so between spasms. Tim’s joke was somehow worse – and in a real sense, more shameful to all parties – than an awful pun could ever be. And, as I looked up, he was still smiling, in perfect control of himself. He had made everyone else feel embarrassed at themselves, and he knew it. Much like his games, like his unending career, his jokes could never make any sense until the final tally. But he stood up, and the meeting was essentially over. I still had a few more laughs in me, to my great chagrin. We were all in Oklahoma now, but when you're the sort of person Tim is, you can make any place feel like San Antonio. I had an insatiable craving for family restaurants and video arcades, for home-baked bread and an empty endless basement all to myself, for infinitely complex jokes that slowly unwound back into straightforward language after thousands of uses with friends. I had all the purpose of an adult in Oklahoma and all the freedom of a youth in San Antonio. I wasn't laughing any more, but with my smiles, I might have been. Life seemed to be unfolding as it should be, and I was finally ready to let it happen to me.

Finally, I gathered myself and asked if I could publish this, considering that I'd obviously had a tape recorder on the entire time. For a second, Tim fully chuckled at the suggestion. He had the last laugh after all.

"Yes, but wait to publish it, John... until," Popovich said as he smiled and glanced at his watch, "until June," I looked at my own watch; exactly 10:00 AM. I quickly got back to mopping, and as I did, Sam Presti and the theatre troupe came into the gym, singing "June is Bustin' Out All Over" from Carousel and I silently hoped the theatre company wouldn't be here every day. I would be perpetually disappointed. At least they weren’t Clay Bennett, I thought, and forever mopped the first beats of the waltzes I heard with an extra staccato.

Ask Pearls of Mystery Anything (actually just one question, that I wrote myself)!

2011-07-18T08:56:00.000-05:00

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.

Richard Jefferson and I meet Coach Mark Jackson

2011-07-14T08:21:00.000-05:00

Mark Jackson was the newly-minted coach of the Golden State Warriors. Curious about this plausible train-wreck, I decided to see what was up. So one morning, I packed my bags, headed to the station, and before noon an equally curious Richard Jefferson and I were on a train, going west to Jackson's "season combine".

"Why is he hosting a season combine? Is that normal?" I asked the conductor left our compartment.

"John, nothing about this is normal. Mark Jackson was the Nets' color commentator for a couple years while I was there. He's the most abnormal person anyone could possibly have chosen for a coaching gig."

This took me by surprise. Of all the players likely to be considered for a job in the surreal and paranormal, Richard Jefferson was right below Ron Artest and Deshawn Stevenson. He had seen it all in this league, and he had an acute sense for what was abnormal, largely because he was the most average player in the history of the league: What was abnormal was merely what was unlike Jefferson.

"Oh, yeah, this one time he tried to teach us all defense," Richard continued.

"Wait, he was the color commentator then?"

"Yeah. Mark jumped, literally jumped, the media box 20 minutes before this game, I think against the Pacers, and then ran over to our pregame huddle," Richard said this like he was narrating a dog run across a yard. Complete indifference.

What could you say to that? "Oh. That's pretty weird."

"Not really. He just jumped the box and ran over to us."

"That still seems pretty weird, RJ," for sometimes calling him by his ridiculously childish nickname withered his beliefs away. But he insisted:

"I mean, Mark actually jumped the media box a bunch of times, usually to deliver a motivational speech or something, ask about how we were doing," Richard said, again, without any sense of the oddity he was describing, "Usually, Coach Scott would give Mark a few minutes if he asked. He just wanted to talk with us."

"Well, that doesn't seem so odd, after all, I guess."

"Normally it wasn't, but this time, he tried to teach us defense. Now, we weren't great that year..."

The train arrived and we disembarked just 100 feet away from Oracle Arena. We started walking.

"What did he teach you guys, RJ?"

"Well, he tried to teach us defense, like I said. He stood up on a soap box, and, like a magician, he asked for a volunteer. This volunteer, he claimed, would then demonstrate his sound defensive principles."

"Did anyone volunteer?"

"Listen, I'm not going to talk bad about that Nets team, but there weren't exactly a lot of volunteers on that team," Richard trailed off with an unmistakable but slight anger in his brows.

"So you volunteered," I inferred, as we passed through the Arc.

"For charity events, for media appearances, you name it. Yeah, I volunteered for Mark's demonstration. I didn't have much of a choice. Mark Jackson without a volunteer is like...well, have you ever seen a game where Mark Jackson is there but Jeff Van Gundy isn't?" I shuddered at this suggestion.

"Yeah, that's like... watching a game commentated by a dog." I mimicked a Mark Jackson monologue. "Tough defensive matchup, enough firepower, but tough offense beats enough defense every time. Ruff Ruff Ruff Ruff Ruff. Mama, there goes that man."

Jefferson suddenly shuddered in recognition: Towards Mark Jackson, shuddering is the healthy response. "Pretty much that's what it was like. If no one volunteered, he would just stand there until the game started. Then he would follow us around on the bench the whole game."

"Really?"

"It's a really, like...organic extension of his persona when you actually see it. Yeah, he would just follow us around, you know, on the bench and Mark even stepped on the court a few times. There's a reason we hired Mike Fratello the next season. You don't have any idea. He looked like a dying puppy when he didn't get a volunteer for his motivational speeches. It was sadness of a territorial variety, I guess you could say. I had to volunteer."

"So...you volunteered. Then what?"

"You know that catch phrase 'Hand down, man down' he always uses?"

"Of course."

"He meant it. He really, really meant it."

"Wow. Damn, that's dumb," I wonder if it is possible to be more condescending to a person.

"Yeah. It's not, I mean, it's not totally dumb. A lot of times, you know, people just plumb forget to raise their hands, heh. But it's not like some eternal law or something. It's just an easy mistake to correct. Basic coaching. But no: He told me that phrase was 'all ye know, and all ye need to know, here on Earth.' I mean, picture him... he was just standing on this soap box, telling me that I always had to keep my hands up, for like 10 minutes, 'on the court or off the court, because we're always on defense if you think about it. But don't. Because you don't have to think about it. Just raise your hands. Your mama will thank you and you won't have to use any effort to raise the roof. ""Mama, I made it,"" you can say, ""I'm on television.""'. It was a free flowing, yelling ramble that sometimes touched on the content of raising one's hands to guard, and that was basically the only message of his that I remembered."

"Wow. How did you make it through all of that?"

"Well, I wasn't in great mental shape by the end of it. By the end of his little speech, 'Hand down, man down.' was like a lulling mantra in my mind. I felt a bit dazed, but no matter how bored or tired I got, my hands started instinctively to rise into defensive position."

"You'd been hypnotized."

"Yeah, I guess," Richard continued without a pause to give this recognition any import. "So the game started...and I guess we were playing the Celtics, because I was guarding Paul Pierce....So, for the first 45 minutes, I hold Paul to something like 5 points on 2 of 10 shooting. And this was a pretty crucial blow to the C's. I mean, they had like 2 good players that year."

"I guess Mark Jackson's advice really was called for."

"Paul was real sick that day, like he had the flu or something, and I had some size and speed advantages. It was probably a fluke, all considering. But I did have my hands up, that's true. And I was having a great game on offense too, but both teams were really bad that year: We weren't winning by much. So with 3 minutes left I was still in the game."

"Pierce drained an elbow jumper right in your face." I said instinctively.

"How did you know? Were you watching, John?"

"No, but I've watched the Celtics and every game that fits your description remotely has that in the next part of the story."

"Oh...So, my hands were up, but not sufficiently high to block shots. I mean, after a game of holding them up, my shoulders were completely exhausted. I was still hypnotized, but I wasn't going to hyperextend my shoulder. I wasn't that hypnotized. So, he drained the elbow jumper, and we..."

"...missed a contested 3, and Paul, going the other way, hit an open 3 from the elbow, putting the Celtics up 1 with just 33 seconds left in the game."

"Uh...yeah. That's exactly what happened. Jesus, John."

"Like I said, I've watched the Celtics a lot, Richard. All their games are exactly the same."

"Anyway,... after that Pierce 3, Byron Scott called a quick timeout. Now, I don't remember seeing this, but apparently at this point, the other players told me that Mark Jackson jumped the media box in one hefty leap."

"Oh. That's pretty weird."

Richard again denied this. "Ah, maybe he had some motivation to give us this time."

"He jumped the media box, Richard, during a game he was commentating."

"Yeah," Richard said, "So then...during the timeout, I saw him standing there. He was looking right at me. Mark Jackson was just staring at me from his new position at half-court. He took the ball from one of the officials, ran over to the huddle, and then he started dribbling the ball with...," Richard struggled for the word before deadpanning: "...with malice. Now, at this point everyone in the huddle just clears out, except for me. So, with my back to the basket, I was 'guarding' Mark one on one now. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do, so I just kept my hands up and my feet shuffling. Then, without warning, Mark, who's been staring at my eyes this whole time, abruptly picks up the dribble and lifts the ball above his head in one hand, all in one fluid motion, like a bowler or something. So I, you know, naturally tried to put my hands all the way above my head to shield myself from the ball, but my shoulders wouldn't let me." Richard was still in this weirdly indifferent descriptive mode, like he had blocked all the emotions from this incident out of his conscious memory.

"Then, out of nowhere, with his other hand, Mark tries to punch me in the stomach. I...," Richard stopped short.

"You...didn't, RJ, you didn't..."

"I put my hands down to block the gut punch, John. As soon as Mark saw an opening, he bopped me in the skull with the ball and I strained my shoulder trying to block it."

"What happened? Was he restrained? He didn't get away with that, right?"

"I actually was unconscious at this point. I don't know what all happened, but Mike Fratello was interviewing within the week. I never asked any questions once I knew he was getting out of there."

"Oh, God. How serious was the injury?"

"Actually, I was fine after a couple weeks. Heh. My shoulder took longer to heal than my head. I only had a minor concussion. I moved on with my life, and now for some reason I'm at his season combine."

"That's the most absurd story I've ever heard."

"No, it's not. Lots of people have issues like that. I mean, we were in New Jersey, John. No, I'm completely over that. But you know what is the most absurd story?" Richard pointed to himself, and then to the floor of Oracle Arena as we entered. "This man is an NBA coach, John. That's the punchline of my anecdote." I didn't have a face that sufficed so I just nodded along.

We entered the floor of the arena where Mark Jackson and the Warriors were doing some drills, as some assorted players from other teams (mostly decent rotation players) watched with a mixture of confusion and horror on their faces. I wasn't sure why, until I saw the poor little Warriors.

"Stephen, what happened to your shoulder? Oh my God!" I blurted out. Little point guard and shooting whiz Stephen Curry's shoulders were gigantic and his arms were raised. "Oh, noooo!"

Stephen complained with bitter tears about "never being able to put my hands down without getting bopped."

"This is some sick shit, Richard," I said privately.

"Par for the course~" Richard trailed off.

We just stood there in astonishment, letting sights like David Lee's arms, that seemed to be grotesquely welded to his neck, really sink in. We just watched the Warriors run these sprints, with their lungs forced open by the unnatural pose.

"That's right, we're going to make Golden State into the Defense State, where the Lakers fear to tread. Hand down, man down," Mark Jackson said. Monta Ellis, the shooting guard best described as mercurial and baroque, had a look of undivided hatred towards Jackson in his eyes. Increasing the scope of view, we could see that he was, like the others, crucified by habit.

As we stared with the other players from across the league, Mark Jackson sauntered over and, like a general, annexed us. "Do you think that this is a spectator sport? Get in the sprints, all of you! Arms up!"

Then he addressed Richard alone, "I'm glad to see that you're finally figuring shit out." Fear came into Richard's eyes, the same fear and the babbling it inspired that had cost him a shot at ultimate glory so many times.

"Move!" Mark ordered us.

"Move!" Richard fearfully begged of me, instinctively putting his hands up as high as he could.

We did so, and sprinted for 10 minutes. Eventually I, who was not an athlete, passed out from exhaustion. This was ignored and I stayed on the floor, dodged by the hateful, fearful athletes, raising their hands out of mortal fear. I just watched courtside at the oppressed soldiers' marching as they eventually stopped and settled in at center court, arms still raised.

"We're going to do a defense drill. Now, how many of you have had a defensive drill with me?"

All the Warriors raised their hands, I noted. Then I thought about that and was really confused. Looking a little closer, I realized that they had skewed their shoulders and tilted their hips a bit so that one hand was higher than the other.

"How about someone not on my team right now? That's the whole point of a combine, after all!"

Richard Jefferson raised his hand.

"Oh, good, Richard, that's right. I remember I had a defensive drill with you, back in New Jersey," Mark Jackson said, oblivious to the malice of his pronouncement, "You can be our 'victim', today." Mark said 'victim' in the cutesy, innocuous, ironical way of motivational speakers that says to third-graders and office workers: "Oh, gee whiz, isn't it embarrassing to be made a fool of in front of your peers!" But of course, Richard was afraid. Nonetheless, Richard stepped out, his hands as high as they could go.

Mark Jackson began to dribble the ball he'd been holding. Hypnotically, he dribbled with the practiced malaise and focus of the 3rd all-time assist leader. Richard held his hands up as best he could, shuffling his feet masterfully to make sure the slow-footed Jackson wouldn't overtake him on either side. But, to our collective astonishment, Mark Jackson suddenly made an unfathomably high-arcing 50-foot three-point shot, which took about 20 seconds from shot to landing.

"I guess it's true what they say," Mark Jackson began.

"What?" Richard and I asked.

Then Mark Jackson punched Richard Jefferson in the face, knocking him unconscious immediately. "'Hand down,...'" Before he could finish we instinctively tackled Mark Jackson to the ground and called the cops.

It was 3 days later, and I had gotten a hotel room near the hospital. Richard had woken up, but they were keeping him around for evidence of a concussion. I was in his hospital room as they were beginning the process of discharging him. Apparently, to Richard's great relief, there was no concussion.

Then Mark Jackson stormed into the hospital room.

"Listen, Richard. I'm out as coach. I don't think I deserved it, but what can you do?"

I ironically asked, "Why would they fire you, after all you've done?"

"Well, there was a lockout taking place, and apparently holding a combine for players offended David Stern a lot. Stern threatened to take the team away from my owner if I wasn't removed. The owner told me as much himself."

"What about punching RJ?" I asked, "Did that factor in at all?"

"Well my owner knows how I have to be to make my team the best, so he didn't really care. He's going to hire me back in a week when this all boils over. 'Pay a fine, do your time,' that's how it is in this league. 'Them that's got shall have, them that don't shall lose, so the Bible says, and it still is true'."

"Wait, really? You're going to be a coach again?" I said. Richard was completely indifferent.

"Yeah, I just wish I hadn't had this little setback," Mark turned to Richard. "Richard, how are you? What I did was necessary, but I'm sorry you got hurt. Here's some medicine," Mark Jackson said, holding up a clear, cubical bucket of greenish water.

"What is it?" Richard asked skeptically.

"It's homeopathic face cream, Richard," Mark said. "Your face is still a bit swollen." This was true and kind of insulting all considering, but Richard looked vaguely complimented by the gesture.

"Thanks, Coach. I hope you are able to lead the Warriors to the playoffs this year. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to be discharged from the hospital."

"You're very welcome, Richard." Mark and I went outside the hospital room. I asked Mark what he thought of Richard.

"Tough worker, hard worker, smart thinker. Stops on a dime and gives you back 11 cents. The ideal workman in the league today. Mama, there goes that man."

I gestured towards the medicine. "Is that...is that just lake water?"

"Homeopathic face cream."

"What kind of water did you use to prepare it," skipping the obvious question of who had prepared it.

"It was from the Bay."

"Okay. Well, nice seeing you."

"Hey, kid," Mark said.

"Yeah?"

"What's your name?"

"John."

"I want to hire you as a 2 guard for the Golden State Warriors."

"What in God's name? I'm only 17, which is the least of-"

"19? Listen, commissioner Stern won't even find out."

"I have a birth certif-"

"Listen, I'm sort of a polymath here. Doctor," (he gestured towards the medicine), "Coach, Player, Hypnotist, Color Commentator," he looked at me and smiled, "Birth Certificate Alterer."

"Okay...let's talk about that later. Why in God's name do you want me to play for you?"

"Because even after you passed out from exhaustion, you kept your hands up. You are going to be our lockdown defender. You'll get in better shape so you don't pass out, and we'll put you in for 20 minutes a night."

It's October now. I'm preparing to play the backup two-guard behind Monta Ellis (how could I turn such an offer down?), who regards me as a usurper of sorts and has threatened my livelihood. With shoulders enlarged and the quickness of a jackrabbit, I nevertheless don't fear him as much I fear the unknown unknowns - like the unusual and distinguished Coach of the Year in waiting, Mark Jackson.

"Black Swan" Review, Posnanski Praise

2011-07-13T19:27:00.000-05:00

Review:

I was reading "The Black Swan" on the flight home. It's got some fascinating stuff on the problem of induction, but overall, the author makes so many snarky hits at concepts and ideas he doesn't really bother to completely understand. I'm halfway through, and it seems to be getting a bit better, but I have to see this book so far as infuriating, decontextualized bile in the grand scheme of things that makes a few good points, and I think I will probably read the rest with such a viciously critical eye that I will probably miss any possibility of enlightenment.

You see, the book is about Black Swans, which are defined to be transformative, unexpected, rare events. The one-in-a-million events, like the invention of the wheel, the onset of a war, etc. Now, after a foreword asking us to imagine all such events in our life and in history, the author (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) claims that most of our lives absolutely hinge on these catastrophically powerful Black Swans, that these events are so transformative that they leave in their dust the gradual changes. This is the general assumption of the book, from which all the rest follows. Taleb's history as a trader gives him a wealth of examples to draw upon to illustrate Black Swans, and the consequent failures of predictions. Taleb also finds a number of historical examples: Wars, far from seeming inevitable, actually take almost everyone by surprise in the beginning. We have failures in predictions, and we are governed by unfathomable forces that are unfathomably rare.

Now, this narrative is innocuous enough, and the empiricism and humility and skepticism the narrative seems to engender should render the book fit for any readers looking for marvelous exposition. But there's a problem. Taleb is a shockingly unpleasant human being, who writes of his exploits with the empiricism of a sales pitch, the skepticism of a high-falutin' charlatan, and the feigned, egregiously false-hearted humility of a pick-up artist. Everyone Taleb decides is wrong is a "fool" or a selfish "fraud", or both. Deprecating humor without real self-deprecation. Human nature causes us to be stupid, okay, but simply by his special life story, he's able to be a lot less stupid, and tell us so, is his main point. He takes a broad, often thoughtful, sweep of the history of ideas, which is commendable. However, his reduction of this history of ideas into his self-serving (to the point of arrogance) and others-tearing-down (to the point of narcissism) is disgusting, and it's hard to take his work seriously. People and ideas he doesn't like are trapped by their own delusions, people he does like are polymaths with good senses of humor. The fox is better than the hedgehog, is what he gets from Isaish Berlin's famous dichotomy. Everything is about whether these people and ideas grasp "the point" (which is ostensibly the big idea of whatever Taleb is writing about at the time) and if they don't, then they are overrated and discarded, and if they are not, they are brilliant and underrated. In Taleb's hegemony of the Black Swan, Umberto Eco's library and the idea of a library containing vastly more unread books than read books, trumps all of the worthfulness of Plato ("Platonicity", or a tendency towards reductive categorization, is (often rightfully) mocked mercilessly), Kant, and all of economics. Everything that confirms the Black Swan is elevated above everything that doesn't yet understand the brilliance of the Black Swan.

I see all sorts of praise for books like this that posit "bold", "counter-intuitive", "deep" theories of everything, but so often (I guess, following Nietzsche) it seems like these books are not really about philosophy but about these "geniuses" who go around to interesting and exclusive clubs and have so many interesting and exclusive friends where they get to say all of these interesting and exclusive things in big meetings. They get to pontificate about how they made their fortune (You have no idea how cool it is to make a million dollars in an evening. It's the most placid feeling in the world, because that amount of money allows you to be comfortable without being arrogant. I slept for twelve hours straight, because I had the ultimate comfort of being right!), make funny stories and personal anecdotes that inevitably illustrate some aspect of their main point*, and generally, take 70 pages to make a simple point and make it into a gigantic revelation for the reader. 70 pages, a chunk of text replete with so many arbitrary neologisms (which are nearly always twinned: For every Extremistan is a Mediocristan in which things are the opposite) that it requires its own thesaurus of cute names. This is David Berri except on subjects that actually matter to our day-to-day lives, without an associated rise in gravitas, respect, and humility with the importance of his subject.

* - PARODY WARNING AHEAD: But of course, Antoinette's error was that she was thinking with One Head. After reading this book, one would hope she would learn to think with Zero Heads next time and approach the problem of poverty with an open mind. It's too bad she learned her lesson so suddenly, without the possibility!

Appendix:

The above was just, like, my opinion, man, and I think it's kind of wrong to leave an opinion without any context. So let me give you an example of Taleb's dismissive arrogance: The book claims that use of the Bell Curve (i.e. the Gaussian normal curve) by sociologists and economists is a fraud. It gives predictions that use this curve the weighty title "Great Intellectual Fraud". It names this concept in the forward, and, after 200+ pages, is still motioning towards a magical "Chapter Sixteen" in which all of this vitriol will be explained as important, thoughtful, and necessary. Now, I'm fairly certain this Chapter Sixteen exists, given that I'm starting Chapter Fourteen after some 50000 prior words in which the order of words and chapters were preserved. But I don't know if it really matters of Chapter Sixteen exists, because (assuming I'm a reader only vaguely familiar with the term) I've been given dozens of psychological "anchors" attempting to endear me to this author and to make the idea of this "bell curve as fraud" idea incredibly palatable and even inevitable, without a slight bit of explanation or evidence other than the credibility of the author. I've been rhetorically set up for an explanation. For someone so keen to point out the narrative fallacy (apologizing for the central contradiction of the book's subject matter in the foreword) and the psychological ability to lead people on to bad conclusions, this is inexcusable leading on and narrative forming. If something is a Great Intellectual Fraud, then its own demerits by a clear-headed author should clearly expose this fraudulence.

Dozens of pejorative references to the bell curve, strangely indifferent references to Gauss (empiricism? Try Gauss and his friends literally climbed mountains to measure the curvature of the Earth.), and dozens of glowing references to people that dislike the Bell Curve. This is where I sit at the gates of Chapter Sixteen. Benoit Mandelbrot is given more play than Gauss. Mandelbrot, Pareto, that guy who wrote about the Pareto distribution, even fucking Zipf are given more play than Gauss in the history of ideas, just because Taleb (the skeptical empiricist who seemingly hadn't been exposed to Bayesian statistics before he wrote a book about probability and Platonic fallacies) doesn't like the way people use the normal distribution instead of his favorite distributions in which certain things are rare but important instead of banal and reducible.

You know what? I took stats: The normal curve does get too much play in introductory treatments, but it has nothing to do with rare events being too frequent (and therefore, for example, Pareto distributions therefore being preferable to normal distributions), any more than the traditional college emphasis on calculus has to do with "things, in general, actually being too discrete", which is essentially Taleb's analogous point with the normal curve.

The simplest reason the normal curve gets so much play is not because of a conspiracy of arrogant intellectuals. It's because of the Central Limit Theorem, which states that if you do the same thing a bunch of times (called trials) and you average the results you get a normal curve around the mean of what you did with a variance that relates to the variance of the individual trial is inversely proportional to the sample size. The variance heads to zero as you conduct infinitely many trials. If you don't know much statistics or much supplementary mathematics, but still have a lot to offer an institution, the CLT gives you an easy set of tools based on easily statable assumptions. Normality is just the mathematical form the tools happen to take. If researchers aren't using it well, I see no reason why they wouldn't butcher the use of Taleb's own favorite distributions, with as much consternation to the author. They still wouldn't think outside the "Platonic" box. They still wouldn't grasp the wonder of the void.

Now, if we don't know much statistics, and we're projecting complex things like the economy, should we probably say something about that? Should we say that we're using the normal distribution because it seems to make sense as a prior for such-and-such a reason? Should we talk about the error bars, and the limited descriptive power of what it is that we're predicting? Should we be a little more humble about the 400-page legislation's proposed impact on the 300 million person economy, if we're using not-very-incisive-nor-infallible tools? Yes, of course we should. Should we be a little humbler about the probability of the biopsy being cancer, and be more cautious with the intuitive probabilitistic bounds we place on statistics? Should we be more aware of our psychological limitations? Yes, of course we should.

But the CLT is a brilliant theorem which ties together the continuous and the discrete, makes the interpretation of certain ubiquitous datasets trivially easy, and in its most general form is a staggeringly gigantic mathematical statement at which I can only smile shake my humble head in ignorance. It makes unfathomable dimensionality comprehensible to people that don't have much mathematical sophistication, and gives people with such sophistication a much richer toolset. That humanity imperfectly grasps this gift is not evidence that we need to drop it. That the CLT is the one thing keeping humanity from grasping the Void of Buddhism (so to speak) is laughable. That it's one of many things keeping humanity from the Void is equally laughable, but also easy to disguise behind the talents of a good author. It is a gift, from God, mathematics, empiricism, or a Black Swan. The CLT is the shit that works, and we have to recognize it.

It's just given a little bit too much play. And it's cool to just say that, I think. I don't know that academics would be so offended by just saying that.

God, it feels like I'm writing an obituary for Taleb here, like the dead are humming around me as I speak ill of them, so little respect do I have for how he has spent his vital mind in banal self-serving narratives. God, it's hard for a reviewer not to mirror the form of the work under consideration, and Taleb's text is a dismal collection of dismal opinions brightened up by clarity and darkened by hateful rhetoric, to a picture of a man, and I guess my sense now was that, all together, this was a picture of spiritual death.

I mean, it just turns into a tally at some point: Taleb actually calls the "last thinking mathematician" Poincare. I'll just list Grothendieck (and, what the hell, John Baez, too) and his unimaginably vast creativity and conscience, in response to this disgusting ignorance and bitterness, leaving a casual search of mathematical philosophy to the reader.* It's glaring ignorance and arrogant foolishness. For someone that calls so many people "frauds" and "foolish" it's amazing how little domain knowledge is required to refute so many of his snarky asides.

* - Wikipedia. In the meantime, some of Taleb's other crimes against art: When introduced to the intractability of the three-body problem, he chastises mathematicians who build more complex models to deal with the complexity encountered instead of giving up and dealing with the problems of ineffable complexity, claiming they "missed the point" of the thought experiment. He rediscovers Bayesian interpretation of probability in a clumsy section claiming that imperfect knowledge about a variable is functionally equivalent to that variable being random (a philosophy which has already been well-formalized into a useful branch of statistics called Bayesian statistics). He uses a long thought experiment about a turkey's lifespan of 1000 days of feeding followed by Thanksgiving to illustrate the failure of linear models (so naive of that turkey), and in an unrelated section chastises a hypothetical "statistician who works for a bank". The statistician's crime? Being a "nerd" who lives a 9-to-5 life and declares that the 100th head has a 50% chance of coming up after 99 heads. He is dismissed as foolish, compared to a street-smart Manhattan version of Rush's version of Tom Sawyer.

Enough of that:

But enough of that. I want to talk about something less unpleasant. Joe Posnanski is the Tim Duncan of sportswriters.

It should be hard to write a blog when your reader's vocalization of your column is - like Duncan's voice - a syrupy lilt that resembles the serenity of a dribble in its syllabic consistency and its airy ambience.

It should be hard to write a blog when you are free - like Duncan is - from the egotistical tearing down of sports figures (including competitors), preferring instead the rare censure and the common praise.

It should be hard to write a blog when you do the same thing every time - like Duncan does - but this is not actually true of either Duncan or Posnanski. Within the apparent simplicity of a column or a move springs the accumulated thoughts and passions of a life well-spent, distilled into the end result with surreal levels of craft and intelligence.

Linking to one of his columns is pointless, just like linking to a film of Duncan highlights: You'll understand his greatness, but you won't understand why. Start at the most recent and work your way back, or google whatever subject you can think of in sports. That's how the rest of us found him, and none of us have any regrets about it.

"The Decision" - One Year Later

2011-07-09T18:43:00.001-05:00

What is there left to say about "The Decision"? What to say hasn't already been said? How can I lure readers into this contrarian death trap of tedious arguments and insidious intent, focusing especially on Richard Jefferson, that I call a weblog? Hmm....

Well, personally I think LeBron made a bad decision in leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers, but "The Decision" was a fantastic, brilliant marketing move that made him the talk of the town for probably the rest of his career. He certainly ended all those "LeBron/Kobe" arguments that people were actually having in 2010. It was a gigantic way of saying to him, "Kobe, listen: you're a great player, but no general manager on Earth would want you over LeBron right now for next year. Where LeBron chooses to go will determine the state of the league for the next decade. You will not understand this, Kobe. It's alright."

Now, in spite of this successful media gamble, and in spite of LeBron inarguably embracing the team concept over selfishness, he was hated on, by, naturally, people born and bred to hate things. He was hated on by such inverse-latchers-on for his pink plaid shirt and his unfortunate decision to be announced first (and therefore most important) in the subsequent Heat parade (another media coup, but Wade's relegation to the end of the Big Three in the parade showed unbearable narcissism by James). This media blunder would haunt James, much like Vlade Divac in "Once Brothers," but there was basketball to play and they were players that played basketball in Miami, now, because of "The Decision", which happened exactly one year ago.

The Heat got off to a blistering start in which they remarkably won more games than they lost despite constantly being flattered and adored by the sports media empire ESPN and simultaneously told that they were being hated on. This contradiction reached its zenith when the blog devoted to the beloved team was filled with talking about how they were hated, and if certain people derived pleasure from hating on them, or if these people actually wanted them to succeed, but begrudgingly, but actually hated the blog that was devoted to them, instead, or, finally, if these people were actually genetically born and bred (like the haters) not to be boxed in by media empires, to instinctively rebel against any media narrative floated their way, no matter how convoluted it made their day-to-day lives, not to mention the headlines! Now, by winning more basketball games than they lost they showed that they could hang in this league of basketball, and the league, impressed, gave way to them, and the team from Miami scrapped its way to unexpected winning streak after unexpected winning streaks. Then, in a fluke only explainable by basic laws of chance or the often-serious matchup problems associated with having three workable players in a game of five against five, the Heat dropped five close games in a row, and were (get this) psychoanalyzed by the media as unable to close games! Get it? They couldn't win CLOSE GAMES, so now they couldn't CLOSE GAMES. In a cruel gesture of deliberate incomprehension, ESPN had turned on them! But luckily, their earlier successes had created further adoration in the masses of fans, and even some begrudging haters saying maybe this decade won't be so bad, until their born and bred habits of hate boiled to the surface once more at another target.

Of course, even despite winning the fans over once and for all, they had to contend with several other teams in the competitive sport of basketball, invented by Dr. James Naismith as a form of soccer for the club-footed and the scurvy-ridden. After comfortably winning out all of the rest of the games in their season, it was playoff time. Then, the Heat stormed through a bunch of injured teams straight to the Finals, proving finally that all that had stood in their way in the past was the perfect health of their opponents. In an interesting subplot, Derrick Rose of the Bulls, who had been named MVP largely because the cautious media voters had recognized LeBron's team sacrifice in moving to Miami and didn't want to pump him up with an individual award of merit that he had clearly transcended. Rose was known for his selfishness, and LeBron was therefore committed to showing Derrick Rose what a real team could do when faced with incredible individual talent. The Heat dominated the selfish Bulls, proving that the real MVP was Team Spirit all along.

Then came the Finals. The hated Mavericks, long known for their selfish billionaire owner Mark Cuban, famously sought to take not only the title, but also the memory of having played for the title. Nefarious, but ultimately short-sighted, as Cuban's psychological work had instead given researchers powerful statistical tools for determining the growth of certain degenerative neurological disorders, saving thousands. Cuban never seemed to grasp the irony of saving memories through a plot to destroy them...

But that is an aside. The hated Mavericks, despite their institutional shortcomings, boasted an unfair frontcourt and a sneaky backcourt. Unlike the gallant Heat, who traveled in groups of three, the classless Mavericks would gang up on teams with five, sometimes six players (I see you, Dwane Casey), and ask their favorite rappers to fight their battles for them. Unfortunately, all the trickery seemed to work, and a particularly clever smoke-and-mirrors routine at the end of Game 2 convinced the Heat they were young children who had had a lot of cough syrup and plenty to eat and just needed some sleep to fight off but to their surprise THE GAME WAS STILL ON and they realized the truth just in time to realize it was too late. And the Mavericks won the series in six games, destroying America's confidence in teamwork and promoting radical individualist ideologies.

The End.

Oh, and Chris Bosh was the other one.

Travel Blog Day 20 - On hiking

2011-07-09T10:43:00.000-05:00

I don't know if I'm cut out for traveling at this point in my life. I like to do exciting things, I guess, but I also know that I feel a sort of guilt about luxury, especially the unearned luxury of merely being born into my family. Especially luxury in a hiatus of searching for a career. I feel a strong sense of guilt over this trip, and my aunt casually telling me to spend more and do more varying things with this time ("You only live once") only makes the guilt stronger, especially as she tells me about how "one of her conditions" for this trip is to start over from a disappointed career as an artist. Now, spending money isn't going to help either of our coming job searches, but, then again, wasting a trip on hotel rooms seems worse. That's why my favorite outdoors pastime is probably hiking (on this trip, usually on straightforward paths or even along roads cutting across the mountains of Italy and Greece).

There are no airs in hiking, no real worries about how I'm dressed or groomed. There are no veneers of authenticity, no pretenses of locality, no luxury, and most of all, no forgetting myself and no escaping myself, neither of which I want. Just a couple buses at beginning and end, some fraction of a marathon's distance taken at 3 of 4 miles an hour (with frequent pauses), some fun sights for my eyes and fun grades for my feet. I don't need scuba dives, or gondoliers, or whistling a happy tune at a bar late to give me what could only equal the ecstasy, engagement, fatigue, and meditation that hiking can.

Quick thought on Quatrain LI from Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat

2011-07-09T09:29:00.000-05:00

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it

-- Omar Khayyam (from Edward Fitzgerald's famous translation of Khayyam's Rubaiyat)

One of my favorite parts of this verse (besides, you know, being an absolutely perfect four-line poem with an absolutely affecting image) is how metrically complex the first two lines are. I'm going to go into this, but first look at the last two lines:

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it

Absolutely straightforward Iambic pentameter. With the stresses:

Shall LURE it BACK to CAN-cel HALF a LINE
nor ALL thy TEARS wash OUT a WORD of IT.

There is only one polysyllabic word, with emphasis clearly fitting the blank verse. Sure, the "it" right at the end is a bit weak, only stressed because it's at the end and because of the "WRIT/WIT/IT" rhyme of the quatrain form, but basically the only ways to pronounce this in English either:

1) Keep all the stressed syllables as above but add stress to some of the unstressed syllables.
OR
2) Keep all the unstressed syllables but remove stress from some of the stressed syllables.

What's more, you can say the whole of the two lines in one or two phrases. It might sound awkward to start with "Shall" and "Nor" but the third line leads into the fourth pretty well with just a single, small pause. "ba-DOOM ba-DOOM, ba-DOOM, etc." It's like a drumbeat or a limerick. There aren't any tricks, just a simple metrical patter. I'm a poetry layman, but I think what I'm saying is simple: it's hard to get much more straightforward as blank verse than the last two lines (maybe replace IT with THAT, I suppose, heh). They're beautiful lines, especially in the context of the poem, but they're strikingly simple metrically.

Now, finally, let's check out those first two lines:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

.

If it's not too embarrassing, try and say that out aloud, or, what's even more fun, imagine yourself saying the lines aloud. Note the more complex structure of stressed syllables that still form Iambic feet, but now have several polysyllabic words, several "tricky" unstressed syllables ("thy PI-e-TY", "and, HAVing WRIT,"), and several pauses unrelated to the line. Those colons make you stop, right (and to a lesser extent, the commas)? You stop after 6 syllables, right?, and then, (possibly) instead of stopping after the incomplete "and, having writ," you the reader rather go to the next line's first foot: "Moves on". Then, making yet another detour of a pause, you go to the final eight syllables. These eight syllables ("Nor all thy piety nor wit") work as an unbroken phrase, a phrase which itself seems to flow right into the third line with an incomplete thought. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think I'm adding anything specious here. The punctuation demands this type of phrasing. Either you say these two ten-syllable (Iambic pentameter) lines as three phrases (containing six, then, six, then eight syllables, respectively) or as four phrases (six, four, two, eight). That's pretty complex, disoriented, and makes the couplet even more impressive, considering that in two lines, Khayyam (and Fitzgerald) also create all of the set-up necessary for the second couplet's gigantic thematic statement.

In this simple (but reasonable) metrical analysis, the phrases in this quatrain are, more or less, 6-6-8-10-10 or 6-6-18-10 syllables long, even though the rhyme scheme falls on the 10th, 20th, and 40th syllables. So you have a snake with two tails which converge as you follow them up to the head. You have this driving rhythm of the blank verse which delineates the ultimate unit of time (Iambic feet are like heartbeats; ba-DOOM, ba-DOOM, ba-DOOM) and your larger units of time (the phrases) and your larger units of word (lines) are completely disjoint for these first two lines. They meet on the downbeat of the Iambic feet, and arguably at the end of the first line, sure, but only in a way that denies any real unity. Then, after what feels like many lines (for we've heard many phrases and pauses already after just two short lines), the poem's measures of time and words come together, like a jazz ensemble solving a polyrhythm, into one unbroken unity and simplicity of phrases that grow ever longer and ever more exacting.

I don't know that I am qualified to say more, except that this is an exhausting masterpiece of a four-line poem that promises an eternity beyond the poem as the moving finger continues to write, for the phrases will grow at once beyond the ten syllables of a line first to phrases that mark the entirety of poems, then to the entirety of rambling epics, then to phrases lasting years, lasting lives, lasting civilizations, then to a single phrase lasting an eternity, exacting a measure of spirit from the reader in each metric foot, feet all of us at some point lose the vitality to outrun. Oh, how the artless and the guileless and the gnashing and the regretful will unite in the oblivion's beat of infinity's drums, heedless to our words, our deepest longing, our cleverest wit, our bitterest tears of regret.

As a Royal Guru once said...

2011-07-08T10:17:00.000-05:00

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

-T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think about it.

-A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh

Okay, I've dissed Richard Jefferson enough. This is a mistake, and, as per my motto*, I would like to fix this mistake. As ridiculous as he is, we cannot prey on phantoms just because we are hungry. RJ 2.0 (as some Spurs fans first enthusiastically, than mockingly, titled his promising 2010-11) didn't exactly bring us to the promised land; in fact, he looked lost in the Memphis series, and indeed, the whole time after the All-Star break, he was a less efficient, less influential part of the Spurs on both ends. Sure, he had his place in the starting lineup, but after Tim's injury (and doubly so after Manu's at the end) he just did not have a place on the team. The reasons for this are several, most of them federal: List while I list.

*-"Never make mistakes, always come correct."

-His 3-point accuracy went up but the moments of spacing for him to shoot became scarcer, his shot attempts were there but (from a combination of fatigue and injury) the Spurs' offensive execution was lagging a bit, and RJ wasn't getting the easier baskets at the rim anymore, and his overall FG% went down in a hurry. He was shooting late in the shot clock more, he was settling for jump shots, and making doomed drives that no one in any stadium, even Oracle, thought would result in a basket.

-When Tim Duncan's immaculate defensive rotations went away with his injury and even after his return (I speculate due to a clipped recuperation), so did much of the Spurs' defensive presence. Now, RJ was not a great, creative defender at any point during the season, but with Tim Duncan making great rotations game after game, it's (as a general rule) much easier to be a solid wing defender. "Help will arrive, RJ. Don't gamble, RJ. Rotate out to the 3-point shooter when such-and-such conditions are met, RJ." Antonio McDyess and Manu Ginobili were good, even great, on defense, as likely to be in the right spot as anyone (George Hill was a good man-to-man stopper with his long wingspan too), and the Spurs' success before the All-Star break had much to do with this very good (if not altogether great) defense.

But with Tim out and then at less than full strength, the Spurs were consistently putting more non-defenders than defenders on the court, especially when you factor in that RJ moved from solid wing to defensive liability, category-wise. So, now your team has Dejuan Blair, Richard Jefferson, Matt Bonner, and Tony Parker receiving borderline-starter minutes, and two of your three best "creator-type" (if that makes sense) defensive players are seriously playing at less than full strength (by the way, Sean Elliott's batshit Willis Reed comparisons weren't so awful once we learned the extent of Manu's injury), you're not going to be a defensive team.

Now, because you dislike RJ's game as much as I do (why else would you be reading this blog?), you might ask, "That's all right and good, but aren't both the offensive and defensive breakdowns essentially RJ's fault to some extent? Can't we hold him accountable for his limitations as a creator on both ends, and his inability to adapt to new situations?" Yeah, that's true, but from last summer, he was being groomed as a certain type of role player who would shoot 3's, be a good wing defender, and pass the ball to other 3-point specialists (or Manu, the basketball specialist) who were lined up behind the arc. His goals coming into this season were, being almost exhaustive: to get open for catch-and-shoot 3's, draw defenders in behind the arc to create a catch-and-shoot opportunity for someone else behind the arc, sometimes (usually in a set play) to get open under the net for an oop or a layup, and on defense, to be a not-exactly-stifling-but-solid-enough wing player. It was, I have to say, beautiful basketball. Pythagorean basketball, balanced, well-proportioned, largely unstoppable.

When all of these things collapsed for the Spurs, all of Richard's training and education and experience over the past 8 months became irrelevant, but (for we have to come correct here) not before playing the perfect role player to Duncan's star in helping the Spurs dominate the league before the All-Star Break. Not every player has to be a dynamic, idealized athlete, and the expectation is ridiculous, only extant because of the Spurs' tendency to find and hold onto such players with ridiculous consistency. To hold RJ accountable for essentially not being as intelligent and immediately adaptable a baller as Tim Duncan or Manu is unfair. He did exactly what was expected of him, and circumstances conspired to make what he did irrelevant. He didn't rise above, but neither do most people faced with hardship of any kind. Most people just get by, with an occasional affectionate look to what once nearly was theirs. RJ's just average as an athlete, able to do a couple things right and doing them with world-class capability, and the sooner we accept that the sooner we can be surprised by circumstances coming together for his brand of average to rule over us all, like a cross falling from the sky, form-fitting his aging shoulders. And then we will worship what is average, idealize it, and God of Transition Years will bless us with a fif title. I'm going to buy an expensive champagne for the occasion, which I will promptly mix with Coca-Cola upon hearing the news. I'll try to pour one out for Kobe too, if I can be bothered to go outside or near any kind of running water when it happens.

Travel Blog Day 17: Two Gorge-ous Hallucinations

2011-07-06T16:28:00.000-05:00

I checked the view count earlier today and apparently Free Darko linked to my ridiculous Burl Ives/Free Darko fiction. Heh.

Blogging's a funny business: One day you're blogging about some gibberish that passes through your head as randomly as a cloud in a dream over the sycamore tress, the next day (or year) you are sanctimoniously defending these same opinions in an overwrought second blog that attests to the consistency of your identity, the solemn consideration with which you decided to pit a quite-popular blogger who pairs basketball and critical theory against a legendary folk singer known for his off-beat characters that encapsulate the futility and the cynical artistry of the aristrocratic American gentry in a satirical screed against the former which, unbeknownst to me at the time, actually fails miserably to make this juxtaposition correctly, damns my narrator (the third character) of mental violence and sadomasochistic machismo, and ends up giving a feeble and "badass" adolescent-hero-figure voice to the legitimately impenentrable and difficult vocal genius Burl Ives. Yes, blogging's a funny business indeed. Yeah, blogging will certainly teach your grandmother to suck eggs, alright.

Listen, Nathan, I'm gonna have to cut this entry short: Y'all cain't see it, but Alex's eyes rolled back, a-bleedin' like a sieve, and he started speaking in tongues that I ain't ever heard in my time on Earth and even.. well, the other place, heh. I guess it's all that Borges fella he's been a-readin'. It infected him like the damn hell plague back in '86, heh. I told him all that porin' over authors damn-nigh sixteen hours a day would hurt his eyes, but he didn't believe me. You should see him, Nathan. It's gruesome. But he'll be alright, else I wouldn't be a-finna chucklin' later with him. I'm pouring some salt from his damn martini over the eyes, yes sir, I guess something from a martini can actually have a damn effect. I'd some bad problems with the drinkin' once before, but that was nothing to do with a damn martini which damned if it does a damn thing. Yeah, there, he's waking up. Just needed some salt from a martini in his eyes. Imagine that, I say, imagine that. Eh heh heh eh heh, I say, eh heh.

Alright, I'm back. Where was I. Yeah, okay, so apparently I didn't write the last paragraph. I wonder why that is. Huh. Oh, okay. Yeah, Burl, that's more like Foghorn Leghorn near the end, not the wise but emotionally distant patriarch of Tennessee Williams in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof". That's not realistic monologue, and some of the worst dialect writing this Earth has ever seen. That said, if you really want, I could go back to "The Big Country" and look at the shotgun scene again, but really, I feel like I've internalized everything you wanted to tell me, Burl, even if I can't immediately imitate you. I mean, I'm not obsessed, I just watched your films and listened to any damn album I could get my hands on! What more can I say? But yeah, no, that's never happened before where you took over like that. And right in the middle of a blog entry. Huh. It's weird.

But you know what? Internalizing half of Burl Ives sends you somewhere entirely new, perhaps into visions, perhaps into tongues, perhaps into song. Sure, you counter, internalizing half of Burl Ives might merely be reconfirming some of your opinions, and you might only be awakening a common spiritual lineage between the two of you, the half of Burl Ives that lives inside you. But even here is an awakening, and that's my point: there has to be some kind of change. No one is born like Burl Ives, or educated to be like Burl Ives. He's like one of the great philosophers. It takes a society and a statistical fluke and some arid mountains of private suffering to develop such a one. A birth, an education, a family, a stark moment and a stark hour of suffering against the backdrop of something affirmative and distinct from suffering, that is what is needed to make a Burl Ives. No one but Burl Ives can be Burl Ives and therefore, to internalize Burl Ives is to make yourself essentially different from who you were, either more generic or more singular, but in terms of becoming Burl Ives, you have only climbed a great distance up an infinitely high mountain. It's an endless journey, no matter how much time you are willing to devote to the task, because while you can understand his every word, you can't, even theoretically, grasp what it means without fundamentally altering your essence. And your essence, while seeming sort of nebulous and hand-wavy as a term, is something that contains your past, your present, and all your possible futures as soon as it touches down onto where you are placed. Perhaps that's a good enough definition of essence, right there.

And maybe this thought experiment of internalizing Burl Ives reveals precisely my problem with Shoals, the thought experiment that first hallucinated the juxtaposition and conflict in the first place. Internalizing half of Shoals, as all his readers who are bloggers have done to some greater or lesser fraction, does nothing except to alter these people to be bloggers that are exactly halfway between themselves and Shoals, a smooth, if multidimensional, continuum of selves. It doesn't change their essence. They could stop reading Shoals and they would go back exactly to the way they were in a timeframe that could be practically predicted by a psychologist and a statistician working. If one could read his thoughts and consider (in a sort of eternity) the whole of Shoals, one could completely internalize him without changing one iota of one's essence. (Personally, I'd probably be a bit cattier, snippier, and better and more apt at comparing something to Avon Barksdale) No possible futures have been altered when you read him. You go on with your life, having accepted his theories, beliefs, and characterizations, or having rejected them. The columns don't provoke enlightenment or its more disturbing cousins so much as they provoke a palatable cross between meditation and gossip which is ephemereal and shallow and able to be (and often is) undone by Shoals himself with another later column of similar aspect. It's mostly longform small talk, whether the subject is fashion, the "We Believe" Warriors, or racism in America.

Now, there's nothing wrong with this, and in the book of life perhaps I'm hardly "deep" in this way, either (I've probably made 10 posts on Richard Jefferson, for God's sake). But God, I just wish there was something more there, Shoals. Give us the "unspeakably injured" moments a little more often. Write for your readers the atomic bombs inside the skulls of the fifties that have been turned into banal commodities on album covers. Let the hedgehog out and prick your audience with more than the occasional annoyance of disagreement. Let the three image form become a montage that changes a randomly selected image on Free Darko imperceptibly, every hour on the hour. Buy into one of those Godawful artistic manifestos of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, namedrop all its adherents, and then pretend you have never heard of any of them in a week. Make alterations to the basketball court and see which ones alter your pick for MVP. Then, really shock us, Shoals. Really take your way of looking at things and take it as far as it can go. The pen doesn't have to end at the bottom of the page. Look at Amar'e. He let the ink from his pen continue on to stain and reappropriate his skin, becoming who he is, in all his falseness, banality, and something ridiculously approximating truth. Amar'e is someone that a misguided teenager could aspire to be, and make some big mistakes. Play basketball with a phrenological head and then write as if the head had been your own. Free Free Darko. Make yourself (if only as an artist) someone that is impossible to internalize and irresistable to attempt. Climb the writer's mountain, strive for the infinite top and give us the impossible views, instead of setting up palatable base camps with reasonable views. Hold on, just a moment, heh. I have to wake my friend Alex with some salt from this martini.

Okay, I'm back. What did I miss? Oh, God, stark idealization of Shoals, what are you doing there? God damn it, first Burl Ives and now this. Yeah, I don't agree with all of that, for sure, and I think that this piece is even odder and problematic than the last one. Something that starts a fire in the soul can't just be extinguished but with another Molotov, I guess. Hmm, I think...I'm going to post this, take a nice little nap, wake up and explore the Ios-Fira trail real early tomorrow. 9 miles or something, I think. But yeah, sorry about this piece. I don't know why I'm having these visions! Such strange water in Santorini! I guess it didn't help that I ate an entire pizza and some baklava with 1.5 liters of water in one sitting, either~. Uh...I guess Day 17's a wrap! Heh.

--Alex

Incredibly Readable and Confusingly Enthusiastic Tripe

2011-07-05T20:30:00.000-05:00

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

--Omar Khayyam

After that pretty negative post on the 2010 Finals, it's only natural that I would have more negative things to say. Or, it's only natural that I would have something overly positive to say about some other Finals. I don't know what's natural anymore, but I know it's the second one that's happening.

How about 2011: That was a pretty good Finals. Let's associate series with Radiohead songs. Whereas the 2010 Finals was the series of "No Surprises", and the Spurs-Grizzlies series was a "Let Down" (I guess OKC-LAL last year was "Morning Bell"?) the 2011 Finals had "Everything in its Right Place" (you only need the title to get these). Wherea$ the 2006 Final$ were more like "Electioneering" (amirite?).

I'm starting to exhaust my Radiohead knowledge. Let's switch gears to Bob Marley songs. Dirk's return to the Finals and subsequent victory were a prime example of "Coming in from the Cold". LeBron was guarded by "Three Little Birds" into a decent but unspectacular offensive performance throughout the series, and his defense, while often tremendous, was not DPOY level. He didn't teach us "How to Disappear Completely" in the crucial Game 4, (Radiohead) but he certainly laid down "The Foundations"*. And therefore a series which seemed like it should have been "Burnin' and Lootin'" for the Heat ended with comebacks that left them "Waiting in Vain" for the buzzer in what seemed like inevitable victories, right until they weren't. And thus did the Mavericks make their unlikely "Exodus" from games that had seemed lost. "Get Up Stand Up," Mavericks, for you have "Satisfied My Soul" in beating the hated Miami Heat. Is "Not a Real City" a Bob Marley song? Because that's something I'd like to say about Miami to its fans, in a closing, arbitrarily petty blow completely directed by sports I'm sure you're all very nice people?

* - This is actually the band that did the song "Build Me Up Buttercup"

It was a really good series. Now, I love star turns, and part of me (maybe part of everyone, represented here by Joe Posnanski) wanted LeBron to utterly dominate on both ends like he had against Chicago and Boston, even despite the tonedeaf arrogance of "The Decision" and the subsequent parade. But somehow, the image of Dwyane Wade carrying a team that suddenly seemed like the overmatched Nets of Jason Kidd's heyday lends a sort of "Ender's Game" series's* "he was the real hero all along" kind of narrative credibility to the Heat's overtalented arrogance. It's ironic (well, ironic ignoring the collective greatness in the Mavericks' organization), but the Heat actually looked like the damaged team, and the damage actually gave the team some respect to these eyes. I guess they answered the question "Could You Be Loved?" originally posed in the title of a Bob Marley song.

* - Weirdly, but also completely reasonably, Kobe Bryant was apparently obsessed with "Ender's Game" in high school.

From the Mavericks' perspective, they won in a way that was incredibly respectable. After the Dirk injury during the season left them unable to score for games at a time, I think most of us saw the Mavericks' core as a group of talented veterans, but frankly, barely a playoff team. But they proved us wrong, game after game. They wouldn't have gotten there (or even to 40 wins) without Dirk, it's true. But Dirk couldn't buy a shot in much of Games 4 and 6*, and Jason Terry and JJ Barea's fourth quarter play (as well as Jason Kidd's perfect anchoring at the point) drove so many of the great comebacks that the Mavericks made in the postseason. Tyson Chandler's defense, the fancy (seemingly unguardable) pick and rolls started by Dirk late in the game, an offense with a seemingly inexhausitible supply of six-minute role players, Brian Cardinal matching Juwan Howard foul for flagrant foul, and so on, created a truly special series from the whole of a very top-heavy team.

* - Incredibly, Dirk's first truly bad game of the last three rounds (I didn't watch enough of POR-DAL to know) of the postseason occurred during an illness, and he still managed to hit the game-winner. But as great as it was, for the first three quarters, Dirk was "Treefingers" (we're back to Radiohead)

I think what made the series special was the narrative most of us came with that posited the inevitability of the Heat "turning it on sometime and taking the series for good," as this "sometime" got pushed back to game 5, then to game 6, then to game 7, and thence to the final realization that the Mavericks had an answer to everything the Heat could turn on, except LeBron. And in the end, LeBron, like a iterative process or a spinning wheel or a revelation, is showing us that this unknown "sometime in the future" is always already a part of his present, as inextricable from his soul as his past. Maybe this is true of all of us, that our present contains both our broken ideals and our actual futures, but it wouldn't necessarily be the overriding theme in our book of life, just as our core values aren't necessarily our ideals.

Unfortunately for LeBron, sports has an ideal as its core value, every series has to end at some point, and apparently this ideal was broken from him and this series ended before his time could ever arrive. Far from hating them, as they're so fond of saying, we have before us only this sympathetic facade of greatness that wants so bad to affirm the rest of the construction. In our own yearning and defensiveness we recognize theirs and year after failed year, a Heat title perhaps becomes palatable and then desired, for we also desire that, for one shining, possible moment, our own facades can at once unmake our flaws and limitations and give us an image of God not on our bread or in the patterns of stars but in our souls, a mark of redemption that shall not be tampered with even if the rest of the way is suffering and ridicule. Oh, God bless us all!

That said, I still think that I'd want the Spurs to win every year from this point on, and that would be much better than the Heat even once. In fact, maybe all that talk of tragedy and narrative gets trumped by the simple fact that they're the Heat, and other teams are the Blazers, Spurs, Thunder, Jazz, Pacers (much respect, George Hill), Bulls, God...even Lakers and Celtics, I guess...and still other teams that are not the Heat and would be better for most of us if they won. Personally, if the Spurs could win just once or twice, that would be nice, and would suffice. That would be great "Exit Music (for a Tim)".

Travel Blog - Day 12: An American in Paros

2011-07-03T19:04:00.001-05:00

In one of the more blasphemous tracts extracted from the post-Pentagon papers of 2018, the time-traveler Oscar "Mercury" Robertson slipped this line into an analysis of the great lockout of 2011:

There is no rebirth. There is no lockout. There is no God.

Whether it's right or wrong (following Thucydides), the owners and players have more bargaining power than the fans, and so they will do what they can, as the fans suffer what we must. But I think this can give us a lens for appreciating the lockout just as we might appreciate a playoff series, as I'll try to explain.

You see...back in 2010, when the Lakers played the Celtics in the Finals, for most fans, the season was over. Either of the most banal, sketchiest contenders would prevail. And it was, as it had to be, the most cynical series that I have ever witnessed. To describe it is to encapsulate it: Kobe took over for a third quarter and left his teammates to wither and rot in the fourth quarter. Ray Allen shot seven threes in a half, but (seemingly psychologically) struggled the rest of the series and ended up right around average. Rajon Rondo probably got an obscene statline in a couple games because of a tremendous third quarter in which he was ubiquitous. The home team got a free throw disparity and won by a margin comfortably fitting this free throw disparity. Pau Gasol was and is less talented than Kobe but because he rebounded and had better percentages he probably played more effectively. When Kobe rebounded and forced his way into the lane all of this became more forgivable and his team won Game 7. Phil Jackson and Doc Rivers were calm and balanced. Kevin Garnett got beaten by Pau Gasol. Etc. Etc.

Now, none of this is to say the series was bad by any stretch. It was entertaining. But the winner was going to be the team with the preponderance of good players, having little to nothing to do with spectacle, style, or artistry. The team with better matchups and better luck was going to win.* Both teams were dedicated, and no team had any real sort of spark plug, or some sort of wild card (there were no really unlikely quarter or game or series MVPs. Glen Davis and Nate Robinson were kind of funny that one time, but that was more like a farcical whim than a substantive fact about the series) The playing of the series was like the writing of a book that has already been written. A living proof of Ecclesiastes. Even though we didn't know the winner, we knew the book had been written already, and it wasn't a novel or even a fun documentary series. It was just a stat sheet with a couple stochastic graphs that statisticians would roll their eyes at. Competitive advantage distilled to its most banal and least sophisticated form. A boxing match that might be somewhat rigged. Nash (the mathematician) equilibrium gone to salt becoming saturated in water. Like flipping a coin seven times in water to see if it's still fair. Am I repeating myself, or using too many metaphors to describe what seems like a simple, if slightly implacable concept? Because that's exactly what watching commentators for this series was like, except they were trying to describe how exciting it was. There's no accounting for taste.

*Yes, this in some form or another applies to all basketball, but rarely was the principle so naked as in this series, because anyone with any experience watching basketball likely knew all the major players, and there wasn't much of uncertainty to them except "would they shoot 40% or 50% in this series" kinds of things. Not "would they solve the opposing defense?" Not "would they win the game by some sort of staggering tour de force?" Not "would a team perservere unnaturally well or unnaturally poorly?" Not "would they finally arrive at the mentality of a champion?" (Except for Kobe, and that's about as overwrought and contrived as any narrative in sports.) I love that better players and better teams usually win, but the information was so perfect in this series, the processing of the information so solid, the players so experienced, that a single game's sample was basically eternity's sample. This was in some sense the starkest playoff series. The better (allowing homecourt advantage in the definition) team won, as it had to, as it always would, as it always could.

In the same way, maybe we can enjoy the lockout for its naked, ridiculous, already-writ application of power, just like we enjoyed that awful, awful 2010 Finals between the Lakers and Celtics. Halberstam would delight in talking about how the players' lawyer and the owners' lawyer were identical in form but different only in substance. And when it comes to endlessly drawn-out negotiations and concessions in which all the facts are already clear, all the bargaining chips are on the table, all the advantages are exposed, maybe that farcical view is just the kind of arbitrary narrative we need to make this an experience of comedy instead of dread.

God bless the CBA and its obvious imbalances. God bless the frontier of horrible contracts which will begin with the latest regulations of recent horrible contracts. God bless the patient owners, for they have the luxury of patience. God bless the small markets, for they will give their fans a scrappy college try that may even find a title or an unforgettable season. God bless the players, with their bodies that decay even as they read this sentence.

RJ Imagination Prayer

2011-06-22T18:39:00.000-05:00

So, after that last post on RJ I only have one thing to say:

No, I don't want to be RJ. I want to be more like Tim.

Oh, imagine clever Tim making quip after keen quip as eternal as the truth, while clumsy RJ babbles the words out of bounds, ephemeral and forgotten.

Oh, imagine thoughtful Tim receiving (without asking) the best seats in the opera house for coolly expressing his opinion to an aristocrat, while dispirited RJ, obscured, sits in front of the orchestra with the rabble for his embarrassing ignorance of Puccini.

Oh, imagine workmanlike Tim running miles before dawn in the sand, while lazy RJ waits for the late alarm to engage in futile calisthenics and check out from his hotel just in time.

And imagine, finally, an exhausted RJ going home from Venice early (in defeat, upon a private jet), a baseball cap not nobly crowning but merely covering his bald, well-intentioned head with a slight sideways slant, the better to reject perfection, while persistent Tim flies the very jet, his first solo flight across the Atlantic, having recently received his pilot's license after months of diligence.

I bought in. I'm staying in Venice for as long as the itinerary says to. I'm proving through revealed preference that I want to be more like Tim, as opposed to (and specifically for the purpose of opposing) being like Rj. It's so exhilirating to buy in and--actually the itinerary says we're leaving tomorrow morning anyway never mind.

RJ Character Sketch

2011-06-22T17:03:00.000-05:00

Day I - Venice

On the flight: Not enough legroom, overpriced airport food, mediocre airline food, not enough sleep, slept a long time when I arrived, baggage-check problems, altering my behavior under the assumption that the TSA cannot distinguish an orange from an organ. It's bad sitcom or stand-up material or Kafka. There's really not much to say. It was uncomfortable, but well within most people's tolerance for discomfort. I don't even find it entertaining but I've called this a travel blog and therefore I must share banalities. It's why the camera obscura principle was discovered, it's why Twitter exists, and it's why I'm typing these words at 0055 on a screen instead of preparing my body for another walking trek through the canal city.

After so many pieces on here in which RJ and his personality were the feature, or at least the backdrop, I think I've distilled the essence of Richard Jefferson, most derided member of the once-legendary Spurs of San Antonio. You see, I barely know a word of Italian and here I am on vacation in Italy, stumbling: stumbling even in my effusive politesse, stumbling especially in wit, without music to create or social situations to control. My strengths are not many in this country yet, like a community organizer at a rough dive or a pick-up artist at a political convention. There's upside there (a gift for language, some study tools), but the upside would come from habits I don't know that I could deliver on. Sure, there are things I can do to mitigate this stumbling in the short term, but most of them boil down to saying less, doing less, and staying along a narrow path constructed by my wisers and superiors. Similarly, being a short trip, there is no obvious benefit to a long-term plan for learning languages.

This is what it is to be Richard Jefferson today, gone from ultra-finisher to only-finisher. Richard Jefferson, gone from regarded All-Star candidate to disregarded rotation player. Richard Jefferson, gone from philosopher's basketball to basketball of chip-shot corner 3's and kick-outs and the rare alley-oop, slamma-jamma slam dunk; in short, basketball caused by good coaching, good passing, or good spacing by people who are not Richard Jefferson. For these he is now paid reasonably by the volume at a fixed rate, instead of being rewarded with an ultimate glory, or even a single ring or title to his name. He is too old to have a long-term plan with any confidence and too undependable and soft to have a short-term plan with any force. He is too dignified than to sit and collect his paycheck but he is not naive enough to deny the money when he makes a reasonable effort towards improvement. He is a tourist in a place where time decays too quickly for the ultimate cultural experience, but he is a reasonable person who will not reject other fun and pleasant experience just on the basis of being a tourist. He may never be a crucial chip on a champion team, but he may win one. He may never be an All-Star, but he may be well-regarded for his presence of mind and veteran leadership. Or he may retire, his present career forming more or less the entire narrative of things, for there is no law saying that a tour must have a culmination, except in books written after the fact about such tours, the other tours and their heroes lost from history by the magic of selection bias.

P.S. In the end, while such also-rans are common, Richard Jefferson is quite possibly the most successful also-ran of the last two decades*, in terms of his team's pure flinching closeness to the title, perhaps flanked only by Steve Nash and Antonio McDyess, which is hopefully only a temporary list, if you catch my drift (or, if you don't catch my drift, I'm implicitly suggesting the Spurs and Suns trade RJ for Nash, cap room, and Grant Hill, and bring McDyess out of retirement, playing 30 neutral games in Grant Hill's house if necessary, even if those are the only 30 games of the entire regular season for the entire, lockout-shortened league).

* - To wit, Jefferson has lost 3 title finals/games (to Duke in 2001 with Arizona, to the Lakers in 2002 and Spurs in 2003 with New Jersey) and two other title-altering games to eventual champs (Game 7 to eventual champion Detroit in WCF and in the Semi-finals of Olympics to Argentina in 2004). The Nets did lose to the Heat in 2006, actually, albeit in just 5 games and in the first round. So that means Richard Jefferson's teams, from his final year at Arizona to his 5th year as an NBA player, lost to the eventual champions of the Euroleague, NCAA, or NBA in his every playoff exit, with the exception of 2005, in which Jefferson was coming off a serious injury (purposefully caused by 2004 Finals MVP Chauncey Billups: you really can't make this up). Considering that the Western Conference was by far the dominant one in this period, and RJ was in the Eastern Conference (which his Nets were hardly dominating for the duration), this is pretty incredible. For every year that Richard Jefferson was healthy, his (always significantly flawed, it should be noted) teams effectively almost won the championships but were outclassed right at the end, six years in a row. To put it one way, Richard Jefferson has achieved something akin to the Baylor-West tandem, and the Celtics here are a diverse spectrum of mostly disjoint groups of overpowering, talented, unnaturally experienced, talented, and well-constructed teams. Even Karl Malone won a title his third try (this is your brain on "Outliers"). Even Steve Nash eventually beat the Spurs. Even LeBron James beat the Celtics. And Antonio McDyess had a 46-inch vertical or something in his prime. That makes McDyess more reasonable, more likeable, more athletic in his prime than Jefferson, probably still got a perfunctory ring from 2004, and plays great defense.

Turning this into a Travel blog.

2011-06-20T07:01:00.000-05:00

I'm going on vacation today, and so now this will be a travel blog of my trip to Italy and Greece over the next few weeks. I will post...well, not pictures, nor journals. In fact, I think what I'll post are fictionalized basketball vignettes that name check recent events in basketball to which I will add local flavor that really will amount to setting, while seeming to have a different style than normal which will mostly be a product of learning two new languages in a touch-and-go way and internalizing authors that I normally wouldn't set aside much time for. So basically what I'm saying is that I will post more often because I will be on the road a lot and having a lot of new experiences, but what I will post will only tangentially relate to those experiences and have mostly to do with the change in habits associated with long travel periods. I will post inconsistently in time and general quality, not more so than I have in the past, but I will have the excuse of a busy itinerary in case anyone calls me out, and since you don't have my itinerary, any excuse I make will seem at least plausible and even if it seems implausible it will be functionally impossible to doubt.

--Alex

P.S. Posts I've planned:

-Dialectic of Z-Bo and (both) Gasol(s)
-Flannery O'Connor on the grotesque face/free throw form/Christianity of Shawn Marion
-How the 2003 Spurs/Nets and the 2011 Mavericks/Heat are extraordinarily similar in a pure basketball sense.
-Free Darko on why David Stern is actually Danish (and why Jeff Van Gundy is actually Scottish)
-Tolstoy and the 2011 Spurs (short version: RJ = Pierre = Silver Era = Self-refuting realism = Intention over Action = Reason, Duncan = Prince Andrei = Golden Era = Self-affirming Idealism = Action over Intention = Virtue)
-How the Heat are a anarcho-syndicalist Marxist's nightmare (and how to stop it with Objectivist-tinged anarcho-capitalism)
-What Mike Brown means for the narrative of the Lakers, what the Lakers mean for the narrative of Mike Brown (everything, nothing, respectively)
-Why Mark McGwire is like Wilt Chamberlain (both played in Bay Area, both beards that were well-tamed but seemed like wild subversion of convention at the time, both have incredible home run records that will stand the test of time)
-Kelly Dwyer on the top 10 examples of coming correct in the last decade.
-Is the lockout literal?
-Why the pick and roll is obsolete (and why the Mavericks are the last team that will ever employ it)
-Will 2003 LeBron James enter the draft, and should the Cavaliers still draft Kyrie Irving, if so (no)?

Burl Ives meets Free Darko

2010-05-16T03:42:00.000-05:00

Did you have an idol growing up? Maybe you liked Jim Morrison or something. I don't know, a lot of people seem to like John Lennon, or James Bond, or Michael Jordan, or Janis Joplin, or Buffy, or that other girl from Buffy. I don't know. Face your demons. The point is, you had an idol growing up. Mine, was, and is, Burl Ives.

Now, folk singer Burl Ives has faded into obscurity; his newest record sold less than a million copies, and he has been on a perpetual decline ever since he conquered the Communists in the folk scene. We are all, for the most part, satisfied with the amount of music Burl Ives has released thus far, with few exceptions (among which, myself). Why do I idolize Burl Ives? Well, I can relate to Ives in a lot of different ways: Like Burl Ives, my temper is that of a mountain. Slow, measured, and ultimately omnipotent. In addition, his music, like mine, is that of an ocean, washing off the sands of the weak, bleeding the weak sands of their essence over decades if necessary. "Have a holly jolly Christmas," goes the song, literally. "Your trajectory moves ever-lower with the passing of the idle days," means the song. You will probably die if you ideologically, spiritually, or physically cross paths with him. This is not due to a lack of empathy, patience, or imagination. It is because, just as water is a solvent of so many things..., well, to quote one of his songs, "Burl Ives/ Is the neutralizer of so many unfortunate goddamn filthy and weak lives." He just goddamn stands there for twenty seconds when he says the first line, forms his body into the musical break which he fills with the second line, in less than a goddamn second. "Oh my god, how I must Idolize/Burl Ives," means the ninth song on my second album. I am crying with fear and enlightenment just thinking about writing this paragraph, because Burl Ives can hunt me down anywhere. He just knows, man. But I digress.

In addition to my idol, high school for me unfortunately had other obligations. Among which was my friend Nathaniel. Nathaniel was very gifted and spent his time studying the Bible to win Internet arguments, moving the Bible to the fiction section of his local bookstores, and talking about being a vegan, by choice. I mostly ignored him, but he was also my best friend in the world, short of my internal image of Burl Ives. So when Nathaniel started getting into basketball, I became very direct (as opposed to my spacey, nebulous norm) and warned him, with the ice of "A Little Bitty Tear": His shit would not fly on a court of reason, nor on a court of passion. A basketball court is both, and he would surely perish if he attempted to say goddamn half of what he said to me while I was in space. I didn't pay much attention to Nathaniel, because he was mostly the guy I was sitting next to while I wrote guitar music in tribute to my idol, but apparently he was writing pretty well by this point.

"Every time they scorn you," I said to Nathaniel from out of nowhere, "I want you to express your scorn with the fire of your favorite writer. And I want you to post it to that little fucking website you call a blog."

"But what if my favorite writer is myself?" Nathaniel inquired.

"Then that infuriates me, Nathaniel, and I want you to goddamn pray Burl Ives doesn't break you like he broke the auditorium last year. Is that understood?" I firmly attached an unblinking glare.

"Yes, sir." Nathaniel knew not to interrupt me while I was channeling. He knew that I had broken the auditorium, in a fit that could not be called a fugue, so consistent with me was it. He knew all of that, and he obliged my requests. Maybe he was goddamn learning something from me and one of Nashville's finest, Burl Ives, after all.

Every once in awhile I would stop playing and demand to see what he was writing. Dear Lord, Nathaniel's violence to writing was what Burl Ives is to violence! "Intersubjective nightmares of Tracy McGrady", "Channeling (and trivializing) Allen Iverson's shallowest understanding - of self and loathing." They were all like goddamn academic papers about current players and teams. Every day that I read one, I would sit him down, point my finger, and say, "This is a goddamn miracle! Leave my sight, before you corrupt the miracle with the reality of your existence." And he would. And I knew he was writing about me, in between the abstractions and placeholder nouns. What's more, I knew what it was he was writing about me. I was the tyranny of Allen Iverson unto himself. That was me, destroying myself, spiritually. His conception placed me equal to Chauncey Billups' "true face." I was the Bulls front office at sixteen Anno Jordani, as he said. Demons, demons, demons, of me he would write, all were demons! His writing was about me and that time I broke an auditorium. It had to be! I pledged a blood oath with this wall in my house, to show Nathaniel the error of his ways! I was not cruel! I was merely enforcing the truth! And cruelty doth yield for me only but what the truth shall reveal! Motherfucking Burl Ives, where are you?

So I wrote a letter that night, knowing it wouldn't go through, but also knowing it would. The proper channels would be gone through, the conduits would disappear in the face of such necessity, and in due time, and exactly when called for, the great folk singer Burl Ives would appear to destroy Nathaniel at one of his goddamn poetry readings after school.

And he did appear. Clad in one of those red and gold bellhop caps, a beard of snow sustained only by the coldness of his cheeks now adorned a face. It didn't seem to matter that the face belonged to a body, because the body was that of Burl Ives, made redundant by the face. For a moment, his glasses seemed to warm your heart until those glasses shot icebeams at the sun and at your eyes, temporarily blinding you and permanently making you see - that those were not the right glasses to adore the warmth of. The face, as big as ten, led the body into the room where I was watching Nathaniel deliver an elegy to Bill Russell and racism. Burl struck, without warning.

"You know, I actually know Bill Russell - he has the heart of a champion."

"Bur...Burl I-"

"Burl. Ives. is what you meant to say. That is my name, Nathaniel, and I've heard all about you." I smirked. Finally my labors had born fruit. "And you must be Alex."

"Yes, sir."

"I think you're a goddamn coward. I wouldn't have stopped at the auditorium."

"Yes, sir. I know how you feel about "next times" and their non-existence, but I know I have it in me to break a whole mountain if I choose. Trouble is, I haven't chosen to."

"That's a weak goddamn excuse. There are no "next times". Only the here and now. Bow as low as you can, you goddamn coward. I broke a mountain but I would never goddamn bank on that. I broke a fucking mountain and I *will* do it again. Do you hear the difference in tone? Bow."

I could not but do so. I had no recourse.

"Now, Nathaniel, your little friend Alex sent me a pack of your writing. I think you're good. Real good. I like your angle, too."

"Gee, thanks, Mr. Ives."

"Call me Burl. Burl. Ives."

"Thanks, Burl. Burl. Ives."

"A funny one. Not like goddamn Alex there, bowing."

I seethed, but if there is justice, this must be it, and struggled to understand how this could be.

"Here's a fucking list of contacts. If you tell them Burl fucking Ives sent you, you will be a professional, published author in less than five years."

"Thanks, Burl. Ives."

"Now get out of my sight, all of you. Except for Alex."

Lying face-down, I dared not stir. He did not lie about breaking a mountain, and my power could hardly sustain his attack for one second, if he chose to.

"Well done, Alex."

"What?" What the hell could be happening? I had lain like a coward at my idol's feet. There was no hope for me now, physically or spiritually. I was one of the worthless, the so many of the goddamn weak and worthless, that had died like a bubble of soap in an acid storm.

"Get up, Alex." I did. "Now let me tell you what I did there. My designs are beyond the imagination of most, but even though you are a goddamn coward, your knowledge of me completes the picture, so to speak, and you are able to imagine what I will tell you."

"What is it, Mr. Ives?"

"Mama don't want no gin, because it makes her sin. All she wants is brandy handy all the time."

"I'm not sure I-"

"Your friend Nathaniel is going to receive unfathomable fame and fortune for having a scarcely valid opinion that is governed mainly by the lens of fear of interpersonal conflict. This will slowly consume his soul. All his readers will either be exposed as charlatans of critical thought, or will go on to be better and more famous as authors eventually. The charlatans will fucking die, and the rest will be immortal. Like you."

"Thank you."

"But now everyone else has to die."

"But why?"

"Because Burl Ives inhabits a closed universe, and cannot die, so they all must, therefore."

"Oh, okay, Burl Ives."

And then he just stood there for a long time. Then he smiled. I obliged him with the next line.

"'/Is the neutralizer of so many unfortunate goddamn filthy and weak lives.'"

"Thank you Alex. Now let me see your guitar."

"Here, Burl."

My guitar is now broken and is unfixable. Every time I try to buy a new one, wherever it is I go, the clerks look at me with the fear of the omnipresent and refuse to sell it to me. And then they log-on to Nathaniel's new site Free Darko to see if Nathaniel (now named Bethlehem Shoals) has posted an update. Those fucking charlatans at the guitar stores. I hope they all die.

Mike Brown's Future After LeBron

2010-05-14T21:36:00.000-05:00

Prequel is here

Mike Brown, jauntily, paces the whole of the benches of both teams. The Q is empty now, save for Brown's practiced, dangerous stomping. His skin glows and his teeth, occasionally shown in smiles and vocalized chomps, shine with layers of shoe polish. Brown is, as he puts two steps on the court to practice a shout at Mo Williams to play some defense for once, a "propah fuck-hawse", beyond the power of the rest of the universe to add or detract. As he jumps up and down because he is practicing seeing an outrageous call against his team, Brown suddenly ponders.

"Oh LeBron, whatever will the rest of the team do without you?"

Brown knows that whatever the answer is for one player, the answer will be different for another. The same is true of fans, writers, and assistant coaches. But not to Mike Brown. His answer is the absence of an answer: He will be a basket-ball coach - for ever, independent of any players that done come and gone. LeBron has left this town, and, barring a little hop that hasn't taken for him anymore, Mike Brown's coaching repertoire and his unwritten "playbook" is exactly the same for him.

"Maybe I'll take out the play where our small forward dunks from the free throw line, or the play where our small forward out-thinks the entire Boston Celtics, or the play where our small forward is better at his position than Mo Williams, at the very fucking least."

Richard Jefferson signing with a team is a sure sign that a franchise had given up any aspirations of any sort for the duration of his contract. Coincidentally, this same Jefferson is the newest Cavalier. Mike Brown sighs raspily.

"Nah, I can't throw out the playbook just because he's gone."

Atlanta Hawks coach Mike Woodson enters the court of the crimson Q, smiling enough to cause little wrinkles under his eyes. He has something to say, never breaking his happy eyes away from Mike Brown's annoyed spectacles.

"Well, if it isn't Mr. Fuck-Horse."

"What the fuck are you doing in this arena, Woodson? Ain't I done laughed you out the fuck away from this beat?"

"Ha, ha, ha, ha," Woodson tried to mimick a real laugh, "Oh, I won't stay long, but I have some photos to show you."

"No, get out. Fuck you and all the irritation you bring this whole city, Cleveland to which I refer, you goddamn cunt-train."

"Are you sure it's not just you that's annoyed?"

"What's with your airs today, you airy, fucking, desert! Is there a fucking pyramid bursting from your chest, that makes you think you're Egypt today? Respond!"

"I just have some photos to show you, like I said."

"Alright, let's see this shit, RIGHT NOW, before I call security."

"I just want you to identify the people you see in these photos. A little exercise, like a cross-words, or a pun, or an Internet message board, you know?"

"I don't know what any of that shit is, Woodson. Next five fucking seconds, SEE PHOTOS, WILL I."

"I call this the fuck-collection. Identify that shit."

Woodson insultingly placed a photo right in front of Brown's huge bifocals.

"Just in case you can't see, Coach."

"That's...Larry Brown."

"Oh, of course it is. Seen here coaching the Spurs, in 1993. Do you know how the Spurs did that year?"

"How?"

"Not good. Notice how he looks like a pacifist."

"Yeah, Larry's always been like that - the Wenceslas of King Coaches. Heh, heh, heh."

"Yeah. Well, here's another picture. Identify it."

Woodson this time held the photo six inches away from Brown's thick glasses.

"Uh...move it closer, I can't see otherwise."

"Aren't you a profes..."

"Yes, this is no time for explanations. Press it to my lenses and shut up."

Woodson obliged. Brown identified.

"That's Phil Jackson."

"What do you think of Phil?"

"A prahm fuck-hawse - a man that would stab your heart out if he had any honesty or dignity - a man that does not."

"That was also from 1993."

"What's the point of this, Woodson?"

"You'll see."

"Then move it along, you airy fairy fucking Gobi cold desert motherfucker."

"Here's another picture... Identify it."

"That's good ol' Larry Brown again."

"Wrong. That's Phil Jackson. Look closer."

Brown shuddered, causing an echo to shudder the Q in turn.

"You're...right. That is Phil."

"That photo was taken during the 2004 Finals."

"My God..."

"The year the Pistons beat the Lakers. Here's another photo of Phil, in happier times."

"Yeah, the change is remarkable. Jax looks just like he did in 1993, and how he's supposed to look, in this one."

"Ha. Ha. Ha ha."

"What the fuck are you trying to laugh about, Woodson?"

"That picture is of Larry Brown, taken during the decisive game 5 of the 2004 Finals. I was his assistant then, and I took it."

"What? How the fuck is that not Phil Jackson?"

"Look closer, and it's clear. That is definitely Larry Brown."

Mike Brown was astonished, and lagged in his pacing behind Woodson for a moment. Larry Brown had the fire that seemed to surround Phil Jackson - the same fire that he'd seen in Ron Artest and Ben Wallace that very next year, when they infamously brawled, punching fans like they were point guards, kicking ushers to the curb.

"So he started, the fight. That tyrant!"

"Yes, Coach. Larry Brown, in his championship year, started fights and personally could blame his geriatric fist for six hundred deaths that year. He was the ultimate fuck-horse that year. You want to know how you win a championship without a great player? That's right: A terrifying coach."

Woodson's brown, husky frame with navy blue sport coats now looked jaundiced. His formerly well-shaved goatee now seemed energetic and unconquerably unshaven.

"The elevation of the meek personified," Mike Brown thought briefly.

"Without LeBron," Woodson continued, "You will turn back into Larry Brown, a mild-mannered, thoughtful milquetoast, and even Austin Carr will not be able to make you seem like a great man anymore. Without LeBron," Woodson paused to indulge, "You are not really a fuck-horse, anymore. You are not a champion, as you know, but now you are fucking nothing. You will get on the cunt-train, which is really the 'can't-train', along with the rest of us, only getting for snatches that uncanny glow in your teeth and skin you savor so much."

"...Wow. So if are you done, you perverted speaker of Beatitudes, you can sit right down on the floor, because I have my own fucking coach album, if you'll kindly sit a spell. FUCKING SIT."

"Okay, Coach Brown, I will sit - after all, this is your waning moment, and to disregard your authority at such a sad -"

"I SAID FUCKING SIT RIGHT FUCKING NOW."

Woodson wordlessly, with knees on the ground, rested his haunch on his feet. His smile continued.

"What's your photos, Coach Brown?"

"You'll see, Coach Woodson."

Brown was looking in his undersized plaid coach-coat for something.

"Well, what is it?"

"Just a second, bird-fucker. I saw your damn pictures and you will see my goddamn pictures."

From Woodson's eyes, the size of the posterboard Brown then pulled from his coat and unrolled was tremendous.

"That has to be 18 by 36 miles, at least. How did you fit -"

"It's a fucking landscape, just like the proportions of my body, Coach. Ain't you taken geometry?"

"But how -"

"It's surface area. Look at how thin it is. A millionth of an inch. I can fold this up almost 20 times and still it will be an inch thick."

"But that's still massive, even if..."

"Surface area is fucking tight. Let's go over what we see. What do you see, Coach? Identify all of what you see."

"I see...a coach."

"Which coach, Woodson."

"That's...Gregg Popovich, I think. But there are some kids in there."

"That's Pop again. This is Pop's life, from 8 minutes after his birth until the present, taken at 20,000 frames per second, and placed in this posterboard, and updated constantly."

"Why 8 minutes?"

"Because he had to develop enough sarcasm and inventiveness to tell his family to videotape him, and how to create the posterboard, without seeming to be arrogant. That took him all of eight minutes."

"Oh."

"Tell me, does he ever waver in his eyes? Does he ever have weakness? Does he ever look like Larry Brown in 1993 or Phil Jackson in 2004?"

"No."

"That's what I thought. He is omnipotent. Is there ever a moment he couldn't coach a team to a million championships?"

"No, but..."

Brown pulled out another posterboard, even larger.

"This is me."

"That is as large as Ohio. But there aren't any frames."

"Correct. This is me at one moment."

"But..."

"Because this is me at all moments. The frames were simply unnecessary, in my case. One frame sufficed, motherfucker."

"What's the point?"

"The point is, my shock at your album was only at losing my remaining respect for Phil Jackson and Larry Brown, and their transient fucking ways. I am the same as I have ever been, modulo the natural weakening of age. LeBron's departure has only empowered me, and will continue to empower me until I die. The same is true of all real coaches. And you are changing right before my eyes, into a fucking leper. Leprosy is contagious, you know, so I want you out of my fucking sight, right now."

Mike Brown was three feet taller now, and Mike Woodson was three feet smaller, even as Woodson stood up from his kneel to confront Brown. Brown stomped, like a gallop but with legs spread. Within a minute he had stomped out an earthquake with epicenter exactly center-court. Afraid for his life, Woodson had to run out, hopping many times his now-tiny height over chasms containing lava and fire-water directly from Cleveland's lakes.

And then Woodson was gone, and Mike Brown continued to pace the sidelines, testing with success his renewed hop, practicing how he could make Richard Jefferson fear him.

Ilgauskas on the Cusp of Something Better

2010-02-19T17:12:00.000-06:00

Now Ilguaskas worked in the front office and as such had a wonderfully moderate salary, a rather plush Cleveland apartment that did not stray too far from the Rustic Masses, and the reputation of a solid, if clumsy and unambitious businessman. GM Danny Ferry was finally stepping down as Cavaliers GM to seek some job in European basketball. And his assistant, a middle-aged man known mostly for his persistance, would be named his replacement, presumably in the next several hours. It was eight o'clock in the morning, and any minute over the course of the day, Big Z or Mr. Ilguaskas as he was known as now, or what have you, would be named General Manager of his former franchise, the Cleveland Cavaliers of the National Basketball Association. Not to say it was official - but Mr. Ilgauskas's promotion was set in stone except for a contract. Mr. Ferry had promised him this promotion yesterday and this contract would only be the "logical conclusion of an existing fact", Danny Ferry had said. Ilgauskas sighed and opened the drapes of his apartment. "What is the logical conclusion of an existing fact?" he asked himself? Ilgauskas saw that dim shade of blood that iron can turn in the distances of Cleveland. The clock, he now noted, was eight oh five.

Some two hours after this, Mr. Ilgauskas was called into his office after a short nap of manifold little pleasant images strung together by the light of the morning and the smell of the hot coffee pot neglected in the kitchen near his sofa. Checking his hygiene and dress briefly, Ilgauskas put on a blue-and-red Cavaliers sweater and a perfunctory Indians cap and then he went out the door into the mid-morning of Cleveland in Spring, its bleak hues redundant upon his sweater. He smiled and breathed in the cool air. "Finally", he thought, "My recognition will be total and legitimate." His first title with Cleveland had been marred by a surreal trade. His franchise record for games played had been marred by a surreal benching on the very night he'd brought his family. His Lithuanian Olympics, his childhood dream, had been cut short by Ferry. But now, it was his turn to lead this organization, and there could be no doubt of the respect this position would carry. "And not too much more responsibility," he thought, "Just enough to keep me busy."

In the press room, raspily-aging horse Mike Brown sat on Ferry's left flank as the latter prepared to make his announcement, and waiting for five or so minutes for Ilgauskas to arrive, clapped heartily upon his arrival. Matching Ilgauskas with his own sweater and Indians cap, Ferry seemed to be on the ball, and summoned the larger man into his presence and invited him on stage.

Once Ilgauskas was on the stage, Ferry asserted himself on the podium and spoke directly to the media, the former players, the current players, and the rest of the coaching staff.

"In the long history of Big Z, let it be known: He has always been the first and last horse in every race." Applause seemed to come from inside and outside the building. "He has always built our bridges, he has always visited our charities, and in a way, " Ferry paused, "He is a symbol, for all of the injustices this team has visited upon others, and all the injustices this team has visited upon itself...."

Ilgauskas felt a little odd, but also felt vindicated. "They know me!" he thought, "And they have always wanted me to be happy."

"...And that is why it is sad to announce one more sad injustice to be visited upon him. You see, folks, the Cavaliers charter prohibits Lithuanians from our team, and in fact, always has."

A gasp from the press room. LeBron, in the front row, fainted.

"Therefore, let it be decided, that retroactively, Mr. Ilgauskas shall, until further notice, be stricken from our record-books."

"But, while this does mean that he cannot serve in any official position," Mr. Ferry smiled, "We can always have a helping hand, and Cleveland can always use another great man to lift us up. Oh wait, I messed up the sentence there. Okay. Cleveland can always use another helping hand, but Mr. Ilgauskas, let it be known, was never a great man. However, there is a great man ready to lift us up."

Just then Mike Brown put on Ferry's offered hat and sweater and walked across the iron stage towards the podium.

"That's right, everyone. Say hello to your new general manager. I'm gonna ride this horse until I die!"

While there was some suppressed applause, the real story that got the press room's attention was the stage holding all three men, which had collapsed in rust and disuse.

Cavs SotU

2010-02-09T23:51:00.000-06:00

"We are strong. But we are strong because we are fast. But we are fast because we are strong. Or not. The bottom line is, I am definitely the president. I don't think we have any argument there," as President James addresses the joint session to applause.

"And Shaq is certainly the Majority. The Big Fella, half the body weight of the entire team." More applause.

"And Mike Brown is certainly the Supreme Court. His husk could move continents of garment companies, deciding who lives and who dies - a sort of Solomon ruling with terrifying wisdom." More applause.

"And Mo Williams is a child. He is a child." Mo looks offended, and all eyes turn to him, no one saying anything. "No, I don't mean like immature. I mean he looks like a child. It's not a bad thing, Mo. You are a fine point guard. You are...just fine, Mo, the way you are. But you are a child." Less applause, still some enthusiasm. Mo is heard to mouth, "Not true" but the incident passes.

"Big Z is surely our working class. He gets angry and populist, and falls down sometimes and we laugh at him, but we all know, without the working class we are nothing, or would want to be after losing him. Let's hear it for Big Z." Reluctant applause as Z stands up clumsily.

"But the Media has also played a role. Fred McLeod and Austin Carr, get that weak stuff out of here deep in the Q!" Everyone stands and stands on top of their chairs. A bunch of chairs in the center of the Q break. "You have to pay for that if you broke it."

10 minutes of silence pass. LeBron is just standing there, with some of the folks in the crowd standing for lack of chair.

"Speech over? I'm probably not going to the Knicks, for reals?"

David Robinson's Spectacular Vacation

2010-01-27T09:20:00.001-06:00

I first met Tim well before he entered the league. I met him when Wake Forest was still a nightmare of responsibility ahead of him. Haha. The year was 1991, and I had planned a summer trip to Cancun, but the plane decided we would go to the U.S. Virgin Islands instead. I decided this is where I would stay for the duration. But when I called to cancel my reservations in Cancun, the hotel would not hear of it. You see, the owners of my favorite Cancun hotel knew and respected me, so before long a room was flown into my new vacation spot.

So I went to the mini-bar and poured myself a moderate amount of Disney Gin and placed the rest of the bottle in the cupboard. It had a moderate amount of alcohol, but I am large and I was barely intoxicated. Also it was Disney Gin. I looked for a court so that I could play a pick-up game against some locals. The rules would be: 2v1 and I had to shoot outside shots. I walked along the beach in Christiantown, the most wholesome town in the world.

Anyway, after awhile I found a court, but it was empty. I smiled with opportunity. I love getting young people involved in basketball. I knocked on every door for a mile with a smile. Finally I gave up. Then I saw this scrappy kid on the court a mile away. I ran to catch up with him to teach him some fundamentals. I ran so fast. At that time I ran a five-minute mile, but at the three-minute mark I hit a street light, and, jogging in place, I waited for the lights to change. While I was waiting, I saw a child taller than the first child enter the arena. That child had no follow-through. I was like that screaming painting, you know the one, while watching him try to hit a futile outside shot. Then a third child entered and had terrible post moves. He was posting up on the others but they were able to take the ball from him before he could move. And they didn't even have any defensive skills. No, kids!

The lights changed and I crossed as fast as the truth can move. Damn, I thought, still a good quarter-mile away and therefore well outside what I should have been able to discern. In one minute, before I arrived, I noticed a fourth child had entered the arena with a flawless sense of basketball. He taught the others and played over 5 full games with them in that minute. They were much better now, but still obviously not as good as this new child. He was holding a basketball at his side and he had them all sitting down cross-legged in a semi-circle in front of him, with his back turned to me. Birds gathered in a semicircle behind the children. He was lecturing them on the kinematics of the post, I could hear. As I approached, the boy bent his knees very low. Then he pushed the ball way up into the air with all his might, at least 500 or 600 feet. I suddenly realized the ball was heading straight behind him - and directly towards me like a rocket! I yelled in panic until I remembered that I was David Robinson and I calmly caught the ball with one hand. It hurt quite a bit but it had its effect.

"Who are you?" this child asked, looking back at me in shock.

"I am...David Robinson of Basketball?!"

"I am Timothy." Timothy was six feet tall and about sixteen.

"Have you been playing basketball long, Timothy?"

"No, the pool here broke and this is the only game left. I've been playing for six months. That pass I made to you..."

"Yes?"

"...- that used to be a butterfly stroke."

I tried to imagine what it would be like if Navy basketball courts had all been broken. I couldn't. It was so horrifying to even conceive of. Like an eye that could never shut. I thought for a few minutes and closed my eyes. Then I had an answer.

"Why don't you show that pass to me again." Timothy repeated the butterfly stroke and sent the ball on its way. I jumped three feet in the air and caught it as it came down several seconds later. "Yesss," I silently thought.

"Okay, Tim, watch this." I vaguely mimicked the breaststroke, but this time, instead of transferring the energy of the jump to the upward motion of the ball, I transferred it to my feet and dunked from the three-point line. As I walked back to his semicircle of birds and children, he was astonished.

"Whoa. I never would have thought of that."

"Oh, you might have. You're not allowed to show anyone that shot though Tim. The media would find out and destroy you. Humility, Tim. Always humility. Here let me show you how to play in the post." Tim Duncan was exactly six foot five and the other children, not more than eleven, eventually would see the two giants dunk and shoot with medicine balls much larger and heavier than the children themselves. They were transfixed, perhaps by virtue, perhaps by spectacle, but were transfixed nonetheless. I thought about offering them all some Disney Gin to sip while they baked in the sun, but Disney Gin is still gin, and that would be wrong of me.

The Death of Sean Elliott

2010-01-23T06:36:00.000-06:00

At his mansion in San Antonio, Elliott was practicing with his All-Star Barbershop Quartet - consisting of, from chirping soprano down to heavy bass, Elliott himself, Stephon Marbury, Shaq, and Dikembe Mutumbo. Right when we were dropping in on them, the quartet was practicing an arranged version of a gospel standard - "The Green Leaves of Summer" from the 1960 film "The Alamo". Its melody was a plaintive aria and Elliott went an octave above the others in order to explore the standard's expressive lyrics:

'Twas so good to be young then, to be close to the earth,
Now the green leaves of Summer are callin' me home.

Their version was haunting and somber. After it was finished, Elliott taught the others how to sound like an ambulance siren. For six hours in a row they all learned how to sound like ambulance sirens. After these six hours there was still, to be charitable, quite a lot of progress to be made on all three fronts. With Dikembe, probably the best image to take is of the Jaws theme being sung by the shark itself. Marbury's alarm, strangely, sounded rather like a wounded lark singing the aforementioned standard. Shaq's alarm, to the amusement of all, sounded exactly like the atrocious blend of happy hardcore and double barbershop that passed for modern music these days. Truly a man of his times, whatever those times may be.

Elliott's alarm, the trigger for this whole alarm-learning session, had been dead-on. Its wail was indistinguishable from a real alarm. In fact, for the last three hours of the session, Sean Elliott had been doing most of the talking - recording hundreds of different samples of the wail to try to get the others to see how it was done - wailing, the others thought, with absolutely no regard for human happiness, wailing with a teacher's anxiety towards stubborn minds, all in order to teach his fellows how the alarm should be done. Elliott would constantly and gently mock all of his students, sometimes going way past normal levels of social conduct. After six hours, Shaq had finally just given up, and they all danced for awhile to his own infectious wail. Elliott was a little disappointed in all of this, but danced anyway, and once the dance was finished, he asked the others to try one more thing for him.

"What is it, Sean?" Marbury asked meekly. "My throat hurts, so nothing too intense."

"We're going to do a couple octaves of scales on the alarm noise, just like three or four times. Five minutes, tops. Is that alright?"

Marbury reluctantly agreed. Dikembe dropped his suitcase that instant. Finally Shaq, who had been leaving through a door in a tan trench coat and a rounded black hat, came back into the room, not quite closing the door. Joakim Noah, who had, minutes earlier, snuck through Elliott's security to dance to Shaq's alarm, inexplicably formed a sort of Al Jardine now, providing a second anchor to the group by doubling Marbury's alto.

The first Do-Re-Mi was a Dirk-disaster, certifiable. All around the world, checks were magically voided in response to the awful sound waves. At the return to the starting Do and the start of the second attempt, even cheery Elliott was feeling quite disenchanted. Still he raised his baton to start again.

The second octave found Dikembe in a sudden flurry of improvement from bottom Do to top Do and back, eventually booming a London bombing siren straight out of 1940, a low wail of great destructive promise. "This octave was only a test," it said, "But next time it very well might not be." Combined with Elliott's more immediate ambulance, the vocal blend was beginning to cohere, and Shaq's alarm, even in banality, actually gave the track a sort of instrumental, visceral beat. Starbury was, as always, the last to get it right, but as the second octave neared Mi on the way down, a sort of enlightenment passed over him. The second return to the starting Do was, in clarity and realization, like that defining THX sound effect that precedes some movies - it was a pure tone that had transcended previous musical imaginations for tonic beauty and urgency. Joakim Noah, who wasn't doing much of anything just then, stood dumbfounded and silent and tried to dance but found himself forced into another kind of dance that he had not imagined could exist - a dance that seemed like throwing and receiving the same pass. Sean Elliott, for the third time in as many minutes, raised his baton, this time with authority.

But this time the octave never began. Instead, the singers began an unprompted siren version of "The Green Leaves of Summer" that was immediately a work of extreme beauty. One could hear and almost feel in the air the green leaves of summer - even in the sophisticated chilliness of a San Antonio fall night. The standard had a new canonical version, and it hadn't even finished playing.

A minute into their rendition, though, the singers were interrupted. The door connecting Elliott's aviary to his recording studio had been left carelessly ajar - by Shaq's aborted exit minutes prior. "Whoops," Shaq deadpanned.

Birds of every kind by the thousands flocked now into Elliott's recording studio, and with infrequent movements, they all appeared to hover above the ground. Shaq and Dikembe immediately looked at one another, took off Elliott's recording headphones, crawled lithely to the marked exit and, grabbing their suits and shutting the door, had escaped without incident, and prayed for the safety of the others, while at the same time calling the authorities for assistance.

Noah and Marbury, on the other hand, had blindly run due east and due west, respectively. But in the doors they ran into, Noah found a small room containing a bear, and Marbury found an equivalent room but with a lion. They each quickly ran the opposite direction, and as they passed one another silently laughed at the other's foolishness in going that way. A second later Marbury found the bear and Noah found the lion. Regrouping now at the center, the two looked around and located the exit. Smashing the door open and running through, they were inexplicably safe now. Shaq and Dikembe shut the door behind them. In the room Shaq admitted his negligence with closing the door, and naturally had thought it would be harmless. And indeed it had been harmless for all four standing there.

Sean Elliott's case was very different. For these were *his* lions and pigeons and bears, and he had loved them all. It was his responsibility to ensure their safety. The idiotic and panicked exits of Noah and Marbury had upset a good proportion of all the animals gathered and they seemed to be poised for chaos, even in their stillness. How could he bring the animals to order with just his voice? Elliott thought for awhile, then, in desperation, chirped out a solo siren version of "The Green Leaves of Summer". Having been enlightened by the ensemble version, his version was now just as poignant. Elliott's audience was receptive - the birds and lions and bears all loved it, for it subconsciously reminded them all of the screeching and unfathomable noises of the womb.

Unfortunately, as it turns out, this was exactly sufficient to cause the birds, in a rare psychological drive towards "unbirth", to try and "re-enter" the womb they had once experienced. Sean Elliott's eyes were violently pecked out, and just as he tried to tell them to "calm down birds" his mouth was entered and quickly destroyed. Within minutes the paramedics and Animal Control had arrived, and now were aware of the animals and were ready to take action. Just now they entered the room in haz-mat suits and took control of all the animals. Animal Control realized, just after giving Elliott dozens of very painful rabies shots, that these shots had been unnecessary - Elliott was dying.

In a fugue of productivity Elliott then wrote a very bizarre will, with Starbury and Shaq as reluctant witnesses. As he was dying, the four remaining singers gathered gave a version of Mozart's "Lacrimosa" using his siren technique, which the other three had successfully taught to Noah while waiting for the paramedics to arrive.

Three Dreams of Sean Elliott

2010-01-19T09:55:00.000-06:00

Sean Elliott awoke in his house in the middle of the night. He had dreamt of his funeral.

===

As per his will, Elliott was to be buried in seemingly random coordinates. The grave was to have latitude exactly halfway between the longitudes of Elliott's mother and wife's graves, and also to have longitude exactly halfway between the longitudes of David Robinson and Avery Johnson's graves.

This "grave-site" ended up being right in the middle of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and of course he could not be buried there. So Sean Elliott was cremated - the thought among the mourners being that his ashes would be spread exactly on the desired point, carried by a boat. But enduring the harsh January in a boat would be somewhat rough, even over saltwater, So the mourners again compromised a bit, and instead of mixing Elliott's ashes with the lake at the coordinates from his will, the mourners baked Sean Elliott's ashes in a (my sources tell me) very tasty rye bread and served it to various birds that passed by on the San Antonio sidewalk where they were gathered. At these birds the mourners laughed and laughed, for the birds' various chirpings reminded them of the deceased. An aging Tim Duncan even gave a particularly chirpy bird a friendly shove - the call-back was at once virtuous and ridiculous, not to mention fitting. The joke was well-received by the mourners.

===

Now Sean Elliott was awake and immediately said aloud, "What an absurd dream that was," speaking in a voice perfectly fitting the sentence. "Bill will love this." Elliott was not concerned about the image of his corpse and ashes - he knew that dreams were not representative of reality. Their only function, really, was to serve as a conversation piece, he supposed.

And indeed, that sentence would help chart the course for the next day. One by one, Elliott would tell all the Spurs all about his funny dream and indeed, the Spurs would find great humor in it - small forward Richard Jefferson especially. Elliott gradually began telling it with embellishments - his favorite puns and flourishes - as those helped to make his silly recounting truly a great story. At one point Elliott had told them his dream so many times that he got his play-by-play announcer Bill to commentate on Jefferson's memorized narration of the dream with him while he added his trademark color commentary.

By the end of the day, though, this routine had worn thin. Sean had told all the Spurs and they were getting quite sick of this retelling - even the once-enthusiastic Jefferson sighed and now secretly hated Elliott's voice. Except for Tim Duncan. For Duncan had been bored by Elliott's tale from the beginning. After hearing the same retelling three times in a row near the end of the day, Duncan spoke up.

"Sean," innocuous Duncan asked, "What exactly do you think your dream means?"

Elliott awkwardly chuckled. "Gee, Timmy, I don't know. I don't think it quite has a meaning. Heh heh ha."

"I really think it would be better for you to come back to me, you know, when you have a more satisfactory response for me, Sean."

So the challenge was made, and Sean Elliott could not refuse. On some level, I here speculate that Duncan had immediately understood - had understood that Elliott's response to the "meaning" of this dream would be unfathomably better than the dream itself - better in insight or hilarity, and probably both. After the challenge Sean Elliott went home to meditate, to no avail. He suspected it was the poses he struck in meditating that caused its failure. At night Sean Elliott dreamt of his funeral.

===

The birds were not chirping. The sky was grey and after a brief pause the snowy impenetrable air followed suit. With grey on every side of them the mourners could not but walk through their grey worlds, each uninhabited. In San Antonio the birds were not chirping. All the mourners were cloaked in a hooded greatcoat including a cute jacket for the urn itself. As per his will Sean Elliott had been cremated and as the mourners walked Tim Duncan held this urn with careful ease. As the mourners reached at last the spot to spread the ashes, Tim Duncan's legs gave way momentarily, collapsing under his age and spreading without ceremony most of the ashes from the urn. As the little whispers grazed the snow in the air, Duncan without emotion began gathering them back into the urn as much as possible. With gloves this task would have been impossible so Duncan took his gloves off and started to dig through the snow and air with some success. Finally another mourner, a tall hooded man of broad shoulders in a greatcoat, stopped him and helped to bring Duncan to his feet. Drawing his hood back something became clear: this man was David Robinson, broadly smiling, as always, with perfect dignity. As they stood up they looked around and then at each other. The only mourners for Sean Elliott, nodding to agree, now threw his ashes in the air, alternating handfuls and reveling in the snow.

===

The next morning Elliott told the other Spurs, to great amusement, about the second dream. The story being new again, the Spurs immediately forgot how he had painfully overstepped with the story the previous day.

Tim Duncan was not so amused and treated the new story like a bad pass from a good Spur. No, Tim Duncan was not at all satisfied, nor had he reason to be. For Elliott still had no answer to Tim Duncan's request yesterday for the first dream's meaning. Today Duncan again pushed the advantage as far as possible, and now demanded an answer to the second dream as well. Duncan expected this answer, he implied, on his desk tomorrow, hand-written. Duncan had a force and seriousness to his words that was surprising. Tim Duncan's stake in this was exactly the same as his stake in a game - he would try relentlessly to help his teammates win to the best of his ability. The only problem, Elliott considered, was what exactly the game was, and who exactly he considered his teammates. This chain of reasoning evoked in Elliott the ruthless birds from the dream.

That evening Elliott thought and thought about the dreams - for two hours, he meditated in every fantastic pose he had ever seen in a movie or self-help book. This tired the aging Elliott out very quickly, and forgetting the dreams, he fell asleep.

===

It was Memorial Day, 1999...

Mike Brown and Mike Woodson Talk Shop

2010-01-16T01:52:00.000-06:00

I was reading SLAM tonight, and I came across the following passage, in which Hawks coach Mike Woodson addresses his team before an important Mavs road game:

“...I don’t give a shit about the offense; you guys can score more than enough points to win games. The offense isn’t the problem. But you have to get stops on defense, and if you’ll listen to what we’re telling you, I promise you’ll get stops. The shit works, okay? The shit works, but you guys just have to have the pride and the heart to buy into it and do what we’re asking you to do every time down the court.”

Reading this reminded me of a little-known incident a few years back. Almost immediately after the 2009 Finals, Milwaukee small forward Richard Jefferson was being scouted for a possible trade to either the Cavs or the Hawks. Jefferson therefore had to make two private appointments with the head coaches of those teams, Mike Brown and Mike Woodson.

Concerns for the complex and heavy schedules of all three men led Jefferson to suggest instead that he meet with both coaches simultaneously. Jefferson supposed that they could meet up in a practice facility for his demonstration, after which they would all get some dinner and discuss where he could fit into their respective teams. This suggestion was well-received by both Woodson and Brown, and so the only remaining unknown was the location. Jefferson said it would be a little questionable to meet up in a Bucks' facility for a demonstration that could very well send him packing, so he suggested they all meet instead in San Antonio at the Spurs' practice facility. After all, Brown had served under Spurs coach Gregg Popovich there, and Woodson had served under the legendary Larry Brown, Popovich's mentor. This seemed reasonable enough for all parties, and it was settled. The plane tickets were bought.

Now, luckily at this time I was working as a mop-boy at the Spurs' practice facility. After all, I was 16, and I was living in one of the plusher suburbs in San Antonio. It was the perfect summer job. I even met David Robinson once in the gym as he showed his church group how important practice is. The Admiral liked me instantly because virtue and skill stand out like a strobe light to him, and I was really effective and methodical with a mop at that time.

I was also a basketball fanatic and an amateur sportswriter. In the dog-days of 2009, before iPhones and Androids had hit the market, I kept a primitive cassette tape recorder on my person wherever I went. This tape recorder caused both amusement and annoyance in the Spurs players, and I would often try (with very limited success) to invite myself to private player meetings. So when I heard that Woodson and Jefferson and Brown were coming to my gym, and that I was supposed to mop the whole gym before they arrived, I became restless with possibility. I quickly created a mopping schedule that would guarantee me close proximity for the duration of their visit, and even planned to get into their graces well enough that I could eat with one of them afterwards.

It's important to note here that Coach Brown and Coach Woodson are very similar in appearance. I mean they are both the same brand of hefty, of the same height, somewhat muscular, and bald. They have extremely similar tastes in clothing. Mike Woodson's skin has a somewhat lighter shade of brown, and Mike Brown has glasses with very thick rims. Mike Woodson has a black goatee. Mike Brown has a different black goatee. If Mike Brown lost his glasses and they were standing together, I would have legitimate trouble handing the glasses to the right one, even if I'd seen from whom it had dropped.

I worked very hard that morning in preparation, and when noon rolled around, Richard Jefferson arrived in the gym corridor in an old Arizona jersey. I went over and gave him a high-five and immediately meshed with him. Jefferson was clearly down-to-earth and humorous. "You're gonna have to tell me which one is which, when they arrive. Tap me on the shoulder once if it's Brown, twice if it's Woodson." he said to me, chuckling. I couldn't tell if he was kidding with that, but he clearly found the humor of the situation in either case. I showed him my tape recorder and told him I was going to tape the whole conversation. He cracked up. "Their voices are really different at least, right?"

"I... don't know, Mr. Jefferson. I can't think of one without the other. I'll probably mix up their voices a couple times." I admitted. "I can't even remember which one has the glasses. It's going to be a hell of a transcription job."

Jefferson was greatly pleased. "Haha, I knew it. Same here, John. I remember that Brown has the glasses, but only because I just finished watching that amazing LeBron buzzer-beater in Game 2 against the Magic. So let's see: I know Mike Brown has the glasses, and I think Mike Woodson has the facial hair, but now I forget if Mike Brown has the facial hair - no, he just has those ridiculous jowls."

"They both have jowls, Mr. Jefferson, and I think they both have goatees. That's one of the many reasons they're so hard to separate."

"Alright, you're definitely invited to dinner," Jefferson smiled. "Get this, the three of us are having dinner together after the demonstration. We're gonna get a booth at a local family restaurant with 4 seats. The two of us are going to sit on one side and Woodson and Brown will have to share one side of the booth, just squeezing together, side-by-side. The image makes me laugh every time I think of it. I'm going to use every wile in my faculties to ensure it happens. Having you along will just help out that much more. We'll sit on the side before they even know what has hit them."

"Wow, thanks, sir!" Jefferson had delivered so much further than I would ever have imagined. "Okay, two things. First, can we get a still photo of them sitting together?"

"No, absolutely not. They are crafty. Both of them are ridiculous, but crafty. Best not even to risk it. You must be a master of discreetness with the tape recorder by now, though, right?"

"I'm good enough."

"Good. But yeah, no photos. I mean they won't want to be seen together, and they definitely wouldn't go for that. Also, it could very well poison the afternoon for me, and I don't want that either. Heh."

"Mr. Jefferson?"

"Yes, John?"

"The facility didn't tell me why you all were coming today, they just told me who the meeting was for. What is the meeting about?"

"This is going to sound odd..."

Jefferson then laid it all out, essentially telling me that this off-season might be his last legitimate chance at being signed by a contender and getting a title that had thus far eluded him with the Nets and Bucks. This was actually a huge interview for him, I considered. Suddenly something crossed my mind.

"Wait, why the hell is Mike Brown looking for a small forward? That's LeBron's position. You're a bit older, but nowhere near a back-up yet, especially in terms of the salary you'd want."

"Yeah, honestly, I've been watching a lot of Cavs games. I don't know what the hell he is thinking. Woodson either. How familiar are you with the Hawks?"

"Not much, sir."

"They don't really need a small forward either. So why are they both - " and Jefferson trailed off in thought.

For the same thought had crossed both of us simultaneously and we made eye contact to prove it.

"You don't think..." I began, but the thought was abruptly truncated and momentarily forgotten for the appearance a noise from the gym's corridor.

"I'M READY FOR SOME GOOD SHIT RICHARD."

Well, Mike Woodson was here. He was smiling at Jefferson and Jefferson smiled back. I had been diligent with the mopping, so now I had the luxury of stopping to make myself look somewhat respectable, and the three of us traded introductions. I spoke to the Hawks coach with careful respect. The tape was rolling now.

"Hello, Mr. Woodson. I'm just the mop-boy today."

I then laid out my slightly contrived reason for being there, with conscious emphasis on my insignificance.

"Alright, you can stay. I used to be tough shit at mopping when I was a teenager."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah, I fucked up at the beginning, but then I learned how the shit should be done. Do you want to me to show you?"

"Umm, yes, sure, Mr. Woodson..." I only hoped the bandwidth on my tape recorder could sustain all of this 'shit'. Woodson grabbed the mop and started dousing the floor with dirty water from the mop bucket. I briefly wondered if Woodson was going to try to light the doused region on fire. He furrowed his brows as he tried to remember how to grip the mop, and, in his baldness, gave us an impromptu lesson on how skin can cling to and dance along the skull on demand.

"So first you want to like...pretend the mop is a fuck-horse. Do you know what a fuck-horse is,...John is your name?"

Before I could try to define a fuck-horse (I didn't know whether or not I hoped "fuck-horse" was actual slang), Mike Brown appeared in the same corridor of the gym that Woodson and Jefferson had entered through. It occurred to me that Jefferson and Woodson had barely spoken in the five minutes so far of this incredibly important interview.

"How are you all, Richard, Mike, ..."

"John, sir. Just an honest mop-boy."

"I was showing John here how not to fuck that shit up with mopping. The shit I know about mopping, on the other hand, works."

"You told him about the fuck-horse technique?"

"I was just getting to that, Mike."

"I just knew you were a fuck-horse adherent, Mike. How dated."

"It's the shit that works!"

Mike Brown considered this, and visibly rejected it with his hand. "No, the fuck-horse is dated. If you aren't riding the cunt-train with your mop stroke by now, well, that's sort of like trying to do algebraic geometry in a modern setting without any knowledge of the Zariski topology on algebraic varieties."

"What the hell?" Richard Jefferson said quietly enough to be mostly inaudible but loudly enough to interrupt.

"It's plenty dated is all I'm saying, Richard. How have you been? Let's sit a spell and I'll lay out what I want to see from you today."

Brown began to strike me as the kind of coach that would sometimes listen to all of a player's problems and have intelligent responses, but at the end of the day would not be there for his players or anyone else that interfered with his arbitrary whims.

Woodson, on the other hand, struck me as being almost fatherly in modality. He may have been cross and vulgar in disposition, but he had made a sincere connection with Richard and I, with none of Brown's pettiness or distance. Whatever a fuck-horse might be, Woodson legitimately thought that I, a mere mop-boy in a different city, should know about the mopping technique, and for my own benefit. There was a warmth there that infected Richard as well.

We all walked towards a table outside the gym, I having officially joined the party. Woodson tried to carry the conversation as we walked. "Richard, I undoubtedly have a role for you here in Atlanta."

Brown was not to be out-done and quickly cut him off. "Richard, I have a bigger role for you here in Cleveland."

"Your shit seems deceptive, Mike." Woodson astutely observed. "What are you going to do, Coach, trade LeBron?"

It was something that was going to be said but it was still surprising to hear.

"Maybe I will trade LeBron if I can get my hands on Richard before you. I think losing 10 extra games or so is worth it. No offense," he turned to Richard, "but I already won a championship as an assistant in 2003, in this very city!"

Richard quickly responded, "I was on the Nets then, Coach." Having briefly misremembered the Spurs' opponent in 2003, Brown actually looked a bit apologetic, and trailed off on a "Well..." as he turned back to Woodson. We all sat down at the table outside the gym.

After we'd sat down, Brown continued his tirade, "...All I'm saying is that 2003 will be plenty enough for me if it means defeating you to get Richard Jefferson, Woodson."

Just a moment more and it was obvious that the husk wars had begun. Woodson shot the first blow. He pursed his lips as if for an angry kiss, and furrowed his eyebrows as before. "You fuck-horse," Woodson spoke with incomprehension, "How could you? You unfathomable fuck-horse."

Still wondering what a fuck-horse could be, I nevertheless held my tongue. Brown would trade LeBron, his franchise player, in order to win this petty battle? Was this what real adulthood would be like? I felt afraid, I must admit.

Brown, upon being called a fuck-horse, didn't react with scorn at all, but his face almost turned inside out as he tightened up in concentration, as if trying to look at his own eyes without a mirror. The skin around his mostly-shaved eyebrows stretched taut towards the top of his cheeks, almost wholly covering his eyes beneath his glasses. As this happened his hand stroked his chin, as if stroking a goatee that didn't exist anymore, as if his clean-shaven chin was evidence of a great difference between himself and Woodson. He nodded up and down very quickly. Infinite husk, I supposed. Standing up, his glasses suddenly became very bright, like reflecting the sun. Brown took his hand off his chin and stared at his counterpart.

"Coach Woodson."

"...Yes, Coach Brown?"

"I am a bit of a fuck-horse, aren't I? Threatening to trade away my franchise to win this meaningless personal tiff. Reminiscent of a fuck-horse, eh?" Had he read my mind? No...we had all thought that.

"I'm...so sorry I said that, Mike." Woodson made a very humble gesture of apology.

"No. Don't take it back. I'm a true fuck-horse and I'm happy to admit it. I want all three of you to admit it." We all reluctantly said so to him. "But let's have some perspective here. The only reason either of us coaches showed up at all is because we knew the other would. Don't lie to me, Mike, you have just as little use for Richard as I do. It was a petty gambit on your part and you should at least admit it like I do."

But Woodson refused to comply. "Richard, come on, let's go to the gym. I want to see the way you'll..."

Brown interrupted and Woodson ignored him. "...drive in the lane." Astonishingly, the coaches had both finished Woodson's sentence.

"See, I knew it. If there's any more of a bull story, if there's any more of an arbitrary question to ask Richard Jefferson, I'd love to hear it. We've all seen Richard driving a hundred times, even young John over here," I nodded, "This interview was a ruse from the get go. I may be a fuck-horse, but I'm not naive, Coach."

We all just sat in silence for awhile. Woodson could not deny what was clear: Mike Brown had seen right through him.

"I guess that makes you a cunt-train, Coach." Mike Brown gloated, "Not even a proper fuck-horse."

"Alright," I asked, "What the fuck do those words mean?"

Brown ignored me, but I caught Richard Jefferson spitting with laughter for a moment, "Now that all of this is settled, how about we get some dinner at the Applebee's. Do they have Applebee's in San Antonio, I forget?"

At this point Tim Duncan appeared outside the gym, obviously dying to start his first practice of the off-season. He noticed us sitting there and came a bit closer. As soon as he recognized Coach Brown, he smiled and prepared to greet us. Duncan's smile was increased when he recognized both Richard Jefferson and the virtuous mop-boy that always had the tape recorder. We were all about to say hi to Duncan. But just then, Duncan saw Coach Woodson and a change came over his face; he immediately made an about-face and walked the other direction, with an unmistakable disappointment. He knew instinctively what all of us, except Woodson, had derived from the conversation: that Mike Woodson is Dark Mike Brown, a Mike Brown that lacked even the awareness of his status as the Dark Mike Brown.

The interview was over and I went to Applebee's where Brown and Woodson told me that they both needed mop-boys in their respective cities and Richard, with fraternal obligation, shielded my eyes from their vulgar mopping demonstrations.

Richard Jefferson Handles a Midseason Interview

2010-01-14T04:27:00.001-06:00

Interviewer: Hello Richard, how are you today?

Richard Jefferson: I'm feeling pretty good. The team is doing great, too, and, you know, that always helps!

I: Richard, how about a firsthand perspective. Could you talk about Manu's recent surge?

RJ: Manu's been, you know, really great these last few games. Tim Duncan sort of looks more like an anchor, physically, but Manu is just as much of an anchor. A light, fast anchor that moves violently under the ship, even hitting the ship and smashing the hull sometimes. But he boosts our morale in a big way. Manu is just an incredible morale-booster.

I: Yeah, I can see what you mean. He really turns those disappointing quarters into stellar ones.

RJ: Heh, just like Tim Duncan with our whole franchise here.

I: Speaking of which, how about Tim? How has working with him been?

RJ: Tim's a real joker, and I guess I've been getting along well with him, when I'm not beating him at basketball video-game. He hates that, heh heh. But really, his play is as efficient and elaborate as it's ever been, and, you know, it's been a joy to watch and interact with.

I: How about DeJuan Blair? 26 points, 21 rebounds? I bet the other teams that passed him up are just dying to have him now!

RJ: Absolutely. Blair's been great. Did you know he's not even 21 years old? God, he knows how to use his hands. Insane numbers, insane hands. Those hands find rebounds where there is nothing there, like a magician on the boards.

I: Yeah, when he's on he can really turn nothing into something in the paint of both ends. And I really like the image of a magician - like pulling a rebound out of his hat.

RJ: Oh you don't know the half of it.

I: Oh yeah?

RJ: Yeah. This one time after practice last week, I looked at my eyes in the mirror and, I swear to God, right there was this contact that I'd lost years ago, right below and to the side of the iris right...here. It must've been stuck in my eye for more than five years. Heh with this kind of thing you never remember not taking it out, you just remember that you had it and lost it somewhere and so you just assume you dropped it. You know what I mean? And it's a tiny contact. I wasn't even sure what it was at first. I could only see it when I like...tilted way to the side like this.

I: Ouch, that's gotta hurt.

RJ: Not really, I hadn't even noticed it. But it bugged me that it was stuck so I called a team doctor anyway to look at it and he confirmed that the contact was still right there in my eye. But of course it might take, like, a minor surgical procedure to get it out. The doctor said he'd talk to a surgeon on staff about a quick removal with tongs or something, but that it would probably not be that simple. It would mean, like, general anesthesia and a half-hour of very precise work. The operating room! It didn't even hurt at all! I wasn't gonna go through with that during the season, and what happens if the surgery goes wrong? General anesthesia can like...kill you if you get unlucky. I don't know. I'd been fine for 5 years and I figured I'd probably have the contact in there until I died, or at least until the end of the season. I'm not likely to die of old age before May like Duncan, so yeah it wasn't a big quality-of-life deal. Heh heh.

I: What does that all have to do with Blair?

RJ: Like I said, I just wasn't gonna think about surgery. And so that's the end of it, right? So the next day I went to Blair to talk about his favorite video-game because he is 12 and the kids like that kind of talk, and before I could even mention the contact, without any provocation, he immediately moved himself towards me and his hands moved towards my eyes. We're not talking a well-lit operating room here. Just a normal, even slightly dim room. A moment later, without asking me he ripped it from my eye with insane precision and speed, like immediately. He's only like 6'5'', you know, and surgeons at that level of expertise are usually almost 7 feet tall.

I: He grabbed the contact out of your eye? Right away?

RJ: Without even a hint from me: that's the thing. Like...maybe he picked up on a slight impression of discomfort, or...I don't even know what else it could be, to be honest. Maybe he didn't even see it or think about it. Maybe it was just instinct. Amazingly this whole ordeal didn't even cause me pain. There was a little shock when he removed it, and I mean, it was pretty odd.

I: I can only imagine.

RJ: Even though I knew that he had just saved me a bunch of time and money, I was actually offended that he had done that to me without asking. It was an offensive rebound, is what I'm saying. I'm glad the lens is gone from me but he probably could have asked first. And he does this like ten times a game, you have to understand. I started to yell, but I forgave him. After all, he's barely seven years old. Blair is a child of seven years, give or take a few, and I can't hold him to my standards of understanding. That wouldn't be fair. I mean he is so young I'm counting the years between us and coming up on infinity.

I: I guess.

RJ: Did you know Tim had a full degree in psychology from Wake Forest before he came to the league? 22 at least before his rookie year, I think. David Robinson, before him, actually went to the Navy for seven years before starting at the age of 29. But Blair? Not even old enough to drink, and I know I've made fun of him for that! He was born in 1989, at least five years after the advent of the personal computer. Did you know he doesn't feel irony when listening to New Kids on the Block or Journey or The Eagles, but actively feels irony in any hint of celebrity culture, including that of his own subcultures? So young. What a freakishly young person.

I: Alright, Richard...I think we've made our point here. He's very young.

RJ: No but... See, the thing was, he wasn't even finished there with the eye.

I: What the hell? Really? Uh...sorry about that.

RJ: Don't worry, yeah, I mean you'd think after a feat like that, Blair'd be plenty finished, and so I gathered myself, complimented him, and prepared to move on with my life, a little morally challenged, but not deeply unsettled. Some people just have the gift of dexterity like that, and on top of that Blair must've had an intuitive sense of healing, so I figured. Now then let's pretend that whole thing didn't happen, was my thinking.

I: Yeah.

RJ: But no. Just after that Blair told me straightaway one of my eyes was a cheap fake, you know, the one with the contact in it? It was just a glass eye wedged in front of my real eye that had some strange mirrors making it seem real or something. It was bizarre, but because of the contact I went along with him on it. Up to now I hadn't even noticed the others appear, but now I was noticing the whole Spurs team standing around me, staring at the surgery I didn't know I needed. The whole roster was there, for some reason. It was a packed little room. The whole gang was there.

I: Like who?

RJ: Let's see, from left to right in the circle it was...me, Tim Duncan, Manu, Tony, Sean Elliott, David Robinson, Tim Duncan, Dennis Rodman, Robert Horry, Tim Duncan, David Robinson's oldest son, Tim Duncan's wife, the AT&T Center, Matt Bonner, DeJuan Blair, myself, Scottie Pippen (not pictured), and finally Tim Duncan. They kept moving around as I tried to count them. I mean, I'm not so sure I saw the others, but I know Tim Duncan was there for sure, because I can still see that devious goddamn smile. Sure enough, just as quickly as Blair had removed the contact minutes ago, he removed the glass eye with those dexterous hands. Now everyone around me was all smiling. I didn't know why. Sean Elliott started to talk about his time as a player in that sickly-sweet voice and I could hear some muffled chuckles about the room. A little freaked now, I quickly thanked Blair again for what he had done, and just then I stared at that glass eye, still in those devil's hands. So weird to see...

I: What about it, Richard? What about the glass eye made you uneasy?

RJ: Well it wasn't even the glass eye at first. First it was the team. Suddenly everyone around me, all the Spurs, started bursting out laughing at me. Tim Duncan was like, "I can not believe you really thought that we had taken out a false eye without a professional operation, just in this room. Ha ha ha ha. Oh Richard, how amusing your struggles in life." Like, what? I wasn't even embarrassed. I was too busy being shocked and a little pissed at Tim Duncan's transgressions and betrayal. Get this: the "glass eye" was actually a snow globe, depicting Blair and Tim Duncan...in a glass-crafting room, crafting that very glass eye/snow globe. I mean, what the hell?

I: So there was never any glass eye. It was all a ruse.

RJ: Not a hint of a glass eye. It had all been sleight of hand. I was so mad. Apparently Blair had been, like, the best magician at Pitt, and had combined this with Tim's psychological prowess to plan the prank. I'm a pretty smart guy, but I'm not out for sniffing out conspiracies like that. I don't watch The Abyss all day...you know, whatever that one quote is. I just don't have the time.

I: You probably could have seen it coming, Richard.

RJ: No, that's a lie. It was a sleight of hand unmatched on this earth. Hands as fast as diamonds are hard, like...the only way to cut diamonds is to build blades of sharper diamonds, just like no one but Blair and Tim could have seen that deception. And it was a knowing, profane little smile on Tim that I saw, just for an instant. He loved every second of it, and still revels in it. So crafty, so hateful.

I: I don't know if I believe you, Richard. I mean, listen to yourself! You're talking about Tim Duncan, not Brian Scalabrine! Tim Duncan, not Eddie House! Tim Duncan, not Stephon Marbury! Tim Duncan never played a single game on the Lakers or Celtics in the last seven years. You must know how crazy this sounds? What's your evidence that any of this took place? Tim Duncan is not the person you describe.

RJ: Well he must have a lot of time on his hands then, man. All I know is that I'm still shaking from all the paranoia, even just turning a corner in broad daylight. I mean I guess this is what playing against Bill Russell must've felt like back in his day, you know? Like he blocks you and next time down the court you're scared he'll do the same and you have to change it up? I haven't eaten breakfast at the same time of day ever since. I see hidden order everywhere and conspiracies behind all the order, you know?

I: Wow, this is really getting you down, RJ!

RJ: Yeah. I've even started believing in Demon Gods. I can still see one of them behind you, right there on the wall, burnt inside my memory like a TV left on too long. Nah, just kidding about that part, hehe. But really though, I haven't slept in days because of this. If I do Tim'll probably put hot sauce in my eyes and he'll make that tonal squeal he calls laughter, as I put my eyes under the faucet for 20 minutes in discomfort. I wouldn't put it past him with what I know, except only that he would never go for the eyes twice...at least I think he wouldn't. I don't know what I believe yet, but I know what I saw. Yeah, Duncan is a real joker alright.

I: He sure has a dry sense of humor.

RJ: You don't believe me at all.

I: Listen, Richard. I am just sure that's what you saw. I have no doubt of your account. Surely your word is unimpeachable.

RJ: Come on. I know it all sounds pretty funny, and I'm really honestly happy for them that they pulled that prank off. I mean think about it: Two players, with so many decades between them, both united in the common purpose in humiliating me with their faster hands. I'm just disappointed I've never won a Finals, I guess, and I just wonder if this whole season is just a larger prank by the Spurs organization to get my hopes up and dash it on a rock like a New Jersey clam, like in 2003. I don't want to face that press conference, heh, because you know that's when they'll spring it on me. Maybe Duncan's whole career, and Blair's whole life, have been devoted to this singular purpose. Maybe Tim put the contact in my eye originally in 2003 or something just so that Blair could remove it last week and set this whole thing up. Nothing would surprise me at this point.

I: I wouldn't go that far, Richard.

RJ: Neither would I. But they might go that far, and that's the whole problem.

I: Blair has wonderful hands though.

RJ: Incredible hands, yes, on both of them. Not in dispute. But let's move on.

I: Alright. So, then, how have you been fitting into the Spurs system, offensively?

RJ: You always ask me that question. Everyone does. Is it really the only thing about Richard Jefferson you want to hear? I am fitting in just fine but I need to learn exactly when to take shots, which is surprisingly complex and hard to learn. Now kindly stop asking me that question. Why do you always ask it? Gosh.

I: I'm sorry, but it's my job to ask things like-

RJ: Oh you don't have to be sorry, Interviewer. I'm sorry for calling you out. It's unfair of me. After all when you signed for that reporter's job you stopped making any choices for yourself. I think that's in your contract. "You will ask whatever we tell you to ask, all and only. The reporter's discretion is limited to choice of suits and ties." Please, someone, just be real with me for once, because even Tim Duncan won't.

I: I really like your sarcasm, Richard. You should appreciate that about yourself.

[Interviewer removes his mask. He is Tim Duncan.]

Four-Children

2010-01-06T02:37:00.001-06:00

Were some of you there when the four-children began to be born in 2100? Do you know what I mean? Those four-of-a-kind babes, born simultaneously from the same mother, fused together in body, and inseparable even in mind? Do you remember their post-natal wails as they tried to adjust to their personal society? Oh my God! Do you remember? Does any among you remember? Because no one else seems to remember and I don't know why - it's like the twelve-hour dreams of endless sterile beaches that appear to me, those days when the water can only ebb from me. Oh well, I'll try to tell you if only for my sake.

You know, we didn't really have the words to describe their physiology then and I don't think we do today. Where to start: Neither technically human nor a collective of humans? Both and neither? Either and or? E tetribus unum? E uno tetres? Anyway, whatever you thought of them, those children definitely had four emergent, interdependent minds and never quite spoke in a single voice. The two brain "hemispheres" of the four-children would beat to four different drums, so to speak, and four distinct sections could be isolated as containing one of them. The sections could be separated without *any* physical harm to any of the four sides - though of course something was lost with the disconnection, as it always is, and it turns out that any such separation (unlike with your standard human) utterly and permanently destroys the psychologies of all four identities. Those were sick experiments, but we just had to know what was going on, and that gave us a little better picture.

It wasn't so bad at first. The first batches were innocuous enough - they were two-children. No one knew how the two-children had gotten there, but at that time we relished sincerely in their birth. The revelation was immense and beautiful to our recovering society. This was, God...2040 or something. Was it two children to one mind or one child to two minds? - the psychologists never really found a consensus there. Siamese minds we called them and I liked that term. One brain hemisphere each, simple as anything. I was working as a nurse in an adjacent province when they called me for a consultation to a maternity ward - to see one of the first two-children ever born. (I don't know if it had four eyes - you'd think a thing like that would be definite, the way you understand things, but then one of them is born with forms unto itself and you're not quite sure how many eyes it particularly has.) Heh, but really, they wanted me for my actuarial degree rather than my love of the fantastic. This miracle or this abomination that plants its legs on our shores like a cross and first thing we do is to see how much is fair value for comprehensive health insurance - what is a price that will benefit both parties consistently? Four hundred a month with a fifty dollar deductible, I think we decided, with a small caveat: The deductible doubles if we discover evidence of competing or independent thoughts between the hemispheres, I believe was the arrangement. I really think a virgin birth has nothing on my visit that day. Someone made the couplet "A two-child hath arisen here/Oh Joyous endless moments!" during a flourish in a column for the paper and we repeated it and each time we drank of the couplet it tasted a little different but always nourished our understanding of the situation. Funny how it falls so flat to us today. Those times were really fantastic.

Fantastic and morally challenging, to be sure. But I don't want you thinking these Siamese minds were horrifying at all. They were new, and surprising, and *different*, but novelty is simply not horror, and in fact anyway the chief object of our culture is miracle insurance - a vehicle of state and motion for processing novelty and horror. To this end some of the first two-children struck poets and new lovers with particular fire and poignancy, and helped to us ease along the weirdness and process what was going on with a familiar frame of reference. We had bold theories that we spoke of in private: as they matured the two-children would develop interdependently, and sometimes this interdependence would wither or flourish especially, just like a relationship, and perhaps (we thought) the two-children could die of the withering of the interdependence.

Papers in those days devoted a column to a sample of 25 of the first two-children. After the war infant mortality was especially bad, and just like the rest of the population born that year, about 7 or 8 of that sample died in the first 5 years. "Died of a Broken Heart," the columns, the sickening columns, would tell us. No doubt. Not from the womb-radiation that probably produced them, not from the poverty of the age that produced such stupid diversions as the very column itself: no: For we think, as newspaper columnists in our otherwise scientific age, that the cause of death was a broken heart. As if newspaper columnists, the most banal poets in all of art, could even have understood how the two-children truly experienced things, beyond their cynical and nebulous approximations. Actually it's kind of amusing, now that I think about it. They were just taking a ridiculous metaphor to a perfectly logical conclusion. We'd eventually get some first-hand experience with the two-children, but you know that before that it was really anyone's guess in those days and the columnists didn't guess so badly, in light of that. And yes, it was a little folksy, and sometimes a little vulgar. But you know they weren't all that far off. In the two-children was a completely different intelligence that developed with an incredible degree of interdependence - an eternal conversation, a duet of improvising instrumentalists.

But anyway, the two-children could already barely communicate with us, and therefore it raised some moral astonishment to discover that a few cases of cross-breeding had occurred almost immediately after they reached the age of fertility. This cross-breeding was a sticky moral question, of course, but it soon became a practical concern when the three-children started to arrive. 2065 or so it must have been, because I know the radiation was again a concern. "Our little democracies" the papers now called the three-children. Was that satirical? No, it was just the optimistic backwash from the blood-sip of that still-unfathomable war. China was not "the next superpower", for that distinction again belonged to God and winter and bread. Yes the old superpowers once more reigned across the Earth. "Our little democracies?" No, and as some of the two-children developed enough composure and communication to start writing in adulthood, we became aware of some rather vicious realities of the two-children. Psychologists knew they had essentially been socialized with themselves, and themselves alone, for the most part, and so very visceral personality traits had developed between the personalities of the two-children. If there was love, as the poets hoped, it was the love of raw and smashed-together familiarity: the ever-hardening malleability of the infant's psychological puzzle of roles where just about anyone can fit anywhere, for we are built to be born into any society. I wonder if they had been instead born into a peaceful society if their relations would not have been built on domination and hate, though, for that is the image they received from their bizarre vantage point.

Knowing this, it became obvious to the educated that the first three-children were not going to be living out an Amish or a Buddhist or a Christian fantasy in their heads but were instead living out the astonishing and baroque decadence and torture of new forms of power and oppression. Every year more multi-children were born and every generation the number of children represented increased. They formed their own little societies based not on number but on the power structure among the hemispheres; a four-child with three of them in one hemisphere and one in the other has more in common with a three-child with two in one hemisphere and one in the other than a four-child with two in both. They could cohabit with the first, but never with the second. Bashing their nebulous heads against one another, the oligarchs and egalitarians could not abide the other.

Less than two centuries after the birth of the automobile the race of man was finally in real danger to the odious four-children, who were born with frightening frequency in the last decade of the 21st century and built their own cities with inconceivable orders - a wooden mound of termites stood stark in Antarctica against the anthills of human civilization. The egalitarian permutation was a recessive gene and died out within a generation. All of them had 3 people in one hemisphere and 1 in the other, a dictator of sorts. They had mastered machines that thought like they did. They (and some of the lesser-numbered children) in concert provided the final push towards a genuine artificial intelligence.

And none of you remember them? God our schools must be so bad in this immortal era of hemispherectomies and total spatial isolation. The artificial intelligence is thinking so quickly in the second hemispheres of all of us even those of us born so far ago as to have witnessed all of this so long ago.

A Children's Tale

2009-12-27T16:15:00.000-06:00

Once there lived a man named Tom. Tom worked hard and one day Tom worked so hard that his employers gave Tom a promotion - they sent Tom to work in freezing Antarctica. In time, Tom would get all sorts of promotions and his employers would send Tom all over the world, to places like Cambodia and Mexico. Far-off places for an Englishman, but Tom just saw it as more work to do. Tom was very happy, for with work would come the satisfaction of achievement. Tom was a good man and worked still harder every single day - harder than anyone had a right to expect. Tom was always traveling in those days.

Tom was meticulous and kept a successful routine. No matter how cold or wet it might be where Tom would be working, Tom would always wear a blue denim overalls and a red flannel undershirt and a tan straw hat. Tom wore boots and a scarf if it was colder - but Tom would never be seen in one without the other. Tom would scarcely sleep in those days, but when Tom would sleep, care would be taken to fall asleep and wake exactly on the hour. That made Tom's wages easier to figure out and Tom's life easier to make sense of. Indeed, routines made Tom's life feel easy and Tom rarely felt burdensome on anyone. Tom ate what was given at such time as it was given. "Life is like pudding," Tom said, "Routines and manners take my mind off the spoon and let me focus on the pudding." Tom would sleep in his outfit. Life was satisfying and no hour felt empty. "When the clock precedes the man," Tom once quipped, "the man precedes the clock."

One day, Tom was in Antarctica working his "darnedest" (as Tom would say) when the employers called for Tom. When Tom got there, on foot, his employers said that for his hard work, Tom would be given a totally new place to work. "Thank you," Tom responded immediately, "for this extra opportunity." But they told Tom that from now on they would require Tom to wear spacesuits all the time at his new job. They told Tom that the work would be harder than any work previous, and because of this, they demanded Tom's robust participation before going any further. "Please, Tom: At least hear us out before you accept blindly, Tom. This will not be quite the same work as before, and you have to know what you're getting into."

"Okay, let's hear it, then."

His employers began a deep and empty and unyielding rant - like a monologue from the Twilight Zone, but without the righteous worldview at bottom. "You will work in the twin coldnesses of the two great abysses known to earth-dwellers, Thomas," is what they said. "That's right: your real gauntlet will be thrown out there - outer space and inner ocean. You have never known the real absence of heat and energy, Thomas. Your deepest condolences yet await you on this newest task. Are you absolutely certain you want to join us again?"

"Yes," Tom said, "Whatever work is required of me."

"The flesh-topology of the unreason to which you will subject yourself is manifestly more insidious and slithering than before, in a psychological sense: even perceiving this terror with a human mind is rather like testing a Gordian knot of infinite mating worms as small as the tiniest strands of thread by putting the knot fully inside your mouth - it's more horrifying than you can begin to imagine - it will gag your psychological breathing even as it infects your psychological digestion - a metaphor that will make perfect sense when you experience it, we think."

Tom just shrugged without really understanding much of it, but pretended to pause in reflection. "I really do respect your insistence, and your gracious patience over the years," Tom said, "but I must accept what work is given to me."

After all, they always used those sick metaphors, and in the end the work hardly seemed as stark or terrible when Tom actually got on the ball and started working at it. "I just wish I could understand what they meant half the time - and why they say what they do," Tom supposed, "Not too much of life is unsettling to me anymore, and I doubt this will be any worse. But I wonder," he continued, "if there is anything to their warnings. I trust *them* but they are like anyone else - they follow the work - and this could be their way of letting me go or getting me out of the way. I know how hard it is to be an employer, and firing an incompetent employee is never easy. Even if you work your hardest, there's always another one out there who comes to work easier and better."

"But in any case," Tom supposed, "Work is work," and all the doubt and worry went away. Now all Tom could think about would be how to fill up outer space with the same glories of life and heat that he had brought to Antarctica and other once-barren places. For changes in the landscape made Tom so happy to see. "It's not like it was and that's all for the better," Tom would say after a job well done. In this sort of outlook, Tom finished working a small patch of sand on one of the winding, Antarctican beaches. Tom said to those living on the beach there how sad it would be to leave, but that Tom would be back as soon as the work was there again. "Good bye, Antarcticans!" Tom would say to them.

"Good bye, Tom!" wailed back the Antarcticans, in their salivating, constricting language. Tom knew there was work to be done, but wished - just for one day - to enjoy the Antarctic forests and the streams - just for one day - to be given a tour of all the exotic organisms above and below the lakes. "After all, I was the one that got them here in the first place." Tom was so well-known here now, and as some Antarctican assistants helped chain Tom's body to the rocket, Tom wept inside the tinted spacesuit so nobody could see. To the Antarcticans Tom re-iterated his hopes for the future and his hopes shined as beautiful lights right in front of his eyes inside the spacesuit - and the lights warmed Tom as Tom's work had warmed continents. One of Tom's employers, supervising the launch, now made a rare display of gratitude. Yelling up that "Happier flights may await you some day, Tom," the gracious employer bowed down to Tom. And for a moment, so did all the Antarcticans. The bow was deep and beautiful to Tom. But all of that was in his past now. "There is more work to do," Tom thought. The rocket was heading into the atmosphere, and Tom was off.

=======

Some months later, as the rocket continued its flight, Tom, being strapped to the hull, could only drift and remember. Tom couldn't look at his watch through the spacesuit, and, as the division of days changed to the unbroken time of outer space, all of Tom's daily routines were interrupted or gradually distorted. The routines had served as great comforts, thought Tom, and, having no point of reference to connect with reality, Tom began to hallucinate constantly, and Tom no longer meaningfully distinguished past and present.

Right now before Tom's eyes was a memory: something his employers had said to Tom once, many years ago. Back then young Tom worked summers on the edge of a pond some miles north of London. When Tom was still in secondary school and working just to make ends meet, Tom's employers, for this single occasion, would speak coherently and understandably to Tom. Tom's employers would always speak simultaneously, like an infinite barbershop ensemble, but today they had dialed that down to a meek quartet. The lowest tones had reminded Tom of a church choir echoing.

"Thomas, all the present human conceptions and orderings of things are just garments and masks to hide the flesh of a much deeper interconnection. The whole universe is a single, functional organism, with organs, circulation, and thoughts, and the whole of human consciousness serves but as a censor. You are a gifted one, and these gifts will enable you, for once, to go beyond the garments and masks."

"Oh yeah?" This was the first Tom had heard of this.

"You know, Lovecraft, with his unfathomable landscapes, had this sort of sight. He reasoned that science, in its course, would one day be the great unmasking agent, uncovering the terrors and geometries of the real world. But Lovecraft, with all his imagination, was still a product of his times, and psychology was still in an infancy. Still high on calculus and economics, a man of his era could not grasp that the natural psychological intuition of an enlightened age is far more powerful. The real avenues would not be the scholarship of professors and statisticians, but the sort of intuitive sensory power given to people like athletes and politicians. And this is something that society cultivates more than anything else. You see, Thomas...," the employers paused, "The universal organism is not something that takes great effort to see. Not at all. No. It is a dormant talent that some have extraordinary potential to cultivate. It's just that it gets repressed by most societies in the course of an infant's development. It takes some special conditions, of course, but people have been seeing this organism since the race of men began. Society has never found it practical, though, and it never really develops on its own. So that's the end of the story."

"Until now, sir?" Tom had asked, having begun to lose the thread.

The employers now caught on and started to simplify it. "Yes. Until now, Thomas. After the atomic bombs in Japan, the broken postwar peace created just the right condition to turn out a crop of kids like you with your extra vision. But Thomas, you must know: you are our favorite of any of them. You work so hard and never put on airs. You know, arrogance is one of the forces that acts to repress this wondrous sight. You try to fit in with society and don't act like you have anything to prove. You work hard at developing your powers, and that's precisely why you can see the universal organism better than anyone else."

"Thanks. That's very kind of you. But I have to ask: What's the point of working at all? As you know, I work for my wages and to make something of myself, but what does it matter to you, sir?"

"The universal organism, Thomas," the employers had said, "is dead or dying most everywhere. Even on Earth where it thrives it is threatened always by decay. But, this is not at all a natural condition, nor is it permanent or irreversible. One day it thrived even in the vacuum of outer space."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yes, Thomas. It's only that way now because people don't work as hard as they could."

"Oh," Tom had supposed. "That makes some sense."

Seeing an opportunity, the employers had said, "How would you like to make it so that the organism is as alive and well as you yourself feel - in this ineffably naive youth of yours?"

"Gee, I don't know."

"Tom, this is a career opportunity. You can work in a satisfied way for the rest of your life."

"J-j-job?"

"Yes, Tom, that's what this is. A job that will outlast any of us. A job that will raise the Elder Gods from their slumber, Tom. A universe that will feel at once more staggeringly large, more horrifying, and more elegant and natural. Believe me, it will take time to -"

"-I love to work at jobs! I have to ask though: How old are you, sir?"

"Several decades old. One Earth lifetime, or thereabouts."

"So you're going to die soon, then?"

"Uhh...yes, Thomas. We want you to continue our legacy, in fact."

"...I would be honored, sir. I am sorry that you will die soon."

"Think...nothing of it, Thomas. It is the function that precedes the man, and I can't really die if you have taken up my function, now, can I? I will live through you, even after the body is dead."

Tom had hoped in those days to make the most of his gift. But now it was obvious to Tom, out here and strapped to a cold rocket, that Tom's employers, with their many heads, had brilliantly manipulated Tom into this job with their utter mastery of human psychology. "No. Now i understand. They could not be human," Tom decided.

======

Many years later, the rocket slowed a bit, and to Tom's astonishment, landed quite smoothly on a giant, uninhabited planet. The straps released finally to allow Tom, after years on the ship, to move his arms and legs. With a feeling of a burden lifted, Tom checked inside the rocket, which was not much larger than Tom's body. Tom realized that his body could not fit inside. There were a lot of people shivering inside the rocket. "Forty-four thousand and twenty-seven," Tom counted quickly. All of them looked at Tom, with their eyes fixed forever on Tom. They were all scared, apparently.

"Oh no," he said, "What could be the matter?"

"Maybe they are just afraid of the new planet," Tom supposed, himself shivering. Tom's head jerked backwards from the rocket by the sudden torrent of shivery emotion inside his temple and behind his neck. Tom recuperated on the planet floor. After a few minutes Tom felt better, and, regaining his hold on things, Tom now looked inside the rocket and smiled. Tom saw, to his previous horror, that the people inside the rocket had been abruptly stitched together with quite a lot of thread from the universal organism. Thus stitched, the people spelled out a message in the Queen's English: "May your flight succeed, Thomas. When you touch down (and read this), the instructions are very simple: You must resurrect the part of universal organism that once thrived on this barren planet. For your information, our research suggests that this planet is the physical basepoint for the universal organism's decayed heart and brain and nucleus. Once this organ is alive and well, the blood of the organism will flow out to eternity - even, in time, perhaps reaching planet Earth for your safe return. More may follow you in the future with new instructions. Remember, Thomas: always eat heartily but not greedily, and always find more work for yourself."

Tom's first reaction was to laugh at the excessive efforts of the employers. "Did they think I wouldn't see it if it weren't spelled out in flesh? Gee," Tom said, "They could have just asked. And besides," he continued, "this is just what I did when I was on Earth!" A meal was distributed to Tom from a compartment that opened on the outside of the rocket. "Meat, all the way out here? How expensive for them. How impractical," Tom said aloud. "But I eat what is given to me and that alone." And besides, Tom always worked better after meat. Tom slurped the baroque stew of meat and broth with enjoyment, and looking at his watch, Tom began to plan a new set of daily routines. The color of the new planet was very light, and allowed Tom a glimpse of Tom's vague, tiny reflection in the glass of the watch. The brief image, which Tom had only seen for a second, really struck Tom and Tom abruptly stopped all movement to see what little Tom could of his reflection.

In fact, Tom supposed, Tom had not seen himself in a very long while, not since primary school or so, when Tom's employers had first made contact. The employers had never brought mirrors to the workplace, had they? "To take a day or a year off - to see myself as I am today - to see myself all full of life and its duties - what a luxury that would be..."

"But I wonder... if I look as horrible as those gruesome metaphors of the employers?" Indeed, who had seen Tom but the employers and the new, exotic organisms Tom had brought from other realms in the course of work? What would Tom look like to another human being? Did Tom dare to open the rocket and inquire? But Tom decided it wasn't so important, and after looking around, started to make a flat piece of land into a beach. Within weeks the large planet looked as beautiful as the Earth of Tom's childhood. But Tom could go much further, and worked with all his might.

But a few years later, as Tom received his daily stew from the terrified rocket, Tom again paused. "But suppose I am a Gordian knot of dangling, entangling flesh," Tom repeated from somewhere, "a thousand miles across?" No, that couldn't be. And Tom now had a home and a purpose. Tom felt strong and directed now. "There is more work to do today." And Tom started to work, for good, and the meat supply seemed illimitable. Those in the rocket gradually dwindled in number.

In the rocket was an older creature - a Buddhist in his former life, and still technically human, but of a fantastic and horrifying shape. For years he had been chanting equally fantastic and horrifying words to the disgust of the others. "One of the hybrids from the early days," the others thought, "discarded even before Thomas was born."

And now there were thirty-eight thousand that remained bound and uneaten inside the rocket - each of them prepared to join a new land in death as lately as possible, and to this end kept absolute silence.

Professor Sarah Allottedness

2009-12-21T09:32:00.000-06:00

Professor Allottedness and I sure had some battles over the story I'd written, on the spot, earlier in the writing class. Yes, she was impressed that I did it in one sitting, but she was rather annoyed by the mode of writing it contained. I was in the front of the class when I asked her with polite irritation to elaborate.

"The God of your story - ," she said, "is as paranoid as all the characters in your story. Your God," she continued, "is just another petty phobic without a sense of direction, ever on the lookout for a usurper to cling to." Growing agitated, she moved forward, "I think you are one of those people that hear voices because you print the sheet music for it every day."

"So what if it is so? So what if I am as you say?" I defended myself against the whole room and nothing would stop me. I didn't know if it was vertigo or anger that made the world blur and spin as I spoke.

"Professor," I continued, "I felt the weight of your criticisms as I wrote it, and that made me stressed and made me say all those things. The net result is a stressed text about stressed people and God help me if stress and claustrophobia is not the impression it produces."

"Alex," she said, looking at me, giving the signal for my execution to someone behind the back of the class, "I know why you write all the time. You know what they'll do if you stop." She looked to the aliens that I couldn't see, in between us. Then she looked at the class, and whispered a word. Looking in front of and behind me and in every direction, her rapid head motions made me feel my center of gravity shift quickly and I probably looked uneasy. "You are just a catcher for the other forces. But don't worry," she said, "Such a catcher am I, as well. You might even learn to see them"

After a few minutes I steadied myself, and she did as well, but now both of our eyes were moving from side to side like REM. We were inhabiting a simultaneous dream - a dream deferred until just now. Our bodies were steady at the front of the room because if we moved we knew we would feel an electric psychosomatic shock, and our eyes were unsettled for the exact opposite reason. I look at it like this: If you catch an image for long enough, as the Buddhists say, that image will start on fire, and the fire will spread and return to you as hot as ever. I don't know if I'm a Buddhist but I have that same fear.

We were young then, she 25 and I 22. I don't know if she was ever really a professor but she had the same authority of one in her own realm of being, and when the terrible earthquakes started I knew that we had always been living in the real world and that before we'd just been jittery with respect to a static universe that didn't really exist. A few years after the earthquakes I found her at another university away from the fault lines and I showed her some stories I'd written. I tried to write down everything that happened there and I probably missed some things but I wasn't taking notes all the time and I don't expect it to be quite right. I apologize in advance for the inaccuracy and thank you for my patience, Please don't separate the hemispheres of my brain or absolve my eventual killers or anything otherwise drastic - drastic action is not yet called for.

We were in the new room with all new faces but our eyes moved around as quickly as before and the alarm bells that we always heard were especially loud and yelling, she rose for a moment above the volumes.

"They were all part of it, Alex."

"The class?"

"And the others in the room. We never should have end our allegiance there; it was a strategic nightmare. Imagine what we could have prevented. The earthquakes, the typhoons, the invasions, the decay, the cognitive governments of unlimited power."

"But all that's over now, and we need to --"

"That time we spent apart was just a frail illusion, Alex, a psychological vestige of the horrible things we saw. We are still in the room. You can never leave it no matter how far you think you are from it."

"And you thought my story was bad, Professor. What you said was my whole point. God is a paranoid schizophrenic in a paranoid schizophrenic -."

"Alex, your story was dreadful, for plenty of reasons, but that's ancient history now. We need to act now. That's all over now. You were knocked out for all of 10 days, Alex. 10 days has felt like as many years to you, and you can only experience those 10 days through the images they implanted in you, and you will never be able to sort through it all. You don't know it but if you torture one of these bats you can't see in the room, you will produce a wine finer than any on Earth. You prefer the red bats, I prefer the white bats. You can't see the bats but you can drink of them all the same."

"But if I was knocked out, how could I experience anything? Is this a deliberate psychological gambit on the part of the other beings, a repression of memory on my part, or was I just unconscious?"

"If I told you the answer you wouldn't even be able to comprehend."

All the whirling stopped and there was Sarah looking for once with a calmness, not submitting or furtive, but simply allowing the world to happen. I finally noticed her black flowing hair. I know she looked good but that's the only thing that had ever mattered about her appearance and it was finally melting into her personality.

"Sarah. How long was I daydreaming."

And I knew I was back in the classroom.

"10 minutes. Now, as I was saying, Alex, Tolstoy, your hero, kept his insights to the images and logic, Alex. He knew that language needed to be invisible. If he wanted a microcosm, he would write both levels and lay it bare for the readers. He would write both about the Napoleonic wars and the death of simplicity. We would give us both the naivete of 19th-century Russian patriotism and Pyotr Rostov. And he would stop there, for metaphors can only go so far. If we have to question whether or not you really meant 'intangible' or 'invisible' on page 50,..."

"Let the satellites that watch over us shoot me down if that wasn't completely accurate, Professor."

"Such a kidder you are. I am as well, Alex, and so I have an appreciation for your wit."

Something Big Will Happen. . .

2009-12-18T21:06:00.000-06:00

. . . in 2010. For Liston will reemerge.

True Eyes 4

2009-12-16T16:57:00.000-06:00

Past, present, and future are simultaneous in the eyes of one that looks with True Eyes upon the world. Or, rather, because time is an illusion, there is no past, present, or future to arbitrarily separate. Phillip K. Dick, speculative author and mystic, once had a vision of circular time, one in which the Crucifixion is at all points not only an event that is remembered, but also an event that is in our futures. No, I claim the world looks to me as a nested, *single* experience of all sensations. What fantastic things I can experience without the veils of illusion and abstraction weighing me down. I see myself as planning to write this, as having written this, and in the process of writing it. All at once, I experience the difficult autumn of death and decay, along with the spring of youth.

The decay of the spiritual world before the Skotianth is experienced as a single event. Not from blossom to death, but a single experience of the spiritual world in blossom, in death, and in transition. It makes me wonder if I can't reinvent the Skotianth delusions more palatably, so that I can look, one day, to a time when the spiritual realm will be cleansed. Perhaps PKD is right - perhaps time, at least in my already-substantial delusions in the certain time hence when I will be robbed of the True Eyes, is circular. And perhaps what is seen is what is seeing, and that I might conquer the Skotianth, as my ancestors, the Ferrianth, had repeatedly failed to do.

True Eyes 3

2009-12-16T16:01:00.000-06:00

The Buyer's Remorse Lamentation

...Not only extant, not only visible, but also biological. In a house, which is transparent to me now, I see a relationship of wires between people that has failing organs and coughs up blood. I walk on the roads, that are apparent manifestations of spirituality and truth, and are paved with rotting flesh. Is this the paradise the parchments of millenia had promised? Or are they what spirituality and truth really have become today, in this decayed, Skotianth-dominated world? The merchant will not want a refund though, and so I must learn to adapt if I am to preserve my sight.

True Eyes 2

2009-12-16T01:15:00.000-06:00

Anti-Skotianth manifesto, 2500 B.C. stolen from the caves in France.

Antarctica, China, Malaysia, Rwanda, Cambodia, Nunavut...Their homes are as manifold as our beliefs, and their habitats are as sharp and ruthless as our minds. They are not men, but men they were. Reproductive barriers between two colonies of ants, like the displacements of a natural disaster, after enough time will completely halt any future interbreeding between the two groups once of the same species. This is the terminal stage of our depature between their and our kind. They are not like ants, or like idiots, or like geniuses. No; the horrifying thing is that they are exactly like us, with certain of our understandings repressed, and certain of our repressed traits pushed to the forefront of their own understanding. Their language is unfathomable to us, coming as it does, from a completely different understanding of the world. They have their economy, and their conquerers, and their roughness, and their leisure. They take women as we do, and their women provide for them the same as ours. But their homes are in termite-like houses, and anthill-like structures, and their bodies are very odd, with another section between the abdomen and pelvis. Their legs are much shorter but their chest is massive, and their arms are skinny and appear to allow for the formation of webs and appendages. We are worried because we have grasped their genetic capability and deemed it identical in biological power to our own intelligence. Jutting out hundreds of feet and sometimes into the Earth, their sharp, mantis-like arms reach out and cast webs to bring other life to them.

They fuse and absorb with and control all life on planet Earth, slowly marking this planet as their own. We have been fighting them and winning, but the defects of birth are so concerning, and the children chase clouds that do not exist and worship new and terrible gods. We begin to think that they will speak, one day, the tongues of the terrible Skotianth. If that is so then this world, with oceans made of love, and harsh skies made of truth and power, will surely perish, or perish from view, soon enough. Our love is a many-flowered plant, and our society is an tree, with its fruits available to everyone, and which everyone is invited to cultivate. If it is to perish let it at least be known.

True Eyes

2009-12-16T00:31:00.001-06:00

From a discarded parchment found in Munich...

It is the year 1402, in the month of March, who knows what day exactly, and I have sold my last extra pair of True Eyes to some Phoenician and Jewish merchants for the gold to buy a sword with which to end my life. For I have seen worse fates than death, and I have seen where the power flows, and I have known the footsteps of astonishment and grown weary. April is the cruellest month and I will not live to see it again this year. All of the drops of poisoned sustenance breed eternal dependence in all new life on the Earth, dependence to the Skotianth. There is indeed pure life in some aging trees that even today predate the malicious Skotianth, trees alive during the Roman period. But within a few hundred years, even those Roman fortresses, like myself, are doomed to fall, their trunks doubled over in pain and despair.

We don't really live in a spatial realm, you know. From the True Eyes it's easy to see that. To understand what is going on, you have to step back from the reality you had trusted, and try to get yourself to see its falseness. You have to trust yourself, if you can't trust anything else. I can't give you the whole picture right now, and the horrors of April prevent me from giving this vision more light, but others have preceded me, and others will follow me. Let me try to do what little I can do.

So let's first attack the assumption of space with the reality of the situation, because the example is instructive. You see, what may appear to be the spatial relations of the things in front of you are actually just an arbitrary division of our world into "here" and "there", the experience of which is constructed by the great Skotianth overlords. The way you're apparently facing, the apparent size of your body, the apparent distance of your computer away from you, the apparent configuration of your body, all of these are false apparitions that should be doubted ruthlessly.

Space is not just a small, local delusion that life has always worked handily and smoothly around, like narcissism or powerlessness. No, this delusion is malicious, deliberate, and has been choking us from our potential. For it applies to the world over and in fact, the entire universe. All extraterrestrials are far away in space, by definition. But their real distance (shown by the True Eyes) is a function of their emotional, economic, and social relationships to us. And, without much surprise, many of the extraterrestrials are very close to us in real distances and real space, influencing the human realm and interacting with us - some even more closely than the Skotianth of our very planet. Of course, these aliens can see us, and we cannot see them. This gives them an opportunity to exploit us above and beyond the exploitation of the Skotianth, who can conveniently use us as slaves with which to bargain in an ever-expanding economy of their control. The Skotianth consciously keep away from awaking, because we could just as soon take charge of our bodies and join other aliens in our cause. We are their animals, though we are just as powerful and intelligent. They have sapped us of our potential, and may continue to do so for all of time. This is the prospect that has finally convinced me to give up my life - I can't bear to watch the enslavement with my True Eyes and know the beautiful, doomed attempts at feeling in your arid realm, reader.

By now it should not surprise you that the whole configuration of the Earth is just a clever little construction of the Skotianth. The way South America and Africa fit together is not a fact of geology, but only a Skotianth map-maker's convenience. That's all the spatial universe is for us; it is just a real-sized map that our current eyes do not allow us to look "up" from. This is why the mind is needed, to imagine our way up.

It is also true that distance and even time are part of the same holistic conspiracy of the Skotianth. In some sense, the ultimate benefit of this "trip" to the Skotianth controllers is that its complexity is so irresistible for us to fixate on and analyze, and thereby become ensnared further in the delusion. Our imaginations, our only extant tool we truly still have control over, are being subverted by our addiction and curiosity towards the natural world. Modern ecology and physics have become gold mines for Skotianth-influenced authors since the dawn of time. The Skotianth do about one thing to our minds, beyond all the delusions, and it's mockingly simple: Every once in awhile, they feed a "revelation" of science or religion to a few of us, feed the rest of us the impression that it is a new and important idea, and watch as we worship and fixate on our ungraspable fantasies. We are obsessed in our journals and holy books and then, as ultimate hypocrites, we go further and exclude other modes of understanding. I have seen this before in other examples: The fixation on money slowly crowds out the practice of bartering. The fixation on dead numbers and dying religion crowds out the practices of vital literature and living spirituality. And now, as I (and countless others throughout this great expanse of simultaneous history) have seen, the fixation on distance, time, and space crowds out the process of seeing reality.

We are taught to believe that if a man is 5 miles away, that it will take such an such a time to reach him, going on such and such roads at such a speed. No. All of these things are comfortable falsehoods. While the interweaving of time and space and distance is true and logical within its own delusional construct, I might imagine that if they could, the overlords would laugh themselves senseless as we take that to be any more than a false conclusion from a false assumption. It doesn't even make sense to talk about how far away a man is, with no other knowledge. We can only begin to understand distance in the context of a metric for something real. If you know that your yardstick could be bent in any direction by the Skotianth without your noticing, you (I hope!) would not take that that yardstick very seriously for measuring. But that is exactly what they do with all of space. So let's take something that they can't directly change. Let's take a friendship of yours, and ask how far away that friend is, in his capacity as a friend.

Let's, for the sake of argument, take a friend you know that is in your view "5 miles away". I claim that it is irrelevant, in this new understanding, the spatial distance. How far away, then, is our friend? The answer is that it depends on the extent, the mutuality, and the emotional function of that friendship. For though the Skotianth can make us feel small with the depression they have created in all of us, and they can hurt all of our friendships thereby, this is a distance they (for once) can't just bend on their own. It would be like us trying to bend space! It's nonsensical. All they can do is try to give a few futile shoves to divide us and get us out of the way, but even then, our real bodies are immune to them. The Skotianth only have power over us in the lifelong psychedelic trip they have created for all of us, though in this realm, their power is ultimate.

Emotional distance, and the separation between people, has always had more of real substance than physical distance has, and these distances can be zero or even negative. People can be emotionally fused while far apart in distance or time or even in different possible alternate dimensions. Thus the universe that is real looks like a significant spatial and dimensional distortion of our current realm. To the Skotianth, our realm is likewise a significant spiritual and emotional distortion of reality. They find it...well the same as we might find a Lovecraft description or a Roerich painting or a Poe story. They find what they have done to us to be an affront to the gods they worship, and the existence of this realm wears them down even to consider. A famous Skotianth proverb is "My eyes bleed just thinking about it." and only through our real power to destroy them in vengeance do they keep this horrid mode of our experience around.

So you see, the construction of distance and others, serves to abstract and distort us us from friendship, our relations of power, and our TRUE allegiances. On the spatial kingdom of Earth separation from what is real is a constant of experience. Religion is a construction that teaches us to profane our deep philosophical relations and then to replace these relations with clouded, close-minded, simple dogma. Government is a construction that separates political groups of all races and classes from uncovering power relations between each other. Property, a bad little spin-off from distance, goes further and (most exorbitantly to a True Seer) actually assigns patches of land and rooms to lucky customers; of course, this just reinforces space and time. A lease is just ordering you to say, under penalty of blood and imprisonment, that you endorse the construction of distance. The construction of size is meant to make us feel small: though in real life we are as large and handsome as we are virtuous, the delusions are meant to humble us in relation to the mere *size* of the universe, as if that size is something other than a "big number" the Skotianth decided upon at random! But in our current delusions, apparently, the size of the universe alone is enough to castrate and pervert our ambitions.

This is, among other things, what the rare gift of True Eyes can show you. This is what the Skotianth, the Shadow Government, has poisoned you from seeing. You can see the relationship between two people. You can see the flow of power, literally manifested before your eyes. You can see to what extent distinctions are arbitrary and to what extent distinctions are not arbitrary. Even as space and distance is a falsehood, True Eyes in fact gives us access to a world orthogonal and as infinite to our own appears, a world of philosophical and emotional and spiritual space, as multidimensional and awe-inspiring as the spatial unverse seems. And journeys are not going from place to place, but from spiritual state to spiritual state. A journey is really of the mind and of the soul. There is more content and less abstraction. And I know this. But I also know that death in the spatial realm is one thing that is not arbitrary. It just isn't quite as you understand it, and I don't look to it with pain, but with the joy of another journey. In the world made manifest by the True Eyes, I shall not die, but break into many strands and eventually begin to work for good in this Earth. And the True Eyes shall not decompose, for vision is infinite within this petty realm we dare to call reality!