As a Royal Guru once said...

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."

Travel Blog Day 17: Two Gorge-ous Hallucinations

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.

Incredibly Readable and Confusingly Enthusiastic Tripe

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?).

Travel Blog - Day 12: An American in Paros

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.

RJ Imagination Prayer

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

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.

Turning this into a Travel blog.

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: