Narratology

The NBA Finals, which begin tonight, have been billed as a study in contrasts.  The Miami Heat’s best player, LeBron James, will be confronted by his opposite number in the Oklahoma City Thunder’s Kevin Durant 

James, it is said, is narcassitic off the court and unsure on it.  Despite his immense talent his teams fail when the stakes are the highest–having won two games and lost eight in the NBA Finals and twice failed to reach the finals despite possessing the leagues best record.  Worse, James refused the burden of leadership, fleeing responsibility in Cleveland to pal around with his buddies Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in South Beach.  This lack of intestinal fortitude is why James has come up short in the biggest moments, as in his near no-show in last year’s Finals against the Dallas Mavericks seemingly confirms.

Durant on the other hand is humble off the court and ruthlessly efficient on it.  He as worked hard to push his team inexorably closer to the ultimate goal, losing to the Lakers two years ago in the first round of the playoffs and the Mavericks last year in the Western conference finals before dispatching both former champions–along with four time champs the San Antonio Spurs–to advance to the NBA finals.  

Durant’s game is more aesthetically pleasing than James’ (Durant is a Porche, James a Hummer) but most of these differences are completely overblown and derive from James’ ridiculous “Decision” television special followed by Durant quietly resigning with OKC days later.  The seemingly clean cut, small town Durant can be just as image conscious as James, as is evidenced by the strategic way he has chosen to tattoo his body.  It’s easy to disparage James for abandoning his home-state team and praise Durant for his loyalty, but first compare Cleveland’s roster with OKC.  If you wanted to win a title would you leave Russell Westbrook, James Harden, Serge Ibaka?  If you wanted to win, wouldn’t you accept less money to play with Wade and Bosh instead of remaining on a team where your best teammates are Mo Williams and Antawn Jamison?  

Commentators would rather talk about LeBron’s supposed lack of ‘clutch-ness’ (whatever that is) than talk about the real reason he didn’t play well in the NBA finals last year: fatigue.  I guess when you are 6’9″ and 270 lbs and play all five positions on defense and four of the five on offense you are not supposed to get tired.  I think OKC will win in 6, but it will have nothing to do with LeBron’s headbands or Durant’s humility.  It won’t mean the Durant is a better player than James, simply that his team is more balanced.  LeBron has had to do EVERYTHING for his team to win in these playoffs, and in this series he will have to do it against the best scoring team in the league (incredibly, OKC’s points per game has gone UP in the playoffs!).  Durant just has to be what he is–the leagues best scoring forward and arguably the NBA’s most indefensible player.  LeBron’s greatness allows us to think that he can solve any problem on the court.  Unfortunately for him, he can’t be all things to all people.

The Beautiful Game

When something mundane is done well, over and over again, it begins to approach the sublime.  This is a fancy way of saying that something ordinary can become—like a work of art—capable of inspiring awe.  The last 48 hours of basketball have been awe-full. 

The San Antonio Spurs evisceration of the Oklahoma City Thunder was simply a joy to watch.  They should burn DVDs of the third quarter of that game and make every AAU coach (and half the coaches in the NBA for that matter) watch it until they have every second memorized.  There are already coaches out there dissecting this game to explain what the Spurs are doing correctly.  But such analysis strips the action of much of its beauty. 

If you have the time, click on this video and watch it with the sound turned off.  Without the sound it’s easy to see how the Spurs offense is designed to punish indecision.  If, as a defensive unit, you are not totally locked in and moving as one, the Spurs will pick you apart.  They don’t seek out mismatches with the intention of getting a given player a shot, they seek out mismatches in the hopes of compromising the cohesion of the team.  Other teams have offenses designed to break down the defense.  The Spurs offense—at its highest level—seems designed to break down your will.  Time and again three or four of the Thunder do the correct thing, but the Spurs are able to find the fifth Thunder, the one who is a step out of position, and exploit his uncertainty.  This seems incredibly simple in theory but like most simple acts is difficult to enact consistently.  Watch the play that begins at 2:49 in the video to get a sense of this.  The play ends with Parker driving the lane between four incredibly athletic defenders, but the action the precedes his drive has left ALL of them flat footed. Incredible.  Even worse is the final play of the video, which begins at 4:40.  Look at the body language of the Thunder when Parker takes his shot.  There is no joie de verve or determination, instead they are simply hoping that the shot will miss.  And hope, as we all know, is not a plan.[i]

The difference between the Spurs—with their offense designed around a certain collective harmony of spirit—and the Miami Heat—their inevitable opponent in the NBA finals—could not be starker.  The Heat embody a different sort of beauty, and almost militaristic and relentless plan of attack that infuriates and enrages those hoping to stop it.  Everyone in the building knows that the Heat’s two stars want to get to the rim, their attack is predicated on those stars using their ability to accomplish this even though you know it’s coming.  Executing such an offense requires an almost masochistic willingness to accept punishment.  Using your body as a battering ram is not for the faint of heart.  Dwyane Wade has always relished this element of the game.  It took LeBron James until game three of the Indiana series to accept this as his lot, as the best way to win an NBA title this season. 

LeBron, you see, wants to play the beautiful game. He possesses the court vision and the generosity of spirit to want to win in the most aesthetically pleasing way possible.  This is what frustrates his legion of critics.  If, they think, LeBron would attack as relentlessly as D.Wade he would achieve greater success.  That’s debatable, but, after Chris Bosh went out to injury, LeBron has finally decided to play it Wade’s way.  He shot 24 free throws in game two against Boston and has been throwing his 6’9” 270lb frame around with abandon throughout the playoffs.  Along the way LeBron has begun to silence his critics.  Despite Wade’s brilliance it’s easy to see that LeBron is carrying a flawed Miami team to the NBA finals.  I wonder what LeBron does if (when?) he loses to a team that plays the game the way, in his heart of hearts, he really wants to play. 

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[i] This is not to excuse Russell Westbrook’s terrible decision making, but even if you replace him with Steve Nash or Chris Paul, Oklahoma City is not winning this series.  They simply don’t have the habits of mind and their talent is not quite enough to overwhelm the Spurs. That said, they are clearly the second best team in the league.

Hip Hop as Theory

Priscilla Wald has suggested that academics expand their notion of what comprises theory. In the spirit of her idea I give you noted Hip Hop theorist KRS-One. This song should be #OWS theme.

Sisters are doing it for themselves…

I am a comic scholar. I used to be a comic reader, but as a comic scholar I get paid to read comic books. It’s a nice gig, and I hope I keep it.

Over the weekend it was my privilege to participate in Understanding Superheroes at the University of Oregon. There will be much more in this about that terrific conference. But I wanted to share here a video that I learned about on my way to the west coast that celebrates Black superheroines.

Enjoy.

ah, ha ha ha ha ha ha

Yeah I’m an iPhone snob, but this is hilarious

false consciousness or just stupid?

There are lots of political commentators that find the idea of false consciousness displeasing, in part because it tends to flatten out the appeal of social processes that people find compelling by focusing solely on the economic impact of those choices. For example, that a working class family tithes 10% of their income to the church might not make financial sense, but this fails take into account the social and communal values that a struggling family might obtain from the church. This failure to understand the non-instrumential appeal of values is the primary critique leveled against Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas.

But what are we to make of Kenneth Gladney, a Black conservative tea party activist involved in an altercation while protesting Obama’s proposed healthcare plan in St. Louis?

A few days after the fight Gladney made an appearance before a

crowd of about 200 people. His attorney, David Brown…read a prepared statement Gladney wrote. “A few nights ago there was an assault on my liberty, and on yours, too.” Brown read. “This should never happen in this country.”

Supporters cheered. Brown finished by telling the crowd that Gladney is accepting donations toward his medical expenses. Gladney told reporters he was recently laid off and has no health insurance

Yes that’s right. A black man got beat up for standing up for the values of right-wing conservatives by protesting against Barack Obama’s healthcare plan and it turns out the dude has no health insurance. SMH

Asian American Comic Con…

will be happening this Saturday. The creators of the wonderful Secret Identities anthology will be there.

peep it if you can.

talking about Watchmen with Brian Zumhagen

Things are happening rather quickly. Anyway, here I am talking about Watchmen on WNYC

http://www.wnyc.org/news/articles/125753

One thing leads to another. I’ll be back on WNYC tomorrow.

Elmcitytree in the Washington Post

Adam Serwer, who I met while pinch hitting for Ta-Nehisi last year, interviewed me at Comic Con last month. My words made their way into the Sunday Washington Post, which is pretty fucking cool.

What a day this has been: my friends have been contacting me about my appearance on WNYC all day and i come home to a note from Adam giving me a heads up about the piece in the Post. Wow

I don’t really know what’s going on right now. But I’ll take it!

For those who are wondering, I should have a link to today’s WNYC appearance by Monday. I’m waiting on the lovely Allison, the producer of the segment, for the link. And if you are visiting for the first time, take a look around, kick the tires, and tell me how you like the place.

enjoy the silence

William Deresiewicz wrote an interesting essay titled The End of Solitude in the recent issue of Chronicle of Higher Education. Please go read the entire thing when you are done here.

Deresiewicz argues compellingly that we are all losing something in our race to be ever more connected. I find this interesting because this is exactly the inverse of the concern that troubled an earlier generation of intellectuals: the rise of mass culture. Just after the end of WWII when most Americans lived either in cities or what we would now call inner-ring suburbs the idea that our culture would cause us to lose any sense of individuality was rampant. That’s why The Organization Man is the book that best defines the mode of existing in the 1950s while serving to warn of the problems that might arise from that existence.

Deresiewicz notes that mass culture is no longer a threat because

we no longer live in the modernist city, and our great fear is not submersion by the mass but isolation from the herd. Urbanization gave way to suburbanization, and with it the universal threat of loneliness. What technologies of transportation exacerbated — we could live farther and farther apart — technologies of communication redressed — we could bring ourselves closer and closer together.

Deresiewicz is no Luddite decrying the spread of technology, though. Contemporary suburban lives are often empty lives, and in that context

the Internet arrived as an incalculable blessing. We should never forget that. It has allowed isolated people to communicate with one another and marginalized people to find one another. The busy parent can stay in touch with far-flung friends. The gay teenager no longer has to feel like a freak. But as the Internet’s dimensionality has grown, it has quickly become too much of a good thing. Ten years ago we were writing e-mail messages on desktop computers and transmitting them over dial-up connections. Now we are sending text messages on our cellphones, posting pictures on our Facebook pages, and following complete strangers on Twitter. A constant stream of mediated contact, virtual, notional, or simulated, keeps us wired in to the electronic hive — though contact, or at least two-way contact, seems increasingly beside the point. The goal now, it seems, is simply to become known, to turn oneself into a sort of miniature celebrity. How many friends do I have on Facebook? How many people are reading my blog? How many Google hits does my name generate? Visibility secures our self-esteem, becoming a substitute, twice removed, for genuine connection. Not long ago, it was easy to feel lonely. Now, it is impossible to be alone

To tell the truth, this is why I don’t blog every day. I mean, if someone were to pay me to do so, I would. Funny how that works. But until then I try to only write when I think I have something to say. I guess that’s why I haven’t yet cottoned to Twitter. If you want to hang out with me, give me a call and let’s go. If you want to know how it was, ask. Just don’t expect me to stop my flow to let you know.