Another year, another failure

April 30, 2008

I’m super busy at work, so posting is light, but I couldn’t help but read this great post by Henry Abbott at TrueHoop lamenting the Suns’ loss last night. And then, in turn, I couldn’t help but post it.

From the article, “Phoenix: Out of Time”:

In building and running this NBA team, the Suns boldly departed sphere of normal NBA decision making (you need a big man who can score in the post! you need bruisers!) and marched to their own polyrhythmic drummer.

They were the hare. The tortoise was the steady drumbeat of conventional wisdom.

Thump thump thump thump thump.

You can’t dance to it. But, like a long march, it’s sure not going away.

When did we learn the Suns’ path wasn’t to a title? Maybe we still haven’t learned that. Maybe you could reboot, do the whole thing again, and they win it all next year.

But it won’t be the same. At the mid-point of this season, the Suns’ braintrust — including D’Antoni — decided that the dance party wouldn’t get them through the long night of the NBA playoffs. It was time to learn how to march.

Enter drum major Shaquille O’Neal. (Ask not for whom the thump, thump, thump of conventional basketball wisdom tolls. It tolls for Shaq.)

It’s like the marching band showing up at intermission of a Tito Puente concert. That’s great work guys, but, um, what are you doing here?

The Suns lost their identity this year. And now, following a game where Steve Nash had three assists, a game where Mike D’Antoni may have lost his job, a game where the sheer and utter weakness that is Shaquille O’Neal’s free-throw shooting was exploited for the final time in these playoffs, we could be looking at a drastically different Suns team next year.

A team that’s not as much fun. A team that missed the ultimate opportunity to spit in the face of convention and take the championship their way. A team that, when it comes down too it, didn’t trust their own style enough to win it all. And suffered the penalty of doing what everyone else was doing.

Think about it. What’s going to give you a bigger chance on the sport’s biggest stage?

Something out of the ordinary? Something different? Something you excel at and no one else can follow?

Or something that everyone else is doing. And already doing a lot better.

Tags: Sports, Basketball |

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WIBR Tournament - Round 3

April 28, 2008

The Final Four is right around the corner. Let’s cut this group in half, shall we?

Click here for the entire bracket.

The What I’ve Been Reading Tournament of Books
Bracket One:

Housekeeping - Marilynn Robinson
vs.
Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth - Chris Ware

It’s funny how we come across the books we love – and how random those choices can be.

Housekeeping was a book on the periphery of eventuality for a long time. Two years ago we celebrated Marilynn Robinson’s Gilead (which lost to Rabbit Angstrom in the first round) as the One Book South Dakota. I read it, wrote about it and fell in love with it.

It could have ended there, but a coworker told me that I absolutely had to read Housekeeping – how it’s better than Gilead (it’s not, but close) and blah blah. At the SD Festival of Books, I purchased a copy, had it signed by Robinson and placed it on my shelf.

It could have ended there, as well. But while I sat in the hospital waiting for Sierra to be born, I read Nick Hornby’s Housekeeping vs. The Dirt, a collection of his Believer articles. He read Housekeeping, loved it, and spurred me to reach for it on the shelf.

I read it and loved it too.

Jimmy Corrigan was fueled by some McSweeney’s love as well – he designed the cover of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Issue 13, a book I received because McSweeney’s was six months late in fulfilling my subscription to Believer.

I loved his style and looked him up. I purchased a copy of Voltaire’s Candide simply because he designed the cover. And naturally, I had to have Jimmy Corrigan, widely accepted as his best work and one of the most respected graphic novels of the 2000s.

It didn’t sit on my shelf. Graphic novels are easy to read, so I started it just hours after taking it out of the box it was shipped in.

What I’m saying is that there’s a lot of love put into a book selection before it’s read. There’s the act of locating the books and the fight to make time to read it. Opinions are gauged, budgets planned, reviews read. After a while, you either impulsively pull the trigger by ordering it online or grabbing it at a store or you wait until you find it at a used bookstore, knowing you’d like to have it on hand but may never read it.

A lot of love went into both of these selections. A chain reaction of factors led to each book’s purchase and completion.

After all of that, it’s hard to shut one of these out. But I have to.

And it makes it so much harder to know that a Final Four showdown of Pulitzer Prize winners is being shot down as well.

The Winner: Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth – Chris Ware

Bracket Two:

The Whistling Season - Ivan Doig
vs.
East of Eden - John Steinbeck

The Whistling Season was selected as 2007’s One Book South Dakota (in fact, it was Gilead’s successor). East of Eden was selected as one of Oprah’s books – in fact, it was a return to the classics, if I remember correctly.

As much as I love One Book South Dakota, it doesn’t really carry the influence (though, admittedly, it also doesn’t carry the stigma) that Oprah’s book club does. Which leads part of me to want to go for the upset here, choosing The Whistling Season over the book everyone knew was going to make it to the Final Four.

But I can’t. Ivan’s a nice guy, and I refuse to let him hang in the wind. The true fact is that this bracket was as chalk as can be. There was no way East of Eden wasn’t going to make it out, which is pretty evident in the fact that I haven’t bothered to write anything about why I’ve chosen it.

Here’s why I choose East of Eden. Because it’s a wonderfully layered novel by one of the English language’s great masters, a book that doesn’t seem as long as it is, a book that looks deep into the psyche of an entire family of fuckups, a family that is doomed to repeat its own mistakes on and on ad infinitum.

It’s Steinbeck’s love letter to the place where he grew up. And it’s as candid as he ever really got (notwithstanding those times when he was accompanied by a dog. See: Travels with Charley.)

The Winner: East of Eden – John Steinbeck

Bracket Three:

Rabbit Angstrom - John Updike
vs.
The Road - Cormac McCarthy

Hey – speaking of Pulitzer Prize winners, here’s two! In fact, four of the final eight have all won Pulitzer Prizes (these two, Steinbeck and Marilynn Robinson). What heady company!

Okay. I’ve been dreading this. Either one could win. And I’m convinced that the winner of this bracket will win the entire tournament. The entire tournament! This is like Spurs/Suns 2007, a battle of heavyweights that will ultimately determine the entire tournament, leaving the other three Final Four combatants shaking in their boots.

But at this point – right now, as I type this – I still haven’t chosen a winner. I’ve even placed links to both book images in the code, not knowing which I’ll eventually choose.

There are two things I could do. I could go on and on about the merits of both of these books, dragging on forever (too late!), ultimately coming to a hackneyed decision based on some triviality like a hangover I had while reading page 346 or a comment that my father made regarding someone with a similar name as the author.

Instead, I will tell you why this decision is so hard.

After reading The Road, I dubbed it “The Best Book I’ve Read in the Past Five Years.”

Oops.

Now, my dilemma: I can either back up that statement wholeheartedly or turn my back on it and choose the other book that qualifies under The Best Book, etc.

I do have an out, though. The Best Book statement was made in March 2007. I read Rabbit Angstrom in April 2007. Continuity, my friends.

The Road really is the greatest book I’ve read from the past five years. It’s haunting and simple, saying so much with so little. That’s what I loved about it – the fears weren’t spelled out for us – they were implied, allowing our minds to create whatever fears we had and transpose them into the story. It was well worth the praise it received. It’s a required read, one of my top ten of all time.

However, Rabbit Angstrom, for all of his faults, sticks with me. The effort of reading all four of the Rabbit books at once, bound together not as four separate sections but as one collected life, made Rabbit part of my circle of friends. I know more about that one character – have watched his rise and fall, his fears and bold accusations, every wrong word and misguided step – than I know about a lot of people in real life.

They’re time capsules, beautifully written and still striking today. The Road is a wonderful book. But Rabbit Angstrom is wonderfuller.

(P.S. – this is a case where both books are equal. So equal, in fact, that if you would ask me which book was better tomorrow, there’s a good chance that The Road would win. Call it a mental coin flip.)

The Winner: Rabbit Angstrom – John Updike

Bracket Four:

Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris
vs.
Black Swan Green - David Mitchell

My past vs. my future. Sad kid trying to fit in vs. copywriter.

As this tournament has gone on, Then We Came to the End has gained momentum I never thought it would have. It’s still pretty fresh in my mind, which helps – like a basketball team that had a rough start of the year forging ahead with a winning streak into the playoffs.

This time, Black Swan Green isn’t saved by a less spectacular book of short stories or a coin flip. When it comes to Then We Came to the End, David Mitchell’s just not in the same league (WIBR-wise).

The Winner: Then We Came to the End – Joshua Ferris

Tags: What I've Been Reading, Books, Literature |

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Just 37 days…

April 27, 2008

Obama! I’ve officially changed my designation from Independent to Democrat.

I’ve signed up for the newsletters and scoped out the headquarters.

I’ve started reaching out to non-converts.

I’ve wondered aloud many times why someone would vote for anyone else. Why someone would choose the politics as usual approach of those other two viable candidates. How someone could listen to his speeches, dissect his stands and compare them with their own values and not be swayed.

We’re not looking at another puppet. This, my friends, is the closest to hope - and the closest to a real voice - that politics has seen since Paul Wellstone.

The signs are up. We’re ready to roll.

Just 37 days until the South Dakota primary.

—–

Update: Apparently, this post included disparaging comments about Hillary and her supporters. Or something like that.

I guess this means I’m being read!

Tags: Politics |

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Hip hop Sierra

April 27, 2008

Last night’s Soulcrate show reminded me of this picture of Sierra with her grandma Cindy.

Word to your (grand)mom, dawg.

Hip hip Sierra!

Of course, this doesn’t mean we condone television shows like Hip Hop Harry - a show that’s both terrifying and awesome; a show that left Kerrie and me stunned, jaws agape, reconsidering how the television could affect our daughter’s life and wondering which Ecstasy crazed TV-exec gave Hip Hop Harry the green light.

Tags: Television, Sierra, Baby Pictures |

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WIBR Tournament – Round 2, Bracket 3 & 4

April 25, 2008

After today, the road to the Final Four is just one win away. We’ve got some heavy hitting match-ups, ladies and gents.

Click here for the entire bracket.

The What I’ve Been Reading Tournament of Books
Bracket Three:

Travels with Charley - John Steinbeck
vs.
Rabbit Angstrom - John Updike

It’s a pity that Travels with Charley was in this bracket. Though let’s be honest – it made it a round further than I had expected. The simple fact is, at the time of writing, I am still trying to figure out if Rabbit Angstrom or The Road will make the Final Four.

Which, I guess, writes Travels with Charley out before it even had a chance.

That’s too bad. Travels with Charley might be the perfect sunny day camping book. While reading Rabbit Angstrom would require an entire month of sunny camping trips.

The Winner: Rabbit Angstrom – John Updike

You Shall Know Our Velocity! - Dave Eggers
vs.
The Road - Cormac McCarthy

Dave Eggers, your cuteness fails you.

McSweeney’s is great, and this book was good, but none of it seems to have any social impact. You never quite grasp the idea that a book can be powerful without throwing yourself into it.

The main character of your life doesn’t need to be the main character of your books.

With A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, it was okay. It was a great plot device, and it was a touching book. It’s your best, and the only one I’d read again.

With What is the What, you never failed to mention your involvement in the book, and while you never physically showed up in the story, you were always there, floating above the story, reminding us of your worth.

But the worst was with You Shall Know Our Velocity. A great story, marred by your infernal meddling. You just had to butt in, throw a wrench in anything we had believed at the time, breaking down the fourth wall and wandering into our engaging fiction novel.

Cormac McCarthy would never do that. He’d just kill the entire nation for our pleasure.

The Winner: The Road – Cormac McCarthy

Bracket Four:

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
vs.
Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (ELIC) was read with rapt attention. Then We Came to the End (TWCE) was read quickly, devoured in just three days.

ELIC is multi-layered, featuring touching relationships and a three-tiered historical set of characters. TWCE is about advertising.

ELIC is filled with beautiful imagery, a tragic story and clever typography. TWCE is written in the simple and expressive style of a copywriter.

ELIC and TWCE could be on separate ends of the spectrum, yet both had a feeling of lightheartedness, though ELIC’s lightheartedness hid a sleeping remorse. TWCE’s lightheartedness didn’t hide anything but a good time.

That’s all fine and good.

What really matters is that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a great book with great characters. But Then We Came to the End is a book I can relate to. And laugh with. Over and over again.

I guess that wins, right?

The Winner: Then We Came to the End – Joshua Ferris

Black Swan Green - David Mitchell
vs.
Like Life - Lorrie Moore

I feel like I’ve already reviewed this match-up. Except in slightly different circumstances, I guess.

Lorrie Moore, in the grand scheme of writers, is not Jorge Luis Borge. Of course, neither is David Mitchell – it wasn’t the quality of the stories that knocked Mirror of Ink out, but the impact and length.

Still, David Mitchell’s short story collection resonated with me because it was joined together to form a perfect novel-like progression of total dork to nearly accepted cool kid. It felt good to me, like all of us total dorks had been somehow vindicated through Mitchell’s stories.

And, if I remember correctly, I chose Like Life to win because…

I just liked Lorrie Moore better.

No real reason. It’s hard to explain. Maybe I’m just a sucker for stories set in New York City. Maybe I like a slice of city life more than I like a slice of trailer park trash.

Or maybe I just liked it better. Let’s go with that.

Nothing against Lorrie Moore, who’s one of my favorites in the short story genre (if you’re curious, you’ve got to read “People Like That are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk” from Birds of America) but Black Swan Green has stuck with me a lot better.