Bryan Joiner

Why then I

Month: May, 2010

May 27, 2010

Two Silly Basketball Columns for the Weekend

It’s Memorial Day weekend, which means it’s time to read Losing the War and fire up the grill (in that order). Before that, here are two silly basketball columns I wrote this week. One is tongue-in-cheek; the other isn’t. I’ll leave it up to you to determine which is which.

Stupid Time

Over at Cleveland Frowns, it’s Stupid Time. Stupid Time has a 1:1 relationship with the LeBron James free agency period. If Stupid Time gets an ice cream, the LeBron James free agency period gets one too. They’re identical twins, or whatever it is you see in the mirror.

There’s nothing inherent in the LeBron James free agency period that renders it Stupid Time. No one makes New York Magazine throw together a slapdash sales pitch as an excuse to remind its readers that basketball is a thing that in fact exists; they did it anyway. No one forces Jeff Pearlman and Buzz Bissinger and other New Yorkers to throw meaningless platitudes about a city toward a basketball prodigy: They do it for themselves. They might be right about everything they say. Does that mean they should say it?

The sports cliché is: Act like you’ve been there before. Barry Sanders in the end zone. The more you have to do to get attention, the less sure you are of yourself. Endzone dances: fun as shit. Handing the ball back to the ref like that shit was nothing? Badass. Also, it’s the way I try to live my life. Being the best and knowing it and leading by example. It’s hard, and it doesn’t work most of the time. But when it does, like when I look at her and know, immediately, yes I actually did say the right thing, it’s when I feel alive.

And yet in New York, we have a little contest going with who can be the city’s biggest suck-up, a throwback to the Bush era-ethos that bigger is not only better, it’s bigger and louder and bigger and louder. I don’t think New Yorkers have a clue about how unbecoming it is to talk about themselves in such lofty terms. Would it be great if LeBron came here? I don’t know, would it be good for Cleveland?

Ah yes, the Cavaliers. The only team LeBron has ever played for. Frowns argues that LeBron’s ties to the area make the player/team bond something heretofore unseen in sports—the amusing part is that the most obvious corollary is playing for the Minnesota Twins right now and is named Joe Mauer and just signed an obscenely lucrative extension to play at home for the next decade. He made the choice right away. LeBron waited on the offers. No matter what happens after this, that won’t change. I think he’s staying with Cleveland. But still.

If I was trying to woo LeBron to New York… wait, why would I do that? I’m not that selfish yet. Maybe I’m too young to understand that part of the equity of living in New York is never having to say you’re sorry for chirping about it. I’ve always found it to be the exact opposite. I’m constantly apologizing: on the subway, on the street, in restaurants, people on top of people, trying to assure them I mean no harm. It takes up no more than five seconds of each day, but it’s worth the investment. You never know when you’ll run up against the crazy ones.

So to the people of Cleveland: I’m sorry. New York has its ups and downs. It has a lot of both. What it doesn’t have is anyone who’s really being fair. LeBron might come here, but as far as I’m concerned, New York can speak for itself.

Eddy Curry’s America

Think about the sheer amount of money that’s in sports for one second. For instance: think of what you bought today for lunch, or what you bought the last time you bought lunch. You were thinking about the price, right? Eddy Curry made $273,000 per minute the last two seasons. Per minute! Just imagine it. Yeah.

Here’s the thing about Mr. Curry: he’s decided to pump all of his money back into the economy. Like, he’s literally broke. He pays $1,075 per month for cable television service, and he’s broke.

So this money went somewhere. It’s not like Tiger Woods’ money, which is getting its running shoes on behind closed gates. Tiger Woods is rich, and what do rich people do? They make more money. That’s their defining feature. If they spend money, it’s to protect the establishment that will allow them, in the long term, to continue being rich, which, again, is only about making money. And if you like being rich—if you like making money—that’s fine! But if you have money, spend it—or—just don’t be a dick. Doing one of these two things shouldn’t be hard. Mike Bloomberg has said he wants to die without a dollar to his name. We can dig that. PAY ME, MOTHERFUCKER!

Seriously, Bloomie making it rain on America, and I’m opening the window with my net on a stick.

It would appear Eddy Curry was, and is, the typhoon of making it rain; free, by his choice, to be a dick, I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether or not he has been one. But make no mistake: the man is generous. $6,000 per month for a personal chef. Six thousand more dollars pumped to the working man every 30 days, and that’s just for eatin’.

The truth is that Eddy Curry is by some means an American hero of the recession. People, even rich people, are cutting back. (Making money can wait.) Bailouts polarized the nation. We don’t like the idea of just giving money to people who have wasted it. You might say Eddy Curry is overpaid. I say he’s not wasting the money. I say that, in general, he should be celebrated. That he’s taken it too far is merely a character flaw. You think your heroes are perfect? You think you are?

Eddy Curry didn’t make more than $1 million while you read this. His beekeeper did. With even bees disappearing, who else is going to support the beekeepers? Eddy Curry: Eddy for America. Eddy Curry’s America. America America.

4 Comments
May 25, 2010

Where the Lost discussion has gone

Mike wrote:

We are to believe that everyone is working out their post-death, pre-heaven issues with some baloney scrambled-up existence? Why? It’s pointless.

To which I replied:

How is that different from regular life?

Or maybe more to the point: Why wait until you die to go after the things that you want?

Have at it.

2 Comments
May 24, 2010

I want a new drug

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about television, it’s not to get worked up about a series finale, or to read too much into one. In all but the rarest cases, we follow our television shows like we’re taking a drug, and expect that final, last hit to be the one that validates all the rest of them—to be the one that shows some sort of clarity for our actions, that absolves us for the dozens or hundreds of hours we’ve sat on a couch, staring at a screen, in a life where people outside are interacting with each other. This is, of course, not how drugs work: The returns are always diminishing. You’re always chasing that first hit again. This is, of course, also exactly how drugs work: When you’re chasing it, you don’t realize the futility of your quest, otherwise you wouldn’t do it. You have a delusion that there is supreme clarity at the end of this path simply so that you will allow yourself to follow it, and you do so because it feels good.

There was one series finale that permanently punctured a hole in this delusion, that showed you what this addiction was really worth, and basically smacked across the mouth the people who believe that television “owes” them something: it was that of The Sopranos, the one modern ending to really be all that instructive in terms of understanding how the medium really works. You want answers? Fuck you, David Chase said. Television is not about answers, it’s not about closure, it’s about catnip voyeurism even in the best of cases. Anyone who thought The Sopranos still “owes” them something is missing the gift in front of their face: A way out. Permanently lower your expectations, Chase was saying, because television will never love you the way you love it, and television is never going away. Learn to deal with it, or spend your life being disappointed. Enjoy the ride if you can, but might it be better never to take the ride at all?

I confess to being something of a Lost apologist: the show was not without its flaws, but it created drama out of nothing better than any show I can remember. My favorite example from this season was when Jack destroyed the mirror at the top of the lighthouse and it seemed like this big deal. I was basically shaking when it cut to commercial before I realized that I had known about the mirror for about two minutes before it was destroyed. It felt like a big deal, and maybe it was for Jack’s character arc, but it was something I hadn’t known existed when I had started the evening. Then, I’m sure, the writers went back to some sort of Dogen-themed subplot I couldn’t stand, but I was satisfied. I had my fix for the day.

So then what to say about the logical problems of the finale? I’m not talking about the lack of answers for really anything having to do with the island. I’m grateful for that. I didn’t want some post-facto explanation about what this place “meant,” as if was anything more than a convenient tableau to create drama. I didn’t want answers where they clearly didn’t exist. For example, the Smoke Monster. What and why? We got nothing, and that’s perfect for me. And the island: What was it? Turns out it was an island, and really entirely separate from the ultimate lessons of Lost. That’s fine too. It, like everywhere else in the world, was just a place where things happen.

No, my problem with the finale—in retrospect—is the final scene, where the castaways are all huddled in the multidenominational church in Purgatorytown, waiting to really die, or whatever. I don’t even have a problem with the conceit. What I have a problem with is what Christian Shephard said: The reason that this particular group of people was assembled was that they had spent the most important years of their lives together, despite the fact that several of these people escaped the island. Are we to believe that nothing important enough happened when Kate and Sawyer got back to L.A. (if they did) for the rest of their lives, and that’s why it was this group that their souls had, consciously or not, chosen to meld with to ease everyone’s transition to the afterlife?

And here is where I reconcile my television problem the way some people might reconcile their cocaine problems. I realize that the entire setup was a conceit to get everyone in the same room so that you feel like it’s all been “worth it,” that you can feel good for these characters and about yourself as you both move on… but why am I supposed to be an expert on “TV conceits?” Why should I care? It’s just another way of feeding the addiction. I liked Lost, both as a series and as a finale, but I’m under no illusions about what it was and wasn’t. It was good popcorn fun couched in the world of survival and the language of philosophy. It wasn’t more than that. I might be ready for something different. I might be ready to even heed the lessons of the show: to focus on life as it happens, to spend more time with the people I’m around rather than falling back on the company of a mostly superficial, compelling TV show, and to do everything I can to enjoy the real things in this world before it cuts to black.

UPDATED THOUGHTS: I was wrong to admonish the final scene for being a TV conceit. I thought about them earlier today and came to the same conclusion Jeff Jensen was, in a sideways world somewhere, banging out on a keyboard:

Personally, I don’t think Lost was promoting one faith over another, and I don’t think Lost was sketching an afterlife cosmology. I think the show was offering us an allegory for how life should be lived — with an ongoing effort to understand each other and ourselves; that such a project is best undertaken with a community of people.

I also think, as I wrote in the comments, that the finale was just great.

9 Comments
May 18, 2010

You Don’t Know How it Feels (To Be A Yankees Fan)

Shortly after the Bruins dropped their four consecutive game to the Philadelphia Flyers, losing a 3-0 lead both in the series and in the game, a Twitterer with the handle of JConnole14 dropped a little phrase that was, one presumes, both bitterly and eagerly retweeted by Bill Simmons: “Now I know how it feels like to be a Yankee fan.” It’s a joke that writes itself, and one that urged Bruins fans to laugh rather than cry. You just suffered a devastating, scantly-precedented defeat. Why not make yourself feel better and twist the knife that’s still wedged into the back of the average Yankees fan, six years and their 27th World Championship removed from the darkest moment in their history?

I like the pluck. I like the motivation. I like everything about it except that it’s not true.

Let’s be careful not to equate hyperbolic situations just because it’s easy. The Bruins loss was horrid, and, for diehard followers of the team, must have felt like being hit by a cement mixer careening down Mt. Washington with busted brakes and a razor wire-barbed cowcatcher on the front. The facts are these: the Bruins have a long history of disappointment that was exacerbated by this newest glorious way to express futility in the face of success; it was an infection that got worse. It’s not Aaron Boone-level pain yet only because it’s merely Bucky Dent-level pain or even, at this point, Bill Buckner-level pain. Being the second round of the playoffs, though, maybe Buckner would be a stretch. Still, it sucked.

Now let’s look at revisit what happened to the Yankees. They are the winningest American sports franchise of all-time. They have won about a quarter of all World Series ever contested, and just to piss you off, have lost 13 of them. They were coming off maybe their most satisfying elimination of the persistently, unapologetically losing Red Sox, and had built a three games to none lead in a sport that’s fickle enough that the Sox were the first team to ever even tie it at three games after that, let alone win the series. Beyond that, the Yankees were beaten in back-to-back overly winnable extra inning games by the same batter in the same day; they followed that up by losing to their most willing gum-flapping antagonist who was pitching with a very obviously injured ankle tendon that was bleeding through his sock, and they lost largely due to their new prized acquisition’s illegal, un-“Yankee”-like open-handed slap of an opposing player; and followed that by being blown out of their own building, their only solace being their one-inning, two-run crusade against the Pedro Martinez vanity experiment. The sport was never the same, and the sport will never be the same. Hockey will continue more or less as it should, even if the headache for B’s fans lingers into August. The pain will eventually fade, and in hockey’s anything-goes playoff system, patience will eventually be rewarded.

Yankees fans who are waiting to reverse what happened in 2004 will have to settle for winning 10 World Series in a row, or having A-Rod break the all time hom runs record in their uniform, or having all civil liberties suspended on their new lockdown campus. I suspect if those things happen, they really won’t care about 2004 any more. But I will, and while I’ll know what it’s like to see my favorite hockey team get felled by four swift kicks to the nuts, I’ll still never know what it felt like for Yankees fans to be so humiliated. Don’t let this one go until you absolutely have to. You earned it.

2 Comments
May 11, 2010

“Your girl”

I recently wrote my second email in a week with the subject line of “Your girl.” The construction of these emails is pretty straightforward: I send a link with no text attached, with information contained therein that refers to someone whom the recipient has noted some attraction or non-email-style attachment. The idea is that they don’t necessarily know who I’m talking about until they open the link, and then they think, “Yes, that is my girl!” Or more: “Yes, that is my girl. More than it is anyone else’s. Except in like real life.”

The first one I sent was to an graduate student in creative writing and was a video of Flannery O’Connor at age five featuring a “backward” walking chicken. I was being ironic. My friend loves to hate Flannery because he loves her writing and hates the not-always-undertones of racism radiating therefrom (and in her public statements) that ruin the whole thing for him.

The second one I sent was to a friend who recently met an, I guess, media personality with whom he’s had some digital contact and whom Frank Rich mentioned in his most recent column.

If I had any interesting Keira Knightley news, one of my brothers would get it with that subject heading. If I had intel on Amy Adams, it would go to the other one. (I’m with the second one.)

If Alicia Keys sent me an email by accident, I’d forward it to a college friend who would deny that he loves her half of the time and be really proud of it the other half. You’d never know what you’re going to get.

Likewise, if I got Kristen Stewart’s phone number, I’d probably tuck it into a message to my friend on the west coast, though I’m not sure if she’d really want to hear him drone on about how handsome Eli Manning is.

If I saw Drew Barrymore falling down drunk on the Lower East Side, I’d write up the story with the subject line and send it to another friend who’s had a reliable thing for her for a decade. I would also prepare to argue the appropriateness of the heading, because it could always be coming.

If I “accidentally” watched one of the masterpieces of the multitalented Maria Ozawa and wanted to compare notes, I’d connect with my old roommate, an expert film critic. If you’re tempted to Google that name, I strongly, strongly suggest you don’t do it at work.

If something something Kirsten Dunst, I’d send something to Moacir just to see if he responded angrily just so I could ask him why he was so angry.

If Kyle Farnsworth spontaneously learned how not to give up home runs and was the feature of an SI.com photo gallery, I have a guy friend who I’m pretty sure would toss down some clickthroughs.

If Mariska Hargitay was on my block for a Law & Order shoot—not inconceivable, by the way, they were filming Bored to Death across the street last week—I’d tell a friend a day after it happened just to have him swear at me. Not that I’d need to see Mariska for that to happen.

If I saw Scarlett J. near the Apple Store in SoHo—and I’m pretty sure I did a couple years ago—I’d tell both a far-flung Frownie-faced friend and my trusty local Diceman. For the record, I don’t get it.

If I saw some Romanian or Korean or Togolese movie that starred an actress of obvious talent and sublime and/or understated beauty, I’d mention to a friend that I’d seen his girl while being about 40 percent sure he’d have no idea of whom I was speaking (and in the other 60 percent lies the joke).

If it was Audrey Tautou, though, it would go to the schoolteacher who I’ve known for damn near 20 years, and who we bafflingly realized were each other’s oldest continuously-held close (/proximity) friend over beers on a Sunday afternoon. And then we’d argue for hours over the ideal size and role of government.

If Chris Onstad drew an Achewood comic where Téodor passed out drunk while searching for naked pictures of Meg White, I’d send it to an ex-coworker. Oh wait: he did and I did.

After all this, who’s “my” girl, you might ask?

I suppose that would be up to you.

12 Comments
May 4, 2010

The Key to Writing

It was a slow day at work (more to the point, I’m moving slowly, even if I shouldn’t be) and I hadn’t written here for awhile, so I decided it was probably time for a blog post. And why not one on writing? It’s something I do a lot and probably don’t talk about as much as I should, because it’s probably the subject on which I have the most knowledge to impart. I’m not talking about past participles or present pluperfects, because I couldn’t teach you what those are, nor am I an peanut gallery grammarian (I am vicious with with my own prose, but only insofar as I know mistakes when I see them; I never bothered to learn what most of them are called) I’m talking about the act of writing itself, of putting words together to make sentences, not in theory but in practice.

During the period in my adult life where I was the most preachy about writing—which, perhaps not coincidentally, was the period in my life where I was doing the least of it—I had a phrase that I was ready to repeat to anyone but most often ended up telling my satisfied self: “The key to writing is to write.” I was, I confess, on to something. One cannot become a better writer without doing the hard work of writing every day, the exact same way one cannot become a great runner without running every day, or one (presumably) cannot become a great chef without cooking every day.  At the time I was saying it not to describe my  habits, but to describe my past ones at the Queens newspaper, where I wrote hundreds of thousands of words that ultimately landed me unemployed by choice, but unemployed nonetheless. I wanted credit for the life I had lived instead of enjoying the life I was living.

I still wrote, and wrote a lot, but without much discipline. My mind would wander from subject to subject, and my output was frighteningly erratic. I could write nothing for months and then write 20,000 words in two weeks. Most of these words went nowhere, and passed before no one’s eyes but my own. My computer is a graveyard of unfinished project after unfinished project. I have taken pains not to erase most of them in the event that, some day, I have the courage to face them and make them into something readable, but that day has not yet arrived.

It turns out that when I said, “The key to writing is to write,” I was only partially correct. There are a lot of other things that help; things that I’ve done virtually all my life, but never as rigorously as I do now in the service of my own work. The first is reading. For a long time I thought that reading was important to writing merely to give the author a platform from which to have an authoritative voice; something of a pile of books to stand on. That is important, but it’s not the only part that is important, nor is it even the critical part. There would be periods of months at a time over the past few years that I wouldn’t read a book at all, because I was satisfied with the amount which I had read. I was underestimating, greatly, the process by which gradually reading one’s way through a book influences one’s ability and inclination to write. I had become the hare and the tortoises were passing me. I have forever rallied against being labeled as a “writer,” because it’s a meaningless, self-applicable title. I wanted to be published first. That led to an unfortunately long neither-chicken-nor-egg scenario for my career, which ultimately righted itself to a degree when I moved to Brooklyn, shut off the TV, and began acting like a professional writer. That meant moving through a book at all times, and putting some words down every day. The important thing for me on the writing side is to keep the restrict0r plates on, so to speak. I stop myself at 750 words, which I’ve already bumped up from 500, in order to maintain my enthusiasm about writing from day to day. As a journalist, I have always been goal-oriented: get the article done, get it edited, get it published. A writer’s job is different: it’s process-oriented, and no amount of guffawing about my past is going to change that.

2 Comments